New York, April 10 - The Spanish Business Council for Competitiveness, or CEC, embarks this week on a tour of several US cities during which it will explain the opportunities offered by Spain's economy to international investors.

The first presentation will be made Wednesday at the New York campus of Spain's IESE Business School and will be run by the CEO of Spanish power giant Iberdrola, Jose Ignacio Sanchez Galan, who will be accompanied by CEC President Fernando Casado.

New York, March 13 - Apollo Global Management LLC and C. Dean Metropoulos & Co will acquire the famous pastries Twinkies and other brands for $410 million, bankrupt Hostess Brands Inc. announced Tuesday.

The joint offer was the only one presented in writing, and so Hostess, which announced its closure last November, decided to turn the brands over to the two companies, the firm said.

The agreement still must be approved by the bankruptcy court supervising the liquidation of Hostess's assets.

A spokesman for Apollo Global contacted by EFE declined to comment on the matter.

Washington, Mar 3 : Online retailer Amazon has been slammed for selling offensive T-shirts with slogans that seem to promote crime against women.’

Earlier on Saturday the firm launched T-shirts for sale with messages including "keep calm and hit her".

According to the BBC, an Amazon statement said later "those items are not available for sale".

The T-shirts are based on the World War II wartime propaganda slogan "keep calm and carry on.”

Among the 8,425 T-shirts offered for sale by the company on the Amazon site had offensive slogans like, "keep calm and knife her", “keep calm and rape them” and "keep calm and grope a lot".

Washington, Feb 27 - Describing India as one of America's "most trusted and valuable partners" in the Asia-Pacific region, a senior US official has said it would serve as the foundation for greater regional economic cooperation and expansion.

"Our relationship from our burgeoning trade, to defence sales and exercises, to our growing education and clean energy partnerships has never been stronger," Robert Blake, Assistant Secretary of State, told a House panel Tuesday during a hearing on "The Rebalance to Asia: Why South Asia Matters."

Washington, Feb 26 : Europe has attracted twice as much investment as the US from Chinese investors in the past two years for commercial opportunities and political reasons, the Rhodium Group, a US consulting firm said in a report.

Annual flows of Chinese direct investment to the European Union (EU) increased from less than $1 billion before 2008 to an average of $3 billion in 2009 and 2010, before tripling to more than $10 billion in the past two years, according to the report.

Washington, Feb 5 - New orders for US manufactured goods rose 1.8 percent in December, following a modest gain in November, the US Department of Commerce reported Monday.

US factory orders increased by $8.6 billion to a seasonally-adjusted $484.8 billion, going up for three of the last four months, reported Xinhua.

New orders for durable goods, or big-ticket items expected to last at least three years such as computers, cars and machinery, rose by $9.4 billion or 4.3 percent to $230 billion in December. This followed a 0.6-percent November increase.

Washington, Feb 5 - The US and Mexico have reached an agreement in principle on terms for imports of Mexican tomatoes, preventing the trade war feared in the wake of Washington's decision last year to suspend a
1996 bilateral accord.

The deal was reached over the weekend and raises the minimum price for Mexican tomatoes sold in the US, US Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade Francisco Sanchez said in a statement.

Houston, Feb 2 : Exxon Mobil, the largest US energy company, has said its profit rose 6 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012, thanks to higher refining margins.

Despite declines in oil production, the Texas-based energy giant said it earned nearly $1 billion in the last three months of 2012, reported Xinhua.

Net income was $44.9 billion in 2012, up 9 percent from a year earlier, the company said.

Exxon Mobil attributed the growth mostly to asset sales and stronger performance in the company's refining and chemical products divisions.

Washington, Jan. 19 : USA Today and polling organization Gallup have announced a mutual decision to end their 20-year partnership.

In a statement, the newspaper said that for 2013, USA Today and Gallup have made a mutual decision to move in different directions.

It added that USA Today was in the final stages of negotiating an arrangement with another polling organization.

According to Politico, in its own statement, Gallup said that `the worlds of journalism and survey research have been changing and evolving' since the two organizations first partnered.

Washington, Jan. 17 : The global market for mobile enterprise business apps reached nearly 25 billion dollars in 2012.

According to the analyst firm Strategy Analytics, revenue associated with mobile workers using enterprise business apps on their devices is also expected to double over the next five years.

Strategy Analytics director of business cloud strategies research Mark Levitt said that the consumer mobile experience has taught mobile workers to expect, even demand, access to information and applications from anywhere using mobile devices, Enterprise Innovation reports.

Washington, Jan 11 : Sales of PCs have dropped 6.4 percent in the fourth quarter compared to the same period last year, a market research firm has said.

This was worse than the 4.4 percent that was predicted earlier by the research firm IDC, and notable in that the quarter included the retail launch of the Windows 8 operating system from Microsoft Corp.

Calling the PC market `sluggish,' IDC said in its report that PC sales `continued to take a back seat to competing devices and sustained economic woes,' Fox News reports.

Washington, Jan 10 : Business-oriented social network LinkedIn has 200 million users, with nearly two new members signing up every second, a report has said.

The firm had reported in its last earnings call on Nov. 1 that it topped 187 million members and had been growing at a rate of 10 million to 15 million users per quarter last year.

According to Mashable, launched in 2003, LinkedIn passed 100 million members in 2011.

LinkedIn''s network compares with 1 billion-plus for Facebook, over 500 million for Twitter and more than 500 million for Google Plus, the report said.

Washington, Jan 8 - With the India-US civil nuclear deal removing the biggest obstacle in their relationship, a US think tank has said their concerted cooperation could help India's global rise and provide a rich opportunity for US businesses.

"The 2008 US-India Civil Nuclear Agreement did away with the biggest obstacle in the relationship-India's murky status in the global non-proliferation regime," the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said in a new report.

Washington, Dec 8 : Facebook's COO Sheryl Sandberg has sold shares valued at more than 26.2 million dollars, according to a regulatory filing.

Facebook disclosed in an SEC filing that Sandberg sold more than 946,588 shares at prices ranging from 27.39 to 27.90 dollars, a level that Facebook hasn''t traded at since August.

In fact, Facebook shares have been on a tear in recent weeks, as Wall Street has embraced the company''s we''re-all-about-mobile message and the biggest so-called lockups on insiders selling their pre-IPO shares have passed, CNET reports.

Washington, Dec 4 - The US manufacturing sector contracted in November after two consecutive monthly increases, a troubling sign for the economic recovery, a leading industry survey showed.

The US Institute of Supply Management (ISM) said the manufacturing index, also known as the purchasing managers index (PMI), dropped from the estimated 51.7 percent in October to 49.5 percent in November, the lowest level since July 2009, reported Xinhua.

A reading above 50 percent indicates that the manufacturing sector is generally expanding, while a reading below 50 percent indicates contraction.