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The addition of 200,000 new jobs in December shows that the economy is strengthening, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis said on Friday.

“We have seen a steady firming up of our economy” in recent months with two million jobs created in the private sector of the past year, she told CNBC television.

“Now we are seeing a better trajectory, we are moving in the right direction.”

“In the last few months, on the whole I have seen good incremental increase in the private sector jobs, so on that side of the factor I would say, ‘Hey, that is not a bad thing at all,” she said free business cards.

But she urged the extension of the payroll tax cut and further measures to support continued improvement in the jobs market.

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Imagine this: You open your eyes, and find yourself standing in front of a tall, lean fellow. He has a long white beard, and wears a long white robe.

Big Pearly Gates loom up behind him. It’s St. Peter, and he looks ticked off.

He’s sitting at a desk with a big book open to a page with your name on it. It’s time for your final performance appraisal.

Pete is a sourpuss. “Well,” he says, fingering a page. “I see you cheated on your eighth-grade English test. And that was a very nasty thing you did to Mary Murphy’s pigtail.”

“Uh, I was just a kid and …”

“Ahem! That’s enough out of you,” gruffs Pete. “Now moving on to your adulthood. I see you were in church all of twice last year. Couldn’t drag your sorry carcass out of bed, huh? And you were chintzy on the United Way contribution.”

You’re sweating. It’s getting warm.

“Now, let us review your investment portfolio,” says old Pete. “What’s this? Altria? Isn’t that a tobacco stock? And here’s a whiskey stock. And Playboy Enterprises! Great balls of fire!”

St. Peter raises his eyebrows and pins you with a stare.

“Well, just how much money did you make from sin?” asks the saint.

At this point, you’re doing a little dance. The ground under your toes is getting very, very hot.

OK, wake up now.

A dream like that might get you thinking about socially responsible investing. There are about 250 mutual funds that promise to ally you with the angels. They screen out companies engaged in vices, war, pollution and workplace meanness while investing in companies that are green, peaceful, socially sensitive and sweet to employees. If you need some quick salve for your guilty conscience, there you go.

The nice thing is that you can feel all smug and socially superior without losing investment return. There have been lots of studies on socially sensitive fund performance, and they’ve generally concluded that social screens have little effect on investment return over the long haul, says David Kathman, analyst for Morningstar, the investment analysis firm.

Over shorter periods, the screens can both help and hurt. For instance, take the Amana Income fund. It invests according to Islamic principles, which means avoiding banks that charge interest. That helped the fund a lot in 2008, when the banking system nearly collapsed. It hurt in 2009 and 2010 when banks bounced back somewhat.

The Domini Social Equity fund screens for environmental behavior and good treatment of workers overnight pay day loans. During the 1990s, that moved its investments away from dirty industries toward technology companies where workers brought dogs to work and played foosball in the office.

That helped Domini shine in the late 1990s, while the tech bubble was inflating, and pulled down returns when the bubble popped.

“It tends to even out,” says Kathman.

That gets us to another thing about such funds. They vary in what they consider responsible. Some lean toward religious principles, others favor the environment. Some ban alcohol stocks. Others will tipple away. Defense stocks? Nuclear power? OK with one fund, not another.

You can find a handy guide to such funds, with performance returns and social screens, at ussif.org/resources/mfpc.

It’s harder to determine whether social investing does anything to change society. In theory, the movement would switch capital away from disfavored companies and toward favored ones. As the shunned companies’ stock price falls, management would change its behavior. Rewarded companies would get even nicer.

But are there enough bleeding hearts to swing a stock price? The U.S. Social Investment Forum, the movement’s trade group, claims heavy clout: $3.07 trillion out of $25.2 trillion in the U.S. investment marketplace is run in a socially conscious way, the group says.

Of course, its definition is pretty broad. It includes mutual funds that are perfectly happy to own a sin stock or a polluter, as long as they can hector management through shareholder proposals and the like. Investors qualify if they deposit money in banks with good community lending records.

With so many different social agendas, influence gets diluted. In fact, there’s some academic evidence that socially shunned stocks do a little better than others. Socially blessed stocks do a little better, too.

Perhaps the answer lies in observing St. Louis. The movement has been around for a couple of decades now, and you can still buy a pack of Camels. Boeing keeps churning out fighter jets. Ameren keeps burning coal, and we’re still a town that loves beer.

Socially conscious investing may get you points with St. Peter. But the CEOs of the world don’t seem to care much.

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Asian policy makers eager to sustain growth in 2012 may put their economies at risk with interest- rate cuts or fiscal stimulus that some can ill-afford.

The likelihood of

Egypt’s military sought to isolate pro-democracy activists protesting against their rule, depicting them as conspirators and vandals, as troops and protesters clashed for a third straight day, pelting each other with stones near parliament in the heart of the capital.

At least 10 protesters have been killed and 441 others wounded in the three days of violence, according to the Health Ministry. Activists say most of the 10 fatalities died of gunshot wounds.

The fighting, sparked when troops sought to break up a sit-in outside the Cabinet headquarters, has seen a particularly heavy hand by the military. Military police have been shown in video footage dragging women by the hair, even stripping the shirt off one veiled woman, and ferociously beating, kicking and stomping on protesters cowering on the ground.

Still, the protesters’ numbers have remained smaller than earlier rallies _ suggesting even anger over the disturbing images was not drawing the broader Egyptian public into a confrontation with the military, which activists behind the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak’s autocratic regime 10 months ago accuse of mismanaging the transition period and committing human rights abuses.

In a statement posted on its Facebook page, the ruling military council on Sunday called the clashes part of a “conspiracy” against Egypt. It said its forces had the right to defend the “property of the great people of Egypt.”

Seeking to depict the protesters as hooligans _ and apparently to counter the widely published images of protesters being beaten _ it also posted on the page footage of young men throwing rocks at a basement window of the parliament building and of at least one man trying to set the place ablaze.

The ruling generals have taken advantage of the growing frustration of many Egyptians over worsening economic hardships and tenuous security, blaming demonstrations, strikes and sit-ins for their predicament. The tactic, coupled with the military’s efforts to stain the reputation of the youth groups behind Mubarak’s ouster, appears to have worked.

The military has been using the state media and loyal private TV stations to project an image of itself as the protector of the nation and filling its public statements with patriotism and grave warnings of a dire future if political turmoil persisted.

Protest leaders increasingly complain that they feel isolated in a society that has grown more concerned with making ends meet than political rights. Many Egyptians see the ongoing, multistage parliamentary elections as a path to stability and an end to military rule.

“The military council uses every opportunity to show itself as the land’s strongest institution,” said Mohammed Abbas, an activist who defected from the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s largest and best organized political group, to side with youth groups more active in protests. “We are making it easier for the generals by our divisions and isolation.”

In Sunday’s clash, protesters and troops battled on two main streets off of central Tahrir Square, trading volleys of stones and firebombs around barriers that the military set up to block the avenues.

One of the streets is site of a research center set up during the three-year occupation of Egypt by France in the late 18th century. The building was almost completely gutted by a fire which broke out during the height of the clashes on Saturday, when troops on its roof and on other nearby rooftops hurled rocks down on protesters below.

Protesters, who blame the fire on the troops, have been trying to salvage valuable books and documents from the center, whose two-story building is now in danger of collapsing after its roof caved in.

The deepening hostility between the ruling military council and the protest leaders is in sharp contrast to the days of the popular uprising against Mubarak in January and February when army troops ordered out on the streets to take over from the hated police were given a warm welcome by hundreds of thousands of protesters in Cairo and elsewhere. The military at the time said it wouldn’t fire on protesters.

When the military stepped into power after Mubarak’s Feb. 11 resignation, it was largely embraced by the public.

Sunday’s renewed violence was also taking place as unofficial results from a second round of voting in parliamentary elections showed Islamist parties, led by the Muslim Brotherhood, continuing their dominance at the polls. Liberal and left leaning parties, many of which sympathetic to the revolutionaries, have been trounced at the ballots.

The third and final round of voting is slated for next month in nine of Egypt’s 27 provinces.

The Islamists have been staying clear of the recent violence, fearing that they could jeopardize their electoral gains by taking part in the protests. Their stance has prompted many activists to accuse them of political opportunism.

The clashes began early Friday when one of several hundred peaceful protesters staging a sit-in outside the Cabinet offices near parliament was detained and beaten by troops. The protesters began their sit-in three weeks ago to demand that the nation’s ruling military immediately step down and hand over power to a civilian administration.

Activists have been trying to drum up public sympathy for their cause by flooding social network sites with photos and video from the troops’ brutal assaults he past two days.

“Liars,” proclaimed a red headline on the front page of the independent Al-Tahrir newspaper, referring to repeated denials by the military council and military-appointed Prime Minister Kamal el-Ganzouri that no force or live ammunition were used against the protesters. With the headline, the paper ran a photo of the woman protester who was half-stripped by attacking soldiers. Other widely circulating footage shows an army officer running toward protesters while firing a pistol at them, though it is not clear from the footage whether he was using live ammunition.

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The leaders of France and Germany called forcefully Monday for a new European Union treaty that would automatically punish countries that use the euro if they violate existing limits on overspending.

Stocks and the euro rose while European government bond yields dropped sharply as investors viewed the proposal for a closer fiscal union among the 17 countries as an important step to save the euro.

Implementing treaty changes could take months, but a commitment to tighter coordination could open the way for further emergency aid from the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund or some combination.

“Our wish is to go on a forced march toward re-establishing confidence in the eurozone,” French President Nicolas Sarkozy said at a press conference alongside German Chancellor Angela Merkel. “We don’t have time. We are conscious of the gravity of the situation and of the responsibility that rests on our shoulders.”

Investors have been hopeful that the pair will get what they want at a summit in Brussels on Friday, where failure could doom the euro.

There is a risk that implementing the proposals won’t move fast enough for markets or the most heavily indebted countries. Countries like Italy and Spain need help now to keep their bond yields _ the cost of their borrowing _ down.

Sarkozy said he and Merkel would prefer that the treaty be agreed by all 27 members of the European Union, but he left the door open to one that just covers the eurozone and anyone else “who wants to join us.”

Sarkozy and Merkel made several proposals, some of which could be enshrined in a new treaty. They included:

_ automatic punishment for any government that allows its deficit to exceed 3 percent of GDP. Governments are supposed to follow this rule already, but many, including France, have flouted it;

_ requiring countries to enshrine in law a promise to balance their budgets;

_ never again asking private investors to take losses, as a bailout of Greece did;

_ making Europe’s bailout fund permanent by the end of next year, rather than mid-2013;

_ and holding monthly European summits until the crisis is over.

Worries about the stability of the euro reached a high in recent weeks as Italy’s bond yield, indicative of the rate it would pay to borrow on markets, jumped to record peaks above 7 percent. That level is considered unsustainable and has eventually forced Greece, Ireland and Portugal to require financial aid. By comparison, bond yields in Germany, Europe’s largest and most stable economy, are roughly 2 percent.

But Europe can’t afford to rescue Italy, the eurozone’s third-largest economy, so the crisis went into high gear in recent weeks when it looked like the country might need a lifeline.

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Concordia honored

ROME

ST. LOUIS 

European stock markets shot higher Thursday as investors waded into riskier assets, emboldened by EU leaders’ pre-dawn agreement to slash Greece’s massive debts.

Oil prices rose above $92 per barrel while the euro gained strongly following the European summit dedicated to fixing a debt mess in Greece before it provokes a bigger debt crisis across the continent.

European trading was buoyant from the outset. Britain’s FTSE climbed 2.1 percent to 5,670.12. Germany’s DAX jumped 3.7 percent to 6,243 and France’s CAC-40 gained 3.9 percent to 3,297. Wall Street also headed toward gains, with Dow Jones industrial futures rising 1.6 percent and S&P 500 futures gaining 1.8 percent.

The Greek market rallied on hopes the early morning deal would finally lift the specter of government bankruptcy.

Shortly after opening Thursday, shares on the Athens Stock Exchange were up 3.46 percent at 800.55, with banking stocks up more than 10 percent _ after suffering heavy losses earlier this week.

The hard-fought European deal requires banks to take on 50 percent losses on Greeks bonds. Eurozone countries and the International Monetary Fund will also provide an additional euro100 billion ($140 billion) in rescue loans as a second bailout package for Greece.

EU leaders “stopped the hemorrhaging,” said Marc Touati, chief economist at Assya Compagnie Financiere in Paris. “(They) have saved the Eurozone and that’s the good news and that’s why the markets are reacting positively.”

European leaders agreed early Thursday on a plan to provide Greece with more rescue loans to help relieve its crushing debt obligations. It will involve private investors taking bigger losses on the value of their Greek bonds, which would make Greece the first nation that uses the euro currency to be rated in default on its debt.

European Union President Herman Van Rompuy said the deal will reduce Greece’s debt to 120 percent of its gross domestic product in 2020. Under current conditions, it would have grown to 180 percent.

In addition, the euro440 billion European Financial Stability Facility will be used to insure part of the losses on the debt of wobbly countries like Italy and Spain, rendering its firepower equivalent to around euro1 trillion ($1 paydayloans.4 trillion).

Loose ends still need to be worked out, and the fundamental problem of low economic growth in the euro zone has not been resolved by the crisis summit, some economists warned.

“(They) have only saved it temporarily,” Touati said. “Unfortunately the fundamental problem concerning the absence of growth has not been resolved.”

Shares in Asia posted solid gains earlier in the day. Japan’s Nikkei 225 index rose 2 percent to close at an eight-week high of 8,926.54. South Korea’s Kospi added 1.5 percent to 1,922.04. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng gained 3.3 percent to 19,688.70.

Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 jumped 2.5 percent to 4,348.20 after trading resumed following a 4-hour technical glitch.

Meanwhile, strong economic reports helped send Wall Street higher on Wednesday.

The Dow Jones industrial average gained 1.4 percent to 11,869.04. The S&P 500 index rose 1.1 percent to 1,242. The Nasdaq composite added 0.5 percent to 2,650.67.

Reports in the U.S. showed businesses ordered more heavy machinery and other long-lasting manufactured goods last month. That indicates businesses are still spending on equipment despite worries about a weak economy and Europe’s debt problems. Sales of new homes rose in September after falling for four straight months.

Benchmark crude for December delivery was up $1.98 at $92.15 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract fell $2.97, or 3.2 percent, to end the day at $90.20 in New York on Wednesday.

Brent crude was up $1.87 at $110.78 a barrel on the ICE Futures Exchange in London.

In currencies, the euro climbed to $1.4003 from $1.3908 late Wednesday in New York. The dollar weakened to 75.83 yen from 76.20 yen.

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The launch of the iPhone 4S was executed at the Toronto Eaton centre with usual military precision and near-religious fervour. Already, some products are sold out.

On Friday morning the store front was a sort of shrine, decorated with flowers and multicoloured post-it notes bearing messages for the late leader, Steve Jobs.

“Thanks for my Christmas gifts,” wrote Ashley. “Thank you Steve Jobs you are in the iClouds now,” wrote another.

“iSad,” said someone else.

More: Five reasons to avoid the new iPhone 4S

More: Apple co-founder Wozniak first in line for new iPhone

More: Glitches raise ire of iPad, iPhone users

The line began Thursday. Mo Bastaki, a 22-year-old accountant, arrived around 6 p.m. This launch is special, says Bastaki, “It’s the last product Steve was alive for.”

But Bastaki, along with some hundred other people, was thrown out of the centre into the rain at 2 a.m.

When they were let back in three hours later, it was a Lord of the Flies affair payday loans. “All these guys who weren’t in line, got in line,” he says.

For some, the exercise is a cultural one. “We come here to feel the environment,” says Xianwen Zhang, a 22-year-old Chinese student from Zhejiang studying with his friends at Humber College, “This does not happen in China.”

It’s a business opportunity for others. One American woman (who wished to stay anonymous) is buying 16 phones for her Russian friends, who pay her to fly back and deliver the goods. “I get to see my brother and friends,” she says.

At six in the morning, blue-shirted Apple employees gave out white tickets, embossed with a perfect silver Apple on top. A ticket equals one phone.

In under two hours, the 32 g white phone had sold out. “If you were thinking white,” said Apple employee Brandon R to people at the end of the line, “maybe think black.”

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