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To: Rick Faurot who wrote (36450)	1/28/2004 12:18:29 AM
From: Rick Faurot	Respond to of 89467

Bomb Explodes Near Baghdad Hotel, Witnesses Say Wed January 28, 2004 12:03 AM ET BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A suspected car bomb blew up outside a hotel in central Baghdad shortly after dawn on Wednesday, badly damaging the building and wounding many people, Reuters witnesses said. "It blew out the whole front of the hotel and there are at least five burned out cars scattered around," a Reuters correspondent at the scene said. One person was carried out of the hotel on a stretcher, covered in blankets. Rescuers were scouring through the rubble trying to get to anyone else trapped inside the three-story building, in a commercial district of the capital. "We were at our post when a car came rushing at us. We opened fire on it but couldn't stop it and then it blew up," Abdulamir Kraybot, a bodyguard for Iraq's labor minister, who lives in the hotel, told Reuters. Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao was due to arrive in Baghdad for a visit Wednesday. Ambulances rushed to the site of the blast and took several people to hospital. A Reuters cameraman at a local hospital said at least five people had been brought in for treatment. U.S. military forces sealed off the area, keeping journalists and bystanders at a distance. "A car smashed into the front of the hotel and then everything came down around us," Ibrahim Mahdi, one of the hotel security guards said. The explosion comes a little over a week after a car loaded with 1,000 pounds of explosives detonated outside the main entrance to the U.S. military headquarters in Baghdad killing 25 people and wounding dozens more. © Reuters 2004. All Rights Reserved.

To: Rick Faurot who wrote (36450)	1/29/2004 8:47:08 PM
From: Rick Faurot	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

Record Number of U.S. Jobless Seen Losing Benefits Thu January 29, 2004 07:34 PM ET By Peter Szekely WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A record number of unemployed American workers face losing all their income in the first half of 2004 because they are using up their state jobless benefits and Congress has stopped extending them, a private study found on Thursday. The number of jobless workers exhausting their 26 weeks of benefits without qualifying for further aid will reach a record 2 million in the first six months of the year, including 375,000 in January, more than in any other month, a study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities said. The liberal research group's report comes after the Republican-controlled Congress recessed last month without further extending an emergency program that gives jobless workers another 13 weeks of federal benefits after they use up their 26 weeks of state benefits. Republican congressional leaders argue that a further extension of the emergency program, which began in March 2002, is not necessary because the economy is improving and the unemployment rate has trended downward in recent months, dropping to 5.7 percent in December. But the author of the center's study, Isaac Shapiro, said Congress stopped the program prematurely. "Rather than waiting to end the program at a point where the labor market is relatively healthy, they have ended it at a time when long-term unemployment is still relatively pervasive," Shapiro said in conference call with reporters. The U.S. economy has lost 2.3 million jobs since President Bush took office in January 2001 and an eight-month recession began choking the economy in March of that year. The pace of the labor market's recovery -- 278,000 jobs were added to payrolls since the summer, including a scant 1,000 last month -- has been anemic compared with the economy's robust rebound and is likely to be targeted by Bush's Democratic challenger in the November election. "The (congressional) Republican leadership is opposing an unemployment extension because they believe they have solved America's economic problems," said Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. "But the jobs problem in America has not been solved." Clinton, a New York Democrat, said she was seeking more Republican support and will eventually force a vote on a bill she co-sponsored with Sen. Gordon Smith, an Oregon Republican, to revive the emergency 13 weeks of jobless benefits. "I'm hoping that as a result of this additional information perhaps we can get some additional Republican support," she said during the conference call arranged by the center. After extending the emergency jobless benefits in January and May 2003, Congress allowed the program to lapse on Dec. 20, 2003, meaning that workers who exhaust their 26 weeks of state unemployment insurance on or after Dec. 21 get no more aid. Not included in the center's estimate of 375,000 workers who are exhausting their state jobless benefits in January are some 200,000 workers who will have used up their additional 13 weeks of federal benefits in that month, bringing the January total of idle workers facing total income loss to 575,000. © Reuters 2004. All Rights Reserved.