Outlining his strategy for nursing the troubled conglomerate back to health, the chief executive's plans were announced on Wednesday for cutting the company's huge debt by selling nearly $12 billion in assets over the next 18 months.

Digging in sediments in northern China, evidence has been gathered by scientists suggesting that complex life-forms emerged much earlier than they had previously thought.

Elizabeth Barber, the author of both Prehistoric Textiles, a comprehensive work on cloth in the early cultures of the Mediterranean, and also of Women's Work, a more general account of early cloth manufacture, is an expert authority on textiles in ancient societies.

The report recommended that the hospital should eliminate unneeded beds, expensive services should be consolidated, and use space in other hospitals.

According to some analysts, the gains in the stock market reflect growing confidence that the economy will avoid the recession that many had feared earlier in the year and instead come in for a "soft landing," followed by a gradual increase in business activity.

The automotive conveyor-belt system, which Henry Ford modeled after an assembly-line technique introduced by Ransom Olds, reduced from a day and a half to 93 minutes the required time of assembling a Model T.

A surge in new home sales and a drop in weekly unemployment claims suggest that the economy might not be as weak as some analysts previously thought.

Not trusting themselves to choose wisely among the wide array of investment opportunities on the market, stockbrokers are helping many people who turn to them to buy stocks that could be easily bought directly.

The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) had long been expected to announce a reduction in output to bolster sagging oil prices, but officials of the organization just recently announced that the group will pare daily production by 1.5 million barrels by the beginning of next year, but only if non-OPEC nations, including Norway, Mexico, and Russia, were to trim output by a total of 500,000 barrels a day.

Although schistosomiasis is not often fatal, it is so debilitating that it has become an economic drain on many developing countries.