IBT Staff Reporter

The Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances, conducted once every three years, provides snapshots of family income and net worth along with basic demographic details and more detailed information on how families store wealth they have.

Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. are in talks over a deal where the companies would sell advertising for each other, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday on its Web site, citing sources close to the matter.

President Barack Obama said on Friday the recession-hit U.S. economy was showing glimmers of hope despite remaining under strain and promised further steps in coming weeks to tackle the financial crisis.

First Wind filed an application permit with the Maine Department of Environmental Protection for a project that will power more than 20,000 homes using wind energy.

Portugal, officially the Portuguese Republic (Portuguese: República Portuguesa), is a country on the Iberian Peninsula. Located in southwestern Europe, Portugal is the westernmost country of mainland Europe and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the west and south and by Spain to the north and east. The Atlantic archipelagos of the Azores and Madeira are also part of Portugal.

A Belgian court ruled on Friday that all Fortis investors were eligible to vote on its break-up, boosting French bank BNP Paribas' chances of buying Fortis assets.

DBS Group Holdings, Singapore's largest bank, said Friday that its chief executive Richard Stanley, who has leukemia, is in critical care after acquiring an infection, according to a report.

A French hostage died on Friday and four others were freed when French forces attacked pirates who had seized their yacht off Somalia, President Nicolas Sarkozy's office said in a statement on Friday.

Senior managers at a major corporate credit union seized last month were preparing to report a credit loss significantly below what an external analysis had revealed, the U.S. regulator of credit unions said on Friday.

Time Warner Cable unveiled a new pricing structure for broadband Internet access that addresses customer's criticism over the service provider's plans to cap bandwidth usage.

Japan's manga-loving prime minister, Taro Aso, has long touted the importance of soft power content such as comics and anime to boost Japan's global diplomatic status.Now he's targeting pop culture's economic potential.

Russia and Iraq have agreed to work on restoring contracts that they signed before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, Russia's energy minister said after the two countries' prime ministers met on Friday.

President Barack Obama said on Friday the recession-hit U.S. economy was showing glimmers of hope despite remaining under strain and promised further steps in coming weeks to tackle the financial crisis.

A U.S. regulatory analysis shows that senior managers at a major corporate credit union seized last month were preparing to report a credit loss significantly below what an external analysis had revealed, the National Credit Union Administration said on Friday.

Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika won 90.24 percent of the vote in a presidential election, officials said on Friday, extending his hold over Algeria, an oil producer with a lingering Islamist insurgency.

Citigroup shareholders should vote against four of 14 board members to improve the company’s risk management, a shareholder advisory group said, Bloomberg reported.

U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar and Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman Jon Wellinghoff signed a Memorandum of Understanding on Thursday, to clarify their agency's jurisdictional responsibilities for leasing and licensing renewable energy projects on the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf.

President Barack Obama said on Friday that he was seeing glimmers of hope across the recession-hit U.S. economy but that it still remained under severe strain.

Under a hail of gunfire, a suicide bomber charged a checkpoint in northern Iraq on Friday, detonating a truck laden with explosives and killing five U.S. troops and two Iraqi policemen.

President Barack Obama will discuss financial conditions in a meeting this morning with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp head Sheila Bair, Securities and Exchange Commission chief Mary Shapiro and Comptroller of the Currency John Dugan.

Poland's mid-sized lender BPH, unit of General Electric, plans to issue up to 750 million zlotys ($225 million) in bonds, the bank said on Friday.

Buy-out houses are doing smaller deals, borrowing less money and are more involved in hands-on management, as the crisis pushes them back to the roots of their industry.

The financial crisis is happening so fast that books about it can be outdated before they hit the shelves. Some U.S. publishers and authors are responding by bringing books to market faster.

A Greek student angry at how his schoolmates treated him shot and wounded a fellow student and two workers at a training institute in Athens on Friday before killing himself, police said.

Fiat staff in Brussels closeted local managers inside their office for several hours in another apparent boss-napping linked to worker anger over job cuts in Europe.

Fiji's president revoked the politically unstable South Pacific nation's constitution on Friday, named himself to replace temporarily a post-coup interim government and called for fresh elections by 2014.

A chocolate Easter egg from aid workers brought a weary smile to the face of Maria Pia Carpentieri, one of thousands of people left homeless by Italy's worst earthquake in nearly 30 years.

Italy held a state funeral on Friday for victims of its worst earthquake in three decades, as the death toll climbed to 289 and survivors voiced anger that houses simply collapsed.

U.N. Security Council negotiations on how to respond to North Korea's launch of a long-range rocket are deadlocked, U.N. diplomats say.