From Editor and Publisher:
“SANTA ANA An Indian company will take over copyediting duties for some stories published in The Orange County Register and will handle page layout for a community newspaper at the company that owns the Pulitzer Prize-winning daily, the newspaper confirmed Tuesday.Orange County Register Communications Inc. will begin a one-month trial with Mindworks [...]

This is an excerpt from a New York Times story published May 16, 2008. Click on the link to read the entire article:

“People on Wall Street seem to be vanishing overnight.

JoAnne Kennedy was laid off by JPMorgan Chase while she was recovering from surgery.

Thousands are losing their jobs as hard-pressed banks cut deep. But while layoffs are nothing new in the financial industry (they come with almost every downturn), this round seems different: it is eerily quiet.

So quiet, in fact, that people refer to these cuts as stealth layoffs. Some bosses hardly say a word after people are fired. At Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, for example, the first clue that someone is gone can be e-mail messages that are returned to senders from a former colleague’s inactivated corporate address.

While the financial markets have found a bit of a footing lately, banks are pushing ahead with plans for some of the deepest job reductions in years. Since last summer, banks worldwide have announced plans to cut 65,000 employees. …”

Here’s a healthcare horror story on a national level: 60 Minutes’ report on Remote Area Medical (RAM), which sets up emergency clinics in the world’s neediest areas. Recently, though, RAM set up its massive clinic, for a weekend, in an exhibit hall in Knoxville, Tenn. Founded to transport U.S. doctors to truly remote areas to provide medical service, RAM is now running weekend clinics in urban as well as rural U.S. areas.

From The St. Petersburg Times:
“Finding a job in Florida is the toughest it has been in three years. State officials said Friday that Florida’s unemployment rate jumped to 4.7 percent in December from 4.3 percent in November. The basic problem: a slowdown in job creation. The economy is creating jobs, but not enough to keep [...]

“It’s the perfect crime, so big and so reeking of establishment that few recognize the inherent criminality, but the results are the same as if some street thug held us all up at gunpoint. This country is spiraling toward recession. Huge amounts of wealth have disappeared with upward of 2-million families in danger of losing [...]

Are you eligible for Medicare but still needing to work (and having trouble finding any) and so painfully aware of the need for finding the plan option that best meets their needs for costs and services … and confused by all the blood-suckers out there?

The St. Petersburg Times’ monthly LifeTimes section, October 30, 2007, aimed at the seniors just published these articles linked below. They do a great analysis of what’s what, tell clearly how to find details you need on the Medicare.gov site, and are generally VERY well written. They’re a solid resource for our members and other readers in that age/needs demographic.

The St Petersburg Times is blessed with a law-degreed, progressive Perspectives page columnist, Robyn Blumner. Here’s the link to her latest: Locked in a job by health insurance:
“[T]his tethering of an employee to his job [in order to retain health insurance for family members with preexisting conditions] reduces job mobility by about 25 percent, says [...]

“Harper’s Index”* for December, 2007, offers us this interesting combinations of statistical information:
Portion of all private insurance companies participating in Medicare that were audited in 2001 and 2006, respectively: 1/4, 1/7.
Number of the forty-nine companies audited in 2003 that were found to have made major errors: 41
Number of these companies that Medicare took any action [...]

We thought UP members might be interested in Career O’Rama. From their website: 
“Career O’Rama was created to be a counter argument to the common career advice you will get from most career books, councelors, and well-meaning advice givers.
Our belief is that most of this advice is both mis-leading as well as mistaken.
Career O’Rama provides the space [...]

 Did You Pay $736,000 for Your Watch? No? Then you’re not a member of “Richistan.”
“America’s super-rich have returned to the days of the Roaring Twenties. As the rest of the country struggles to get by, a huge bubble of multi-millionaires lives almost in a parallel world. The rich now live in their own world of [...]