Your customized news for Sat, Feb 18, 2012

The nation's unemployment rate is falling faster than expected, but what counts as a job has become increasingly murky.

More than a quarter of people who have found jobs since the recession ended have landed in temporary positions, according to government data, though private estimates range far higher. The numbers reflect a fundamental change in the way Americans work, with neither businesses nor their employees expecting to stay together for life.

The Smithsonian has acquired the tapes, documentation, copyrights, and over 50,000 lines of code that chronicle the invention of e-mail. The lines of code that produced the first "bcc," "cc," "to" and "from" fields were the brainchild of then-14-year old inventor V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai.

MADRID — While Greece haggles over every detail in an austerity plan imposed by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund, Spain has been Europe's good student.

Even while the Socialists were still in power, Spain took the initiative in slashing mercilessly into welfare budgets and reducing salaries, vowing to get a handle on a dangerous pile of deficits and debts. The conservative prime minister elected three months ago, Mariano Rajoy, has pursued the cutback campaign even more vigorously, raising taxes and redoing labor laws.

Laura Bush, a member of the advisory council for the National Museum of African American History and Culture, asked a friend at the Houston Endowment to meet with the museum's founding director last year.

The nation's unemployment rate is falling faster than expected, but what counts as a job has become increasingly murky.

More than a quarter of people who have found jobs since the recession ended have landed in temporary positions, according to government data, though private estimates range far higher. The numbers reflect a fundamental change in the way Americans work, with neither businesses nor their employees expecting to stay together for life.

The massive sale of beachfront-property spectrum is expected to raise as much as $25 billion and help pay for a payroll tax cut. Providing the airwaves to private companies has the potential to enhance the services of existing wireless providers such as Sprint Nextel and Verizon Wireless, or even create new competitors.

Federal authorities on Friday arrested a 29-year-old Moroccan man in an alleged plot to carry out a suicide bombing at the U.S. Capitol, the latest in a series of terrorism-related arrests resulting from undercover sting operations.

— America is No. 1 in organ donations.

— How Obama fares among Catholic voters.

— A handy guide to Fedspeak.

— Does unemployment drive rebellion? Maybe not.

We'd be remiss in not mentioning that today is the three-year anniversary of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. So what do we know about the stimulus, three years later?

Well, we know that the economy is still lousy, with millions of Americans out of work. But it's hard to know what the counterfactual is. The University of Chicago's Booth business school recently surveyed the nation's top economists, and the vast majority agreed that the economy would be in worse shape today without the stimulus. How much worse? One possible clue comes in this graph from today's Economic Report of the President, showing that the recent U.S. recession was far less severe than the average downturn associated with past financial crises: