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Audiences found the vampire romance "Twilight" infectious in its opening weekend, pushing the movie to a take of $70.6 million.

Catherine Hardwicke's film also enjoyed the biggest opening ever for a female director, blowing away the previous standard of $41.1 million set by Mimi Leder's "Deep Impact" in 1998.

Drawing from its huge fan base of teenage girls, who fell for Stephenie Meyer's novel of forbidden love between brooding vampire Edward Cullen and bookish high schooler Bella Swan, "Twilight" made a whopping $20,636 per theater, according to Sunday morning estimates.

And the fangirls will get another taste soon enough: Summit Entertainment, which released "Twilight," announced during the weekend that it's going ahead with production of "New Moon," based on the second book in Meyer's internationally best-selling series. Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart will return as its star-crossed lovers, but whether Hardwicke will be at the helm again is still being determined.

The laid-back Hardwicke, who went bodyboarding at sunset Saturday to take her mind off this high-pressure weekend, said Sunday morning that she was heading to a meeting later in the day to discuss her possible involvement in "New Moon."

"I want to be sure that it's going to be done right. I don't want to rush into it," she said. "It's not like `Friday the 13th' or `Halloween,' you can't just do it super fast and knock another one out. I want to understand their plans and all that."

Hardwicke, whose previous films include "Thirteen" and "Lords of Dogtown," also said she was thrilled about the prospect that the success of "Twilight" will inspire other women and young girls to pursue a career in filmmaking.

"I hope not just women but all minorities get enthused and encouraged by it. I look at the (Directors Guild of America) calendar, at the pictures of everyone that had different movies each month, and it's usually 22-29 different directors, and almost every month there's one female and maybe one minority," she said. "We've been having a lot of events, talking to a lot of fans, and so many kids of course are madly in love with Robert but tons of kids of every kind (and) girls are coming up to me and saying `I want to direct now, I'm writing a screenplay now, you're my inspiration.' I think it's great that people are getting excited."

The big opening for "Twilight" also helps put Summit Entertainment on the map, said Richie Fay, the company's president of domestic distribution. Summit has only been around since April 2007 and "Twilight," its sixth release, cost just $37 million to make.

"It certainly says what we've been saying all along, that we can do more with less," he said. When Warner Bros. pushed "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" from this weekend to a July 2009 debut, and Summit jumped to move "Twilight" from Dec. 12 into that spot on the schedule, "that decision was made in a day. I don't know that the major studios have that ability."

The tremendous take for "Twilight" far exceeded expectations, which had been set around $50 million.

"Teen girls rule the earth," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of Media By Numbers. "If you look back at the `Hannah Montana' movie, how well that did, and now this movie, the teen girl audience will never be ignored again or underestimated. It was always teen boys who were the coveted ones, but someone finally caught on to the idea that girls love movies, too, and if you create something that they're into, that they're passionate about, they will come out in big numbers and drive the box office."

The other major debut of the weekend, Walt Disney's 3-D animated "Bolt," made $27 million to take third place. Featuring the voices of John Travolta and Miley Cyrus, "Bolt" follows the cross-country journey of a dog who plays a superhero on television, but sadly realizes he has no magical powers once he gets separated from his "person."

Chuck Viane, Disney's head of distribution, said "Twilight" took a bite out of everyone's box office this weekend. If the vampire saga hadn't been around, Viane said, Disney would have expected an opening of at least $30 million.

"Obviously we believe in the Thanksgiving holiday in a big, big way," he said. "We've always viewed this as one of those 10-day marathons between opening day and the end of the Thanksgiving weekend."

Last weekend's No. 1 movie, "Quantum of Solace," came in second with $27.4 million. The latest James Bond extravaganza has now grossed $109.5 million, and it crossed the $100 million mark faster than any other film in the franchise, said Rory Bruer, head of distribution for Sony. It's also made $309 million internationally.

"We're in great shape. We're way ahead of where we were with `Casino Royale,'" said Bruer, referring to the last Bond picture, which also starred Daniel Craig as a more visceral incarnation of 007.

Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Media By Numbers LLC. Final figures will be released Monday.

1. "Twilight," $70.5 million.

2. "Quantum of Solace," $27.4 million.

3. "Bolt," $27 million.

4. "Madagascar 2: Escape 2 Africa," $16 million.

5. "Role Models." $7.2 million.

6. "Changeling," $2.6 million.

7. "High School Musical 3: Senior Year," $2 million.

8. "Zack and Miri Make a Porno," $1.7 million.

9. "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas," $1.67 million.

10. "The Secret Life of Bees," $1.28 million.

Sun Microsystems Inc. plans to cut up to 6,000 jobs, or 18 percent of its global work force, as sales of its high-end computer servers have collapsed.

The drastic move announced Friday highlights Sun's desperation to cut costs and survive as an independent company. Sun's shares have fallen so steeply they've crossed an ominous threshold, driving the company's market value below its cash on hand.

That means investors believe the company itself is essentially worthless. After eight years of devastating financial problems and multiple attempts at restructuring, Sun's latest woes have ramped up speculation that one of the most storied names in computing could be snapped up dirt-cheap by a bigger rival. Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM Corp., and Dell Inc. are all possible suitors.

"The magnitude of the work force reduction is certainly overdue," said Brent Bracelin, an analyst with Pacific Crest Securities.

Bracelin said the move puts Sun in a better position to return to profitability, but added that the company is facing hard questions about a possible sale or spinning off parts of the business.

Sun shares fell 2 cents to $4.06 in midday trading Friday.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company said the job cuts will include between 5,000 and 6,000 of its 33,000 employees over the next year. The cuts should save an estimated $700 million to $800 million annually.

Sun expects charges of $500 million to $600 million spread out over the next 12 months to pay severance and other restructuring costs.

Sun also said its software chief, Rich Green, has resigned, as the company splits its software division into three new business groups. One will handle Sun's Java programming language and open-source database offerings. Another will be responsible for Sun's Solaris operating system, which is used to run servers. The third will focus on developing programs for "cloud computing" services delivered over the Internet.

"These are hard but necessary changes," Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's chief executive, said in an interview.

He said the company has been deeply wounded by the credit crunch, because customers can't get loans to buy expensive servers. A quarter of the Sun's business comes from the ailing financial services sector.

Schwartz said the restructuring of the software division reflects the company's increased focus on open-source software, whose underlying code is available for free. Sun's strategy, which some analysts believe isn't paying off as promised, is to sell support services for that software.

Schwartz said he's pleased with the company's process in picking up new customers through its software offerings.

The company's problem is "isolated to a single line item": sales of its high-end servers, which fell 27 percent in the latest quarter to $576 million. That's a staggering shortfall for a division that contributes a quarter of Sun's overall revenue. Sun's sales last year were nearly $14 billion.

"Across the board we feel great about our direction," Schwartz said.

Breaking up the business units also serves another purpose: it packages them nicely for possible spinoffs or sale, analysts said.

Sun's share price gives the company a market value of roughly $3 billion. Yet at the end of September, Sun had $3.1 billion in cash on hand. The gap indicates extreme pessimism about the company's prospects.

Sun posted a loss of $1.7 billion in the latest quarter, largely because it wrote down the value of the business by $1.45 billion.

At the height of the dot-com boom, Sun's stock price, adjusting for splits since then, topped $250 per share. The company was riding strong sales to Web startups and boasted that its servers "put the dot in dot-com," a catch phrase that became a punch line after the meltdown when Sun's sales shriveled.

The company has done several rounds of big layoffs in the last three years. Sun has cut 2,700 jobs since August of last year in two separate restructurings. The company had previously cut about 4,000 jobs after Schwartz took over as CEO from co-founder Scott McNealy in 2006.

The retailer saw a rise in Q3 profits but expects coming quarters to be less profitable.

Editor's note: Republican Leslie Sanchez was director of the Bush White House Initiative on Hispanic Education from 2001 to 2003 and is the author of "Los Republicanos: Why Hispanics and Republicans Need Each Other." She was not a paid consultant to any 2008 candidate. Sanchez is CEO of the Impacto Group, which specializes in market research about women and Hispanics for its corporate and nonprofit clients.

Leslie Sanchez says the Republicans must catch up to Democrats in their use of new campaign technology.

Ever since John McCain and Howard Dean in 2000 showed the Internet's potential for fundraising, the question was always whether the Web could be effective at "GOTV," or getting-out-the-vote.

Among young voters at least, Barack Obama has proven that it can -- and, in the process, he's uncovered a major flaw that cuts to the core of the Republicans' approach to party organization and discipline.

Obama poured many of his campaign's millions into his social networking operations on the Web, which his campaign rightly saw as critical to building grassroots support and enthusiasm.

A community organizer by training, occupation and nature, Obama saw his databases for the potential they represented -- an army of supportive voices, a legion of potential volunteers, and a division of precinct captains.

Such is the world not just of Chicago ward organizations, but of politics everywhere.

The McCain campaign, reflecting the broader skepticism I've seen in the GOP about the Web, doubted whether the Internet could get voters out of their Barcaloungers (or, in the case of younger voters, off their futons) and into the polling booth.

Michael Palmer, McCain's Internet director during the primaries, told ABCNews.com last June that if Obama's online efforts "don't have an endgame political benefit, then they don't help you at the end of the day."

On Tuesday, Obama showed the Republicans the Internet's endgame.

On Facebook alone, Obama signed up 2.4 million users as supporters, compared with just 624,000 for McCain. A Facebook virtual ticker challenged users to actually go out to the polls, and clocked more than 1 million by noon on Election Day and 5 million by the time all the polls closed.

According to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) at Tufts University, the number of voters under 30 rose by 3.4 million compared with 2004.

About 66 percent of those voters supported Obama, compared with 32 percent for McCain. By contrast, the overall voting population gave Obama a much narrower margin of victory -- 53 percent to 46 percent.

In previous elections since 1976, according to CIRCLE, the percentage of young voters supporting the winning candidate varied by an average of only about 2 percentage points from the overall voting population.

At the least, young voters contributed to Obama's wins in North Carolina, Indiana, and Virginia.

When Mark Penn, then Hillary Clinton's chief strategist, chided Obama's supporters as "look(ing) like Facebook," he was right. While some of us over the age of 29 are just now mastering Twitter and Facebook, a UCLA survey of 272,000 college freshmen found that 86 percent spend "some time" each week on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.

Obama realized that the 70 million Americans on Facebook (the vast majority of them under the age of 30) have become accustomed to a Web experience that's interactive.

Web-based political social networking requires empowerment -- introducing well-trained, highly motivated local supporters to one another and then turning the campaign over to them.

McCain's official site included a social networking area, McCainSpace, but it was mostly an afterthought, competing for attention with messages from the candidate, campaign ads, issues summaries, photo galleries -- and of course the obligatory online donations and volunteer signups.

The Obama social networking site invited each new user to post a blog right away upon signing up. To the Obama Web team (which included one of the founders of Facebook), putting users in touch with one another was almost as important as putting the user in contact with the campaign.

Team Obama posted nearly 2,000 videos on YouTube, and the campaign contracted to build a text-messaging campaign that reached millions of voters geographically on their mobile phones. All told, it was a hefty viral marketing combination.

During the primaries, volunteers could sign in online, download a list of phone numbers and make calls from home to voters in the target states -- a virtual phone bank that other campaigns had to pay for.

Joe Trippi, the Democratic operative behind the Web-savvy Howard Dean campaign, was quoted in the New York Times noting Obama's progress: "We were like the Wright brothers," he said. Obama, on the other hand, "skipped Boeing, Mercury, Gemini -- they're Apollo 11, only four years later."

A college student and editor-in-chief of www.scoop08.com, Alexander Heffner, believes young voters were serious about voting this time around. "So many young people invested in him [Obama], unlike with Bill Clinton," Heffner told me.

The Obama campaign's use of the Internet will change campaign politics just as much as the fax machine and the autodialer did. If the GOP is going to compete in this growing tech world, they'll have to do more than just reverse-engineer the bells and whistles on Obama's Web sites.

They'll have to analyze Obama's entire approach to social networking -- a bottom-up, unruly approach that turns first-time voters into activists. That'll be easier said than done for a hierarchical organization that values order and discipline over all else (except, perhaps, seniority).

Nevertheless, if the GOP wants to compete on an even footing with the tech-savvy, social networking Obama-crats, they've got a real revolution ahead.

U.S. stocks were trading higher Monday, jumping back to earlier highs after Fed chief Ben Bernanke's testimony on signs of loosening in the credit crisis. Investors responded positively to some positive earnings reports and to a narrowing in credit market spreads, which suggests that the government's efforts to stabilize the banking system are starting to work.

European stocks were higher as banks lined up to tap state rescue packages to shore up their finances, part of measures to stem a global financial crisis.

Bonds were slightly lower, with yields moving a bit higher. The dollar index was lower. Gold futures were sharply higher. Oil futures were up on speculation OPEC will cut output at emergency meeting.

On Monday, the Dow Jones industrial average was trading 199.60 points, or 2.25%, to 9,051.82. The S&P 500 index was up 24.36 points, or 2.59%, at 964.91. The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index rose 21.03 points, or 1.23%, to 1,732.32.

On the New York Stock Exchange, 22 stocks were trading higher for every seven that were in negative territory, while on the Nasdaq the ratio was 17-8 positive, amid moderate trading, according to S&P MarketScope.

Major European indexes were trading higher Monday. In London, the FTSE 100 index surged 5.41% to 4,282.67. In Paris, the CAC 40 bounced 3.56% to 3,448.51, while Germany's DAX index rose 1.12% to 4,835.01.

In Asia, Japan's Nikkei 225 jumped 3.59% to end at 9,005.59, while Hong Kong's Hang Seng index surged 5.28% to close at 15,323.01.

President Bush, looking for answers to an economic emergency with just three months left in office will host an international summit to discuss ways to fix the world financial system but warned against reforms that threaten capitalism. "We will work to strengthen and modernize our nations' financial systems so we can help ensure that this crisis doesn't happen again," Bush said at the Camp David presidential retreat, according to an Associated Press dispatch. Bush, meeting with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, did not announce a date or site for the summit. But Sarkozy suggested it be held in the shadow of Wall Street before the end of November.

Governments continued to announce measures to shore up financial institutions. Germany's cabinet approved strict conditions for banks that make use of its €500 billion rescue package, including limits on managers' salaries, bonuses and severance. "The criteria for appropriate (remuneration) are based on responsibilities and personal performance, business conditions and the success and outlook of the company compared to others in its field," the provisions agreed by cabinet stated, according to a Reuters dispatch.

Bavaria's public sector bank, BayernLB, was ready to ask for funds, Bavaria's finance minister said. Commerzbank said it would take a close look at using the funds. Societe Generale led a steep fall by France's top three banks as concern heightened they may be next in line for state funds. On Sunday, the Dutch government agreed a €10 billion cash injection into financial group ING (ING), powering its shares higher by almost 23%. ING said it had agreed to sell its Taiwan Life insurance unit to Fubon Financial for $600 million, increasing its capital in a deal analysts said would benefit shareholders. In Sweden, the government outlined a plan worth more than 1.5 trillion crowns ($271.5 billion) that would include credit guarantees and a bail-out fund. "The government is proposing powerful measures to ease the effects on Swedish households and companies of the financial turbulence," said Financial Markets Minister Mats Odell.

Traders listened to Bernanke's testimony on the U.S. economic recovery to the House Budget Committee. Saying that uncertainties around the economic picture are unusually large, the Fed chief said it would be appropriate for Congress to pass a second fiscal package to stimulate growth. While recovery from what he expects to be a protracted economic slowdown will depend on how quickly confidence returns to the financial system, he said he was confident that the measures the government is taking would help restore people's trust in the financial system.

Also on the Fedspeak calendar Monday: Atlanta Fed President Dennis Lockhart on the U.S. economic outlook and Fed Gov. Randall Kroszner on risk management.

Offering more detail about the Treasury's plan to inject $250 billion into banks, Secretary Henry Paulson said the the new capital should be deployed, not hoarded, though the government hasn't defined the type of lending to avoid forcing bad lending decisions. Paulson also said he expects lenders to step up efforts to aid homeowners in avoiding foreclosures. So far interest has been pretty broad in the program and he emphasized that these are investments, not expenditures, which should ultimately not come at a cost to taxpayers.

In economic news Monday, U.S. leading indicators rebounded by a better than expected 0.3% in September, from a revised 0.9% decline in August (-0.5% previously). That left the 6-month annualized rate of change at -2.5% from -2.1% previously. Positive contributions from money supply, consumer expectations, and the yield curve more than offset negative contributions from building permits, initial jobless claims, stocks, and the factory workweek, notes Action Economics