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JetBlue Airways and Aer Lingus of Ireland will disclose on Friday particulars of a strategic alliance that was first announced in conclusion year, and the Wall Street Journal says the venture is unusual because budget airlines generally avoid such tie-ups because of the cost.

But the sum of two units airlines plan to avoid the expense of a big electronic universe by simply connecting their websites.

"This is totally new," JetBlue’s chief executive, Dave Barger, told the Journal.

Aer Lingus chief executive, Dermot Mannion, told the Evening Herald of Dublin that the deal "changes the face of access to North America for the Irish traveling public."

The alliance will allow passengers to book travel between Ireland and 40 U.S. destinations (the Evening Herald says 51), including Kennedy International Airport in unused York.

The deal may help make intelligible the 19 percent stake that Deutsche Lufthansa took in JetBlue late utmost year. The German airline could have existence barred from taking besides an American airline, but it could regard over an Irish one that now has a big gateway into the U.S. market.

Its sales and stock price in freefall, its management in flux, Motorola said Thursday that it is considering breaking itself up, shedding an anemic cell-phone handset division that accounts for more than half its revenue.

Heaving the dead weight of the cell-phone business overboard would leave Motorola with its healthier, faster growing units that make settop cable-TV decoder boxes, high-speed computer modems, and handheld radios.

The announcement came two months after the C.E.O. at the time, Ed Zander, was pushed used up in favor of Greg Brown, who was then the chief operating officer. He announced the decision to look at whether to split off the cell-phone unit.

"We are exploring ways in which our changeable devices business can accelerate its recovery and retain and attract talent while enabling our shareholders to realize the value of this great franchise," he said in a prepared statement.

In the company’s most recent quarterly-earnings description, Motorola said its handset portion accounted for $14.2 billion in revenue through the first three quarters of 2007. Total company revenue was about $27 billion.

Handsets, however, lost $813 million in that proposition, while modems and settop boxes earned $517 million and radios brought in $762 the masses.

Just one year earlier, the handset unit had made an operating profit of $2.4 billion in the first nine months. That was when Motorola’s ultraslim Razr phone was the must-have accessory. It sold more than 100 million of the devices.

But Motorola was caught flat-footed when consumers moved on to higher-bandwidth smartphones like BlackBerry and Treo devices.

In large part, that was because Motorola didn’t have an answer when investors asked the company how it would model steady the success of the Razr.

"The Razr was like hitting a grand slam, and you can’t hit a grand slam every time," he told the tech writer Kevin Maney in an interview published in the December issue of Condé Nast Portfolio. "You win baseball games with lots of singles and doubles, good fielding, good pitching. In the global-device business, if you want to be successful, you obtain to be maniacally boring."

Maney, puzzled, asked him what he meant by means of that.

"It’s about having lots of products come out on hour of travail," Zander answered. "It’s the supply chain. It’s the cost structure."

In an interview last November with Bloomberg News, Zander appeared to blame the lack of a Razr successor on the people running his handset division. They "had a strategy that proved not to be correct," he reported.

But he added: "That’s been corrected. We’ll be back."

A month later, far-reaching before Motorola had a chance to come back, Zander was gone.

And in a short time, the handset business may be gone too.

Bidding on what may be the last large pieces of wireless spectrum to be auctioned off by the Federal Communications Commission exceeded $15 billion on Thursday, well overhead the $10 billion target set before the sale began.

In a win for wireless "open access" advocates, bidding for the highly desirable "C block" of spectrum topped the F.C.C.’s $4.6 billion reserve price. That suggests that some bidder has for the present exigency won the frequencies.

C block, a 22-megahertz chunk of spectrum, is singular in that the winning bidder will have to let its customers use at all confined apartment phone or wireless device, not just the hardware sold by the company offering the service, as is now the case.

F.C.C. chairman Kevin Martin called this so-called open-access provision "an important transformation for the wireless industry."

While this open access might make the frequencies less attractive to some bidders, it is believed to make them more attractive to companies like Google that have expressed interest in offering wireless services without getting into the business of selling hardware at retail stores.

Whether Google was the high bidder, as some suspect, will not be known until the auction of all the available lots of spectrum ends. Auction rules require anonymity to the time when there are no more bids for in any degree of the licenses on the block, and bidding continues on the smaller regional licenses, so the winner of the C block may not subsist announced for weeks.

Google has made it clear that it would meet the reserve price for the C block; if Google is the high bidder and wins, the group volition instantly become a formidable player in the wireless industry.

Verizon Wireless, AT&T, and Echostar are among those also thought to be interested in the C block.

Some have suggested that Google was "bidding to lose" the auction on this account that it had already won the two open-access provisions, and because of the cost of building an actual network—as much while $25 billion.

Art Brosky of Public Knowledge, a public-interest group focused on digital communication, said that if Google won the C block, it could partner with an existing provider—Sprint would be a good candidate—and modify that provider’s network to make it compatible through the C block. "Then we could have a true open network," Brodsky said.

Open access advocates praised today’s developments. The Public Interest Spectrum Coalition, a consortium of consumer groups, said, "The fact that bidders met the $4.6 billion threshold is a welcome development for consumers."

"We hope that the freedom that will develop as the new spectrum opens up will carry over into the existing cellular network," it added.

Danielle Sullivan faced a financial crisis. In August, the mortgage lender she worked for bellied up without paying its employees. By November, the 29-year-old middleman had missed her second job and was starting a third. The payments on her four-bedroom home in Phoenix suburb began to pile up.

Searching for a bailout, Sullivan found a website that promised to rent her house to cash-flush Super Bowl fans. A week later she held a check for $3,200—four nights’ rent for a place twenty miles away from the University of Phoenix stadium in Glendale, Arizona, where the big game will be played Sunday.

“I don’t know what I would be favored with done if I didn’t obtain this,” says Sullivan, who closed without ceasing her $400,000 home a little greater degree of than a year ago. “I paid this month’s mortgage and the next.”

Sullivan is among potentially thousands of homeowners in the greater Phoenix area who, in perhaps the greatest sign of desperation in the housing market, are leaning steady prospects of a Super Bowl windfall—in some dire cases, to recapture them from foreclosure. “It’s their last resort,” says Blaine Wiggins, owner of bigeventrentals.com, which lists over 170 homes. “The Super Bowl is in their back yard, so why not recoup a year’s worth of payments?”

Ads on sites like Craigslist and those of a cottage industry of new rental agencies catalogue last-minute rentals—from a $25,000-a-week condo to a downtown penthouse, complete with limousine service and concierge, against $100,000. One real estate investor managed to rent his $4 million, 12,000-square-foot mansion for $40,000. In that case there was no risk of default, but the house had been steady the market since last spring.

“When the wheels stopped everybody got caught,” says its owner, who asked not to be named. Another ad for a three-bedroom home at any upscale Scottsdale golf resort reads: “This is a rough market! I will do anything to save my home…. You determine have utility 24 hours a daylight…from a juvenile, fit, beautiful, thin cheerleader.”
 
“It probably means they’re in a pretty bad way,” says Daren Blomquist, a spokesman for RealtyTrac, an industry firm that counts and deals in foreclosures. “It’s a market that was red hot and is experiencing hard times and a pretty dramatic pullback from that period of excess.”

Foreclosures in Maricopa County alone, RealtyTrac says, are up almost 40 percent since December, and nearly 200 percent since 2006, twice the national average. According to the National Association of Realtors, middle home sale prices in the Phoenix area are down more than 4 percent in the last quarter, among the worst rates in the nation’s cities. Across Phoenix, spec houses sit empty, second and third homes have been languishing for sale since summer, and a growing number of people who invested in multiple properties are having a tough time holding on to their own homes. (See that cities have been hit hardest by the fall in housing prices.)

Mike Roberts, an investor and mortgage broker in Scottsdale, Arizona, bought two homes when it seemed nothing could be off wrong—a four-bedroom house in an exclusive Scottsdale subdivision, and another in nearby West Valley. Both have been for sale, or lease, or whichever came first, for months without offers. Now he’s hoping to rent the Scottsdale home, which he lives in, for Super Bowl week.

“It’s not a way out, but a way to stop some of the bleeding,” he says. Roberts began asking $10,000 for the rental, then lowered it to $7,000 with no results. Now, he says, he’ll let it go for a mere $3,500. But by midweek, he hadn’t even had one call on the property. “I can’t sustain too much greater quantity. If I don’t get it rented we’re looking at just a few months.”

That’s the kind of crisis JulieAnn Stone hopes to avoid. Stone is a Realtor, and when the market was hot, as she puts it, “the greed factor kicked in.” She owned a condo in Mesa, a Phoenix suburb. She bought another in Scottsdale, a third out of state, and finally a fourth property—a luxurious five-bedroom home in an upscale Glendale development—with the intentions of flipping the whole of of them for a profit.

In Glendale, just a mile and a half from the stadium, she has taken out two mortgages, pulling out as much equity as possible in order to renovate her properties and keep her trade afloat. Now, the $10,000 in monthly payments threatens to haul her under too.

“A lot of us thought that leveraging the stuff that we had was the best resolved mode of action as the market kept going up and up and up,” she says. “I remember my simple life.” To turn things around, Stone founded a new business, Jewelstone, a staging service for empty properties and a luxury rental brokerage set up, in part, to market for the Super Bowl. But that last component has also been a lesson in recalibrating her expectations. She has rented just four properties in the place of game week, all for just a fraction of what she had hoped. The big Super Bowl rental plan has been anything but a Hail Mary, she says.

In fact, it’s mostly been “a whole a part of hype.”

Is MBIA toast?

The top bond insurer has reported a fourth-quarter loss of $2.3 billion after writing down $3.5 billion on its credit derivatives. MBIA also took a $713.5 million loss before taxes on its exposure to rising delinquencies and defaults among home-equity products.

For the year, MBIA lost $1.9 billion, compared with a profit of $819.3 million in 2006.

Amid the losses, the company is struggling to hold onto the lifeline of its business—its triple-A rating. That rating provides a blanket of protection for states and municipalities that issue bonds, allowing them to pay a lower interest rate. Without it, the company could collapse.

So the company is trying to shore up its capital, closing a deal with special equity firm Warburg Pincus to invest $500 million. MBIA also cut its dividend and sold $1 billion in notes.

The sword hanging over MBIA is its holdings of collateralized debt obligations, the value of which have eroded as a result of the collapse of the subprime mortgage market. (See "What’s a C.D.O.?")

Last month, the company said its C.D.O. exposure totaled $30.6 billion. Of that, $8.1 billion represented exposure to "C.D.O.’s squared," or C.D.O.’s whose underlying portfolio includes tranches of other C.D.O.’s.

"We are disappointed in our operating results with a view to the year," Gary Dunton, MBIA’s chief executive, said, citing the poor performance of the company’s credit derivatives that caused the company to increase its loss reserves.

In a letter sent to state and federal regulators on Wednesday, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman said he estimated that MBIA’s losses on residential mortgage-backed securities and C.D.O.’s would total $11.6 billion. Ackman has been shorting MBIA’s stock, betting that the company will eventually collapse.

Pressure on C.D.O. values will only increase. Standard & Poor’s lowered or put on review ratings on some $534 billion of bonds and C.D.O.’s tied to subprime. S&P said it did not expect the ratings action to add significantly to financial institutions’ losses. "However, we believe that total losses for financial institutions will eventually reach more than $265 billion," the ratings management said.

In a conference call today, Dunton, MBIA’s chief executive, acknowledged that the social meeting had problems. "All of the monolines are paying for their mistakes," he said.

But he added that "nothing justifies" the 80 percent drop in MBIA’s  stock reward over the last year. He blamed "fearmongering" and "distortion of the facts"  by self-interested parties, a clear reference to Ackman and his supporters.

Disputing estimates that MBIA could lose more than $11 billion on its credit derived investments, Dunton said that the rating agencies in their worst-case scenarios see only a possible $3 billion in losses.
 
Others also believe that investors’ fears about a collapse of MBIA are overdone. Pointing out that MBIA has already cleared the hurdles of reviews with Fitch and S&P and has raised new capital, Jonathan Laing in Barron’s finds "the current price levels of its debt, credit-default swaps, and, yes, not only so its stock to be absurdly low."

"Moreover, both the debt and equity markets seem to be ignoring the nature of bond insurance," Laing says. Insurers only need to pay off over the life span of the underlying debt obligations, he says. That could mean over 20 years or more.

One of the more prying things about MBIA’s fourth-quarter statement is that it was released minutes after twelve o’clock at night.

"Saving bad news till the middle of the night is not going to alleviate the reverse action," says Yves Smith on the Naked Capitalism blog. "Or perhaps MBIA has an astrologer?"

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There are uncertainties about the future of Google that determination have to wait until after today’s market close, when the company reports fourth-quarter results. But Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt have by stipulation certainty on at least one issue in advance.  

Page, Brin, and Schmidt tell Fortune magazine that in the summer of 2004, just before Google’s initial of the whole not private offering, they made a pact to work contemporaneously for 20 years.

If the long-term strategic intentions of Google’s couple co-founders and chief executive were always in question, the three billionaires have given investors reassurance that they are in this for the duration.

So while no leadership overhauls appear to be in the cards, exactly what else is in store for the company still remains unclear.

Vishesh Kumar of TheStreet.com points out that investors have figured out that data about growth in search are not an nice predictor of revenue. And with Google’s performance in a recession environment as yet untested, there’s a lot of uncertainty regarding what sort of results Google will report today.

Then there are the questions about strategic direction. Looking beyond search, what is exactly is the Web hercules’s plan for display advertising, video advertising, and mobile content?

There has also been heavy speculation lately near Google’s intentions in the telecom sector.

Google has already developed a cell-phone-software platform, Android. While rumors circulated on Wednesday that the search giant would form a mobile-phone copartnership with Dell, many believe that Google’s intentions are to form alliances with multiple handset makers to state the Android platform in a whole spectrum of phones.

Google is also known to be interested in bidding (and bidding to win) in the Federal Communications Commission’s auction of the 700 MHz spectrum, a potential multibillion-dollar investment, which leads to questions about whether the search giant aims to build a wireless place of traffic to compete with Verizon and AT&T.
 
So the Street will be looking to hear about a lot further than fourth-quarter E.P.S. out of Google this afternoon. But as for the forecasts, analysts on average expect earnings of $4.44 a share on revenue of $3.5 billion.
 
 
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Congress and the Federal Reserve can’t move fast enough to stay the economy from falling into a recession, new data show.

Consumer spending barely grew in December, rising just 0.2 percent, the slowest gain in six months, the Commerce Department reported. The data, following soft sales reports from many retailers, shows that Americans are cutting back on their spending, the main driver of economic growth.

A separate report from the Labor Department showed that the number of Americans who filed initial claims for state unemployment benefits rose 69,000, to 375,000 last week—the biggest gain since September 2005, when claims rose in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The jobless claims data are often volatile, but today’s number may confuse investors, as it comes a day before the most closely watched economic report of them all, the employment figure as being January.

On Wednesday, the Commerce Department estimated that the economy grew at each annual pace of 0.6 percent in the last three months of 2007, the slowest growth in five years, when the economy was just emerging from a recession.

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The leaders of the six Arab nations that form the Gulf Cooperation Council began gathering in the Qatari capital of Doha today for a two-day summit meeting. They will tackle two thorny issues: how to deal with the precipitous decline in the value of their dollar holdings at a time of unprecedented high oil revenues; and how to deal with a guest that they themselves invited.

The guest is President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. Although Iran borders the Persian Gulf and is an Islamic country like the six members of the council—Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—it is almost totally a Shia state, while the six are largely Sunni. More important, there are concerns that Iran may drudge toward destabilizing, or even toppling, the monarchies that govern the six states. Indeed, Gulf security—including Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions—is among the issues on the table at the summit, according to the organization’s secretary general, Abdul Rahman bin Hamad al-Attiyah of Qatar. (American intelligence agencies said today in a report that Iran halted moil on a nuclear arms program in 2003—a finding that may help ease tensions over Iran.)

Yet the issue that is probably more pressing for the Gulf leaders concerns the growing pressure in favor of them to abandon their pegs to the falling U.S. dollar. The chairman of the Abu Dhabi-based Arab Monetary Fund, Jassem Al-Mannai, said last week that the G.C.C. countries should switch to a "managed float," or peg their currencies to a basket, including the euro, the British pound, and the Japanese yen, all of which have been strengthening in recent months, while the cost of the U.S. dollar has declined by more than 10 percent since 2000.

"There is no currency exchange system suitable for all ages and places…. In the past, G.C.C. economies were negligible and now they have to adopt polices that suit their economic progress," Al-Mannai said, adding that the E.U. was now the main trading partner of the G.C.C. countries, through some $165 billion in trade annually, or 35 percent of their overall foreign trade. Asian countries account for another 30 percent of trade, and the U.S., only about 10 percent. Indeed, the U.A.E., the second largest economy in the council after Saudi Arabia, has called for whole Gulf oil producers, which possess 38 percent of the world’s proven crude oil reserves of 1.3 trillion barrels, to switch from fixed exchange rates to currency baskets.

"Revaluation will not be in the interest of Gulf countries, and it will not help solve the problems that they are facing, because nobody can accord. us a guarantee for the dollar not to fall more distant," Al-Mannai said. "It will not give these countries the freedom to fight increase, which is posing a growing threat to their economies."

His reference was to the certainty that inflation is at a 10-year high in Saudi Arabia, a 16-year peak in Oman, a 19-year high in the U.A.E., and near a record in Qatar. Al-Mannai, whose organization was founded in 1976 with the goal of creating a single currency among 22 Arab states and promoting trade amidst them, said that the U.S. Federal Reserve was cutting rates "to contain the fallout from a mortgage debt crisis" and that Gulf central banks were following suit "despite the risk of stoking inflation."

Although official figures cite an inflation rate of about 10 percent in the Gulf region, private-sector analysts assert that the figure is closer to 25 percent. In Dubai, for example, rents have doubled in the last two years; and gasoline prices have risen by as much as 40 percent.

According to a state in Reuters, rising prices of essential commodities have triggered calls for a national wage increase in Saudi Arabia, demands for price controls in Qatar and Oman, and demand for higher pay by migrant workers in the U.A.E. Indeed, Sultan bunker Nasser al-Suweidi, the governor of U.A.E.’s central bank, recently cited inflation in his call for reform, saying dollar pegs regard forced Gulf central banks to track U.S. monetary policy to maintain the relative price of their currencies, Reuters said.

Of the six G.C.C. countries, Kuwait has already begun pegging its currency, the dinar, not to the U.S. dollar but to a currency basket.

The question of depegging local currencies has taken on special urgency because of the vast remittances by unskilled workers to their homelands, mostly in Asia. According to N. Janardhan, a U.A.E.-based analyst, these remittances amount to more than $30 billion annually. But the decline in the value of the U.S. dollar has affected the net integrity of the money they send household. Holiday plans are being canceled, and many unskilled workers have sent their families back home because the cost of living has become unaffordable.

In fact, Janardhan said, in the last few days, currency dealers in the region have stopped converting U.S. dollars in anticipation of what would amount to a revaluation of roughly 5 to 8 percent of local currencies end a depegging from the dollar.

But the G.C.C. leaders who are gathering in Doha surely would know that depegging their currencies from the U.S. dollar is easier said than done. After all, oil—which provides their livelihood—is still traded in dollars. Moreover, the OPEC countries have more than $4 trillion invested in various projects globally, not to mention in U.S. Treasury securities, which helps America cope with its nagging trade and budgetary deficits. And there’s the political reality that, in the final separation, the U.S. is the guarantor of the security of the Gulf countries— and that it may be politically unwise to challenge Washington.

So will the Gulf leaders restrain go ahead with a depegging? Chances are that a decision has already been made behind closed doors and the summit would be a venue to showcase it.

In the meantime, there is Iran.

Iran is certain to bring up the issue of trade: It has proposed a regional free-trade pact with the six Gulf nations. Of Iran’s global exports of $100 billion annually, about $2 billion go to the U.A.E.—mostly agricultural products, including pistachios—while Iran imports more than $10 billion worth of electronic and other manufactured goods from the U.A.E., mainly through Dubai. Iranian officials have said that Iran has invested more than $120 billion in the U.A.E.’s economy through various entities. But considering Iran, analogous most of the G.C.C. countries, is primarily an exporter of crude oil and natural gas, it is difficult to see how a wider trade arrangement can be fashioned regionally that would benefit as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but sets of players. After all, G.C.C. countries have very little by tendency of action of indigenous manufacturing; their outbound non-oil trade tends to consist mainly of re-exports.

“Get your shit together," Scott Galloway reprimanded the second-year M.B.A. students in his brand strategy class at N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business on Wednesday. "If you just skim the case I assign you, it hurts my feelings."

It was only the second class of the semester, but the professor was already living up to his reputation. "He’s a jackass," one student had heard before signing up for the class anyway. "He’s not haunted with fear to call you out if he thinks you don’t understand what you’re talking about. But it works."

That kind of authority may work well with a bunch of grad students, but it’s not likely to warm the heart of Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., chair of the New York Times Company.

Galloway, 43, is joining forces with the hedge fund Harbinger Capital in order to force change on the New York Times. That means forcing change on the Sulzberger family, which controls the company, and Arthur, who represents the family. Harbinger and Firebrand Partners, which is Galloway’s fund, disclosed a 4.9 percent ownership stake in the company earlier this week.

According to a alphabetic character from Galloway to Sulzberger and New York Times chief charged with execution Janet Robinson, the funds want the company to focus on its core assets and expand its digital presence in order to create shareholder value. They plan to propose while a candidate four new fare members, including Galloway, at the company’s April 22 shareholder conflux.

Others have tried and failed before him, but Galloway’s letter seems to have given disgruntled New York Times shareholders renewed hope. Its stock rose more than 13 percent this week. However, it’s still down 65 percent from five years ago.

The funds insist they don’t want the company to change its dual-class shareholder structure, which gives the Sulzberger family controlling voting power. The last investor to challenge that, Hassan Elmasry of Morgan Stanley, failed last year before divesting his stake at a loss.

Instead, the funds appear to be going for a kinder, gentler approach to activist investing. They want to "serve as an honest broker" between the company, shareholders, and any "opportunities presented for shareholder appraisal."

The letter was long on activist rhetoric and short on details. Galloway declined to comment on the specifics of the funds’ intentions.

Galloway’s record in shareholder activism doesn’t make known us much, one or the other. He sort of stumbled into it after he was kicked off the board of directors of the e-commerce company he founded, Red Envelope, in 2004.

He bought enough stock in the company to wage a fight to regain his council seat, which he did in 2006. Galloway remains on the board today, but it’s not clear that his presence has done much in spite of shareholders. The stock has fallen from $10.25 in June of 2006 when he rejoined to just $3.61 today.

A very precept investment in the Sharper Image by Galloway with Gracie Capital in 2006 was profitable in the short term, but unprolific for investors even in the medium term. The funds were in and out of the stock in just a month, and no demands were made.

Also in 1996, Galloway joined the board of Harvey Electronics at the behest of a group of investors providing the company with a $4 very great number capital steeped liquor. The stock was at $3.64 then, and it’s at $0.05 now. Harvey Electronics filed for bankruptcy in December.

Galloway first partnered with Harbinger in 2006, when they jointly invested in Gateway Computer; it, too, delivered mixed results. The funds disclosed a 10 percent stake in the firm in August that year, and they were successful in winning a board seat for Galloway that December, when the stock traded on the side of $1.86. Last August, less than a year after the funds targeted it, Acer bought Gateway for $1.90 per share.

Galloway’s approach is unusual, in that he teams up with a capital investor such as Harbinger; they provide the financial muscle while he does the tire-kicking, letter-writing, and shareholder-swaying. He gets around 10 percent of the profits from the deal, in addition to the board seat if it’s successful.

The structure means he can have all the fun of activist investing but minimal financial risk.

But even if his money isn’t always on the line, Galloway’s reputation is. And taking on the New York Times is his most public venture yet.

For years, shareholders have been frustrated by the fact that the New York Times holds itself out as a pillar of journalistic ethics, while its owners have flatly refused to play by the handbook of what’s considered good corporate governance. Attempts to get them to change their ways have resulted in mere blips of embarrassment for the company.

Meanwhile, as the newspaper industry overall languishes, it seems that everyone has something to say about how the New York Times Company runs its business. And for good reason: Shareholders are bracing for another disappointment this morning, whereas the company is scheduled to post fourth-quarter earnings. Analysts forecast earnings per share will have fallen 14 percent from the same period a year earlier.

Plenty of critics argue that the company should take significant steps to address falling shareholder value, maybe by divesting non-core holdings like About.com and its stake in the Boston Red Sox. Former Wall Street Journal editor Paul Steiger recently suggested the company should merge with Bloomberg to better compete against Rupert Murdoch-owned Dow Jones.

According to one person familiar with the funds, the Sulzbergers have responded to this week’s letter from Galloway and a "preliminary and cordial dialogue" between the two parties has begun.

It appears that Galloway’s "kill him with kindness" routine has gotten off to a good start. But with Sulzberger’s long history of stubborn refusal, there’s no telling how long before that "jackass" in him comes out.

Americans are reining in their purchases at brick-and-mortar stores, but online? For many, it’s still shop till you drop (or until your internet kindred crashes).

Amazon.com recorded a 42 percent gain in sales in its fourth quarter, by far its biggest quarter because it includes the holiday shopping season. Online commerce overall did well this during the season, with sales rising 19 percent from a year, Bloomberg News reports. American retailers overall had only single digit gains.

More important, Amazon was upbeat about the year to tend hitherward, suggesting that consumers may be more confident than recent economic data, including the G.D.P. report, might suggest. The company expects revenue of $18.8 billion to $19.8 billion for the year, above analysts’ forecasts.

For the quarter, Amazon said net income more than doubled, to $207 a thousand thousand or 48 cents per share, compared with net income of $98 million, or 23 cents per share, in the quarter a year earlier. Sales rose 42 percent, to $5.7 billion. The profit matched Wall Street’s estimates, but the revenue number topped them.

"This quarter showed accelerated sales growth and record operating profits," said Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive of Amazon.com. "In our view, these unusual financial results are driven by one thing: continuously improving the patron experience."