Berkshire Hathaway Inc., the investment vehicle for billionaire investor Warren Buffett, on Tuesday reported that it has sold its stakes in Duke Energy Corp., Dun &Bradstreet Corp., Great Lakes Chemical Corp. and Level 3 Communications Inc.
Goodrich Corp. will pay a 20-cent-a-share quarterly dividend this spring. The corporation announced Tuesday that it will make the payment April 1, to shareholders of record as of March 8. The size of the dividend is unchanged from last quarter.
The federal government won’t accept any more applications for a popular visa program that provides skilled foreign labor to U.S. companies, the office of Citizenship and Immigration Services said Tuesday. Less than five months into the fiscal year there already are enough applications to fill all 65,000 slots for H1-B visas, said Chris Bentley, a spokesman for the agency. Critics say the program allows businesses to fill jobs with cheap foreign labor. Business officials say it’s used only for jobs where there aren’t enough qualified Americans.
A federal judge Tuesday further limited the government’s ability to prove Martha Stewart and her stockbroker conspired to lie about Stewart’s sale of ImClone Systems stock. The judge blocked prosecutors from putting into evidence a voice mail that broker Peter Bacanovic left for Stewart on Feb. 4, 2002, the day she was first interviewed by the government in the ImClone investigation. “The fact that he tried to contact her really isn’t evidence of anything, other than that they talked to each other sometimes,” U.S. District Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum said. The essence of the conspiracy charge is that Stewart and Bacanovic worked together to hatch a cover story for why Stewart sold 3,928 shares of ImClone Systems stock on Dec. 27, 2001.
The Treasury Department sold three-month bills at a discount rate of 0.915 percent, down from 0.92 percent last week. Six-month bills sold at a rate of 0.975 percent, down from 0.99 percent. The new rates understate the actual return to investors – 0.931 percent for three-month bills with a $10,000 bill selling for $9,976.90 and 0.996 percent for a six-month bill selling for $9,950.70. The Federal Reserve said the average yield for one-year constant maturity Treasury bills, the most popular index for changing adjustable rate mortgages, fell to 1.24 percent last week from 1.28 percent the previous week.
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