BUSINESS

Woolworths has announced plans to source all its own-label fresh milk products from Parmalat in NSW, a move the company said is not related to its 'milk war' with Coles.

As with tennis elbow overuse will cause you pain. Alas, not just our weary elbows ache after the same activity over and over again but also our weary minds will feel the pain from management speak overuse syndrome.

The company claimed that under a unique measure used only by itself and the oil industry, earnings would fall 39%, but on the measure used by the rest of corporate Australia net profit is forecast to almost double for the six months to June.

Japan is pushing towards a radical reworking of its consumption tax as a way of boosting revenues as the country grapples with the cost of rebuilding after the March 11 quake and tsunami, a crippling deficits and rising debt which are being made worse by the costs of the country's rapid ageing.

Suddenly help for Greece is getting tougher, despite the widespread expectation that the 12 billion euros of loans from the IMF and EU would be paid so as to avert a financial crunch.

The Australian stock market reversed early gains to shed three quarters of a per cent on Monday, as skittish sentiment triggered a broad-based sell-off.

Euro zone ministers have given Greece till July 3 to approve further spending cuts and tax increases in exchange for another €12 billion in emergency funding.

A small sigh of relief on Friday night as US sharemarkets posted their first weekly gain since April, with the S&P 500 and Dow ending moderately higher in the face of worries about Europe's debt crisis and a slowing US economy.

A big week for the US economy, or rather a week when the current gloomy sentiment about the outlook for the US economy will be further tested.

So now for the hard part of 'saving' Greece a second time in 13 months and hopefully making sure it will be the last.

Despite a positive start, Australian stocks closed at a near 10 month low today as markets around the Asian region tumbled after European governments failed to agree on a new bailout package for Greece.

Independents Andrew Wilkie and Nick Xenophon have presented bills to phase out the live export trade over the next three years.

The vaunted mining boom may have largely fueled up the national economy yet in the case of the Northern Territory, its residential construction industry appeared to have absorbed the negative impacts of the two-wind growth.

U.S. stocks closed higher Friday, snapping a six-week losing streak, as hopes intensified for a resolution to the Greek debt crisis.

Struggling with dwindling sales numbers while addressing the continued onslaught of Apple smartphones and their cheaper counterparts powered by Google’s Android, Finnish mobile giant Nokia aims to arrest its sliding market shares by refocusing its energy towards the lucrative Asian market.

- OceanaGold has revised its mine plan for Didipio- Brokers see this a key de-risking event- The market is ascribing no value to the projectBy Greg PeelOceanaGold's ((OGC)) core mining operations are centred in New Zealand, but the company's exciting prospect for expansion comes in the for...

(This story was originally written and published on Wednesday 15th June, 2011. It has now been re-published to make it available to non-paying members at FNArena and to readers elsewhere).

New research suggests the great Australian dream of owning a large, detached house no longer exists.

More than a thousand of Australia’s corporate heads spent last night in the cold in order to raise funds and awareness for the homeless.

Harmful mineral oils from the printing inks used on cardboard can migrate into food if recycled cardboard is used for food packaging.

It might sound a bit melancholy, but Greece and the US economy will again dominate markets here and overseas in the coming week.

Despite all the gloom and doom from Greece, Europe and the US, as well as the glum tone on sharemarkets here and offshore, there was one unchallenged bit of good news for Australia over the weekend.

The Australian Dollar staged a rally back through the 1.0600 level after a lacklustre onshore session on Friday.

US consumer sentiment eased from 74.3 to 71.8 in June, below the consensus forecast of 73.5. The US leading index lifted by 0.8pct in May, well above the consensus forecast of a 0.4pct gain.

Paul Ceglia claims that in 2003 he signed a contract with Mark Zuckerberg that entitles him to half the holdings of Facebook Inc.'s co-founder and CEO. Last week, Ceglia said he underwent a polygraph test in New York last week to prove his claim. Now he wants to Zuckenberg to undertake the same lie detector test.

The Canada-based company has confirmed it will release the new touch BlackBerry Bold 9900/9930 in late August this year. The new Bold looks a lot like the previous version, but boasts of a 2.8" touch screen and claims to be the thinnest Blackberry phone yet. It has dimensions of 115 x 66 x 10.5 mm, and weighs approximately 130 grams.

Nortel Networks Inc. has received significant level of interest in patents that can be used for smartphone technology. Accordingly, it postponed an action sanctioned by a bankruptcy court in the United States from June 20 to June 27, at 9:00 a.m.Apple Inc., the maker of the iPad and the iPhone will be trying to outbid Google Inc. for the tech portfolio, Bloomberg News reports, citing two people familiar with knowledge of the matter said.

In yesterday's article, The Global Gas Race (see below), the suggestion was made that Citi analysts believed Origin Energy would "ditch" a second train at APLNG.

Understandably, global investors continued trimming their positions in the past month, remaining defensive, as they tried to work out whether the current Wall of Worry was a repeat of 2010's or more serious.