4. UNITED STATES
Sales on Black Friday outpace last year’s
The holiday shopping season got off to a surprisingly solid start, according to data released Saturday by a research firm.
But the sales boost came at the expense of profits as retailers slashed prices to attract crowds.
Sales during the day after Thanksgiving rose 3 percent to $10.6 billion, according to preliminary figures released Saturday by ShopperTrak RCT Corp., a Chicago-based research firm that tracks sales at more than 50,000 retail outlets.
Experts, who predict this year’s overall holiday shopping period will be the weakest in decades thanks to an overall contraction in spending, caution that this year’s sales growth may be hard to sustain.
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3. THAILAND
Protesters smash through police cordon
BANGKOK — Anti-government protesters who have closed Bangkok’s airports broke through a police cordon meant to shut them off from supplies, raising fears Saturday of widening confrontations in the standoff that has strangled the country’s economy.
About 400 protesters, traveling in a convoy of cars from the occupied international airport, attacked a police checkpoint staffed by more than 100 police.
Meanwhile, an official reported that an explosion inside the prime minister’s besieged office compound has wounded 33 people. The Narentorn Medical Center said Sunday that five had been hospitalized.
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FLORIDA
Their work in orbit accomplished, astronauts of the space shuttle Endeavour got the green light to return to Earth Sunday but were warned “pretty iffy” weather at the main landing site at Kennedy Space Center could send them across the country or keep them up an extra day. NASA has readied its backup landing site in California, Edwards Air Force Base.
ARIZONA
Prosecutors have offered a plea deal to an 8-year-old boy charged with murder in the shooting deaths of his father and another man in their St. Johns home, court records show. Defense attorney Benjamin Brewer said Saturday that the possible deal would resolve the case without it being transferred to adult court.
AUSTRALIA
Officials rushed Sunday to reach about 80 whales stranded on a remote coast in southern Australia. The group was spotted from the air on Saturday on a rocky coastline at Sandy Cape in the northwest of Tasmania state. Many of the 80 long-finned pilot whales appeared to be dead.
IRAQ
A rocket exploded Saturday near a UN compound in Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone, killing two foreign catering employees and wounding 15 others, according to UN and military officials.
OHIO
WKRP is back on the air in Cincinnati — but this time it’s for real. A low-power TV station has changed its call letters to WKRP, the same as the fictional radio station in the 1970s hit series “WKRP in Cincinnati.” The station changed its call letters to promote its new digital TV signal.
5. EGYPT
$75
What Saudi King Abdullah said is a “fair price” for a barrel of oil, according to an interview published Saturday. Ministers from OPEC countries decided to delay until December a decision on cutting production.
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Page compiled from Tribune news services
