OIL
U.S. crude ends at 2½-year high
NEW YORK | U.S. crude ended at a 2½-year high Wednesday as Palestinian rocket strikes on Israel escalated Middle East geopolitical risks and U.S. gasoline inventories posted the biggest seasonal decline on record.
U.S. crude futures for May delivery settled at $105.75 a barrel, gaining 78 cents and marking the highest close since September 2008.
In London, Brent May crude futures pared losses and settled down 15 cents at $115.55, after having hit the day’s high of $116.40, edging close to its 2½-year high hit late in February.
That narrowed Brent crude’s premium against its U.S. counterpart to below $10 a barrel, after ending on Tuesday near $11.
CURRENCY
Euro falls; gold and silver up
NEW YORK | Worries that a political crisis in Portugal could topple the government and force the country to seek a bailout sent the euro lower on Wednesday and drove gold within a whisker of its all-time high on safe-haven demand.
Continued unrest in the Middle East and North Africa drove up the price of oil, while Wall Street stocks rallied as mining stocks rose with higher metals prices.
Silver hit its highest price since 1980 as the ongoing Western airstrikes on Libya and the worries about Portugal revived worries about the European debt crisis.
Portugal’s parliament started a plenary session to debate the government’s austerity measures, setting the stage for the likely collapse of the minority Socialist administration.
STOCKS
S&P: Stock buybacks more than doubled in 2010
BOSTON | America’s biggest corporations more than doubled their repurchases of stock last year in another sign of confidence in the economic recovery.
Standard & Poor’s said Wednesday that S&P 500 companies spent $299 billion last year to buy back their shares. That’s up from the $138 billion spent in 2009, when the recession officially ended at midyear.
In the fourth quarter alone, share repurchases jumped 81 percent from a year earlier, to $86 billion.
Despite the surge, S&P said buybacks last year were still just half of their pre-recession level.
Buybacks are up for the sixth quarter in a row. S&P said 270 of the companies in the S&P 500 purchased their shares during the fourth quarter, up from 251 in last year’s first quarter.
INTERNET
’Search Direct’ will play up Yahoo content
SAN FRANCISCO | Yahoo Inc. unveiled a revamped Internet search service Wednesday that showcases information from movie listings to weather forecasts as users type in a query.
Executives said the new service, dubbed Search Direct, will speed up the time it takes users to find information on the Web.
Yahoo said that Search Direct will be available in the United States on Thursday on its main search Web page, and will gradually expand to the other parts of Yahoo, including the home page.
The service displays information in a pop-up box that appears and then changes in real time as a user types in a search query, as in Google Inc.’s service.
CALIFORNIA
Jobs re-elected to Disney board
BURBANK | Shareholders of the Walt Disney Co. on Wednesday re-elected its entire board including Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs, despite concerns over his health and his poor attendance at company board meetings.
Proxy advisory firm Glass Lewis & Co. had recommended voting against Mr. Jobs’ re-election because he failed to attend 75 percent of the board meetings in fiscal 2010.
Mr. Jobs became Disney’s largest shareholder after the company purchased Pixar Animation Studios in 2006 for $7.4 billion in stock. Mr. Jobs, who bankrolled Pixar when it was a fledgling movie house, now holds a 7.3 percent stake in Disney.
• From wire dispatches and staff reports
Please read our comment policy before commenting.