Today's Headlines

Bloomberg:
- Manhattan apartment prices rose at the slowest pace in three years during the first quarter, more evidence that an increase in mortgage rates has cooled off the most expensive urban real estate market in the US.
- Microsoft(MSFT) won its biggest-ever contract for mobile-phone software, an order form the US Census Bureau that covers 500,000 handsets.
- The Iraqi Special Tribunal will file genocide charges against former ousted dictator Saddam Hussein for the Anfal campaign against the Kurds.
- Kuwaiti women are voting today for the first time, in municipal elections.
- International Paper(IP) agreed to sell 5.1 million acres of forestlands in the US to two investor groups for about $6.1 billion.
- The US Fed reversed a year-old order that effectively barred Citigroup(C) from making big acquisitions.
- Caterpillar(CAT) stands to gain as much as $5 billion in sales as a boom in oil squeezed from Canadian sand boosts demand for mining trucks and parts.
- French student groups and labor unions began their fifth nationwide protest against a new labor law today, with police looking out for the violence that marred earlier demonstrations.
- Crude oil is falling on speculation that a government report will show US inventories rose for the seventh time in eight weeks.

Wall Street Journal:
- Finland’s Nokia Corp.(NOK) said the company missed its own deadline for shipments of its E-series mobile phones, designed to compete with Research in Motion’s(RIMM) BlackBerry devices.
- Goldman Sachs(GS) was the investment bank that did the most business in the Asia-Pacific region excluding Japan in the first quarter of the year, with estimated revenue of $95 million, citing Dealogic Plc.
- Franklin Templeton Investments plans to launch the US’s first mutual fund focused on the populous emerging markets of Brazil, Russia, India and China, known as a BRIC, citing a filing with the SEC.
- Computer Sciences(CSC) is in talks that could lead to a sale of the business.
- The FCC accepted five offers for its May 10 sale of airwaves used to provide high-speed Internet access on planes, at the same time ruling that an application by Verizon(VZ) Airfone Inc. is incomplete.
- US investor Carl Icahn has dropped plans to take control of Blockbuster Inc.(BBI).
- Citigroup(C), agreed with 7-Eleven to put its brand on 5,500 ATMs within the convenience-store chain’s US outlets.
- The US would incite “geopolitical disaster and a moral calamity” if it caved into pressure from critics to withdraw troops from Iraq immediately, Pete Wehner, director of the White House’s Office of Strategic Initiatives said.

Washington Post:
- News Corp.’s(NWS) MySpace.com, Google’s(GOOG) Blogger.com, Wikipedia and CitySearch ranked top among Internet sites for visitor growth.

NY Times:
- Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is spending billions of dollars garnered from oil revenue in a bid to set up his socialist government as a contrast to US President Bush’s conservative administration.
- IBM(IBM) will work with Rapport, a Silicon Valley start-up that has designed a flexible microprocessor to perform video processing for less than a tenth the power of existing chips.
- New York state allocated $479 million in the state budget for “pork-barrel spending” by lawmakers in the past three years.

Financial Times:
- Emerging-market bonds have not been especially volatile so far, even though global interest rates are rising and risks may be rising in markets such as Poland, Ukraine, and Hungary.