Tax news

By Linda A. Johnson, AP Business Writer TRENTON, N.J. — Allergy sufferers who take the popular prescription medication Zyrtec are getting several options that don’t require a prescription.

On Monday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave approval for Ohm Laboratories to sell generic versions of Pfizer’s (PFE) Zyrtec. The antihistamine, which doesn’t make takers sleepy, generated about $1.3 billion in annual sales but lost patent protection in late December.

Ohm will sell the drug without a prescription under its chemical name, cetirizine hydrochloride, in five and 10 milligram doses. The medicine treats hives and allergy symptoms such as runny nose, sneezing and itching of the nose, throat and eyes.

Ohm, which sells generic, private label and non-prescription medicines in this country, is a subsidiary of Ranbaxy Laboratories, India’s biggest drug company.

Jim Meehan, Ohm’s vice president of sales and distribution, said the products will be launched immediately.

Last Friday, FDA approved two other companies to sell cetirizine hydrochloride as a generic, over-the-counter drug, also in five and 10 milligram doses. They are Caraco Pharmaceutical Laboratories of Detroit and Perrigo of Allegan, Mich. Perigo will sell the products under store-brand labels.

McNeil Consumer Healthcare, a unit of Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), said in November it had won approval to start selling brand-name Zyrtec over the counter this January. It acquired the “switch rights” to sell a non-prescription version of Zyrtec as part of its $16.6 billion purchase of Pfizer’s consumer health care business at the end of 2006.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Reader Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification.

 SETTING RECORDS
Crude oil, dollars per barrel, one year  MARKETS 2007Stocks: Volatile 2007 ends with annual gainsOil: Record-setting year saw crude near $100Gold: Gold heads for largest yearly rise in 30 years
By John Wilen, AP Business Writer NEW YORK — Oil prices headed slightly lower Monday, marking a quiet end to a record-breaking year, although rising demand and geopolitical instability are expected to keep upward pressure on energy costs early in 2008.

“There’s a good chance this week that we’ll see some record highs,” said Jim Ritterbusch, president of Ritterbusch and Associates in Galena, Ill.

On Monday, light, sweet crude for February delivery fell 79 cents to $95.21 a barrel In afternoon trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Traders chalked up the decline to weak home sales data — a concern for U.S. economic growth.

Also undercutting oil on Monday was the strength of the dollar. Crude futures offer a hedge against a weak dollar, and oil futures bought and sold in dollars are more attractive to foreign investors when the greenback is falling. Many analysts credit this year’s record price gains — the largest percentage price gain ever — to speculators driven to oil futures by the weak dollar.

Crude futures rose roughly 58% in 2007 as demand from booming economies in Asia surged while American motorists continued to hit the road in record numbers, sending gas prices above $3 a gallon.

Analysts see little standing in the way of oil’s ascent to $100 a barrel, or higher, once traders return from their holiday breaks. Oil reached a trading record of $99.29 on Nov. 21, and is above the inflation-adjusted highs set in early 1980.

Oil prices lately have been pumped up on the heels of Turkish attacks on Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq, where concerns are growing that the rebels would retaliate by attacking an oil pipeline. The recent assassination of Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto has exacerbated worries about global instability. And attacks by Nigerian rebels on that oil-rich nation’s crude infrastructure also have driven crude prices higher this year.

Earlier Monday, oil prices rose on supply concerns raised by minor outages at refineries in Texas and California and Iran’s plans to start up its first nuclear plant. Iran’s announcement is an example of a development that, while not directly threatening oil supplies, brings the West’s confrontation with the OPEC member sharply back to the fore.

Minor outages at refineries in Texas and California, on the other hand, directly threaten supplies of heating oil and gasoline. Still, the glitches were minor, and the price effect was short-lived.

Gasoline futures for January delivery rose 0.53 cents to $2.465 a gallon on Monday, while January heating oil futures fell 0.21 cents to $2.6349 a gallon. Both contracts have set price records in recent weeks on supply concerns. Contributing to the volatility was position-squaring ahead of both contracts’ expiration later Monday, analysts said.

At the pump, meanwhile, gas prices rose 4.6 cents over the weekend to a national average of $3.046 a gallon, according to AAA and the Oil Price Information Service. Gas prices are following the lead of crude futures, which have risen 8.6% in December.

Gas and oil prices have reversed course in recent weeks after falling sharply in early December as oil inventories appeared to be growing, and several forecasters lowered demand growth predictions. But several weeks of falling inventories have combined with data suggesting demand remains strong to push oil futures back near record levels.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Reader Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification.

 FIVE TRADING DAYS
Dow Jones industrial average, five days  INVESTING TOOLSMANAGING YOUR MONEY: Sign up for our free e-mail newsletter. Every Friday, you'll get a week's worth of USA TODAY's personal finance news and columns.READERS' CHOICE: See the 50 stocks that appear most in USATODAY.com reader portfolios.YOUR PORTFOLIO: Create free portfolios at USATODAY.com to track your stocks or mutual funds. Click here to get started.STOCK AND FUND SCREENERS: Market screener (most active stocks), mutual fund finder, intraday stock screener.ASK MATT ABOUT STOCKS: USA TODAY's Matt Krantz answers your questions daily at money.usatoday.com.
By Madlen Read, AP Business Writer NEW YORK — Stocks sank Monday as a modest uptick in existing home sales could not lift investors’ downcast spirits on the last day of Wall Street’s volatile and difficult year. The Dow Jones industrial average fell more than 100 points with only a few hours left of trading.

The National Association of Realtors said November existing home sales rose 0.4% to an annual rate of 5 million — the first rise in nine months. However, sales are still 20% below where they were a year ago, and the median existing home price has dropped 3.3% over the past 12 months.

Falling home prices this year have made it hard for struggling homeowners to refinance their mortgages, and the slump in construction activity has hurt home builders and other housing-related industries.

Investors have some reason to believe that Wall Street in 2008 might be able to put to rest some of its financial troubles. The U.K.’s Observer newspaper reported Sunday that Merrill Lynch (MER) was in talks over the weekend to line up capital from investors in China and the Middle East in exchange for portions of the Wall Street firm.

Merrill, like many other financial houses, has seen its portfolio lose billions of dollar in value due to misplaced bets on mortgages. And as Citigroup (C), UBS (UBS), Morgan Stanley (MS) and Bear Stearns (BSC) have done, it has turned to investors in Asia for much-needed capital — Merrill has already gotten $4.4 billion this month from a Singapore fund, which bought a 9.9% stake in the U.S. brokerage.

The Dow will be posting its first fourth-quarter drop since 1997. The blue chips’ gain for the year so far of about 7%, though, is respectable — not as large as the increase in 2006, but a better performance than the modest loss seen in 2005.

In early afternoon trading Monday, the Dow fell 102.02, or 0.8%, to 13,263.85.

Broader stock indicators also fell. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index fell 11.16, or 0.8%, to 1467.33, and the Nasdaq composite index fell 23.19, or 0.9%, to 2651.27.

Going into Monday’s session, the S&P was up 3.4%, and the Nasdaq was up 9.6%.

Government bonds rose. The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note, which moves opposite its price, slid to 4.03% from 4.12% late Friday.

Treasurys have staged an unusually impressive rally in the past year. Weakness in the housing sector and overall economy, as well as concerns that beleaguered banks could face a year-end liquidity squeeze, provided fuel for the government bond rally.

Declining issues outnumbered advancers by 2 to 1 on the New York Stock Exchange, where volume came to a light 395.4 million shares.

2007 was a remarkable year on Wall Street. The market began the year continuing the rally that propeled the Dow above 12,000 for the first time in October. Then, in late February, came a reminder that stocks were capable of turning tail and plunging — a skid on China’s stock market and an ominous economic outlook from former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan sent the Dow down 416 points in one day.

That panic didn’t last long. In April, the Dow barreled above 13,000 for the first time and then glided past 14,000 in mid-July. But in late July, however, the market realized that the ongoing slump in housing, and a rise in mortgage foreclosures due to resetting adjustable-rate loans, was taking a toll across the credit markets.

Though the housing market started teetering as early as 2005, few people anticipated how much the downturn could affect the global financial system. Mortgages given to borrowers deemed “subprime” comprised only about an eighth of the $10 trillion U.S. mortgage market — why would that rattle the world markets?

The problem was, these pieces of debt were chopped up, repackaged and woven into larger fixed-income instruments, on which banks and other investors made billion-dollar bets — bets that were extremely profitable during the housing boom, but calamitous when borrowers couldn’t keep up with their mortgage payments. When one slice of the instrument defaulted, it pulled the whole thing down with it.

Investors bailed out of anything tied to mortgages, and soon Wall Street realized that financial institutions in the United States and overseas were holding billions of dollars in assets that were losing value by the day. The biggest names on the Street — Merrill Lynch, Citigroup , Bear Stearns — announced billions of dollars in write-downs. Merrill and Citi lost their CEOs, and several financial firms needed billion-dollar investments to clean up their balance sheets.

In the midst of this turmoil, the credit markets all but seized up, and all these interconnected events pummeled stocks. Triple-digit drops, recoveries and then drops again in the Dow became commonplace as Wall Street suffered through months of volatility reminiscent of the terrible days after the 2001 terror attacks.

In August and September the Federal Reserve began to act, with interest rate cuts and injections of liquidity. It helped for a while, and in October, stocks were rallying again taking the Dow to another set of record highs — only to succumb again to fears about the unknown extent of the credit mess.

Wall Street goes into 2008 still shaky because of that uncertainty, not to mention oil’s jump this year of about 60% to nearly $100 a barrel, and the U.S. dollar’s tumble to record lows against the euro. On Monday, the dollar rose against most other major currencies, gold prices fell, and crude oil prices fell 77 cents to $95.23 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

“We’ve seen the return of volatility. I think that will be around for a while, and will govern trading for the new year,” said Scott Fullman, director of investment strategy for I. A. Englander & Co. “Stock selection and strategy will play a very important part in the success of anybody who is trading going into the new year. This is not a time where you throw a dart at the board.”

In 2007, stocks in the technology and energy industries did well, while the financial sector and small-caps — usually fledgling companies that rely heavily on loans to grow their business — lagged.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Reader Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification.

 GLEAMING BRIGHT

Gold prices over a year.

LONDON (Reuters) — Gold is on track for its biggest yearly gain since 1979, with prices hovering Monday about $15 an ounce away from its historic highs.

It has jumped more than 30% this year as a slide in the dollar, record high oil prices, credit market turmoil, falling U.S. interest rates and geopolitical tension helped to increase its safe-haven appeal.

“For gold, this marks the sixth consecutive year of positive returns and consequently represents the longest gold price rally in history,” Deutsche Bank said.

In the past days, the metal gained on speculative buying driven by dollar weakness and tensions in Pakistan following the assassination of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto.

Spot gold hit a 7-week high of $843.20 an ounce before falling to $835.50/836.30 in European trading, compared with $837.80/838.50 in New York late on Friday.

“Certainly we are looking for a test of $850 very early in 2008. All the supportive factors are still there. The dollar is very much under pressure and we have got geopolitical tensions,” said James Moore, precious metals analyst at TheBullionDesk.com.

“There is going to be some reallocation of money next year and certainly gold is going to get a favor, as a market to move 30% in one direction is going to raise attention.”

Gold was fixed at a record high of $850 in January 1980 on high inflation linked to strong oil, Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and the effects of the Iranian revolution.

After adjusting for inflation, that level was equal to $2,079 at 2006 prices, according to industry estimates.

The latest safe-haven buying was sparked by Bhutto’s killing last week, which plunged Pakistan into crisis.

“Gold spiked to fresh highs on escalating geopolitical tensions, tightening oil supplies and a weakening dollar, which seem to stack the deck in favor of further upward movement,” said Pradeep Unni, analyst at Vision Commodities in Dubai.

The dollar fell vs. a basket of major currencies, keeping it on track for its worst annual performance in four years, as investors speculated that 2008 could bring slower U.S. economic growth and lower interest rates.

A weaker dollar makes gold cheaper for holders of other currencies and often lifts bullion demand. The metal is also generally seen as a hedge against oil-led inflation.

Copyright 2007 Reuters Limited. Click for Restrictions. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Reader Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification.

JERSEY CITY (AP) — Vonage Holdings (VG) and Nortel Networks (NT) have settled their patent litigation, allowing for cross-licensing of the telecom companies’ technology.

The agreement does not call for any payments by either company.

Under the agreement, Nortel and Vonage will cross-license each others’ technology, which is used to make emergency calls and dial 411. The settlement is subject to final documentation.

“We are pleased to resolve this issue and enter into a productive relationship with Nortel,” said Vonage Chief Legal Officer Sharon O’Leary.

This year, Vonage agreed to settle four other patent suits, and in each case, promised to pay the other side for prior use of its products.

Earlier this month, it agreed to pay AT&T (T) $39 million as part of a settlement. Vonage also has said it will pay Sprint Nextel (S) and Verizon Communications (VZ) a total of $200 million to settle lawsuits.

Vonage spokesman Charles Sahner said earlier this month that the company was dragged into the legal battle with Nortel after it acquired three patents from Digital Packet Licensing last year. DPL had filed a suit against Nortel in 2004 alleging violation of those three patents, so Vonage continued with the lawsuit. Nortel countersued, saying Vonage violated 13 of Nortel’s patents, and asked that Vonage be kept from using the technology.

Despite having now settled all of its legal battles, Vonage still faces many challenges as cable companies roll out their own digital phone services and consumers increasingly opt for cellphones in place of landlines.

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Reader Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Projections for S&P 500 companies' fourth-quarter earnings swung to a 6.1 percent drop on Monday from an 11.5 percent rise on October 1, in the biggest quarterly move since Reuters Estimates started compiling analysts' forecasts in 1999.

The sharp decline comes as financial write-downs and an economic slowdown take their toll on corporate results, pushing down forecasts for the fourth quarter.

First- and second-quarter estimates have also fallen significantly. Analysts now expect first- and second-quarter earnings to rise just 5.1 percent and 5 percent, respectively, according to Ashwani Kaul, senior market analyst at Reuters Estimates.

That's down from an October 1 expectation of 11.4 percent earnings growth for the first quarter and 9.4 percent growth in the second.

"The surge in analysts' conservatism is primarily the result of the subprime crisis in the U.S. and globally and its impact on the write-downs in the financial sector," said Ned Riley, chief investment officer at Riley Asset Management.

The financial sector, which has been battered by losses tied to subprime mortgages, is expected to see year-over-year earnings down 62 percent in the fourth quarter.

"Forecasters are also becoming more sensitive to the possibility of recession in the United States, and those macro forces will exert huge influence over consumer spending in the United States as well as globally," Riley said.

There were more profit warnings than positive pre-announcement statements in December, according to Reuters Estimates. Of the companies that gave forward-looking guidance statements, 193 companies gave negative guidance compared with 161 that gave positive guidance.

"I think the same will be true for 2008," Riley said. "While there is still a fairly optimistic bias for profits at the moment, I expect first- and second-quarter earnings forecasts to drop and that might happen sooner than has been the case in the past two quarters."

The huge swing in the earnings forecasts highlights their limitations, Riley said.

"Analysts forecasts are merely an extrapolation of a trend and a reflection of management's own optimism about their specific companies. Generally speaking, I would rely more on one's assessment of the economic future and how each economic sector is impacted by that," he said.

The technology sector is expected to be the strongest fourth-quarter performer, with analysts forecasting a 25 percent gain. Health care comes second with analysts expecting gains of 12 percent.

(Editing by Leslie Adler)

By Jeannine Aversa, AP Economics Writer WASHINGTON — Sales of previously owned homes inched up in November but that didn’t change the overall bleak picture for an ailing housing industry that has been suffering through a painful slump.

The National Association of Realtors reported Monday that sales of existing single-family homes, condominiums and townhouses rose 0.4% in November from October, to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 5 million units. Over the last 12 months, however, existing home sales have plunged 20%, underscoring the troubles in the housing sector.

Economists were calling for sales to either move up slightly or hold steady for November.

Home prices continued to sink.

The median price of a home sold last month was $210,200. That marked a 3.3% drop from a year ago. It was the fifth biggest annual decline on record. The median price is where half sell for more and half sell for less.

Sales were mixed across different regions of the country.

Existing home sales jumped 10.3% in November from October in the West. They were flat in the Midwest. However, they fell 2% in the South and 3.3% in the Northeast.

The inventory of unsold homes in November fell 3.6% to 4.27 million homes. At the current sales pace it would take 10.3 months to exhaust that overhang.

“Inventory is still high and further reduction in prices may be required in some areas to induce buyers back into the market,” said the association’s chief economist, Lawrence Yun.

A dip in 30-year mortgage rates in November probably helped give nationwide existing home sales the small boost last month, the association suggested. Yun thought the small increase could be taken as a sign that the market might be stabilizing. That said, previous signs of stabilization earlier in the year have been dashed. A credit crunch that took a turn for the worse in the summer has aggravated housing problems.

The housing market has been suffering through a severe slump following five years of record-breaking activity from 2001 through 2005. Sales turned weak as did home prices. The boom-to-bust situation has increased dangers to the economy as a whole and has been especially hard on some homeowners.

Foreclosures have soared to record highs and probably will keep rising. A drop in home prices left some people stuck with balances on their home mortgages that eclipsed the worth of their home. Other home buyers were clobbered as low introductory rates on their mortgages jumped to much higher rates, which they couldn’t afford.

Problems in housing are expected to persist well into 2008 — a major election year.

The housing and mortgage meltdowns have raised the odds that the country will fall into a recession. And, the situation has given Democrats and Republicans— including those who want to be the next president — plenty of opportunities to spread blame around.

The economy’s growth is expected to have slowed sharply to an annual pace of just 1.5% or less in the final three months of this year. Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan recently warned that the economy is “getting close to stall speed.” The big worry is that housing and credit troubles will force individuals to cut back on spending and businesses to cut back on hiring and capital investment, throwing the economy into a tailspin.

The Realtors group urged the Fed to slash interest rates by as much as three-quarters of a percentage point in January as a way to embolden home buyers. Most economists expect a quarter-point cut at the central bank’s meeting on Jan. 29-30.

“The Federal Reserve could greatly help the housing market by making a one-time, large interest rate cut” instead of a series of smaller reductions, Yun said. “Knowing the Fed may cut rates, people are waiting and waiting to enter the market.”

To help bolster the economy, the Federal Reserve has sliced a key interest rate three times this year. Its latest rate cut, on Dec. 11, dropped the Fed’s key rate to 4.25%, a two-year low.

On Friday the government reported that new-home sales plunged 9% in November to a pace of 647,000, the lowest in more than 12 years.

The new-home numbers are thought to give a more current account of the health of the housing market because they are recorded when a contract is signed. The existing home figures lag because they are based on contract closings, many of which reflect deals negotiated months earlier.

“You want to take the two reports together, which demonstrated ongoing weakness in housing demand. This data today still doesn’t indicate we’re at a bottom,” said Michael Darda, chief economist at MKM Partners.

Contributing: Reuters

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Reader Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification.

 BHUTTO KILLED IN ATTACKStory: Gunman shoots Pakistan's ex-PMProfile: Political pioneer's epic life cut short | Photo galleryTimeline: Key events in Bhutto's careerU.S. reaction: Attack condemned | News stuns Pakistani-AmericansAnalysis: Stability threatened, experts sayBlogs: Candidates weigh in | More coverageA new leader: Bhutto's son maintains political dynasty
By Paul Wiseman, USA TODAY ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan’s stock market, nearly invincible throughout a year of political turmoil, plummeted nearly 5% Monday, the first day of trading after the Dec. 27 assassination of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto.

A Pakistani election official raised doubts about whether an election can be held on schedule Jan 8 following several days of rioting and looting by grieving Bhutto supporters.

The Karachi Stock Exchange 100 Index dropped 694.92 points, or 4.7%, to 14,077.16 — worst performance in 18 months.

“It was a bit unpredictable,” said Akif Moshtaq, market watcher at Moosani Securities in Karachi. “Almost everything ended lower.”

Despite the sour finish, the Karachi exchange finished the year up 40%, reflecting strong economic growth. “The market will bounce back,” Moshtaq predicted.

Bhutto was killed in a suicide bomb and gun attack on Thursday.

Video footage of the killing raised new questions about the government’s version of how Bhutto died, while the country’s most prominent opposition politician urged U.S.-backed President Pervez Musharraf to step down and be replaced by a national unity government.

“He is a one-man calamity,” former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif told reporters. “The United States should see that Musharraf has not limited or curbed terrorism. In fact terrorism is now stronger than ever before with more sinister aspects.”

Pakistan’s election commission will announce Tuesday — a day later than expected — whether to postpone parliamentary elections after consulting with provincial officials across the country, said Kanwar Dilshad, election commission secretary.

Dilshad said the three days of rioting and looting that followed Bhutto’s death had damaged the country’s ability to hold elections on time.

In 10 voting districts in southern Pakistan’s Sindh province, a Bhutto stronghold, rioters torched election offices and destroyed voting records.

And publishers in riot-stricken Karachi shut their doors several days and stopped printing ballot papers.

Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party, expected to benefit from sympathy votes, rejected the delay, suggesting that the commission and the Pakistani government wanted to buy time for the ruling party, which backs President Pervez Musharraf.

“We demand immediate elections — and on Jan. 8,” senior party official Shah Mahmood Qureshi told AFP.

But Ijaf Shafi Gilani, chairman of pollsters Gallup Pakistan said that a short delay — four to eight weeks — might be justified given the damage to the nation’s electoral machinery.

“I’d give the government the benefit of the doubt,” he said.

Tariq Azim, spokesman for the ruling party, earlier said that a 12- to 14-week delay might be necessary.

Western governments are urging the government to go ahead with the polls without major delays.

They see the elections as a key step in U.S.-backed plans to restore democracy to the nation as it battles Taliban and al-Qaeda militants.

Foreign election monitors cautioned that a full observation mission would be impossible if the polls went ahead next week because the unrest had caused them to delay preparations.

“We cannot follow our standard methods if the date stays January 8,” said Mathias Eick, a spokesman for the E.U.-led mission, saying the best it could manage was a limited “assessment” of the polls.

Disagreements between Bhutto’s supporters and the government over the precise cause of death are undermining confidence in Musharraf and adding to calls for international investigators to probe the killing.

The video footage, obtained by Britain’s Channel 4, shows a man firing a handgun at Bhutto from close range as she stands up in an open-topped vehicle.

Her hair and shawl then move upward, suggesting she may have been shot.

She then falls into the vehicle just before an explosion rocks the car.

The government has insisted Bhutto was not hit by any of the bullets and died after the force of the blast slammed her head against the sunroof.

Bhutto’s family and supporters say she died from gunshot wounds to her head and neck.

Bhutto’s husband said late Sunday he refused permission for doctors to perform an autopsy, meaning that short of exhuming her body — something her supporters have already ruled out — the cause of her death will be difficult to establish.

On Sunday, Bhutto’s political party named her 19-year-old son, Bilawal Zardari, as its symbolic leader and left day-to-day control to her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, extending Pakistan’s most enduring political dynasty.

It also appealed to the party of former Prime Minister Sharif to reverse an earlier decision to boycott the polls.

Sharif’s party later agreed.

Contributing: The Associated Press

To report corrections and clarifications, contact Reader Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification.

As is becoming a New Year’s tradition, for the first two weeks of this year, I will forgo answering your questions and instead offer my annual Top 10 Trends in Small Business.

A few things to note up front:

• This is not a predictions column but a trends column. Predictions are inherently speculative, trends are not. New trends are forces that are already occurring, but which may be flying a bit under your radar.

• Some of these trends can help your business, others are simply good to know, and yet others may just be interesting. Sit back and enjoy.

No. 10: Your PC is going virtual. Is your business? The wireless/online/virtual revolution is coming to your PC, and I am not just talking about mobility, that’s old news.

What I am talking about here is that computer hardware and software as we know it is changing before our very eyes. Broadband Internet connections are not only becoming ubiquitous but faster, resulting in the transference of software and content from your hard drive to the Internet. Whether it is Microsoft’s Office Live or Google’s online applications, the Internet is now the groovy place for cool apps to hangout.

This also means that 2008 will see the growth of such useful gadgets as wireless dashboard printers, online data backups, and increased collaboration services.

And about blogging — are you taking advantage of this incredibly powerful and inexpensive way to both grow your business and connect with your customers? I thought blogging was a fad, the CB radio of our time, but I was wrong. So I give up, admit defeat, and am launching my own blog next week —Business as Unusual.

The final piece of this online puzzle is that, as YouTube continues to conquer the world, streaming video is becoming de rigueur for any site worth its salt.

No. 9: The year of marketing creatively: As Advertising Age points out, 2008 is going to be a year where there will be a lot of competition for eyeballs. Between the presidential election, continued high gas prices, a slowing economy, and tight credit, “consumers will continue to pull in the reins as disposable income tightens dramatically.”

As a result, the flip side of the coin is that there will be plenty of room for creative marketing, especially by leveraging the sorts of e-tools mentioned above. Hitting potential customers with unique offers, in unusual places, “using unconventional methods,” is the sort of thing that can bust the box.

No. 8: Entrepreneurs of the world unite:  The trend mentioned last year — small being the new big — continues to accelerate as microbusinesses transform the planet. Whether it is Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his groundbreaking Microloan bank, or Kiva.org offering loans, grants, and small business know-how to the developing world, micro businesses are radically changing the world.

Throughout history people have devised various systems to try and help the poor, whether it be a religion, charity or communism. But it turns out that the greatest thing ever invented to help someone out of poverty is .. their own small business. The capitalist revolution in China has pulled hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in a generation; the single greatest anti-poverty program ever.

No. 7. Say hello to your new assistant — your cellphone: It was in the middle of a great golf game earlier this year when I knew that the tried and true basic boring business cellphone was on its way out. It was then that our pal Richie, a big, burly guy who owns Richie’s Bail Bonds, answered a call on his cellphone, a Sidekick. Previously, the only other Sidekicks I had ever seen were Paris Hilton’s and my daughter Sydney’s.

2007, of course, was the year that the iPhone was introduced, immediately upping the ante for all other cellphone makers.

The upcoming new generation of smart phones will be truly amazing. Get this: Japanese consumers already use their cellphones to scan McDonald’s wrappers for nutritional information. Like the iPhone and iPod, expect simplicity to rule the day with these new devices.

No. 6: Search is still king: As everything goes online, the function of search to your business continues to grow in importance. While the most popular Google searches of 2007 were of celebrities, what is illuminating is the fastest rising searches (note how many are potentially business related):

1. The iPhone
2. Webkinz (a stuffed animal you can play with online)
3. TMZ
4. Transformers
5. YouTube
6. Club Penguin (A networking site for kids)
7. MySpace
8. Heroes
9. Facebook

Social networking is that important? See next week’s Top 5.

Ask an Expert appears Mondays. You can e-mail Steve Strauss at: sstrauss@mrallbiz.com. And you can click here to see previous columns. Steven D. Strauss is a lawyer, author and speaker who specializes in small business and entrepreneurship. His latest book is The Small Business Bible. You can sign up for his free newsletter, “Small Business Success Secrets!” at his website —www.mrallbiz.com.

To report corrections and clarifications, contact Reader Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification.

LONDON - Britain’s largest pharmaceutical companies are facing questions about the controversial U.N. oil for food program in Iraq.

GlaxoSmithKline (nyse: GSK - news - people ) and AstraZeneca (nyse: AZN - news - people ) have been asked to hand over documents and e-mail relating to their involvement in the U.N. program in Iraq to Britain’s Serious Fraud Office, the two companies confirmed on Monday.

The Serious Fraud Office, which can act as both investigator and prosecutor, launched an inquiry into British firms implicated in corruption allegations relating to the program, following the publication in 2005 of the results of an investigation led by Paul Volcker, former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve. The report into the U. N. program, which allowed Iraq to sell oil in exchange for food, drugs and other basic products at a time when its foreign trade was restricted by international sanctions slapped on it after its 1990 invasion of Kuwait, identified over 2,000 companies which may have been involved in kickbacks to Iraqi officials. The program was suspended in 2003 following the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Similar follow-up investigations have been launched in the U.S. and Sweden into companies based in those countries.

A spokesman for the Serious Fraud Office said it had issued so-called Section 2 orders requesting information from a number of British companies, which it would not specify by name. He said that while it was impossible to speculate what penalties the companies would face, criminal penalties were possible.

GlaxoSmithKline said it “does not believe that its employees or its agents in Iraq knowingly engaged in wrongdoing regarding the oil for food program.” It added that the company had gone to “considerable lengths” to impose anti-corruption measures when dealing with intermediaries in Iraq.

A spokesman for AstaZeneca said the company was fully cooperating with the investigation, adding that it had conducted its own internal investigation following the publication of Volker’s report, which did not uncover any unethical behavior in relation to their business in Iraq.

The news had minimal impact on their share prices. GlaxoSmithKline ticked down 0.3%, to £12.77 ($25.58) in morning trading in London, while AstraZeneca slipped 0.5%, to £21.64 ($43.35). “We don’t know the full ins and outs of the investigation yet,” said Panmure Gordon analyst Savvas Neophytou.

The inquiry comes as the final blow in what has been a challenging year for GlaxoSmithKline, riddled by job cuts, lower profits and a high-profile inquiry by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration into its controversial diabetes pill Avandia. Even though the drug was allowed to remain on the market, an FDA panel voted overwhelmingly that the drug did increase the risk of heart attacks. (See: ” Glaxo Gets Off With A Warning”)

AstraZeneca also announced it would slash 4,600 jobs earlier this year after a cost-cutting program proved to be less succesful than it had hoped for. (See: ” AstraZeneca Cuts Away More Jobs”)

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