Mark Memmott

"We are certainly living through times of great economic anxiety," International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde said this morning.

"Exactly three years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers," she cautioned in a Washington, D.C., speech, "the economic skies look troubled and turbulent as global activity slows and downside risks increase."

There are many remarkable things about what U.S. Marine Dakota Meyer did two years ago in Afghanistan.

NPR's Tom Bowman tells the story of the then-corporal's heroics. Along with Staff Sgt. Juan Rodriguez-Chavez, Meyer (now a sergeant in the Marine Corps Reserve) disobeyed orders and undertook a dangerous, six-hour battle to rescue stranded troops who had been ambushed by enemy fighters.

The number of people filling first-time claims for unemployment insurance rose by 11,000 last week from the week before, the Employment and Training Administration just reported.

There were 428,000 such claims. After peaking at 659,000 in March 2009, weekly claims started to edge down. But they've remained near or above 400,000 since early April of this year.

The stories of lost pets turning up years later and hundreds (or thousands) of miles from home keep coming.

Today's tale, from The Associated Press:

"A calico cat named Willow, who disappeared from a home near the Rocky Mountains five years ago, was found Wednesday on a Manhattan street and will soon be returned to a family in which two of the three kids and one of the two dogs may remember her.

Good morning.

Our early posts:

-- U.K. Prime Minister To Gadhafi: 'It Is Over, Give Up'

-- Swiss Bank UBS Says Rogue Trader Caused $2 Billion Loss

Other top headlines of the day so far: