The Filter: Before 9/11, CIA Tried to Recruit Gay Terrorist

(March 17) -- With so many news aggregators out there, who can keep up? AOL News filters the filters to steer you to the headlines that really matter.

Skip Those, Read This: The Huffington Post leads with an AOL Daily Finance story in which Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner warns that unemployment will stay high for the forseeable future. "The forecast projects that in the fourth quarter of 2011, the unemployment rate will be 8.9 percent, and that by the fourth quarter of 2012, it will be 7.9 percent," he told Congress on Tuesday. And the real unemployment rate -- "the 15.1 million workers who are either part-time-of-necessity because they can't find full-time work, marginally attached because they live on the very fringes of employment, or out of the labor force because they are discouraged and have given up looking," according to a recent Huffington Post story -- is actually twice as high.

Prison Population Plummets: The Slatest leads with a New York Times report on state prisons, which have seen their number of inmates fall for the first time in 37 years. According to a new report, "state prisons held 1,403,091 people as of Jan. 1, nearly 6 percent fewer than a year before." The main reasons for this are states' efforts to keep parolees out of jail and reduce sentences for nonviolent offenders. Some say the decline is overdue, given the fact that crime rates have fallen the last 15 years. But meanwhile, the inmate population of federal prisons has increased 7 percent this year.

State Sovereignty: The Daily Beast leads with another New York Times story on states, this one on the rise of states' rights movements. Both South Dakota and Wyoming, for instance, have passed laws declaring federal gun regulations are invalid if weapons are made and used within the states' borders. Meanwhile, the Oklahoma House of Representatives passed a bill that would allow its citizens to opt out of federal health care reform. "In most cases, conservative anxiety over federal authority is fueling the impulse, with the Tea Party movement or its members in the backdrop or forefront," The Times reports.

Catch of The Day: The Daily Beast picks up a fascinating New York Observer article detailing the CIA's efforts to recruit a gay Iraqi terrorist a year before 9/11, which had it been successful could have thwarted the attack. "The character at the center of the intrigue was an enigmatic but jovial man named Ahmad Hikmat Shakir, or 'Shakir el Iraqi,'" the Observer reports. Shakir first appeared on the CIA's radar when he showed up at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Malaysia in January 2000.

Tiger Tickets: The Slatest picks up a TMZ report that tickets to this year's Masters golf championship -- never easy to get -- have shot up in price with Tiger Woods' announcement that he'll be playing. Woods has been on a self-imposed hiatus from the game since news of his serial infidelity broke late last year. "Woods last played on Nov. 15, when he won the Australian Masters in Melbourne for his 82nd career victory," ESPN reports. "His world then unraveled less than two weeks later; he was involved in a one-car crash outside his Florida home that required a hospital visit and led to a series of revelations about his personal life that included a later admission of multiple affairs."

March Madness: In other sports news, The Slatest picks up an ABC News report on President Obama's picks for the men's and women's NCAA basketball tournaments, which begin Thursday. Obama's full picks will be announced by ESPN, but his picks for the men's Final Four are Kansas, Kentucky, Kansas State and Villanova.