mysql> SELECT name, birth FROM pet
-> WHERE MONTH(birth) = MONTH(DATE_ADD(CURDATE(),INTERVAL 0 MONTH));

...so that the output will be "this week", rather than "this month"?

With the first wave of iPhone contracts expiring in June, consumers have plenty of other options.

Stocks hold gains despite sluggish housing data

Investors were relieved Tuesday after a government report on the economy met expectations and eased their concerns that the recession is deepening.

The Commerce Department reported third-quarter gross domestic product, a measure of the economy that tallies the value of goods and services, fell at an annual rate of 0.5 percent. That was in line with analysts' expectations and matched the government's estimate of a month ago.

While the readings show further weakness, investors have likely already priced in very low expectations. The concern, however, is that the current quarter will be much worse.

The market was also able to get past a report that showed sales of new homes fell in November to the slowest pace in nearly 18 years, while new home prices dropped by the biggest amount in eight months.

New home sales fell by 2.9 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual sales pace of 407,000 units, a weaker performance than economists had expected and was the slowest sales pace since January 1991. The median price of a new home sold in November was $220,400, a drop of 11.5 percent from the sales price a year ago.

Trading volume was light, and is expected to remain so the rest of this week as investors head into the holidays. Analysts are mindful that light volume tends to skew the market's movements, and warned that this week may not suggest any long-term trends.

"Don't read too much into the numbers until the end of the day, we're really in a holding pattern right now," said Ryan Larson, head of equity trading at Voyageur Asset Management. "It is a very quiet news week, and much of it has already been priced into the market."

In late morning trading, the Dow Jones industrial average rose 20.87, or 0.24 percent, to 8,540.64.

Broader indexes were also higher. The Standard & Poor's 500 index rose 2.95, or 0.34 percent, to 874.58. The Nasdaq composite index added 6.58, or 0.43 percent, to 1,538.93. The Russell 2000 index of smaller companies fell 0.96, or 0.20 percent, to 474.11.

Advancing issues led decliners by 4 to 3 on the New York Stock Exchange, where volume came to 245 million shares.

Bond prices were little changed Tuesday. The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note, which moves opposite its price, fell to 2.15 percent from 2.17 percent late Monday. The yield on the three-month T-bill, considered one of the safest investments, was unchanged at 0.02 percent from late Monday.

In corporate news, greeting-card company American Greetings Corp. said it swung to a third-quarter loss, hurt by hefty charges and a decline in sales. Shares fell $3.00, or 30 percent, to $6.82.

Commercial financial firm CIT Group Inc. said Tuesday it received preliminary approval to obtain $2.33 billion as part of the government's $700 billion bank investment program.

The dollar was mixed against other major currencies, while gold prices fell.

Light, sweet crude fell 76 cents to $39.10 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Overseas, Japan's Nikkei stock average rose 1.57 percent. Hong Kong's Hang Seng index fell 2.75 percent. In afternoon trading, Britain's FTSE 100 was up 1.05 percent, Germany's DAX index was up 1.11 percent, and France's CAC-40 was up 0.48 percent.

Copyright 2008 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed

Mortgage rates are falling as this week's dramatic action by the Federal Reserve provides a boost to the dismal housing market, but the nation's unemployment rolls are stuck at historically high levels amid a deepening recession.

Mortgage giant Freddie Mac (nyse: FRE - news - people ) on Thursday reported that rates had fallen to the lowest level on records dating back to 1971. Average rates on 30-year fixed-rate mortgages dropped to 5.19 percent, down from the year's previous low of 5.47 percent, set last week.

Jobs data from the government, while better than expected, was still sobering. The Labor Department on Thursday said its tally of initial jobless benefit claims fell to a seasonally adjusted 554,000 from an upwardly revised figure of 575,000 the previous week. The new tally was slightly below economists' expectations of 558,000 claims.

Another slight improvement was seen in the number of people who continue to receive jobless benefits, which declined to 4.38 million from 4.43 million the previous week. Economists expected a slight increase to 4.45 million.

Still, claims remain near the highest level since 1982, though the labor force has grown by about half since then.

And the cuts continue. Water treatment and storage systems maker Pentair Inc. (nyse: PNR - news - people ) said Thursday that it will cut more than 10 percent of its work force, or about 1,600 jobs, due to a faster-than-expected drop-off in demand and consumer spending. One day earlier, hard drive maker Western Digital Corp. (nyse: WDC - news - people ), managed-care company Aetna Inc. (nyse: AET - news - people ), and Newell Rubbermaid Inc. (nyse: NWL - news - people ), maker of products including Rubbermaid storage containers and Sharpie pens, announced mass job cuts.

Meanwhile, President-elect Barack Obama is laying the groundwork for a giant economic stimulus package, worth possibly $850 billion over two years, which Democratic congressional leaders say could be passed within two weeks of Obama taking office.

----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1


                   National Cyber Alert System

                 Cyber Security Alert SA08-352A


Microsoft Internet Explorer Data Binding Vulnerability

  Original release date: December 17, 2008
  Last revised: --
  Source: US-CERT


Systems Affected

    * Microsoft Internet Explorer
    * Microsoft Outlook Express
    * Other software that uses Internet Explorer components to render documents


Overview

  A vulnerability in Internet Explorer could allow an attacker to
  take control of your computer.


Solution

  Apply an update

  The updates to address these vulnerabilities are available on the
  Microsoft Update site. We recommend enabling Automatic Updates.

  Disable Active Scripting  This vulnerability can be mitigated by
  disabling Active Scripting in the Internet Zone, as specified in
  the Securing Your Web Browser document. Note that this will not
  block the vulnerability, but it will help to protect your computer
  against a common method used to execute this vulnerability.
  Enable DEP in Internet Explorer 7  Enabling DEP in Internet
  Explorer 7 on Windows Vista can help mitigate this vulnerability by
  making it more difficult to achieve code execution using this
  vulnerability.


Description

  When rendering certain documents, Internet Explorer may crash or
  allow an attacker to run code on your computer. The attacker could
  install malicious software or access sensitive personal
  information. Attackers are actively exploiting this vulnerability.

  For more technical information, see US-CERT Technical Alert
  TA08-352A and US-CERT Vulnerability Note VU#493881.


References

 * US-CERT Technical Cyber Security Alert TA08-352A -
  <http://www.us-cert.gov/cas/techalerts/TA08-352A.html>

 * Microsoft Security Bulletin MS08-078 -
  <https://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms08-078.mspx>

 * US-CERT Vulnerability Note VU#493881 -
  <http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/493881>

 * Securing Your Web Browser -
  <https://www.us-cert.gov/reading_room/securing_browser/#Internet_Explorer>

 ______________________________

According to the most recent data, as many as one in 10 mortgages in the U.S. are delinquent or in foreclosure. The continued decline in housing prices has been exacerbated by the decline in the economy. The housing sector is caught in a continued downward spiral.

Foreclosure is a slow and costly process and represents significant dead weight loss for the economy. Estimates are that the cost of foreclosure is 30% to 35% of the value of a house. Moreover, there are externalities that are associated with properties that do foreclose in that they contaminate the value of neighboring properties. This issue is also critical because reducing losses to default and foreclosure will help stabilize the financial system by reducing the actual losses--and the uncertainty about them--that are passed through the financial system to the holders of the mortgages and mortgage-backed securities. Default losses are concentrated in the "first loss" and mezzanine tranches of collateralized debt obligations, which has made them highly toxic to the financial institutions holding them.

Here is the question: Given the attention that has been devoted to the problem of troubled mortgages and the number of programs that have been put forward to address them, why so little impact? The simple answer is that the programs are badly designed.

Some examples: Hope for Homeowners is a Federal Housing Administration program designed to modify existing loans by writing down the principal, offering insurance against further default and introducing shared appreciation on the property. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac laid out plans for restructuring mortgages that lower payments but extend the term on the loan or involve balloon payments. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) has proposed to restructure troubled mortgages by lowering payments, but with no write-down of principal and with a balloon payment due at the end. So far, the response to these programs has been minor. Why?

First, they start with lousy incentives. Both Hope for Homeowners and the FDIC programs are available to homeowners who are delinquent by several months in their payments. If you want to restructure your mortgage, what does this tell you? Stop making payments! Sensibly, most bank restructuring programs require borrowers to show good faith by keeping payments current before they will consider restructuring.

Another problem is that restructuring per se is not a great solution. For the most part, it simply kicks the can down the road. Lowering current payments but requiring either a balloon payment or an extended payback term postpones the problem without solving it. Moreover, since it does nothing to address the negative equity of the homeowner, it increases the probability of secondary default if prices or owners' incomes continue to fall. For all of these reasons, owners become essentially like renters, with all of the adverse incentives that may imply.

The existing approaches to loan modification do not balance the incentives of the borrowers and the lenders. Shared-appreciation mortgages (which are a component of the FHA plan) do this well. Shared-appreciation restructurings offer a debt for equity swap whereby, in return for modifying the loan, the borrower must give up some of the future appreciation in the value of the property. Designed properly, this would discourage borrowers from seeking modifications if they can continue to pay their mortgage.

Real-time data indicate the U.S. economy continues to deteriorate. Income tax withholdings edged up 0.5% year-over-year in the past two weeks and three days and increased 0.4% year-over-year in the past four weeks and three days. Both of these growth rates are well below the three-month average of 1.4%.

Also, the TrimTabs Online Job Postings Index plunged 12.3% in the first three weeks of November to the lowest level since July 2005. Based on our real-time indicators, we estimate the economy is shedding jobs at a rate of roughly 350,000 per month.

Some bullish pundits point to growing amounts of cash on the sidelines--a view that has to ignore the shrinkage of equity and real estate assets as well as the drop in household incomes. What is more important is that consumer cash flow has been collapsing as the economy slumps. In the past eight months, TrimTabs Savings and Investment Flow (TTSIF) totaled $37 billion, down 93% from $502 billion from April 2007 through November 2007. Assuming TTSIF from December 2008 through March 2009 is down 50% from the $300 billion savings flow from the same four months of the previous year, TTSIF in the 12 months ended March 2009 would be less than $200 billion, setting a new multi-decade record low.

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The U.S. float was little changed for the third consecutive week, falling $3.5 billion in the holiday-shortened week ended Wednesday, Nov. 26. Corporate buying remained feeble. New cash takeovers rose to a 10-week high of $950 million, while new stock buybacks edged up to a three-week high of $2.0 billion. On the other side of the liquidity ledger, new offerings rose to $450 million, while net insider selling jumped to a 13-week high of $850 million.

Corporate liquidity is worsening worldwide. On the buy side, large takeovers like BHP Billiton/Rio Tinto, Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan/BCE and Panasonic/Sanyo have been called off, and stock buybacks have hit record lows in Europe and Canada. On the sell side, European banks remain desperate for capital. Banks in Japan and Canada, which had been considered immune to credit market problems, have announced large equity offerings.

New stock buybacks have totaled a mere $11.2 billion in November, the lowest since March 2004. Since Bear Stearns imploded in March, buybacks have been below $30 billion in all but two months. Companies are not confident enough about their prospects to commit large amounts of precious cash to share repurchases.

The holiday shopping season got off to a surprisingly solid start, according to data released Saturday by a research firm. But the sales boost during the post-Thanksgiving shopathon came at the expense of profits as the nation's retailers had to slash prices to attract the crowds in a season that is expected to be the weakest in decades.

Sales during the day after Thanksgiving rose 3 percent to $10.6 billion, according to preliminary figures released Saturday by ShopperTrak RCT Corp., a Chicago-based research firm that tracks sales at more than 50,000 retail outlets. Last year, shoppers spent about $10.3 billion on the day after Thanksgiving, dubbed Black Friday because it was historically the sales-packed day when retailers would become profitable for the year.

But this year, many observers were expecting consumers to spend more time browsing than buying, amid contractions in consumer spendingand growing fears about economic uncertainty and trouble in the global financial markets.

"Under these circumstances, it's truly amazing when you think about all the news that led into the holiday season, it certainly appears that consumers are willing to spend more than most expected," said ShopperTrak co-founder Bill Martin. "Everybody wants value for their dollar, so we saw a tremendous response to the discounts."

While it isn't a predictor of overall holiday season sales, Black Friday is an important barometer of people's willingness to spend during the holidays. Last year, it was the biggest sales generator of the season while the Thanksgiving shopping weekend of Friday through Sunday accounted for about 10 percent of overall holiday sales.

Still, experts, who predict this year's overall holiday shopping period will be the weakest in decades thanks to an overall contraction in spending, caution that this year's sales growth may be hard to sustain.

Also complicating matters is a shorter buying season - 27 days between Black Friday and Christmas - instead of 32 last year.

How Your Data Can Get Loose

Ed Sperling, 11.21.08, 04:00 PM EST

The ways in which your data can wind up in other people's hands is multiplying.

Meta Data: iPhone 2.2

Brian Caulfield, 11.21.08, 04:40 PM EST

Apple's software update promises improved call quality and adds Google Street View.