Unemployment eased in Southwest Florida in October, though it remains at a collective 12.3 percent in Manatee, Sarasota and Charlotte counties -- a level not seen since the mid-1970s.

Local work force experts are seeing a pickup in inquiries from employers, while tourism promoters report a boost in hiring with the early arrival of the winter season.

But one of the state's top economists says no one should get too comfortable with the notion of a turnaround.

"The Twilight Saga: New Moon" was on course to break two box-office records in one day.

The second installment of the vampire saga broke the record for midnight ticket sales Thursday night and was expected to record the biggest single-day sales ever at the box office Friday evening.

Gross receipts from midnight shows in the U.S. and Canada totaled $26.3 million, distributor Summit Entertainment reported Friday morning.

BERKELEY, Calif. – A student protest on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, over large fee increases at UC campuses statewide ended peacefully late on Friday.

Police arrested 41 demonstrators, according to the Associated Press, after as many as 50 students and their sympathizers occupied a building before dawn on Friday. A university spokesperson could not be reached immediately for comment.

Associated Press/Harpo ProductionsA teary Oprah Winfrey announces during a live broadcast of "The Oprah Winfrey Show" that the show will end its run in 2011.

Film critic Roger Ebert has explained that he convinced Oprah Winfrey to go into the syndicated TV business back in the '80s by taking a napkin and writing down his salary for co-hosting "At the Movies," then multiplying it several times over to account for Winfrey working solo on a longer, daily show that would almost certainly get higher ratings.

So I took the plunge and installed Chrome OS on a virtual machine on my Windows 7 laptop. I used Sun's free VirtualBox virtualization software and the downloadable version of Chrome OS hosted by Gdgt. Actually, when I used the Gdgt download in the form of a VirtualBox image, I couldn't get it to boot-so I tried again with the VMWare download (also compatible with VirtualBox) and all went well.

Except for one thing: There's very little reason to check out Chrome OS just now. What you get is a somewhat stale version of the OS that has features that don't work unless you have an e-mail address at Google.

Nov. 21 (Bloomberg) -- Senate Majority Leader Harry Reidtonight faces the first big test of whether he can keep hisDemocratic colleagues united behind health-care legislation.

Senators plan to take a vote at 8 p.m. Washington time thatwould clear the way for debate on the most sweeping changes tothe U.S. health system since the 1965 creation of the Medicareprogram for the elderly and disabled.

With every Senate Republican opposing the legislation, Reidcan’t afford a single defection from his 60-member caucus toenable the chamber to take up the bill when Congress returnsfrom a weeklong Thanksgiving recess. By late yesterday,Democrats had locked up almost all the votes they needed.

Reporting from Washington - After negotiating critical last-minute commitments, Senate Democratic leaders on Friday stood on the verge of achieving the necessary 60 votes to begin debate on the most expansive healthcare legislation to go before the Senate in nearly half a century.

Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson, who was among three Democratic holdouts, announced that he would back an all-important procedural vote set for Saturday that will allow the chamber to take up the wide-ranging bill unveiled this week by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.).

The farewell countdown has begun.

An emotional Oprah Winfrey announced yesterday that she is ending her famed daytime talk show after 25 years in September 2011.

“So why walk away and make next season the last?” the queen of daytime asked rhetorically.

“Here is the real reason: I love this show. This show has been my life. And I love it enough to know when it’s time to say goodbye. Twenty-five years feels right in my bones, and it feels right in my spirit.”

A daylong occupation of a classroom building at UC Berkeley on Friday ended with the arrests of 41 students who had barricaded themselves inside to protest budget cuts and steep hikes in student fees, university officials said.

Campus police entered Wheeler Hall about 5 p.m., and the demonstrators were taken into custody without incident, campus officials said in a statement. The protesters were charged with trespassing and released, the statement said.

WASHINGTON - With no margin for rebellion, Senate Democrats pushed toward a crucial test vote tonight on their sweeping health care bill, with wavering moderates appearing to be falling in line.

One of three uncommitted centrists, Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska, announced yesterday he would vote with his party's leaders on the must-pass procedural measure allowing debate to go forward.

Nelson said that it didn't mean he'd back the final bill, but that Nebraskans wanted changes to the health care system. "The Senate owes them a full and open debate,'' he said in a statement.

With tears welling in her eyes, Oprah Winfrey on Friday told viewers what they likely already knew -- that she will be ending her top-rated talk show at the end of the 2010-11 TV season, her 25th on national television -- saying simply, it "feels right in my bones."

Left unaddressed was what her on-camera contributions will be to OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network, the much-delayed cable startup partnership with Discovery Communications that later Friday slid its launch date from mid-2010 to January 2011. Winfrey also offered no clarification as to whether she or her Harpo Productions will continue to have a presence in Chicago.

SARAH PALIN'S sit-down with Oprah Winfrey this week may have been the most tense TV encounter of the year, a palpable mix of suspicion and mutual need. Oprah was good for Obama, but she's also good for books, and Palin is good for TV. When the two shook hands across the chasm of a coffee table, you wondered if the studio circuitry would blow.

It didn't, but of all of the interlocutors Palin faced in this week's "Going Rogue'' media blitz, only Winfrey managed to cut through Palin's efforts to cast herself as a victim. Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly were all too willing to blame Palin's public relations woes in 2008 on cynical campaign operatives, evil liberals, and the "lamestream media.'' Barbara Walters framed her as a lovable mom who makes moose hot dogs with cheese.

In a striking scene of civil disobedience, dozens of students barricaded themselves inside a UC Berkeley building for more than 11 hours Friday to protest a 32-percent hike in student fees, sparking a tense standoff that swelled to hundreds.

The dramatic display ended Friday evening with dozens of arrests, climaxing a week of civil unrest mirrored at other campuses around the state, such as UC Santa Cruz and UC Davis, where hundreds marched for the third day Friday to decry one of the biggest fee hikes in UC history.

Regarding "Fact-checking ‘Going Rogue' " (Page A4, Nov. 14), I was underwhelmed by the article on the Associated Press investigation of Sarah Palin's travel expenses. According to the article, Palin and her daughter spent four nights in New York at a $700 per night hotel on a trip that cost a total of $3,000, including air fare. A bit of simple math says she managed to fly from Alaska to New York for several hundred bucks. She must have had some coupons. Perhaps the Associated Press will perform a similar analysis of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's air travel costs. She has a government-provided Boeing 757 dedicated to her travel needs. It burns more jet fuel taxiing than Palin's entire trip cost.

WASHINGTON — Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska, one of three wavering Democrats, said Friday that he would vote to start debate on a giant health care bill as Democrats and Republicans squared off over the legislation in advance of its first big test in the Senate.

Mr. Nelson's announcement had the effect of increasing pressure on the two other uncommitted Democrats, Senators Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana and Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, who faces a difficult race for re-election next year.

Based on the above video (found here), the scene in Noblesville, Ind., at the end of Sarah Palin's appearance looked more like a protest than a book signing.

Outside the Borders bookstore in Noblesville (wouldn't it be great if it was a Barnes & Noble in Noblesville?), dejected Sarah Palin fans shouted, "Sign our books! Sign our books!" as her personalized bus sputtered and prepared to drive away.

New York Giants middle linebacker Antonio Pierce is out indefinitely after an MRI revealed a bulging disk in his neck, according to the team's medical staff.

NFC East blogESPN.com's Matt Mosley writes about all things NFC East in his division blog.

• Blog network: NFL Nation

Pierce was hurt in a game against the Arizona Cardinals on Oct. 25, but did not have an MRI until Friday when he started to experience more discomfort, according to the team's medical staff.

LOS ANGELES -- California's mission of providing residents with access to affordable, high-quality public education suffered a setback this week as University of California officials sharply increased student fees, driven by economic realities that are forcing similar steps at public university systems across the country.

In response to a state funding gap of more than $1 billion, the Regents of the University of California decided Thursday to increase student fees for residents next year by 32 percent. The increase means undergraduate students will now pay more than $10,000 annually -- triple what students paid a decade ago.

"The Twilight Saga: New Moon" is poised to break its second box office record in a single day.

According to four people who have closely watched ticket sales data today but requested anonymity because they are not authorized to release the information, the teen vampire phenomenon is all but certain to gross more than $67.2 million, the record set by "The Dark Knight" last year for the biggest single-day take at the box office.

Physicists returned to their future on Friday. About 10 p.m. outside Geneva, scientists at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, succeeded in sending beams of protons clockwise around the 17-mile underground magnetic racetrack known as the Large Hadron Collider, the world's biggest and most expensive physics experiment.

For physicists, the event was a milestone on the way back from disaster and the resumption of a 15-year, $9 billion quest to investigate laws and forces that prevailed when the universe was less than a trillionth of a second old. The collider was designed to accelerate protons to energies of 7 trillion electron volts apiece and smash them together in tiny fireballs in an effort to replicate and study the conditions of the Big Bang.