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WASHINGTON–The number of laid-off Americans filing initial jobless benefit claims rose slightly last week while the number of people continuing to claim benefits set a record for the ninth straight week, the Labor Department said Thursday.

The figures indicate that the labor market remains weak even as some other recent economic indicators have come in better than expected.

The Labour Department said first-time claims for unemployment insurance rose to a seasonally adjusted 652,000 from the previous week's revised figure of 644,000, slightly higher than analysts expected. A year ago, the number stood at 367,000.

The total number of people claiming benefits for more than a week jumped 122,000 to 5.56 million, significantly higher than analysts' projections of 5.48 million and the highest on records dating back to 1967. The continuing claims data lag initial claims by a week.

The number of continuing claims has increased by more than 100,000 four times in the past five weeks, an indication that workers are remaining on the rolls for longer as they struggle to land a new job after being laid off.

As a proportion of the work force, the number of people receiving benefits is at its highest level since May 1983, when the economy was recovering from a steep recession.

The total is nearly double the amount a year ago, when about 2.8 million people were continuing to receive unemployment checks.

And that number doesn't include an additional 1.47 million people receiving benefits under an extended unemployment compensation program approved by Congress last year instant payday loan. That tally was as of March 7, the latest data available.

Separately, the Commerce Department reported that the gross domestic product, the broadest measure of the nation's economy, fell at an annual rate of 6.3 per cent in last year's fourth quarter, slightly worse than the previous estimate of 6.2 percent.

The recession drove the unemployment rate to 8.1 per cent last month, the highest in more than 25 years. Many economists expect the rate could reach 10 per cent by early next year.

The four-week average of initial claims, which smooths out fluctuations, dropped slightly to 649,000. Last week it reached its highest level since October 1982, though the work force has grown by about half since then.

More job losses were announced this week. On Wednesday, Shaw Industries Group Inc., the world's largest carpet maker and a subsidiary of Warren Buffett's holding company Berkshire Hathaway Inc., said it would close two plants in Georgia and lay off about 600 workers.

On Tuesday, pharmaceutical company Hospira Inc. said it would cut 1,450 jobs, or about 10 per cent of its work force, while beleaguered automaker General Motors Corp. said it laid off 160 engineers, the beginning of 3,400 planned cuts among its salaried employees. GM has said it will cut 47,000 jobs worldwide this year.

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German business confidence fell to the lowest level in more than 26 years in March, adding to signs that the recession is deepening.

The Ifo institute in Munich said its business climate index, based on a survey of 7,000 executives, dropped to 82.1 from 82.6 in February. That’s the worst reading since November 1982. Economists expected a decline to 82.2, according to the median of 37 forecasts in a News survey.

A global slump in demand has forced German companies to scale back production and cut jobs, pushing the economy into its worst recession since World War II. Metro AG, Germany’s largest retailer, yesterday reported an unexpected drop in fourth- quarter profit as consumers pared spending. Commerzbank AG expects gross domestic product to decline as much as 7 percent this year.

“These data are a reminder of just how bad conditions are in Europe’s largest economy and put paid to any thoughts of a swift rebound in activity,” said Colin Ellis, European economist at Daiwa Securities SMBC Europe Ltd. in London. “We have not reached the bottom yet, by any means.”

European government bonds erased declines after today’s report. The yield on the German two-year note fell one basis point to 1.38 percent by 9:07 a.m. in London. The euro was little changed at $1.3462.

‘Tender Green Shoot’

Ifo’s gauge of current conditions declined to 82.7 from 84.3. Still, the measure of expectations increased to 81.6 from 80.9.

“The Ifo’s absolute level is still depressingly low,” said Carsten Brzeski, an economist at ING Group in Brussels. “Nevertheless, the gradual improvement of the Ifo’s expectation component is at least a tender green shoot of stabilization.”

The European Central Bank has signaled it’s ready to lower its key interest rate further from a record low of 1.5 percent. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition also plans to spend about 82 billion euros ($110 billion) to stimulate growth, including tax breaks and investment in infrastructure.

Ifo economist Gernot Nerb said in an interview with Bloomberg Television today that it’s “too early” for government measures to have an impact on the economy payday advance. He also called on the ECB to lower its key rate by a full percentage point when policy makers next meet on April 2.

‘Chain Reaction’

The global economic crisis has exposed Germany’s reliance on exports as an Achilles Heel. German exports dropped for a fourth month in January, manufacturing orders plunged 38 percent from a year earlier and industrial output declined the most on record.

Volkswagen AG Chief Executive Officer Martin Winterkorn said on March 12 that 2009 “will be one of the most difficult years” in the company’s history. ThyssenKrupp AG, Germany’s biggest steelmaker, on March 19 forecast its first quarterly loss in three years and said it may cut more than 3,000 jobs.

This year will be a “big challenge,” Wolfgang Reitzle, CEO of Linde AG, the world’s second-largest maker of industrial gases, said on March 16. “A certain chain reaction has been generated that we feel too.”

German Economy Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg said last month that while most indicators are “definitely very negative,” others offer “hope” that the economy could begin to turn around before 2010.

‘Good Start’

German investor confidence unexpectedly rose to the highest level in almost two years in March and the country’s benchmark DAX share index has gained about 13 percent this month. In neighboring Belgium, business confidence increased in March, the central bank said yesterday.

Deutsche Bank AG Chief Executive Officer Josef Ackermann said yesterday Germany’s largest bank had a “good start” to the year. In 2010, “some degree of recovery in the banking industry is foreseeable,” he said.

The RWI institute said on March 23 it expects the German economy to expand 0.5 percent in 2010.

“We can see some light at the end of the tunnel but it’s too early to give the all clear,” said Tobias Basse, an economist at Norddeutsche Landesbank in Hanover. “The current difficult situation will persist for a while.”

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Bernard Madoff, who masterminded the biggest Ponzi scam in history, lost his latest effort on Friday to get out of jail.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit shot upheld a trial judge’s decision to revoke his $10 million bail ahead of his June 16 sentencing. Madoff, 70, faces a potential 150-year sentence in federal prison.

"The district court found that in light of the defendant’s age (70) and the length of a potential sentence (150 years), he has an incentive to flee, and that because he has the means to do so, he presents a risk of flight, and therefore should not be released," the 2nd Circuit said in a written document.

Madoff lawyer Ira Lee Sorkin said said he was "disappointed" in the ruling. "We are disappointed and we respectfully disagree but the court has ruled," he said.

Sorkin had argued that Madoff was not a flight risk or a danger to the community.

"Since his arrest, Mr. Madoff has complied at all times with the extraordinarily restrictive bail conditions imposed upon him; he has not attempted to flee nor has he attempted to harm any individual or the community," Sorkin argued.

Madoff has been locked up in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan since March 12, when he pleaded guilty to 11 criminal counts, including fraud, money laundering and perjury easy payday loans.

Thousands of investors were victimized by Madoff’s massive, long-running scheme, with losses in the billions of dollars. Investigators are still tallying up the number of victims and the amount of the money that was stolen.

Investigators are also seizing and itemizing Madoff’s assets - including those belonging to his wife Ruth - for liquidation. The assets, worth more than $800 million, will be used to pay back burned investors.

No one in Madoff’s family has been charged. But on Wednesday, his accountant, David Friehling, turned himself in to federal authorities to face charges that he "rubberstamped" Madoff’s books. He was not accused of participating in the Ponzi scheme, or even having knowledge of it. But authorities said Madoff paid him up to $14,500 a month to approve audits of his firm without really examining the numbers, and then lying about it.

Friehling was charged with securities fraud, aiding and abetting investment adviser fraud and filing false audit reports to the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

He was released Wednesday on $2.5 million bail and could face a 105-year sentence if convicted. 

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NIKE Inc on Friday announced plans to restructure its brand.

Highlights:

* Announces NIKE brand geographical restructuring to enhance consumer focus

* Says may result in an overall reduction of up to 4% of the company’s

workforce

* Says brand reorganization into six geographies

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Bankrupt Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc is auctioning a thrift and an industrial bank it owns, and the process is in the early stages, a source familiar with the matter said on Monday.

The sale of Lehman Brothers Bank FSB, a Delaware-based thrift, and Woodlands Commercial Bank, a Utah industrial bank, is being handled by investment bank Lazard Ltd, the source said.

A transaction will have to go through the U.S. bankruptcy court process, said the source, who asked not to be named because the sale process is not public.

A Lehman spokeswoman said the company was selling all assets as part of Lehman’s wind-down in bankruptcy.

“We’re looking to realize value whenever we can get it,” Lehman spokeswoman Kimberly Macleod said.

“We’re going to hold it until someone comes with fair value and the creditors’ committee approves it,” she said, noting Lazard was running the sales process for this and other assets.

Lazard declined to comment.

Last month, a U.S. bankruptcy judge allowed Lehman to pump cash into the two banks to avoid a seizure by regulators.

FSB was a centerpiece of Lehman’s mortgage loan origination, purchasing and servicing business creditreport. Lehman reported equity of about $467 million and total assets of about $6.5 billion in the bank at the end of 2008.

Woodlands issues commercial and real estate loans to major corporations, short-term secured warehouse loans to borrowers and interest rate products, such as swap or derivative contracts. It does not conduct retail deposit operations and has no consumer deposit or loan customers, according to a court filing.

Woodlands, which was earlier known as Lehman Brothers Commercial Bank, has been funded primarily by brokered certificates of deposit. As of December 31, it had total assets of about $5.4 billion and Lehman’s equity of about $432 million, according to the filing.

Lehman, once the fourth-largest U.S. investment bank, filed for bankruptcy protection on September 15, in the largest U.S. bankruptcy filing in history.

The case is: Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc, U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Southern District of New York, No. 08-13555

(Reporting by Paritosh Bansal and Emily Chasan; Editing by Andre Grenon)

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An owner of Eclipse Aviation Corp. said he has found enough customers to buy the company out of bankruptcy.

About 20 customers have expressed interest in buying the Albuquerque, N.M.-based company, said Mike Press, one of the earliest owners of the company.

Eclipse, which manufactured light, high-performance jet aircraft and employed 1,000 in the United States, filed for bankruptcy in November, when it said it owed more than $1 billion in debts.

“It’s good news — good news for the country because the company will hire back employees and get the industry back up and running,” Press said no fax needed payday loans. “We want 100 percent of shareholders to be customers.”

Press said he expects he’ll have the firm commitment from customers to buy the company within the next two to three weeks.

Press and Mason Holland plan to call the resurrected company Eclipse Jet LLC. Eclipse Aviation had an operation at Albany International Airport.

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For Toronto’s Paul Pethick, the days of gathering around the TV set for an evening of entertainment are but a fuzzy memory.

While the 35-year-old English-language teacher still watches a considerable amount of television, nearly all of it – from hit programs such as Heroes to sci-fi classics like Star Trek – is piped into his house via the Internet and watched on the computer.

In fact, with the exception of news and live sports, Pethick can’t recall the last time he watched a TV program on plain old cable.

"My wife and I watch the computer together while we eat dinner," he said. "Actually, I don’t even call it my computer anymore. I call it my TV."

Pethick didn’t set out to replace his television set, but a four-year stint teaching English in Japan left him craving familiar North American television programs such as the hit series 24.

He eventually found it on the Web and soon discovered that most other shows were there, too, with the possible exception of a single episode of The Simpsons that continues to elude him.

Now, he can’t imagine ever going back. "I get to watch what I want, when I want it."

It’s the type of techno-epiphany that should be sending shivers down the spines of television industry executives, who have relied on a business model that encourages people to arrange their lives around their favourite shows.

They need only look at what happened to the music recording industry’s near-obliteration by the file-sharing phenomenon to gain an appreciation for the Web’s ability to upend decades-old business models in just a few years.

While it’s not clear whether television will ultimately suffer the same fate, broadcasters are nevertheless moving quickly to make sure they aren’t caught flat-footed by a sudden technological shift.

In the United States, they have already begun putting a significant amount of content online in a bid to make file sharing or any other third-party services less attractive.

The most ambitious effort has been Hulu.com, a joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corp., the parent of Fox. The service allows U.S. surfers to choose from a growing library of top-rated TV shows from different sources and available to view through an elegantly designed media player.

The shows are generally added to the service after they air. Commercials are limited to either a single spot that plays before the video, or several shorter ones that play while the content is streamed. Users can choose which commercial to watch from a given advertiser.

Hulu, which launched a year ago, attracted roughly 25 million monthly viewers in January, according to ComScore Media Metrix. By contrast, Google’s YouTube attracted just over 100 million viewers, while social networking site MySpace fetched 63 million viewers for video content.

Some analysts believe Hulu is actually making money as a distribution outlet – estimated to be as much as $12 million (U.S.) in 2008 – no small feat, given the challenges faced by other media companies when it comes to attracting advertising dollars online.

In Canada, where people under the age of 18 now spend about as much time on the computer as watching TV, it’s a different story.

Networks such as CTV and Global have made some programs available online, but the process has so far been a series of halting steps.

Adding to the frustration for Canadians is the fact that the Internet’s global reach doesn’t yet extend to the world of TV shows, where traditional geographic borders have been imposed on the World Wide Web.

A Canadian viewer who tries to log on to Hulu.com or CBS Interactive’s TV.com will soon discover the content has been blocked to viewers trying to access the site from outside the U.S.

The culprit is complex international licensing deals that allow broadcasters such as Global Television and CTV to air American programming. Since the U.S. networks earn revenue from such deals, there’s little incentive to open up online content to foreigners.

There’s also not much motivation for Canadian TV networks, which pay top dollar for U.S. shows, to also secure online rights, given that the vast majority of their revenues come from traditional TV ads no credit check payday loans.

While some savvy surfers have figured out ways to circumvent the controls, the reality is it’s often easier to download the shows from a file-sharing service such as BitTorrent, where most of the content has been stripped of advertising.

Either way, observers say the situation threatens the Canadian broadcast industry because it encourages viewers seeking online content to bypass the networks.

"Those who hold rights to Canadian programming need to be more dynamic and to make programming available more broadly and quickly if legal channels are to thrive," argued a recent paper by Canadian consulting firm The SeaBoard Group. "To drag out availability in some sort of homage to the economic and distribution models of yesteryear is to court more creative illegal (and therefore `zero revenue’) solutions."

But while there is little doubt the Internet is poised to change the way television content is delivered, it’s too early to tell whether the shift will actually sound a death knell for broadcasters or merely transform the way they do business.

At present, the vast majority of television programming still takes place the way it has for decades, with families sitting down on their couches and staring at their increasingly large, higher resolution television sets.

Brahm Eiley, president of Convergence Consulting Group Ltd., said there’s currently no evidence to suggest the traditional television model is in danger of being replaced by the Internet.

"The economics aren’t there," he said, noting revenue earned by sites such as Hulu is a drop in the bucket compared with the billions spent by advertisers to reach conventional TV audiences.

Eiley also argues that there is currently little incentive for people to make the jump online because much of what they want to watch is already available via traditional broadcasts or cable, often in a much higher-quality format. "The problem is that the experience of watching online isn’t better – it’s worse."

Furthermore, the one area where Web-based TV would seem to offer a clear advantage – giving people the ability to watch shows on their own schedule – can be replicated fairly easily through the use of personal video recorders and video on demand services, Eiley said.

Although there’s no question traditional broadcasting revenue is on the decline, the main culprit has been the rise of specialty TV channels on cable or satellite that allow advertisers to target their messages with more precision.

Indeed, it’s no coincidence that Canada’s biggest media conglomerate, Canwest Global Communications Corp., which owns the Global Television network, risked further weighing down its debt-heavy balance sheet in 2007 by partnering with Goldman Sachs to purchase the specialty TV channels owned by Alliance Atlantis for $2.3 billion.

That’s not to say that the Internet isn’t becoming an increasingly important part of the television universe, or that new technologies won’t come along and upset the current balance.

For example, software company Boxee has made it possible for users to watch "free" Internet content, including streamed programs from network websites and Hulu, on their big-screen televisions. (Hulu recently demanded its content be pulled from the service, although a scaled-down version of Boxee’s Hulu application has since reappeared following an outcry from users.)

Still, broadcasters, including those in Canada, say they believe the Web is emerging as a way for viewers to augment, not replace, traditional TV-watching habits.

"I don’t think Web-enabled TVs are there yet and I don’t think consumers are ready for another dedicated device on top of the stereo or DVD stack," Stephan Argent, CTV’s vice-president of digital media, said in a recent interview.

"From our perspective, our strategy is to allow viewers to play catch up on episodes that they’ve missed. Part two is to catch new viewers online who will then watch on television.

"That, to me, is a circle. It’s not down one road or the other. You’re kind of bouncing back and forth."

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WASHINGTON — A report from the Business Roundtable, which represents CEOs of major companies, says America’s health care system has become a liability in a global economy. Concern about high U.S. costs has existed for years, and business executives — whose companies provide health coverage for workers — have long called for getting costs under control.

Americans spend $2.4 trillion a year on health care. The Business Roundtable report states that Americans in 2006 spent $1,928 per capita on health care, at least 2

Staples Inc. (Nasdaq: SPLS) said fourth quarter sales tumbled 14 percent to $4.6 billion when excluding the impact of the office supply company’s acquisition of Corporate Express last summer. The company also declined to give any sales or profit forecast, blaming limited visibility into the future.

The company generated net income of $286 million in the quarter that ended Jan. 31, down from $333.2 million in the year-ago period payday loan.

Staples bought Corporate Express in July 2008 for $4.4 billion, net of cash acquired, in a move that expanded product and service offerings to five additional countries.

Staples said it expects the weak economic climate to continue throughout 2009.

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