Free Republic

WASHINGTON — On most days now, Mahdi Obeidi rides his new mountain bike, plays with his grandkids and works on getting a U.S. patent for technology he originally developed to build a nuclear bomb for Saddam Hussein. Obeidi, who headed Hussein's uranium enrichment program until it was shut down in 1991, is the only Iraqi weapons scientist that the CIA is known to have brought to the United States after the invasion last year. The CIA also flew eight of his family members here in August 2003 and secretly set them up in three adjoining apartments in a leafy Virginia...

After a successful summer internship at a mortgage tech company, Alana Klopstein was thrilled to get a job offer. She signed the contract in January 2022, giving her peace of mind during her final year at UC San Diego. Then in June, three months before her start date, she got an email from the company.

Students graduating from college in spring 2011 faced an odd sort of serendipity. Of course, there have been better years to enter the job market. But at the start of the year, as many companies determined their entry-level hiring budgets, corporate earnings were strong and the economy showed signs of recovery. “Hiring picked up in spring. It was pretty fortuitous,” says Robert Conners, who received a bachelor’s degree in finance and business economics from Indiana University Kelley School of Business in May. Conners signed an employment contract in the fall of his senior year with a firm that wound up...

As the economy gradually recovers, some big U.S. companies are cranking up their recruiting and advertising thousands of job openings, ranging from retail clerks and nurses to bank tellers and experts in cloud computing. Many of the new jobs are in retailing, accounting, consulting, health care, telecommunications and defense-related industries, according to data collected for The Wall Street Journal by Indeed Inc., which runs one the largest employment websites. It said the number of U.S. job postings on the Internet rose to 4.7 million on Dec. 1, up from 2.7 million a year earlier. The company daily collects listings from...