President Bush expressed hope that New Orleans is on its way to recovery after being devastated by Hurricane Katrina three years back. Around $126 billion has been provided in disaster aid over the past three years for the redevelopment of the Gulf region.

While President Bush admitted that a lot of work still needed to be done, he praised the progress made in the still-recovering region. Around 115000 homeowners have received funding worth $7 billion from the Louisiana’s Road Home program. New Orleans sales tax revenues have swung back to 90 percent of the pre-hurricane levels. In the last year, 8000 jobs were added to the economy and tourism in New Orleans is looking up.

President Bush promised to give New Orleans more time to recover. He said that on the request of Governor Bobby Jindal and other state leaders, the state had been allowed another 30 years to pay back its share of levee improvement costs which amounted to $1.8 billion.

The President also vowed to offer all required help from federal resources. He claimed that while $2.6 billion had already been provided by the Department of Health and Human Services for medical care of the uninsured and underprivileged, the federal government is looking to recruit doctors and health care professionals in greater numbers.

Three years back new Orleans had been devastated by Hurricane Katrina which destroyed the economy of the region and left more than 800000 people homeless.

The popular online auction site, eBay has decided to undertake major changes in its fee structure and business model. It will feature more of fixed-price listings and gradually move away from auction-oriented sales.

In recent times, eBay has been struggling with declining sales. Pageviews have fallen by 15 percent year-over-year while the stock is down by 26 percent. In order to address the situation eBay has decided to list items with a set, “buy-it-now” price. Other changes in its fee structure include slashing upfront fees to list sales items by 75 percent and increasing its final sales commission.

In the early days of the Internet, there was a need for a few major sites which would offer a dependable and organized retail platform for online buyers and this need was filled in by sites like eBay and Amazon. In fact eBay became so popular that it soon reached 26.4 billion pageviews a month and attracted 238 million visitors worldwide.

But with the evolution of web technology and secure payment systems, online sellers have been able to reach out to customers directly. Online customers too prefer to search for what they want to buy through Google and contact the seller. This has created a dent in the popularity of online auction sites like eBay which is now looking to introduce major changes.

A recent study in the US suggests that giving Gardasil, the expensive vaccine against cervical cancer, to women through their mid-20s may not be worth the cost.

Gardasil is manufactured by Merck and Co and a three dose regimen is priced at $ 360. The FDA has approved its use for females from 9 to 26 years. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that females from 11 to 26 receive the shots which are supposed to provide protection from infections caused by four strains of HPV.

However, a new study published online by the New England Journal of Medicine suggests that the high cost of Gardasil justifies its use only among pre-adolescent girls who have not yet been exposed to HPV. Among older females, the cost effectiveness of the vaccine is greatly reduced. Also Gardasil does not guarantee total prevention of cervical cancer because it does not offer protection against certain cancer-causing HPV strains.

Doubts regarding the cost-effectiveness of Gardasil have placed Merck and Co under greater pressure as the company is already facing reluctance from college-going and older women to try on its vaccine. Sluggish Gardasil sales have not only spelled trouble for the financial outlook of Merck but have also created difficult market conditions for GlaxoSmithKline’s vaccine against cervical cancer labeled Cervarix which hopes to debut in the US after getting the nod from FDA

Rising inflation has ensured that your monthly paycheck goes only so far in paying for household expenses. Even if both partners in a family are earning, still you may find it increasingly difficult to meet costs of groceries, gasoline, credit cards, mortgages and kid’s education. In such a scenario, you may explore the option of pursuing a weekend business to generate an additional cash flow needed to cover expenses.

The first question to resolve before starting a weekend business is to decide what to do. The business should preferably require minimum investment in time and funds. It will help if the business is related to your weekday job as the latter will provided a ready network of resources and clients to tap into. For instance if you are employed in sales & marketing, you can think of working as a fund raiser on weekends. On the other hand if you wish to escape the workday grind and try something new like yoga or cake decoration, a weekend business is the perfect opportunity to test the waters.

Other important questions that need to be addressed are what to charge the clients and how much will you make. This will need some astute calculations so that you can arrive at an estimate needed to break even and even generate some extra cash which was the point of starting a weekend business in the first place. Finally, if you see that your weekend business is flourishing and you are enjoying being your own boss, you may even consider giving up your nine-to-five job and become a full-time entrepreneur.

One of capitalism’s most liquid institutions is the Bordeaux wines futures market. While the lush vineyards of southwest France seem a world away from the ruthless world of high finance, the tasting week in every spring at the Bordeaux vineyards creates the grounds for an equally competitive futures market rife with speculation, judgments and risk.

In the first week of April every year, around 5000 wine experts, importers and wholesalers arrive at the Bordeaux vineyards to evaluate the latest vintage. After the wine tasting is over the chateaus fix their price per bottle and mid-May onwards they sell as much as 90 percent of that year’s product to the market makers.

The bottles may take up to two years to hit the market during which some merchants hold on to the futures in the hope of making a quick profit. On the other hand, traders may sell the futures to their clients right away with the addition of a hefty commission. Clients from all parts of the world generally pay upfront and commit to buying a certain number of cases.

In most regions, wines are put on market after they are bottled. However at Bordeaux, huge international demand has made sure that the process starts much earlier when the wines have still not fully matured. Among the labels which command the greatest price are those which constitute the “first-growth” Bordeaux wines like chateaus Lafite, Mouton Rothschild, Latour, Margaux and Haut-Brion.