Today's Headlines

Bloomberg:
- A NYSE membership, known as a seat, sold for a record $3.025 million today, bolstering the Big Board’s defense against critics of its plan to purchase electronic exchange Archipelago Holdings.
- Hedge funds will pay Wall Street record fees this year for brokerage services, a business dominated by Morgan Stanley, Bear Stearns and Goldman Sachs.
- The French government approved extending the nation’s sate of emergency as curfews and bans on public meetings in Paris and Lyon brought calm to areas hit more than two weeks of violence.

Wall Street Journal:
- Google has contacted at least one publisher to gauge interest in a possible service that allows consumers to “rent” books online.
- The computer industry’s unceasing drive to improve performance has encountered an obstacle, in that the latest hardware uses too much electricity and generates too much heat.
- A Chinese government copper trader is missing after he took a big short position on the London Metal Exchange.
- President Bush’s administration is looking to trade easier foreign investment in US airlines in exchange for improved entry rights for US carriers to London’s Heathrow Airport.
- Negotiations over a possible sale of Computer Sciences to Lockheed Martin and three private-equity firms have broken down over the structure of the transaction.
- Archipelago Holdings intends to start an exchange-traded fund focusing on technology, an area of the market in which there’s already plenty of competition.
- A plan to make a $100 laptop computer has attracted the interest of computer companies and governments.

NY Times:
- The US record industry says it loses most sales to so-called “casual piracy” or the copying and sharing of CD’s by friends.
- In some Arab countries, such as Jordan, secret police are a hindrance to democratic reform.
- A coalition of US liberal groups plans a television campaign against Judge Samuel Alito, the Supreme Court nominee, seeking to move attention from his record on abortion to other issues.
- EBay may announce today that it will stop charging fees to people who develop Internet and software programs that direct customers to its Web site.
- Members of the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild want to create rules that restrict how commercial products can be incorporated into the story lines of television shows.

Crain’s New York Business:
- Many of New York’s wine and liquor wholesalers are eliminating discounts to stores and restaurants in response to an investigation by state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer.

AP:
- The number of US prisoners sentenced to death and those executed fell last year as the country’s death row population declined.

Profil:
- EBay’s $2.6 billion purchase of Skype Technologies will make it easier for the online auctioneer to sell more expensive products such as new cars and real estate, CEO Whitman said.