The Palm Beach post is reporting Suicide calls jump amid economic woes.



A local hot line has seen a dramatic spike in suicide calls from people in Palm Beach County who are facing foreclosure and can't pay their bills, according to numbers released today.



Since the start of the year, 256 people in the county told operators at the 211 hot line that they were thinking about suicide. Of those, 44 told operators that their main reason was that they had lost a job, were facing foreclosure, couldn't afford to pay their bills or were homeless.



During the same period in 2007, from Jan. 1 to June 10, the hot line received 137 suicide calls from people in Palm Beach County. Only 15 of those gave economic reasons.



The callers' problems seem markedly different than in the past, said Susan Buza, executive director of 211 Palm Beach/Treasure Coast. Many callers, she said, have tried to find work for months.



Buza said she began adding up the numbers after operators noticed a rise in calls from people who could lose their homes.



"When we started looking at it, we were really shocked," she said.

Weekly Claims

In the week ending June 7, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 384,000, an increase of 25,000 from the previous week's revised figure of 359,000. The 4-week moving average was 371,500, an increase of 2,500 from the previous week's revised average of 369,000.

State Fiscal Budgets

Monster Job Listings Plunge

The number of job listings on employment Web site Monster Worldwide (MNST) fell dramatically in May compared with a year earlier, according to Deutsche Bank analyst Jeetil Patel.



Patel says that U.S. job postings are down 18% on a year-over-year basis for the quarter to date, with a 21% drop in May. That’s worse than the 8% slide in April. Patel says the shrinking number of listings could pressure revenue and profits in the June quarter. He says revenue from the North American careers segment could be down 10% year-over-year in the quarter, well below the 4% decline he had been projecting.

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