Business News

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks could sputter this week as volumes dry up in holiday-shortened trading and with a slew of economic reports likely to illustrate the recovery is still fragile.

NEW YORK - Investors are heading toward the final month of the year with more questions about the economy than they had just a few weeks ago.

NEW YORK (AFP) - Key housing sector data may provide direction for Wall Street in the coming week as the market looks for confirmation of economic recovery and girds for the year-end holiday period.

PORTLAND, Ore. - J.M. Smucker Co. nearly tripled its profit in the second quarter as the addition of Folgers coffee gave a jolt to its lineup and lower commodity prices for coffee beans and other items fattened its profit margins.

Dell's earnings are up and expectations are solid, but the company's stock still took a hit Friday afternoon after analysts signaled the company isn't playing a key role in the PC market recovery. Dell's shipments were flat in the third quarter and down five percent from the year-ago period despite improvements in the large-enterprise and small-and-midsize business segments and increased demand and revenue from business customers.

Homebuilder D.R. Horton Inc., saw new home orders spike 26 percent from a year ago in the latest quarter as buyers raced to close deals and take advantage of a federal tax credit. But a wider-than-anticipated loss fueled by write-downs sent shares tumbling more than 15 percent Friday.

BERLIN (AFP) - EU Industry Commissioner Guenter Verheugen has criticised informal financial pledges to General Motors by countries vying to save jobs at factories belonging to the automaker's European unit.

General Motors has emerged from bankruptcy. Now it must step out of the long dark shadow of its own reputation.

LAS VEGAS - Court documents show police linked a drug blamed in Michael Jackson's death to the pop singer's personal physician who bought it at a Las Vegas pharmacy.

About a year ago, observers of the UK commercial property market would not have been shocked to see the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse riding around the corner.

I am not your typical MBA student. I chuckle thinking about the havoc I will wreak on the incoming class pie charts that the admissions office will prepare at the Georgetown McDonough School of Business (McDonough Full-Time MBA School Profile), where I will start this fall. How will they categorize a gay Bosnian Muslim refugee, a former chemist who writes about sexuality in Islam while counseling college students?

Santiago - Valeria Garcia has come a long way in the past two decades. As a high school dropout, she lived in a wooden shack with a dirt-floor kitchen and a tin roof in San Ramn, one of the Chilean capital's roughest neighborhoods. But at age 33 she went back to high school and then earned a degree in psychology from a local university. For seven years she commuted an hour each day by bus to classes, all the while taking in washing to make ends meet.

WASHINGTON - Moderate Senate Democrats threatened Sunday to scuttle health-care legislation if their demands aren't met, while more liberal members warned their party leaders not to bend.

WASHINGTON - As if small businesses needed another reason not to hire, consider their latest financial burden: The cost of rising unemployment itself.

MIDDLETOWN, Pa. - The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission says the small amount of radiation detected at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant is not significant.