Today's Headlines

Bloomberg:
- Gasoline futures fell to their lowest price in almost six months as the peak-demand driving season came to a close with US inventories of the motor fuel above normal levels.
- Chevron Corp.(CVX) said it completed the deepest successful test of a Gulf of Mexico well, showing it may be possible to produce billions of barrels of oil from a new undersea deposit.
- European service industries from banking to telecom, the biggest part of the economy, expanded at the slowest pace in seven months in August.
- Abiomed Inc.(ABMD) won US approval to sell the first artificial heart that allows patients to walk away from a power source for an hour at a time.
- Compagnie Generale de Geophysigque SA agreed to buy Veritas DGC for $3.1 billion to become the world’s biggest surveyor of oil and gas fields as energy exploration surges.
- Katie Couric begins trying to lift CBS News from the ratings cellar tonight by becoming the first network tv anchor to go live on the Internet.
- Phelps Dodge(PD) dropped its $17.7 billion takeover bid for Canadian nickel-miner Inco Ltd.
- The Fed can be “patient” in considering whether to raise interest rates again, said St. Louis Fed President William Poole. He also said a housing crash is “very unlikely.”
- A tropical depression in the central Altantic Ocean developed into Tropical Storm Florence, making it the sixth named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season.

Wall Street Journal:
- Moody’s Investors Service will today publish its first public rating on a hedge fund, a move that brings some transparency to the industry, which has $1 trillion in assets.
- Some US hospitals are paying as much as $50/hour for replacement nurses to cope with a growing number of strikes and staff shortages.
- The World Health Organization, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and the World Bank are looking for new heads to help set strategies to combat global health risks including AIDS and pandemic flu.
- Large US companies are doing a better job of managing cash, a development that often lets them boost cash flow.

NY Times:
- American Eagle Outfitters(AEOS), Abercrombie & Fitch(ANF), Pacific Sunwear of California(PSUN), J. Crew Group(JCG) and Gap Inc.(GPS) are targeting post-collegiate customers with new clothing stores.
- TiVo will offer subscribers previews of CBS’s four new series this fall, while a majority stake in ITN Networks will be purchased by a group that includes Sony Corp.(SNE).

AP:
- Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad today called for a purge of liberal and secular faculty members from Iran’s universities.
- U.S. oil and gas reserves could grow by more than 50 percent as three companies said Tuesday that results from a deep-water exploratory drilling project in the Gulf of Mexico indicate a significant oil discovery.

Interfax:
- Kazakhstan produced 42.6 million metric tons of crude oil and gas condensate in the first eight months of the year, 4.5% more than in the year-earlier period.