Fitch says France to keep its triple-A rating

January 11, 2012 at 3:29AM

Fitch says France to keep its triple-A ratingThe euro rose against the dollar after Fitch Ratings said that it won't cut France's top-shelf credit rating this year. News that France won't lose its triple-A rating was a relief to investors. If France were downgraded it could hurt efforts to resolve Europe's debt crisis. A lowered credit rating means it would cost more to fund bailouts of debt-saddled countries like Greece. Fitch did, however, warn that Italy, Spain, Belgium, Ireland, Slovenia and Cyprus could be downgraded by the end of the month.

Domain-name bidding is about to beginBidding will begin this week for words and brand names such as ".sport," ".NYC" and ".bank" to join ".com" as online monikers. Up to 1,000 domain name suffixes -- the ".com" in an Internet address -- could be added each year in the most sweeping change to the domain name system since its creation in the 1980s. The oversight agency for Internet addresses, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), will take bids for new suffixes from 6:01 p.m. Wednesday Minnesota time until April.

Kodak suing Apple, HTC over imaging patentsEastman Kodak Co. filed patent-infringement lawsuits against Apple Inc. and HTC Corp., claiming the smartphone makers are infringing several of its digital-imaging inventions. The lawsuits, filed in federal court, claim that some of Apple's iPhones, iPads and iPods and HTC's smartphones and tablet devices infringe four Kodak patents related to image transmission.

Dividends staging a comebackCompanies in the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index paid $240.6 billion in dividends in 2011, up from $205 billion in 2010. The 2011 payout was the largest since 2008, when firms had not yet been hit by the full brunt of the financial crisis and paid a record $247.8 billion in dividends. Dividends are on track to set a record of more than $252 billion in 2012, according to data released by S&P based on current dividend rates of 394 companies.

Sources hint E.U. will oppose NYSE mergerEuropean regulators will push to block the planned $10 billion merger of the New York Stock Exchange and its German counterpart, two people close to the merger said Tuesday. Antitrust regulators fear that the combined company, which would be the largest operator of stock exchanges in the world, would unfairly dominate trading of financial tools called derivatives in Europe, one of the people said. One said the European Union's competition commissioner, Joaquin Almunia, is set to recommend blocking the deal, between NYSE Euronext and Deutsche Boerse, at a Feb. 1 meeting. Both spoke on condition of anonymity.

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