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The parent company of United and Continental airlines says it lost $138 million in the fourth quarter because of the costs of integrating the two airlines.

Without special charges, United Continental Holdings Inc. says it would have earned $109 million, or 30 cents per share.

Analysts surveyed by FactSet had been expecting a profit of 13 cents per share.

Revenue rose more than 5 percent, to $8.93 billion, the same as analysts expected.

The company spent $170 million integrating the two airlines.

A year ago it lost $325 million because of integration costs. The companies closed the merger on Oct. 1, 2010.

Revenue for each seat flown one mile rose 8.2 percent as the company raised fares.

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Tens of thousands of Egyptians rallied Wednesday to mark the first anniversary of the country’s 2011 uprising, with liberals and Islamists gathering on different sides of Cairo’s Tahrir Square in a reflection of the deep political divides that emerged in the year since the downfall of longtime leader Hosni Mubarak.

Groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and their liberal and secular rivals differ over the goals of the revolution and the strategy to achieve them, in particular the relationship with the country’s interim military leaders.

Military generals led by Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi took over from Mubarak when he stepped down on Feb. 11, 2011. The ousted president is now on trial for his life on charges of complicity in the killing of hundreds of protesters during the uprising.

Volunteers from the Brotherhood, a fundamentalist group that won just under half of parliament’s seats in recent elections, were checking IDs and conducting searches of the thousands flocking to join the protests.

Other Brotherhood followers formed a human chain around a large podium set up overnight by the group. The Brotherhood loyalists were chanting religious songs and shouting, “Allahu Akbar,” or God is great.

In contrast, liberals on the other side of the square were chanting, “Down, down with military rule,” and demanding that Tantawi, Mubarak’s defense minister for nearly 20 years, be executed.

“Tantawi, come and kill more revolutionaries, we want your execution,” they chanted, alluding to the more than 80 protesters killed by army troops since October. Thousands of civilians, many of them protesters, have been hauled before military tribunals for trial since Mubarak’s ouster.

“We are not here to celebrate. We are here to bring down military rule. They have failed the revolution and met none of its goals,” said Iman Fahmy, a 27-year- old pharmacist who wore a paper eye-patch in solidarity with protesters shot in the eye by security forces during recent protests.

Fahmy was among several thousand protesters led by pro-reform leader Mohamed ElBaradei who were marching toward Tahrir Square from a neighborhood on the west bank of the river Nile. Several other marches were proceeding toward Tahrir, raising the possibility of a massive turnout at the square.

Unlike many of the demonstrators, ElBaradei, a Nobel Peace laureate, said that the immediate return of the military to the barracks was not a top priority.

“I don’t think that is the issue right now. What we need to agree on is how to exactly achieve the revolution’s goals starting by putting down a proper democratic constitution, fixing the economy, security and independent judiciary and media and making sure the people who have killed those people are prosecuted,” he told The Associated Press fast payday loan.

There were no army troops or police in Tahrir Square, birthplace of the 18-day, anti-Mubarak uprising that began on Jan. 25, 2011.

Liberal and left-leaning groups behind Mubarak’s ouster say that, except for putting Mubarak on trial, the generals have left the old regime largely in place. They say that the Brotherhood has tacitly accepted this, concentrating its efforts on winning parliamentary seats rather than working for the realization of the uprising’s goals _ social justice, democracy and freedom.

“You have the parliament, the marshal (Tantawi) is in power and the revolutionaries are in prison,” a man shouted at a Brotherhood supporter carrying the blue flag of the group’s political arm, the Freedom and Justice Party.

The Brotherhood is the largest single bloc in the new, 508-seat parliament, which held its inaugural session on Monday. The group’s supporters have mostly stayed away from recent protests demanding the military immediately step down, arguing that it was time for elections rather than street protests.

But the liberal and leftist groups maintain that the revolution must continue until remnants of Mubarak’s 29-year regime are removed from public life and government, and until those responsible for the killing of protesters are brought to justice.

“I am not here to celebrate. I am here for a second revolution,” said Attiya Mohammed Attiya, a 35-year-old father of four children who is unemployed. “The military council is made of remnants of the Mubarak regime. We will only succeed when we remove them from power,” said Attiya.

The Brotherhood’s election win came in the nation’s freest election in decades, held in stages over a six-week period starting Nov. 28. Another Islamist group, the ultraconservative Salafis, won about a quarter of the seats, while liberals and independents could only garner under 10 percent of the seats.

The Brotherhood was outlawed for most of the 84 years since its inception, subjected to repeated crackdowns by successive governments. Under Mubarak, hundreds of them were jailed on trumped-up charges.

“We are the political force that paid the heaviest price,” said Alaa Mohammed, a teacher and Brotherhood supporter. “Thanks to the military council, we had the cleanest elections ever, and the military protected the revolution.”

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European finance ministers piled the pressure on Greece’s private creditors Monday to reach an agreement with Athens to cut the country’s massive debt load, with the Dutch representative warning bondholders that they may be forced to take losses.

Time is running out for Greece to reduce its debt by some euro100 billion ($129 billion) and avoid missing a vital bond repayment deadline. Talks between the country and representatives of banks and other investment firms to secure a deal hit an impasse over the weekend.

The deal would involve private creditors swapping their old Greek bonds for ones with a 50 percent lower face value. The new, lower priced bonds, would also have much longer maturities _ pushing repayments decades into the future _ and will pay a much lower interest rate than Greece would currently have to pay on the market.

It’s clear that Greece needs some form of deal soon _ it faces a euro14.5 billion ($19 billion) bond repayment on March 20, which it will be unable to afford if the bond swap doesn’t go through.

The Greek government and representatives for the private creditors said they are moving closer to a final deal. But any agreement also has to be signed off by the other 16 countries that also use the euro as their currency and the International Monetary Fund, who have made the deal a key condition of the country winning any further bailout loans.

Greece has been surviving on a first euro110 billion ($142 billion) batch of rescue loans since May 2010, which were conditioned on deep spending cuts and sweeping public sector reforms.

At the center of the debate is the interest rate that Greece will have to pay on the new, lower-valued bonds. The interest rate is key not only to determining the overall losses for the bondholders but also to whether the deal will work.

If the interest rate is too high, a second, euro130 billion ($168 billion) bailout for Greece may not be enough to put the country back on its feet. The other eurozone states and the IMF would have to provide more loans, but they are unwilling to do so.

But if they are too low, the losses for bondholders will become so high that it will be difficult to get them to agree voluntarily to a deal.

Dutch Finance Minister Jan Kees de Jager indicated that the eurozone may be moving away from its previous insistence that investors will not be forced to take losses.

“We’ve never pushed for a default, but we’ve never said it (a restructuring) must be voluntary,” de Jager said as he arrived for a meeting with his eurozone counterparts in Brussels no fax payday loans. “Our goal is a sustainable debt. It has our preference if it’s voluntary, but it’s not a precondition for us.”

Greece needs to secure a deal quickly if it wants to avoid a disorderly default on March 20.

“Given that any debt swap deal will involve a lot of lawyers, it is estimated that around 5 weeks are needed between agreement and the bond maturing to prevent default,” said Louise Cooper, markets analyst at BGC Partners. “This does not leave much wriggle room, although such pressure must focus the minds of all at the negotiating table.”

A forced restructuring would likely trigger payouts on so-called credit default swaps _ a contract traded between banks and other investment firms that want to insure against potential defaults. Because the market in CDS is obscure _ with no clear data on who would owe whom how much _ the eurozone fears that a payout could lead to turmoil on financial markets similar to what happened after the collapse of U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers in 2008.

Although officials, including the French and Greek finance ministers, insisted that a deal was in the making, few expected a final agreement ahead of a key summit of EU leaders next Monday. De Jager suggested that negotiations may even drag on beyond that.

A Greek official said the government now hopes to make a formal offer on the bond swap to investors by Feb. 13. He declined to be named because talks are ongoing.

Greece’s economic problems kicked off Europe’s debt crisis more than two years ago and the continent’s inability to resolve its troubles have raised concerns about other highly indebted countries. But positive bond auctions in Spain, Italy and France last week have eased some concerns about the region’s bigger economies and have lifted stock markets and the value of the euro.

Ministers will also seek to put the finishing touches on their permanent bailout fund _ the euro500 billion European Stability Mechanism _ which is scheduled to come into force this year. They will also discuss a new intergovernmental treaty designed to keep eurozone countries from overspending.

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If you made life simple on yourself and bought U.S. Treasury bonds early last year, you may be patting yourself on the back now.

Treasurys that mature in 10 years returned about 16 percent in 2011. Longer-term Treasurys gained more than 20 percent.

But as these highly unusual gains have been reported in the media, people new to bond investing have been wondering how the phenomenal gains could have possibly happened when they shopped for bonds and found only disgustingly low interest rates. As one retiree wrote me: “I haven’t wanted to buy Treasurys because they are paying only 2 percent interest, and I’m not going to be able to live on 2 percent. So how could a person earn 16 percent on those Treasurys paying 2 percent?”

The answer goes to the heart of how investment gains, or returns, are calculated for bonds.

If, for example, a retiree were to go directly to the U.S. government and buy a fresh 10-year Treasury bond that is paying 2 percent interest, and he held it for the full 10 years, he would get paid the 2 percent interest he was promised each year. And that’s all he would get, not 16 percent.

On paper, if he had a brokerage statement for 2011, the 10-year Treasury bond he bought early in the year would have been worth about 16 percent more at the end of 2011. But it would have been a gain recorded on paper, not one the investor could spend unless he was willing to sell his bond at that higher price. But some investors do buy and sell bonds without waiting for them to mature. And if a person bought a 10-year Treasury bond at the start of the 2011 and sold it at the end of the year, he ended up with about a 16 percent return. That total return came from combining the appreciation on the price of the bond and the interest he collected during the year.

Likewise, if the person didn’t buy individual bonds but put money into a bond mutual fund that selected U.S. Treasury bonds, he would have seen at the end of 2011 that he probably gained more than 14 percent for the year. If at the point, he decided to remove his money from the fund, he actually would have captured the 14 percent gain. Money left in the fund could have gained or declined.

What happened in 2011 was unusual. And here’s how the gain occurred. At the beginning of 2011, people were expecting the economy to improve, and so yields on 10-year Treasurys were a little more than 3 percent payday loans. But as the year went on, investors became increasingly nervous as the economy started to look like it might go back into a recession. Consequently, nervous people piled into U.S. Treasurys for safety, and the combination of a lousy economic environment, a promise by the Fed to keep interest rates low and the popularity of Treasurys made yields slide to unusually low levels. By the end of the year they were paying just under 2 percent. That meant that bonds yielding 3 percent earlier in the year were much more valuable than those late in the year at 2 percent. So those early 3 percent bonds gained about 16 percent in value.

If this is confusing, as it is to many, just answer this simple question: If you were given a chance to earn 3 percent interest or 2 percent interest, which would you choose? Clearly, if you had a choice of two bonds that were equal in safety, you would want the one paying 3 percent, not 2 percent. So at a time when new bonds are paying about 2 percent and older bonds are paying 3 percent, people want those older bonds. If you happen to be holding those older 3 percent bonds, you will find that they will become extra valuable. If you decide to sell them, you will get back more money than you originally invested.

If you yearn for similar gains, keep in mind that a 16 percent return is not likely to happen this year. If interest rates keep falling because people fear recession, there could be another nice gain. But yields have fallen a lot. To go to zero percent this year, the world would probably have to go into a serious recession. Even at zero, the bond math would result in a gain of only about 16 percent, said Matt Tucker, a managing director of BlackRock’s fixed-income portfolio group.

It’s more likely that at some point in the future the bond math will work in the opposite direction. Interest rates will start climbing as the economy improves, and people will prefer rates of 3 or 4 percent that eventually become available. At that point, investors won’t like 2 percent anymore. And today’s bonds will lose, not gain, value. The question is when this will happen, and no one knows.

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It will take another two or three years for the St. Louis area to gain back the jobs it lost in the recession, and the jobs recovery here has been a bit slower than many other metro areas, according to a new report out this morning from the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

The report - a detailed look by forecasting firm IHS Global Insight at employment and exports in the nation’s 367 metro areas - found the St. Louis region has added back just 37 percent of the jobs it has lost since its pre-recession peak. That ranks 203rd out of 367 metros.

But, the study also found that St. Louis fared pretty well last year, adding nearly 11,000 jobs in 2011, or 10.7 percent, the 39th fastest clip in the nation. IHS predicted St. Louis will return to peak employment in 2014 or 2015, about in line with many other metro areas in the Northeast and Midwest. Sun Belt regions - hit harder by the housing crisis - generally have longer to wait while energy-rich metros from the Dakotas to Texas could return to peak employment this year, if they haven’t already payday loans.

The Conference of Mayors - including St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay - is holding its annual meeting in Washington this week, and job-creation is high on the agenda.

A few other facts from the report:

The St. Louis metro area is home to 40 percent of jobs in Missouri. Median household income here has fallen 3 percent since 2007, to $50,900. Across all metros it has fallen 1.3 percent, to $47,000. In the first half of 2010 (the most recent data available), exports accounted for 8.6 percent of St. Louis’ economy. That’s higher than average and up from 6.2 percent in 2005.

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SANAA, Yemen _ A Norwegian man who was working for the United Nations was kidnapped by armed tribesmen in Yemen’s capital Sanaa on Sunday, officials said.

Norwegian Foreign Ministry spokesman Ford Overland Andersen said the ministry was informed the 34-year-old Norwegian man was abducted early Sunday, but would not give more details.

According to a Yemeni security official, the U.N. worker was kidnapped in the capital Sanaa by armed tribesmen who transferred him to central Marib province, 110 miles (170 kilometers) east of the capital.

The official said the U.N. worker was taken hostage by the Obeyid Marib tribe. They were demanding the release of a tribesman who was arrested on charges of killing four soldiers assigned to guarding oil tankers.

Tribal leaders with close ties to the Obeyid Marib tribe said the U.N. worker was in good health and that his captors were in contact with the U.N. office in Yemen.

Also Sunday, a Yemeni military official said al-Qaida militants executed two soldiers who had been abducted two months ago while fighting al-Qaida militants west of Zinjibar, the provincial capital of Abyan province.

The official said the bodies of the soldiers were found in the country’s south.

Al-Qaida’s dangerous Yemen branch has been taking advantage of nearly a year of internal turmoil over demands that President Ali Abdullah Saleh step down to take control of areas in Yemen’s south.

For the past two days, around 200 al-Qaida militants have been occupying an 500-year-old mosque and school in the central province of Bayda.

On Friday the militants overran the building, which has not been in use for years. The site was a tourist attraction in the town of Radda.

An Associated Press photographer who visited Radda said the militants put up a nearly 40-meter cordon around the site and are armed with RPG’s, automatic rifles and other weapons.

Residents of Radda said the black al-Qaida flag has been raised atop the historic mosque. Some feared that if security forces try to storm the site, they would be forced to flee their homes.

A top security official in Bayda said it was not the responsibility of police to remove the militants from the school, but to maintain general calm in the province.

All Yemeni officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief reporters.

Bayda, about 100 miles (150 kilometers) south of the capital Sanaa, has seen large anti-Saleh street protests over the past year.

Yemen’s opposition has accused Saleh of trying to torpedo a power transfer deal by allowing security to deteriorate in the south as a way of arguing that he must stay in power.

The U.S. long considered Saleh a necessary ally in combatting Yemen’s active al-Qaida branch, which has been linked to terror attacks on U.S. soil and is believed to be one of the international terror organization’s most dangerous franchises. The U.S. withdrew its support last summer and said he should step down.

Islamist militants began seizing territory in the southern Abyan province last spring, solidifying their control over the town of Jaar in April before taking the provincial capital, Zinjibar, in May.

Yemeni security forces have been trying unsuccessfully to push them out since then in fierce fighting that has caused many casualties on both sides. The conflict has forced tens of thousands of civilians from Zinjibar and the surrounding area to flee, many to the port city of Aden.

At least 2,000 displaced Yemenis returned home to Zinjibar for the first time in months on Saturday, raising fears that al-Qaida may be trying to use the civilians as human shields.

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Spain successfully raised nearly euro10 billion ($12.7 billion) in debt auctions Thursday in a sign of investor confidence in the new conservative government’s attempts to get a grips on the country’s debt.

The treasury said demand for the three bonds, which mature in 2015 and 2016, was strong and the amount sold was double the maximum sought.

The auction was the first since the conservative Popular party took office last month after its landslide election win Nov. 20. It came a day after Parliament approved the government’s first austerity measures, a euro15 billion ($19.1 billion) package aimed at reining in the swollen deficit. The country’s Ibex stock market index rallied 1.5 percent on news of the sale.

Spain has a 21.5 percent unemployment rate and its economy is expected to fall back into recession. It is battling to avoid slumping further into a debt crisis that has already forced Greece, Ireland and Portugal to seek financial bailouts.

Its borrowing costs shot up last year but have eased in auctions since the election.

Marc Ostwald, strategist for Monument Securities described the demand Thursday as “very impressive” and said the sale indicated a welcome for the government’s efforts to quickly bring the deficit under control.

“There is no denying the overall success, particularly as yields are well down on previous equivalent sales, ” he said in a note.

In 2010, Spain began to emerge from a near two-year recession triggered by the collapse of a property and construction bubble that drove growth for nearly a decade. Economy Minister Luis de Guindos predicts the economy will slide back into recession early this year with the last quarter of 2011 and the first of 2012 both registering negative growth free business cards.

Also on Thursday, Italy saw its borrowing costs drop sharply as it easily sold euro12 billion ($15 billion) in bonds in its first test of market sentiment of the new year.

Investors bought euro8.5 billion in 12-month bonds at a yield of 2.735 percent, sharply down from last month’s rate of 5.95 percent, and euro3.5 billion in bonds expiring at the end of May at just 1.644 percent interest, down from 3.251 percent in the last comparable auction.

Spain has pledged to slash its deficit from 11.2 percent of GDP in 2009 to within the European Union limit of 3 percent by 2013.

Under the former Socialist government, widely criticized for its handling of the economic crisis, the deficit target for 2011 had been 6 percent. But the new government claims their predecessors concealed data and that the figure will be at least 8 percent.

Finance Minister Cristobal Montoro, however, insists the aim for 2012 remains 4.4 percent, as the Socialists had planned.

The new austerity measures include euro8.9 billion ($11.3 billion) in spending cuts, a freeze on civil servants’ salaries and on practically all government hiring. The government has also ordered a two-year increase in income and property taxes.

The package was part of an extension of the 2011 budget because the last government did not pass one for 2012. More austerity measures are expected when the government presents its 2012 budget by the end of March.

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