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NEW ORLEANS: For the first time since it was a Spanish colony some 200 years ago, New Orleans is getting revitalized by Spanish speakers.One of the more dramatic and immediate impacts of Hurricane Katrina has been the influx of thousands of new Latinos who have moved to the city to detoxify, renovate and rebuild storm damaged roads, flood walls, businesses and homes.Following a mini-boom in Latinos has been a growing number of Latino-owned businesses, especially in the retail and service sectors.Two Mexican eateries, Taqueria Guerrero and El Rinconcito, now sandwich a longtime New Orleans Italian ice cream shop, Angelo Brocato’s, in MidCity. A few blocks away, a Latino-owned beauty parlor recently opened.Before Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans’ Latino population hovered around 3%. Officially, it’s now around 4.5%, according to a 2008 census survey.That number is sure to grow. Nearly half of all New Orleans area construction workers are Latino, according to a 2006 population study by Tulane University and the University of California at Berkeley. And the number of Hispanic children registered in the Orleans Parish public school system reported nearly doubled, going from 3% up to 5.6%.The nonprofit Puentes New Orleans was founded two years ago to serve the new growing Latino population, said director Lucas Diaz. The group helps Latino families climb up the economic ladder, offering classes on buying homes and public leadership.”It wasn’t possible before the storm,” Diaz said. “There’s just so many more people. And there so many more businesses that are just more visible, which is a shift in that regard.”The Latino population boom presented a big business opportunity for New Orleans broadcast guru Ernesto Schweikert.Schweikert, 55, was born in Guatemala but has lived in New Orleans for nearly 40 years. He started the city’s first Spanish radio station in 1991. He also was looking to start the city’s first Spanish television affiliate.After the storm, he bought a troubled station, and now he runs Telemundo affiliate KGLA with local news programming. The timing couldn’t have been better. “The TV station came in to fill a big empty space in the Spanish community,” said Schweikert.Schweikert says that since the storm, his stations have been seeing triple the number of Latino-owned businesses seeking advertising time as they did before the storm.”New Orleans has one of the oldest Hispanic communities in the country,” Schweikert said. “Hispanics were the ones who rebuilt the French Quarter, now it’s up to the Latino community to rebuild New Orleans.”

Source:CNN

(Fortune Magazine) — For years a cardinal rule of retirement investing has been to put every penny you can into IRAs, 401(k)s, and other tax-deferred accounts. That advice rested on a commonsense assumption: that after you stopped working you’d move into a lower tax bracket. That was important because the money you take out of a tax-deferred account is subject to ordinary income taxes. But with the Bush tax cuts expiring and new taxes on the horizon, that assumption about tax brackets no longer seems like such a sure thing. So it’s time for retirement savers to adjust their strategies to reflect the new reality and to protect themselves against tax changes that could take a significant bite out of their retirement accounts. Taxes have always been the wild card in retirement planning, but the outlook is wilder than ever. Consider: Income tax and capital gains rates are slated to rise in 2011 when the Bush tax cuts expire. In 2011 the maximum capital gains rate will rise to 20% from 15%; the special tax break for dividends will end, meaning they will once again be taxed as ordinary income; and income tax rates will revert to pre-2001 levels of 15%, 28%, 31%, 36%, and 39.6% – up from current rates of 10%, 15%, 25%, 28%, 33%, and 35%. Those rates are the floor, not the ceiling, though. Taxes could surge even higher, especially for the wealthier segment of the population, as certain exemptions and itemized deductions will be phased out for those with incomes exceeding 200,000. At the same time, Congress is considering a surtax on couples earning at least 350,000 to pay for health-care reform. If it goes through, the top rate of 39.6% would climb to about 45% – the highest income tax rate the nation has seen since 1986, when the top levy was 50%. And that would probably not be the end. There’s still the question of how the federal government will begin to cover the trillions in debt it is running up as it spends money to combat the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. The uncertain tax outlook can be paralyzing. “The whole idea of not knowing how much money you really have saved because you don’t know how much you’re going to have to pay in taxes makes it impossible to plan,” says Keith Maliniak, a 60-year-old physician in Harrisburg, Pa. But even if you don’t know how high your rates will be, there are steps you can take to insulate your retirement stake from the vagaries of the tax code. Luckily, you have a weapon in the war on taxes: the Roth IRA. With a Roth, you don’t get a tax deduction when you put money in, but the money in your account grows tax-free and – this is the key advantage – your withdrawals are tax-free, so you don’t need to worry about what the tax rates will be or what bracket you’ll be in when you retire. Until now Roths have had a big catch: income limits of 105,000 for individuals and 160,000 for joint filers. But starting in 2010 anyone will be allowed to convert existing retirement accounts to Roth accounts, making this key retirement tool available to everyone. (Of course you’ll have a big tax bill when you make the switch – more on that later.) In addition to allowing tax-free withdrawals in retirement, Roth IRAs offer several other advantages over tax-deferred accounts: You don’t have to make mandatory withdrawals from the account when you reach 70 years of age as traditional IRAs require; second, you can pass the account on to your children and grandchildren, where the assets will continue to grow tax-free; third, you can withdraw contributions anytime without penalty following the initial five-year “seasoning” period; and fourth, you can withdraw up to 10,000 tax-free to purchase a principal residence. 0:00
/2:44Mixed signals on the recovery”I think in almost any circumstance, tax-free is better than tax-deferred,” says Gregg Fisher, president and chief investment officer at Gerstein Fisher, a financial advisory firm. If you left a Roth to a grandchild, for example, the account could continue to appreciate tax-free for 60 or more years. Many financial advisers are now recommending that clients put at least 30% – and possibly as much as 80%, depending on age and income – of their retirement assets into Roth IRAs so that a bigger chunk of their assets escape taxation. This strategy is significantly different from five years ago when advisers favored tax-deferred IRA accounts and recommended only 10% to 15% be channeled into Roths, says Joseph Leonard, a financial planner and author of The Retirement Vault. If your income is below the IRS limits, you can contribute up to 5,000 a year to a Roth (6,000 if you are over 50). Some companies have begun to offer Roth 401(k)s, which have no income limits. But for the most part, high earners have to settle for converting existing IRAs and paying the tax bill. As part of the deal, if you convert in 2010 you can stretch the tax payments out over three years, easing the pain. The questions of whether – and how much – to convert are complicated and there’s no one-size-fits-all answer. When you convert, the money in the IRA is added to your taxable income. This could bump you up into a higher tax bracket: “If you earn 120,000 a year and want to convert 200,000 of IRA money, that will throw you from the 28% tax bracket to the 36% bracket for that particular year,” says Leonard. That said, advisers suggest that the combination of the stock market slump and the likelihood of future tax increases makes today an ideal moment to convert traditional IRAs to Roths. “First, we’re at historic low income tax rates,” says James Lange, a CPA and lawyer and the author of Retire Secure. “Second, if you believe stocks go up over time, and that we’re at a low point, this is probably one of the best times in history to convert.” In general, conversion may make most sense for younger people who are in lower tax brackets and have smaller IRA balances. That’s because their tax hit will be lighter and they’ll have a long time for the assets to grow tax-free before they need to make withdrawals. If you’re in the top two tax brackets and within 10 years of retirement, it might be wise to convert only a small portion of your IRA to Roths, if any. “If you’re five or six years from retirement, you may want to wait to convert because you may be in a lower tax bracket five years from now,” says Leonard. But there are situations in which even high earners and older people may want to convert. Lange offers this example. “Let’s say you used to have income of 150,000, and you got laid off and you’re only going to have income of 60,000 this year,” he says. “You’re hoping to get a job and be back where you were next year. Then you should make the conversion this year because you’ll be in a much lower tax bracket.” For some folks, the appeal of leaving tax-free accounts to heirs may be reason enough to move to a Roth. That’s what persuaded Carroll Harris, a 68-year-old Southport, N.C., resident, to begin converting his traditional IRAs in 2008; he plans to do more conversions in 2009, 2010, and 2011 to spread out his tax payments. “I’d rather bite the bullet and pay the tax now,” says Harris, who worked for 30 years in the international transportation business. “It’s going to be a tremendous asset for my children and their children down the road because it will sit there and build for 30 or 40 years for them tax-free!” One thing the experts agree on: Don’t convert unless you can pay your taxes out of other cash – using assets from your IRA to pay the taxes is a losing proposition. “If you’re paying the tax from the account itself, you’re lengthening the break-even period because you have a lesser amount of money in the account growing tax-free,” says Fisher. And if all the complications lead you to make a decision you later regret, you can cancel a Roth conversion up until April of the following year. “If your financial circumstances change – you lose your job – and you no longer feel comfortable paying a large tax bill because of the conversion,” says Fisher, “there’s an opportunity to go back and undo the deal.” You can’t beat a tax break that comes with an escape clause.

NEW YORK (Fortune) — The other day, General Motors did two things it has never done before:It showed outsiders full-scale mockups of new models, some of which won’t be introduced until the 2012 model year. And…Its CEO and other top executives talked directly to customers.Shorn of big chunks of debt, underperforming brands, and excess dealers, General Motors is determined to show the world that, post-bankruptcy, it really is a new company with a new attitude.With that in mind, it invited more than 100 public citizens to a behind-the-scenes tour of GM’s design center, followed by the opportunity to drive new models at GM’s 4,000-acre proving ground.Because this is the new GM, the event was widely communicated through webcasts, blogs, and tweets. GM is even encouraging the pubic to offer unfiltered opinions about GM car designs through an online platform called the Lab.Whether or not the average citizen can actually contribute anything of value to a process that involves divining customer preferences as much as eight years in the future is another question.0:00
/0:46GM closer to unloading SaabMy own experience is that amateur car buffs are too opinionated to offer constructive advice, while the vast majority of consumers simply have no experience or training in looking that far ahead.Of course, the whole idea of talking to customers isn’t a new one. Twenty-five years ago, Toyota engineers actually moved to Southern California so they could live with customers while they conceived the new Lexus.GM has listened to customers before, too, but usually through the one-way glass of a focus group. The company amassed loads of consumer research but either didn’t disseminate it properly or filtered it through the ideas of its middle-aged engineers, who wanted to do things their own way. Sales and marketing, which was responsible for making sure the new models hit their volume targets, was often the last to be involved.To the customers and later to the media, GM showed off a dozen or so upcoming models that were developed by the old GM (presumably the one that didn’t talk to consumers) but will be sold by the new one.The biggest revelation was provided by Buick, which is getting a new lease on life. While most observers were consigning Buick to oblivion in the post-bankruptcy GM, product planners had other ideas in mind.The brand, which is more popular in China than it is in the U.S., is getting two new smaller sedans and two new small crossover vehicles. That will effectively triple Buick’s product line, which today consists only of the LaCrosse sedan, Enclave crossover, and soon-to-be discontinued Lucerne.The new emphasis on Buick is a logical one, given the aging of the U.S. population. But GM has underinvested in Buick for years and — despite its endorsement deal with Tiger Woods, which was discontinued a year early in 2008 — the brand sorely needs revitalization.GM needs to follow the example of Hyundai. Despite the poor reputation of the cars it sold during its early years in the U.S., it has built a new name for itself based on, of all things, its superior quality. It did so by listening carefully to what its customers wanted, then exceeding their expectations.GM will have to do the same thing. Its recent efforts are encouraging, but we’ve seen other revivals at GM that never gained traction. As CEO Fritz Henderson likes to remind us, the automaker has been granted a second chance and won’t be getting a third one.

Source:CNN

NEW YORK: It’s not exactly buying a car online — not yet. But General Motors’ new eBay portal for its California dealers is a buyer’s opportunity to avoid haggling face to face with a salesman, doing it byte to byte on a computer instead.Under a new trial program launched Tuesday, more than 225 of the troubled automaker’s California dealerships will list their inventory of Chevrolet, Buick, GMC and Pontiac cars and trucks online at gm.ebay.com. The new “microsite” gives consumers the option to suggest a lower price, which the dealer can then accept or reject. If the offer is rejected, buyers can submit up to 10 more offers. Consumers also have the option to buy a vehicle at the advertised price.But the deal is not sealed online. The actual purchase takes place at the dealership. Buyers who don’t live nearby can arrange to have a car delivered to them at their own expense. “You’re still essentially buying from a dealership,” said Jessica Caldwell, an auto industry analyst at automotive research Web site Edmunds.com. “It doesn’t completely cut out the middle man, but is a step in that direction.”Flexibility: Still, analysts said the program gives consumers more flexibility and pricing power.”Consumers who might otherwise be apprehensive about haggling over car prices face-to-face could feel empowered by the chance to bargain anonymously online,” said James Bryant, an auto industry analyst at Hoover’s, a business information provider.Bryant said the large number of dealers in the program gives consumers the ability to comparison shop and find dealers in their area more easily. “Consumers will be empowered with a lot more information, and that’s always good,” he said. For GM, the site is a response to an increasingly Web-savvy consumer, but determining the value of a trade-in “remains a glitch” in the program, said Louis Lataif, a former vice president at Ford Motor who is now dean of Boston University School of Management.”Vehicle purchases, unlike virtually any other big-ticket purchase, generate ‘haggling’ because the consumer is often both a buyer and a seller,” Lataif said in an e-mail message. “So on-line buying will have limitations.” Lataif said consumers will still want to maximize their trade-in value and will want to shop their trade among various dealers, which can’t be done online. He also said buyers will need to visit a dealership to test drive an automobile. One other catch: The cars posted on the site are also available to customers who visit the dealership, which means the vehicle can be sold to someone else at any time. But Lataif sees a positive in the process of shopping for a vehicle online.”The Internet will continue, however, to be an excellent source of consumer information so that, as has been the case now for several years, car shoppers are much better informed as they walk into dealerships to begin the buying process,” he said.

Source:CNN

NEW YORK: It’s not a happy new year for the states.States are carrying their financial woes into the new fiscal year, which for most started on Wednesday. Some had yet to pass their fiscal 2010 budgets. For others, tax hikes and draconian spending cuts went into effect.Governors and legislators spent fiscal 2009 wrestling to balance budgets as tax revenues plummeted amid the weakening economy. Many were forced to slash funding for social services, education and public safety, as well as raise sales levies, income taxes and other fees.Fiscal 2010 is not looking much better, experts said. New budget gaps opened up even before the year began.”The economy is not out of the woods so states are not out of the woods,” said Bert Waisanen, fiscal analyst with the National Conference of State Legislatures.About a dozen states had yet to enact their budgets, as of Tuesday afternoon, according to the conference. Some were awaiting their governor’s signature, but at least six were still tied up in the legislature.”They are dealing with some very difficult fiscal decisions,” Waisanen said.California is suffering particularly acute problems. The state is days away from having to issue IOUs as the governor and legislators continue to battle over closing a 24 billion budget gap. Though the Golden State passed its budget in February, new shortfalls have forced officials to come up with a new spending plan. It faces a cash deficit of 2.8 billion in July that will grow to 6.5 billion by September. The state’s controller calls it the worst shortfall since the Great Depression.States that enter the new fiscal year without a budget could be forced to shut down services unless they pass temporary spending bills, or have provisions that allow for continued funding of state services and agencies.0:00
/5:59Gov. Rendell: Pa. must hike taxesPartial shutdowns took place in Michigan and Pennsylvania in 2007, in New Jersey in 2006 and in Minnesota in 2005. In the latter three cases, workers were furloughed until a budget agreement was reached. Michigan’s impasse lasted only four hours.New taxes take effectMore than half the states have raised taxes in 2009, and some of the increases will take effect on July 1, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.For instance, smokers in Colorado will now pay sales tax on their cigarette purchases. Florida residents will have to fork over an additional 1 in cigarette taxes.Vermont is extending sales taxes to digital downloads and liquor purchases, while Hawaii increased its hotel room tax by 1 percentage point to 8.25%.Nevada residents will now pay 6.85% in sales taxes, up from 6.5%, and businesses with payrolls greater than 250,000 will pay a 1.17% tax, up from 0.63%.Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick Monday signed a fiscal 2010 budget that included a 25% sales tax increase that goes into effect on Aug. 1.”They need to raise taxes to bring their budgets back into balance,” said Nick Johnson, director of the center’s state fiscal project.Though public officials are reluctant to raise taxes in a recession, many found they had to after slashing spending. Some 10 states proposed increasing personal income taxes and eight looked at hiking corporate taxes, according to the National Association of State Budget Officers. Incomes taxes often take effect January 1.With tax revenues continuing to plummet, experts see more tax increases and spending cuts ahead, though they may not be as severe as the measures enacted over the past year.”We’re a little more stable now, but we don’t have any guarantees,” said Waisanen of the state legislative conference.

Source:CNN

NEW YORK (Fortune) — It is no surprise that Hans Vestberg, who will become Telefon AB L.M. Ericsson’s CEO next year, started off an interview about his new post by talking about the global financial crisis. Vestberg, after all, is the Swedish telecommunications gear maker’s chief financial officer, and he’s had a front-row seat for the worldwide economic malaise.But Vestberg, who will replace Carl-Henric Svanberg (he’s becoming BP’s chairman), will face more challenges than the global economy, which may start to rebound as he takes office. A more persistent challenge for Ericsson (ERIC) may well be competition from rivals old and new.Earlier this month Nokia Siemens, a joint venture of the two telecom giants, agreed to acquire key wireless assets from Canada’s Nortel. The purchase will give Nokia Siemens a stronger foothold in the North American market, where Ericsson, the world’s largest supplier of wireless telecom equipment, has been a major player.The Nortel deal “gives Nokia Siemens something else in their arsenal,” says Jane Zweig, CEO of the Shosteck Group, a telecommunications consulting group. “And I don’t think Ericsson really factored Nokia Siemens in.”Ericsson also faces stiff competition from a pair of Chinese equipment makers, Huawei and ZTE.Huawei and ZTE have been taking share from established equipment makers such as Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) and others for years. Initially customers had concerns about the quality of the Chinese companies’ products. But today, phone operators say, the products from Huawei and ZTE are comparable to those made by longtime gear providers.0:00
/3:19What’s in your iPhone?Vestberg, 44, says he believes Ericsson has its own set of tools in its arsenal. “Of course, we will always face competition whether they are French American or Chinese,” he says. “I think our competitive advantage is our technology leadership. We will compete by having the best technology and the most robust technology.”He also points to Ericsson’s strong presence in the services business. As telecom networks have become more complex, a growing number of operators are turning to Ericsson (and others) to basically run their systems and help them migrate from one generation of technology to the next.Vestberg appears to have the energy for the job. Since joining the company in 1991 he has worked for Ericsson around the world in markets such as China, Chile and Brazil. He was president of Ericsson in Mexico and served as CFO for Ericsson in North America.Executives and analysts who’ve met Vestberg describe him as personable and relationship oriented. And because he worked so closely with Svanberg, they say, investors are not likely to see many radical changes in Ericsson’s strategy.

Source:CNN

NEW YORK (Fortune) — Best-selling author Ben Mezrich is the first to concede he doesn’t know exactly what happened between Mark Zuckerberg and the Victoria’s Secret model at that San Francisco club in the summer of 2005. He tells the story just as sources reported it to him: a touch on the leg. A grasp of the hand. The pair leaving the club. That’s it. Any inference from there is your own.But man, is there ever inference. In “Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal,” due out July 14 from Doubleday, Mezrich spins a fast-paced tale of intrigue and suspicion that follows Facebook’s young founder on his ruthless rise to prominence in Silicon Valley. The 262-page narrative portrays Mark Zuckerberg as a hard-hearted genius with a fetish for Asian women who is not above stealing ideas and turning on his friends in his quest to create the dominant social network. “West Wing” creator Aaron Sorkin has already agreed to write the screenplay, and Daily Variety recently reported that David Fincher (“Fight Club”) may direct the movie.Doubleday labels the book “nonfiction”Mezrich, who was criticized for making up characters and scenes in his best-selling book “Bringing Down the House,” uses a lengthy author’s note to broadcast his reporting methodology. He describes his work as a “dramatic narrative account,” explaining that he reconstructed dialogue and even, to the extent that it moved the story forward, entire scenes. Some would call this fiction. But Doubleday has bravely labeled it nonfiction. Or as Mezrich told Fortune.com, “There are certain places in the book where I’m sort of doing a legitimate speculation.” He calls his work “a best guess.”Of course, Mezrich’s primary source for a good deal of the material is Eduardo Saverin, a classmate at Harvard College of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Saverin used earnings from smart investments he’d made as an undergraduate to help start the site, then called TheFacebook.com.Long before Saverin connected with Mezrich, however, he’d become estranged from Zuckerberg. After Saverin was pushed out of the company, Saverin and Zuckerberg lobbed lawsuits at each other liberally from April 2005 until last August when the suits were dismissed. Over the winter Saverin’s name was added to the Facebook web site as one of the cofounders. At about that time Saverin also stopped talking to Mezrich. Saverin didn’t respond to Fortune.com’s attempts to contact him.Mezrich remembers meeting Saverin by chance. “It was about 2 a.m. in the morning when I got an email out of the blue to my web site, which is essentially a fan site. This kid wrote an email — I’m a Harvard senior and I have a really fantastic story for you’ — which of course you hear all the time. But the kid said, ‘You know, I’ve been best friends with these people who founded Facebook, and I want to tell you this story.’ I wasn’t looking for this story, but I went and met this kid for a drink. So I show up at this bar, Bar 10 at the Westin [hotel in Boston], and the kid shows up with Eduardo Saverin. He wouldn’t tell me who Eduardo was at first. It was all kind of secretive. Then Eduardo began to tell me this whole story, and he was clearly upset.”Mezrich is quick to add that “Accidental Billionaires” is based on many other interviews and documents. He got lucky, of course, when thousands of pages of court documentation surfaced after Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, also former classmates of the Facebook founder, sued Zuckerberg claiming he stole their idea. (This suit settled and the twins reportedly received 65 million.)One person Mezrich never spoke with is Mark Zuckerberg. Says Mezrich, “There was always this ‘Mark might talk to you, Mark might talk to you’ thing going on, but in the end Mark decided not to talk to me, and he made it pretty clear he didn’t want any of the people he’s involved with talking to me.” In a deft story-telling move, Mezrich turned this deficit in his favor, playing up the mystery behind Zuckerberg’s personality.Sex and Drugs and KoalasOne of the book’s more picaresque characters is Silicon Valley bad boy Sean Parker, the cofounder of music file-sharing service Napster and one of Zuckerberg’s boyhood heroes, per Mezrich. Mezrich describes Parker and Zuckerberg’s first meeting in a Manhattan restaurant: “the look on Mark’s face, the sudden flush in his cheeks and the brightness in his eyes. Pure idol worship.” Mezrich wouldn’t say whether he interviewed Parker, but Parker is included in many of the book’s more salacious moments — parties where drugs feature prominently. Parker did not respond to requests for comment.Often the details Mezrich makes up are juicier than the facts that inspired the scenes. For example, Mezrich believes Zuckerberg had to break into a Harvard residence house to retrieve student data to launch an early forerunner of Facebook. At the start of a chapter, he writes: “He might have gotten what he needed in other ways, we certainly don’t know for sure every detail; but we can imagine how it might have gone down…” Cut to the middle of the night where a kid “who just liked to prove what he could do, how much smarter he was than everybody else” crept into a residence hall, then ducked behind a sofa while two coeds engage in a sexual act.So far, even some of the details labeled “fact” in the book have been disputed. Soon after they arrive in Silicon Valley, Zuckerberg and friends find themselves eating koala meat on a yacht belonging to a Sun Microsystems (SUNW) founder. Yup, the cuddly marsupial. When excerpts from the book’s proposal appeared on Gawker earlier this year, that anecdote was called into question.”It was a story told to me by Eduardo, and I did my best to look into it, and I believe truly that it happened, ” says Mezrich. “I believe they ate koala on the yacht of one of the founders of Sun Microsystems. It wasn’t the CEO as Gawker reported. And the funniest email I got after that proposal [leaked], is that the one thing Eduardo wanted to make sure of is [the fact that] it wasn’t the CEO it was the COO. That was his main problem with my proposal.”Facebook RespondsFacebook spokesman Elliot Schrage thinks the book is so inaccurate readers will not take it as fact. “Ben Mezrich clearly aspires to be the Jackie Collins or Danielle Steele of Silicon Valley. In fact his own publisher put it best. ‘The book isn’t reportage. It’s big juicy fun,’ he says, quoting Doubleday publicist Todd Doughty from a June 24 New York Times blog post. “We particularly agree with the first part of that and think any readers will concur.” In the end, “Accidental Billionaires” is not that damning to Zuckerberg’s character. And it’s not that true. But much as the story may be more fiction than fact, it may well take its place in American culture as Facebook’s definitive founding myth, particularly if Hollywood gives it the full treatment.

NEW YORK: The number of Americans filing for initial unemployment insurance rose unexpectedly last week, to the highest level in more than a month, according to government data released Thursday.There were 627,000 initial jobless claims filed in the week ended June 20, up 15,000 from a revised 612,000 the previous week, the Labor Department said.The number was above the consensus estimate of 600,000 from economists surveyed by Briefing.com.That’s the highest level of initial claims since the week ended May 16, when 636,000 were filed.The 4-week moving average of initial claims was 617,250, up 500 from the previous week’s revised average of 616,750. Continuing claims: The government said 6,738,000 people continued to file unemployment claims in the week ended June 13, the most recent data available.That’s up 29,000 from the preceding week’s revised 6,709,000 ongoing claims. The 4-week moving average of continuing claims rose to 6,759,750, down 3,250 from the prior week’s revised average of 6,763,000. State-by-state data: In the week ended June 13, the most recent data available, 14 states reported that initial claims decreased by more than 1,000. Michigan had 5,414 fewer initial claims, which a state-issued comment attributed to fewer layoffs in the automobile industry. A total of 6 states reported new claims increased by more than 1,000. Florida reported the most new claims, at 8,383, which a state-supplied comment attributed to layoffs in the construction, trade, service and manufacturing industries.

Source:CNN

NEW YORK (CNNMoney,com) — Sales of newly constructed homes fell unexpectedly in May and were down almost a third from last-year’s levels, a government report said Wednesday.New home sales ticked down 0.6% last month to a seasonally-adjusted annual rate of 342,000, the Commerce Department reported. That was from a revised reading of 344,000 in April.Analysts expected the rate of new home sales to rise to 360,000, according to a consensus estimate of economists compiled by Briefing.com.New home sales were 32.8% below the same month a year ago, when the estimate stood at a 509,000 annual rate.Median and average prices: The median sales price of new homes rose to 221,600 in May, up more than 4% from a revised 212,600 in April — and up more than 3% from the median price of 229,300 in May 2008.The average sales price in May was 274,300, down more than 5% from a revised 260,800 in April. Supply: The seasonally-adjusted estimate of new houses for sale at the end of May was 292,000, a 10.2-month supply at the current sales rate.On Tuesday, the National Association of Realtors reported that existing home sales rose 2.4% in May, as prices fell nearly 17% from a year ago.

Source:CNN

NEW YORK: The smartphone wars are heating up with recent launches of the Apple iPhone 3GS and Palm Pre, and Research In Motion is determined to stay in the game.BlackBerry maker RIM announced Tuesday it would launch the new BlackBerry Tour for Verizon and Sprint customers this summer, aimed at international travelers.The Tour allows users to transition between different mobile network standards as they travel outside of North America. Verizon and Sprint transmit their wireless service on a standard that essentially only exists in North America, so their customers need phones that work on multiple standards if they travel abroad.Currently, the only BlackBerry on the Verizon (VZ, Fortune 500) and Sprint (S, Fortune 500) networks that lets users move seamlessly between networks is the BlackBerry 8830 World Edition, which is more than two-years old. The Tour will give Verizon and Sprint an updated competitor to the BlackBerry Bold and BlackBerry Curve 8900, which are only available in the United States through AT&T (T, Fortune 500) and T-Mobile. Both of those mobile networks use standard that is much more common across the globe, while Verizon (VZ, Fortune 500) and Sprint (S, Fortune 500) offer CDMA service, which is limited primarily to North America.”Many current [Verizon and Sprint] BlackBerry clients wanted a device like the Bold, which has a better operating system than the old global phone,” said Ryan Reith, senior research analyst at IDC. “The Tour gives RIM the opportunity to market a phone to those customers.”0:00
/4:27No surprises, just a new iPhoneLike BlackBerry’s Bold and Curve models, the Tour includes GPS, a 3.2 megapixel camera and BlackBerry App World access.RIM believes the phone will sell well to businesses, like the Bold, but will also be popular with consumers, like Curve. The company did not set an exact release date for the new phone.”The new BlackBerry Tour will offer a compelling choice for the growing number of wireless customers looking to upgrade their existing cell phone to a smartphone,” said Mike Lazaridis, co-chief executive of Research In Motion, in a statement.Earlier this month, RIM competitors Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) and Palm (PALM) unveiled the new iPhone and Pre smartphones. After the touch screen BlackBerry Storm received largely negative reviews in November, 2008, RIM is expected to unveil a touch screen BlackBerry with a physical keyboard, much like the Pre, in the coming months.Shares of RIM (RIMM) were unchanged Tuesday.

Source:CNN