"business-and-economics" via webbersan

U.S. producer prices fall a record 2.8% in October, the most since 1947, as gasoline prices plummet 24.9%, the Labor Department says. The data should prove reassuring for inflation-minded Federal Reserve policy makers.

Shares of Hewlett-Packard rally more than 13% in premarket trading Tuesday after the tech giant said it would beat Wall Street’s targets for its fiscal fourth quarter and for 2009, marking a rare move among big-cap names in the current economic environment.

U.S. stock futures dropped Tuesday as investors continued to adjust to the swift deterioration in the economy, though a surprisingly early report of a growing profit at Hewlett-Packard carried indexes off early lows.

European credit markets continued their slide Tuesday, as credit default swap indexes headed out towards the record wides last seen in the days after the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Poor macro numbers and corporate earnings have begun to provide tangible evidence that companies are only now feeling the real effects of the crunch....

S&P 500 Likely to Make New Lows According to Bloomberg the nation’s top-ranked market technicians are calling for new lows in the S&P 500.Last week’s 11% rally from a 5-year low lasted just 1 day - and the index has slipped 6.6% during the last 2 sessions. Jeff de Graaf of ISI Group the highest-rated technical analyst by a Institutional Investor magazine survey said “Historically you would’ve had a better charge from the bulls at this point.” And John Roque of Natixis Bleichroeder thinks the index will likely fall to 680 by the end of the year.For a fundamental view of the ...

Al Aynsley-Green: Moral panics arise with gruelling regularity. This time, it's 11 million young people in the firing line

The controversial blogger and occasional Cif contributor, Hossein Derakhshan, has been arrested in Tehran, according to the Iranian website, Jahan News (summary in English here).

London-based Derakhshan reportedly went back to Iran about three weeks ago. The circumstances of his arrest are unclear but according to the Iranian report he has "admitted" to spying for Israel - a charge that could have extremely serious consequences if the authorities in Tehran decide to pursue it.

On a previous visit to Iran he was detained and interrogated, then allowed to leave the country after signing an apology for his blog writings.

Here on Cif we have no idea what evidence - if any - the Iranian authorities may have against him, though "spying" is often the sort of charge trumped up by paranoid regimes.

Among the blogging community he is often regarded as an enfant terrible who goes out of his way to court controversy.

In 2006 he made a highly-publicised visit to Israel and told the Jerusalem Post that he wanted to prevent an Israeli attack on Iran and he wanted Iranians to understand that "Israelis are not evil".

A few months later he wrote on his blog:

The more the clash between the West and Iran escalates, the more convinced I become that soon I have to take one side in this nasty conflict. Between Bush and Khamenei, I definitely take Khamenei's side ... If the US waged a war against Iran, I'd absolutely go back and defend Iran. I can't let myself to sit down for a moment and watch [them] make a Baghdad out of Tehran.

More recently, he has been regarded as a defender of President Ahmedinejad. Though declaring himself on his blog to be an atheist, he wrote in an article for Cif last year:

I believe the Islamic Republic is a valuable cause, worth defending and, at its worst, is way better than anything that the United States or anyone else can bring to Iran.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds