Unemployment across the 17 European Union countries that use the euro has struck 12 percent for the first time since the currency was launched in 1999, official figures showed Tuesday. Eurostat, the EU's statistics office, said the rate in February was unchanged at the record high after January's figure was revised up to 12 percent from 11.9 percent. Over the month, a net 33,000 people in the eurozone joined the ranks of the unemployed. Spain and Greece continued to suffer from unemployment rates above 26 percent, and many other countries were seeing their numbers swell to uncomfortable levels. Germany, Europe's biggest economy, has an unemployment rate of only 5.4 percent. That's even better than the U.S. rate of 7.7 percent, according to a report of the Associated Press.
