Today's Headlines

Bloomberg:
- Dubai will invest as much as $5.1 billion in Kirk Kerkorian’s MGM Mirage(MGM), giving the Las Vegas casino company a partner as it expands into real estate.
- Helmut Fisher, head of structured product sales at Merrill Lynch International(MER) in London, says “The hedge fund sector is recovering. There’s a certain normalcy that has returned and volatility has declined, even though it is still higher than before the subprime crisis began.”
- Natural gas in NY fell to an 11-month low on probable expansion of US inventories and the threat of storm damage to Gulf of Mexico production ended.
- Crude oil in NY is falling to a 2-month low after an EIA report showed an unexpected increase in inventories.
- President Bush laid out his argument for maintaining the US presence in Iraq, asserting that an early pullout would lead to the kind of bloodshed Southeast Asia experienced after American forces left Vietnam.
- Tech Data(TECD), the world’s second-biggest distributor of computer products, climbed the most in six years in Nasdaq Stock Market trading after its quarterly earnings and a sales forecast beat analysts’ projections.
- The four largest US banks each borrowed $500 million from the Fed’s discount window on behalf of clients after the central bank cut the interest rate it charges and encouraged lenders to use the facility.

Wall Street Journal:
- Federal Reserve officials are cautiously optimistic that the series of steps they have taken to stabilize markets have started to work.
- The US Defense Department is to shut down its terrorism database after it was criticized for storing information about people who posed no threat.
- US doctors are encouraging a new treatment called bariatric surgery for diabetes and weight loss. The treatment, which shrinks the stomach and sometimes reroutes the intestines helped 75% of patients who underwent the surgery lose their diabetes.
- US attorney generals are uniting to persuade MySpace, Facebook Inc. and other Web social-networking sites to include more extensive parental controls and age-verification devices so children can’t use the sites.

Dow Jones:
- PIMCO’s Gross Sees Time Near For Bargain-Hunting In Credit.

Financial Times:
- Private-equity firms probably won’t walk out on pending buyouts.

Reuters:
- Google Inc.(GOOG), having failed to get regulators to make phone companies resell wireless spectrum to rivals, still may bid on mobile-phone airwaves being auctioned by the US government.
- Hedge funds see opportunities in distressed debt.

BBC:
- Sony Corp.(SNE) will probably this week unveil a tuner which enables its PlayStation 3 game console to record and play back television shows.

Die Welt:
- Bert Ruerup, an economic adviser for Germany’s government, said the economy’s recovery is still “intact and robust” after turbulence on financial markets.

Kuwait News Agency:
- Iraqi stocks rose .4% yesterday after international investors bought into the Baghdad market. Foreign investors accounted for almost 10% of the transactions.