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Italy, mired in a fourth recession since 2001, is struggling to shake the threat of debt-crisis contagion even as the nation

Yahoo ended Scott Thompson’s four-month stint as its CEO without giving him a severance package, according to documents filed Monday.

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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Iraqi officials say a car bomb has killed a policeman in the western city of Ramadi.

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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Poland’s lawmakers have approved a controversial government plan to raise the retirement age to 67 for most Poles.

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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Hiring slowed in April and workers dropped out of the labor force in droves — not a good sign for the job market going forward.

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. 

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Stronger profits from Microsoft, McDonald’s and other major U.S. corporations pushed stocks higher Friday. Optimism from Europe helped brighten the mood.

The Dow Jones industrial average and the Standard & Poor’s 500 index had a winning week for the first time this month.

“There’s been a wrestling match all week long between strong earnings and weak economic data,” said Lawrence Creatura, a portfolio manager at Federated Investors, the money-management firm. “At the moment, earnings are winning.”

Before the market opened, McDonald’s posted better quarterly profits, buoyed by warm weather and sales of new menu items like Chicken McBites and oatmeal. Sales picked up even in Europe, McDonald’s’ biggest market, despite economic turmoil and severe weather.

Microsoft beat analysts’ projections with quarterly earnings and revenue, and sales in its Windows division were surprisingly strong. And General Electric posted a profit of more than $3 billion, helped by orders for locomotives, aircraft engines and other equipment.

The Dow rose 65.16 points to close at 13,029.26. The S&P 500 added 1.61 points to 1,378.53.

Corporate earnings results have provided a pleasant surprise, said Sam Stovall, chief equity strategist at S&P Capital IQ. After nine straight quarters of growth, earnings for S&P 500 companies were expected to be nearly flat. But eight of every 10 companies that have reported so far, including Coca-Cola and IBM, have beaten estimates. As a result, first-quarter earnings are now projected to rise 4.4 percent, according to S&P.

In Europe, Germany’s DAX rose 1.2 percent, and stock indexes in France and Spain were higher. A closely watched survey in Germany, the continent’s economic powerhouse, showed business optimism rising for the sixth straight month. Economists had expected a decline.

In other U.S. trading, Apple sank 2.5 percent, helping to tug the Nasdaq composite index down 7.11 points to 3,000.45. Apple, the most valuable company in the world, accounts for 12 percent of the Nasdaq.

The Dow gained 1.4 percent this week, and the S&P 500 index 0.6 percent. But it wasn’t a smooth ride. Better earnings reports and higher retail sales helped drive the stock market up to start the week free credit report and score. The Dow rose 194 points on Tuesday, its best day in more than a month.

Then worries about Europe came storming back. Markets reversed course Wednesday, after the Bank of Spain said that the amount of bad loans held by Spanish banks rose to an 18-year high.

If those banks falter, it would put pressure on Spain’s already troubled government to prop them up. Weak reports on jobs, housing and manufacturing in the U.S. added to the selling pressure, and the Dow slumped 151 points in two days.

“It’s been like the weather here in upstate New York _ unpredictable,” Creatura said. “One day is up, the next day is down.”

The encouraging news out of Germany helped drive oil prices up Friday. Benchmark U.S. crude rose 78 cents to finish at $103.05 per barrel in New York. Brent crude, widely used by U.S. refiners to produce gasoline, added 76 cents to $118.76 in London.

Among stocks making big moves in the United States:

_ Oil services giant Schlumberger Ltd. rose 3 percent. The company’s quarterly profits jumped almost 38 percent as strong drilling activity in the Gulf of Mexico and the Middle East offset a slowdown in North America’s natural gas fields. Schlumberger said that world oil demand appears to have “stabilized” and that the risk of a double-dip recession has declined.

_ E-Trade Financial Corp. jumped 6 percent, the largest gain in the S&P 500. The online broker reported a 40 percent jump in first-quarter profit after the close of trading Thursday, beating Wall Street estimates with the help of a big tax benefit.

_ SanDisk Corp. plummeted 11 percent, the S&P’s biggest loser. The flash memory maker said late Thursday that weak demand and low prices cut its quarterly profit by nearly half. SanDisk warned that it expects the trend to continue.

_ Tempur-Pedic International Inc., the mattress maker, plunged 20.6 percent after posting a disappointing full-year earnings forecast. It cited concerns about competition and foreign exchange rates.

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IBM posted first-quarter earnings Tuesday that beat analysts’ estimates.

The tech giant reported a profit of $3.1 billion, an increase of 7% versus last year. Revenue for the quarter was $24.7 billion, up slightly from a year ago.

Excluding certain charges, earnings per share came in at $2.78, above estimates of $2.65. The company, which is the enterprise world’s largest vendor, is one of the hottest stocks in tech and has consistently topped Wall Street profit expectations for the past few quarters.

However, shares of IBM (, Fortune 500) were down 2% in after-hours trading as sales narrowly missed analysts’ forecasts of $24.8 billion.

IBM expects the future to be brighter: It raised its full-year earnings per share estimates to "at least" $15, up from a previous forecast of $14.85.

"We delivered another excellent software performance, expanded services margins, and continued the momentum in our growth initiatives," IBM CEO Ginni Rometty in a release, citing those factors for IBM’s decision to to raise its guidance.

Rometty, formerly the company’s senior vice president for sales, marketing and strategy, succeeded CEO Sam Palmisano after he stepped down in October.

IBM has made a big push into software and services, two of the more rapidly growing and profitable areas of tech, over the past few years.

"When you look at our offerings in business analytics, cloud, and Smarter Planet, about half of the revenue is software," IBM CFO Mark Loughridge said during a conference call with analysts.

IBM’s earnings report came on a busy day for the tech sector. Intel (, Fortune 500) and Yahoo (, Fortune 500) also both released their latest financial results after the closing bell Tuesday.  

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