Despite the sense of disappointment on Wall Street, Google still met most analysts' official forecasts for revenues and pre-tax earnings in the final quarter of last year. However, with investors accustomed to the company blowing away such predictions, the latest results represented the first big earnings disappointment that the company has issued. In its previous five quarterly earnings reports as a public company, Google's revenues beat estimates by between 6-15 per cent.

Google executives also indicated that the company faced big expenses in the future as it continues to spend heavily to build its technology base and expand internationally in a race to take advantage of big new internet advertising markets that are emerging.

"This is a distribution scale business of massive proportions," said Eric Schmidt, chief executive officer. "We're not yet finished getting all the information in Google into the hands of users around the world," a task that would take significant extra investment, he added.

Wall Street's disappointment came despite further signs that Google is taking market share in the fast-growing search-related advertising market away from its closet rival, Yahoo. Leaving aside the commissions it pays to other websites that carry its search results, Google's revenues jumped 97 per cent from a year before, to $1.29bn, though that represented a slowdown from the 109 per cent growth rate of the preceding three months.

Costs rose faster than many analysts had expected as the company spent heavily on expansion. "We've made it very clear we're focused on growing our business, and international growth in particular," said George Reyes, chief financial officer.

Google has broken with Wall Street tradition since it went public by refusing to issue predictions of what its quarterly earnings are likely to be, arguing that this sort guidance encourages companies to take a short-term approach to managing their businesses. It has also warned that its focus on long-term growth could lead to volatile earnings in the short term.

For the final three months of last year, Google reported earnings per share, on the pro-forma basis on which Wall Street judges the company, of $1.54, below the $1.76 that the stock market had expected. The company said that its tax rate had jumped because the proportion of expenses allocated to its international operations was higher than it had expected, accounting for most of the apparent earnings shortfall. Net income for the period rose 82 per cent to $204m, or $1.22 per share.

Kraft said the cuts would save an additional $700 million in annual costs, atop a targeted $450 million in savings it already had hoped to achieve through a restructuring that began in January 2004.

Northfield-based Kraft already had announced closures of 19 production facilities and the elimination of 5,500 jobs. Kraft said Monday that those efforts are on track, but it is expanding the restructuring plans to include more cuts.

The company said it intends to close plants in Broadmeadows, Victoria in Australia and Hoover, Ala., but did not announce the other facilities it plans to close. Kraft also said it would trim 10 percent of its brand portfolio.

Kraft said the additional cuts would cost the company $2.5 billion, bringing the total cost of its overall restructuring to $3.7 billion.

Kraft announced the moves Monday while reporting fourth-quarter earnings results that beat analysts' expectations.

Earnings for the October-December period totaled $773 million, or 46 cents a share, up from $628 million, or 37 cents a share, a year earlier. Revenue rose to $9.66 billion from $8.78 billion a year ago.

Excluding 10 cents in restructuring charges, Kraft posted a 56 cent operating profit. Wall Street had expected a profit of 53 cents a share, based on the consensus estimate of analysts polled by Thomson Financial.

When the maker of Kraft cheese, Nabisco crackers, Oscar Mayer meats and Post cereals announced its 2004 restructuring, there had just been a shake-up at top management that followed more than a year of disappointing sales and earnings.

At the time, Kraft executives blamed the poor results on American consumers' increased health concerns, which had put the entire packaged food industry under severe pressure to change quickly. The company's troubles cost marketing expert Betsy Holden her job of co-CEO and head of North American operations in December 2003. That left Roger Deromedi solely in charge.

The job and plant cuts and the earnings were announced after the market closed for the day. Kraft had risen 71 cents, or 2.4 percent, to close at $30 on the
New York Stock Exchange. Its shares added another 75 cents, or 2.5 percent, in after-hours trading.

The group has proposed a solution -- calling on federal policymakers to approve new ways of paying doctors that would put primary care doctors in charge of organizing a patient's care and giving patients more responsibility for monitoring their own health and scheduling regular visits.

U.S. doctors have long complained that reimbursement policies of both Medicare and private insurers reward a "just-in-time" approach, instead of preventive care that would save money and keep patients healthier.

"Medicare will pay tens of thousands of dollars ... for a limb amputation on a diabetic patient, but virtually nothing to the primary care physician for keeping the patient's diabetes under control," said Bob Doherty, senior vice president for the

ACP.

The ACP plan called for innovations such as using e-mail to consult on minor and routine matters, freeing up expensive office visit time for when it is needed. Doctors would be compensated for an e-mail consultation.

The proposals include incentives for doctors to work more efficiently and to provide better care, ACP President Dr. C. Anderson Hedberg told a news conference. "ACP proposals would provide patients with access to care that is coordinated by their own personal physician," Hedberg said.

YOUNG DOCTORS AVOIDING PRIMARY CARE

The ACP cited an American Medical Association survey that found 35 percent of all physicians nationwide are over the age of 55 and will soon retire.

In 2003, only 27 percent of third year internal medicine residents actually planned to practice internal medicine, the group said, with others planning to go into more lucrative specialty jobs.

"Primary care physicians -- the bedrock of medical care for today and the future -- are at the bottom of the list of all medical specialties in median income compensation," the ACP said.

The group, which represents 119,000 doctors and medical students in general internal medicine and subspecialties, joins others that warn the U.S. health care system is untenable.

"If these reforms do not take place, within a few years there will not be enough primary care physicians to take care of an aging population with increasing incidences of chronic diseases," said Dr. Vineet Arora, chair of the College's Council of Associates.

Dr. Sara Walker, a Missouri physician, said she believed doctors were leaving general practice because of drops in Medicare reimbursement to doctors.

"A drop in Medicare payments will not only force me to stop taking Medicare patients but could force me out of business," agreed Dr. Kevin Lutz, a solo practitioner in Denver.

Exxon Mobil said on Monday it earned $10.7 billion in the fourth quarter of last year and $36.1 billion for all of 2005 -- bigger than the economies of 125 countries.

The Senate Judiciary Committee, which is holding the hearing on Wednesday morning, said it asked representatives from Exxon Mobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Valero Energy and the U.S. units of BP and Royal Dutch Shell to tell their side of the story.

"All declined the invitation to testify," the committee said in a statement on Monday, without providing details.

The companies, with the exception of Valero, took a beating at a Senate hearing last November on the industry's soaring profits at the time and high energy prices.

Bill Kovacic, a member of the Federal Trade Commission, is scheduled to testify at Wednesday's hearing.

The FTC is investigation whether oil companies manipulated gasoline prices and oil refining production levels. The agency plans to finish its probe and send its findings to Congress this May.

Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal will also testify.

The price for gasoline jumped 2.1 cents over the last week to a national average of $2.36 a gallon, up 45 cents from a year ago, the government said on Monday.

Tollis, 16, took a fatal hammer blow to the head after trying to prevent her murder.

Sapone covered Tollis's mouth with a chestnut husk to silence him and also slit his throat in what Italian media called "an orgy" of bloodletting. The band pushed the dead bodies into a pit and urinated on them.

Four other followers of the band received sentences of between 24 and 26 years.

The convictions were the latest for members and followers of Beasts of Satan, and followed the high-profile conviction of band leader Andrea Volpe, who received a lighter, 30-year sentence after leading authorities to the bodies and confessing to the killings.

Band members were also convicted for murdering Volpe's ex-girlfriend Mariangela Pezzotta in 2004. She was shot in the mouth and her body mutilated.

The Satanic killings sparked fears in Italy of a spread of devil cults, and the Vatican last year started a course for Roman Catholic priests on Satanism and exorcism in response to what the Church said was a worrying interest in the occult, particularly among the young.