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New York, NY, United States (AHN) – It’s the economy that keeps Americans up at night, on edge and worried, revealed a new CNN/ORC International poll released Friday.

Some 70 percent said that things are not going well in the United States, with just three out of 10 saying things are okay, putting the state of the economy as the top worry and the most pressing issue heading into the new year.

More than half of those surveyed, or 57 percent, said the economy is the most important issue facing the country at present, and half named unemployment as the most important issue facing the economy. The deficit came in a very distant second with 16 percent.

Even as the payroll tax extension bill looms, only 7 percent of Americans named taxes as the most important economic issue in the United States.

The CNN poll of 1.085 American adults was conducted by ORC International via phone between Dec. 16 and Dec. 18.

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Paris, France (AHN) – Moody’s announced Friday it was downgrading the credit rating of all three of France’s top banks because of the difficulty they have borrowing money.

Credit Agricole and BNP Paribas went down one notch from a Aa2 rating to Aa3, which is the fourth-highest investment grade rating. Societe Generale fell from Aa3 to A1, the fifth-highest rating. The best rating a bank can get is AAA.

BNP is the largest bank, Societe Generale is second and Credit Agricole is third.

The credit rating agency also gave each of the three a negative outlook and warned that it might downgrade them again.

Moody’s said that not only had liquidity and funding conditions deteriorated at each of the banks, but that it was likely the situation would become worse because of further funding pressures from the European debt crisis, which has deteriorated.

The ratings cuts for these three banks follow Moody’s previous downgrades in September of Credit Agricole and Societe Generale.

Part of the problem with liquidity comes from the fact that many money market funds in the United States have refused to lend to European banks since the summer. That has made it difficult for eurozone banks to maintain borrowing in U.S. dollars.

The European Central Bank on Thursday announced new measures to make sure that eurozone banks do not run out of cash.

During the past few months, both BNP and Societe Generale announced asset sales aimed at reducing their reliance on short-term wholesale funding.

However, Moody’s cautioned that if too many European banks try to sell assets at the same time it would depress their value and result in selling them at a loss.

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Berlin, Germany (AHN) – German exports fell by a larger percentage than forecast for October because of lower demand from southern European markets affected by the economic crisis.

Exports fell by 3.6 percent in October compared to September. It was larger than the 1 percent drop expected and the largest decrease seen by Germany in six months. By contrast, exports only fell by 1 percent in September compared to August.

Germany is Europe’s largest economy and it has been the economic engine for the region during the ongoing economic crisis.

In addition, German imports fell by 1 percent, which was also more than expected.

Germany saw its trade surplus fall from $23 billion to $15.5 billion, which is about 5.5 percent of the nations’ gross domestic product. Moreover, the surplus in the current account fell to $13.8 billion from $21.4 billion a month earlier.

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New York, NY, United States (AHN) – Black Friday is supposed to be all about rushing to stores, fighting the crowds and waiting in long lines to get the best deals. But this year, it was online shopping that really paid off for retailers and customers.

Online sales jumped 39.3 percent on Thanksgiving Day, and 24.3 percent on Black Friday compared to the same days last year, reports Coremetrics, which tracks real-time data from 500 retailers in the apparel, department store, health and beauty, and home goods categories.

Coremetrics reported that sales were strong in all categories. Online home goods sales jumped 48.8 percent, apparel sales soared 47.2 percent, and the health and beauty categories enjoyed a 34.2 percent increase year-over-year.

The jump in online sales was helped by Internet-only specials and exclusives. Leading shoppers online were free shipping deals.

Many brick and mortar stores, such as Best Buy, also offered their in-store doorbuster deals online for the first time this year.

Department stores saw the biggest gains in online shopping, with online sales rising 59 percent compared to last year.

While more were shopping online, they were not necessarily spending more. The average value per order remained relatively unchanged from last year at $190.10, and the number of items per order fell from 7.4 percent to 6.4 percent.

Those holding out for better deals may find them on Cyber Monday. According to the National Retail Federation’s Shop.org eHoliday survey, eight out of 10 online retailers plan to offer promotions on Cyber Monday. Data tracking firm ComScore forecasts record sales of $1.2 billion.

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United States (AHN) – 117 minutes

In theaters November 18, 2011

Rating: PG-13, Drama

Breaking Dawn never breaks down.

Instead, it holds up its end of the bargain for the Twilight series and its loyal fans, as The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 surfaces as the first-half of a finale with a one-year intermission.

The romantic modern-day vampire drama that kicked off the big-screen series, Twilight (2008), cast quite a spell, which is why we’re now four movies in out of five.

The ponderous first sequel, The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009), dipped slightly in impact, but not so much as to remove the wanna-see factor from the next sequel, the ultra-romantic, revenge-driven The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (2010), which not only restored the glory of the original but presented the series’ strongest metaphor yet for teen angst and offered the most accomplished performances yet from the three principals.

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1, which will be followed in a year’s time by Part 2, is (taking a page from the Harry Potter series) the first half of the final book — a 2008 best-seller, massive at 754 pages — in the series of supernatural horror-romance novels for Young Adults by Stephenie Meyer.

Breaking Dawn finds human Bella and vampire Edward — played, as if you didn’t know, by Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson — on their mixed-marriage honeymoon in Brazil, having postponed their decision to transform Bella into a vampire and thus join Edward’s extended, never-aging family.

Before long, Bella discovers that she’s pregnant. And the more Bella shows, the more emaciated she becomes, so concerned and desperate Edward turns to Bella’s rejected romantic suitor, Jacob, played again by Taylor Lautner, a werewolf who is estranged from his tribe.

Bella then experiences a nearly fatal childbirth when her half-vampire daughter Renesmee joins their family.

Bill Condon (Dreamgirls, Kinsey, Gods and Monsters), who’s new to the series’ directorial chair and shot this and its successor back-to-back, tries to follow suit and fit in, aiming to please the series’ rabid fans, whom we’ve come to know as Twi-hards. And he delivers, inviting them as guests at the Bella-Edward nuptials and playing to their familiarity with the material with a surprising amount of unforced humor.

But once again, the film is let down by patently fake special effects, thus immediately undermining the overall illusion every single time that the wolves appear. And especially when they speak, which they should never do. If the level of CGI work isn’t improved by the time the next installment surfaces — one promising to contain more than its share of effects-heavy action sequences — the flight of this popular series could be in for one very bumpy landing.

Screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg, who has scripted all four of the Twilight films, sets the table for the series’ conclusion with a narrative that moves slowly and sometimes seems dramatically undercranked. To some degree, the level of urgency is diminished because of Breaking Dawn’s place in the series’ progression. That is, we know throughout that resolution will remain a long way off and that this is part of a connected and continuous double feature.

Still, the irresistibility of youthful passion remains the controlling metaphor of the series, as film number four takes its rightful place alongside its predecessors.

As for the three leads, they have certainly inhabited their roles long and often enough to make them feel lived-in, even if they sometimes seem to be ever so slightly on automatic pilot. Playing it safe in this way in a blockbuster series aimed at adoring fans may ultimately be the wise approach, but it also diminishes the film’s capacity for surprise and stimulation. But not to anywhere near a fatal degree.

And give Condon and Rosenberg credit for finding exactly the right place to end Part 1 and trigger the anticipation campaign for Part 2. This neat trick of releasing two halves of a story with the ending of the first part as a dynamic launching pad for the many-months-away second part is executed as slickly as it was in Kill Bill.

The penultimate PG-13-rated installment in an understandably and deservedly popular fantasy series, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 is so well handled and ends so effectively, this should be a very tough wait and a very long year for Twi-hards.

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Colombo, Sri Lanka (IRIN) – Cottage industries such as poultry farming, home gardening and bee-keeping are becoming increasingly popular among returnees in Sri Lanka’s former northern conflict zone as alternatives to regular jobs, officials say.

“We have seen a lot of applications for loans for poultry and home gardens,” Prem Kumar, area manager for the Bank of Ceylon, one of Sri Lanka’s two largest state-owned banks, told IRIN in northern Vavuniya District.

“When jobs become harder to find, people find it easier to start something on their own, especially so when they see there are opportunities to succeed.”

With job creation low , unemployment at about 20 percent and under-employment around 30 percent, cottage industries now play a vital role in generating income in the former war zone, say government officials.

“They have now become an important part of income-generation efforts,” Piencia Charles, the country’s top government official for Vavuniya District, explained.

High on the list is poultry farming. “The reason is because there is a ready-made market in the villages. You really don’t have to worry too much about transport,” Kanagasabapathi Udayakumar, the general manager of the Vavuniya North Multi-purpose Cooperative Society (MPC), noted.

A kilogramme of chicken sells for around Rs350 (US$3) and the MPC itself made a profit of around Rs80,000 ($730) when it recently sold a flock of 200 birds.

“This time we have around 500, targeting Christmas,” Udayakumar said.

In the village of Allankulam in Mullaitivu District, Selvakumar Arundha hopes to make a similar profit from her 100 birds. She started the farm with an initial investment of $270 pooled by six women in early 2010. Now each one earns about $2.50 per day from the farm.

“Most of us used the money we earned from taking part in cash-for-work programmes,” she said.

Another group of women has formed a similar venture involving a small vegetable plot.

“Next time, we hope to try tobacco. It will give us a better profit,” Thangarasa Sivakolandy, one of the members, said.

The International Labour Organization (ILO) is supporting 30 single female-headed households in the Vavuniya North region to set up home paddy parboiling operations by January 2012.

Under the scheme, each woman will be given a grant of Rs75,000 ($680) to buy the large pots needed for the parboiling and build a small storage area.

According to ILO officials, the women will be linked to five small mills near their villages, also supported by the organization, which will buy the paddy. A kilogramme of paddy will make them a profit of around Rs5 and the mills will buy the paddy for at least two years. ILO plans to fund 10 such mills and 60 households.

The MPC’s Udayakumar sees another advantage in popularizing parboiling and milling within the region. “We won’t fall prey to the price mafia,” he said.

During the last paddy harvest, outside buyers drove down prices because of the lack of processing facilities in the region. “Farmers could not keep the harvest so they were buying at prices sometimes 40 percent below market rates.”

Bee-keeping potential

“With over 50,000 hectares of jungle in the Vavuniya North Division, there may be potential to develop a bee-keeping and honey-producing industry,” the ILO said in a recent project update.

One person could manage 10 hives easily, which would provide an income of about Rs72,000 ($650) during the two annual harvesting seasons, Kiruja Sivasubaramanium, an ILO official working on the project, explained.

Meanwhile, Udayakumar said that once the roads connecting remote villages such as Nedunkerni became more easily accessible, the importance of cottage industries would increase even more, at least in the short term.

“Now, because of transport difficulties, it is very hard to take fresh produce like vegetables to the south. Once the road is better everyone will want to grow vegetables, which fetch higher prices than paddy,” he said.

A few months earlier, eggplant became a particularly popular commercial vegetable in Nedunkerni and Olumadu but soon almost everyone stopped growing them.

“Because buyers from outside were making a killing, buying at Rs10 per kilo here and selling at between Rs30 to 40 [elsewhere],” Udayakumar said.

According to the UN , more than 380,000 war-displaced have returned to Sri Lanka’s former conflict zone, making the re-establishment of local livelihoods a key component to recovery efforts.

ap/ds/mw

– Provided by Integrated Regional Information Networks.

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New York, NY, United States (AHN) – U.S. stocks slipped into the red Friday morning after uncertainties lingered following Thursday’s European deal to tackle the eurozone debt crisis.

Shortly after 10 a.m., the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 3 points, the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index was off 5 points and the NASDAQ fell 11 points.

All eyes are still focused on Europe and the financial crisis that the eurozone faces. Analysts are questioning if the $610 billion rescue fund leaders agreed on Thursday will be enough.

On the U.S. economic front, U.S. personal spending rose 0.6 percent in September in line with estimates, while personal income rose a scant 0.1 percent, short of estimates of 0.3 percent.

Merck reported third quarter profits of 94 cents a share and revenues of $12 billion, topping estimates. Chevron’s quarterly profits topped Wall Street estimates but sales fell well short of forecasts. Whirlpool announced plans to cut roughly 10 percent of its workforce, or 5,000 jobs, after reporting its sales growth was growing much slower than anticipated.

Commodities were also lower. Light sweet crude fell $1.93 to $92.16 a barrel, and gold gave back $8.90, last trading at $1,739 a troy ounce.

Stocks surged 339 points on Thursday after the eurozone agreement. U.S. markets are on track for their best October performance on record.

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New York, NY, United States (AHN) – From 2000 to 2010, the median income in the United States fell 7 percent after adjusting for inflation, the U.S. Census Bureau reported.

The decline marks the worst 10-year performance on record, dating back to 1967. And what’s worse is that according to economists in the latest Wall Street Journal forecasting survey, income will not catch up before 2021.

Census Bureau data also revealed that a college degree doesn’t hold the clout and earnings power it once had. Only advanced degree holders managed to eck out record earnings increases over the past decade.

High unemployment and sluggish economic growth are both having an impact on American wages. Improvement looks a way off.

According to forecasts, the jobless rate, currently at 9.1 percent is only expected to decline to 8.2 percent by the end of 2013, a decline of less than one percentage point over more than two years.

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Washington, DC, United States (AHN) – The U.S. economy is “tipping into a new recession,” the esteemed Economic Cycle Research Institute says.

Moreover, there is absolutely nothing that policy makers can do to stop it.

In a statement on its website, ECRI stated that it warned its clients last week about the looming double-dip recession. The only thing ECRI says it is not certain of is whether the recession is just around the corner or if it has already started.

The ECRI also made a case for why people should heed its forecast.

“ECRI’s recession call isn’t based on just one or two leading indexes, but on dozens of specialized leading indexes, including the U.S. Long Leading Index, which was the first to turn down – before the Arab Spring and Japanese earthquake – to be followed by downturns in the Weekly Leading Index and other shorter-leading indexes. In fact, the most reliable forward-looking indicators are now collectively behaving as they did on the cusp of full-blown recessions, not ‘soft landings,’” the organization said.

In addition, the institute said the Economist, a leading financial publication, had noted the ECRI was the only entity that had correctly called three recessions without any false calls in between.

The ECRI explained what a new recession means for the nation.

“It’s important to understand that recession doesn’t mean a bad economy – we’ve had that for years now. It means an economy that keeps worsening, because it’s locked into a vicious cycle,” ECRI said in a statement. “It means that the jobless rate, already above 9 percent, will go much higher, and the federal budget deficit, already above a trillion dollars, will soar.”

“Here’s what ECRI’s recession call really says: if you think this is a bad economy, you haven’t seen anything yet. And that has profound implications for both Main Street and Wall Street,” the institute added.

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Berlin, Germany (AHN) – The Bundestag, Germany’s Parliament, agreed on Thursday to increase the country’s guarantees on European Union loans to $284 billion (€211 billion) from $167 billion (€124 billion).

The 523 to 85 vote gave the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) power to purchase bonds in secondary markets, enable bank recapitalization and offer precautionary credit lines.

The Bundestag also approved the increase in the EFSF to $599 billion (€440 billion). The measure was approved because of the support of the Christian Democrats, Free Democrats, Social Democrats and Greens.

The approval of the hike represents a victory for German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who spent weeks campaigning for approval of the July 21 agreement by eurozone leaders. Germany holds the largest amount of Greek government bonds.

However, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schauble and Economics Minister Philipp Roster said any further increase was out of the question.

With the European Commission expecting the larger EFSF in place by mid-October, zone leaders are now focusing on how to prevent the region’s debt crisis from spreading further. One of the measures they are eyeing is the establishment of a permanent rescue fund that would provide more capital and tools to manage defaults.

However, the chairman of a private-equity firm said the newly approved bailout package would not be enough to solve the eurozone’s debt problems. He suggested that the amount should be in the trillion-euro level, not just billion.

Austria is expected to ratify the expanded rescue fund on Friday, while four other countries have yet to vote on it.

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