News Summary: S&P 500 ends week at a 5-year high

DECEMBER JOBS: Stocks headed higher, capping a good week, after a report showed that hiring held up in December during the tense fiscal negotiations in Washington, with U.S. employers adding 155,000 jobs.FIVE-YEAR HIGH: Stocks moved up at the end of the day pushing the Standard & Poor's to its highest close in five years.GOOD START: Stocks got the year off to a strong start, surging after lawmakers...

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Fed officials eye timeline for ending asset purchases

SAN DIEGO (Reuters) - The Federal Reserve could halt its asset purchases this year if the economy improves and unemployment drops, two top Fed officials said on Friday, a view seconded by most economists at Wall Street's top financial institutions.Meanwhile, another top Fed official warned the U.S. central bank's aggressive easing plan threatens the Fed's credibility.St. Louis Fed President James...

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Wall Street cheers "cliff" deal, but only for now

NEW YORK (AP) — When lawmakers delivered a long-delayed, last-minute agreement on the budget, Wall Street celebrated. And it would be easy to think that the surge in the Dow the following day meant that investors had put their concerns about Washington's political gridlock behind them.The Dow Jones industrial average surged on the news, but that doesn't mean the volatility is over. In fact, there...

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Turkey: Military will keep fighting rebel Kurds

ANKARA, Turkey (AP) — Turkey will press ahead with military operations against autonomy-seeking Kurdish rebels even as Turkish officials hold talks with the rebels' jailed leader to end the 28-year-old conflict, officials said Friday.Last week, the government confirmed that Turkey's intelligence agency was talking to rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan with the aim of convincing the Kurdistan Workers' Party,...

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Britain's top tabloid scolds Argentina over the Falklands

BUENOS AIRES/LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's biggest-selling newspaper had a simple message for Argentina in an editorial published on Friday in the South American country: "HANDS OFF" the Falkland Islands.The seven-paragraph epistle, penned by the populist Sun tabloid and published in Argentina's main English language newspaper, came in response to fresh demands from President Cristina Fernandez to...

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Excavators head to Myanmar to find WWII Spitfires

LONDON (AP) — An airplane-obsessed farmer, a freelance archaeologist, and a team of excavators are heading from Britain to the Myanmar city of Yangon on Saturday to find a nearly forgotten stash of British fighter planes thought to be carefully buried beneath the former capital's airfield.The venture, backed with a million-dollar guarantee from a Belarusian videogame company, could uncover dozens...

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Pakistani girl shot by Taliban leaves UK hospital

Three months after she was shot in the head for daring to say girls should be able to get an education, a 15-year-old Pakistani hugged her nurses and smiled as she walked out of a Birmingham hospital.Malala Yousufzai waved to a guard and smiled shyly as she cautiously strode down the hospital corridor talking to nurses in images released Friday by the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham."She is quite...

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Christmas updates to shine light on UK retail prospects

The prospects for consumer spending and the broader British economy will be in focus next week when a host of retailers, including Marks & Spencer and Tesco, report Christmas sales figures.Many store groups found the going tough last year as consumers fretted over job security and a squeeze on incomes.With wage rises failing to match inflation and another round of government spending cuts slated...

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Has Obama Been Good for Millionaires?

The question of whether Americans are better off than they were four years ago depends, of course, on the American.For the 12 million unemployed, the answer is most certainly no.But for many of America's millionaires, the answer may be more affirmative.A new study from WealthInsight, the London-based wealth-research and data firm (and yes, they are non-partisan), showed that the United States added...

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Obama Wins 2012 Election: Why Your Taxes Are Going Up

When President Obama and the new Congress begin to tackle important legislation and federal policy in January, one of the key issues will be how to reform America's byzantine tax code.Obama campaigned on a platform to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans, declaring that millionaires and billionaires need to "pay their fair share." The president proposed the highly controversial "Buffett Rule,"...

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