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As winter loosens its grip, employers are taking on more help.

Hotels, bars and restaurants added 33,000 workers, while retailers tacked on 21,000 jobs in March, the Labor Department said Friday. Economists say those increases suggest employers are growing more confident that Americans will be spending more this year.

"Consumers still have the wherewithal to make discretionary purchases and were just waiting for the snow to be plowed and the temperatures to rise to resume spending," IHS Global Insight chief U.S. economist Doug Handler wrote in his analysis.

The Labor Department report showed that all together, employers added 192,000 jobs in March.

That hiring boost encouraged people to resume their job hunts, pushing up the labor force participation rate to 63.2 percent, from 63 percent the previous month. With more people filling out job applications, there was no improvement in the unemployment rate. It held steady at 6.7 percent.

Still, that was a big improvement over last year's 7.6 percent.

This year's pace of hiring is "consistent with a moderately growing economy at present and a faster-growing economy later this year," Handler said.

The sense that the economy is thawing out after "a long, harsh winter" was echoed by Matthew Shay, who heads the National Retail Federation, a trade group for store owners. "Merchants are eager to move forward with their spring hiring and operational plans," he said in a statement.

The positive momentum also showed up in the construction sector, where employers added 19,000 jobs. Over the past year, construction employment has risen by 151,000.

That hiring helped March mark a milestone: private-sector employment returned to the pre-recession level of 2007.

Alan Partridge

Director: Declan Lowney

Genre: Comedy

Running time: 90 minutes

Rated R for language, brief violence and nudity

With Steve Coogan, Colm Meaney, Tim Key

A court in India has sentenced three convicted rapists to death by hanging under a new law that seeks to crack down on attacks on women in the country.

According to Al-Jazeera, "The men are the first to be tried and convicted under a recently revised law that carries the death penalty for those convicted of multiple sexual assaults."

The news agency says:

"The anti-rape law is aimed at repeat sexual offenders and puts in place a host of new provisions and punishments, including criminalizing stalking, voyeurism and acid attacks.

"It stipulates the death penalty for repeat offenders and those whose victims are left in a vegetative state."

Behind all of the mass-produced food that's churned out by fast-food restaurants and cafeterias is a hidden army of workers — professional taste testers, or "sensory panelists." Their job is to evaluate every aspect of a food product — from the texture to the spice combination to the salt levels — before it hits consumers' plates.

Spend the day sampling food and get paid for it — doesn't sound so bad, does it? But as one former professional food tester recently interviewed by The Billfold, the work often is not all that appetizing.

Matthew, a freelance illustrator, spent eight months testing frozen fried foods – from French fries and Chinese food to jalapeno poppers – at a big frozen food company that counts several major fast food chains among its clientele. "I'd come home with huge blisters in my mouth from the salt," he told The Billfold.

Taste experts like Matthew have to go through intense training to be able to talk about food objectively, says Tanya Ditschun, the director of sensory science at Senomyx, a company that develops flavor ingredients.

During training, which can take months, panelists are taught descriptive words and to measure the intensity of each characteristic.

"We were taught a trade-secret flavor intensity scale that we used as a metric to judge all other foods against," Matthew told Billfold reporter Mike Dang. "At the low end is oil, and at the high end is a strong fruit juice."

Matthew's training, Ditschun says, seems pretty typical.

But getting everyone to agree can prove quite challenging. "We'd be eating slices of pizza, and trying to agree exactly how many points to give each element and have hour-long arguments," he said.

Matthew said he spent more than half of his four-to six-hour days testing dozens of products, taking large bites of potato and swishing it around in his mouth while taking note of all the different characteristics before spitting everything out.

And then he'd repeat.

"We'd be doing eight to 15 products a day, so to save time you'd end up swallowing some of it," he said in the interview. "There were countless hours with mushed up potatoes swirling around your mouth."

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