MID-DAY UPDATE: Obama defends U.S. spending on no-fly zone, consumer spending up 0.7% in February
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MID-DAY UPDATE: Obama defends U.S. spending on no-fly zone, consumer spending up 0.7% in February
Here are today’s top headlines from the Marketplace Morning Report and around the web
- Consumer spending was up last month and grew at the biggest clip since October. Thanks to cars and gas for those cars. You can check out Marketplace’s coverage here.
- President Barack Obama will address the nation tonight about the situation in Libya. Critics are asking about the financial costs of the U.S. mission there. Here’s more Marketplace coverage.
- News this morning that the gourmet fruit seller Harry and David is filing for bankruptcy. The 77-year-old Oregon company has had a hard time luring consumers to its expensive fruit gift baskets because of the recession.
- Dutch electronics giant Philips warned today it’ll probably lose a couple hundred million dollars selling TVs in the first quarter of the year.
- Japan’s top business lobby gave its government the green light to scrap a planned cut in the corporate tax rate and urged firms to look at shifting production to western Japan.
- It seems the pending takeover of T-mobile by rival AT&T hasn’t yet stopped T-Mobile from running ads making fun of AT&T’s service. At least one of T-Mobile’s commercials, which says “Sometimes you just gotta pay more to be slower. It makes sense if you don’t think about it.” That ad is still running. Which means somebody in T-Mobile ad sales probably just got added to the list of “redundant jobs” when the merger goes through.
- Starting today, Russia is staying on Daylight Saving Time all the time. No more changing clocks. When implementing the new plan, Russian President Dimitry Medvedev said the time change had negative effects on people and even animals. He cited cows who were thrown off by the changed scheduled of their milking routine. Please, think of the unhappy cows.
You can read the rest of the headlines from the Marketplace Morning Report here.
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