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Robert Joel Halderman, known as Joe, who until last month shared a residence in Connecticut with Ms. Birkitt, is a longtime and well-respected producer for the CBS News program "48 Hours Mystery." Mr. Halderman, 51, pleaded not guilty to one count of attempted larceny, after he reportedly threatened to expose Mr. Letterman. According to prosecutors, Mr. Halderman gave Mr. Letterman, 62, a one-page screenplay treatment depicting the talk-show host as a great success whose "world is about to collapse around him" with revelations of his trysts. Mr. Halderman also handed over photographs, correspondence and a page of the personal diary of Ms. Birkitt.

Robert Joel Halderman, known as Joe, who until last month shared a residence in Connecticut with Ms. Birkitt, is a longtime and well-respected producer for the CBS News program "48 Hours Mystery." Mr. Halderman, 51, pleaded not guilty to one count of attempted larceny, after he reportedly threatened to expose Mr. Letterman. According to prosecutors, Mr. Halderman gave Mr. Letterman, 62, a one-page screenplay treatment depicting the talk-show host as a great success whose "world is about to collapse around him" with revelations of his trysts. Mr. Halderman also handed over photographs, correspondence and a page of the personal diary of Ms. Birkitt.

As some companies begin to rebuild stocks, the impact could wash through the economy for a few more months, adding jobs and moderating the overall decline. Then the underlying weakness of the economy will probably reassert itself, say experts. After years of borrowing against homes and cashing in stock to spend in excess of their incomes, many Americans are tapped out. Austerity and saving have replaced spending and investment in many households, constraining the economy. As many Americans transition from living on home equity loans to sustaining themselves on paychecks, weekly pay continues to effectively shrink: Over the last year, average hourly earnings for rank-and-file workers - some 80 percent of the labor force - have increased by 2.5 percent. But average weekly earnings have expanded by only 0.7 percent, less than the increase in the cost of living, because employers have slashed working hours. In September, the average workweek edged down by one-tenth of an hour, to 33 hours. For those out of work, the job market looks harsher now than at any point in the recession. The number of people who have been jobless for more than six months increased in September by 450,000, reaching 5.4 million. "We have a truly massive crisis of long-term unemployment," said Christine L. Owens, executive director of the National Employment Law Project in a statement, adding that nearly 400,000 jobless people had exhausted their unemployment benefits by the end of September. "Today's employment report is a marching order for Congress to pass unemployment benefit extensions to all states, quickly." The first signs of improvement are likely to be seen among temporary workers, say experts, as companies now hunkering down in the face of uncertain prospects take tentative steps to expand. But temporary help services lost 1,700 jobs in September. "Companies are extremely cautious," said Roy G. Krause, chief executive of Spherion, a recruiting and staffing comp

As some companies begin to rebuild stocks, the impact could wash through the economy for a few more months, adding jobs and moderating the overall decline. Then the underlying weakness of the economy will probably reassert itself, say experts. After years of borrowing against homes and cashing in stock to spend in excess of their incomes, many Americans are tapped out. Austerity and saving have replaced spending and investment in many households, constraining the economy. As many Americans transition from living on home equity loans to sustaining themselves on paychecks, weekly pay continues to effectively shrink: Over the last year, average hourly earnings for rank-and-file workers - some 80 percent of the labor force - have increased by 2.5 percent. But average weekly earnings have expanded by only 0.7 percent, less than the increase in the cost of living, because employers have slashed working hours. In September, the average workweek edged down by one-tenth of an hour, to 33 hours. For those out of work, the job market looks harsher now than at any point in the recession. The number of people who have been jobless for more than six months increased in September by 450,000, reaching 5.4 million. "We have a truly massive crisis of long-term unemployment," said Christine L. Owens, executive director of the National Employment Law Project in a statement, adding that nearly 400,000 jobless people had exhausted their unemployment benefits by the end of September. "Today's employment report is a marching order for Congress to pass unemployment benefit extensions to all states, quickly." The first signs of improvement are likely to be seen among temporary workers, say experts, as companies now hunkering down in the face of uncertain prospects take tentative steps to expand. But temporary help services lost 1,700 jobs in September. "Companies are extremely cautious," said Roy G. Krause, chief executive of Spherion, a recruiting and staffing comp

HELENDALE * Investigators believe the murder of an elderly Helendale man last December is linked to cockfighting and gambling, San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department officials said. While Homicide detectives would not say Jesus Rocha, 68, was holding illegal cockfights on his 10-acre property, authorities do believe he is involved in the criminal sport in some way. "It's gambling and sometimes people lose large amounts of money and that creates problems between individuals and groups of people," Cindy Beavers, spokeswoman for the Sheriff's Department, said. "In this case someone lost their life."

Avoiding Speeding Tickets Trapster is essentially a cell-phone social network that allows motorists to hook up with one another for the purpose of issuing real-time alerts about the location of speed traps. Over the last year, Trapster has significantly broadened its functionality, adding several new applications, carriers and formats. When we spoke with Trapster.com founder and CEO Pete Tenereillo in mid-August, the big news at the time was that Trapster.com had just released its first Android version, which means it's now available on the T-Mobile G1 phone, which significantly increases its penetration, making it accessible to many more users. "Before, if a user had a phone that used the Android system, they didn't much care if it was available on the iPhone," Tenereillo said. Trapster works like this: Go to the Web site, and sign up for a free membership. Then download the Trapster software to your cell phone or PDA. Tenereillo said that most current-generation cell phones, Blackberries and other PDA's can accommodate the Trapster software. Then, you're ready to hit the road. And once you're tooling down the highway, if you spot a state trooper or city cop lying in wait with a radar gun or laser unit, you just need to punch in "pound one" on your cell phone -- or dial a toll-free number. Other users are then alerted on their cell phones or PDA when they approach the same speed trap. "One great thing about that is that it's hands-free," says Tenereillo. "You don't have to be looking at the phone or even be holding it to be notified of the speed trap -- which, of course, is safer, because you don't have to take your eyes off the road to be notified of the trap."

The Gulf cartel has recently hung banners in Nuevo Laredo accusing Calderon's administration of protecting the less-openly bloody Sinaloa cartel, while cracking down on extremely violent rival drug gangs. While Sinaloa hit men have carried out massacres in the past, the Gulf and La Familia cartels frequently use the grizzliest methods imaginable to eliminate rivals and attack police and army patrols.

Sohn said the Central Valley and Inland Empire, which have suffered some of the worst foreclosure rates in the nation, are dragging down the rest of the state. Coastal California is rebounding well, he said, and the comeback in Asia's economy is helping California's major ports.

The funeral procession for Tahnee Whiting - the woman whose vehicle was found at the bottom of the California Aqueduct earlier in the month - was traveling east on Main Street when for unknown reasons the tractor trailer heading north on Highway 395 ran through the intersection striking the white SUV directly behind Whiting's hearse, according to Whiting's mother, Kim Isom. About six people were in the overturned vehicle, but only three were transported to Desert Valley Hospital with minor injuries.

emember how Republican Scott P. Brown's victory in January's Senate race in Massachusetts was supposed to represent a mortal blow to health-care reform? "Probably back to the drawing board," Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) declared the next day. "Might be dead," Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) surmised. "We're back to where we were maybe even years ago," concluded Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.). But rather than dooming the effort, Brown's win appears to have helped Democrats refocus the legislation and their strategy for selling it. Once on track to produce a bill that Republicans were prepared to depict as partisan and laden with special-interest perks, Democrats now expect to unveil legislation that costs less and more aggressively tackles health-care inflation -- a package they say could leave them less vulnerable in November. It drops the "Cornhusker Kickback" that so infuriated voters, and includes a few Republican ideas tacked on by President Obama. "There's no government takeover of health care; there's an expansion of the private market, subsidies, more choice -- I mean, it's so much of what many of us had hoped for from the very beginning," said Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), a moderate and reluctant supporter of the original Senate bill. The House and Senate will launch the final legislative phase this week, with the aim of holding votes before the end of the month. The action will come in two phases. First the House will vote on the bill the Senate approved on Christmas Eve. Then each chamber is expected to consider a package of "fixes" offered under a budget rule known as reconciliation that will protect it from a GOP filibuster in the Senate. Democrats could still fail to pass the overhaul for any number of reasons, and Republicans are vowing an epic showdown on the Senate floor to derail the reconciliation package. Sen. Judd Gregg (N.H.), the senior Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, which holds jurisdiction over reconciliation bills, has called the

The tuition was daunting - about $41,000 for a 14-month program - but he said the admissions recruiter portrayed it as the entrance price to a stable life. "The recruiter said, 'The way the economy is, with the recession, you need to have a safe way to be sure you will always have income,' " Mr. Newburg said. " 'In today's market, chefs will always have a job, because people will always have to eat.' " According to Mr. Newburg, the recruiter promised the school would help him find a good job, most likely as a line cook, paying as much as $38,000 a year. Last summer, halfway through his program and already carrying debts of about $10,000, Mr. Newburg was alarmed to see many graduates taking jobs paying as little as $8 an hour washing dishes and busing tables, he said. He dropped out to avoid more debt.

The real Tuscany, as locals have been telling me over the years, is found in the dead of winter, when the crowds are thinner and the rooms, flights and restaurants are pleasantly cheaper.

Last year, outstanding credit-card debt dropped an eye-popping $93.2 billion to about $876 billion, according to Federal Reserve data, which are not seasonally adjusted. During the same period, charge-offs -- the unsecured debt the banks determine they won't get back and charge off to loss reserves -- added up to $83.3 billion. In other words, only about $10 billion of the drop is attributable to consumers paying off their debt. Robert Hammer, chief executive of investment bank R.K. Hammer, said when credit charge-offs are exceeding receivables, the impact is clear. "For the first time in my 30 years in this business, the dollar amount of card loans finished the year lower than they started," he said. "That would mean that consumers have either put their credit cards in a safe-deposit box and only get them out for special occasions or that some are cutting them up and not using them at all. And we don't think any of that is going on."

The jobless rate in Riverside County was 15.1 percent in January, up from 14.3 percent the previous month, new figures show. About 137,600 people are unemployed in Riverside County, according to the California Employment Development Department. Riverside County's jobless figure was in line with the 15 percent unemployment rate that the Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario metropolitan statistical area reported, state officials said. San Bernardino County's unemployment rate was 14.8 percent in January, up from 13.6 percent in December, the monthly labor report showed. In the Coachella Valley, unemployment rates for cities ranged from a low of 5.4 percent in Indian Wells to 29 percent in Mecca. In January, California's unemployment rate was 13.2 percent, compared with 10.6 percent for the nation, EDD reported. Read more tomorrow in The Desert Sun.

"After analyzing risky mortgages made on homes in Arizona, California, Florida and Nevada, where the housing markets had overheated, Mr. Paulson went to Goldman to talk about how he could bet against those loans. He focused his analysis on adjustable-rate loans taken out by borrowers with relatively low credit scores and turned up more than 100 loan pools that he considered vulnerable, the S.E.C. said. Mr. Paulson then asked Goldman to put together a portfolio of these pools, or others like them that he could wager against. He paid $15 million to Goldman for creating and marketing the Abacus deal, the complaint says. One of a small cohort of money managers who saw the mortgage market in late 2006 as a bubble waiting to burst, Mr. Paulson capitalized on the opacity of mortgage-related securities that Wall Street cobbled together and sold to its clients. These instruments contained thousands of mortgage loans that few investors bothered to analyze. Instead, the buyers relied on the opinions of credit ratings agencies like Moody's, Standard & Poor's and Fitch Ratings. These turned out to be overly rosy, and investors suffered hundreds of billions in losses when the loans underlying these securities went bad. Mr. Paulson personally made an estimated $3.7 billion in 2007 as a result of his hedge fund's performance, and another $2 billion in 2008. He was also treated like a celebrity by members of a Congressional committee that invited him to testify in November 2008 about the credit crisis. At the time, none of the lawmakers asked how he had managed to set up his lucrative trades; they seemed more interested in getting his advice on how to solve the credit crisis. "

In Google's case, the intruders seemed to have precise intelligence about the names of the Gaia software developers, and they first tried to access their work computers and then used a set of sophisticated techniques to gain access to the repositories where the source code for the program was stored. They then transferred the stolen software to computers owned by Rackspace, a Texas company. Rackspace, which had no knowledge of the transaction, offers Web-hosting services. It is not known where the software was sent from there. The intruders had access to an internal Google corporate directory known as Moma, which holds information about the work activities of each Google employee, and they may have used it to find specific employees. A version of this article appeared in print on April 20, 2010, o

Ominous

The Last Resort has a new owner, and is closed for now.

"It's like the front line of a new virus outbreak." The trends have unnerved even well-established businesses. "There is such a huge lack of confidence in the politicians, in the European Union and in the banks," said Arturo Virosque, 79, president of Valencia's chamber of commerce and the owner of a local logistics company. Ticking off crises going back to the Spanish Civil War in his youth, he said, "this is different. It's like an illness." After price cuts by competitors, Mr. Virosque's company reduced charges for storage and transportation, and slashed its work force to about 170, from 250. "The worst thing is that we have to cut the young people," he said, because higher severance makes it too expensive to fire older workers. While unemployment traditionally is higher in Spain than in much of Europe, the sharp increase has many here nervous. The jobless rate for those under 25 is at a Depression-like level of 31.8 percent, the highest among the 27 nations of the European Union.

ABOUT 30 PERCENT OF ARRANGEMENTS on the site involve the daddy paying an "allowance," usually a thousand or two a month, though the site claims some reach $10,000. The rest provide the baby with incidental cash, shopping sprees, gifts, travel or the fleeting illusion that theirs is a high-end, easy life. "I get flown to whatever city I want," wrote a North Carolina college student, who goes by the name gurlnextdoor on the site's blog, a mix between an online support group and a kaffeeklatsch. "He pays for it, takes me shopping, we talk, laugh, go out to eat and do whatever we want to do for our days together. . . . I don't bring up mundane problems about my home life, and he does the same. . . . If I wanted someone to talk to about my life problems, I'd get a boyfriend or a therapist."

the real poop on love science

Companies have used government-subsidized short working hours - known as kurzarbeit - to avoid mass layoffs, but that still costs them money and is only a temporary solution. In February exports fell 23 percent compared with the previous year. Industrial output shrank 20.6 percent for the month, compared with the year before. "We would need to see signs of improvement in summer or early autumn. Otherwise it becomes too expensive for companies to continue kurzarbeit," said Gernot Nerb