Today's Headlines

Bloomberg:
- Central bank rate hikes around the world should begin to dampen inflation, the Fed’s Fisher said.
- US Treasuries rose, pushing the benchmark 10-year note’s yield to the lowest since April, as slowing inflation and housing bolstered expectations the Fed is done hiking interest rates.
- Teck Cominco Ltd. withdrew from the three-way contest for Canadian nickel miner Inco(N), increasing the likelihood Brazil’s Cia. Vale do Rio Doce’s $17.4 billion cash offer will win.
- Iran may discuss with the European Union suspension of its nuclear activities provided the international community acknowledges its right to access atomic energy for peaceful purposes.
- Bill Gross, manager of the world’s biggest bond fund, added US Treasuries and agency debt for a second straight month in July on expectations the Fed is ending a two-year cycle of interest-rate increases.
- China permitted the biggest gain in the yuan since ending a peg to the dollar in July last year, a day after allowing the largest decline, suggesting the central bank is easing controls over the exchange rate.

Wall Street Journal:
- Lebanon’s government and the Shiite militant group Hezbollah are vying for political control of the country’s reconstruction effort.
- Verizon Wireless(VZ), Sprint Nextel(S) and other cell-phone providers plan to allow advertising on their networks to capture marketing business from the Internet.
- The US Transportation Security Administration plans to test a smaller computer-tomography scanner to improve screening for explosives at airport checkpoints.
- Japanese hedge funds run by Whitney & Co. of the US have lost 20-30% of their value this year.
- A magazine with content from Time Warner’s(TWX) Sports Illustrated will go on sale in China today, testing a moratorium set by the government last year on new magazines other than science and technology publications.

NY Times:
- NYC plans to release more than 1,600 recordings of emergency calls made during the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center, some from people killed in the disaster.

USA Today:
- US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said disarming Hezbollah fighters will be the task to the Lebanese government and isn’t the mission of the 15,000 UN peacekeepers being deployed in coming weeks.

Washington Post:
- Lockheed Martin(LMT) has proposed an unmanned version of its Joint Strike Fighter, the F-35, which would be the first full-scale fighter to fly without a pilot.

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung:
- Germany’s birth rate fell last year to the lowest level since 1946.

Handelsblatt:
- Qiagen NV(QGEN) CEO Peer Schatz plans more acquisitions in medical diagnostics and aims to boost revenue at the division so it makes up half of the total.

YLE:
- The OECD said Finland’s minimum wage is too high and is a barrier to getting employers to hire young people for work.

Bild Zeitung:
- A growing number of Germans are living off state welfare payments. Some 41.5% of the country’s 39 million households receive welfare.

Xinhua News Agency:
- China’s State Council today imposed the first sanctions on local leaders for ignoring polices aimed at cooling the economy.