Dave Swift hasn't just been selling dishwashers. One of his first jobs after being appointed president of Whirlpool North America last January was to manage the $2.6 billion acquisition of rival Maytag. Whirlpool is now the second-largest appliance manufacturer in the world (behind Sweden's Electrolux), with annual sales of about $19 billion. The company's third-quarter earnings edged up 3 percent, to $117 million, but the stock fell on investor concerns about rising material prices and costs related to the Maytag purchase. Swift sat down recently with Deputy Business Editor Rick Newman to discuss the Maytag acquisition, Korean and Chinese competitors, and the latest in home appliances.
Encouraged by falling commodity prices, consumer products giant Procter & Gamble Co. raised its profit outlook a bit for the rest of the fiscal year after reporting a first-quarter profit that bested analyst predictions.
Could infertility be reversed by taking a simple supplement? Maybe, in some cases. A study released today from the November issue of Obstetrics and Gynecology found that infertile women who consumed an average of 76 milligrams of iron per day through supplements and food sources had a 60 percent lower risk of failure to ovulate than those who ingested the lowest amounts of iron. Failure to ovulate is the second leading cause of infertility, after clogged fallopian tubes.
AP - Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki on Tuesday ordered the lifting of joint U.S.-Iraqi military checkpoints around the Shiite militant stronghold of Sadr City and other parts of Baghdad — another apparent move to assert his authority with the Americans and appeal to his Shiite support base.
AP - The U.S. and Chinese governments announced Tuesday that North Korea agreed to rejoin six-nation nuclear disarmament talks, a surprise diplomatic breakthrough that comes only three weeks after the communist regime conducted its first known atomic test.
Republicans unleashed a firestorm of criticism against Sen. John Kerry after the Vietnam veteran told college students they'd "get stuck in Iraq" if they didn't work hard in school. The White House press secretary, house majority Leader and Sen. John McCain, another Vietnam vet, immediately demanded Kerry apologize. Kerry reacted: "If anyone thinks a veteran would criticize the more than 140,000 heroes serving in Iraq and not the president who got us stuck there, they're crazy."
NASA Administrator Michael Griffin today approved sending a space shuttle to repair the 16-year-old Hubble Space Telescope, reversing his predecessor's decision to nix the mission. Hubble has let scientists make direct observation of the universe as it was 12 billion years ago, discovered black holes at the center of galaxies, and taken thousands of dramatic images.
North Korea has agreed to rejoin six-nation talks on its nuclear weapons program, U.S. and Chinese officials said today. President Bush said he is "pleased" at the agreement. The surprise announcement came three weeks after North Korea detonated a nuclear bomb.
![[logo]](http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/img/bbc_news_120x60.gif "BBC News")
![[logo]](http://www.csmonitor.com/images/logo_88x31.gif "Christian Science Monitor"){kind=logo}
![[logo]](http://graphics.nytimes.com/images/section/NytSectionHeader.gif "NYT > Home Page")
![[logo]](http://www.usnews.com/usnews/images/rss/logo_rss.gif "USNews.com"){kind=logo}
![[logo]](http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/us/nws/th/main_142b.gif "Yahoo! News")
![[logo]](http://image.guardian.co.uk/sitecrumbs/Guardian.gif "Guardian Unlimited")
![[logo]](http://i.cnn.net/cnn/.element/img/1.0/logo/cnn.logo.rss.gif "CNN.com"){kind=logo}
