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WASHINGTON — The U.S. service sector, which employs nearly 90 percent of America"s work force, grew in January at the fastest pace in five years. The report capped data Thursday that pointed to an expanding economy and stronger hiring.
The Institute for Supply Management, a private trade group, said Thursday its index of service sector activity rose to 59.4 last month. That was up sharply from December"s reading of 57.1. It was the 14th straight month of growth and the highest reading since August 2005.
Any reading above 50 indicates expansion.
The economy"s service sector includes everything from retailers and hotels to health care companies and financial services. Service industries are benefiting from a more confident consumer spending more freely.
Manufacturing and the service sectors are growing at pre-recession rates, and economists expect that will translate into more hiring in the months ahead.
The government is set to issue its January employment report today. Economists are predicting a net gain of 146,000 jobs last month, though some suggest it could be higher based on the latest economic data.
"Growth and employment have picked up in January," said John Ryding, an economist at RDQ Economics. "The economy is on a more robust growth path in early 2011."
Also Thursday, retailers reported solid January sales gains, defying fears that snowstorms would inhibit shopping. Costco Wholesale Corp, Victoria"s Secret parent Limited Brands and Macy"s Inc. all posted increases that beat Wall Street expectations.
U.S. factory orders rose in December, the Commerce Department said. Orders were pushed up by demand from businesses for machinery and communications equipment. Orders have now risen in five of the past six months.
Earlier this week, the ISM trade group said factory activity in January expanded at the fastest pace in nearly seven years.
Another positive sign: Fewer people applied for unemployment benefits, reversing a spike from the previous week largely caused by harsh winter weather.
Applications fell to 415,000, the Labor Department said. That resumes a downward trend that took shape late last year and gave rise to hopes that employers would step up hiring.
Applications are well below their peak of 651,000, reached in March 2009, when the economy was deep in recession. Fewer than 425,000 people applying for benefits is consistent with modest job growth. But applications would need to fall consistently below 375,000 to signal a likely decline in the unemployment rate.
In a separate report, Labor said productivity — the level of output per hour worked — rose 2.6 percent in the final three months of last year. That"s slightly higher than the previous quarter. Still, the trend in productivity growth has been declining. That indicates employers may need to step up hiring soon if they want to expand.
The report on the service industry bolstered the notion that companies may be ready to add workers. The services employment index rose to 54.5, the highest since May 2006. The employment indexes in the manufacturing and service sector indexes both rose in January.
Employers will likely create a net 2.2 million jobs this year, according to a survey of economists taken last month by The Associated Press. That is double the number of jobs generated in 2010.
Consumers are forecast to spend a little more freely, boosting economic growth to about 3.2 percent in 2011 from 2.9 percent in 2010. But the economy would need to grow much faster — closer to 5 percent for a year — to substantially reduce unemployment.
Analysts project that the unemployment rate will fall to 8.9 percent by the end of this year, according to the AP Economy Survey.
AP Writers Martin Crutsinger and Anne D"Innocenzio contributed to this report.


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PS (Polystyrene)
Among its disadvantages we can note poor impact resistance and low chemical resistance, especially to solvents. Polystyrene does not tolerate strong acids and dissolves in aromatic solvents. It also has low resistance to UV and turns rapidly yellow (3–6 months) when used in lighting products or outdoors.
The highest temperature at which it can be used is limited to approx. 70 °C. The material is not authorised for lighting fittings for professional use, especially high powered ones or those with long burning times. The material is often chosen for domestic applications due to its low material costs.

subset: commoncrawl


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Sabbatical Program
The Athenaeum of Ohio offers a ten-week (quarter) Sabbatical program for men and women in ministry. These ten-week quarter programs are designed by the individual to fit his/her needs. Encouraging personal growth and integration within a community atmosphere, the Sabbatical offers:
- Master's-level courses in pastoral, biblical and systematic theology
- Participation in daily Eucharist
- Morning and evening prayer
- The opportunity for spiritual direction
- The use of the excellent 110,000 volume Eugene H. Maly Memorial Library
A spacious 75-acre campus surrounds the seminary providing a climate of seclusion and retreat, while the City of Cincinnati provides numerous cultural opportunities.
Sabbaticals for autumn, winter or spring are arranged by writing to:
Office of the Dean
Athenaeum of Ohio
6616 Beechmont Avenue
Cincinnati, Ohio 45230


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Bristol Bay, An Economic Engine for Alaska
- Date: January 27, 2012
Bristol Bay is an economic engine for Alaska. The bay –referred to as America's Fish Basket – is home to a fishing industry that produces almost 40 percent of the wild-caught seafood eaten in the United States, including salmon and halibut. With good tasting fish comes a plethora of jobs.
The Bristol Bay fishing industry creates more than 12,000 jobs for fishermen and processors – those who harvest the fish from Alaska's frigid bay – who live in the state year-round or just during fishing season. And it creates jobs for people nationwide who have a connection to the industry, such as those who:
- Produce bait and gear for the fishermen to use when harvesting fish
- Build the boats used by fishermen
- Buy the fish, then sell it to retailers
- Sell the fish at restaurants or grocery stores
Add up all of these jobs – as well as other revenue, like dollars generated through the sale of boats and the fish itself – and the annual value of Bristol Bay's fisheries is almost $5.4 billion dollars. This was found in a recent WWF study assessing the five commercial fisheries in Bristol Bay and its adjacent waterways.
The figure would be even higher if we could put a dollar value on the other benefits of the bay, including biodiversity, recreation, scenic amenities and social and cultural significance.
Even without these benefits factored in, the value of the bay's fisheries over 40 years ($216 billion) far exceeds the U.S. government's estimated value of oil and gas development in the region over the same time period ($7.7 billion), as noted in the study.
Given the importance of Bristol Bay, WWF and its partners seek to protect the bay from such threats as:
- climate change
- mining
- oil and gas development
Learn more
Read WWF's Study: The Value of Commerical Fisheries Near Bristol Bay, Alaska (PDF 1.05, MB)
WWF's other efforts to protect Bristol Bay
- In This Story:


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|Kontact is the integrated Personal Information Manager of KDE.
Kontact suite unites mature and proven KDE PIM applications under one roof. Thanks to the powerful KPart technology, existing applications are seamlessly integrated into one.
The components of KDE Kontact are tailored to work well with each other. This results in features like intuitive drag-and-drop between appointment handling, task lists and contacts. KDE Kontact supports various groupware servers. When using these servers your workgroup has access to features like shared email folders, group task lists, calendar sharing, central addressbooks and meeting scheduling.
In short: KDE Kontact delivers innovations to help you manage your communications more easily, organize your work faster and work together more closely, resulting in more productivity and efficiency in digital collaboration.
These programs can be integrated into Kontact:
There is a mailing list at
and for urgent help, an IRC channel on Freenode
If you have problems concerning Akonadi and the new KAddressBook, there are pages dedicated to these issues
In KMail, right click on your Inbox and choose Properties. Go the Maintenance Tab. Have a look at the Location. It has either .kde4 or .kde in the path.
Substitute the appropriate path below.
You need the following config files:
And the following directories:
If you use Akregator within Kontact, you will also need:
And the whole .kde4/share/apps/akregator directory.
Of course the simplest way is just to keep your whole home directory.
Just a word of warning. If the directory naming is different between Desktops or between the two versions of your distro, this will not work as there are references to the directories within the config files. This means that if the files were in a .kde directory, you cannot just put them in a .kde4 directory without editing the references within the config files.
On small screens, you may wish to reclaim the space used by the Kontact sidebar. You can replace it with an (editable) toolbar:
Unlike KDE 3, KDE 4 does not have built-in SOCKS support yet. However, it is still possible and relatively simple to make KMail and KNode use a SOCKS proxy, by using proxychains or other similar tools like tsocks or socksify. Assuming that proxychains is correctly installed and configured, all you need to do is to open a terminal (e.g. Konsole) and type:
proxychains kdeinit4
You don't even need to restart KMail/KNode! (You need to type the above command every time you start a new KDE session though).


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Similar problem as Raz : I have had a crash after finishing Taurog 1. And the victory has not been awarded.
Edit :it did it again on Taurog 1 :
Darvin wrote:EDIT - and boss messages that fail to appear are still an issue.
Stuff like the above isn't really helpful, because it doesn't tell us anything extra about the circumstances that the bug happened in at all, which makes it nearly impossible to narrow down reproduction criteria, making it very unlikely that we'll manage to see the bug happening ourselves.
Darvin wrote:Fair enough, although to be entirely honest I still have yet too find any particular pattern to it. Sometimes I'll get a message from one boss and not the other on the same dungeon run.
I will at very minimum include the race/class/dungeon/preps details when I encounter this bug in the future (although due to limited internet access I doubt I will be playing much DD over the next week).
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