The blotter: Week ending 7 March 2010

By Michael Fraase

Sunday, 07 March 2010 07:24PM CST

Section: Blotter

Business

Janis Joplin blotter acidBob Collins, writing in his news cut blog for Minnesota Public Radio, cites the Economist and US News with the first wave of a potential political push for delayed retirement. Collins notes, “the push to delay retirement is gaining some favor at a time when many older workers are being forced into early retirement because they’re losing their jobs.” Here’s the nut graf from US News: “The number of unemployed Americans ages 55 and older expressing interest in finding a job has grown by 60 percent since the end of 2007, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But finding work has proved difficult. The unemployment rate for older job seekers has more than doubled since 2007 to 7.2 percent in December 2009, and the average duration of the job search for older workers was 36 weeks in November—far longer than the 28 weeks most younger workers remain unemployed.”

ESRD

Gary Schwitzer, tenured University of Minnesota Journalism School associate professor, announced his resignation via Twitter. Schwitzer wants to focus on helping people understand issues related to healthcare and devote more time to healthnewsreview.org (hey, full-text for your RSS feed would be nice) which provides analysis of healthcare journalism. Last year, Schwitzer helped develop a health journalism program for the University’s J-School. It’s been shelved, because, after all, who needs quality healthcare journalism.

Intellectual property

Apple this week filed a series of lawsuits against HTC, the manufacturer of Google’s Nexus One smartphone which runs Google’s Android operating system. Apple claims infringement of 20 of its patents. The question is why Google wasn’t named in the actions.

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