By Lorie Hailey
Associate Editor
A Whitley County housing project is producing homes with little or no energy costs, reports the Lexington Herald-Leader.
The houses are designed to use 90 percent less energy for heating and cooling than a conventional home, and they have solar panels on the roof that generate power to sell back to the electric company.
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For the Class of 2012, the optimism of graduation is clouded by the uncertain aftermath of the worst economic slide since the Depression, says the Associated Press.
Last year, graduates 24 and younger posted a 9.3 percent jobless rate; since then, there have been signs of progress. Unemployment averaged 7.2 percent during the first third of this year, compared with 9.1 percent in the same period in 2011. And one survey estimates that about 7 percent more new college grads will find work this year than a year ago.
But the job market is still tight, millions of people remain unemployed and graduates are entering a work world where salaries have not rebounded since falling during the recession, the AP says.
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Auto dealers reported they saw the most floor traffic on a Memorial Day weekend since 2006, reports USA TODAY.
The annualized pace of sales should hit 14.5 million, according to LMC Automotive and J.D. Power and Associates. That’s up from a previous prediction of 14.3 million.
A year ago the monthly pace was 11.8 million, according to sales tracker Autodata.
Toyota, Honda and VW are likely to be May’s biggest winners, the paper reports.
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Hundreds of thousands of out-of-work Americans are receiving their final unemployment checks sooner than they expected, even though Congress renewed extended benefits until the end of the year, the New York Times reports.
The checks are stopping for the people who have the most difficulty finding work: the long-term unemployed. More than five million people have been out of work for longer than half a year. Federal benefit extensions, which supplemented state funds for payments up to 99 weeks, were intended to tide over the unemployed until the job market improved.
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