The nation's unemployment rate dropped slightly to 4.7 percent in August as the economy added 128,000 new jobs, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this morning.
Lockheed Martin edged out aerospace industry rivals Boeing and Northrop Grumman late Thursday to win a $3.9 billion contract to build NASA's next generation of manned spacecraft.
Smokers today inhale more nicotine per cigarette than they did six years ago. That's the finding issued this week by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, which requires manufacturers selling cigarettes in the state to report on nicotine content annually. (Utah and Texas are the only other states to collect such data each year.)
AP - Hurricane John bore down on the southern tip of Baja California on Friday, forcing tourists to shelter in luxury hotel ballrooms and poor Mexicans to huddle in vacant schoolhouses.
AP - Ernesto weakened to a tropical depression as it plowed northward over land Friday, but it still had the punch to lash Virginia with 6 inches of rain, flooding highways, forcing evacuations and knocking out power to hundreds of thousands of people.
AP - Sectarian violence is spreading in Iraq and the security problems have become more complex than at any time since the U.S. invasion in 2003, the Pentagon said Friday.
Death squads and terrorists have ramped up attacks on civilians in Iraq, killing more than 1,600 people in cold-blooded "execution-style" slayings in July alone, a Pentagon report said today. The report concludes the "current violence is not a civil war."
Tropical Storm Ernesto made landfall at 11:30 p.m. at Long Beach, North Carolina, with 70 mph winds, just 4 mph below hurricane strength. The storm is dumping heavy rain in the Carolinas and forecasters predict it will cause flooding in the Mid-Atlantic.