Thompson, 54, left Sunday in a management shake-up triggered by inaccurate information in his official biography. He would have been entitled to a severance package if Yahoo had terminated him “without cause,” according to the contract he signed in January.

When Yahoo fired Carol Bartz as CEO eight months ago, the company paid her $3 million in severance. Bartz stands to make even more money from the nearly 386,000 shares of restricted stock and nearly 416,000 stock options that vested upon her ouster.

Thompson kept a $1.5 million bonus and restricted stock valued at $5.5 million that Yahoo paid him when he joined. Those sums were intended to compensate him for benefits he gave up by leaving his job running PayPal, the online payment service owned by eBay Inc.

But Yahoo Inc free credit score online. is requiring Thompson to surrender unvested stock awards valued at $16 million.

Thompson was getting an annual salary of $1 million at Yahoo and could have gotten a bonus of up to $2 million this year.

Yahoo parted ways with Thompson because of the recent revelation that his bio included a college degree in computer science that he never received. Thompson received an accounting degree from Stonehill College, a small school near Boston, in 1979.

Citing unnamed people familiar with the matter, The Wall Street Journal reported that Thompson had recently told Yahoo’s board that he has been diagnosed with thyroid cancer. The disease contributed to Thompson’s decision to leave Yahoo, according to the Journal.

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Security officials say the parked car exploded around 7:30 a.m. Sunday near a police patrol in a main street in the center of the city.

An official in the nearby Ramadi hospital said five other policemen were seriously wounded. Two passers-by were also wounded, he said.

All officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information.

Ramadi is the capital of Anbar province and used to be a stronghold of al-Qaida. Recently, local militias have managed to bring a measure of calm to the city and province, part of a general drop in violence seen across the country.

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The lower chamber of Parliament voted Friday 268 to 185 with 2 abstentions to approve changes sought by the pro-business government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk, which argues that delayed retirement will help Poles build up larger pensions and reduce state spending.

Trade unions have vehemently opposed the plan and were staging a noisy protest outside Parliament.

The current law allows women to retire at age 60 and men at 65. The armed forces and some other services have even more lenient regulations which the new law also seeks to toughen up.

The new law still needs approval from the Senate and from President Bronislaw Komorowski.

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Japan’s Nikkei 225 index rose 0.2 percent to 9,065.73 after opening lower. South Korea’s Kospi also opened lower before settling flat at 1,950.03. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng was up less than 0.1 percent at 20,341.49.

But Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 rose 0.4 percent to 4,292.40 and benchmarks in mainland China and Taiwan also rose.

“The Eurozone crisis remains in the spotlight, keeping sentiment under pressure,” strategists at Credit Agricole CIB in Hong Kong wrote in a note to clients.

World markets have been roiled this week by political instability in Europe. Greece has been left without a government since elections on Sunday, adding to growing worries that it will drop out of the euro currency union or be forced out.

The turmoil shook markets in Spain, where the interest rate that the government must pay on benchmark 10-year bonds rose to an uncomfortably high level of 6.06 percent. Rates of above 7 percent are seen as unsustainable, and forced Greece, Ireland and Portugal to ask for bailouts.

Toyota Motor Corp. rose 2.1 percent, a day after the carmaker said quarterly profit more than quadrupled and it made an upbeat forecast as it recovers from a sales plunge caused by the tsunami in Japan last year.

On Wall Street on Wednesday, the Dow closed lower for the sixth day in a row, down 0.8 percent at 12,835.06. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index fell 0.7 percent to 1,354.58 and the Nasdaq composite average Nasdaq dropped 0.4 percent to 2,934.71.

Benchmark oil for June delivery was down 6 cents at $96.75 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract fell 20 cents to finish at $96.81 per barrel in New York on Wednesday.

In currencies, the euro rose to $1.2952 from $1.2945 late Wednesday in New York. The dollar rose to 79.73 Japanese yen from 79.68 yen.

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The economy added just 115,000 jobs in the month, the Labor Department reported Friday, down from March when employers created 154,000 jobs.

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Obama battles job crisis

The U.S. lost 4.3 million jobs in President Obama’s first 13 months in office. Track his progress since then.

Meanwhile, the unemployment rate fell to 8.1% as 342,000 workers dropped out of the labor force. At 63.6%, the portion of the working-age population participating in the job market is now at its lowest level since 1981.

That’s problematic mainly because it weighs on economic growth.

"If there are less people working, then your potential for what the economy can produce is reduced," said John Silvia, chief economist at Wells Fargo.

Job market dropouts

The labor market has been on a roller coaster this year, with job growth starting off strong in the first couple of months of 2012. Then a disappointing slowdown in March led many to wonder whether the recovery was taking a turn for the worse. April’s weak growth compounded those fears.

But revisions from previous months also showed the economy gained 53,000 more jobs in February and March than originally thought.

Some economists believe the slowdown now is mainly due to the seasonal adjustments the government uses in calculating its figures. Warm weather earlier in the year may have given the job market an artificial boost in January and February, which is now tapering off.

"This is payback in terms of the weather," Silvia said.

Retailers added 29,000 jobs in April, while restaurants and bars added 20,000 workers. Temporary agencies hired 21,000 and manufacturers added 16,000 jobs. Meanwhile, the government continued to slash workers.

Recruiters say they’re still seeing plenty of demand for high-skill workers in technology, health care and professional services like accounting, but not enough of America’s unemployed have the right qualifications.

"Companies are changing and innovating, and therefore the jobs that they need are changing," said Kathy Kane, senior vice president of talent management at Adecco Group North America. "The hardest part for us right now is to keep up with those changes and find the workers with the skills for the new jobs, not the old jobs."

Indeed, workers with a bachelors degree or higher have only a 4% unemployment rate, while those with just a high school education have a 7.9% jobless rate.

Overall, the job market has a long way to go to climb out of the deep hole left by the financial crisis. Of the 8.8 million jobs lost, only about 3.7 million have been added back.

Roughly 12.5 million Americans remain unemployed, and 41.3% of them have been so for six months or more. 

Source

Exuberant, diverse crowds filled the Place de la Bastille, the iconic plaza of the French Revolution, to fete Hollande’s victory, waving French, European and labor union flags and climbing the column that rises at its center. Leftists are overjoyed to have one of their own in power for the first time since Socialist Francois Mitterrand was president from 1981 to 1995.

“Austerity can no longer be inevitable!” Hollande declared in his victory speech Sunday night after a surprising campaign that saw him transform from an unremarkable, mild figure to an increasingly statesmanlike one.

Sarkozy is the latest victim of a wave of voter anger at government spending cuts around Europe that have tossed out governments and leaders over the past couple of years.

In Greece, a parliamentary vote Sunday is seen as critical to the country’s prospects for pulling out of a deep financial crisis felt in world markets. A state election in Germany and local elections in Italy were seen as tests of support for the national government’s policies.

Hollande promised help for France’s downtrodden after years under the Sarkozy, a man many voters saw as too friendly with the rich and blamed for economic troubles.

Hollande said European partners should be relieved and not frightened by his presidency.

“I am proud to have been capable of giving people hope again,” Hollande told huge crowds of supporters in his electoral fiefdom of Tulle in central France. “We will succeed!”

Hollande inherits an economy that’s a driver of the European Union but is deep in debt. He wants more government stimulus, and more government spending in general, despite concerns in the markets that France needs to urgently trim its huge debt.

Sarkozy conceded defeat minutes after the polls closed, saying he had called Hollande to wish him “good luck” as the country’s new leader.

Sarkozy, widely disliked for budget cuts and his handling of the economy during recent crises, said he did his best to win a second term, despite widespread anger at his handling of the economy.

“I bear responsibility … for the defeat,” he said. “I committed myself totally, fully, but I didn’t succeed in convincing a majority of French. … I didn’t succeed in making the values we share win.”

With 75 percent of the vote counted, official results showed Hollande with 51.1 percent of the vote compared with Sarkozy’s 48.9 percent, the Interior Ministry said. The CSA, TNS-Sofres and Ipsos polling agencies all predicted a Hollande win as well paydayloans.

Hollande has virtually no foreign policy experience but he will face his first tests right after his inauguration, which must happen no later than May 16.

Among his first trips will be to the United States later this month for summits of NATO _ where he will announce he is pulling French troops out of Afghanistan by the end of the year _ and the Group of Eight leading world economies.

Hollande’s first challenge will be dealing with Germany: He wants to re-negotiate a hard-won European treaty on budget cuts that Germany’s Angela Merkel and Sarkozy had championed. He promises to make his first foreign trip to Berlin to work on a relationship that has been at the heart of Europe’s postwar unity.

Germany’s foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, congratulated Hollande on Sunday night and said both countries will keep on cooperating closely in driving the European Union’s policies and be “a stabilizing factor and a motor for the European Union.”

At home, Hollande intends to modify one of Sarkozy’s key reforms, over the retirement age, to allow some people to retire at 60 instead of 62. He also plans to increase spending in a range of sectors and wants to ease France off its dependence on nuclear energy. He favors legalizing euthanasia and gay marriage.

Sarkozy supporters call those proposals misguided.

“We’re going to call France the new Greece,” said Laetitia Barone, 19. “Hollande is now very dangerous.”

Sarkozy had said he would quit politics if he lost, but was vague about his plans Sunday night.

“You can count on me to defend these ideas, convictions,” he said, “but my place cannot be the same.”

His political allies turned their attention to parliamentary elections next month.

People of all ages and different ethnicities celebrated Hollande’s victory at the Bastille. Ghylaine Lambrecht, 60, who celebrated the 1981 victory of Mitterrand at the Bastille, was among them.

“I’m so happy. We had to put up with Sarko for 10 years,” she said referring to Sarkozy’s time as interior and finance minister and five years as president. “In the last few years the rich have been getting richer. Now long live France, an open democratic France.”

“It’s magic!” said Violaine Chenais, 19. “I think Francois Hollande is not perfect, but it’s clear France thinks its time to give the left a chance. This means real hope for France. We’re going to celebrate with drink and hopefully some dancing.”

Source

But in mid-April, four months after a service station and convenience store hired him as an overnight clerk, Hegwood learned his hair style had suddenly became a problem.

Hegwood, 24, hasn’t been fired. But he hasn’t collected a paycheck since.

His supervisors at a St. Louis Petro Mart have told Hegwood that he’s welcome to return to work — if he shears the dreadlocks that run about halfway down his neck.

Hegwood doesn’t understand the fuss.

“It’s a gas station,” he said. “People aren’t going to not buy gas just because the clerk has dreads.”

Policies on the personal grooming habits of employees land on the edge of state and federal employment discrimination laws.

Companies doing business in Missourihave the right to terminate or suspend any employee that doesn’t meet established guidelines addressing hair, tattoos or dress.

“An employer may condition a job on an employee’s compliance with the employer’s hair styling preferences, unless the employee’s alternative hair styling preference is connected with the employee’s inclusion in a protected category,” Missouri Department of Labor spokeswoman Amy Susan explained in an e-mail. “For example, a particular hair style may be a tenet of the employee’s religion, or the employer may decline to hire a prospective employee because the employee is considered to be disabled because of his or her hair style (such as believing someone without hair to be suffering from cancer).”

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is a bit more exacting. It looks at how various groups of people wearing various hairstyles are treated in comparison to other groups.

“The baseline for evaluating grooming policies is to look at their overall burden on different groups of employees,” EEOC spokeswoman Justine Lisser wrote in a general overview of the Petro Mart matter.

“…If an employer prohibits a range of hair styles, such as both corn rows and mohawks, and the no cornrows/dreadlocks policy affects 30% of its African-American employees while the no mohawks affects only 3% of its white employees, we could say that the policy had a disparate impact on African-Americans, even if it applies to all employees.”

Hegwood has sported dreads on and off for years. The dreadlocks were in place when he applied for and was offered the $8 business cards.50-an-hour position at Petro Mart late last year.

“They didn’t say anything about it then,” he said.

Nor, Hegwood added, was there any mention of the dreads posing a threat to safety or the health of co-workers.

Owned and operated by Western Oil Co. in Earth City, Petro Mart does have a written policy stipulating that hair should be “kept neat and clean…immoderate styles… such as corn rows, braids etc. must be approved by a supervisor…dreadlocks and mohawks are unacceptable.”

Western Oil did not respond to requests for a response.

A father of three, Hegwood doesn’t know how long he can take a principled stand against Petro Mart and its grooming policy.

He needs a salary to support his children and pay for the remainder of his education at St. Louis Community College-Forest Park, where Hegwood hopes to earn a degree in business.

The worst of the job crisis may be over — unemployment in the St. Louis region dropped to 8.1 percent in March.

But back in the hunt four months after starting a job “I really liked,” Hegwood fears landing employment remains a challenge.

“Maybe I’ll start my own business,” he said, looking ahead. “That way I can wear my hair anyway I want.”

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“We’re all technology companies at heart. Whether you’re a law firm or a bank, the core of your company is technology. And that is kind of shaking the core of the office today.” — Thomas Vecchione, head of Workplace Design at Gensler, the global architectural firm, on the work space evolution that includes “free range” offices in which employees take a seat each day at whatever desk is available.

Source: The Point, WBUR/Boston

BY THE NUMBERS

3.9 million - The population of Oregon — and the number of Americans who continue to suffer the effects of unemployment lasting more than a year. The long-term unemployed represent 29.5 of the nation’s jobless.

Source: The Pew Charitable Trusts

FINAL WORD

“You know, how could you not look?” - Cardinals President Bill DeWitt III on whether he tracks the struggles of a former employee, Albert Pujols, in the box scores each day.

Source: St. Louis Post-Dispatch

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The Institute for Supply Management says its index of non-manufacturing activity dropped to 53.5 last month from 56 in March. Any reading above 50 indicates expansion.

The ISM’s survey covers all sectors outside of manufacturing. That includes retail, construction, financial services, health care, and hotels.

The slowdown in services comes as consumers have reined in their spending a bit. Consumer spending rose in March, but by much less than in the two previous months.

Americans are spending more on goods, such as cars and appliances, but are holding back when it comes to services. A government report Monday showed that spending on services was flat in March.

The ISM’s services index reached the highest point in a year in February, when it was 57.3. Consumers stepped up their spending that month at the fastest pace in seven months.

And in the first quarter, Americans increased their spending at the fastest pace in a year. But most of those gains were in January and February. And Americans spent more while saving less, a trend that economists worry isn’t sustainable guaranteed online personal loans.

The job market is improving, but incomes are barely growing. That could weigh on consumer spending in the coming months, dragging on the services sector.

Manufacturing has been the driving force behind the economic recovery. Economists would like to see services firms contribute more. On Tuesday, the ISM said that the manufacturing sector expanded at its fastest pace in 10 months. Measures of new orders, production and employment all rose. But manufacturing accounts for only about 12 percent of U.S. output.

Services firms need to step up hiring to accelerate job gains and rapidly push down the unemployment rate. The service sector includes low-paying positions in retail and restaurants. But it also has higher-paying jobs in professions such as information technology, accounting and financial services.

The government will release the April employment jobs report on Friday. Economists are predicting that employers added 163,000 jobs, and the unemployment rate will remain 8.2 percent.

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LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SA (MC) and its peers are raising prices to make up for lost business in China and lower profitability outside the country, even if it puts items like 2,270-euro ($3,000) Lockit handbags further out of reach for Europeans whose disposable incomes are shrinking amid austerity.