Monday Business Edition

“If history is any guide, real GDP growth will be negatively affected through mid-2011,” the Bank said in its latest East Asia and Pacific Economic Update report.

But growth should pick up in subsequent quarters “as reconstruction efforts, which could last five years, accelerate”, it added.

The new version of the classic double-decker 747 took off into nearly cloudless skies at 9:58 am (16:58 GMT) from the Paine Field airport near Boeing’s Seattle headquarters, watched by thousands of workers and guests.

The red, white and orange-liveried aircraft landed just over four hours later having been taken through its paces over Washington state, on the northwest Pacific coast.

In what would be one of the largest US corporate takeovers in years, AT&T looked to snap up the US unit of Germany’s Deutsche Telekom, netting 34 million more subscribers and securing nearly 40 percent of the market.

The deal would see currently second-ranked AT&T leapfrog its arch-rival Verizon — transforming the lucrative US telecoms industry and sending ripples through the advertising, commercial real estate and a host of other sectors.

The US media landscape has changed somewhat since the Times, in September 2007, aborted TimesSelect, its two-year experiment with making readers pay for full access to NYTimes.com.

Print advertising revenue and circulation have continued to slide but newspaper and magazine publishers have latched on to devices like Apple’s popular iPad as a potential lifeline.

Finance minister George Osborne unveils his 2011/2012 tax and spend plans amid fears that his drastic belt-tightening measures could tip Britain back into recession.

Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, which rose to power in May 2010, has sought to slash a record public deficit that it inherited from the previous Labour administration.

Heads of state and government of the 27 European Union states meet Thursday and Friday in Brussels, with the situation in Libya, and nuclear safety issues in the wake of Japan’s quake and tsunami severely damaging a reactor, high on the agenda.

Their remaining focus will be on meeting a self-imposed deadline for a “comprehensive” response to a roller-coaster euro debt crisis aimed at soothing nervous money markets.

The square may soon be getting another landmark building, after larger-than-life US property tycoon Donald Trump signed an agreement this month to help develop one of his signature towers there, plus another in the coastal resort of Batumi.

The deal was a PR boost for the ex-Soviet state which is struggling to lure back foreign investors following its war with Russia in 2008 and the global financial crisis.

The pair made headlines last year when they said they would seek to get fellow billionaires to commit half of their wealth to good causes as part of the “Giving Pledge”. So far, 59 rich Americans have taken the pledge.

But while charitable giving is widespread in countries such as the United States, it is less well established in developing nations such as India and China, where Gates and Buffett went in September on a similar mission.

As defense contracts go, Delhi’s bid to replace 126 aging MiG fighters is large, but hardly a show stopper.

Still, in an industry where billion dollar contracts are commonplace, the project is turning heads.

The budget itself is expected to be soporific with no big tax cuts or new spending announcements.

Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper has already hinted it would not include “deep cuts,” nor “a whole new suite of large, unaffordable, new government spending commitments.”

He’s skilled at both, but neither is his real job.

“I work as a driver for a local company, but the salary is too little,” he says. “I come here on my off-days to earn a little extra.”

And although visitors avoiding Egypt and Tunisia may not necessarily flock to Greece — which has troubles of its own from an unpopular economic overhaul — the extra demand is enough for the entire region, industry representatives said.

“As an all-year destination, Spain is most likely to gain Egypt’s market, followed by Turkey,” says Yiannis Papadakis, deputy chairman of the Hellenic association of travel and tourist agencies (Hatta).

Although Australia uses no nuclear power, it is the world’s third-ranking uranium producer behind Kazakhstan and Canada, exporting some 9,600 tonnes of oxide concentrate annually worth over 1.1 billion dollars (1.09 billion US).

It also holds the world’s largest reserves of uranium — the most widely used nuclear fuel — with 23 percent of the total, according to the World Nuclear Association.

The deal gives AT&T, the No. 2 US mobile service often criticized for its poor network performance, additional capacity to expand and meet ever increasing demands for videos and data from devices such as Apple Inc’s iPhone.

For Deutsche Telekom, the deal offloads an asset that was declining in profitability and provides it with funds to pay down debt and buy back shares. The German telecom operator also gets an 8 percent stake in AT&T as part of the deal, becoming its largest shareholder and retaining some exposure to the U.S. market.

Macroeconomists have largely concluded that Japan won’t shave more than a few tenths of a percentage point off global growth, even though it is the world’s third-largest economy and looks likely to slip into a brief recession.

Hung Tran, deputy managing director of the Institute of International Finance, said the direct GDP impact from Japan will most likely be “small and reversible,” but the indirect effects may be large and long-lasting.

Take Aflac. It derives 76 percent of its sales from Japan. Last quarter, Aflac (AFL.N) got a 6 cents-per-share lift from a rising yen. This quarter, it expects a bigger boost from forex gains.

Yet the shares of Aflac, Japan’s No. 1 foreign insurer, fell 8.8 percent last week following news of the massive earthquake and tsunami. Earnings estimates have not been revised in the past two weeks, according to Thomson Reuters StarMine data.

The buyback has been expected for some time, given the relatively unfavorable terms for the investment bank, which paid Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc (BRKa.N) $500 million a year in dividends, or more than $15 a second,

The firm is paying a 10 percent premium to buy back the shares. It will take a $1.6 billion hit to first-quarter earnings, including the premium. Repurchase terms were agreed in September 2008, when the deal was struck.

The assets include a $1 billion deposit that Citibank demanded to continue providing foreign exchange settlement services to broker-dealer Lehman Brothers Inc (LBI) after its parent filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, according to a complaint filed in U.S. bankruptcy court in Manhattan on Friday.

Citibank, part of Citigroup Inc (C.N), also froze more than $300 million in additional deposits, according to the complaint filed by Lehman Brothers trustee James Giddens.

The strongest banks, including JPMorgan, are entitled to raise dividends and buy back shares in a matter of weeks, while weaker banks, including SunTrust Banks Inc, were authorized to issue shares and pay back government bailout money.

The Federal Reserve tested how banks would fare if the economy were to come under more pressure, in another round of stress tests nearly two years after the first round. European banks face similar tests.

No one is predicting a massive slowdown, but as the grim human toll of Japan’s March 11 quake mounted Monday and fears of spreading radiation and prolonged power outages grew, forecasts about the economic effect of the quake also darkened.

Few economists are ready to specify just how big Asia’s slump will be because of the uncertainties over Japan’s Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant and when power shortages – which are hitting industrial production – will be resolved.

The lure this time is “RewardVille,” a show of appreciation aimed at getting players even more absorbed in their online farms, cities, crime rings and poker games. The program unveiled a week ago doles out game points and credits that can be used to buy more virtual goodies on Zynga’s existing games.

It’s the latest attempt to deepen people’s attachment to Zynga’s strangely addictive world at a time attention spans are becoming more fickle. Several entertainment options now bombard people on an array of digital devices.

Workers are racing to bring the nuclear plant under control, but the process is proceeding in fits and starts, stalled by incidents like the smoke and by the need to work methodically to make sure wiring, pumps and other machinery can be safely switched on.

What caused the smoke to billow first from Unit 3 at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant and later from Unit 2 is under investigation, nuclear safety agency officials said. Still, in the days since the March 11 earthquake and tsunami wrecked the plant’s cooling systems, both reactors have overheated and seen explosions. Workers were evacuated from the area to buildings nearby, though radiation levels remained steady, the officials said.

The March 11 disaster – which killed more than 18,000 people and ravaged northeastern Japan – will likely shave up to 0.5 percentage point from the country’s economic growth this year, the bank said in a report. The impact will be concentrated in the first half of the year, it said.

“Damage to housing and infrastructure has been unprecedented,” the World Bank said. “Growth should pick up though in subsequent quarters as reconstruction efforts, which could last five years, accelerate.”

In Helena, Jackie Merenz loads her beat-up SUV with juice boxes, graham crackers and apple sauce she bought at Walmart for her 6-year-old daughter’s birthday party. The 60-mile round trip she makes twice a week for groceries hits her wallet hard – the food stamps don’t go far, gas prices are skyrocketing and to top it off, her husband had to stop working after getting injured.

Living out in Montana’s Big Sky Country often means driving long distances for the basic necessities, and people on tight budgets like Garcia, 49, and Merenz, 26, have long been creative in making ends meet.

Whether it grows is another matter.

Polls show that about 1 in 8 Americans believe they have been personally helped already, well before the main push to cover the uninsured scheduled for 2014.

The three studies take a new approach to crop and climate research by bringing together researchers from a wide variety of fields and encouraging them to find solutions appropriate to specific geographic areas. One study will focus on Midwestern corn, another on wheat in the Northwest and a third on Southern pine forests.

Shifting weather patterns already have had a big effect on U.S. agriculture, and the country needs to prepare for even greater changes, said Roger Beachy, director of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, an arm of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And since the changes are expected to vary from region to region, he said different areas will need different solutions. Some areas may gain longer growing seasons or suffer more frequent floods, while others may experience more droughts or shorter growing seasons.

Stocks were already falling when the European Union’s energy chief warned of an impending nuclear catastrophe in Japan. It didn’t matter that few investors in the U.S. had ever heard of Guenther Oettinger or that other reports from Japan weren’t quite as dire. The Dow Jones industrial average fell 200 points in the next four hours.

“The market went up so far so fast, and investor surveys were showing a great deal of bullishness, the kind we often associate with the peak of a bull market,” says Gendreau, of the Financial Network, a financial advisory firm. “Whenever you’re fully invested in stocks – when everyone’s on one side of the trade you’re very vulnerable to bad news.

Billions of dollars are at stake as a growing number of states look for ways to generate more revenue without violating a 1992 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that prohibits a state from forcing businesses to collect sales taxes unless the business has a physical presence, such as a store, in that state.

States are trying to get around that restriction by passing laws that broaden the definition of a physical presence. Retailers are resisting being deputized as tax collectors.

Nissan said it will resume production of parts at five plants Monday. It then plans to resume vehicle production Thursday as long as supplies last.

Most of Japan’s auto industry shut down after a powerful earthquake and tsunami devastated the country earlier this month. Nissan and other carmakers have started resuming some production, but the industry still faces rolling blackouts and infrastructure problems

Italian officials warned they would do whatever was necessary to free the crew of the “Asso 22,” which includes eight Italians, two Indians and Ukrainian. The tug was involved in servicing oil platforms off the Tripoli coast.

The ship owner, Naples-based Augusta Offshore SrL, said Tripoli port officials had boarded the vessel Friday and Saturday, asking to see and photograph its equipment, with some spending the night on board.

The produce came from Ibaraki prefecture in the northeast, where radiation was found in spinach grown up to 75 miles (120 kilometers) from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant. Another bin of spinach – labeled as being from Chiba prefecture, west of Tokyo – was sold out.

“It’s a little hard to say this, but I won’t buy vegetables from Fukushima and that area,” said shopper Yukihiro Sato, 75.

The stakes are high in Atlantic City, which is in the fifth-straight year of a revenue decline brought on by the explosion of casino gambling in neighboring states and made worse by the poor economy.

For the past five years, it has been trying to remake itself as a destination resort for higher-spending customers willing to stay a few days and take in shows, go shopping and eat at gourmet restaurants in addition to gambling.

But with pressure increasing on folks not to smoke, Zippo Manufacturing Co. is hoping to capitalize on its brand by offering a wider variety of products – from watches to leisure clothing to cologne – through kiosks and Zippo-brand specialty stores designed to showcase the durable image reinforced by each distinctive lid “click” of its brass-encased, lifetime-guaranteed lighters.

Realizing that producing 18 million lighters a year in the mid-1990s was probably the company’s high-water mark – Zippo’s 550 employees will produce about 12 million lighters this year – the company started marketing research before president and chief executive officer Gregory Booth was hired 10 years ago.

The victim of the attack was a South African-run gold exploration concession in the economically depressed Talas province in western Kyrgyzstan. A mob of young men threatened workers and raided offices, smashing furniture and throwing equipment out of windows before setting a medical clinic alight.

This former Soviet nation, which hosts U.S. and Russian military air bases, has been struggling to put its economy back on track since last year’s violent overthrow of widely reviled former President Kurmanbek Bakiyev and a spate of ethnic killings in the south. But further such incidents paired with the country’s rocky recent history could scare off more foreign investment.

But there are stark differences between the disasters.

“It’s probably not politically correct to say it, but TMI was a piece of cake compared to what they’re facing over there in Fukushima, in terms of the problem,” said Harold Denton, the federal nuclear engineer who became a calming, knowledgeable voice during the height of the Three Mile Island crisis in March and April of 1979.

The real estate tycoon with the comb-over hairdo and in-your-face attitude plans to decide by June whether to join the field of GOP contenders competing in 2012 to make the Democratic incumbent a one-term president.

Trump insists he’s serious. He rejects skeptics’ claims that he’s using the publicity to draw viewers to “Celebrity Apprentice,” the NBC reality program he co-produces and hosts.

In the bitter aftermath of a showdown with Wisconsin’s governor, and as other states move to weaken public employee bargaining rights, unions and their allies dare to hope they can turn rage into revival. This could be a make-or-break moment for a movement that brought the nation the 40-hour week, overtime pay, upward mobility, a storied century of brawls, progressivism and corruption – and now a struggle to stay relevant in the modern age.

Not so many answer to the call anymore when labor demands, as it did in the bloody strife of Kentucky coal country generations ago, “Which side are you on?”

In New Hampshire, supporters argue that reducing the tax by a dime would help the state compete with Maine, Vermont and Massachusetts, while opponents say it would still lose millions of dollars even if higher sales resulted.

New Hampshire’s House voted Thursday to reduce the tax and sent the bill to the Senate, where its prospects are uncertain. New Jersey and Rhode Island have also considered reducing their taxes.

For years, the future has been slow to appear at the site of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. But with six months remaining until the national 9/11 memorial opens, the work to turn a mountain of rubble into some of the inspiring moments envisioned nearly a decade ago is thundering forward.

One World Trade Center, otherwise known as the Freedom Tower, has joined the Manhattan skyline. Its steel frame, already clad in glass on lower floors, now stands 58 stories tall and is starting to inch above many of the skyscrapers that ring the site. A new floor is being added every week.

Last year’s tests were widely considered a failure after some banks passed, only to require bailouts weeks later. The new test will see how banks fare with an extreme deterioration in financial markets and economic activity in order to gauge where the weak links in Europe’s financial system are.

The European Banking Authority said that the simulation will assume EU economic output will shrink 0.4 percent in 2011 and will show no growth in 2012 – a 4 percentage point difference from current forecasts. That compares with a 3 percentage point drop assumed in the 2010 stress tests.

These days, inflation is much lower. Yet to many Americans, it feels worse now. And for a good reason: Their income has been even flatter than inflation.

Back in the ’80’s, the money people made typically more than made up for high inflation. In 1981, banks would pay nearly 16 percent on a six-month CD. And workers typically got pay raises to match their higher living costs.

Most of Japan’s auto industry is shut down. Factories from Louisiana to Thailand are low on Japanese-made parts. Idled plants are costing companies hundreds of millions of dollars. And U.S. car dealers may not get the cars they order this spring.

If parts factories in Japan stay closed for several more weeks, dealers and manufacturers will feel deepening effects: fewer cars, diminished revenue and frustrated customers.