An exodus of African-Americans from struggling industrial cities such as Cleveland and the growth of Sun Belt states “have pushed racial segregation in U.S. metropolitan areas to its lowest level in a century,” The Wall Street Journal reports, based on a study by the conservative Manhattan Institute.

The institute finds that U.S. cities are more integrated now than at any time since 1910, based on analysis of census data from neighborhoods, according to the newspaper.

“Fifty years ago, nearly half the black population lived in a ghetto, the study said, while today that proportion has shrunk to 20%,” The Journal reports. “All-white neighborhoods in U.S. cities are effectively extinct, according to the report.”

Still, segregation hasn't been eliminated. The typical urban African-American still lives in an area where more than half the black population would need to move to achieve overall integration.

"There are still segregated places, like the South Side of Chicago, the East Side of Cleveland and Detroit," says Jacob Vigdor of Duke University, a co-author of the report. "But those places have fewer people."

Indeed, the newspaper notes that the “beacon of economic opportunity is luring ambitious young African-Americans such as Willie Payton Jr., 28 years old, who left Cleveland for Houston a year and a half ago for a promotion in the Veterans Administration.” He now manages outpatient care at Houston's Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center.

"It was a good promotion, and with the economy being the way it is, it was too good to pass up," Mr. Payton tells The Journal.

China's vice president, Xi Jinping, is coming to Washington Feb. 14, but he won't get a loving welcome from unions and some lawmakers, including U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown.

The New York Times reports that “coalition of big American labor unions, Democratic politicians and trade advocacy groups plans (today) to start campaigning for the Obama administration to file a series of trade cases against China in the auto industry.”

They accuse Beijing “of unfairly subsidizing Chinese auto parts makers and illegally restricting the exports of crucial raw materials that foreign parts makers need to stay competitive,” according to The Times.

Sen. Brown, a Democrat from Avon, who is a congressional leader of the trade effort along with Sen. Debbie Stabenow, Democrat of Michigan, is blunt in describing his view of the issue to the newspaper: “The Chinese have cheated.”

The coalition says a “900% increase in auto parts imports from China over the last decade, to nearly $12 billion a year, is to blame for job losses in Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania — three swing states that the administration cannot easily ignore in a presidential election year,” according to The Times.

Sen. Brown tells The Times that Washington's appetite for a more assertive trade policy was whetted last month by China's imposition of steep tariffs on $4.9 billion a year on imports of sport utility vehicles and large cars from the United States.

This Reuters story about defections from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints references a key moment in Mormon history that took place in Kirtland.

Mormon Elder Marlin Jensen, the church's official historian, tells Reuters that attrition has accelerated in the last five or 10 years, reflecting greater secularization of society. (He would not provide numbers on the rate of defections.)

The LDS church “claims 14 million members worldwide — optimistically including nearly every person baptized, Reuters says. But census data from some foreign countries targeted by clean-cut young missionaries show that the retention rate for their converts is as low as 25%, Reuters reports, and sociologists “estimate there are as few as 5 million active members worldwide.”

Mr. Jensen tells Reuters that not since a famous trouble spot in Mormon history, the 1837 failure of a church bank in Kirtland, have so many left the church.

"Maybe since Kirtland, we've never had a period of — I'll call it apostasy, like we're having now," he told a group of college students.

But he says the church remains vibrant and is using technology to reverse this trend.

"The church has a very progressive research and information division, with tremendous public opinion surveyors," he says. Among other steps, it has hired an expert in search-engine optimization to raise the profile of the church's own views in a web search.

The economy is a little better, but your mood isn't.

So reports, Right Management, part of Manpower Group, which has released a survey showing that only 21% of North American workers consider their job “rewarding and gratifying.”

In the survey of 438 workers, conducted in December and January, 30% summed up their work situation as “I want to enjoy my life, so I work,” while 49% went so far as to say, “My job is unrewarding and saps my energy.”

A Right Management executive says in a statement, “Employees are clearly in a grumpy mood, a trend we've tracked for more than a year. In better times we probably would have found just a minority complain that their energy is being sapped and so forth, but now it is almost a majority of employed North Americans who seem to be unhappy.”

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