World Business

WASHINGTON At least 18 children under 15 years not new died in toy-related accidents in 2007.

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The full age of these deaths were caused by dint of. blocked airways, drowning or accidents involving motor vehicles, according to Consumer Product Safety Commission data. Many of the incidents were not caused by the toys, limit occurred while the children were playing.

Fourteen of the 18 children were boys.

The largest number of children, five, were killed in tricycle-related incidents - one from a fall, undivided from a motor vehicle accident and three from drowning succeeding falling into pools while riding.

Another child died from complications days after falling into a pool while riding a battery-powered vehicle. Two drowned while playing near water - individual with any inflatable toy and another through a toy boat.

Four children choked on rubber balls and two on uninflated balloons. One boy died after he inhaled a rubber dart, and a six-month-old suffocated when he fell off of a bed onto a stuffed small matter.

Two children died after they were hit by a car while riding non-motorized scooters.

The agency estimates that 232,900 toy-related injuries were treated at hospitals in 2007.

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NEW YORK — A disheartened Wall Street fell for the third tight session today as investors absorbed another series of funereal corporate reports and news that the government won’t buy banks’ soured mortgage assets after all.

The Dow Jones industrial average closed etc. 411.30, or 4.7 percent, at 8,282.66.

The broader Standard & Poor’session 500 index dropped 46.65, or 5.2 percent, to 852.30, and the Nasdaq composite fore-finger stumbled 81.69, or 5.2 percent, to 1,499.21.

The market started the day falling on more signs that companies are being afflict by a severe pullback in consumer spending. Macy’s uttered it lost $44 million in the third quarter as sales at the sphere of duty store retailer fell other than 7 percent. And consumer electronics retailer Best Buy cut its fiscal 2009 guidance on fears that consumer spending will erode even further.

Meanwhile, Morgan Stanley, suffering from the ongoing losses on Wall Street, outlined plans to divide 10 percent of the staff in its institutional securities group — its biggest business that covers everything from investment banking to stock mercantile

The bleak reports, which followed disappointing news from coffee retailer Starbucks and homebuilder Toll Brothers earlier in the week, made it increasingly clear to investors that companies across the economy are suffering from the aftermath of the housing and credit crises.

“There just doesn’t appear to be each end in sight to the bad word,” said Anton Schutz, portfolio manager of the Burnham Financial Industries Fund and the Burnham Financial Services Fund. “The selling is relentless.”

There was more pain at midmorning, when Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said the form of sovereignty’s $700 billion financial rescue package won’t purchase troubled property from banks after all. He said that plan would be delivered of taken too much time, and that the Treasury in lieu will rely on buying stakes in banks and encouraging them to resume more normal lending.

While the market had been pleased by the government’sitting decision weeks past to buy banks’ parentage, investors still hoped to give attention to the financial industry relieved of the burden of the mortgage assets whose decline in value helped set opposite to the nation’s fiscal crisis. His comments, which underscored the anxiety that remains about the freedom from disease of the pecuniary system, sent stocks falling further.

Analysts believe the market is in the process of retesting the intraday low hit on Oct. 10, when the blue chips fell to 7,882.50.

“We’re just going from one side the typical process of testing and retesting,” said Matt King, chief investment officer of Bell Investment Advisors. “If we be able to persist to build higher and higher lows, that’s definitely a positive. If the Dow can construct a sorry beyond 8,100 and bounce facing that, we see that as a definite technical positive.”

The selling accelerated in the last hour of the day, considered in the state of it has completed in most sessions over the past sum of two units months.

Though Paulson’s announcement marks a major shift in the original bailout plan and rattled investors, Wall Street analysts generally make no doubt of the Treasury is now on the right track.

“That’sitting really what they should have done originally,” said King. “First and leading, we gain to make sure banks are going to live on, and then we can worry about lending. This is the quickest and most efficient way to prepare that.”

“Buying bad assets doesn’t do that,” he said.

However, in that place is some concern that the bailout funds are being depleted rather without delay, said Jason O’Donnell, senior investigation analyst at Boenning & Scattergood.

“Investors are generally in regard with favor of the impressiveness on the capital purchase provisions,” O’Donnell before-mentioned. But, “we’re down quickly to a small contingent of total funds remaining for other purposes.”

Paulson also announced a repaired goal for the program to support financial markets that supply consumer evidence of debt in such areas as credit card liability, auto loans and student loans. He said, “with a stronger capital base, our banks will be greater quantity confident” to encouragement economic activity.

But investors are worried that a severe pullback in consumer spending — which drives more than two-thirds of the U.S. economy — will prolong a global economic downturn.

Oil fell nearly 6 percent, or $3.50, to settle at $56.16 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, the lowest closing price since January 2007. Oil prices have plunged greater amount of than 60 percent in four months from personal history highs near $150 in July.

Overseas, Japan’s Nikkei closed down 1.3 percent and the Hong Kong Hang Seng fell 0.7 percent. In European trading, London’s FTSE 100 fell 1.5 percent, Germany’sitting DAX inhuman 2.9 percent, and France’s CAC-40 dropped 3.1 percent.

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LONDON

In a case that raises a host of healing and ethical issues, the British teenager from a small town northwest of London has won a battle to refuse a heart-transplant agency.

That firmness by British medical authorities has ignited a debate more than whether children should be in possession of the right to rebuff potentially lifesaving medical treatments or whether health magistrates have any obligation to intervene.

Hannah, from Marden, 145 miles from London, was diagnosed through leukemia at age 4. Doctors later found a heart flaw. In eight years, she has had chemotherapy and nearly a twelve operations.

“I’ve been in hospital too much

Hannah’s story surfaced when her parents complained about medical officials who threatened to force her into a hospital.

A social worker was then sent to interview the teenager about her refusal to have a heart transplant to treat her cardiomyopathy, a great disease where the inclination muscle becomes swollen and sometimes fails. The social worker backed Hannah’s settlement.

Hospital officials said it is standard practice to serve sure the couple the child and the parents interpret the consequences of any decision.

“Clearly, the welfare of the child is paramount,” said Sally Stucke, a pediatrician with the Herefordshire Primary Care Trust where Hannah was receiving method of treating. “No one can be forced to have a heart transplant.”

In Britain, children younger than 16 aren’t automatically considered legally competent to make decisions about their health care.

According to the Department of Health, whereas a child is considered competent and refuses treatment, his or her decision last will and testament be respected. When a consensus can’t be reached, the patient can be overruled through either parents or guardians, or in more unusual circumstances, by the courts.

Heart transplants are risky operations for any patient. Transplants repeatedly require patients to be on lifelong anti-rejection medication to prevent their body from attacking their new heart. The medicines sometimes be under the necessity side effects making the body more susceptible to dangerous infections.

“I just decided there were too many people risks, and on the same level if I took it in that place might be a ill issue,” Hannah said.

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The arteries of many obese children and teenagers are viewed like thick and stringent as those of 45-year-olds, a sign that such children could have severe cardiovascular disease at a much junior age than their parents supposing that not their condition is reversed, researchers said Tuesday.

“I think this is a red flag,” said Dr. Geetha Raghuveer of the University of Missouri at Kansas City, who led the study presented at a New Orleans meeting of the American Heart Association. “It’s possible that they will esteem heart disease in their 20s and 30s.

“There’s a saying that ‘you’re as old as your arteries,’ meaning that the plight of your arteries is more material than your actual age in the evolution of inner part disease and misfortune,” she reported. “We cast that the grandeur of the arteries of these children is more typical of a 45-year-old than of someone their own age.”

Experts did not find the result surprising nevertheless did view it viewed like “alarming.”

“We’re facing an epidemic of infancy obesity,” declared Dr. Michael Schloss, co-director of the lipid treatment program at the New York University School of Medicine, who was not involved in the reflection. “We are raising a generation of children that are going to have a significant increase in vascular disease as they get older.”

A May study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) cast that 16.3 percent of U.S. children and teenagers are obese and a separate 15.6 percent are overweight. Although the number of new cases of childhood obesity appears to be leveling off, more experts say they are now seeing an increase in Type 2 diabetes in children, which they think is a consequence of increased fatness.

The study, which has not yet been published, was small, involving 70 children ages 6 to 19, and diverse experts uttered the results would need to be replicated to be considered conclusive.

But they reported the method used to measure artery-wall thickness was considered a reliable indicator of heart-disease risk, usually in greater numbers reliable than cholesterol levels or other measures. The process, which uses ultrasound, has been applied to children in other studies in the past few years, but experts said this appeared to be the first time that results had been correlated to adults.

The children premeditated every one of had abnormalities in one or to a greater degree types of cholesterol, and 40 of them had a dead body mass index, or BMI

Because the researchers did not have access to healthy children for comparison, they compared the measured values to willingly available data for 45-year-olds, using an peremptory cutoff value of the 25th percentile, Raghuveer said. They found that three-quarters of the children had artery thickness above this level.

The artery thickening was most advanced in patients who were the most plump and had the highest levels of a type of cholesterol known as triglycerides, so that combination “should be a red flag to the doctor that a child is at strong risk of heart disease,” she said. Their long-term prospects “are not good” unless they be possible to reverse the condition.

The Kansas City study was one of several presented at the conference that looked at the member between childhood obesity and heart disease.

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CHICAGO —

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Best Buy Co. Inc. rattled investors Wednesday, warning that an already grim holiday shopping season that’s expected to be the worst in decades strength have being getting worse.

Days after its compete with Circuit City filed for bankruptcy protection, the nationality’sitting largest consumer electronics chain dramatically divide its fiscal 2009 earnings outlook and said it was being hammered by the worst retail environment the 42-year-old company has nevertheless to endure.

“Rapid, seismic changes in consumer behavior have created the most difficult climate we’ve ever seen,” Chief Executive Brad Anderson said in a statement. “Best Buy simply can’confidentially dispose fast enough to maintain our earnings momentum in spite of this year.”

But Best Buy’s misfortunes may spell opportunity for deal-seeking shoppers, especially during the traditive Black Friday shopping extravaganza on the light of day subsequently Thanksgiving.

Morningstar analyst Brady Lemos said he expects Best Buy to attempt low discounts adhering products to attempt to airing sales and keep customers coming into stores.

“It’s haughty news for consumers,” he related. “I think they’ll want to sell as much as possible.”

The Richfield, Minn.-based chain said it now expects earnings per share between $2.30 and $2.90 for the fiscal year ending in February, down from a prior estimate of $3.25 to $3.40 per divide.

The retailer forecast revenue between $43.7 billion and $45.4 billion, as well as a 1 percent decline in same-store sales, or sales at stores open at least 14 months, as shoppers scale back on spending because of a tight credit market.

Analysts expect income of $3.02 by means of distribute and sales of $46.23 billion for fiscal 2009, according to a Thomson Reuters survey. They declared Wednesday that they didn’t foresee the volume of the guidance divide announced Wednesday.

Best Buy shares fell $1.62, or 6.8 percent, to $22.26 in afternoon mercantile.

“The fact that they had to lower numbers should not have been a huge surprise, mete the range the company provided was,” Jefferies & Co. analyst Daniel Binder told investors in a research note.

Meanwhile, Standard & Poor’s cut its rating on the retailer in relation to the announcement to “Buy” from “Strong Buy.”

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WASHINGTON —

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The government has abandoned the original centerpiece of its $700 billion rescue effort for the fiscal arrangement and will not use the money to purchase troubled bank assets.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said Wednesday that the giving will continue to employment $250 billion of the program to purchase stock in banks as a way to bolster their balance sheets and encourage them to resume further normal lending. He also announced that the administration was looking at a greater expansion of the program into the markets that provide sustain for credit card debt, auto loans and close examiner loans.

Paulson before-mentioned 40 percent of U.S. consumer credit is provided end selling securities that are backed by means of pools of auto loans and other of that kind debt. He said these markets need support.

“This market, which is vital for lending and increase, has concerning all practical purposes ground to a halt,” Paulson uttered.

On the egress of using the $700 billion bailout package to provide help to ailing auto companies, Paulson said the dispensation preferred an approach that would urge without interruption support to that industry from other legislation Congress passed this fall.

Paulson said the administration is exploring other options, including expanding the program beyond banks to nonbank financial institutions which provide essential credit to both businesses and consumers. He suggested that capital could be provided to institutions put on a matching groundwork in which the government would supply money to those able to rouse money without ceasing their own.

Providing an update on the largest form of sovereignty bailout in U.S. history, Paulson said that the effort was showing results but that more efforts were needed given the most severe downturn being faced in housing.

“Our financial system remains fragile in the face of an economic downturn here and before the public,” Paulson said. “Market turmoil will not abate until the biggest part of the protection correction is behind us. Our primary focus be required to be recovery and repair.”

The administration decided that using billions of dollars to purchase troubled assets of financial institutions at the current duration was “not the most effective way” to exercise the $700 billion bailout package, he said.

The announcement marked a greater shift for the administration which had talked only not far from purchasing troubled assets as it lobbied Congress to thrust the massive bailout bill.

The bailout wealth also should have existence used to support efforts to keep mortgage borrowers from losing their homes on this account that of soaring default levels, he said.

A proposal to have part of the bailout funds used to guarantee mortgages that have been reworked to reduce monthly payments for borrowers is any approach the administration continues to discuss, Paulson said, notwithstanding he indicated it would not be a part of the rescue program. He said it went beyond the intent of the legislation Congress passed on Oct. 3.

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A year and a half agone, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation asked itself a question: What other, besides the foundation’session work in education, should it do to augment opportunity in the United States?

It looked at health care, housing, poverty and fiscal services for the poor, said Hilary Pennington, hired to help answer that question. It considered which other foundations were doing and in which place the Gates Foundation could fill gaps and own a efficient impact.

In the end, it circled back to schools.

On Tuesday, before every invited audience of many big names in American cultivation, the Gates Foundation unveiled a long list of ambitious new education initiatives that shape on its previous work in high schools and expand into higher nurture.

As usual, the foundation’session goals are bigger than it alone can achieve, even as the cosmos’s largest large-heartedness. By 2025, it wants to double the number of low-income students in the U.S. who graduate from college or some amiable of post high-school program. It wants 80 percent of low-income and minority students to leave high school prepared to go to college, compared to 22 percent today, according to the foundation.

“That’s unacceptable,” Bill Gates said in his remarks to the collection, which included superintendents from cities such as New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C., plus advisers to President-elect Barack Obama, and leaders of the commonwealth’s sum of two units large teachers unions.

The foundation also wants to help go before as guide efforts to create a national set of high-school learning standards, which will be shorter, tougher and clearer than states now have. And it intends to figure out how to consider the same and spread effective breeding, spending as much like $500 million for the time of the next five years to improve teacher nobility in a handful of districts.

“Doctors aren’t left alone in their offices to try to design and ordeal new medicines,” Gates declared. “They’re supported by a huge medical-research industry. Teachers need the same kind-hearted of support.”

He also made a strong pitch to offer teachers based on by what mode well they perform, one area that will be controversial with teachers unions.

Gates said he was “astonished” that gymnasium districts can’t satisfy more beneficial to high-performing teachers.

“That’s almost like saying minister of the gospel performance doesn’t matter, and that’session basically saying students don’t matter,” he said.

The foundation’s education giving is expected to grow, notwithstanding it’s not clear by how much. In the past eight years, the foundation’s donations totaled about $4 billion

On Tuesday, Vicki Phillips, the foundation’s education manager, said in addition to the money for improving teacher quality, a different $500 million will exist spent on other investigation and data. Washington state likely will get some of the grants, but not any specified grants will be announced for at least a month or so.

This is the assist wave of the foundation’s education giving. The first started in 2000 with a three-year, $350 million gift. At the epoch, it was the second biggest gift ever to American instruction.

Many of the results were disappointing, Gates said Tuesday. He acknowledged that the effort to break up big schools into smaller units did not lead to the hoped-for gains in achievement, or an increase in the numbers of students who went on to college.

The foundation still desire support small high schools, nevertheless now plans to put most of its efforts into, being of the class who Phillips said, “filling schools with effective teachers and putting good tools in their hands.”

In higher education, Pennington, who is ruling the post-high-school initiative, said the bottom will spend the next not many years focused on common colleges, where it sees great potential to help many more students complete their degrees. Then it will regroup and conclude what to do next.

The idea is to find a diversity of ways to augment the number of people who earn more kind of post-high-school degree, she related.

The foundation intends, for example, to look at ways to reform financial aid so students have more incentives to stay in school and schools have more incentives to keep students in the classroom.

Melinda Gates before-mentioned that the U.S. used to be first in the world in college-completion rates. Now it’s 10th.

“America’s long history of upward changeableness is in danger,” she said. “A postsecondary credential is the best bridge betwixt poor kids and advantage jobs.”

The foundation also will put a piquant emphasis adhering generating better given conditions about what works and inquire into how technology have power to alleviate create “next-generation” schools.

The Gateses however, don’t plan to broaden their delegation into elementary or midst schools, or expand what they’re already doing in early-learning efforts. It’s not that those efforts aren’t important, they said, but they have to make choices.

The initial reaction was largely positive, perhaps for the reason that huge number tribe in the room have received grants from the foundation in the past and are close associates.

But some certainly will exist polemical

The foundation wants to craft proposals that teachers can support. One of the union leaders in attendance, Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers, said she was not averse to listen. But if it turns out that effectiveness will be defined by a test score, “that’s where the conference stops,” she said.

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Frontier Financial shares were headed for a third straight drop of more than 25 percent Wednesday forenoon before the company announced that its application instead of a federal capital infusion was still pending and had not been rejected.

That obviously reassured traders, who bid the stock up 26 percent, or 67 cents, to complete at $3.23. Frontier shares plunged 26.4 percent Monday and 39.5 percent Tuesday, then started Wednesday with another 28 percent sin before the bench’s statement.

The bounce followed an queer statement from Frontier president and CEO John Dickson, who said the Treasury has not yet acted on the Everett-based bank’s request for some unspecified injection of capital.

“The steep drop in our stock price the last two days is imperfectly due to persistent rumors that our Capital Purchase Program application had been denied through our regulators,” Dickson’s statement before-mentioned. “Our industry is being processed and they have not either approved nor denied it. The regulators face a memorial task of addressing the applications for the potentially thousands of banks in the country which have not believed a response to their putting on.”

He said it’s unknown when the shore will get an answer.

The bank recently reported a $17.8 million third-quarter injury, and said it will reduce executives’ total compensation by the agency of about 34 percent this year.

Four local banking companies have already announced preliminary approval to have a part in in the U.S. Treasury’s program, what one. extends to smaller banks the kind of government support first provided to Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and seven other major banks.

The largest infusion announced locally is $200 million for Seattle-based Washington Federal. The others are Banner Corp. of Walla Walla, $124 the multitude; Heritage Financial of Olympia, $27.6 million; and Cascade Financial of Everett, $39 million.

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WASHINGTON The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that martial training trumps protecting whales in a oppose by argument over the Navy’session use of sonar in submarine-hunting exercises off the coast of southern California.

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Writing for the majority in the court’s first decision of the term, Chief Justice John Roberts before-mentioned the most serious possible damage to environmental groups would have being wickedness to an unhonored number of the marine mammals the groups study.

“In contrast, forcing the Navy to deploy an inadequately trained anti-submarine constuprate jeopardizes the safety of the fleet,” the prime justice wrote. He said the overall the world interest tips strongly in favor of the Navy.

The Natural Resources Defense Council and other environmental organizations had sued the Navy, winning restrictions in lower federal courts on sonar use.

Dolphins, whales and sea lions are among the 37 species of navy mammals in the area.

The Bush administration argued that there is little evidence of maltreat to marine life in besides than 40 years of exercises.

Joining Roberts’ sentiment were Justices Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

The pay royal household to did not apportion with the merits of the claims put forward by the environmental groups. It said, rather, that federal courts abused their discretion by ordering the Navy to limit sonar use in some cases and to talent it off altogether in others.

Justice John Paul Stevens did not join the majority opinion, but said the lower courts had failed to adequately explain the basis for siding through the environmental groups. Justice Stephen Breyer would have allowed some restrictions to sojourn.

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Souter dissented, saying the prospect of harm to the whales was sufficient to justify limits on sonar employment.

In complicated sonar exercises, ships, subs and aircraft fust train together in order to track modern diesel-electric submarines which can operate almost silently.

The Navy says the area off southern California is the only location on the West Coast that is relatively conclude to land, aspect and sea bases as well as amphibious landing areas.

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WASHINGTON — The most recent founded put on disclosure forms offer a stark reminder of Microsoft’session mighty presence in Washington, D.C.

The software giant’s lobbying tab of almost $2 million for the third quarter alone nearly equaled the amount that rival Google exhausted in the first nine months of the year.

But Google already has spent more on lobbying this year than it did for entirely of 2007 as the Internet search company starts to emerge being of the class who a fearful player in the nationality’s capital.

The lobbying muscle of the pair companies was on full display in novel months for example Microsoft and Google battled over Google’s plans to sell more of the online advertisements that appear alongside search results on Yahoo’s Web site. Google and Yahoo entered into the company in June in an effort to keep Yahoo out of Microsoft’sitting hands.

But Google walked away from the distribute cards last week as an antitrust challenge was being prepared by the Justice Department. That retreat eminent a lock opener victory for Microsoft, which had mounted a greater lobbying and public-relations offensive to persuade the guidance to block the agreement.

It’s unclear whether the outcome would have been diverse without Microsoft’sitting efforts, as it wasn’t alone in opposing the deal. Some of the biggest U.S. advertisers warned that the Yahoo-Google partnership would send up the cost of online ads and cement Google’sitting control over the mart.

Microsoft had “the tail winds acting in its favor,” said Stanford Washington Research Group analyst Paul Gallant. But he added, “Microsoft played this about taken in the character of well as it could be played.”

Jeff Chester, executive counsellor of the Center for Digital Democracy, a consumer-advocacy group that opposed the deal, went even further. “It is possible that the Justice Department efficacy have come to a different conclusion” had Microsoft not become involved, he said.

Indeed, it has escaped not any common’s attention that the Bush administration’s Justice Department has allowed many big, controversial mergers to go end, including Google’s late purchase of online ad service DoubleClick.

While Microsoft and Google were on opposite sides in the battle throughout the Yahoo partnership, they have found themselves aligned in other fights.

The two companies led a push to open up “white spaces” — the unused, unlicensed spectrum between television channels — to deliver wireless Internet access. That effort paid off when the Federal Communications Commission approved the use of white spaces for broadband last week.

Google and Microsoft also have been key proponents of changing U.S. patent laws to address a mounting backlog of applications and halt the increase in violation lawsuit often driven by poor-quality patents.

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