Here are five trends to keep an eye on during the holiday shopping season, which can be a contact sport for consumers and a test of survival or retailers.

The General Electric Company said yesterday that it was selling its troubled reinsurance business for $6.8 billion to Swiss Re.

The European Central Bank said Friday that it was poised to raise interest rates, ending weeks of speculation.

With cable television, Netflix and internet, you probably spend more on entertainment than you do on groceries, clothing or gasoline.

As retailers think it is never too early to start shopping for Christmas, they also think it is never too early to worry about how much shoppers will spend.

The Senate passed legislation that would extend a program that required the government to cover insurance losses in cases involving terrorist attacks.

An estimated 40 million Americans enjoy hunting or recreational shooting - more than those who play golf and tennis combined.

Swirling around a record-high copper market are rumors and innuendo that have buffeted a market already prone to fluctuating on whispers.

A jury convicted an executive of the HealthSouth Corporation of conspiracy and lying to auditors in connection with the $2.7 billion fraud at the company.

New standards for calculating fuel economy ratings on cars and trucks will be proposed by the end of the year, according to the E.P.A.

Ronald W. Burkle, a leading grocery store investor, talks about the future of groceries as they are pinched by Wal-Mart on one end and Whole Foods on the other.

Cisco Systems sees its future sitting on top of a television, acquiring television set-top-box maker Scientific-Atlanta.

I can't believe what it takes to manage my finances these days. I'm not talking about anything complicated, just the endless pile-up of money chores.

The European Union and the United States struck a preliminary accord on Friday to increase trans-Atlantic airline access.

Auto analysts are pining in print for Carlos Ghosn, the chief executive of Nissan, to succeed Rick Wagoner as chairman and chief executive of General Motors.

Sync magazine, a men's magazine devoted to electronic gear and gadgetry, will fold after 18 months of publication.

By The Associated Press.

By The Associated Press.

In its first year of operation - 1981 - the Butterball Turkey help line got 11,000 calls from people who had questions about how to cook for Thanksgiving.

Sony BMG can learn two lessons from its recent attemp to fend off piracy: One, bloggers will catch you. And two, it's not the screw-up, it's the cover-up.

By Reuters.

The factories that once supported four generations of the Roy family are now mostly parking lots.

James Simons runs Renaissance Technologies, whose hedge funds have yielded yearly returns of 33.21 percent, an impossibly high number.

Foreigners have invested $1.01 trillion into long-term American securities, the first time the total has topped that threshold.

With cable television, Netflix and the Internet, you probably spend more on entertainment than you do on groceries, clothing or gasoline.

Pacific Rim leaders end their two-day summit with a call for a breakthrough in global trade talks next month.

There is no evidence that the bird flu drug Tamiflu harms children, America's medicines regulator concludes.

Reinsurer Swiss Re agrees to buy the insurance unit of industrial giant General Electric for $6.8bn.

Reuters - U.S. stocks could make fresh gains next week as sectors such as technology draw new money, but overall trading volumes will likely be limited as many investors hit the road for the Thanksgiving holiday, according to analysts.

Reuters - Wal-Mart Stores on Saturday maintained its November sales forecast and said demand for groceries outstripped general merchandise sales.

Reuters - OPEC oil exporters will not consider cutting production at next month's meeting unless prices fall rapidly, the organization's chief said on Saturday.

Reuters - China has agreed to buy 70 aircraft from Boeing Co. during U.S. President George W. Bush's visit to Beijing this weekend, a senior U.S. official said on Saturday.

The spotlight is back on Shawn Fanning, the creator of Napster, this time as a symbol of how big business and the disruptive force of the Internet just might find a way to get along.

In recent years, housing, real estate and the related industries have become a huge factor in the crucial economic area of employment growth.

Without intending to do so, Google set in motion multilateral disarmament by telling its first advertisers in 2000: text only.

A new study suggests that it may be too soon to give up on actively managed mutual funds.

The nuclear-power sector has been enjoying something of a revival, because of its operating-cost advantages over other forms of electricity production.

With 'volunteer vacation,' people may work on clearing trails in the Sierra National Forest to teaching English to a hospital staff in China.

THANKSGIVING dinner is often scheduled for the late afternoon or early evening, so there is plenty of post-turkey time for families to socialize. Unfortunately, living-room conversations occasionally degenerate into arguments, especially when far-flung relatives of varying political persuasions or football fan bases are thrown together. The urge to bop one's father-in-law or cousin on the head can be powerful.

Kurt M. Landgraf is the president and chief executive of Educational Testing Service.

Turkey, Turkey,.

IT is a conundrum of medical care: although patients are the reason that doctors' offices exist, the patients' physical and psychological comfort is rarely considered in the design.

As the man who founded the hedge fund Crescendo Partners, Eric S. Rosenfeld has made a name for himself as an activist investor willing to take on the managers of companies that he believes are undervalued. At a conference last week, he made a new name for himself by singing and dancing about it.

In a new book about Google, there are occasional hints that the extraordinary success of the search-engine phenom has begun to go to its head.

NO one can predict with certainty what the stock market will do on any given day, but forecasting a gain on the day after Thanksgiving is a safer bet than most. Investors are inclined to feel good after their day off, and they often express it by bidding up share prices upon their return.

INSANITY,

The wider net being cast by prosecutors in trying to find corporate malfeasance has begun to snare a more elusive prey: anonymous Wall Street bankers.

The civil case against Paul E. Johnson is the only one contending bias by an individual analyst that has gone to trial since the stock bubble burst in 2000.

A rejections of the defense that 'Everone else is doing it, too.'

Reuters - The U.S. Treasury Department acknowledged on Saturday that Deputy Treasury Secretary Robert Kimmitt expressed concern over the pace of China's moves toward a market-based currency regime in a recent interview.

Reuters - Defense contractor Lockheed Martin Corp. and three private equity firms have abandoned talks to buy Computer Sciences Corp. , a person familiar with the matter said on Saturday.

Reuters - Japanese electronics maker Pioneer Corp. (6773.T) plans to cut 10 percent of its domestic work force, or about 1,000 jobs, and scale down its DVD recorder business to shore up its struggling operations, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun business daily said on Sunday.