Bloomberg:
- Crude oil is falling again below $62/bbl. on speculation that the decision by Venezuela and Nigeria to cut output will have little impact on supply.
- US researchers Andrew Fire and Craig Mello won the Nobel Prize for medicine for finding a mechanism that regulates the flow of genetic information in plants, animals, and humans.
- President Bush said the UN shouldn’t wait any longer to send peacekeepers into Sudan’s war-torn Darfur region to end the killing and deprivation there.
- Gilead Sciences(GILD), maker of the world’s best-selling AIDS medicine, will buy Myogen(MYOG) for about $2.5 billion to acquire experimental biotechnology drugs for hard-to-treat heart and lung conditions.
- Morgan Stanley(MS) is offering its top-paid traders and bankers millions of dollars of incentives to avoid defections to rival banks and attract new hires.
Wall Street Journal:
- Harrah’s Entertainment(HET) may be purchased by private-equity companies that could include Colony Capital and Texas Pacific Group.
- Though many Americans are unhappy with the perception that the rich are getting richer, they still want to be rich themselves and don’t favor political candidates who attack wealth creation. Moreover, the most recent data from the IRS shows the income share of the top 1% of Americans declined to 19.0% in 2004 from an all-time high of 20.8% in 2000.
- US corporate directors are abandoning their former club-house boardroom style and have become more assertive, after scandals such as the one at Enron Corp.
- Facebook.com and News Corp.’s MySpace.com, both social networking sites, face competition from smaller, second-tier sites including Piczo Inc. and XuQa.com.
- HJ Heinz(HNZ), Sara Lee(SLE) and other US companies are testing a variety of oils to satisfy growing demand from health groups and government regulators for food with less trans fats.
- US insurer-owned banks are becoming more profitable and now make up five of the 20 fastest-growing banks in the US.
- Rising prices for energy, and not faltering wage growth, are what most hurt the paychecks of US workers, economists Allan Hubbard and Edward Lazear wrote. At an annualized rate, nominal wage growth has been about 4% this year, about the same rate as in the late 1990s.
NY Times:
- US Representative John Murtha, a Democrat of Pennsylvania, may be best know outside Washington for his break with President Bush over the Iraq War; in the Capitol he’s best known for turning Congressional members’ pet projects, or earmarks, into power. Murtha, who is the top Democrat on the House military spending subcommittee and who announced this year a bid to become the next House Democratic leader, often tacitly trades Democrat votes with Republican leaders for earmarks for himself and his allies.
NY Post:
- Google(GOOG) will open a new 300,000 square-foot office today at 111 Eighth Avenue in NY.
Sunday Times of London:
- Mohamed Atta, leader of the Sept. 11 hijackers, smiles and jokes with another hijacker in a newly released al-Qaeda video taped in 2000.
Interfax:
- The latest talks between Russia and the US on Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organization are progressing “very constructively.”
Le Figaro:
- A French high school philosophy teacher, facing death threats from extremist groups for a critical article he wrote on Islam in Le Figaro, received support from daily newspaper Le Monde.
Kommersant:
- Declining oil prices may help slow growth of consumer prices in October, citing central bank Deputy Chairman Alexei Ulyukayev.
Asharq al-Awsat:
- MA Kharafi Group of Kuwait plans to build a $1 billion oil refinery in Egypt.
Rzeczpospolita:
- Poland may invest at least $3 billion to set up wind power plants.
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