The Star Online: Business
The Star Online: Business |
- Oil and gasoline prices on the rise again
- WikiLeaks getting credit card funds
- Grisly labels not so scary for cigarette sales
| Oil and gasoline prices on the rise again Posted: 07 Jul 2011 06:31 PM PDT NEW YORK: A funny thing happened on the way to lower oil and gasoline prices: They went up. Two weeks after the U.S. and other oil-importing nations took action that knocked down the price of oil to almost $90 a barrel, it's back around $100. Oil is rising again as investors bet that the economies of many countries, including the U.S., will improve in the second half of the year, and global demand for petroleum will rise. Benchmark oil for August delivery rose $2.02, or 2.1 percent, to settle at $98.67 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Brent crude gained $4.97, or 4.4 percent, to settle at $118.59 per barrel on the ICE Futures exchange. Higher oil prices mean higher gas prices. The U.S. average pump price rose 1.4 cents on Thursday to $3.583 a gallon (94 cents a liter), according to automobile club AAA and the Oil Price Information Service. That's up 86 cents a gallon from a year ago. Gas prices likely will remain choppy, rising or falling within a 20-cent range for the rest of the summer, according to Oil Price Information Service analyst Tom Kloza. They probably won't push back to near $4 a gallon, where they were in early May, barring floods or hurricanes that could affect refinery operations. While most experts agree that the world has plenty of oil, there are concerns that supplies could get tight as demand rises. The U.S. and other nations in the International Energy Agency have said they will release 60 million barrels of crude from emergency stocks to cover possible shortfalls caused by the shutdown of Libyan oil production because of ongoing unrest there. Libya supplied about 2 percent of the world's oil, much of it high-grade crude used for refined products like gasoline. Benchmark oil fell as low as $90.61 a barrel at the end of June following the IEA announcement. It then began a steady climb, as investors shrugged off the IEA move and focused on the prospect of growing demand in the second half of the year, especially in the expanding economies of China, India and Brazil. There are also more positive signs in the U.S. economy that could point to more jobs and more energy consumption. The Labor Department said Thursday that the number of Americans who applied for unemployment benefits fell last week to the lowest level in seven weeks. Payroll processor ADP said the private sector added 157,000 jobs last month, which was more than double what economists had forecast. In addition, U.S. factory orders rose 0.8 percent in May to $445.3 billion, which was almost 32 percent higher than the low point during the recession, reached in March 2009. In other Nymex trading for August contracts, heating oil rose 13.87 cents to settle at $3.1020 per gallon and gasoline futures added 12.94 cents to settle at $3.1270 per gallon. Natural gas lost 8.4 cents to settle at $4.138 per 1,000 cubic feet. - AP Latest business news from AP-Wire Full Feed Generated by Get Full RSS, sponsored by USA Best Price. |
| WikiLeaks getting credit card funds Posted: 07 Jul 2011 06:29 PM PDT LONDON: WikiLeaks has again begun accepting credit card donations, a company affiliated with the secret-spilling site said Thursday. Andreas Fink, the chief executive of Icelandic payment processor DataCell, told The Associated Press that Visa and MasterCard were again processing payments to WikiLeaks after a seven-month hiatus. Fink claimed the move as a tacit admission of guilt from the credit card companies, but it may well have been accidental. Visa Europe spokesman Simon Kleine told AP that processing the payments was "not something that we've sanctioned" and that the company was investigating. An email and phone calls seeking comment from MasterCard were not immediately returned. Visa and MasterCard pulled the plug on the company, DataCell ehf, in early December, shortly after WikiLeaks began publishing about 250,000 U.S. State Department cables. But Fink said Thursday that card services had been restored - saying that lawyers had made sure of it by making test donations. "We have seen donations going through," he said, although he added that he wouldn't get a clear idea of how much money was flowing into WikiLeaks' coffers for another couple of days. Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. were two of a host of financial and Internet services companies which severed their links with WikiLeaks following the publication of the State Department cables. PayPal Inc., Amazon.com, EveryDNS and others also cut their ties with the site amid intense government criticism of the online activist group - leading WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to accuse them of bowing to pressure from the Pentagon. Last week, WikiLeaks and DataCell said they were preparing to take the credit card companies to court in Denmark. On its website, WikiLeaks claims that the block placed on WikiLeaks by companies such as MasterCard and Visa have cost it more than 90 percent of its donations, or $15 million. It has offered no explanation as to how those figures were derived. The company is still raising money through bitcoins, a kind of online currency, and direct bank transfers to accounts in Iceland and Germany. - AP Online: http://www.datacell.com Full Feed Generated by Get Full RSS, sponsored by USA Best Price. |
| Grisly labels not so scary for cigarette sales Posted: 07 Jul 2011 06:26 PM PDT RICHMOND, Virginia: The top U.S. tobacco companies' sales aren't expected to go up in smoke despite new grisly warning labels that are set to appear on cigarettes packs next year. The graphic labels, which were released in June by the Food and Drug Administration and include an image of rotting teeth and gums, will cause a decline of less than one percent in overall U.S. tobacco revenues in 2013, according to a recent analysis by research firm IBISWorld. An average person in the U.S. smokes fifteen cigarettes a day at a cost of about $1,500 per year, which translates to about $300 million in lost revenue. That's only a fraction of the estimated $43.8 billion in revenue for the tobacco industry in 2013, the firm's calculation show. The analysis, however, does not take into account the cost of redesigning and printing new cigarette packages, the number of people who won't start smoking because of the warnings, or the smokers who cut down on their habit. "Gradually, the warnings could impact the smoking population," said IBISWorld cigarette and tobacco industry analyst Mary Gotaas. "But in the near term, it won't have much of an impact." The nine warning labels are required by federal law to take up half of the pack, both front and back, by the fall of 2012. The labels, which represent the biggest change in cigarette packs in the U.S. in 25 years, also include images of the corpse of a dead smoker, diseased lungs, a smoker wearing an oxygen mask and a man wearing an "I Quit" T-shirt. The warnings must also appear in advertisements and constitute 20 percent of each ad, and cigarette makers will have to run all nine labels on a rotating basis. The FDA estimates that the labels will cut the number of smokers by 213,000 in 2013, with a smaller additional reduction through 2031. Aside from the potential to get people to quit smoking - or prevent them from starting - the labels also could have a huge marketing effect for cigarette makers by making their brand names less important, said Deborah Mitchell, executive director of the Center for Brand and Product Management at the University of Wisconsin. Being unable to differentiate cigarette packs, Mitchell said, consumers will care less about what brand they're smoking, and more about how much it will cost them. That's a potential concern for Marlboro, the nation's top-selling cigarette, and its owner Richmond-based Altria Group Inc., parent company of the nation's largest cigarette maker, Philip Morris USA. "A great brand like Marlboro, it's like they cast this spell," Mitchell said, referring to the brand's cowboy mythology. "If the spell is broken, for example, with this really negative packaging ... all at once, Marlboro is just another brand of tobacco." Despite the estimated minimal impact on revenue, in a federal lawsuit, some of the major companies argue that the warnings will relegate their cigarette brand names to the bottom half of the cigarette package, making it difficult or impossible to see. - AP Latest business news from AP-Wire Full Feed Generated by Get Full RSS, sponsored by USA Best Price. |
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