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Recession. At the same time, unemployment remains high at 7 percent and the total number of long-term unemployed is 4.1 million, a figure underscored by his call for a renewal of the emergency jobless benefits.
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• CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) -- A popular soap-opera actress and former Miss Venezuela, 29-year-old Monica Spear surely could have afforded to vacation elsewhere.
• Yet she and her ex-husband, who worked in the travel industry, spent New Year's in the mountains of western Venezuela with their 5-year-old daughter then visited the plains of Apure state.
• On their return by car to Caracas, Spear and Thomas Henry Berry, a 39-year-old British citizen, became the latest symbols of the rampant violent crime that is afflicting this oil-rich nation.
• Robbers shot and killed the two and wounded their daughter on an isolated stretch of highway when they tried to foil the assault by locking themselves inside their car, which had been disabled by tire punctures, police said Tuesday.
• The slayings late Monday outraged Venezuelans, triggering a wave of calls for action on social media. TV personality Camila Canabal expressed what many were feeling in a tweet: "Sadness, anger, indignation, impotence, shame and pain, pain, pain, dammit!!!"
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• HALEIWA, Hawaii (AP) -- Alice Lunt didn't worry too much when she saw waves splashing close to her home on Oahu's North Shore on Christmas Eve. She had seen the ocean edge close before. But before dawn, a neighbor woke her with a call.
• "Everything was washing away," she remembered the neighbor saying.
• The water claimed Lunt's deck that day, and washed away a concrete slab the next night -- part of a fast-moving collapse of the shore that also ripped out a neighbor's backyard and forced another to cut away rooms to save the rest of their house.
• The Christmas swell damaged at least five oceanfront properties in the neighbor

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