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As interest rates on certificates of deposit continue their downward slog, annuities, money market accounts and even interest-bearing checking accounts are all emerging as attractive alternatives.

In the past 24 months, the amount invested in CDs nationally dropped nearly 30 percent, while those in locally based banks tumbled 40 percent. For the 75 banks based in St. Louis tracked by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, CD deposits totaled $10.48 billion at the end of June, down from $17.6 billion when CD interest rates in mid-2009.

There’s no secret why: The national and local average for a 5-year CD this week came with a 1.26 annual percentage yield, below inflation and down from about 4 percent in 2008.

So what’s an investor to do?

Many investors are ditching CDs in search of better returns or investments that provide better liquidity, such as money market accounts. CDs have long been viewed as a relatively safe place to invest money without the volatility of stock market swings, as the funds are insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. But CDs also come with a catch

An early rally is fading on Wall Street as traders worry about Europe’s ability to contain its debt crisis.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel suggested that the second Greek bailout package might have to be renegotiated. European leaders want banks to take bigger losses on Greek bonds. News reports indicate that France and the European Central Bank oppose the idea.

Technology companies rose after Amazon.com announced a new tablet computer and Microsoft said it was expanding a smartphone partnership with Samsung.

The Dow Jones industrial average rose 65 points, or 0.6 percent, to 11,257 shortly before noon Wednesday. It had been up as many as 126 points earlier.

The Standard & Poor’s 500 rose 2, or 0.2 percent, to 1,178. The Nasdaq composite fell 2, or 0.1 percent, to 2,545.

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A year after Rawlings lunged back into the football helmet business, the sports equipment manufacturer is gaining momentum.

Rawlings, based in Town and Country, is best known for its signature emblazoned on baseball bats and gloves. The company started manufacturing football helmets last fall after a 20-year absence. Now company officials say Rawlings is on track to capture between 6 percent and 7 percent market share in its first year, and its unit sales are triple what the company forecast a year ago.

“People respect the brand, and they know it,” said Mike May, spokesperson for the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association, a nonprofit trade group based in Silver Spring, Md. “They’re not some new kid on the block. It’s tough to penetrate any market when you have two established brand names, Schutt and Riddell, that have been around with football helmets for years. But it helps to have some established credibility on the street, which Rawlings has.”

Rawlings was founded in 1887 and was the first company to develop shoulder pads for football. But it stopped making football helmets more than two decades ago.

Mike Thompson, Rawlings’ senior vice president of marketing, said Rawlings spent nearly three years researching the market and developing its helmet before last year’s launch. “We’re far exceeding our expectations,” Thompson said this week.

Rawlings re-entered the market focusing on youth, high school, college and professional players, and started taking orders in March.

Rawlings is owned by consumer products conglomerate Jarden Corp., based in Rye, N.Y., a Fortune 500 company with $6 billion in sales last year. Many of Jarden’s brands

Drivers of electric and other alternative-fuel vehicles enjoy a special perk: They can drive solo in California’s carpool lanes.

But under a controversial plan proposed by local traffic agencies, those drivers will have to pay to use two heavily used carpool lanes that are being converted to toll roads.

It has riled electric-car shoppers and alternative-fuel-vehicle advocates who worry that this is the first step in chipping away at a California tradition of letting solo drivers of autos with new technology and low emissions into carpool lanes paydayloans.

Officials plan to convert 25 miles of freeway carpool lanes into toll lanes. Carpoolers and buses will be able to use the lanes for free, while solo drivers

To some heavyweight pundits, the resizing of the iconic Ikea Billy bookshelf signals the death of the print book and the demise of reading.

To Ikea, it just means you can finally shelve your coffee-table books.

Billy shelves deeper than the standard 28 centimetres (11 inches) just allow people to store bigger books, Ikea Canada spokeswoman Madeleine Löwenborg-Frick told the Star on Tuesday.

“This design update is quite simply to accommodate a wider selection of books.”

Nearly 50 million Billy bookshelves have been sold worldwide and there has been no drop in sales, said Löwenborg-Frick.

Regardless, The Economist smelled doom.

“The firm reckons customers will increasingly use them for ornaments, tchotchkes and the odd coffee-table tome — anything, that is, except books that are actually read,” the magazine warned.

Time magazine picked up the banner, declaring that the move “foreshadows the demise of books.”

“They’ve realized we’re more comforted by the endless capacity of a millimeters-thin box of transistors,” blogger Nick Carbone wrote.

“In the first five months of this year, sales of consumer e-books in America overtook those from adult hardback books,” The Economist reported.

“Just a year earlier, hardbacks had been worth more than three times as much as e-books, according to the Association of American Publishers. Amazon now sells more copies of e-books than paper books.”

High profit margins for e-book are spurring the trend, compounded by retailing giant Amazon.com’s move to “agency pricing.” The six major U.S. publishers have agreed to set the consumer prices for their e-books, The Wall Street Journal reported. It means retailers can’t discount an e-book price without the publisher’s approval.

Publishers also get 70 per cent of each sale, from which they pay the author royalties; the retailer gets 30 per cent, WSJ said.

For the consumer, it means far fewer $9.99 bestsellers through Amazon and prices that are higher today than they were at the start of last year.

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Imagine a nation without the Postal Service.

No more birthday cards and bills or magazines and catalogs filling the mailbox. It’s a worst-case scenario being painted for an organization that lost $8.5 billion in 2010 and seems headed deeper into the red this year.

“A lot of people would miss it,” says Tony Conway, a 34-year post office veteran who now heads the Alliance of Nonprofit Mailers.

Businesses, too.

The letter carrier or clerk is the face of the mail. But hanging in the balance is a $1.1 trillion mailing industry that employs more than 8 million people in direct mail, periodicals, catalogs, financial services, charities and other businesses that depend on the post office.

Who would carry mail to the Hualapai Indian Reservation in the Grand Canyon? To islands off the coast of Maine? To rural villages in Alaska? Only the post office goes to those places and thousands of others in the United States, and all for 44 cents. And it’s older than the United States itself.

Ernest Burkes Sr. says his bills, magazines and diabetes medication are mailed to his home in Canton, in northeast Ohio, and he frequently visits the post office down the street to send first-class mail, mostly documents for the tax service he runs. As his business increased over the past three decades, so has the load of mail he sends, and it’s still pretty steady.

“I don’t know what I’d do if they’d close down the post offices,” said Burkes, who doesn’t use rival delivery services such as UPS or FedEx. “They need to help them, just like they helped some of these other places, automobiles and others.”

Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe is struggling to keep his money-losing organization afloat as more and more people are ditching mail in favor of the Internet, causing the lucrative first-class mail flow to plummet.

Donahoe has a plan to turn things around, if he can get the attention of Congress and pass a series of hurdles, including union concerns.

“The Postal Service is not going out of business,” postal spokesman David Partenheimer said. “We will continue to deliver the mail as we have for more than 200 years. The postmaster general has developed a plan that will return the Postal Service to financial stability. We continue to do what we can on our own to achieve this plan and we need Congress to do its part to get us there.”

He acknowledged that if Congress doesn’t act, the post office could reach a point next summer where it doesn’t have the money to keep operating.

That wouldn’t sit well with Mimi Raskin, a wine and antiques store owner in Grants Pass, Ore., who likes her birthday card mailed. “If you get a birthday card on the Internet, it’s like, well, I didn’t care about you enough to go to a store, buy a card that suited your personality, and mail it,” she said.

Donahoe and his predecessor, John Potter, have warned for years of the problems and stressed that the post office will be unable to make a mandated $5.5 billion payment due Sept. 30 to a fund for future medical benefits for retirees.

A 90-day delay on the payment has been suggested, but postal officials and others in the industry say a long-term solution is needed.

Donahoe has one. It includes laying off staff beyond the 110,000 cut in the past four years, closing as many as 3,700 offices, eliminating Saturday delivery and switching from the federal retirement plan to one of its own.

Cliff Guffey, president of the American Postal Workers Union, called the proposal “outrageous, illegal and despicable.”

A contract signed in March protects many workers from layoffs. Guffey said the attempt to change that now “is in utter disregard for the legal requirement to bargain with the APWU in good faith.” Other unions, including the National Association of Letter Carriers, are negotiating their contracts with the post office.

Yet Donahoe’s efforts are drawing praise from people such as Conway, the head of the nonprofit mailers, who says these are necessary steps that officials have shied away from in the past.

Several bills proposing ways to fix the agency are circulating in Congress. One, by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., would impose a control board to make the tough decisions.

When it was first introduced, the bill was perceived as “way out there,” Conway said. But as the postal financial problems have become more obvious, “you’re seeing people thinking maybe it isn’t that extreme.”

Gene Del Polito, of the trade group American Association for Postal Commerce, said now that Donahoe has offered a plan, “why not give him the authority do to do what needs to be done.” If that fails, then a control board could be instituted, he said.

Closing offices seems an easy way to save, but members of Congress never want cuts in their districts, and while the public may mail less, people still want their local office to stay open.

The changes that Donahoe are proposing would mean a different post office, but one that still operates for people such as Jovita Camesa, who’s 75 and lives in a downtown Los Angeles retirement complex. She said she’s sending more first-class mail than ever due to her expanding circle of grandchildren.

Camesa said she wouldn’t think to use the Internet for those birthday and holiday greetings, or start going online to seek out the articles she now reads in the issues of Vogue, Readers Digest, Prevention and other magazines that are delivered to her. “I’m not interested in the Internet or computers,” she said. “I’m very traditional.”

Ellen Levine, editorial director of Hearst Magazines, told a Senate hearing that the Internet has not eliminated the need for mail delivery of magazines.

“Nearly all publishers use the United States Postal Service to deliver their magazines to subscribers,” she said. “While most consumer titles are also available on newsstands, mail subscriptions will remain the major component of hard-copy magazine circulation in the United States for the foreseeable future.” Overall, Levine said subscriptions account for about 90 percent of magazine circulation.

Olive Ayhens, an artist who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., says she pays her bills online but still uses first-class mail. She was mailing announcements of her newest gallery opening; one was going to her son in London.

“Less than a dollar, I’m sending to London,” she said during a stop at the James A. Farley Post Office in Manhattan.

The internet, along with the advent of online bill paying, has contributed to a sharp decline in mail handled by the post office, from 207 billion in 2001 to 171 billion last year. Although the price of stamps has increased from 34 cents to 44 cents over the same period, it is not enough to cover the post office’s bills, in part because of higher labor costs.

Yet one of the biggest problems isn’t mail flow or labor or other costs. Rather, it’s a requirement imposed by Congress five years ago that the post office set aside $55 billion in an account to cover future medical costs for retirees. The idea was to put $5.5 billion a year into the account for 10 years. That’s $5.5 billion the post office doesn’t have.

No other government agency is required to make such a payment for future medical benefits, so why not drop it for the post office.

Like everything in Washington, it’s not that simple.

The Postal Service is not included in the federal budget, but the Treasury Department account that receives that payment is.

That means that when the post office deposits that money, it counts as income in the federal budget. So, if it doesn’t make the payment, the federal budget deficit appears $5.5 billion bigger, something few members of Congress are likely to favor.

In announcing his bill, Issa warned of a need to avoid a “bailout” of the post office, which does not receive taxpayer money for its operations.

Others, however, have characterized the $5.5 billion payments as a post office bailout of the federal budget because it makes the deficit appear smaller.

“We have made that argument,” said Del Polito. But it has been rejected with the argument that the payments are required by law and ending them requires a change in the law.

That problem of appearing to increase the federal deficit creates a reluctance to deal with the matter directly, Del Polito said.

So where does that leave the post office and those Americans who don’t have access to the internet?

Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., suggested more people start sending passionate letters as a way to save the agency.

As good an idea as love missives may be, they are unlikely to be enough.

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Associated Press writers Jeff Barnard in Grants Pass, Ore.; Deepti Hajela in New York; Bob Johnson in Montgomery, Ala.; Kantele Franko in Columbus, Ohio; and Jacob Adelman in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

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Samsung Electronics cannot sell its new Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet computer in Germany after a court ruled Friday that its design “too closely” resembles Apple’s iPad2.

The ruling by a Duesseldorf state court, however, only applies to direct sales from the Seoul, South Korea-based company, meaning distributors who acquire the Galaxy Tab 10.1 from abroad could resell them in Germany.

Apple had taken Samsung to court over its Galaxy line, arguing their design is too close a copy of their own products.

Samsung said in a statement it will appeal the ruling, which it said “severely limits consumer choice in Germany.”

Already in August, the court ruled in favor of Apple, based in Cupertino, California, forcing Samsung to withdraw its tablet from the European market. It later determined the injunction only applied to sales in Germany, where it had not yet been launched faxless pay day loans.

“We also believe that by imposing an injunction based on this very generic design right, this ruling restricts design innovation and progress in the industry,” Samsung said.

Judge Johanna Brueckner-Hofmann said in her ruling that Samsung, “did not keep the necessary distance” in its design, the news agency dapd reported. Apple patented its design in 2004, and Brueckner-Hofmann cited products from Asus, Acer and Toshiba as examples of tablet computers that nonetheless have a clearly different design.

Apple and Samsung are involved in a series of legal disputes in countries around the world over allegations that each copies the other’s technology.

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Italy’s Senate approved Premier Silvio Berlusconi’s disputed austerity package Wednesday, ending weeks of uncertainty that roiled financial markets unsure that the government was serious about cutting its deficit and avoiding becoming Europe’s next debt crisis victim.

The upper chamber voted 165-141 with three abstentions to approve the package, which the government put to a confidence vote to ensure Berlusconi’s allies united behind him after weeks of bickering over details of the plan.

The proposal now goes to the lower Chamber of Deputies, where Berlusconi’s allies also maintain a majority.

The final package aims at reducing the country’s deficit by more than euro54 billion ($70 billion) over three years through budget cuts, tax hikes and changes to the country’s costly pension system. Italy’s deficit to GDP ratio now stands at 120 percent, one of Europe’s highest.

Had the vote failed, Berlusconi would have been forced to resign, a prospect lawmakers clearly wanted to avoid given the nervousness with which financial markets have already viewed Italy’s flip-flopping proposals and ability to balance the budget by 2013.

The European Central Bank had demanded stiff austerity measures to calm the markets, but it’s not clear whether the package passed Wednesday is sufficient. The ECB has spent billions over the last month buying up Italian government bonds to get Italy’s borrowing costs lower and help them avoid becoming the next eurozone nation to need an international bailout.

“We did our job,” proclaimed Maurizio Gasparri, head of Berlusconi’s party in the Senate, after the vote, saying the “robust” package should assure markets and the ECB.

The package was bitterly opposed by Italy’s main labor union, which staged a general strike on the eve of the vote. A few dozen protesters launched smoke bombs in front of the parliament building Wednesday.

Lawmaker Angelo Bonelli of the opposition Greens said the plan targeted Italy’s weakest, saying they were “shouldering the brunt of the crisis.”

Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti’s office confirmed Wednesday that the final changes in the plan, including pension reform that had been resisted by Berlusconi’s coalition allies, significantly increases the dent in Italy’s deficit. Italian media reported the latest new taxes and spending cuts totaled euro4 billion ($5.7 billion).

When the deficit-battling package was first unveiled Aug. 12, the package added up to euro45.5 billion ($64.1 billion). But weeks of waffling by squabbling coalition allies whittled down the new or higher taxes and spending cuts, further shaking the markets’ confidence, and the government beefed up the measures at a Cabinet meeting Tuesday.

“The decisions taken yesterday by the Cabinet have strengthened the measures significantly,” Antonio Azzollini, the head of the Senate’s budget committee, told the assembly.

Azzollini, from Berlusconi’s party, said sales taxes on goods and many services would be raised from 20 percent to 21 percent, an additional income tax of 3 percent would be on levied on incomes exceeding euro300,000 (nearly $450,000), and the timetable for raising the retirement age for women would be speeded up from 2016 to 2014.

Berlusconi had originally shied away from putting the package to a vote of confidence in his government, but decided to speed up its passage after ECB president Jean-Claude Trichet, during a visit Saturday, appealed for quick, decisive action to save Italy’s credit reputation.

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Schnucks is exiting the Mid-South region, selling nine of its Memphis, Tenn.-area stores to Kroger and closing three others, the grocery chain announced this afternoon.

“Despite the best efforts of our talented store teams and a strong customer following, we were unable to gain the strong foothold we had hoped for when we entered the market in 2002,” Scott Schnuck, the company’s chief executive, said in a statement. “Schnucks competes very favorably in other markets, but in the Mid-South, fierce competition including a growing number of non-traditional grocers and lingering high price perception was the one-two punch that brought us to today’s announcement.”

The Memphis area was Schnucks’ second-largest market with 12 stores and eight fuel and convenience centers. Schnucks, which is based in Maryland Heights, operates 105 stores in seven states.

The nearly 1,200 Schnucks employees at those stores will be given the chance to interview for positions with Kroger.

Last year, Schnucks closed another store in the Memphis area. At that time, it cited increased competition from other retailers, including some supercenters.

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Apple is fending off a fresh barrage of criticism from Chinese environmental activists over alleged pollution by the manufacturers who make its iconic products.

In a report issued Wednesday, a group of nongovernmental organizations accused the company of violating its own corporate responsibility standards by using suppliers that allegedly violate the law and endanger public health by discharging heavy metals and other toxins payday loan lenders.

Apple responded to the allegations by saying it took such concerns seriously but had found discrepancies in the report.

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