CNN Radio News Day: December 7, 2012

CNN Radio News Day is an evening news program providing an informative, thoughtful and creative look at the day's events. It's posted Monday through Friday at 4:30 pm ET.

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(CNN) – Welcome to CNN Radio News Day.

• The U.S. Labor Department's new jobs report came out Friday.  The headline grabber was the unemployment rate, which fell to its lowest level in nearly four years – 7.7%.  And the report showed the economy added 146,000 jobs in November, handily beating analysts' projections.  But  Diane Swonk, chief economist with Mesirow Financial, says there are still underlying concerns:
  

  "Although the data is much better than initially expected taken in the context of the last three months, the momentum is not what we thought it would be at this stage of the game."               

• Congress has left town for a long weekend.  And it's likely you're not surprised to hear that there's no progress to report on the impending so-called fiscal cliff.   There's been a lot of talk about taxes and tax rates.  But there are also hidden, or what could be called 'orphan' issues, that are tied up in the cliff.  Two of those issues and groups of people: seniors on Medicare, and the unemployed.   Judith Conti, a lobbyist and advocate for the unemployed with the National Employment Law Project, says these issues are getting lost in the public discourse:

"I described it as maybe like a bastard stepchild."

• For most people, remembering something just sort of happens without any thought going into it.  But what if the regions of your brain responsible for making memories suddenly stopped working?    42-year-old John Kirkwood suffered a massive stroke more than six years ago.  Since then, the New York man has been teaching his brain to learn how to remember in a new way.  And it's been a process:

"Who am I and how have I changed, and who was I before and how do I rectify who I am now?"

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