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The Dow finished above 9,000 for the first time since January on Thursday, a surprise rebound that included eBay rallying 9 percent and Ford up 8.5 precent. But some caution that this doesn't mean the bull is back—lowered expectations were a major factor. "Better-than-expected results" from bolstered eBay, Ford, and AT&T, along with an increase in home re-sales produced the warm feelings on Wall Street. More closely-watched quarterly reports are expected from Amazon, Microsoft and others Thursday evening. "Relative to the estimates, it looks like they are doing well. Part of that is an expectations game," an expert told Bloomberg in reference to the companies that surged Thursday. Optimistic observers say that eBay's boost signals a recovery in e-commerce. Ford rebounded by restructuring its debt, and AT&T keeps raking in loot from the ubiquitous iPhone.
Senate Democrats said they'll miss the August health-care overhaul deadline—but House Democrats are still chugging away, and they're open to a last-resort loophole to get the bill to the floor: bypassing its last, stalling committee, the panel on Energy and Commerce. The Hill reports that, while moderate Blue Dog Democrats in Energy and Commerce drag their feet and keep the bill off the floor, Democratic leadership is now threatening to bypass the committee altogether, if they don't resolve their disagreements fast. "All options will be on the table," said Democratic Caucus Chairman John Larson (D-CT), who noted that "the preferable course" would be to go through the committee. Speaker Nancy Pelosi demurred on the possibility of bypassing the energy committee, and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) says progress is still being made. One committee member, California's Rep. Jane Harman, said members were asked to clear their calendars for Saturday, suggesting that the bill could clear its final committee soon.
This won’t help accusations that Pyongyang behaves like a petulant child: North Korean officials are trading schoolyard insults this week with Hillary Clinton: On Thursday, Clinton said in Thailand that North Korea has "no friends left that will protect them from the international community's efforts to move toward denuclearization." In response, an unnamed North Korean official called Clinton "by no means intelligent" and a "funny lady." The official even went after her looks: "Sometimes she looks like a primary schoolgirl and sometimes a pensioner going shopping." Meanwhile, U.S. officials believe the North Korean government's modus operandi is to be deliberately provocative, CNN reports—to "act out" to get the U.S.'s attention.
The police sergeant who was involved in the bungled arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. said he was "disappointed" by President Obama's statement that cops acted "stupidly." "I support the president to a point, yes," the sergeant, James Crowley told local news in Boston. "I think it's disappointing that he waded into what should be a local issue and something that plays out here... As he himself said... he doesn't know all the facts." Gates is a personal friend of Obama's, and the president did not mince words on Wednesday when he put the arrest in a larger context. "There's a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That's just a fact." Obama said. The sergeant has said he won't apologize, and his police union has expressed full support for him.
The fight is on: In a news conference on Thursday, Pittsburgh Steelers' Ben Roethlisberger forcefully denied sexually assaulting Andrea McNulty, a 31-year-old Lake Tahoe casino hostess. "I would never, ever force myself on a woman," the Super Bowl-winning quarterback said. "I want to fight to protect my family and my reputation." Last Saturday was the first he'd learned of the allegations, he said, which were detailed in a civil suit filed by McNulty. In it, the Harrah's employee accuses Roethlisberger of raping her in a penthouse suite last July. "I'm not going to discuss my private life or this civil case in the media," he continued. "I'll respond to her outrageous allegations in the appropriate forum."
Should he stay or should he go? Ousted Honduran president Manuel Zelaya left the Nicaraguan capital Managua—where he has been staying since his exile on June 28—with a "caravan of supporters" on Thursday and plans to return home to Honduras, reports The New York Times. The regime that overthrew Zelaya has vowed to arrest him if he enters his home country again. Nonetheless, Zelaya said his large body of supporters should save him: "I hope when the armed forces see the people [traveling with me] they will lower their rifles." The coup that ousted Zelaya drew international scorn, including the condemnation of the Council of the Americas and President Obama, who said the coup was "not legal."
Obama's prime-time health-care push may have been in vain: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has announced that the Senate won't pass any health-care reform until after the August recess. Instead, he says, they'll work to push a health care package through in the fall. It's the Republicans who have resisted the president's package so far, Reid says, and have asked for more time to complete the package. Says Reid: "It's better to get a product that's based on quality and thoughtfulness than on trying to just get something through." In a townhall meeting at Shaker Heights, Ohio Obama agreed: "I want to get it right."
Two mayors, two state assemblymen, five rabbis and dozens of others from New Jersey (sounds like the opening of a joke) have been swept up by the Feds and stand accused of participating in a corruption ring with roots in Brooklyn, Israel, and Switzerland. The details of the vast scandal are only beginning to be sorted out, but involve the familiar "pay to play" scheme in which people seeking government permits handed over cash to obtain under-the-table approval. A U.S. attorney said in a press conference Thursday that the people involved "existed in an ethics-free zone," and "that average citizens 'don't have a chance' against the culture of influence-peddling." The Feds investigation is the product of a "two-year corruption and international money-laundering investigation."
The biggest names in broadcast journalism filed in to St. Bartholomew's Church in midtown Manhattan on Thursday to pay final respects to legendary newsman Walter Cronkite, at his funeral. According to the Associated Press, Connie Chung, Diane Sawyer, Brian Williams, Dan Rather, Barbara Walters, Matt Lauer, Tom Brokaw, and Morley Safer were all in attendance; Yoko Ono sent flowers. 60 Minutes commentator Andy Rooney spoke, choking up during a story about the newsmen's youth as reporters, explaining, "I just feel so terrible about Walter's death that I can hardly say anything. He's been such a good friend over the years." Cronkite producer Sanford Socolow and son Chip Cronkite also spoke. Chip highlighted on his father's humility, recalling how he described himself as "just a reporter" who "just ended up reporting bigger and bigger stories." A public memorial will be held in coming weeks at Lincoln Center.
Mark Buehrle, the Chicago White Sox's ace pitcher, threw the 18th perfect game in Major League Baseball history Thursday against the Tampa Bay Rays, facing 27 batters and not walking a single one. Buehrle, who was elected to the all-star team this year, had already pitched a no-hitter in 2007. As is usually the case in stellar pitching performances, Buehrle was saved by a spectacular play in the outfield that prevented a home run. The center fielder Dewayne Wise ran to the outfield wall and leaped above it, corralling the ball as he fell to the ground and keeping the perfect game in place.
While making a point about the inefficiencies in the health-care system, President Obama made a reference to The Matrix in his primetime press conference. Throughout the nation, nerds gasped, once again in awe of a president who collected comic books as a kid and knows the Vulcan greeting from Star Trek. "If there's a blue pill and a red pill, and the blue pill is half the price of the red pill and works just as well, why not pay half price for the thing that's going to make you well?" Obama said. There is one problem with the reference, however. In The Matrix, the blue pill keeps you blissfully ignorant of the pseudo-reality engineered by mechanical tyrants.
New revelations keep coming out of the secretive Bush White House. A new article in Time Magazine paints a vivid picture of President Bush and Dick Cheney's tense relationship during the final days of their time in office. The vice-president had developed a near-obsession with a presidential pardon for his disgraced aide, Scooter Libby, who was indicted on charges of perjury and obstruction. So much so that one source said Cheney "really got in the President's face" over the issue. White House staff in general thought that Libby had in fact lied under oath, and Bush eventually came to think the same. After consulting with several trusted advisers, Bush, who strongly believed that "no one is above the law," made the decision that Libby did not deserve a pardon because he showed "no signs of remorse." Cheney, to this day, strongly disagrees and believes that "a man was left on the battlefield."
It's certainly a long way from Hollywood: Angelina Jolie visited Iraq for the third time on Tuesday to show support for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis displaced from their homes. The UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador met with families in the district of Abu Ghraib, held children, and listened to people's stories. When she met an Iraqi who told her of his problems, the mother of six responded: "It takes a lot of strength for you to survive this life. I don't know if I would be strong enough to survive this." At the end of her day-long visit, Jolie reflected: "This is a moment where things seem to be improving on the ground, but Iraqis need a lot of support and help to rebuild their lives."
Here's the latest raunch from Italy, folks: recorded conversations of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and the escort Patrizia D'Addario in the midst of a lengthy love session. The whispered words are there for all to read, and include such gems as "A young man would have come in a second... I mean he would have come... Young men usually have a lot of pressure..." and Berlusconi's off-putting response: "But if you will you allow me... (muffled) I believe it is a family thing." The 72-year-old Berlusconi also offers some wise advice to maintain sexual health: "You should have sex with yourself. You should touch yourself often." There are other recordings of Berlusconi giving a private tour to D'Addario of his infamous Spanish villa. Yet one nagging question looms over all the others: Exactly where did she stash the recorder?
Perhaps Wall Street should take a page from university playbooks. Moved by falling endowments and declines in fundraising, university presidents are voluntarily forgoing benefits and even giving themselves pay cuts to set an example, Bloomberg reports. The presidents of Brown University, Stanford, Middlebury, and Washington University have lowered their own salaries--in Brown's case by as much as 17 percent. Travel expenses have also gone. Instead of flying, Cornell's president now takes the bus between the school's Ithaca and New York campuses whenever possible, while Barnard's president has saved the school $50,000 annually by eliminating the chauffeured car that has served university presidents for the last 30 years.
It's the mystery of New York's Meatpacking District: who planted the awning of an old building under the High Line with beautiful pink and white begonias? The mysterious planter, it turns out, was Robert Isabell, famous party planner and floral designer who was found dead in his Greenwich Village home on July 8th at the age of 57. According to The New York Times, Isabell had purchased the five-story building a year ago with the intention of developing it into retail and office space. Now that he's gone, however, the people who crowd the High Line this summer will look down at those begonias and, in some small way, experience the bright legacy of Robert Isabell.
Summer camps around the country are turning into boot camps for proper hygiene as directors confront the swine-flu pandemic. At Camp Matoka in Maine, for example, campers receive temperature checks, are given bottles of hand sanitizer, and the serving staff wears masks. “We’ve never had flu in the summer like this,” Dr. Dora Anne Mills, Maine’s public health director, told the New York Times. “We have 33 camps in Maine with outbreaks, and another 10 in the pipeline being tested. Some of them have 70 to 100 kids in isolation, so they’re running shadow camps for them.” Similar outbreaks have occurred in other states as well: one camp in Georgia canceled its first session due to a number of sick counselors while Vermont's Camp Killooleet sent everyone home for a week after as many as 15 kids grew ill within days.
Doesn't Hollywood have any ideas of its own? Variety reports that the massively popular online video game World of WarCraft will be dramatized on the silver screen. The game's plot is an epic conflict between the Horde and the Alliance, and in the game players can choose to play characters such as orcs, trolls, humans, and dwarves. Warner Bros. is set to distribute the film, which will be directed by Sam Raimi of Spider-Man and Evil Dead fame. Raimi is set to supervise development and shoot the picture after he finishes Spider-Man 4 early next year.
On the heels of suspicions that painkillers caused Michael Jackson's death, actress Jamie Lee Curtis has revealed that she also suffered from an addiction to prescription drugs. "I too found painkillers after a routine cosmetic surgical procedure and I too became addicted," Curtis, 50, wrote in her blog on The Huffington Post. "The morphine becomes the warm bath from which to escape painful reality." Curtis empathizes with Jackson, she writes, whom she believes was trying to numb the pain of his own life. And while she doesn't disclose many details of her struggle, she says she has since overcome it. "My recovery from drug addiction is the single greatest accomplishment of my life," she writes. "But it takes work—hard, painful work."
Fifteen cars full of Los Angeles detectives and federal drug agents arrived Wednesday morning at the Houston clinic of Michael Jackson's doctor after obtaining a warrant based on preliminary autopsy results that indicate a drug overdose linked to Jackson's demise. Dr. Conrad Murray is the last doctor to have seen Jackson alive and is suspected of administering the drug in question, Propofol, which is usually only used in hospitals. Murray and his lawyer aren't saying whether the drug was administered, but say they're eager to close the case. "The coroner wants to clear up the cause of death, we share that goal," explained Murray's lawyer. The site of the raid is located in the Armstrong Medical Clinic, owned by a doctor whose DEA license was revoked in 2005 for "over prescribing," according to officials.
You'd think there wasn't a recession going on. The Washington Post reports that Wall Street's six biggest banks have reserved a combined $74 billion, up from $60 billion last year, to pay executives and other employees mere months after the government bailed them out with taxpayer dollars. Goldman Sachs set aside $6.6 billion as it announced record profits; Morgan Stanley set aside $6 billion despite three straight quarterly losses. The public kerfuffle over large bonuses had led top financial leaders to promise reform, namely, tying pay to long-term financial performance and not risky short-term decisions such as those that contributed to the meltdown.
The final question during President Obama's prime-time press conference on Wednesday was about the controversial arrest of African-American scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. for breaking into his own home. President Obama came down on the side of those who say race played a factor, saying the Cambridge (Mass.) Police Department acted "stupidly." Noting that Gates is a "friend," Obama cracked jokes about the difficulty of breaking into the White House, but returned to a serious tone when he argued that Gates' arrest demonstrates how "race remains" an unresolved issue in America.
Here's news that likely won't inspire a Moment of Zen for the networks: In a poll conducted by Time magazine, Daily Show host Jon Stewart has been voted America's Most Trusted Newscaster, post-Cronkite. Matched up against Brian Williams, Charlie Gibson, and Katie Couric, Stewart won with 44 percent of the vote. Williams came in second, followed by Gibson; Couric finished last. Time has broken down the results state-by-state, for the especially curious. As The Huffington Post points out, "Stewart finished no lower than second place in all states, except, curiously, Vermont."
Seeking to dispel accusations that its government behaves like a petulant child, North Korean officials are trading schoolyard insults this week with the U.S.: On Thursday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in Thailand that North Korea has "no friends left that will protect them from the international community's efforts to move toward denuclearization." In response, North Korea's foreign-ministry spokesman went personal, telling a state news agency that Clinton's comment "suggests she is by no means intelligent." The state news report even went after her looks: "Sometimes she looks like a primary schoolgirl and sometimes a pensioner going shopping."
Mixed unemployment news from the government Thursday. The Associated Press reports that 554,000 people filed initial claims for unemployment last week, slightly higher than analysts expected, although the Labor Department said that the timing of auto-plant shutdowns was juking the stats. The good news is that total jobless-benefit rolls fell by 88,000—more than expected—to 6.2 million, which is the lowest they've been since mid-April.
Save health care, save the economy, was President Obama's message in a televised prime-time speech and appearance Wednesday. After recounting successes with the economy and job market, Obama argued that reining in health-care costs and moving away from an employer-centered insurance system will help "rebuild [the economy] stronger than before." The president discussed protecting individuals from overspending on health care and underscored his pledge not to increase the national deficit. The president also took on his right-wing detractors, quoting (but not naming) Bill Kristol's urge for Republicans to "go for the kill" and South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint's desire to "break" him: "This isn't about me. I have great health insurance, and so does every member of Congress.... This debate is not a game." During the question and answer session, Obama reiterated his desire to keep health-care costs off "the backs of middle-class families," noting that the Senate Finance Committee is still working on their portion of the bill. He'll try to win the support of "Democrats and some Republicans."
U.S. officials announced Wednesday that Saad bin Laden, a son of Osama bin Laden, has likely been killed in Pakistan. The suspected cause is Hellfire missiles fired from a U.S. Predator drone sometime this year. A senior U.S. counterterrorism official told NPR that "without a body to conduct DNA tests on, it's hard to be completely sure," but U.S. spy agencies are "80 to 85 percent" certain that the junior bin Laden, who officials think was in his late 20s, is dead. Saad bin Laden reportedly spent years under house arrest in Iran before moving to Pakistan in 2008, former National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell says. And while he was active in al Qaeda, he wasn't believed to be a major player—for this reason, he wasn't important enough to target personally, but was simply "in the wrong place at the wrong time." "We make a big deal out of him because of his last name," the counterterrorism official commented.
The congressional battle on health care isn't about health care, it's about controlling the rhetoric. Last week, Sen. Jim DeMint said that if Republicans can stop Obama's health-care bill, "it will be his Waterloo, it will break him." Now, Politico reports, Republican leaders in the Senate worry that the GOP is misplaying its hand, as Democrats have seized on DeMint's comment to paint the GOP as a party whose mission is to ruin the Obama presidency. Republican leaders are already working on damage control. Sen. John Cornyn, head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee said DeMint's comments were "a distraction," and jabbed the Democrats by adding, "If they'd rather get into a food fight, rather than actually solve problems," he supposed DeMint's comment gave them an excuse. Sen. Lamar Alexander, the Senate Republican Conference chairman, agreed with Republican Minority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell, who told Meet the Press: "My goal is not to stop the president; my goal is to get the right kind of health care for America."
A 7.8 magnitude earthquake accomplished hundreds of years of continental drift in a few seconds. The Guardian reports that the quake has jolted New Zealand's South Island closer to Australia. As the The Guardian put it, "Global positioning systems showed that Te Anau, a town in the remote Fiordland region, was now 10 cm closer to Australia, it said, while the South Island's south-western tip, Puysegur Point, was 30cm (11.8ins) closer." Although the earthquake was New Zealand's biggest in 78 years, it caused only slight property damage when it struck last Thursday.
Apparently, the death of newspapers has been greatly exaggerated. At least for the moment. After a first-quarter loss of $74.5 million, the New York Times Company reported second-quarter net income of $39.1 million, up from $21.1 million a year ago. A tax adjustment slightly inflated the earnings. The company's profit, helped by steep budget cuts, comes despite a 31.9 percent drop in ad revenue at the company's papers and Web sites this quarter. The company cut its operating costs by $140.5 million—about 20 percent—compared with a year earlier, but $29 million of that reduction came from the closure of a money-losing newspaper and magazine-distribution subsidiary.
Ah, the benefits of low expectations. "Better-than-estimated results" from major companies sent the Dow Jones Industrial Average surging past 9,000 for the first time since January on Thursday—up over 160 points in late morning trading. Surprising quarterly numbers from eBay, Ford, and AT&T along with an increase in home re-sales produced the warm feelings on Wall Street. But don't get too giddy. "Relative to the estimates, it looks like they are doing well. Part of that is an expectations game," an expert told Bloomberg. Optimistic observers say that eBay's boost signals a recovery in e-commerce. Ford rebounded by restructuring its debt, and AT&T keeps raking in loot from the ubiquitous iPhone.
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