United Parcel Service Inc. will raise its shipping rates in 2009 by 5.9% on the ground and 4.9% in the air.
The formal rate increase for air and international shipping is 6.9%, but the world's largest package deliverer will lower its fuel surcharge by 2%.
By Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, October 17, 2008; 3:13 PM
LONDON, Oct. 17 -- Prime Minister Gordon Brown has been so widely praised for his international leadership on the global financial crisis that a political cartoon here this week showed workers carving his face into Mount Rushmore.
On Friday, it all apparently became too much to bear for Conservative Party leader David Cameron, who broke a two-week political truce with his nemesis in a speech blasting Brown as "the one who created this mess in the first place."
AP - A stock market as difficult to fathom as it is volatile pulled off another stunning U-turn on Thursday, transforming a 380-point loss for the Dow Jones industrials into a 401-point gain. Was it the government's bailout beginning to have an effect? The credit markets finally beginning to loosen up? Investors looking for a bottom in stocks?
AP - Britney Spears did not appear at her driver's license trial Thursday. Instead, her father did the talking.
Reuters - Google Inc quarterly profit surpassed Wall Street forecasts, sending shares up more than 10 percent as the Internet search and advertising leader withstood deepening economic turmoil around the globe.
AP - Is there room among the pratfalls and bedroom tirades of YouTube for an experimental, full-length film?
Reuters - Chrysler LLC has had talks with Renault SA about a tie-up or a sale, one of a series of potential deals under urgent review that include consideration of breaking up the No. 3 U.S. automaker just over a year after it was taken private, people familiar with the talks said on Thursday.