Total sales of video game hardware, software and accessories hit $1.69 billion during the month, up from $1.1 billion in the same period a year earlier, according to data from market researcher NPD Group.

“The video games industry continues to perform in the face of an ever-increasingly difficult economic environment as many turn to more in-home entertainment,” said NPD analyst Anita Frazier in an e-mail. “Even if growth slows over the back half of 2008, the industry is poised to achieve record-breaking revenues of over $22 billion for the year.”

Hardware sales grew 54 percent to $615.1 million from $399.2 million a year ago. Software sales jumped 61 percent to $872.6 million from $542.2 million.

The portable Nintendo DS was the best-selling gaming system during the month, with 783,000 units. This is up from just 452,600 in May of this year. The Wii, meanwhile, sold 666,700 units and it has now outsold both the PS3 and the Xbox 360.

Sony Corp.’s PlayStation 3 bested Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox 360 console in June. The PS3 sold 405,500 units compared with just 219,800 for the Xbox 360. The higher PS3 sales were fueled by the launch of the highly anticipated “Metal Gear Solid 4,” which is available exclusively for Sony’s console. The game sold 774,600 copies, not including those bundled with the PS3.

Activision Blizzard Inc.’s “Guitar Hero on Tour” for the DS came in second with 422,300 units sold, followed by Microsoft’s “Ninja Gaiden II” with 372,700.

“Wii Play,” which launched more than a year ago, continues to sell well — a rarity for video games, which tend to have much shorter shelf lives. Business Week News

According to foreign residents in Pyongyang, Egypt’s Orascom group has recently begun refurbishing the top floors of the three-sided pyramid-shaped hotel whose 330-metre (1,083 ft) frame dominates the Pyongyang skyline.

The firm has put glass panels into the concrete shell, installed telecommunications antennas — even though the North forbids its citizens to own mobile phones — and put up an artist’s impression of what it will look like.

An official with the group said its Orascom Telecom subsidiary was involved in the project but gave no details.

The hotel consists of three wings rising at 75 degree angles capped by several floors arranged in rings supposed to hold five revolving restaurants and an observation deck.

A creaky building crane has for years sat unused at the top of the 3,000-room hotel in a city where tourists are only occasionally allowed to visit.

“It is not a beautiful design. It carries little iconic or monumental significance, but sheer muscular and massive presence,” said Lee Sang Jun, a professor of architecture at Yonsei University in Seoul.

The communist North started construction in 1987, in a possible fit of jealousy at South Korea, which was about to host the 1988 Summer Olympics and show off to the world the success of its rapidly developing economy.

A concrete shell built by North Korea’s Paektu Mountain Architects & Engineers emerged over the next few years. A proud North Korea put a likeness of the hotel on postage stamps and boasted about the structure in official media.

According to intelligence sources, then North Korean leader Kim Il-sung saw the hotel as a symbol of his big dreams for the state he founded, while his son and current leader Kim Jong-il was a driving force in its construction.

But by 1992, worked was halted. The North’s main benefactor the Soviet Union had dissolved a year earlier and funding for the hotel had vanished. For a time, the North airbrushed images of the Ryugyong Hotel from photographs.

As the North’s economy took a deeper turn for the worse in the 1990s the empty shell became a symbol of the country’s failure, earning nicknames “Hotel of Doom” and “Phantom Hotel.”

Yonsei’s Lee and other architects said there were questions raised about whether the hotel was structurally sound and a few believed completing the structure could cause it to collapse.

It would cost up to $2 billion to finish the Ryugyong Hotel and make it safe, according to estimates in South Korean media. That is equivalent to about 10 percent of the North’s annual economic output.

Bruno Giberti, associate head of California Polytechnic State University’s Department of Architecture, said the project was typical of what has been produced recently in many cities trying to show their emerging wealth by constructing gigantic edifices that were not related in scale to anything else around them.

“If this is the worst building in the world, the runners up are in Vegas and Shanghai,” said Giberti.

By Jon Herskovitz, Reuters

(Additional reporting by Kim Junghyun; Editing by Jonathan Thatcher and Alex Richardson)

Copyright © 2008 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters shall not be liable for any errors or delays in the content, or for any actions taken in reliance thereon.

Copyright © 2008 Palangkaraya Post. All rights reserved.

Kenny Pichardo, 24, was the first to buy an iPhone 3G at an AT&T store in the New York borough of Queens, but he said it took the store half an hour to get the phone activated.

That boded badly for the approximately 70 people after him in line. Pichardo had camped out overnight to be first.

A spokesman for AT&T Inc., the exclusive carrier for the iPhone in the U.S., said there was a global problem with Apple Inc.’s iTunes servers that prevented the phones from being fully activated in-store, as had been planned.

Instead, employees are telling buyers to go home and perform the last step by connecting their phones to their own computers, spokesman Michael Coe said.

At Apple’s flagship store on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, customers were waiting at the counter for at least 20 minutes to get their new phones activated.

When the first iPhone went on sale a year ago, customers performed the whole activation procedure at home, freeing store employees to focus on sales. But the new model is subsidized by carriers, as is standard in the wireless industry, and Apple and AT&T therefore planned to activate all phones in-store to get customers on a contract.

The problem extended to owners of the previous iPhone model. A software update released for that phone on Friday morning required the phone to be reactivated through iTunes.

“It’s a mess,” said freelance photographer Giovanni Cipriano, who updated his first-generation iPhone only to find it unusable.

On Thursday, Apple had problems with the launch of a new data service, MobileMe. The service is designed to synchronize a users personal data across devices, including the iPhone, but many users were denied access to their accounts.

Enthusiasm was high ahead of the 8 a.m. launch of the new phone, and a line of hundreds at the Fifth Avenue store encircled the block. Many of them were already owners of the first iPhone, suggesting that Apple is preaching to the choir with the new model, which updates the one launched a year ago by speeding up Internet access and adding a navigation chip.

Thanks to subsidies by the carrier, the price has also been cut substantially to $199 for the cheapest model in the United States.

Alex Cavallo, 24, lined up at the Fifth Avenue store, just as he had been a year ago for the original iPhone. He sold that one recently on eBay in anticipation of the new one. In the meantime, he has been using another phone, which felt “uncomfortable.”

“The iPhone is just a superior user experience,” he said. The phone also proved a decent investment for him: He bought the old model for $599 and sold it for $570.

Nick Epperson, a 24-year-old grad student, spent the night outside an AT&T store in Atlanta, keeping his cheer up with bags of Doritos, three games of Scrabble and two packs of cigarettes. Asked why he was waiting in line, he responded simply “Chicks dig the iPhone.”

The new phone went on sale Friday in 21 countries, with one more, France, following next week. In most of them it was the first time any iPhone was officially sold there, though several countries have seen a brisk grey-market trade in phones imported from the U.S.

IPhone fever was strong even in Japan, where consumers are used to tech-heavy that do restaurant searches, e-mail, music downloads, reading digital novels and electronic shopping. More than 1,000 people lined up at the Softbank Corp. store in Tokyo and the phone quickly sold out.

“Just look at this obviously innovative design,” Yuki Kurita, 23, said as he emerged from buying his iPhone, carrying bags of clothing and a skateboard he had used as a chair during his wait outside the Tokyo store. “I am so thrilled just thinking about how I get to touch this.”

The phone went on sale first in New Zealand, where hundreds of people lined up outside stores in New Zealand’s main cities to snap it up right at midnight — 8 a.m. Thursday in New York.

“Steve Jobs knows what people want,” Web developer Lucinda McCullough told the Christchurch Press newspaper, referring to Apple’s chief executive. “And I need a new phone.”

In Germany, sales were brisk at local carrier T-Mobile’s stores, particularly in Munich, Hamburg and Cologne, said spokeswoman Marion Kessing. /ap

Investors seemed unimpressed by a statement from Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who said the government’s focus is ensuring that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac remain as presently constituted to carry out their mission.

The government-chartered companies at times each lost more than 40 percent on growing speculation that a government bailout is needed. A collapse of the two financiers would cause further shock to the financial system, and trigger more losses to banks and brokerages with significant holdings of mortgage-backed securities.

The troubles at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are just the latest depressing turn in a year-old credit crisis that shows no sign of ending, disappointing stock traders who just months ago who thought the worst was perhaps over.

Global banks and brokerages have scrambled to sell assets and raise capital in an effort to offset nearly $300 billion of write-downs linked to the credit crisis. Citigroup Inc. announced Friday it will sell its German retail banking operation to France’s Credit Mutuel for $7.7 billion.

Meanwhile, oil continued its ascent on supply concerns. A barrel of oil vaulted to a record above $147, raising more concerns about the impact of higher prices on inflation and in turn, the overall economy.

The confluence of negative news offset a mostly positive quarterly report from General Electric Co. The conglomerate that owns everything from television network NBC to jet engine plants reported second-quarter profits that met analysts’ expectations. However, the outlook across its business lines was mixed.

“You have two issues, crude popped back up $10 to $11 in the last few days, and that is causing some concern. The second point is the financial services sector, there is concern and speculation that Freddie, Fannie and Lehman won’t be around on Monday. That’s obviously causing worry,” said Phil Orlando, chief equity market strategist at Federated Investors.

In late morning trading, the Dow fell 215.84, or 1.92 percent, to 11,013.18 after having fallen to 10,980.37. It last traded below 11,000 on July 25, 2006.

Broader stock indicators also lost ground. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index fell 23.59, or 1.88 percent, to 1,229.80, and the Nasdaq composite index fell 38.15, or 1.69 percent, to 2,219.70.

Light, sweet crude rose $5.08 to $146.73 per barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Behind the rise are concerns about a disruption to tight global supplies amid tensions over Iran’s launch of test missiles and the possible renewal of oil-related violence in Nigeria.

Bond prices fell. The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note, which moves opposite its price, rose to 3.83 percent from 3.80 percent late Thursday. The dollar was mixed against other major currencies, while gold prices rose.

Orlando said investors are looking to Federal Reserve President Ben Bernanke and Paulson for guidance.

“It feels like that Friday before the big Bear Stearns/JPMorgan announcement, so you’re wondering if Bernanke and Paulson are going to sit around on the weekend trying to figure things out,” Orlando said, referring to the near-collapse and subsequent Fed-orchestrated buyout of Bear Stearns.

“It seems all the confidence in the market has dissipated in these key financial services companies. When you talk about too big to fail, the government has to step in to figure out a solution to the Fannie and Freddie confidence issue,” he said.

Freddie Mac fell $2.55, or 32 percent, to $5.45, while Fannie Mae tumbled $3.61, or 27 percent, to $9.59 as investors worried about their stability. Piper Jaffray analyst Robert Napoli lowered his price targets on both companies, and said in a note to clients investors should “not be in a position that only two government-sponsored lenders are willing to make mortgage loans and, without them, our economy would collapse.”

Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. fell $3.87, or 22 percent, to $13.43 as traders fretted that the No. 4 investment bank will succumb to soured debt.

Citi slipped 31 cents to $15.97 after saying it will book a $4 billion gain from the sale of its German retail operation. The deal is part of a plan by Chief Executive Vikram Pandit to sell up to $500 billion in assets to help boost profitability.

Investors remain cautious about the entire financial sector, especially ahead of second-quarter reports due next week from major names like JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Merrill Lynch & Co. JPMorgan declined $1.70, or 4.9 percent, to $32.79 and Merrill fell $1.91, or 6.6 percent, to $26.80.

There are also new reports that InBev NV raised its takeover offer Anheuser-Busch Cos. The maker of Budweiser, Bud Light and other beers is expected to approve the new offer, which values the company at $70 a share, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. Anheuser-Busch rose $4.62, or 7.6 percent, to $65.83.

In economic news, the United States’ trade deficit narrowed in May as exports — including industrial supplies and consumer goods — climbed to all-time highs. The Commerce Department said growing exports drove the trade gap down to $58.8 billion, a 1.2 percent decrease from April and the best showing since March.

Investors are also examining a better-than-expected reading of the mood of consumers. The Reuters/University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment index rose to 56.6 for July from 56.4 in June. It had been expected to decline.

Declining issues outnumbered advancers by about 5 to 1 on the New York Stock Exchange, where volume came to 575.6 million shares.

The Russell 2000 index of smaller companies fell 9.03, or 1.35 percent, to 661.41.

Overseas, Japan’s Nikkei stock average fell 0.21 percent. In afternoon trading in Europe, Britain’s FTSE 100 fell 1.68 percent, Germany’s DAX index declined 1.89 percent, and France’s CAC-40 fell 2.46 percent. /ap

Prime Minister Fuad Saniora had been struggling to form a government since former army chief Gen. Michel Suleiman was elected president in May.

Saniora announced the Cabinet formation Friday in Beirut.

Hezbollah’s veto power was part of an Arab League-brokered deal to achieve compromise between the U.S. and Western-backed parliamentary majority and Hezbollah-led opposition.

Pam Westfall, a registered nurse with the Health Department, said she got her shots this morning since she needed to renew them and she works a lot with children.

“We at the county Health Department all work a lot with kids, and we recognize the importance of health professionals, especially those who work with kids, of updating vaccinations,” Westfall said.

Westfall said whooping cough is extremely important to guard against because it is transmitted through airborne germs.

“For adults, they may get whooping cough and think it’s just a bad cough, and it will go away in two or three months,” she said. “But for an infant, it can mean hospitalization and even death.”

Although children are the ones who typically get seriously ill from whooping cough, it is usually adults who transmit the sickness to them.

The agency also encourages travelers to get their vaccinations updated since they may be around large numbers of people who have not been immunized against these sicknesses, Westfall said.

People who are around children, in particular, should update their immunizations, she said.

“Teens, adults, caregivers, parents, grandparents, all need to make sure to be reimmunized against pertussis, tetanus and diphtheria every 10 years, we recommend, especially those around kids who are 2 years old and under,” Westfall said.

Westfall said the pertussis portion of the vaccination is a “little more expensive” than just the tetanus shot, but the agency is working to educate the county on the importance of guarding against this preventable illness.

For more information, contact the Porter County Health Department at (219) 465-3525 or visit its office at 155 Indiana Ave., Suite 104, in Valparaiso. It is open from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday.

The improvements include a surgery waiting area with nearly 20 comfortable chairs so families can wait privately for their loved ones.

The outpatient recovery area includes 10 private rooms for patients.

“It’s where we get patients ready and we take care of them until they can go home,” Donna Anvik, registered nurse, said.

The recovery area for general surgery features three stations for adults and one private room for children.

The recovery stations are much larger than the current ones and farther away from additional activity.

Highlighting the improvements, however, are three state of the art operating rooms.

“We’re pretty proud,” Tracy Denowh, registered nurse, said. “We’ve worked in the same ER since the hospital was built.”

The largest of the operating rooms is scheduled to handle all orthopedic surgeries as well as other operations.

Dena Prevost, registered nurse, explains orthopedic surgeries require more room than other procedures. The operating room includes a C-arm so medical staff can view X-rays during the procedure if needed.

Other improvements include having the kitchen/cafeteria at a more visual location, a new gift shop and the west entrance becoming the main entrance.