AT&T says it will no longer sponsor top golfer Tiger Woods, who announced earlier this month that he would take an indefinite break from the sport.

The company joins Accenture and Gillette in dropping support for the golfer after he admitted to “infidelity” to his wife.

AT&T’s logo appeared on the golfer’s bag. The company did not comment on its reasons for dropping Woods.

AT&T said it would continue to sponsor the AT&T National PGA event in July.

In a terse statement, AT&T said: “We are ending our sponsorship agreement with Tiger Woods and wish him well in the future.”

The deal had been billed as a “multi-year” agreement when it was announced at the beginning of 2009.

There is an acute shortfall in sugar production in the two major sugar producing countries, namely Brazil and India. While Brazil is seeing a 5% to 8% shortfall in production due to scanty rainfall, India is facing a sharper decline of over 15% due to monsoon failure.
This has resulted in Sugar prices reaching a three decade high price few weeks back, and experts are expecting the prices to firm up further in the coming weeks due to hoarding and genuine demand pileup.

Over 31.3 million people watched the memorial service of Michael Jackson at Staples center, Los Angeles, and the golden coffin with his body left the place soon after the event. Even after four days since the event, the family or any other government official, has not come out with details of where the coffin has been buried.
This has left all Michael Jackson fans in the dark and the mystery is likely to continue for few more days, by when the family is expected to clarify the real status.

The tightening of the media freedom in Iran is continuing with the government authorities closing down the newspaper Etemad-e-Melli, or National Confidence with immediate effect.
The paper had earlier challenged President Ahmedinajed on his re-election as Iran President and is now facing the wrath for its anti government activities.
The Iranian authorities have also clamped down new restrictions on international newspapers on collecting data from Iranian streets.

Most of us are always shocked at the erratic movement in crude oil prices. But there are lot of factors that affect the crude oil prices , beyond the basic demand and supply issues :
- Global political environment, and specifically in the oil producing middle east region. More the tension in Middle east region, higher will be the oil prices. Immediately after the invasion of Iraq, the crude oil prices went down, but once the world realized that normalcy may not return to Iraq in the near future, crude oil prices started moving higher and higher.
So if there is real stability in Iraq, you can expect the crude oil prices to remain stable or even trend lower. But that could be more than offset, if Iran gets into confrontation with US or the West.

- Availability of low cost funds for global speculators pulls up or down the crude oil prices. Crude oil is the highest traded commodity which is of interest to every country in the world, be it India or South Korea or China or Japan or US or Europe.
Japan had the lowest rate of interest right from 2007 which was exploited by many hedge funds, in borrowing low cost funds from Japan and then investing that money in speculative deals. But when US and Europe started increasing the interest rates, the borrowing of funds from Japan turned not-so-lucrative, which reduced the fund availability for speculative funds.
So look for major changes in the interest rates in leading economies.
- Collapse of any major global company can squeeze out investors across the globe : When US investment banker Lehman Bros went under without any notice, all other bankers became wary, and started increasing the interest rates for unsecured credit, and even asked for returning of funds from weak borrowers. This forced many hedge funds to pull back money from the crude oil market, by closing down their long positions. That lead to steep crash in the crude oil prices from 147 dollars to around 70 dollars in just few months.
So watch out for any other major global company bankruptcy announcement, if you are investing in crude oil market.
- Surge in demand in new big markets : China and India have over 35% of the world population, but consume less than 15% of the global crude oil production. A sneak into their last one decade data would indicate to you that these two countries together had the highest growth rate in crude oil consumption. Even after such a health growth rate for nearly a decade, these two countries are still left out with a huge gap between potential and actual consumption.
So, if India and China continue with their economic growth plans , then they can more than offset the drop in crude oil consumption in the US + Europe. And a sharp economic decline in India or China, could really pull down Crude oil demand substantially.
So keep watching the economic growth trends of China and India.
- Increase in crude oil production capacities : Crude oil production capacities are currently 10% more than what the world needs, and these cannot be increased at short notice. So if the demand goes up substantially for whatever reason, and if supplies also get cut down by few percentage points, then you can expect crude oil prices to shoot up substantially.
- New gas and oil finds across the globe can also influence the global crude oil prices due to change in demand scenario. So keep tracking such events very closely. India has doubled its natural gas producing just a month back, which means its demand for imported crude oil will come down in coming months.
- Risk appetite of global investors from US / Europe / Japan / China : The individual retail investors in these countries collectively hold over four trillion dollars of money in various investments. These people had withdrawn out of their risky investments from 2008 September till February 2009.
Since March 2009, Most of the global funds who had withdrawn out of risky investments have started to put back their cash into commodities including Crude oil. Even as of last week, these funds have invested over 15% of their corpus in cash, which means more money waiting to be invested.
Based on evaluation of all the above factors, we can safely conclude that the crude oil prices will remain in the 60 dollars to 100 dollars mark for the next few months.
And if somebody tells you that the OPEC is controlling and influencing the crude oil prices, please do not believe that. The OPEC body is helpless and does not seem to be in control of the crude oil prices in any way. They are actually to be pitied for their dependence on the speculators for their fate.

The brazilian officials have said that the debris recovered from the Atlantic by Brazilian search teams is “sea trash” and not from a lost Air France jet. Brig Ramon Borges Cardoso contradicted earlier reports, saying “no material from the plane has been recovered”. The teams have found lots of aeroplane debris including wooden pallent and buoys. They also found some oil slick. But, they have not yet found the airliner itself. And, they are saying that it may not be that of the airfrance.

The Crude oil prices are slowly inching towards 70 dollars mark, owing to low inventory indication from US and Europe. There are also reports that the economic recovery in China could be faster than expected, which could create more demand for crude oil, whereas the supplies could be stagnant.
With the crude oil prices ruling below 60 dollars for most of last year, most of the countries have put their expansion plans on hold. That is expected to result in lower supply gear up in the second part of 2009, whereas the demand could be growing little faster.
Overall, experts are still seeing the crude oil prices to remain in the 50 dollars to 75 dollars band for the rest of 2009.

The crude oil prices went up to eight months high last week to 70 dollars, but most of the speculators have been nervous at the pace of gain in the last few months. Hence, they have unwound their long positions in the last few days, resulting in pressure on the crude oil prices.
The crude oil prices have crashed to 66 dollars due to the speculative unwinding, which is expected to continue for few more weeks. With no major economic data coming out of US and Europe, we can expect the crude oil prices to remain range bound between 55 dollars to 75 dollars, for the next few weeks.

The french authorities have come back and said that they may never find the flight data recorders of the Air France jet that went missing over the Atlantic. They, though promising a detailed investigation, said that the circumstances are difficult and that the reason why the jet went missing might never be found. The Flight AF 447 was heading from Rio to Paris with 228 people on board on Monday when it was lost over the ocean. Navy has spotted debris 650km (400 miles) off Brazil’s coast and navy vessels are converging on the area.

The US government has disclosed an exhaustive listing of all the civilian nuclear sites across the country, and also the nuclear material stock pile areas, on the internet few days back.
On identifying the blunder, the government has got the data removed from the internet. Experts fear that though most of the data was available already for civilian digestion in bits and pieces, the consolidated listing with mapping is causing concern in security circles.
Security experts fear that the data could be used by the Islamic terrorists for their future strikes, if US is not alert enough.
Another reason for the disclosure by the US could be to induce Iran and North Korea to voluntarily disclose their nuclear sites to the world.