Friday, October 23, 2009

Almanacs “Trading Gains on Profits Despite Job Loss Reports - New York Times” plus 4 more

Almanacs “Trading Gains on Profits Despite Job Loss Reports - New York Times” plus 4 more

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Trading Gains on Profits Despite Job Loss Reports - New York Times

Posted: 23 Oct 2009 12:11 AM PDT

Stocks moved upward on Thursday, riding momentum from stronger-than-expected earnings reports despite a round of jobless figures that showed persistent weakness in the labor market.

An assortment of companies, from AT&T to Xerox, reported higher-than-expected earnings, feeding the hopes of investors that the earnings season would remain positive. AT&T said it earned $3.19 billion, or 54 cents a share, in the third quarter as the Apple iPhone helped attract two million new wireless customers. Its profit topped Wall Street forecasts for 50 cents a share.

Adding to the optimism, a report on leading economic indicators released Thursday showed an improved outlook for the general health of the economy.

The Dow Jones industrial average rose 131.95 points, or 1.33 percent, to 10,081.31, one day after it closed below 10,000. The Standard & Poor's 500-stock index jumped 11.51 points, or 1.06 percent, to 1,092.91. The Nasdaq composite index gained 14.56 points, or 0.68 percent, to 2,165.29.

At the same time, several banks and energy companies, including Fifth Third Bank and Consol Energy, showed disappointing earnings, but share prices of energy and utilities rebounded as the broad market rallied late in the session. Financial stocks drove much of the increase, as did better-than-expected reports from heavyweights like McDonald's and 3M.

After the market closed, there were more optimistic signs in quarterly reports from American Express and Capital One.

EBay surprised investors when it reported its earnings had dropped 29 percent, to $349.7 million, or 27 cents a share. Shares of eBay fell $1.06, or 4.23 percent, to $23.97. Amazon.com, by contrast, outpaced expectations, and investors said strong retail sales were boding well for the holiday season.

Several large companies, including the cigarette producer Philip Morris International, Xerox, and Dow Chemical, reported diminishing sales, but still outpaced expectations.

The generally upbeat company reports seemed to eclipse data from the Labor Department showing that the number of newly laid off workers filing jobless claims last week rose to 531,000 from 520,000 a week earlier. That figure was higher than economists had predicted, and it led to concern that the unemployment rate would continue its march upward.

Investors seemed to mostly ignore that bit of news, however, propelling stocks upward.

"The sentiment right now is to drive this thing home strong and that remains constant and consistent," said Randy Cass, founder of First Coverage, which is based in Boson. "Unless there is a completely unbelievable data point, they're not getting the heebie-jeebies."

Still, the jobless numbers were distressing to some investors.

"The pickup there is definitely concerning," said Jeffrey A. Hirsch, editor of the Stock Trader's Almanac. "It probably surprised a few people more so than they're willing to admit."

Overseas, the Nikkei stock average in Japan fell 0.64 percent. The FTSE 100 in Britain declined 0.96 percent, the DAX in Germany index fell 1.21 percent, and the CAC-40 in France dropped 1.35 percent.

The dollar, which fell to $1.50 against the euro on Wednesday, its lowest level in more than a year, continued to teeter at that threshold, though it rebounded slightly early in the day, prompting investors to turn away from other commodities like gold and oil. By the end of Thursday, it had returned to $1.50.

The price of crude oil hovered at $81.23, down slightly.

Interest rates were little changed. The Treasury's 10-year note fell 7/32, to 101 24/32, and the yield rose to 3.41 from 3.39 late Wednesday.

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On Native Ground - American Reporter

Posted: 22 Oct 2009 09:40 PM PDT

 On Native Ground
MY BACK PAGES: WATCHING MY CRAFT CHANGE OVER 30 YEARS
by Randolph T. Holhut
American Reporter Correspondent
Dummerston, Vt.

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Printable version of this story

DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- I got my first job in journalism at the age of 18 in the spring of 1980. I was a freshman in college and landed a night shift gig at WSPR, a radio station in Springfield, Mass.

News came over an Associated Press teletype machine at 65 words a minute. Changing the heavily inked ribbons was always a chore, not to mention making sure the paper didn't run out.

Stories were typed on battered old manual typewriters that dated back to the 1940s.

Computers? Still a new-fangled technology that hadn't yet seeped down to this level of the business.

The Internet? There were only a few hundred people using it. If you needed to look up an address, you got a phone book or a city directory. If you needed to confirm a stray fact, you pulled out The World Almanac.

They were still using reel-to-reel tape recorders, and a razor blade and Scotch tape were your tools for editing audio. It was still an analog world, with dials and meters and black telephones with dials.

In the fall of 1985, when I started working in newspapers, video display terminals were cutting edge technology. Two years later, I went out and got my first computer - a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 laptop. With its built-in 300 baud modem, I could file a story anyplace I could find a pay phone.

Cellphones? That was as futuristic as the communicators they used on "Star Trek."

There were still a few smokers in the first city room I worked in. The barroom downstairs was still a place where you could find reporters between shifts. The building also shuddered just a little from the giant presses when they fired up, and the stairwells were coated with a thin film of ink.

That first newspaper company I worked for - the Worcester (Mass.) Telegram and Evening Gazette - had four morning and six afternoon editions and a dozen bureaus in the county it published in. There were two separate news staffs, and even though they worked for the same company, the competition was still fierce.

One of my several jobs was working in the morgue - the newspaper's library - where we still clipped stories out of each day's edition and filed them away in envelopes. When a reporter or editor needed background on a subject, my job was to retrieve the right folders with the right clippings in a room filled with hundreds of cabinets with files that went back decades.

Pneumatic tubes brought pictures up to the composing room, and page proofs came down to the copy desk the same way. The darkroom was just that, a dark room filled with a dozen photo enlargers and photographers rushing make prints on deadline. I eventually learned how to do darkroom work and how to go from taking the film out of the camera to producing a finished print in under 30 minutes. The photos from the AP came one at a time from a LaserPhoto printer, in 8 minute intervals. Waiting for photos was a constant hassle.

The old photographers I encountered then were old enough to have used Speed Graphics - the bulky, hard-to-focus 4 x 5 inch cameras that were the newspaper standard from the 1920s to the 1960s.

The old compositors I encountered then were old enough to remember linotypes and the smell of melting lead.

The old editors I encountered then were old enough to remember pastepots and black pencils and making and remaking a newspaper on the fly with a few written instructions and a lot of teamwork in the mechanical departments.

Pagination - making a pages on a computer - was just starting to creep into use. I remember the first such unit - a Mac Plus - which was used to make graphic. Within 10 years of seeing that Mac for the first time, I would be making pages on a computer. The compositors - the wizards with Exacto knifes that could do just about anything you asked, just don't touch the type, please - were out of a job.

Automation changed lots of things. I was replaced by a computer terminal in the paper's morgue. Indexing was now done with a few keystrokes, not with a heavy steel straight edge tearing pages. Digital photography made the darkroom obsolete. The teletype printers disappeared, and wire service news came flying into the mainframe computers at thousands of words a minute.

And now I feel as ancient as the people I met when I started out, the tribe that started out in the 1940s and 1950s, when newspapers were king and the work that reporters did was the stuff of movies.

Twenty years ago this month, I went through my first buyout. The T & G had been sold two years before, and changes were in the works. Being a junior member of the staff who lashed three part-time jobs into something of a living, I was thrown overboard immediately. But I was struck by how many people, the elders of the paper that I looked up to and learned from, chose to take a buyout and leave than stick around and face an uncertain future. Most of that generation left, and I got my first education on the harshness of the newspaper business.

The morning and evening papers merged the following year. The T & G's bureaus started to disappear. The presses moved out of the hulking old building on Franklin Street and went to a remote site a few miles away. The papers were sold again, this time to The New York Times Co. They eliminated zoned editions this year and the paper is struggling to survive.

Since that bleak Yuletide two decades ago, I've been through three more newspaper sales. I've become an elder, talking about the old days of afternoon papers, pasting-up pages, teletypes and darkrooms to a generation that Googles phone numbers and needs MapQuest to find an address. And I've watched my profession go from fat and sassy to threadbare and dying in one generation.

I'm still young enough to be a bridge between the analog and digital eras, and still looking forward to the shape of journalism to come. The tools we have now to tell stories were barely dreamed of when I started out, but I recognize how important they are and working to master them. We just have to remember that the need to tell stories is primal, and that storytellers will always be needed.

What will the young reporters I work with now be saying when they look back at their careers 20 years from now? Will they be talking about that gruff and crabby gray-bearded editor they had as their first mentor? The rickety first-generation iMacs that they have to use to write their stories on? The lack of reliable Internet and cellphone service? Or will they talk about working in newspapers at a time when they became quaint relics of a bygone age?

My love for the printed page is still abiding, but it's hard to remember what it was like before the Internet, before desktop computers, before digital cameras and voice recorders, before the avalanche of data that pours from the Web each day, before the 24-hour news cycle, before all the changes that I have seen in nearly three decades of broadcast, print and online journalism. The past is a nice place to visit, but the future is still the place I hope to see.

Randolph T. Holhut has been a journalist in New England for nearly 30 years. He edited "The George Seldes Reader" (Barricade Books). He can be reached at randyholhut@yahoo.com.

Copyright 2009 Joe Shea The American Reporter. All Rights Reserved.

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Friday Finishers: Jobless numbers moving down - Journal Times

Posted: 22 Oct 2009 09:19 PM PDT

Thumbs up: Smiling through the pain. Area jobless rates came out this week and the city and county of Racine got the "good news" that there was some improvement from August. The city's jobless rate went from 16.2 percent to 14.5 percent, while the county's rate went from 10.2 percent to 9.3 percent. But September rates typically fall as teachers go back to work, so the improvement was not exactly unexpected. The staggering number of jobs lost in the past year in southeastern Wisconsin remains a problem, but it is still good to see the Racine jobless rate numbers sliding away from the 17 percent mark and the county dipping back below 10 percent. It also marked the first month this year that the jobless rate was not double that of the same month in 2008. The statistics came in a week where there was a spot of bad news - Warehouse Specialists announced its closing and that will end 32 local jobs - and two pluses. RCEDC officials said a Chinese company would develop a $10 million to $15 million "eco-business park" along Highway 11 and a deal is in the works to land a new business involved in tire recycling that could add 88 jobs to the area. The pluses this week seemed to be outdistancing the minuses on the road to recovery.

Thumbs up: Providing child care support so that parents can work was a big part of the move to end welfare in Wisconsin so it was not welcome news when it became evident that some providers and recipients were gaming that system to bilk the state out of millions of dollars. Efforts to close loopholes and put the Wisconsin Shares program back on level and legal grounds came on a couple of fronts this week as the Legislature passed a law that would hold child care providers personally accountable for overpayments even if their firms go out of business. That closes one loophole and more legislation is on tap for action next week. So, too, Racine and Kenosha counties announced they will join in an anti-fraud task force to investigate fraud in the child care subsidy program. Both deserve a salute and we hope the program can get back on the straight and narrow.

Thumbs up: Wow! Must be time for the state football playoffs. Area football fans got their money's worth this week with a trio of stunning games. The defending WIAA Division 7 state champion Catholic Central Hilltoppers came back from a 35-13 halftime deficit and overcame Racine Lutheran 42-35 to clinch the MCC title. Both teams advance to the playoffs. Waterford High School missed out on an undefeated season when it lost in double overtime to Lake Geneva Badger - but the Wolverines, too, advance to next week's playoffs. Burlington, meanwhile, was eliminated from playoff contention it was edged by Union Grove, 28-24. It was the first time Grove has prevailed over the Demons in 33 years. Racine Park, 5-4, which lost to Oak Creek, rounds out the area playoff teams.

Thumbs down: Some prognosticators like to use those furry caterpillars and the Farmer's Almanac to predict the severity of Wisconsin's winters, but we take a much more dollars and sense approach. Racine County says it will cope with a 14.6 percent drop in maintenance funding from the state Department of Transportation by having three fewer snowplow drivers this winter. We see a slurry of flurries in our winter driving crystal ball and hereby predict that there will be traffic slowdowns. We'll get back to you on the pothole forecast for spring.

Thumbs up: If you've got the house all buttoned up for the winter and still have a yen to do a few seasonal chores, there are opportunities galore on Saturday as Racine County residents take to field and stream to do a little fall cleaning. It's time for Make a Difference Day 2009. There are invasive plants to deal with at Riverside Park on Horlick Avenue just south of the Sixth Street bridge, cleanup work going on at 13 different spots along the Root River, buckthorn removal at the Abe Kirkorian Nature Preserve in Sturtevant and the Johnson Dog Park Run along Highway 38 south of 4 Mile Road, wood chips that need to be spread along the hillside at the Racine Zoo and a Highway D cleanup in Rochester - to name just a few. You can find a list of chores that need to be done and contacts at the Volunteer Center of Racine County Web site at:

http://www.volunteercenterofracine.org/index.php/Main_Page

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The almanac - United Press International

Posted: 22 Oct 2009 05:44 PM PDT

Today is Thursday, Oct. 22, the 295th day of 2009 with 70 to follow.

The moon is waxing. The morning stars are Mercury, Venus, Mars and Saturn. The evening stars are Neptune, Jupiter and Uranus.

Those born on this date are under the sign of Libra. They include Hungarian composer Franz Liszt in 1811; actresses Sarah Bernhardt in 1844 and Joan Fontaine in 1917 (age 92); comic actor Curly Howard of "The Three Stooges" in 1903; English author Doris Lessing, winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize for literature, in 1919 (age 90); psychologist and LSD advocate Timothy Leary in 1920; artist Robert Rauschenberg in 1925; actors Derek Jacobi and Christopher Lloyd, both in 1938 (age 71), Annette Funicello in 1942 (age 67), Catherine Deneuve in 1943 (age 66) and Jeff Goldblum in 1952 (age 57); and champion skater Brian Boitano in 1963 (age 46).

On this date in history:

In 1797, the first parachute jump was made by Andre-Jacques Garnerin, who dropped from a height of about 6,500 feet over a Paris park.

In 1836, Gen. Sam Houston was sworn in as the first president of the Republic of Texas.

In 1938, inventor Charles Carlson produced the first dry, or xerographic, copy, but had trouble attracting investors.

In 1962, U.S. President John Kennedy announced that Soviet missiles had been deployed in Cuba and ordered a blockade of the island.

In 1966, The Supremes became the first all-female group to score a No. 1 album, with "Supremes a Go-Go."

In 1978, Pope John Paul II was installed as pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church.

In 1990, U.S. President George H.W. Bush vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1990, saying it would lead to a quota system.

In 1991, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir warned that Israel would refuse to negotiate with any Palestinians who claimed alliance to the PLO.

In 1992, pioneer sportscaster Red Barber died at age 84.

In 2001, anthrax spores were found in a mail-opening machine serving the White House. Preliminary tests on 120 workers who sort mail for the executive mansion were negative.

Also in 2001, the Pentagon announced nearly 200 U.S. jets struck Taliban and al-Qaida communications facilities, barracks and training camps and disputed Taliban claims that 100 civilians died when a bomb hit a hospital in western Afghanistan.

And in 2001, an estimated 500 people were killed when the Nigerian army attacked villages throughout the eastern state of Benue.

In 2003, a poll indicated 59 percent of Palestinians wanted attacks against Israel to continue even if Israel leaves the West Bank and Gaza.

Also in 2004, rescuers confirmed 64 dead following an explosion in a central China coal mine. Eighty-four miners were missing in the toxic gas-filled shaft.

In 2005, Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai ordered an investigation into the reported desecration of bodies by U.S. troops said to be captured on tape by a TV crew.

In 2007, U.S. President George Bush formally asked Congress for $46 billion in emergency funding for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. That's in addition to the nearly $145 billion in his original budget for next year.

In 2008, Mexican officials say federal army troops have arrived at Rosarito Beach in Baja California to battle a relentless wave of drug gang slayings in the state's border towns. Police estimated at least 140 killings in and around Tijuana since Sept. 26.

A thought for the day: of the existence of God, Clarence Darrow said, "I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure -- that is all that agnosticism means."

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Atherton City Manager Jerry Gruber wins 10 percent pay raise - The Almanac Online

Posted: 22 Oct 2009 04:18 PM PDT

By Andrea Gemmet
Almanac Staff Writer

Jerry Gruber, Atherton's city manager, has been on the job fewer than two years, but clearly, he's won the whole-hearted support of the City Council. He is getting a 10-percent raise, bringing his annual salary up to $160,000. The 10-percent raise is retroactive to January 2009.

The council approved the raise on a 5-0 vote at the Oct. 21 meeting. As an item on the consent agenda, it passed without comment.

Mr. Gruber started work for the town in January 2008 with an annual salary $145,000.

The city manager job also comes with a $400 monthly car allowance and free housing, in the form of a town-owned home in Holbrook-Palmer Park. Living at the city manager's house is a requirement of the job, and thus a tax-free perk, according to a legal opinion included in Mr. Gruber's contract. Under his contract, the town also pays the full cost of his retirement and health care benefits.

Mr. Gruber's new contract with the town was negotiated by a council subcommittee composed of Elizabeth Lewis and Jim Dobbie, and was reviewed by Atherton's labor counsel before being brought to the full council for approval.
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