Tallahassee Democrat from Tallahassee, Florida • Page 31

Saturday February 11, 2006 -a T1 0 0 Stocks Mutuals Editorial Business Editor Zannah Lyie Phone: (850) 599-2312 Fax: (850) 599-2202 E-mail: zMetallaliassee.com 4-5 Tallahassee Democrat w.f aft sfiasseexonf 1 Digest 0 fc 'iU i fill LUIi 1L nnn TO ABC affiliate had shared space with NBC affiliate By Rocky Scott DEMOCRAT STAFF WRITER Tallahassee's ABC affiliate, WTXL-TV, will end a five-year partnership with WTWC-TV that included sharing studio space and advertising sales staff and strike out on its own, a station official said Friday. "On Feb. 20, we will have a brand new lo6k and a brand new sound," said Richelle Ridgeway, news director for WTXL (Channel 27, cable 7). The move comes after corporate parents of the two stations decided to end a joint-service agreement. Sinclair Broadcast which owns NBC affiliate WTWC, (Channel 40, cable 12) announced in its fourth-quarter earnings report earlier this week the agreement, which had been in place since 2001, would end Feb.

13. The stations have shared advertising sales personnel and studios since they combined. Ridgeway said WTXL, owned by Southern Broadcast Corp. of Sarasota, would lease studio space from WFSU-TV while waiting for new facilities to be built. She said the new facilities will include an "was a mutual agreement," Franklin said.

"(Southern Broadcast) felt they would prefer to operate as a stand-alone ABC affiliate." Media Ventures Management sold WTXL to Southern Broadcast a wholly owned subsidiary of Calkins Media, in June 2005. Mike Dunn, production manager at WFSU-TV, said WTXL will use one of the two studios available at WFSU's location off Pottsdamer Street to produce its newscasts with WTXL personnel. WFSU has about 40 full-time employees, Dunn said. No WFSU personnel will be involved in WTXL operations. Contact Rocky Scott at (850) 599- 2176 or rscotttallahassee.com.

all-digital production format. She said she hoped the station could move into its new home by the end of the year, but declined to disclose its location. "This is a positive thing," she said. "We were just two corporations with two different goals." Ridgeway said WTXL would be adding staff to compensate for the loss of shared personnel. Bob Franklin, station manager at WTWC, said the broadcast outlets had been operated as "one station with two He said there would be no reduction in his station's workforce.

Ending the arrangement WALL STREET Stocks end higher on late-day rebound Stocks rebounded from an earlier decline to post moderate gains Friday as investors looked past a mediocre outlook from Dow Jones industrial Pfizer, Inc. and a new record U.S. trade deficit. The Dow rose 35.70, to 10,919.05, after losing as much as 63 points early in the session. The Standard Poor's 500 index gained 3.21 to 1,266.99, and the Nasdaq composite index advanced 6.01, to 2,261.88.

Bonds pulled back from an early run-up, with the yield on the 10-year Treasury note jumping to 4.58 percent from 4.55 percent late Thursday. Meanwhile, the dollar was down against most major currencies, as god prices plunged. Crude futures slipped following a report suggesting that high prices were starting to stifle demand. This week, the Dow jumped 1.16 percent. The 500 added 0.23 percent and the Nasdaq declined 0.23 percent.

ECONOMY Trade deficit soars to new record: American appetites for all things foreign, from oil to cars to clothing, pushed the trade deficit to yet another record in 2005. And the year's $201.6 billion deficit with China, the largest ever recorded with a single country, brought demands for a crackdown on what the U.S. sees as unfair trade practices. The Commerce Department reported Friday that the overall trade gap climbed to an all-time high of $725.8 billion last year. The deficit was up 17.5 percent from 2004, marking the fourth straight record.

The chief culprit in pushing the deficit up last year was record global oil prices and increased U.S. demand because of a loss of Gulf Coast production following Hurricane Katrina. The U.S. foreign oil bill soared to a record $251.6 billion, up 39.4 percent from 2004. DIVIDENDS Flowers declares dividend: The Thomas-ville, Flowers Foods declared a dividend of 10 cents per share for the fourth quarter of 2005.

This action renews the annual dividend rate of 40 cents. The dividend is payable on March 10 to shareholders of record on Feb. 24. Flowers Foods produces and markets packaged bakery foods for retail and food service customers. Symbol lifts Big Easy jeweler Foreign markets bet on events i ft 4 5 1 By Kristen Hays THE ASSOCIATED PRESS HOUSTON Long before Enron Corp.

drowned in scandal, its former chiefs Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling trumpeted the company's savvy in creating trading markets beyond energy. Now it turns out they are the sub ject futures contracts that allow investors its A 1 rv i ti Vwv i to wage, SJ, Lay I i whether they will be convicted of fraud and conspiracy charges. Intrade, a futures market based in Fleur-de-lis draws New Orleans buyers, fuels quick rebound By Rukmini Callimachi THE ASSOCIATED PRESS NEW ORLEANS -Every New Orleans lady, or so it's said, owns at least one piece of Mignon Faget jewelry adornment as central to a lady's wardrobe in this city as a piece from Tiffany Co. in New York. But after Hurricane Katrina made landfall Aug.

29, destroying huge swathes of the city and dispersing her clientele, Faget was forced to lay off 72 of her 80 employees. She assumed her business would fold. Instead, she's thrived, almost entirely because her signature motif on necklaces, brooches, earrings and bracelets is the fleur-de-lis a stylized lily with three petals drawn together at its base. The symbol of New Orleans adorns everything from the mayor's business card to city trash cans, to the football uniforms of the New Orleans Saints. As New Orleans struggles to rebuild, the fleur-de-lis, originally bestowed on the city by its French settlers, has become a unifying symbol and the anchor of the Faget business.

"People want to wear it as a badge of courage," said Faget, whose family settled in the city in the 1700s. "It has never been more meaningful to us." Faget (pronounced fah-ZHAY) fled the city one day before the storm, barely taking time to board up her three stores and lock the jewelry in a vault at the company's business offices, a former bank building. Away from New Orleans, she considered filing for bankruptcy. She needn't have worried. Though looters made off with cheaper pieces left in the downtown store, they never broke into the vault, where Faget's treasures survived the storm unscathed.

Skilling Dublin, Ireland, "Tff; creates trading vehicles based on everything from which film will win best picture at the Academy Awards to whether bird flu will be discovered in the United States before March 31. It recently added contracts on whether jurors will convict Lay of at least four Please see ENRON, 3E BILL HABER Associated Press photos Mignon Faget assumed her jewelry business would fold when Hurricane Katrina battered New Orleans. But the fleur-de-lis figures have forced her to reopen two of her three stores to keep up with the demand. It operates 35 bakeries that produce a wide range of bakery products in the southeast, southwest and mid-Atlantic states. BROADCASTING Cable revenues up; market share down: Cable company revenues rose faster than inflation last year, but cable's share of the TV-viewing market declined as satellite services gained ground, the Federal Communications Commission said in a report released Friday.

The FCC's annual report on competition among video providers found that cable's revenues rose about 10.8 percent over the year through June 2005. It also found that the number of cable households fell by nearly 1 million, and cable's share of households with something more than an antenna fell to 69.4 percent from 71.6 percent a year earlier. At the same time, satellite TVs share of those households rose to 27.7 percent from 25.1 percent. The FCC didn't indicate how much cable rates rose, but Commissioner Michael Copps said they were too high. TAXES IRS extends deadline: The IRS on Friday gave people hit by hurricanes last year an extra six months to decide whether to claim losses related to the disasters on 2004 or 2005 tax returns.

Taxpayers living in regions of Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas hit by hurricanes can claim unreimbursed losses on their 2005 tax returns, or they can claim the losses by amending their 2004 tax returns. The deadline for amending the previous year's return is now Oct. 16, extended from April 17. The decision does not extend the regular tax-return-filing deadlines. The IRS instructed taxpayers to write, in red ink, the name of the hurricane on top of their tax forms.

The tax agency also has a special publication and a disaster hot line, 1-866-562-5227, to help taxpayers who suffered losses in the hurricanes. Democrat staff and wire services Using a laptop bought at a store along her evacuation route, the company's vice president, Virginia Saussy Bairnsfather, 39, began fashioning an amateur advertisement for the local newspaper, announcing the reopening of the flagship store on fashionable Magazine Street on Oct. 12. Bairnsfather didn't expect anyone to be shopping for jewelry so soon after the hurricane the Please see FLEUR, 3E iiiitfiiiiTimf- "wniwtifti ir itiimm iMWiWiffliiftiftrr rrl Public broadcasting loses TV chief LJL Roosevelt Wilson is publisher and owner of the Capital Outlook, a weekly newspaper aimed at Tallahassee's black community. Wilson and his wife, Cathy, purchased the paper in 1991.

In the 15 years since then, it has grown from a circulation of 8,000 to a little more than 15,000. The paper, which comes out every Wednesday, has also been fully digitized and has built up strong editorial pages over the years. Wilson, a veteran newspaper man, started his journalism career in 1963. He held several positions, working as a sports reporter for the Ocala Star Banner and as sports information director and a journalism professor at Florida He retired from teaching in 2003. Buying Mtiutual funds 'it Net sales of mutual funds worldwide: $904 billion in America and the world since the Sept.

li; 2001, terrorist attacks. The other project is an effort to address critical gaps in middle- and high-school students' knowledge of American history and civics. Last spring, Rep. John Din-gell, and Rep. David Obey, D-Wis.

asked CPB Inspector General Kenneth Konz to investigate the hiring of Pack, who they said, citing a New Yorker article, "was named a few weeks after he represented Lynne Cheney, the Vice President's wife, in a meeting with PBS to request a series of programs on which Mrs. Cheney would appear." THE ASSOCIATED PRESS WASHINGTON The Corporation for Public Broadcasting's top television executive has resigned after three years to return to independent film producing. The latest top-level departure comes as the corporation, set up by Congress in 1967 to finance public broadcasting while shielding it from political influence, is roiled by controversy over efforts by top executives to put more conservatives on public television and radio. Michael Pack, senior vice president of television programming, stepped down in order to exercise his long-standing option with CPB to produce "Winning Modern Wars," a film he set aside when he joined CPB in February 2003, the corporation announced Thursday. Before joining CPB, Pack had produced some shows for public television hosted by leading conservatives.

CPB president and CEO Patricia Harrison, a former co-chair of the Republican National Committee, praised Pack's work and said his legacy "will ultimately be two innovative, groundbreaking CPB projects." The first, "America at a Crossroads," is a planned series of documentaries about changes $317 billion I hit ma 2SU1 2S03.