Chicken Samples Contaminated
April 20th, 2011
AOL News
By: Andrew Schneider
This is a rough month for carnivores and others who like eating safe meat.
Two studies, one released last week and the second made public today, have scientifically tested beef, chicken, pork and turkey purchased from groceries in six cities from Seattle to Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
What they found was enough to make a caveman queasy.
The latest study was conducted in Seattle by Mansour Samadpour, a leading bacterial microbiologist who heads the Institute for Environmental Health, a national network of food safety laboratories.
Samadpour’s staff purchased 100 packages of chicken parts and fryers from 10 Seattle-area groceries during March. The analysis of these samples found that 65 percent of the birds tested had campylobacter, 19 percent had salmonella and 2 percent had E. coli or listeria.
U.S. Department of Agriculture inspectors at all slaughterhouses or processing plants watch for these poisonous bacteria. However, Samadpour also found that an alarming number of the poultry samples had a bacteria the government doesn’t look for — Staphylococcus aureus.
Staphylococcus aureus is a fast-acting toxin that often causes gastrointestinal symptoms within 30 minutes, and according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it sickens at least 240,000 people a year.
Samadpour told AOL News that 10 percent of the samples had the even more concerning, and multi-drug-resistant, S. aureus, or MRSA. Handling contaminated chicken with a cut or break in the skin is a screaming invitation for MRSA to enter the body. Public health experts warn that bacterial resistance to antibiotics is a serious problem, as it often makes many diseases difficult if not impossible to treat.
The study was funded by Seattle food safety lawyer William Marler, who, as AOL News reported in the past, had commissioned Samadpour’s labs to test 5,000 samples of beef for the presence of non-O157 strains of E. coli. They documented that millions of pounds of beef sold throughout the country were contaminated with strains of dangerous E. coli that the USDA neither outlaws nor apparently cares much about.
“I funded the chicken study because I’m concerned that consumers don’t understand how many pathogens may be on the chicken they purchase and serve to their families,” Marler told AOL News.
Marler said he was concerned because one of the samples was contaminated with E. coli 0126, a bacteria usually found only in beef.
All the contamination most likely occurs because of sloppiness in the processing facilities, where the meat comes into contact with feces, which causes most of the dangerous bacteria to flourish, Marler said.
Marler and food safety agencies recommend that great care be used when handling the uncooked chicken at home and that the poultry must be cooked to 165 degrees, which should kill most of the bacteria that leads to food poisoning.
The exception to that cook-it-to-death rule may well be staph-contaminated meat, because those toxins are far more resistant to heat and the meat must be cooked more thoroughly to be made safe, food safety experts say.
That fact alone makes the findings of another group of food scientists more troubling.
A nationwide study by the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) published this month in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases reported on the analysis of 136 samples — 80 different brands — of beef, chicken, pork and turkey. They were purchased at 26 retail grocery stores in Los Angeles, Chicago, Fort Lauderdale, Flagstaff, Ariz., and Washington, D.C.
Lance Price, senior author of the study, says nearly half of the meat and poultry samples — 47 percent — was contaminated with S. aureus. And more concerning is that more than half of those staph bacteria — 52 percent — were resistant to at least three classes of antibiotics.
Click here for the full report from AOL News
Plants ‘Can Think and Remember’
April 20th, 2011
BBC News
By: Victoria Gill
Plants, scientists say, transmit information about light intensity and quality from leaf to leaf in a very similar way to our own nervous systems.
These “electro-chemical signals” are carried by cells that act as “nerves” of the plants.
In their experiment, the scientists showed that light shone on to one leaf caused the whole plant to respond.
And the response, which took the form of light-induced chemical reactions in the leaves, continued in the dark.
This showed, they said, that the plant “remembered” the information encoded in light.
“We shone the light only on the bottom of the plant and we observed changes in the upper part,” explained Professor Stanislaw Karpinski from the Warsaw University of Life Sciences in Poland, who led this research.
He presented the findings at the Society for Experimental Biology’s annual meeting in Prague, Czech Republic.
“And the changes proceeded when the light was off… This was a complete surprise.”
In previous work, Professor Karpinski found that chemical signals could be passed throughout whole plants – allowing them to respond to and survive changes and stresses in their environment.
But in this new study, he and his colleagues discovered that when light stimulated a chemical reaction in one leaf cell, this caused a “cascade” of events and that this was immediately signalled to the rest of the plant via a specific type of cell called a “bundle sheath cell”.
The scientists measured the electrical signals from these cells, which are present in every leaf. They likened the discovery to finding the plants’ “nervous system”.
Thinking plants
What was even more peculiar, Professor Karpinski said, was that the plants’ responses changed depending on the colour of the light that was being shone on them.
“There were characteristic [changes] for red, blue and white light,” he explained.
He suspected that the plants might use the information encoded in the light to stimulate protective chemical reactions. He and his colleagues examined this more closely by looking at the effect of different colours of light on the plants’ immunity to disease.
“When we shone the light for on the plant for one hour and then infected it [with a virus or with bacteria] 24 hours after that light exposure, it resisted the infection,” he explained.
“But when we infected the plant before shining the light, it could not build up resistance.
“[So the plant] has a specific memory for the light which builds its immunity against pathogens, and it can adjust to varying light conditions.”
He said that plants used information encrypted in the light to immunise themselves against seasonal pathogens.
“Every day or week of the season has… a characteristic light quality,” Professor Karpinski explained.
“So the plants perform a sort of biological light computation, using information contained in the light to immunise themselves against diseases that are prevalent during that season.”
Professor Christine Foyer, a plant scientist from the University of Leeds, said the study “took our thinking one step forward”.
“Plants have to survive stresses, such as drought or cold, and live through it and keep growing,” she told BBC News.
“This requires an appraisal of the situation and an appropriate response – that’s a form of intelligence.
“What this study has done is link two signalling pathways together… and the electrical signalling pathway is incredibly rapid, so the whole plant could respond immediately to high [levels of] light.”
Click here for the full report from BBC News
Apple Founder Steve Jobs Has 6 Weeks to Live?
April 20th, 2011
The National Enquirer
There’s been worldwide interest since we reported that Apple boss Steve Jobs – the mastermind behind the iPod, iPhone and iPad – could have only six weeks to live!
Shocking photos obtained exclusively by The ENQUIRER show the 56-year-old cancer-stricken computer genius has become rail-thin and heartbreakingly weak in recent days despite putting up a tremendously courageous battle.
Since the print edition of the new issue of The ENQUIRER containing this blockbuster story began hitting newsstands on Wednesday in New York, media outlets worldwide have reported our story – and some websites have even attempted to rip off our exclusive photos!
For nearly seven years, the Apple co-founder has battled a rare form of pancreatic cancer – called a neuroendocrine tumor. It is a slower moving cancer than the type that killed actor Patrick Swayze in 2009 and actor Michael Landon in 1991.
Only about 4 percent of patients with any form of pancreatic cancer can live longer than five years.
Jobs has taken three medical leaves of absence from Apple and had a 2009 liver transplant after the cancer spread.
But after studying the new photos of the world-renowned entrepreneur – taken on February 8th in California – medical experts consulted by The ENQUIRER say it appears he’s losing his battle.
Jobs was photographed outside the Stanford Cancer Center – the same place where Swayze was treated during his final days.
The heartrending photos show the terrible damage cancer has done to Jobs’ 6-foot-2 frame – dropping his weight from a precancer 175 pounds to about 130 now.
One of our experts – Boca Raton, Fla., critical care physician Dr. Samuel Jacobson, who has not treated Jobs – told The ENQUIRER: “The poor guy! Judging from these photos, he is close to terminal. I would say he has six weeks.
“He is emaciated and looks to have lost a lot of muscle mass, which spells a poor prognosis.”
Click here for the full report from the National Enquirer
10 Countries With The Most Billionaires
April 20th, 2011
Huffington Post
By: Harry Bradford
No longer dominated by Americans and Europeans, the members of the world’s billionaire club increasingly hail from around the globe, first and third world countries alike. And while some of the mega-rich might may spend more time on yachts than in their home countries, even billionaires have a place they call home. It’s just becoming increasingly difficult to predict where that home is.
According to this year’s annual Wealth Report, published by Knight Frank and Citi Private Bank — Scorpio Partnership, a wealth management consultancy firm, also contributed — new billionaires are increasingly likely to come from emerging economies like India and Russia, the latter of which increased its billionaire count by 30 percent last year, according to Forbes. The world’s total number of millionaires has skyrocketed, too, increasing by 22 percent from one year prior, when the global economy witnessed a drastic drop in millionaires.
No country’s elite, however, have benefited more from last year’s rebounding economy than China’s, with the country’s tremendous economic growth raising the billionaire count by 140 percent. At this rate, many economists expect China — ranked 35th in Forbes’ billionaires list as recently as 2005 — to soon claim the title of most billionaires in the world.
“That growth [in China] may be strengthened,” Scorpio Partnership director Stephen Wall wrote in the rport, “by the range of wealth sources driving economic growth.”
Of all their thriving industries, the Internet technology sector has perhaps treated China’s elites the best. And no one better represents that industry than China’s richest man and Baidu search engine founder Robin Li. Still, Chinese billionaires will continue to face stiff competition from the U.S. in the future, as Facebook alone represents six of America’s billionaires, including the youngest billionaire in the world: 26-year-old co-founder Dustin Moskovitz.
10. Canada
Number of billionaires: 22
Total Population: 33,739,900
Notable Billionaires Include: David Thompson (Chairman of Thompson Reuters), Jeffrey Skoll (ex-eBay President) and Guy Laliberté (CEO of Cirque du Soleil).
9. Japan
Number of billionaires: 23
Total Population: 127,560,000
Notable Billionaires Include: Masayoshi Son (CEO of venture capital Softbank Capital), Hiroshi Yamauchi (President and Chairman of Nintendo) and Tadashi Yanai (Founder and President of retail holding company Fast Retailing).
8. Switzerland
Number of billionaires: 27
Total Population: 7,731,167
Notable Billionaires Include: Ernesto Bertarelli (biotech entrepreneur known for Merck-Serono) and Esther Grether (art collector and Swatch shareholder).
7. Hong Kong
Number of billionaires: 29
Total Population: 7,003,700
Notable Billionaires Include: Li Ka-shing (businessman and Chairman of Hutchison Whampoa Limited) and Thomas and Raymond Kwok (inherited Real Estate developer Sun Hung Kai Properties.)
Click here for the full report from the Huffington Post
Jamie Oliver Shows How Much Sugar Is in Flavored Milk
April 20th, 2011
TVSquad.com
By: Jason Hughes
Last season, ‘Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution’ (Tue., 8PM ET on ABC) went to Huntington, W.V., one of America’s unhealthiest cities. This year, he was off to one of its largest. Once there, he met resistance at just about every corner.
The Los Angeles Unified School District — the second largest in the U.S., serving between 700,000 and 750,000 students — refused him access to their schools. None of the national fast food chains that got their start in L.A. were willing to work with him. He did get a smaller local chain to open their doors, but the owner was reluctant to make expensive changes.
In an attempt to shock them, he decided to turn his attention to the flavored milk available in the school. While the perception is that this is a healthier alternative, it actually contains as much sugar as soda. So he set up a dramatic demonstration.
He dumped a week’s worth of sugar onto and into a school bus. Unfortunately, only about 25 people showed up for the presentation, but a revolution can start with just a few.
“Yeah, I’m trying to make it dramatic because I want people to care, and at the moment it’s just us,” he said to the crowd. The lack of concern in the area was very disconcerting to him in this premiere episode, but he’s not done fighting for the kids and people of Los Angeles.
Click here for the full report from TVSquad.com
School Lunches Around The World
April 20, 2011 by KT
Filed under Kevin's Blog
AOL News
By Steven Stern
When President Harry Truman signed the National School Lunch Act into law in 1946, he probably didn’t imagine that American schools would one day be serving chicken fingers, frozen French fries and soggy pizza.
While nutrition activists are trying to get healthier foods into our schools, we wondered what school lunch looks like in other countries — places where ketchup has never been considered a vegetable.
Finland
The Finnish educational system is often considered one of the best in the world and serving healthy school lunches is a major priority. Government regulations demand that meals are “tasty, colorful and well-balanced.” Since the late 1990s, guidelines have specified serving proportions: vegetables, cooked and raw, must cover half the plate (carrot and beet salads are popular), with proteins and starch taking up one-quarter plate each. The majority of the nation’s schools offer a vegetarian option every day. The national specialty hernekeitto, a green pea soup often flavored with smoked pork, is usually served on Thursdays in a nod to Finnish tradition.
Australia
Most Aussie kids bring their lunch from home. And most of the time, that lunch is a sandwich of cheese and Vegemite, the jam-like, salty yeast-based spread that’s been a staple since 1922. The Vegemite sandwich gets a shout-out in Men At Work’s classic antipodean anthem “Down Under.”
Italy
The sustainable food crowd loves Italy, and with good reason. The majority of Italian schools serve lunches made from organic ingredients, mostly grown nearby. The daily meal at la mensa della scuola — the school canteen –is usually centered around pasta or risotto, with salad served as a separate course. Meat shows up on the menu only a couple times a week, and in small portions. But it’s not all about nutritionally correct eating for Italian children; merendine, aka snacks, are big parts of most children’s days. Bread spread with chocolatey Nutella is a classic between-meal sweet and Italy’s kids are almost as addicted to packaged candies and cakes as their American counterparts. Italy actually has a higher proportion of overweight children than the U.S.
Kenya
People who went to school in Kenya usually have strong feelings about githeri; they’re either totally nostalgic or extremely sick of it. A mixture of beans and dried corn, the dish is traditionally associated with the Kikuyu tribe, but it has become the standard school lunch throughout the country. Every day, school children line up with their plastic bowls as servings are ladled out from huge pots.
Korea
Most school cafeterias in Korea use sectioned metal trays and there’s a standard way of filling them up. The two biggest sections are for rice, usually served with pickled vegetable kimchi and soup. Smaller compartments — there’s usually three of them — hold side dishes of vegetables and fish. As for the beverage, kids are given little plastic bottles of sweet yogurt drink, hugely popular in Korea.
Barbados
For many kids in Barbados, the best part of school is the morning snack of milk and biscuits — known as cookies to us Americans — provided free in all schools since the 1930s. The locally produced Wibisco brand biscuits have nourished generations of children. In 1963, the government began a hot lunch program, with meals, beans and rice, mostly, delivered by van to schools around the island.
Brazil
The school day for most students in Brazil starts at 7 a.m. and runs till noon. To stave off hunger pangs during the morning hours, kids will munch on snacks like queijadinhas, which are muffins made from cheese and coconut. While many children eat lunch at home after school, the Brazilian government has sponsored a nationwide school lunch program since 1955, offering hot, healthy meals to underprivileged students.
France
You don’t think the French would serve their children sloppy joes, do you? School lunches are taken just as seriously as meals for adults. In fact, kids are served pretty much the same things adults eat. A week’s menu in a restaurant scolaire — the canteen of a French school — might include veal scallops Marengo, hake with lemon sauce, and lamb with paprika. Fresh bread and salad are, of course, included at every meal and fruit and yogurt are the usual desserts. The only thing the kids don’t get is wine.
Japan
In Japan, school lunch known as kyuushoku is an important part of every child’s daily schedule. Meals are eaten in the classroom; after the tables are cleared, the student assigned as that day’s lunch monitor serves everyone. Rice and fish make up the bulk of the menu, but some days students are treated to the kind of East-West comfort food that Japanese kids especially love: dishes like korokke, which are fried potato croquettes or omurice, an omelet filled with a ketchupy rice and chicken mixture.
Zambia
School lunch in Zambia is nshima. Actually, pretty much everyone’s lunch in Zambia is nshima — breakfast and dinner too. The starchy dish of white cornmeal cooked to a thick, sticky dough is the staple food of the entire population. It’s eaten with your hands and dipped into relishes made from greens, dried sardines called kapenta, or stewed soy protein.
Denmark and Norway
Scandinavian school children usually bring their own lunches to school. The standard is homemade or store-bought smørrebrød, which are open-faced sandwiches of cheese, liver spread or salami on dense dark rye bread.
Singapore
Multicultural Singapore is famous for its street food. Residents flock to huge outdoor food courts and buy their meals from the various hawker stands. In most schools, kids get to do the same. The canteen or “tuckshop” in a Singapore school is often a collection of different stalls rented out to private cooks. Students choose between noodle soups, curries with rice and so-called “Western” food. One typical Western lunch that kids particularly love is chicken chop, which is boneless chicken covered with thick gravy, served with either spaghetti or beans and coleslaw.
Click here for the gallery of the images!
The More You Make, The Less You Pay
April 20th, 2011
Bloomberg BusinessWeek
By: Jesse Drucker
For the well-off, this could be the best tax day since the early 1930s: Top tax rates on ordinary income, dividends, estates, and gifts will remain at or near historically low levels for at least the next two years. That’s thanks in part to legislation passed in December 2010 by the 111th Congress and signed by President Barack Obama.
“This is clearly far and away the most generous tax situation that’s existed,” says Gregory D. Singer, a national managing director of the wealth management group at AllianceBernstein (AB) in New York. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
For the 400 U.S. taxpayers with the highest adjusted gross income, the effective federal income tax rate—what they actually pay—fell from almost 30 percent in 1995 to just under 17 percent in 2007, according to the IRS. And for the approximately 1.4 million people who make up the top 1 percent of taxpayers, the effective federal income tax rate dropped from 29 percent to 23 percent in 2008. It may seem too fantastic to be true, but the top 400 end up paying a lower rate than the next 1,399,600 or so.
That’s not just good luck. It’s often the result of hard work, as suggested by some of the strategies in the following pages. Much of the top 400′s income is from dividends and capital gains, generated by everything from appreciated real estate—yes, there is some left—to stocks and the sale of family businesses. As Warren Buffett likes to point out, since most of his income is from dividends, his tax rate is less than that of the people who clean his office.
The true effective rate for multimillionaires is actually far lower than that indicated by official government statistics. That’s because those figures fail to include the additional income that’s generated by many sophisticated tax-avoidance strategies. Several of those techniques involve some variation of complicated borrowings that never get repaid, netting the beneficiaries hundreds of millions in tax-free cash. From 2003 to 2008, for example, Los Angeles Dodgers owner and real estate developer Frank H. McCourt Jr. paid no federal or state regular income taxes, as stated in court records dug up by the Los Angeles Times. Developers such as McCourt, according to a declaration in his divorce proceeding, “typically fund their lifestyle through lines of credit and loan proceeds secured by their assets while paying little or no personal income taxes.” A spokesman for McCourt said he availed himself of a tax code provision at the time that permitted purchasers of sports franchises to defer income taxes.
For those who can afford a shrewd accountant or attorney, our era is rife with opportunity to avoid, or at least defer, tax bills, according to tax specialists and public records. It’s limited only by the boundaries of taste, creativity, and the ability to understand some very complex shelters.
Click here for the full report from Bloomberg BusinessWeek
The Kevin Trudeau Show: 4-19-11
Today, Kevin turns the show over to you, the listener. Hear the inspirational true stories of how the Global Information Network has touched real people’s lives and why YOU should consider becoming a part of this extraordinary club. If you have a story to share, click here to leave a comment.
Motivation:
Real Success Stories From Real People
Where It All Begins
Become A Success Story
Self Help:
The Water Filtration Systems Kevin Uses
Protect Yourself From Economic Crisis
Create Alternative Streams Of Income
Wealth:
U.S. Debt Concerns Weigh on Global Stocks
Everything Kevin:
Become An Insider!
Support Kevin!
Kevin is on YouTube!
Sign Up For Kevin’s FREE Podcast
Follow Kevin on Twitter
Become A Fan of Kevin on Facebook
Kevin’s Film Club
Kevin’s Book Club
Take Trudeau on the Go! Click here to download this show to your iPod, mp3 player, or PC through iTunes!
Click below to watch the Kevin Trudeau Show!
Drug-Resistant Bacteria Found In 1/4 of US Meat, Poultry
April 19th, 2011
The Raw Story
By: AFP
A sampling of grocery store meat in five US cities has shown a type of drug-resistant bacteria is contained in about one quarter of beef, chicken, pork and turkey for sale, a study said Friday.
Staphylococcus aureus, a bacteria that can cause skin infections, pneumonia, sepsis or endocarditis in people with weak hearts, was found in 47 percent of samples, said the study in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.
The study drew fire from the meat industry, which pointed to the “small sample” taken and said its findings were misleading.
More than half — 52 percent — of the infected samples contained a tough strain of S. aureus that was resistant to at least three types of antibiotics.
Most of the time, the bacteria would be killed off during cooking, but risks of contamination can come from handling raw meat in the kitchen and touching other utensils, or from eating meat that is not fully cooked.
“For the first time, we know how much of our meat and poultry is contaminated with antibiotic-resistant Staph, and it is substantial,” said Lance Price of the Translational Genomics Research Institute in Phoenix, Arizona, and senior author of the study.
“The fact that drug-resistant S. aureus was so prevalent, and likely came from the food animals themselves, is troubling, and demands attention to how antibiotics are used in food-animal production today.”
S. aureus is not among the four bacteria routinely tested in meat by the US government: Salmonella, Campylobacter, E. coli, and Enterococcus.
More than two million people in the United States are infected with these bacteria annually, and hundreds die. The young and the elderly, and people with weakened immune systems are most at risk.
The 136 samples that were tested included 80 brands of meat and were taken from 26 retail grocery stores in five cities: Los Angeles; Chicago; Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Flagstaff, Arizona; and the US capital, Washington.
The report said the bacteria was found inside the meat and therefore was not likely to have come from handling.
Instead the likely culprit was “densely stocked industrial farms, where food animals are steadily fed low doses of antibiotics… ideal breeding grounds for drug-resistant bacteria that move from animals to humans,” the study said.
“Antibiotics are the most important drugs that we have to treat Staph infections; but when Staph are resistant to three, four, five or even nine different antibiotics — like we saw in this study — that leaves physicians few options,” Price said.
The study did not assess the risk to the population posed by the resistant staph strain.
“Now we need to determine what this means in terms of risk to the consumer,” said co-author Paul Keim, director of the Center for Microbial Genetics and Genomics at Northern Arizona University.
The biggest meat and poultry trade association in the US, the American Meat Institute, said the study “misleads consumers about US meat and poultry, which is among the safest in the world.”
“Despite the claims of this small study, consumers can feel confident that meat and poultry is safe,” said AMI Foundation president James Hodges in a statement.
The AMI statement added: “These bacteria are destroyed through normal cooking procedures, which may account for the small percentage of foodborne illnesses linked to these bacteria.”
Click here for the full report from Raw Story
U.S. Debt Concerns Weigh on Global Stocks
April 19th, 2011
Daily Finance
By: AP
A warning from Standard & Poor’s that the agency might lower its rating on U.S. government debt sent stocks on their steepest slide in a month Monday.
S&P said there is a 33 percent chance it would lower the country’s credit rating from AAA in the next two years if Washington fails to pare the country’s debts.
The Dow Jones industrial average, the S&P 500 index and the Nasdaq composite all had their sharpest falls since March 16.
The Dow fell 140.24 points, or 1.1 percent, to close at 12,201.59. The Standard & Poor’s 500 fell 14.54, or 1.1 percent, to 1,305.14. The Nasdaq composite fell 29.27, also 1.1 percent, to 2,735.38.
S&P reaffirmed the U.S. government’s top credit rating of AAA but expressed doubts that Washington would move quickly to curb the country’s mounting budget deficits.
U.S. government bonds are widely seen as the benchmark for the safest kind of debt. The highly unusual move by the ratings agency to lower its outlook for U.S. debt to “negative” from “stable” caught investors off guard.
“This is a wake-up call,” said Peter Cardillo, chief market economist at New York-based brokerage house Avalon Partners Inc. “The government is now going to have to do something to cut the budget. That is a long-term positive for the stock market, though it might not be in the near term.”
The change means that S&P could lower its rating on U.S. government debt in the future. If that were to happen, the U.S. government would have to pay more to borrow money when it issues bonds.
Since the government’s borrowing rates are used as a benchmark for nearly all kinds of debt, many borrowers would also pay higher rates, including companies, homeowners and credit card users. That would have a negative impact on spending in general and the overall economy.
ADVERTISEMENT
“The credit worthiness of the country is the underpinning on which all other asset classes are valued,” said Jack Ablin, chief investment officer at Harris Private Bank. “If all of a sudden the credit quality of U.S. Treasurys isn’t as high as people perceive, we could see (an) erosion of confidence and values decline.”
U.S. government debt prices fell after the S&P warning came out but soon recovered. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note, which rises when the note’s price falls, jumped as high 3.47 percent after the S&P’s warning, from 3.38 percent just before. By late afternoon the yield was back at 3.38 percent.
The euro fell against the dollar as Europe’s debt problems spread. Spain had to pay a much higher interest rate on new debt. There was speculation of a possible default by Greece, and a nationalist party in Finland made big gains in an election Sunday.
The euro was worth $1.4235 in late trading, down from $1.4436 Friday.
Citigroup Inc. closed flat at $4.42 after reporting earnings that came in just above analysts’ expectations. The bank’s net income fell 32 percent but it was able to set aside less money to cover losses from loan defaults as more customers made payments on time.
Several other big banks are due to report earnings this week. Traders are keen to find out if banks are lending more. Upcoming reports from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Wells Fargo & Co. this week are “crucial for the markets,” says Quincy Krosby, a market strategist for Prudential Financial.
Industrial supply company W.W. Grainger rose 1.7 percent. The company’s first-quarter net income soared after it began offering new products and pushed into Mexico, Colombia and Japan.
Four stocks fell for every one that rose on the New York Stock Exchange. Trading volume was 4.6 billion shares.
Click here for the full report from Daily Finance
