Today's Top Stories 9-22-11

BLOOMBERG

Rick Perry leads Mitt Romney among Florida Republicans and they each hold double-digit advantages over the party’s other presidential contenders, according to a Quinnipiac University poll highlighting the two-man rivalry defining the race.

The Palestinian Authority will push ahead with its bid to get United Nations statehood recognition though it won’t press for an immediate vote as support in the Security Council appeared to be below the needed threshold.

South Africa’s central bank left its benchmark lending rate unchanged at a 30-year low today to help support economic growth as the global recovery stalls.

Applications for jobless benefits decreased 9,000 in the week ended Sept. 17 to 423,000, Labor Department figures showed.

The Bloomberg Consumer Comfort Index fell to minus 52.1 in the period to Sept. 18 from minus 49.3 in the prior week. Sentiment among men slumped to an all-time low. A monthly expectations gauge held at minus 34, the worst reading since March 2009.

The real’s biggest five-day plunge since 1999 is fueling speculation Brazil will sell reserves to shore up the currency, reversing a 28-month-old strategy aimed at stemming gains.

Treasury 30-year bonds rallied, pushing yields down the most over two days since the depths of the financial crisis almost three years ago, as stocks tumbled worldwide on the Federal Reserve’s plan to extend the average maturities in its portfolio of U.S. debt.

AP Top Stories

The House of Representatives unexpectedly defeated a bill that would fund the federal government past September 30 on Wednesday as dozens of Republicans broke with their party to push for deeper spending cuts.

The New York Police Department put American citizens under surveillance and scrutinized where they ate, prayed and worked, not because of charges of wrongdoing but because of their ethnicity, according to interviews and documents obtained by The AP. The documents describe in extraordinary detail a secret program intended to catalog life inside Muslim neighborhoods as people immigrated, got jobs, became citizens and started businesses. The documents undercut the NYPD's claim that its officers only follow leads when investigating terrorism.

Palestinian protesters have denounced President Barack Obama for his opposition to their bid to win U.N. recognition of a Palestinian state.

Josh Fattal and Shane Bauer, two Americans released from an Iranian prison, spent their first full day of freedom in seclusion, enjoying a joyous reunion with their families in the Gulf State of Oman after being held for more than two years accused as spies.

The general commanding NATO's mission in Libya said Thursday that isolated groups of forces loyal to ousted strongman Moammar Gadhafi continue to be a threat to local people but are unable to coordinate their actions.

Renewed violence in the Yemeni capital killed at least nine people as street battles broke out between forces loyal to the regime and its opponents, medical and security officials said.

Rescuers on Thursday finally reached some of the villages in India's remote northeast that were cut off by a magnitude-6.9 earthquake in the Himalayan region last weekend, as the death toll in the disaster climbed past 100.

States are getting new guidance from President Barack Obama about how they can get around provisions in the No Child Left Behind law. It's a step the administration has undertaken that effectively guts the Bush-era law since Congress had been slow to rewrite it.

The top tier of luxury consumers curbed their spending on high-end clothes, accessories and jewelry in the first half of 2011, while regular consumers picked up the slack for the first time since the 2008 financial crisis, a study by American Express' consulting unit said Thursday.

In record-setting numbers, young adults struggling to find work are shunning long-distance moves to live with Mom and Dad, delaying marriage and buying fewer homes, often raising kids out of wedlock. They suffer from the highest unemployment since World War II and risk living in poverty more than others — nearly 1 in 5.

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