In Friday trading, the yen rallied against the dollar and compounded concerns about the strength of the U.S. economy driving stocks further downward in the final session of a tumultuous week. The Dow Jones industrials led the retreat mirroring a pattern of Thursday's trading with a meagerly positive start and dropping by as much as 100 points in the afternoon. The Standard & Poor's 500 index and Nasdaq composite followed suit. The Associated Press reports.
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Plug pulled on Ground Zero webcam: Introduced less than a year ago to show the progress of construction at the World Trade Center site, reduced traffic on the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. website didn't justify the cost of hourly photo updates, said a spokesman. The agency still intends on posting stills of the progress from time to time, the Associated Press reports.
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IBM, American Air parent ink pact: IBM wins in a bid to manage the benefits and training call in centers for AMR, parent company of American Airlines, the nation's largest carrier. Companies like IBM and EDS (who also put in a bid for the business) are aggressively pursuing so-called business-transformation outsourcing deals like this one to offset slower growth in other parts of their business, the Associated Press reports.
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What the Dell?!: These are not the best of times for Dell: laptops and notebooks not selling, customers not serviced, federal accounting probe unresolved, and competition from rivals unrelenting. And let's not forget a generous topping of shareholder lawsuits to boot. After reporting a 33 percent decline in fourth-quarter profits in a press release Friday, most notably in their mobility sector, the company is gearing up to make some serious changes, the Associated Press reports.
