The Morning Meeting: Job Loss…France Loves Obama…Taliban Horror…Madonna Denied…and Person of the Week

Lots of news on this first Friday in April.

The hemmorhaging of jobs continues. 663 thousand jobs gone in the month of March. That’s 2.1 million jobs lost in the first quarter of 2009. The unemployment rate rose to 8.5 percent — the highest figure since 1983. More than 13 million Americans are now unemployed. We’re mining the numbers this morning, looking for the silver linings, asking the experts whether there’s a proverbial "bottom" there, on the horizon.

In Paris, it’s called "amour", and there’s beacoup d’amour directed President Obama’s way in France today, where he and the first lady have arrived on the second leg of their European tour. There is also plenty of substance; a NATO meeting at which the alliance’s role in Afghanistan is topic A, and a town hall where young people have been asking the American President some pointed questions.

Ready to launch? That’s the question for the North Koreans, and analysts from Tokyo to Seoul to Washington are watching very closely. So are we — with reporters in Seoul and Tokyo and at the Pentagon reporting both on the pending missile launch and the possible international responses.

We’re also asking our Pakistan correspondent to report on an horrific scene in Swat, until not long ago a favored tourist spot and now a region controlled by the Taliban. A young woman is seen being beaten for an alleged relationship with a man; it is brutal, difficult to watch, and sadly reminiscent of the era when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan.

Other: an Iowa court rules in favor of same-sex marriage; the families of the FLDS speak, one year after their children were taken away by the authorities (and by the way, all but one of those families have since had their children returned); Madonna is rebuffed in her attempt to adopt another child from Malawi, and we’ll have our Person of the Week. A one-woman recession-beater.

Stay tuned…