The Daily Corner

The nation’s unemployment rate rose above 10% for the first time since 1983 in October, a much worse jump than expected as employers continued to trim jobs from payrolls. The government reported that the unemployment rate spiked to 10.2%, up from 9.8% in September. It is the highest that this rate has been since April 1983. Economists had forecast an increase to 9.9%.

The largest job losses in October were in construction, manufacturing, and retail. The economy lost 219,000 jobs in September, revised from a previous estimate of 263,000. In the last three months, job losses have averaged 188,000 per month, compared with an average of 357,000 during the prior three months.

“The only good news is the number of layoffs are dropping off, but those who are laid off still aren’t finding jobs,” said David Wyss, chief economist with Standard & Poor’s.

Thursday there was a deadly shooting spree at Fort Hood, the Texas Army base where 13 people were killed and 28 wounded by an Army psychiatrist facing deployment to Afghanistan. U.S. Army officials said Friday that the alleged shooter in the military-base massacre that left 13 people dead and dozens wounded was in stable condition as investigators interviewed witnesses and tried to piece together details of one of the worst incidents of soldier-on-soldier violence in U.S. history.

Alleged shooter, military psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, hadn’t been a disciplinary issue since recently being transferred to Fort Hood from Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington. Col. Military officials said the focus now is on the wounded soldiers who continue to need medical care. Half of those hospitalized required surgery and are in stable condition, Col. Braverman said.

The shooting rampage Thursday was halted by a female civilian police officer who shot him, said Lt. Gen. Robert Cone, the top military commander on the base. Sgt. Kimberly Munley and her partner responded within three minutes of reported gunfire. She was in stable condition Friday and is expected to recover from wounds sustained in the gun battle.

Although the 39-year-old had just been promoted to major in May, his family says he had hired a lawyer to help him get out of the Armed Forces. “Apparently became very disgruntled in the mission in Iraq and Afghanistan and voiced that to a lot of his colleagues,” said Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX).

He also voiced it to the world in an Internet posting, where he compared suicide bombers to GI’s who save their colleagues by throwing themselves on a grenade.

Investigators discovered four more bodies Tuesday at the Cleveland, Ohio, home of a convicted rapist — making a total of 10 since last week, Police Chief Michael McGrath said Tuesday. Authorities charged Anthony Sowell, 50, with five counts of aggravated murder after unearthing the bodies of women at his home last week. Sowell also was charged with rape, felonious assault and kidnapping, police said.

The police stated that they found a bucket in the basement that had a skull inside. The police are continuing to search the house and grounds, and they are actively searching cold cases to see if any might be related to this case.

The Boston Celtics and point guard Rajon Rondo have reached agreement in principle on a five-year, $55 million contract extension. The deal, originally reported this morning, comes just before the Monday deadline. Had they not agreed, Rondo would have been a restricted free agent after the season, giving the Celtics the chance to match any offer he received from another team.

Rondo’s agent, Bill Duffy said, “As much as we were willing to wait his contract out, the Celtics stepped up to the plate to meet the original request. This is a really fair contract. We wanted him to be paid like one of the top five point guards around. It also allows the Celtics to maintain continuity to continue to be one of the best teams at this time”.

The organization responsible for managing the assignment of domain names and IP addresses has approved a new plan to allow non-Latin characters in Web extensions. Known as Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs), the system is designed to globalize the Net so regions around the world can use their own local alphabet characters to surf in cyberspace, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Calling IDNs the “biggest technical change” to the Internet since its birth 40 years ago, ICANN unanimously approved the plan on the final day in Seoul.

This means domain names could be written in languages such as Greek, Chinese, Arabic, Hindi or Cyrillic and be understood naively by the servers that connect computers together over the web. Currently, domain names can only be displayed using the Latin alphabet letters A-Z, the digits 0-9 and the hyphen, but in the future countries will be able to display country-code Top Level Domains (cc TLDs) in their native language.

Lil Wayne (real name: Dwayne Carter Jr.) pleaded guilty Thursday to felony gun possession in a Manhattan courtroom. The plea stems from his 2007 arrest after a New York concert. As part of the plea deal, he’ll be sentenced to one year in prison and must also give up his passport.

The Grammy-winning rapper was caught July 22, 2007, in New York City when he tried to hide a loaded .40-caliber semiautomatic gun from cops after his tour bus was pulled over. Police were searching the vehicle because they said they smelled pot.

Following on the heels of Tuesday night’s $2.2 million debut at a series of midnight showings, “This Is It” took in another $7.4 million in its first full day of release — and another $12.7 million overseas. Overall, it gives the film a worldwide total of $20.1 million — impressive numbers for a midweek release, that’s a documentary.

Radovan Karadzic is allegedly responsible for the killing of 8,000 Muslims in Srebenica in 1995. He is in The Hague now for charges of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. The charges are genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes in Bosnia’s 1992-95 war. Karadzic is accused of leading four years of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia.

He boycotted the opening day of his trial yesterday, saying he has not had enough time to prepare. The prosecution has prepared nearly a million pages of evidence against him.

Wiretap evidence of Karadzic allegedly discussing the mass slaughter of 300,000 Muslims was unveiled today at the genocide trial of the former Bosnian Serb leader. The phone taps record Mr Karadzic saying: “They have to know that there are 20,000 armed Serbs around Sarajevo. It will be a black cauldron where 300,000 Muslims will die. They will disappear. That people will disappear from the face of the earth.”

Please tell us the good/bad/ugly of upgrading to Windows 7 and any others concerns you may have faced.

Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) this morning reported a 14% slip in sales and an 18% plunge in profit for its fiscal first quarter. Its shares immediately soared, briefly flitting to a 52-week high of $29.35. First-quarter net income fell to $3.57 billion, or 40 cents a share, beating the 32-cent average estimate of analysts surveyed by Bloomberg.

“We are very pleased with our performance this quarter and particularly by the strong consumer demand for Windows,” said Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Chris Liddell in a statement. “We also maintained our cost discipline, which allowed us to drive strong earnings performance despite continued tough overall economic conditions.”

The earnings announcement topped off a high-profile week for Microsoft, in which it unveiled its new operating system, Windows 7.

Did you upgrade? What did you think of Windows 7?