Acceleration

WASHINGTON -The nation's unemployment rate surged to the highest level in a quarter-century last month and, despite signs that the economic crisis might be near bottoming out, hundreds of thousands more Americans are likely to lose their jobs in the months ahead. The pace of job losses is unprecedented in modern America. With 663,000 jobs eliminated in March alone, the unemployment rate jumped to 8.5 percent, its highest level since late 1983. The net job loss since the recession started at the end of 2007 climbed past 5 million.

The decline in home prices in the Baltimore metro area accelerated last month - the average fell below the 2005 figure - but the hemorrhaging in sales came to a near-halt. The average sale price in Baltimore and its five surrounding counties dropped to about $296,000, according to numbers released yesterday by Rockville-based Metropolitan Regional Information Systems. That's down nearly 6 percent from a year ago. And it's $7,500 less than sellers got in September 2005, at the height of the buying frenzy.

With gas prices hovering around the $4 mark, the U.S. needs a serious energy conservation strategy. There are any number of options that ought to be pursued, from investing in energy alternatives to developing better transit systems, but there's one that's gotten surprisingly little attention despite its potential for substantial savings. It is time to reduce the maximum speed on the nation's highways. President Richard Nixon was the first to pursue such a course 34 years ago when he approved a national speed limit of 55 miles per hour in response to an oil crisis.

Congress is finally getting serious about global warming. But ironically, the approach it is considering would hasten, rather than slow, environmental calamity. The Senate opened debate this week on legislation known as the Warner-Lieberman bill. It would limit U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in 2012 to 2005 levels, and reduce those by 70 percent in 2050. Unfortunately, by encouraging energy-intensive American industries to flee to developing countries, this bill would penalize U.S. businesses that could contribute to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and thus accelerate global warming.

Now that Carrie Underwood is no longer an unknown singer from Oklahoma -- now that the American Idol winner has two multiplatinum albums and two Grammy awards to her name, one of the questions she gets most is: "What does it feel like to be famous?" How do you answer that? "It's just awkward," Underwood said. "I don't really know how to answer it. ... It's like, `Oh, it feels great.'" Underwood said from the start she never really knew what to expect. She wasn't prepared to win the fourth season of American Idol or for her record-setting 2005 debut album, Some Hearts, to sell more than 7 million copies.

Carpoolers opens funny - four guys on their way to work, singing along with Air Supply - but it's downhill from there, and the slide, although quick and permanent, isn't even dramatic enough to be interesting. A low-rent Big Shots, Carpoolers, which premieres tonight, doesn't have enough edge to be offensive. It just isn't funny. Which is a problem, you know, for a comedy. It's too bad, as the sum of its parts is much better than its whole. Fred Goss, a fine, funny actor, plays Gracen, a marital arbiter who has a hard time standing up for himself.

Harford County would get fewer jobs than projected from the expansion coming to Aberdeen Proving Ground, according to a new demographics study, and county officials say commercial construction must be accelerated. Those issues are likely to dominate a town hall meeting in Edgewood on Wednesday, when government officials provide an update on Harford's preparations for BRAC, the base expansion that promises to bring about 19,000 jobs to APG. The new projection of additional jobs was about 3,500 less than county officials' previous estimates, said James Richardson, the county's economic development director.

An increasing swath of the Baltimore region is caught up in a housing slump that is getting worse and appears to have further to fall. Average home-sale prices in the first six months of the year fell in a little more than half of Baltimore's suburban communities and a third of city neighborhoods, while sales volume in the region was the lowest for the first half of a year since 2000, a Sun analysis found. The number of areas with declining prices has swelled since 2006, the first full year of the housing market downturn.

WASHINGTON -- President Bush and top military officials predicted yesterday that casualties in Iraq will accelerate between now and September, when a much anticipated deadline arrives for assessing the results of a troop buildup that Congress has finally agreed to pay for. Iraqi insurgents will try to "kill as many innocent people as they can to try to influence the debate here at home," Bush said. "And so, yeah, it could be a bloody - it could be a very difficult August." Having made hard-fought progress on war funding and immigration reform in the past week, the president used a Rose Garden news conference - his first extended question-and-answer session at the White House in nearly two months - to maintain momentum.

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Rushing to beat new accounting rules for stock options, some 900 companies used a controversial tactic to erase an estimated $8 billion in options costs that would have dented their profits for years. "You can argue about the merits and the pros and cons of it, but at the end of the day, it creates apples-to-oranges comparisons," Bear Stearns analyst Chris Senyek said. "We want investors to be able to make apples-to-apples comparisons when they value companies and their earnings streams," Senyek said.