UNEMPLOYMENT

The number of unemployed people in the UK rose by 44,000 to 2.49 million in the last quarter of 2010, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said on Wednesday.

California Governor Jerry Brown issued a hiring freeze across state government in the midst of an estimated budget deficit of $25.4 billion.

Transparency campaigners sued the European Union's executive on Tuesday for withholding documents on free trade talks with India, stepping up pressure on the bloc to make its policymaking less secretive.

Thousands of Shi'ite protesters marched into the capital of Bahrain on Tuesday after a man was killed in clashes between police and mourners at a funeral for a demonstrator shot dead at an earlier anti-government rally.

Recent improvement in the U.S. labor market has shortened the duration of the U.S. Federal Reserve's extended period of near-zero interest rates, but only by about three months, a San Francisco Fed economist said. To try to blunt the effects of the Great Recession, the Fed lowered its target rate for overnight lending between banks to near zero in December 2008, and has promised to keep it there for an extended period.

Structural economic changes have likely pushed up the 'natural' rate of U.S. unemployment to about 6.7 percent, researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco said on Monday. That's much higher than the 5 percent level that has been the historic norm, the researchers said in the latest edition of the San Francisco Fed's Economic Letter.

John Steinbeck's masterpiece The Grapes of Wrath stands as a chronicle of the Great Depression and as a commentary on the economic and social system that gave rise to it. His themes of man's inhumanity to man, the dignity and rage of the working class, and the selfishness and greed of the moneyed class ring true today.

The U.S. labor market still is in a deep rut despite a recent drop in the unemployment rate, Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank President Sandra Pianalto said on Tuesday. Unemployment rates have decline a bit recently, but job creation remains anemic, as businesses have been cautious in expanding their payrolls, Pianalto said in remarks to the Summa Hospitals Women's Board.

A graduate of the prestigious University of Tokyo's economics department, Keishiro Kurabayashi could have joined a blue-chip firm and begun climbing the corporate ladder. Instead, he interned at DeNA, then a fledgling start-up and now a successful social networking and mobile gaming firm.

The debts assumed by the Western democracies will overwhelm their economies and lead to the end of our current Dollar-denominated, global currency regime. This has profound implications for Americans' standard of living and our empire's role in the world.

Top House Republicans reacted to President Barack Obama's 2012 budget proposal on Monday, saying that it would destroy jobs and that the President missed a unique opportunity to reduce the federal government's budget deficit, which would rise to $1.65 trillion under the plan.

The global airline industry will also likely see 800-million more travelers by 2014, and more than a quarter of them will come from China.

Detroit tops the list of fastest growing metropolitan areas for technology jobs, according to a report by Dice.com - a career Web site for technology and engineering professionals and companies in the US.

Inspired by Egypt, at least 2,000 protesters broke the barriers set up around the May First Square in the capital city of Algiers on Saturday

Resurgence of far-right in Europe (SLIDESHOW)

Decoding the Egyptian Revolution to understand the beginning, the end of Hosni Mubarak regime, significance, and effects of the downfall.

On the last day of January, a crowd of 600 gathered in sub-zero temperatures on Moscow's Triumph Square and began to chant Freedom! Freedom! and call for the resignation of Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

Wisconsin's new Republican governor on Friday proposed sharply curtailing the bargaining rights of public employee unions and other cost-saving measures to rein in the state's growing budget deficit.Governor Scott Walker said he will ask the Republican-controlled legislature to pass his budget repair bill next week. He said it was aimed at bringing stability to state finances and stave off employee layoffs this year.

A furious wave of protest finally swept Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak from power on Friday after 30 years of one-man rule, sparking jubilation on the streets and sending a warning to autocrats across the Arab world and beyond.

Spain, reeling under the weight of massive unemployment and a collapsed property market, saw its economy shrink by 0.1 percent last year, although it grew by 0.2 percent during the fourth quarter, according to the country’s National Statistics Institute.

A recession is the decline of a nation's gross domestic product (GDP) over two or more consecutive quarters. It is also referred to as a period of economic decline and reduced economic activity. During recessions, many macroeconomic indicators vary in a similar way. GDP, employment, investment spending, capacity utilization, household incomes; business profits and inflation all fall, while bankruptcies and the unemployment rate rise. Here is a list of recessions that occurred since the Great ...