What’s next… Pet Rocks? Sheesh!

A Quebec father who was taken to court by his 12-year-old daughter after he grounded her in June 2008 has lost his appeal.

Quebec Superior Court rejected the Gatineau father’s appeal of a lower court ruling that said his punishment was too severe for the wrongs he said his daughter committed.

The father is “flabbergasted,” his lawyer Kim Beaudoin told CBC News.

In its ruling, issued Monday, the province’s court of appeal declared the girl was caught up in a “very rare” set of circumstances, and her father didn’t have sufficient grounds to contest the court’s earlier decision.

The family’s legal wrangling started with a dispute over the girl’s internet use.

Giampaolo Giuliani told locals to evacuate their houses and posted a video on YouTube in which he said a build-up of radon gas around the seismically active area of Abruzzo suggested a major earthquake was imminent.

Several tremors had been felt in the medieval city of L’Aquila, around 60 miles east of Rome, from mid-January onwards, and vans with loudspeakers had reportedly driven around the city spreading the warning. But instead of heeding Mr Giuliani’s advice, the local authorities reported him to police for “spreading alarm” and he was told to remove his findings from the internet.

Even after he was proved right, civic leaders effectively dismissed him as a maverick whose accurate prediction was little more than a fluke. As the row escalated yesterday, the Italian president, Silvio Berlusconi, was among those having to fend off angry questions about whether the area should have been evacuated in the light of the warnings. Maria Francesco, a survivor of the earthquake who lives in L’Aquila, said: “It’s a scandal what’s happened. For the past three months there have been regular tremors, and they’ve been getting stronger and stronger. The authorities were well aware.”

Mr Giuliani, a researcher at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory near L’Aquila, has now demanded an apology over the attempts to gag him. He said: “There are people out there who should be offering me apologies – and whose conscience should bear the full weight of what has happened.” He added: “It is not true to say that earthquakes cannot be predicted. We have been able to predict events for almost ten years in a range of 120-150 kilometres from our detectors.

“In the last three days we saw a large increase of Radon. Large increases of Radon, above safety thresholds, mean strong earthquakes. “Even classic technology could have been used to predict it. My seismograph indicated a strong earthquake and we had it online, everybody could watch it, and many did and realised that the tremors were increasing.”

This story reminds me of Jim Berkland, the California geologist who predicted in the newspapers the 1989 quake in San Francisco one day prior to the event. Suspended from his position and told not to make any more predictions, he resigned.

An 8.5% unemployment rate is unmistakably bad. It’s the highest rate since 1983 — a year that saw double-digit unemployment, nearly 30 commercial bank failures and more than 15% of Americans living below the poverty line.

But the real national unemployment rate is far worse than the U.S. Department of Labor’s March figure, announced today, shows. That’s because the official rate doesn’t include the 3.7 million-plus people who are reluctantly working only part time because of the poor labor market. And it doesn’t include the workers who have given up scouring want ads for seemingly nonexistent jobs.

When those folks are added to the numbers, the unemployment rate rises to 15.6%. In March 2008, that number was 9.3%. The Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking this alternative measure (.pdf file) in 1995.

“The situation out there is very grim,” says Heather Boushey, a senior economist at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank. “We have seen the mounting of job losses faster than any point since World War II. I have never seen anything escalate this bad.” Here’s another way to look at the unemployment figures: More than 5 million people have lost their jobs since the start of the recession in December 2007. And more than 13 million people are unemployed. That’s the highest number the U.S. has seen since it began tracking unemployment after World War II. For every job out there, more than four people are competing for it, says Boushey. Some unemployed workers have become so frustrated by the difficulty of landing a job that they’re exiting the labor market altogether. Prior recessions saw a spike in the number of women choosing to be stay-at-home moms rather than continue to compete for work. This recession has seen a large spike in the number of laid-off men opting to become stay-at-home dads — or at least stay at home.

Once people stop looking for work, they’re no longer entitled to unemployment benefits.

This is not news to those who are paying attention.