Business news for Sat, 22 Mar 2008. 443 news.

Q. I have a co-worker who says she's psychic. She's fond of haughtily walking around the office making various predictions of doom. None of her "predictions"...

Southwest Washington Medical Center is growing its own qualified nurses. Instead of struggling to find qualified applicants to fill nursing...

Every month, at ground zero of the city's subprime mortgage meltdown, a handful of people in the neighborhood face homelessness when they or their landlords default on mortgage payments.

Q: Can an agency submit my résumé to companies without telling me? I told a recruiting firm very clearly to get my consent before...

Former Symbionese Liberation Army fugitive Sara Jane Olson was taken back into custody Saturday after it was discovered that her earlier release had been due to an administrative error.

After working in gyms for 26 years, Gina Berta opened her own personal-fitness studio, one that resembled a spa more than a weight room...

SAN FRANCISCO — Shoppers are discovering an upside to the down economy. They are getting price breaks by reviving an age-old retail strategy: haggling.

Eliot Spitzer's fall from grace brought with it a chance for critics to kick him in the butt on the way out the door. As critics debated his...

Steven Lehman, whose Federated Market Opportunity Fund has posted top returns in 2008 after five years in the middle of the pack, put half...

April 29 can't come soon enough for Take-Two Interactive. That's when the video-game maker, which is facing a hostile takeover bid, releases...

Wall Street firms are stepping up to use the Federal Reserve's new direct lending program, submitting their hard-to-trade securities for funds from the central bank.

ALGIERS (Reuters) - Petroleum prices will range between $80 and $110 per barrel for the rest of 2008, OPEC President Chakib Khelil said on Saturday.

Of greater importance is chronic unemployment, which Congress calls the most useful indication of recession. As of Jan. 2008, 18.3 percent of jobless workers had been out of work for six months or more, compared to 16.2 percent the previous year.

Endeavour's astronauts embarked on the fifth and final spacewalk of their mission.

Corporate insiders are more bullish on stocks than they have been at any time since late 2005, when the bull market was very much alive and well.

Some financial companies have been battered beyond reason and now represent solid value, and some long-term investors have begun wading back into financial stocks.

A roadside bomb killed three American soldiers north of Baghdad, pushing the U.S. death toll in the conflict to nearly 4,000. Meanwhile, Iraqi authorities reported that a U.S. airstrike killed members of a U.S.-backed Sunni group. (Complete coverage)

THE New York Stock Exchange was closed on Friday, as it has been every Good Friday for at least 144 years, except 1898, 1906 and 1907. That last one was the same year as the infamous Panic of 1907, when the total value of all Big Board stocks plunged by more than a third. Hence, a legend that persists 101 years later: Traders get to stay home the Friday before Easter not just because it's a Christian holy day but because of an association with one of history's great bear markets. Brooks P. Nelson, a second-generation professional investor, remembers his father telling him the story every year: "He used to say, 'It's closed on Good Friday because of the panic of aught-seven'," Nelson, 53, said in a telephone interview with Bloomberg News. Rumor had it that in 1907, "the good Irish-Catholic traders said, 'We told you not to open on Good Friday'." Supposedly, the tale went, the market behaved so badly that the exchange vowed never to allow trading on Good Friday

ALOHA Airlines has told the United States Bankruptcy Court that it is in discussions to sell all or some of its company. The airline filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Thursday, a little more than two years after emerging from bankruptcy. Aloha's attorneys said on Friday the firm's passenger services, air cargo and contract services, which include US mail shipments, were for sale. The carrier said it would continue to fly as long as the court accepts the airline's financial plan to keep operating. The company told the court it had US$3.5 million remaining in cash, but expenses over the next 10 days would take US$2.3 million of that. Judge Lloyd King granted Aloha permission to pay its daily operating costs, such as wages, fuel and utilities. Yucaipa Cos, led by billionaire investor Ron Burkle, has invested more than US$110 million in Aloha since it emerged from bankruptcy.

INTRA-REGIONAL trade within Asia and domestic demand will help reduce the effects of a United States slowdown, while continued efforts to diversify financial markets may also soften the impact, according to South East Asian central bankers. Growth in the US is projected to slow because of the continuing fallout from turmoil in the country's subprime mortgage market, the central bankers, known as the SEACEN Governors, said yesterday in a joint statement after a two-day meeting in Jakarta. Even so, support from domestic demand among Asian economies has enabled "greater intra-regional trade," Heng Swee Keat, managing director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, told Bloomberg News after the meeting. "The fundamentals in most economies are better than they were in previous recessions." The US Federal Reserve on Wednesday cut its key interest rate by three-quarters of a percentage point to help avert a recession in the world's largest economy, amid its worst