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The Philippines cut interest rates for the first time since July 2009, joining emerging markets from Thailand to Indonesia in easing monetary policy as a deteriorating global economy threatens growth.

Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas lowered the rate it pays lenders for overnight deposits by a quarter of a percentage point to 4.25 percent, according to a statement in Manila today. The decision was predicted by 13 of 17 economists in a Bloomberg News survey, with the rest expecting no change. The central bank maintained the reserve requirement ratio at 21 percent.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s new director — armed with the bureau’s full powers — has set his top priorities for what to do first.

With President Obama’s recess appointment of former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray last week, the six-month-old bureau — created as part of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law — inherited a couple of key new powers.

These include the ability to regulate nonbanks and the ability to crack down on financial products considered unfair, deceptive or abusive toward consumers.

CNNMoney asked Cordray to detail his top three priorities in a media briefing on Thursday.

‘Know Before You Owe’

Cordray said his top priority was the bureau’s "Know Before You Owe" campaign, dedicated to helping consumers understand all the terms of their mortgage, credit card and student loan agreements.

By July, the consumer bureau has to finish up its simpler mortgage federal disclosure form, as required by the Dodd-Frank law that created the bureau.

The bureau is also working on a one-page financial aid shopping sheet to help students figure out how much in federal loans and private loans students should consider taking on, and what kind of loan repayments will follow after graduation.

Policing nonbanks

The next big priority for the bureau is to police nonbanking financial firms including student lenders, debt collectors, payday lenders and mortgage originators and servicers.

"We have the opportunity now, we’re aggressively moving forward with non bank supervision to level that playing field in these same markets," Cordray said.

The day after Cordray started, the bureau launched its nonbank supervision program, expected to turn its focus on the mortgage sector.

On Wednesday, the bureau released a new set of standards for consumer bureau officials to examining mortgage originators. The mortgage industry played a big role in the housing bubble that led to the financial crisis, signing up homeowners for loans they didn’t understand and couldn’t pay.

Cordray said that consumer bureau examiners would be sent into mortgage broker offices to start looking at their books in coming months.

On Thursday, Cordray will hold a hearing on payday lending — loans made to a worker in advance of his or her paycheck — in Birmingham, Ala. Alabama is home to the largest number of payday lenders per capita in the nation, according to the bureau.

Cracking down on law breakers

The last priority Cordray outlined is the one that makes the financial sector the most uneasy: Holding financial firms accountable when their financial product takes advantage of consumers.

"Providers need to know that whether they’re big or small, and whatever market they’re in, they have to follow the law and they have to obey the law," Cordray said. "They can’t engage in unfair and deceptive and abusive practices."

The power to declare products deceptive and abusive and to stop financial firms from selling them is another power that the bureau didn’t get in full force until Cordray took over.

And it’s the one everyone is going to be watching. So many other financial regulatory agencies failed at cracking down on firms that break laws that protect consumers. Those failures were a big reason the consumer bureau got created in the first place.

The bureau employs about 800 staffers. And it had already started flexing some key powers, such as examining the books of some the nation’s largest banks.

There’s still debate about whether Cordray’s appointment is legitimate. Republicans say it’s not. Obama made the recess appointment while Congress was technically in a do-nothing session, weeks after the Senate failed to muster enough votes to confirm Cordray.

But Cordray says he’s going to leave such questions for others, and concentrate on the task at hand.

"We have a job to do. We’re going to do the job. It’s a very important job, " Cordray said. 

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The Associated Press opened its newest bureau here Monday, becoming the first international news organization with a full-time presence to cover news from North Korea in words, pictures and video.

In a ceremony that came less than a month after the death of longtime ruler Kim Jong Il and capped nearly a year of discussions, AP President and CEO Tom Curley and a delegation of top AP editors inaugurated the office, situated inside the headquarters of the state-run Korean Central News Agency in downtown Pyongyang.

The bureau expands the AP’s presence in North Korea, building on the breakthrough in 2006 when AP opened a video bureau in Pyongyang for the first time by an international news organization. Exclusive video from AP video staffers in Pyongyang was used by media outlets around the world following Kim’s death.

Now, AP writers and photojournalists will also be allowed to work in North Korea on a regular basis.

For North Korea, which for decades has remained largely off-limits to international journalists, the opening marked an important gesture, particularly because North Korea and the United States have never had formal diplomatic relations. The AP, an independent 165-year-old news cooperative founded in New York and owned by its U.S. newspaper membership, has operations in more than 100 countries and employs nearly 2,500 journalists across the world in 300 locations.

The bureau puts AP in a position to document the people, places and politics of North Korea across all media platforms at a critical moment in its history, with Kim’s death and the ascension of his young son as the country’s new leader, Curley said in remarks prepared for the opening.

“Beyond this door lies a path to vastly larger understanding and cultural enrichment for millions around the world,” Curley said. “Regardless of whether you were born in Pyongyang or Pennsylvania, you are aware of the bridge being created today.”

Curley said the Pyongyang bureau will operate under the same standards and practices as AP bureaus worldwide.

“Everyone at The Associated Press takes his or her responsibilities of a free and fair press with utmost seriousness,” he said. “We pledge to do our best to reflect accurately the people of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea as well as what they do and say.”

KCNA President Kim Pyong Ho called the occasion “a significant meeting.”

“I believe that the reason we are able to conduct all these projects in less than a year is that President and CEO Thomas Curley and the other members of the AP have promised to report on the DPRK with fairness, balance and accuracy, and have tried to follow through in collaboration with KCNA,” he said in remarks prepared to mark the occasion fast payday loan.

“Even though our two countries do not have normalized relations, we have been able to find a way to understand one another and to cooperate closely enough to open an AP bureau here in Pyongyang as we have today,” Kim said.

The North Korean capital, dappled in snow, remains in an outwardly subdued mood two weeks after the official mourning period concluded for Kim Jong Il, who died of a heart attack last month. His son, Kim Jong Un, has since become the third generation of his family to lead North Korea, following his father and grandfather, the nation’s founder.

Kim’s death came amid increased diplomatic activity surrounding the Korean peninsula, including recent bilateral meetings between North Korea and South Korea, and between North Korea and the United States. While his death put all that on hold, there are hints that North Korea remains willing to engage on a deal to restart six-party talks addressing the country’s nuclear program.

The AP bureau will be staffed by reporter Pak Won Il and photographer Kim Kwang Hyon, both natives of North Korea who have done some reporting for AP in recent weeks on Kim’s funeral and the mass public mourning on the streets of Pyongyang.

The bureau will be supervised by Korea Bureau Chief Jean H. Lee and Chief Asia Photographer David Guttenfelder, who will make frequent trips to Pyongyang to manage the office, train the local journalists and conduct their own reporting. Lee and Guttenfelder, both Americans, are longtime AP journalists with broad international experience.

As with other Asian news stories produced by AP, news from North Korea will be sent initially to AP’s Asia-Pacific regional editing desk in Bangkok, where AP editors review and edit the stories for distribution to AP member newspapers and customers. Similarly, photos from North Korea will be edited at the Asia-Pacific photo editing desk, located in Tokyo.

Over the past two years, AP has been in contact with North Korean officials about how to set up broader access for AP print and photo journalists to Pyongyang. This led Lee and Guttenfelder to make several extensive reporting trips to North Korea. A team of AP photojournalists conducted a three-day workshop for KCNA photographers in Pyongyang in October.

KCNA hosted Curley and other AP executives in Pyongyang in March, and a five-member KCNA delegation, led by Kim, attended talks at the AP’s world headquarters in New York City in June.

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Bel-Ridge - Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon stopped by a chemical manufacturing plant here Friday to tout his latest jobs plan, a plan that’s considerably more modest than previous editions.

Maybe it reflects the realities of election year politics. Maybe it reflects exhaustion after last fall’s economic development special session came up empty. But the “Missouri Works” plan Nixon has barnstormed the state to unveil this week is focused on mostly small-bore, and acheivable, programs designed to trigger job growth across the state.

“My clear priority for 2012 is to create jobs,” he said. “That’s always been our focus and that has not changed.”

Nixon said he’ll fill in details during his State of the State address next week, but the outlines of Missouri Works are this.

- Attract auto-supplier jobs around the expanding General Motors and Ford plants.

- Boost exports, help small businesses tap foreign markets and open more overseas trade offices.

- Continue to invest in high-tech training programs

- Expand the “Show-Me Heroes” program to hire veterans.

- Fund the new Missouri Science and Innovation Reinvestment Act at $4 million.

- Continue to refine incentives to target “high-growth industries no fax payday loans.”

- “Create jobs in rural communities.”

Many of these programs came from the strategic plan the Missouri Department of Economic Development crafted last year, and most generally get broad support from business leaders and lawmakers.

Still, the agenda is considerably less ambitious than in 2010, when Nixon pushed big tax breaks for auto plants, or 2011, when he proposed overhauling the state’s dozens of tax credit programs. Many of the proposals are things Nixon can do on his own - without lawmakers’ help - though he’ll need the General Assembly to fund MOSIRA and, he said, for his auto-parts supplier proposal. 

As for tax credit changes, which gobbled up so much time and energy last year but went nowhere, Nixon said he’d still welcome them. But, he noted, that’s a long-term project.

“The short-term budget benefit from tax credit reform is relatively small,” he said.

And Nixon is up for re-election in less than ten months.

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A former tabloid newspaper editor told Britain’s media ethics inquiry Thursday that he published an inflammatory story about the parents of a missing girl because he thought there was a possibility the story could be true.

The unfounded Daily Express story suggested that Kate and Gerry McCann, the parents of missing schoolgirl Madeleine McCann, might have been linked to her 2007 abduction and possible death.

The Daily Express newspaper had to make a front-page apology and pay a substantial settlement to the parents, but former chief editor Peter Hill seemed unrepentant when quizzed about the decision to publish.

“I felt the stories should be published because there was reason to believe they might possibly be true,” he said, suggesting that the saga of the young girl’s disappearance from a holiday resort in Portugal had generated extraordinary interest throughout the world.

Hill testified before the Leveson Inquiry, a wide-ranging investigation of wrongdoing at British newspapers. The inquiry stems from public anger about the phone hacking scandal, which saw reporters and private detectives hack into the voicemail systems of celebrities, sports stars, crime victims and royal aides.

Committee lawyer Robert Jay seemed angered by Hill’s casual explanation of the decision to link Madeline McCann’s parents to her disappearance, suggesting that Hill had just “whacked it into the paper” regardless of its veracity.

Hill responded angrily that he felt he was being put on trial and said other British papers had taken similar liberties in reporting the McCann case.

The hacking scandal has centered on Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World tabloid, which the media mogul shut down in July.

More than a dozen journalists have been arrested in the probe, senior executives with Murdoch’s News Corp. media empire have lost their jobs, and top U.K. police officers have resigned over their failure to tackle the problem.

Another tabloid editor, Dawn Neesom of the Daily Star, testified that reporters do exaggerate headlines, dramatize reporting and occasionally go too far. She said stories are written “to put a smile on people’s faces.”

Neesom’s paper is among the smallest of Britain’s daily tabloids, with a circulation of about 650,000 and a decidedly lowbrow tone Faxless payday loans. Front pages typically feature seminude reality television stars, celebrity gossip and sensationalized stories about immigration.

Neesom said her paper’s mission was to entertain, but she evaded claims that the paper systematically distorted stories to titillate its readership.

“To be entertaining doesn’t necessarily mean that you can just make a story up,” she said.

Inquiry lawyer Robert Jay then flipped through some of the paper’s more creative headlines _ including one stark front-page story that appeared to claim that “American Idol” star Simon Cowell had died.

“TELLY KING COWELL IS DEAD,” the June 2, 2011 headline read, followed by the subtitle: “The show’s finally over for Simon.”

The story itself referred to an off-the-cuff remark by rival talent show judge Gary Barlow claiming that Cowell’s reign at the top of British television was over. Cowell himself is alive and well.

Inquiry lawyer Robert Jay asked Neesom how she could justify the alarmist headline.

“It’s wrong, isn’t it?” Jay said.

“Um … it’s dramatic,” Neesom said. “Eye-catching.”

Even more dramatic was a front-page story published on April 21, 2010, when international air traffic had been paralyzed by a huge ash cloud from the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajokul. Over a picture of an airplane wreathed in ash and fire, the headline read: “TERROR AS PLANE HITS ASH CLOUD: Dramatic pictures as jets get OK to defy volcano.”

The “pictures” were actually from a television reconstruction of an event that had occurred almost three decades earlier. Jay told Neesom that U.K. airport officials had been so horrified by the misleading headline that they had pulled the paper from their newsstands.

Neesom agreed the ash cloud terror story may have “over-egged the pudding.”

“Occasionally, I admit, we do cross lines,” she said. “But we do have standards.”

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U.K. shop-price inflation slowed in December to the lowest in 16 months as retailers discounted electrical goods and clothes to lure holiday shoppers, the British Retail Consortium said.

Retail prices rose 1.7 percent from a year earlier, down from 2 percent in November, the trade group and Nielsen Co. said in an e-mailed report in London today. A separate report from KPMG LLP showed hiring for full-time jobs dropped for a third month in December.

Slowing inflation may ease pressure on consumers and help encourage domestic demand this year. The Bank of England, which will probably maintain its emergency stimulus for the economy tomorrow, has forecast that consumer-price growth will slow sharply in the coming months.

Stocks wandered between small gains and losses early Monday as traders looked ahead to Alcoa Inc.’s fourth-quarter results, the unofficial start of corporate earnings season.

Alcoa will release its financial results after the market closes. The aluminum company is seen as an economic bellwether because many industries use its products.

Alcoa rose 2.2 percent, the most of the 30 stocks in the Dow Jones industrial average. It fell 2.1 percent on Friday after Alcoa said it will reduce its smelting capacity by 12 percent by closing smelters in the U.S. and Europe. An analyst predicted that Alcoa will post its first quarterly loss since the recession.

The Dow rose 4 points to 12,364 in the first half-hour of trading. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index rose 1, or 0.1 percent, to 1,278. The Nasdaq composite index rose 6, or 0.2 percent, to 2,679.

The Nasdaq is now up 2.9 percent for the year, compared to 1.2 percent for the Dow and 1.7 percent for the S&P 500.

European markets were roughly flat as French and German leaders met to craft a regional fiscal treaty they agreed to pursue last year. It was their first crisis summit of 2012, after numerous such events last year.

The treaty aims to impose stronger oversight over the budgets of countries that use the euro. Excessive borrowing by nations such as Greece and Italy are weighing down the European economy and threatening stronger countries, such as Germany and France payday loans.

The French and German leaders stressed that they view boosting growth a priority, despite widespread spending cuts that are expected to slow economic activity in the region.

Germany’s DAX and London’s FTSE 100 each fell 0.3 percent, France’s CAC 40 rose 0.1 percent.

Chinese markets rose after Premier Wen Jiabao promised to encourage lending to entrepreneurs who have been battered by weak global demand. Lending was tightened last year to cool China’s overheated economy. The nation has reversed course in recent months after global demand slumped, which hurt exporters and resulted in widespread layoffs.

In corporate news:

_ CareFusion Corp. plunged 6 percent, the most in the S&P 500 index. The San Diego-based medical device maker announced preliminary results that were weaker than analysts had expected.

_ Inhibitex Inc. soared 42 percent after Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. said over the weekend that it would buy the Alpharetta, Ga. maker of hepatitis C medicine for $2.5 billion. Other developers of hepatitis C treatments also rallied sharply. Idenix Pharmaceuticals Inc. jumped 34 percent and Achillon Pharmaceuticals Inc. rose 10 percent.

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One of the most spectacular flameouts in corporate history will be on the docket this week when pre-trial motions begin into criminal charges against former executives at Nortel Networks Corp.

Justice Frank Marrocco is scheduled to preside Thursday over motions, including those by the defence, in an open-court hearing at the Superior Court of Justice of Ontario. A trial before the justice is to begin in Toronto on Jan.16.

The RCMP charges allege that the defendants, including ex-Nortel chief executive Frank Dunn, engineered an elaborate accounting fraud to mask falling Nortel sales after the technology stock bubble popped in the spring of 2000.

Prosecutors say the scheme cost the Toronto company

Planned job cuts dropped in December but were up 14% overall for 2011, according to a report from outplacement consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

December’s total of 41,785 announced lay-offs was a 1.6% drop versus November, and was the lowest monthly total since June. Total announced job cuts for 2011, however, hit 606,802, up from the 529,973 announced in 2010.

The increase in cuts was driven primarily by lay-offs in government and financial sector jobs, which together accounted for 41% of all announced job losses.

With pressure on governments at all levels to cut spending and the European debt crisis still unresolved, both these sectors are "likely to continue to struggle in 2012," Challenger CEO John Challenger said in a statement accompanying the report.

The retail sector also struggled last year, with weak consumer spending contributing to a 32% increase in announced job cuts, the Challenger report said.

The reports come one day before the Labor Department issues its closely watched monthly employment data for the month of December.

A CNNMoney survey of economists forecasts that American companies added 150,000 jobs in December, and that the unemployment rate ticked up to 8.7%.  

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Companies added more workers than forecast in December, a sign that the U.S. labor market was gaining momentum heading into 2012, according to a private report based on payrolls.

The 325,000 increase exceeded the highest projection in a Bloomberg News survey and followed a revised 204,000 gain the prior month, the report from the Roseland, New Jersey-based ADP Employer Services showed today. The median estimate called for an advance of 178,000.

An acceleration in hiring may spur further gains in consumer spending, which accounts for about 70 percent of the world