Your customized headlines for Sat, Mar 10, 2012

As the country logs its third straight month of strong job growth, economists and politicians are daring to hope that a recovery dogged by false starts and sluggishness is finally taking hold.

The Labor Department reported Friday that the economy added 227,000 jobs last month, more than analysts had expected. It also said job growth in January and December — which was already robust — was even better than previously thought. It revised those figures upward by 61,000 positions.

The parents are often panicked when they call the day-care center.

They are moms who need a second job to pay the light bill; dads whose shifts changed at a restaurant; students with a class that continues into the evening. And now, they need a child to be put to bed not by a relative, but a staffer.

Roger Fidler, in jeans and a black turtleneck, is watching Steve Jobs, in jeans and a black turtleneck, introduce the iPad.

Fidler is sitting in his stark white office — the late Apple co-founder adored white's simplicity — and Jobs is strolling on stage in a 2010 video playing on Fidler's MacBook. "There's laptops and smartphones now," Jobs says. "But a question has arisen lately: Is there room for a third category of device in the world, something that's between a laptop and a smartphone?"

Every device has its pros and cons. Here are five reasons to buy — and not to buy — the latest iPad.

Reasons to buy:

1. The display: If you're really into photos or video, then the screen is probably the single-most compelling reason to upgrade. Apple says that the iPad screen has more pixels than an HDTV.

As the country logs its third straight month of strong job growth, economists and politicians are daring to hope that a recovery dogged by false starts and sluggishness is finally taking hold.

The Labor Department reported Friday that the economy added 227,000 jobs last month, more than analysts had expected. It also said job growth in January and December — which was already robust — was even better than previously thought. It revised those figures upward by 61,000 positions.

— Recent jobs reports have been great, but many economists still expect jobs growth to slow in 2012. Why? (There's an answer at the link; this isn't just rhetorical.)

— Fukushima's last remaining resident.

News sites everywhere are blaring scary headlines like: "Greece Deal Triggers $3 Billion in Default Swaps" Markets even lurched for a bit on the news. So what exactly is going on in Greece?

Planet Money's Jacob Goldstein has a nice, simplified explanation. Over the past few weeks, Greece has been working to restructure its debt — the people holding Greek bonds will get repaid far less than they were originally owed. And there was a lingering question about whether the people who'd bought insurance on these bonds (in the event of a Greek default) would get their insurance money. Today, the committee that decides these things pronounced that, yes, they will.

Pressured by Germany and other northern European states to rein its budget, Greece experienced a sharp fiscal contraction last year that proved brutal to the country's economy without ultimately helping its long-term deficit problem. Moody's economist Tu Packard surveyed the damage in a new research note: