Today's Headlines

Bloomberg:
- President Vladimir Putin’s control over industries such as oil and machinery and the government’s reluctance to allow foreigners to buy majority stakes in Russian companies is hurting economic growth.
- Merrill Lynch unseated Morgan Stanley at the top of the lucrative market for stock sales in the first quarter and may get an additional boost from its rival’s persistent feuding with former executives.
- Microsoft agreed to pay Gateway $150 million over four years to resolve legal claims.
- Crude oil is falling for a sixth consecutive day, the longest decline since October 2003, on signs that refiners will have sufficient supply to make gasoline during the peak demand months of summer.
- Lazard Ltd. plans to sell shares to the public for as much as $27 each, valuing the company’s parent at about $3.9 billion.
- Ford Motor’s shares and bonds fell after CEO William Clay Ford Jr. cut the company’s 2005 profit forecast amid plunging sales of US pickups and sport-utility vehicles.

The Wall Street Journal:
- American International Group Chairman Maurice Greenberg used the private investment partnerships CV Starr and Starr International to reward favored executives.
- Ameritrade Holding, E*Trade Financial and Charles Schwab shares have fallen this year as a price was has broken out in the discount brokerage business.
- US apartment vacancy rates fell and rents rose in the first quarter of 2005, in the strongest performance for dwelling owners since 2001.
- Cablevision Systems will decide this week whether to raise its $16.5 billion bid for Adelphia Communication’s cable-television assets.
- Apple Computer faces growing competition from cell-phone companies and wireless carriers moving into the market for mobile music.
- Most stock analysts who suggested selling a particular company’s shares erred in past years, as a large number of sell recommendations did better than stocks carrying a “buy” or “hold” advisory.

NY Times:
- Vivendi Universal SA, Take-Two Interactive Software and eight other major video game publishers plan to incorporate product marketing in more than 40 games this year.

USA Today:
- The Fed can keep to its strategy of raising interest rates in a “slow, methodical” way as long as inflation remains tame, said Anthony Santomero, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.

Xinhua News Agency:
- China’s crude oil imports fell 1.7% in the first three months of the year.
- China’s steel-product imports fell 41% in the first three months of the year.

AFP:
- China will support India’s bid for permanent membership of an expanded UN Security Council.

Project Finance International:
- A group of 10 private Chinese oil companies will merge to form a $1.2 billion competitor to PetroChina and the country’s two other large oil producers.