Bits: Investing Online $10 at a Time

By Ryan J. Donmoyer

June 18 (Bloomberg) — U.S. citizens and residents with
UBS AG accounts are racing the clock to disclose their secret
holdings to the Internal Revenue Service after the Swiss
Parliament ratified an agreement to surrender the names of
4,450 bank clients, tax lawyers said.

Swiss lawmakers yesterday ended a standoff and approved
the bank’s settlement with the U.S., allowing the names to be
transmitted to tax authorities as

By Rob Waters

June 18 (Bloomberg) — Patients blinded in one or both eyes
by chemical burns regained their vision after healthy stem cells
were extracted from their eyes and reimplanted, according to a
report by Italian researchers at a scientific meeting.

The tissue was drawn from the limbus, an area at the
junction of the cornea and white part of the eye. It was grown
on a fibrous tissue, then layered

By Kate Andersen Brower and Roger Runningen

June 18 (Bloomberg) — President Barack Obama pivoted from
the Gulf of Mexico oil spill back to the economy today with an
emphasis on the jobs created by his administration’s $862
billion economic stimulus package.

At a groundbreaking in Columbus, Ohio, for the 10,000th
road project funded by the stimulus, Obama said improving the
nation’s infrastructure is one of the keys to long-term
prosperity.

By Margaret Collins and Alexis Leondis

June 18 (Bloomberg) — Bank of America Corp., the largest
U.S. bank by assets, is trying to attract investors with less to
invest through a new online trading site.

Bank of America’s Merrill Lynch, the world’s largest
brokerage with more than 15,000 financial advisers and about
$2.2 trillion of client assets, will let customers trade stocks,
mutual funds and options online starting June 21, through

By Bloomberg News

June 20 (Bloomberg) — The following is a translation of
portions of the question-and-answer-style statement on yuan
exchange rate reform issued by the People’s Bank of China today.

Is further yuan reform in China’s interests?

The decision to proceed further with yuan reform and an
improved managed-float exchange rate regime is based on China’s
conditions and development strategy. It is in line with reform
in the direction of

By Lisa Lerer and Patrick O’Connor

June 18 (Bloomberg) — U.S. Representative Joe Barton may
be the only person who had a worse day on Capitol Hill yesterday
than BP Plc Chief Executive Officer Tony Hayward.

The Texas Republican sparked a political backlash from both
parties when he apologized to Hayward — at a hearing where
other lawmakers lined up to berate BP — and accused the White
House of a

By John Helyar and David Glovin

June 18 (Bloomberg) — Kenneth I. Starr knew how to
cultivate relationships with powerful people, and he did it in
the most transparent way — by serial name-dropping.

Dining with Starr in the Grill Room at the Four Seasons in
New York meant listening to him reel off bold-face names as fast
as he guzzled Diet Cokes, according to one occasional lunch
companion who asked not

By Bloomberg News

June 21 (Bloomberg) — China’s signal of an end to the
yuan’s fixed rate to the dollar may accelerate a shift toward
domestic demand as the prime driver of growth as President Hu
Jintao seeks to strengthen household incomes.

The People’s Bank of China two day ago indicated it’s
abandoning the 6.83 yuan peg to the dollar adopted during the
global crisis to shield exporters. The central bank said

By Elisabeth Behrmann

June 20 (Bloomberg) — Sundance Resources Ltd., an
Australian-based iron ore explorer, today confirmed Ken Talbot,
former chief executive officer of Australian mining company
Macarthur Coal Ltd., is missing in West Africa after an aircraft
carrying nine mining executives was lost.

Talbot was on board a plane chartered by Sundance on a
flight to the company’s Mbalam iron ore project in Cameroon from
the capital, Yaounde, yesterday, according to