Politics this week: 3rd - 9th February 2007

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose job it is to try to assess what is happening to the atmosphere, published its fourth scientific report on February 2nd. It concluded, in terms somewhat stronger than the third report, that things are indeed getting hotter, and that mankind is, indeed, to blame. What to do about it will be addressed in other reports to be published later this year. See article

The European Commission said automakers should be forced to increase the fuel efficiency of new cars by 20% within five years. Car companies said the target was an arbitrary figure and would lead to job losses in the EU as production moved elsewhere. See article

Russian prosecutors charged Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former boss of the Yukos oil company and a critic of President Vladimir Putin, with laundering over $20 billion. Mr Khodorkovsky, who is already serving an eight-year prison term for fraud, said the new charges were designed to prevent his early release.

Italy's foreign minister, Massimo D'Alema, denounced as “unfortunate outside interference” a letter to an Italian newspaper from the ambassadors of America, Australia, Britain, Canada, the Netherlands and Romania. The envoys had called on Italy to give greater support to the NATO mission in Afghanistan. See article

Two French Muslim groups sued a satirical magazine for defaming the Prophet Muhammad by reprinting cartoons first published last year in Denmark. Nicolas Sarkozy, France's center-right presidential candidate, gave his support to the magazine.

Some 160,000 turkeys were gassed at a farm in Suffolk to stop Britain's worst outbreak of bird flu from spreading. See article

Put it in perspective

Flooding in Jakarta killed dozens of people and forced 340,000 to flee their homes. Indonesia is already struggling with an outbreak of dengue fever and is still grappling with bird flu, which has killed five people since the beginning of the year.

Thailand's military-backed government sacked the national police chief, ostensibly for failing to catch those who planted bombs in Bangkok on New Year's Eve. Separately, the government decided to reopen Bangkok's old airport, Don Muang, while it fixes the many faults found at the $4 billion Suvarnabhumi airport, opened only five months ago.

Vietnam's government unveiled plans for a $33 billion rail link between the capital, Hanoi, and Ho Chi Minh City in the south.

The design for a 40km (25-mile) atom smasher that will cost $8.2 billion was unveiled at a meeting in Beijing. Physicists want to discern one overarching set of laws that govern the universe and say the machine will help them make the discovery. The International Linear Collider, as it is known, will not start up until 2019 at the earliest and could be built in America, Japan or Switzerland.

Adding it all up

George Bush sent his budget to Congress. The $2.9 trillion request asks for more funding for the military and reduces spending on health care and other domestic programs over five years. It also forecasts reduced federal deficits that eventually reach a surplus in 2012. Skeptics wondered how this could be twinned with Mr Bush's request to extend his tax cuts. See article

Rudy Giuliani confirmed he was entering the presidential race. Although he did not make a formal declaration, the former mayor of New York filed the usual campaign papers and told a TV interviewer that “I'm in this to win”. See article

The Senate was embroiled in debate on Mr Bush's policy on Iraq. Several resolutions ranging from support to outright condemnation of Mr Bush's plans have been produced and the parties are negotiating over which can proceed. See article

Dangerous digs

An explosion killed 32 miners at a rudimentary coal mine in north-eastern Colombia. Days later, a second blast at another mine in the center of the country killed eight.

In Bolivia, more than 20,000 miners marched through the capital, La Paz, in protest at plans by Evo Morales, the country's socialist president, for a sharp rise in taxes on mining. The government backtracked, saying the tax rise would apply to large privately owned mines and not to small mining co-operatives.

Opponents accused Argentina's government of fiddling the country's inflation figure after a senior statistician was sacked and her replacement changed the methodology of the consumer-price index. The government said inflation in January was 1.1%; economists said it was 1.5-2%. See article

More than a dozen gunmen attacked two state law-enforcement offices in the Mexican resort of Acapulco, killing seven people while videotaping the assaults. President Felipe Calderón sent some 8,000 troops to the area last month to crack down on drug-trafficking and organized crime.

A new mission to accomplish

The killing in Iraq continued unabated, with at least 130 people, mostly Shias, dying in a single suicide-bombing in a Baghdad market. A “surge” of extra American troops into Baghdad was set to begin in an effort to quell the sectarian violence.

The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, head of the Fatah party, and his Islamist rivals from Hamas, represented by their leader-in-exile Khaled Meshal, started talks in Mecca to end weeks of factional fighting in the Palestinian territories.

Egypt's president, Hosni Mubarak, ordered a band of Muslim Brothers, including the group's number three, to be tried in a military court. Lawyers said that 165 members of the Brotherhood, the country's most popular opposition group, have been detained since December.

In Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, sporadic night-time mortars and rockets were launched at the presidential palace, hotels and the port, presumably by remnants of the Islamist fighters, most of whom were routed a month ago by Ethiopian troops. An African Union peacekeeping force has yet to be assembled. See article

At the end of an eight-country tour of Africa, China's president, Hu Jintao, said he would try to cut his country's $3 billion trade surplus with the continent.

Click here to the original capsules and more features from The Economist.com

Business this week: 3rd - 9th February 2007

Vornado Realty Trust withdrew its bid for Equity Office Properties, leaving the way clear for shareholders in America's largest real-estate investment trust to accept Blackstone Group's offer of $38.9 billion. The transaction sets a new record for a leveraged buy-out, underscoring the relentless takeover of public companies by private-equity firms. See article

Blackstone Group was one of four private-equity firms making up a consortium that expressed a keen interest in acquiring J. Sainsbury. The British supermarket chain has a market value of around £9 billion ($18 billion); if successful, the leveraged buy-out would be Europe's biggest. See article

London's latest landmark, the Gherkin, was sold for £600m ($1.2 billion), a record for the capital's booming commercial-property market. The seller, Swiss Re, will remain in the building as its main tenant until at least 2031.

Steve Jobs called for an end to digital-rights management technology that protects music sold over the internet. DRM was insisted upon by big record labels, but Mr Jobs thinks it is inhibiting the growth of the online-music market. Some observers reckoned that Apple's chief executive was trying to deflect criticism aimed at iTunes' own FairPlay system from regulators in Europe. See article

The long and winding road

Meanwhile, a settlement was reached in a trademark dispute between Apple and Apple Corps, the Beatles' music company. The agreement gives Apple ownership of all the “Apple” logo trademarks, but the computer-maker will license some trademarks back to Apple Corps. The two sides have been arguing since the early 1980s; fans now hope they can come together and make the Beatles' songs available on iTunes.

There was more bother for YouTube over copyright infringement. Viacom, the owner of MTV, asked that all of its content be removed from YouTube's website after the two sides failed to reach a distribution deal. Meanwhile, Jeff Zucker chose his first day as boss of NBC Universal to chastise YouTube for failing to address media copyright on video clips.

Eastman Kodak unveiled its line of desktop printers and low-cost ink cartridges. Troubled Kodak is hoping its new products will encroach on Hewlett-Packard and others by addressing consumers' gripes about the cost of replacement cartridges for their printers (by weight, the ink within them costs more than caviar).

A case to answer?

A three-man panel of a federal appeals court in San Francisco ruled that the biggest sex-discrimination case in American history could proceed against Wal-Mart as a class-action lawsuit. The suit was brought on behalf of past and present female employees, who claim the retailer is biased towards men in pay and promotion. An estimated 2m women could join it. Wal-Mart fulminated against the legal basis of the case and said it would fight all the way to the Supreme Court if it had to.

The long-running takeover battle for Endesa moved closer towards completion when the board of the Spanish energy company recommended E.ON's latest €41 billion ($53 billion) offer to shareholders.

HSBC said that high rates of bankruptcy in America's subprime mortgage market meant it would take a much higher charge than expected (estimated to be around $10.5 billion) on bad debts for 2006.

With the threat of huge lawsuits against cigarette-makers seemingly receding in the United States, Britain's Imperial Tobacco decided to enter the market, agreeing to buy America's Commonwealth Brands for $1.9 billion.

Chung Mong-koo, the chairman of Hyundai Motor, received a three-year prison sentence for embezzling company funds. The jail term surprised those used to the comparatively light sentences handed down in South Korean corporate cases. However, the court decided not to send the head of the country's biggest automaker to his cell straightaway, citing the need to protect the national economy during his appeal. Investors have been pushing for more transparency in the country's chaebol.

Still full of eastern promise

The Shanghai stockmarket recovered somewhat after losing 11% of the value of its domestically traded shares in five days. The index surged last year, as improved earnings at Chinese companies spurred investor confidence. With one senior Chinese politician now warning that the market was overheated (and that most of the index's companies should be delisted), some pondered if this was the inevitable end to a Chinese bubble. Cooler heads said it was just a market correction. See article

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Media Can’t Cover the News if They Don’t Cover the World

US papers are closing foreign bureaus to save money. That's the wrong move.

PROVO, UTAH - It used to be that the state of the economy determined the outcome of national elections in the United States.

"The economy, stupid," was the memorable injunction from political adviser James Carville to Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign team.

But now it is international affairs that dominate. It was foreign affairs – notably Iraq – that overshadowed the presidential debates of 2004. With the economy chugging along quite nicely, it is foreign affairs – notably Iraq – that will probably loom over the 2008 campaign, too.

It is ironic in this era of globalization, as international affairs rise to the top of the agenda, that some media companies are forsaking the responsibility to inform readers, listeners, and viewers of what is happening in the world, and analyze what it means.

Faced with declining circulation, rising costs, and competition from the Web, some large newspapers are closing foreign bureaus and slashing budgets for travel. Recently, The Boston Globe announced that it would close its last three foreign bureaus – in Berlin, Bogotá, and Jerusalem – after three decades of reporting from staff members based overseas.

The Baltimore Sun is closing its bureaus in South Africa and Russia after closing its bureaus in Britain and China earlier.

In the television news field, CNN is maintaining its position abroad, but the other major networks have long since been closing foreign bureaus and withdrawing resident correspondents. Instead, they resort to "parachute journalism," which means dispatching US-based reporters for short spells abroad when important news breaks. The downside of this is that the reporters parachuted in do not have the background, sources, or cultural sensitivities of correspondents who would have been stationed in their respective areas of coverage for extended periods.

All this disturbs columnist and editorial page editor Fred Hiatt, who laments in his newspaper, The Washington Post, what he fears may be the "vanishing foreign correspondent." Formerly stationed in Tokyo, he recognizes that wire reporters from the Associated Press and elsewhere do noble work but says that they generally cannot provide the variety of reporting, analysis, and interpretation beyond the wire services' menu.

After 9/11, writes Mr. Hiatt, there was nearly universal acknowledgment that Americans would be better off if they knew more about the world. But a survey by Monitor correspondent Jill Carroll, studying foreign news coverage at Harvard's Shorenstein Center, found that the number of US newspaper foreign correspondents declined from 188 in 2002 to 141 last year.

In a period of smaller profits, newspapers have been adopting various measures to cut costs and recapture lost circulation. Some have been creating supplementary new print products to boost the budgets of the core newspapers. The Wall Street Journal, following in the path of many other newspapers, is printing on narrower pages, saving millions of dollars annually in newspaper costs.

Some are looking to their Web pages, which have generally been operating on an experimental basis for some years, but which have now begun to gain traction as advertisers perceive their promise. The Wall Street Journal is shifting the coverage of breaking news to its website, while directing longer, in-depth stories to the print newspaper. The Los Angeles Times has announced plans to do much the same thing, moving spot-news to the 24-hour-cycle Web page, while assigning stories and analysis to the print paper.

Times editor James O'Shea indicated that the decision is in part motivated by declining advertising in the print paper. Automobile advertising in his paper will be down $47 million this year compared with 2004 figures, and only half that loss will be recovered with new online ads. "If we don't reverse these revenue trends," he told assembled staff members, "we will not be able to cost effectively provide the news – the daily bread of democracy. The stakes are high."

Newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal have substantial foreign staffs, the cost of which is substantially higher than operating costs for US-based reporters.

Will the foreign bureaus be tempting targets for cost-cutters? Brian Tierney, who bought The Philadelphia Inquirer last year, told The Washington Post's Howard Kutz: "We don't need a Jerusalem bureau. What we need are more people in the south Jersey bureau."

Hiatt ponders whether his concerns about the future of foreign correspondence are just "the nostalgia of a dinosaur." Let us hope not. A troubled world needs a steady flow of information about the challenges – and how to resolve them.

Click here to read the original report by John Hughes of the Christian Science Monitor

US parents see media, not sex, as top worry - according to study

U.S. parents are more worried about the amount of time their kids spend watching television or meeting friends on Internet social networks than about sex or alcohol abuse, according to a new study.

The study was released on Monday by Insight Research Group and commissioned by Common Sense Media, a San Francisco-based group that studies the impact of media on kids.

Some 57 percent of 1,138 U.S. parents surveyed were either very concerned or strongly concerned about children spending too much of their time with different media outlets. By comparison, about 45 percent of parents said they were as concerned about their kids engaging in sex or using alcohol.

“Intuitively, parents have a sense that too much media isn’t a good thing, but they can’t quite put their finger on why,” James Steyer, founder and chief executive of Common Sense Media, said in a statement.

Parents also saw themselves as bearing the biggest responsibility for the way media affects their kids, well ahead of the companies that create TV shows or Internet content, who ranked third on the list.

Common Sense Media and the Aspen Institute are hosting a conference in New York this week where chief executives from some of the largest media companies — Time Warner Inc. CBS Corp. Warner Music Group Corp. and Comcast Corp. — will discuss the media’s influence on kids.

TV viewing topped the list of media categories that worried parents, following by Internet use and playing video games. Listening to the radio and reading magazines were deemed as the safest types of media, according to the poll.

Concerns over their children struggling in school or developing a weight problem also ranked higher, at 55 percent and 46 percent of respondents, than sexual activity or alcohol use.

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Black power

America's blacks have growing political clout. They need to use it to confront some difficult questions

IT IS hard to remember a time when black America has been in such a prime political position. Barack Obama is the first black candidate to have a serious chance of winning the presidency (latest polls show him beating both John McCain and Rudy Giuliani in a head-to-head contest). And even if he fails this time round, he is likely to remain on the top rung of American politics for decades to come—perhaps as a vice-presidential candidate in 2008, and probably as a presidential candidate later.

Mr Obama is only the start of it. The Democratic takeover of Congress has dramatically increased the clout of the 43-strong black caucus. Members of that caucus chair five congressional committees and at least 14 subcommittees. Charles Rangel, a wily New Yorker, is in charge of the Ways and Means Committee, arguably the most powerful in the House; James Clyburn is majority whip, the third-ranking Democrat in the chamber.

Black America has something even more important than committee chairs: leverage. The two leading Democratic candidates, Hillary Clinton and Mr Obama, are both eager to court the black vote. Mr Obama needs to combat the suspicion that he is “not black enough”. Joe Biden may look like a buffoon when he says that Mr Obama “is the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean”; but many civil-rights activists worry that he is not one of them.

Mrs Clinton is also making a determined bid for black votes. She is currently doing much better among black voters than Mr Obama is: a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll puts her support at 60%, compared with 20% for Mr Obama. She also has a large number of black leaders in her pocket. Blacks were a vital part of her husband's coalition—so much so that Toni Morrison dubbed Bill Clinton the first black president—and the Clinton machine will fight to keep it that way.

On top of this, there is more competition between Democrats and Republicans for the black vote than at any time since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. George Bush has made two black people in a row secretary of state—a far more elevated job than the Democrats had ever found for their most loyal supporters—and has increased aid to Africa. Ken Mehlman, the recently retired Republican Party chairman, put courting black voters near the top of his list of priorities. Last November the Republicans fielded black candidates for three major jobs, a Senate seat in Maryland and two governorships, in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Opportunities like this do not come along every day. Black Americans will undoubtedly seize the chance to focus resources and attention on their problems. But they need to do more than this. One easy lesson is to start playing the two-party system to their advantage. It is understandable that blacks should have turned against the Republicans after the debacle of Hurricane Katrina: even good black candidates, such as Maryland's Michael Steele, did badly in November. But it is nevertheless foolish to pledge your votes to just one party.

Blacks also need to start rethinking many of the policies that they have inherited from the civil-rights era. There are signs that 77-year-old John Conyers, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, will use his power to sound old civil-rights tunes and to raise some crowd-pleasing issues, such as reparations for slavery. But black America needs to go beyond these ancient favorites and ask much harder questions.

The era of affirmative action, or preferential treatment for blacks, seems to be drawing to a close. It has always been unpopular with the majority of Americans: 58% of voters in Michigan wanted to restrict the policy in a ballot in November 2006. The Supreme Court has been able to defend the practice only by producing some implausible guff about “diversity”. And the new conservative majority is unlikely to let that nonsense endure for much longer. But what should replace it? Ideally, something quite different. Black Americans now have a chance to support policies, such as school vouchers and charter schools, that help not only themselves but other people; and that treat blacks not as an underprivileged caste, but as individuals.

This new attitude means holding blacks to the same standards as everybody else. Bill Cosby, a black comedian, was roundly denounced for “blaming the victim” when he said that there was something desperately wrong with black street culture. But he had a point. That street culture is not only a symptom of a deeply dysfunctional society; it also helps to perpetuate what it celebrates. Mr Cosby's solution to the problem—holding each individual accountable for his or her behavior regardless of race—is not blaming the victim. It is common sense.

Beyond victimhood

A new attitude also means recognizing that the old policies have had a perverse effect: the huge gains that blacks have experienced since the Civil Rights Act have been unevenly distributed. A black middle class and a comfortable black establishment have emerged: about 1.1m blacks earn more than $100,000 a year. But a black underclass is also evident: people who are trapped in poverty by failed schools, broken families and endemic crime. Almost half of all black children are being raised by two parents, and a third of them are being brought up in poverty, compared with one-seventh of white children.

The paradox is that black Americans will be better off if they act less like a racial pressure group. This means focusing economic aid on the plight of the underclass—black, white or brown—not on blacks in general. Blacks will be disproportionate beneficiaries of this approach because they make up a disproportionate part of the underclass. The best use of black America's new political power is to stop thinking so much in terms of race, which is a diminishing problem, and start thinking in terms of class, which, alas, is a rapidly growing one.

Click here to see more of the original article from The Economist

Politics this week: 27th January - 2nd February 2007

Scores of Iraqi Shias were killed by Sunni insurgent bombs and mortars during the Shias' main religious festival, Ashura, while tit-for-tat killings in Baghdad and elsewhere continued. Earlier, near the Shias' holy city of Najaf, American and Iraqi troops fought an advancing force of a breakaway Shia sect, killing at least 260 of them. The newly appointed overall American commander of troops in Iraq said that “time was short” for turning things round. See article

In the first successful suicide-bombing for nine months inside Israel, a Palestinian from Gaza killed three people in a bakery located in a residential area in the Red Sea resort town of Eilat.

At the African Union's annual summit in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, the president of Chad, Idriss Déby, denounced the president of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir, who failed in his attempt to win the organization's chair for the coming year; it went instead to Ghana's president, John Kufuor. Mr Déby also assailed the AU itself for being “deaf and blind to ethnic cleansing” in Sudan's western region, Darfur, where the killing has spilled over into Chad.

Also at the AU summit, Somalia's interim president, Abdullahi Yusuf, agreed to hold a conference to try to reconcile his country's many rival clans. But no agreement was reached on sending an AU peacekeeping force to take the place of the Ethiopian troops who recently invaded the country to sweep Islamist militias from power.

As a token of China's growing interest in Africa, its president, Hu Jintao, began an eight-country, 12-day tour of the continent. Attention will be focused on his trip to Sudan where he will discuss international efforts to make peace in Darfur. See article

When's the Royal visit?

Nicolas Sarkozy, the center-right candidate for the French presidency, made an election-campaign visit to London, where there are thought to be some 300,000 French residents. A poll showed Mr Sarkozy pulling ahead of the Socialists' candidate, Ségolène Royal. See article

Police in Britain arrested nine men suspected of planning to kidnap and murder a Muslim British soldier on leave from Afghanistan. See article

Germany ordered the arrest of 13 suspected CIA agents over the kidnapping, for five months, of a German national of Lebanese descent. Meanwhile, the foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, was embarrassed by revelations that he had opposed the release of a German-born Turkish citizen held in Guantánamo Bay for four years. Investigators found no evidence of terrorist activity by the Turk, Murat Kurnaz. See article

Carla del Ponte, the United Nations war-crimes prosecutor at The Hague, urged the European Union not to resume talks with Serbia until it took steps to hand over Ratko Mladic, a Bosnian Serb general wanted for war crimes. The EU suspended talks last year in protest at Serbia's failure to arrest Mr Mladic.

Forcing one's hand

With threats of subpoenas hanging in the air, America's attorney-general, Alberto Gonzales, agreed to hand over classified documents about the government's (recently abandoned) domestic spying program to a committee in Congress. Only selected legislators will be allowed to review the top-secret files.

Washington, DC, witnessed its biggest anti-war rally in a while. By some estimates around 100,000 people protested in the capital against George Bush's plan to send extra troops to Iraq. Meanwhile, a Senate committee held a hearing to confirm Admiral William Fallon as Mr Bush's top commander in the Middle East. The main topic of conversation was Iran.

The former White House press secretary, Ari Fleischer, testified for the prosecution (under an immunity deal) at the trial of Lewis “Scooter” Libby. Mr Libby, a former chief of staff to Dick Cheney, has pleaded not guilty to charges that he obstructed an investigation into the leaking of a CIA officer's name to the press.

More bad news on AIDS. Trials of a vaginal microbicide called cellulose sulphate, which was intended to stop women becoming infected, were halted when it was found that those receiving the treatment were more susceptible to infection, rather than less so.

A shaming report

An official inquiry into hundreds of murders of opposition activists, priests and journalists in the Philippines concluded that the army killed most of them. But it rejected claims by human-rights groups that top military chiefs had sanctioned the murders.

Bangladesh's High Court ordered that elections in the country could not be held for three months, when it expects an overhaul of the election process to be completed. The country's election commissioners resigned as part of the reform process. An election scheduled for last month was postponed amid protests that the ballot would be rigged.

Six policemen and a civilian were killed by a roadside bomb in eastern Sri Lanka, the scene of recent fighting involving rebel Tamil groups.

Nepal's prime minister, Girija Prasad Koirala, pledged that the country would be a federal state in the future. Eight people have died in protests by southern Nepalese demanding the change over the past couple of weeks.

King Hugo

Venezuela's National Assembly granted powers to President Hugo Chávez to legislate by decree for the next 18 months. See article

The first video images of Fidel Castro, Cuba's ailing president, released since October showed him looking stronger though still frail, and chatting with Venezuela's Mr Chávez. Mr Castro's health is a “state secret”, but he is said to have suffered complications after intestinal surgery.

Canada's government said it would pay C$11.5m ($9.8m) to Maher Arar, a Canadian software engineer who was detained by American officials and flown to Syria where he was tortured. An inquiry found that Canadian officials had falsely told their American counterparts that Mr Arar was a terrorist.

Ecuador slipped towards mob rule. Thousands of protesters, organized by the new president, Rafael Correa, stormed the Congress, where a majority of newly elected legislators are opposed to plans for a constituent assembly.

Click here to read the original news capsules from the Economist.com

Business this week: 27th January - 2nd February 2007

The New York Stock Exchange and the Tokyo Stock Exchange announced an alliance. The partnership covers trading-systems technology, investor services and regulation and is the latest expansive move into foreign markets by the NYSE, which is acquiring Euronext and recently took a stake in India's National Stock Exchange. For Japan's biggest stockmarket, the pact should help boost market confidence, which has been dented by a series of technical mishaps in its trading operations. See article

Citigroup agreed to buy Egg, an online bank, from Prudential, a British insurer, for £575m ($1.1 billion). Egg's sale price is much less than the £950m Prudential had said it was worth a year ago when Egg's minority shareholders were bought out. The bank made a loss of £145m last year, but Citigroup hopes that combining it with its own British consumer operations will prove a boon. See article

Deutsche Bank had a record year; its annual net profit rose by 70% to euro6 billion ($7.8 billion) in 2006, partly on the back of a resurgence in its investment banking business.

Climb every mountain

With $6 billion in development costs and a delay of some two years behind it, Windows Vista finally went on sale to consumers. Microsoft's latest operating system, its first since XP in 2001, has better security and new navigational designs. Bill Gates, the company's chairman, promised PC users that “the wow starts now”; analysts said they would sooner wait for Vista's sales figures.

Dell's chairman, Michael Dell, returned to his old job of chief executive after Kevin Rollins was dismissed. The computer-maker is trying to reboot its business in response to sliding market share and slowing growth. Investors were heartened by the news. See article

Google's fourth-quarter net income nearly tripled compared with a year earlier, to $1 billion (its annual profit for 2006 doubled to $3.1 billion). The company is prospering from website advertising revenue; the number of paid clicks rose by 61% in the quarter. However, Google's share price came under pressure after analysts cautioned its future profits might be hurt if it over-extended its new business.

US Airways withdrew its hostile $9.8 billion offer for Delta Air Lines after Delta's creditors threw their support behind the bankrupt carrier's reorganization plan. Delta and its pilots' union insist the company has a future as an independent airline, but the bid has raised speculation about more attempts at consolidation in the industry.

The empire strikes back

India's Tata Steel beat Brazil's CSN in the bidding for Corus, an Anglo-Dutch steelmaker, so creating the world's fifth-largest steel company. Formed in 1999 from the remnants of British Steel, Corus is India's biggest foreign takeover. But Tata's share price fell sharply amid concern that the price it is paying, £6.2 billion ($12.2 billion), is too high.

US Steel said its annual net profit last year rose by more than 50%, to $1.4 billion. The company's European operations helped compensate for a rise in cheaper steel imports and falling demand from automakers in America.

Altria made a long-awaited decision to spin off Kraft Foods. The idea was first mooted more than two years ago, but was delayed while Altria fought litigation about its Philip Morris tobacco business. Kraft's sales have been languishing of late, partly because of the trend towards healthier foods; the decision to divest the company will put an additional 1.5 billion of its shares in the market.

Ford reported an annual loss of $12.7 billion, its biggest ever, on January 25th. The automaker is suffering from a persistent decline in sales and is busily restructuring itself. Meanwhile, General Motors said it would delay announcing its results because of accounting errors.

Manchester won the competition to host Britain's first Las Vegas-style “super-casino”. The city was chosen by the independent Casino Advisory Panel over more high-profile bids, including one led by Philip Anschutz, an investor, for a casino at London's Millennium Dome.

Hank Paulson, America's treasury secretary, told the Senate Banking Committee that he would like eventually to see a “fully market-determined, floating Chinese currency”. The new Congress has made no secret of its irritation at China's stance on trade and exchange rates.

Shopaholics

America's GDP grew at an annualized rate of 3.5% in the fourth quarter, which was stronger than expected (the economy grew by 3.4% for the whole of 2006). A surge in consumer spending, helped by falling energy prices, boosted the figure. See article

Click here to read the original news capsules from the Economist.com