Market News - NASDAQ

LONDON (ShareCast) - Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL - news) is braced for a formal objection from Brussels to its planned $7.4bn acquisition of fellow US technology company Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVAD - news) , escalating the company's legal wrangle with Europe's competition authorities, according to the FT.

Time Warner (NYSE: TWX - news) reported its revenue declined 6% to $7.1 billion, but said it is on track to post solid results this year, adding that it still expects to spin off AOL by the end of 2009, writes the Wall Street Journal.

Faced with lurking dangers to the budding recovery, Federal Reserve policymakers are sure to leave a key interest rate at a record low to entice Americans to spend more and help the economic turnaround gain traction, reports USA Today.

A House committee voted to exempt small public companies from part of a federal law designed to prevent financial fraud. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel lobbied members of the House Financial Services Committee to exempt small public companies from a provision in the landmark Sarbanes-Oxley bill that was passed in 2002 in response to the Enron and WorldCom corporate accounting scandals, according to a lawmaker and several other sources familiar with the effort, says the Washington Post (NYSE: WPO - news) .

The Obama administration could support a bolder consolidation of bank regulators, an official said, as the US Senate prepared legislation to streamline financial supervision. Chris Dodd, chairman of the Senate banking committee, could unveil a draft bill next week that reduces the country's bank regulators from four to one, retaining a separate division for smaller banks, writes the FT.

The number of jobs the Obama administration credits to federal stimulus money could be overstated by at least 20,000 of the 640,000 claimed, a Wall Street Journal analysis found. Recipients of the government grants and contracts appear to have made mistakes when estimating the number of jobs that have been saved or created, according to the Journal's review.

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher J. Dodd plans to circulate a draft bill of sweeping financial reforms as soon as next week that breaks with the Obama administration and the House on two key issues, officials said, writes the Washington Post.

Fiat (Milan: F.MI - news) and Chrysler Group are scheduled to spend an almost unbelievable six hours Wednesday briefing analysts and journalists about the U.S. automaker's five-year business plan, or survival plan, if you prefer, according to the USA Today.

The bitter battle over the future of the Internet calling service Skype appears to be nearing an end. A resolution of the litigation surrounding the service, which is owned by eBay, could be announced as soon as this week, according to several people who have been briefed on the situation, says the NY Times.

China, finally, is ready to build a house for Mickey Mouse. Beijing has approved plans to build a Disney (NYSE: DIS - news) theme park in Shanghai, a major milestone in the more than decade-long effort by Walt Disney to dramatically expand its reach into China, writes the LA Times.

Friday's unemployment figures are not expected to provide significant encouragement. Although job losses have not been as extreme as they were late last year, when more than 500,000 jobs were being eliminated each month, massive layoffs are still occurring, reports the Chicago Tribune.

AT&T is suing Verizon Wireless in an effort to stop its bigger mobile rival from using "misleading" coverage maps in advertisements that AT&T says are causing it to lose "incalculable market share", according to USA Today.

Bernard Madoff's longtime auditor pleaded guilty to securities fraud charges, saying he failed to do his job to verify the disgraced money manager's financial records but did not know Madoff was running history's biggest Ponzi scheme, says the LA Times.