Oaxaca's hidden market treasures

Entrepreneur Susana Trilling runs a cooking school in Oaxaca, Mexico, where she guides students through the local market's culinary wonders. Tag along on our visit.

Sweets being sold at the Mercado de Abastos, Oaxaca's largest market.
Dried rojo peppers at Mercado de Abastos. These peppers are specific to the Oaxacan region and are an important ingredient in one of the local moles and several sauces.
Three different mole pastes sold by the Molinos del Sol at the Mercado de Abastos. There are a total of seven different moles.
This cow's milk cheese, queso fresco, is made fresh twice every day and is typical of Oaxaca.
Chapulines are fried grasshoppers seasoned with salt chile and lime juice. They are a popular crunchy snack.
Tomatillos at the Mercado de Merced. Tomatillos are used in moles, sauces and salsas.
Fresh meat in the Mercado de Merced. Meat is often sold without refrigeration at the open air markets.
Huitlacoche is Mexico's "truffle." It is a fungus that grows on corn and has a distinctive earthy flavor.
Cooking at the family run restaurant, Alberto's in the Mercado de Abastos.
Empenadas de flor de calabaza (empenadas filled with squash blossoms and cheese).
Squash blossom and black bean tacos roasting on a comal: an iron surface lying directly on hot coals.
Memela ready to be served: a large corn tortilla smothered with refried black beans, queso fresco and salsa verde.
Prickly pear gelato churned by hand and sold and the Mercado de Merced.

House OKs $146B economic aid bill

Fast-track measure would offer cash rebates to consumers in bid to juice growth. Fate of package in Senate uncertain.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The House voted 385 to 35 Tuesday to approve an estimated $146 billion stimulus package aimed at countering the slowdown in economic growth.
The legislation, which House leaders brokered last week after intensive talks with the Bush administration, faces an uphill battle in the Senate.
A number of senators have said they want to amend the plan. Both chambers have sent out flares indicating there will be hard-headed negotiating ahead.
The battle is likely to be conducted at high speed since lawmakers say they want a stimulus package delivered for the president's signature by mid-February.
The House bill calls for one-time tax rebates to go primarily to individuals making less than $75,000 and to married couples making less than $150,000. It would also provide temporary tax breaks for businesses that would let them deduct more of their investments in plants and equipment more quickly. And it contains two measures aimed at helping homeowners get or refinance mortgages.
Taking the lead in the Senate is Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont. He has proposed a $160 billion package that the committee will debate and possibly vote on Wednesday.
The Senate proposal differs from the House plan in several key ways. The sticking points: Who should get the rebates? Should they go to senior citizens and more six-figure households? Should the bill help unemployed workers? Should efforts to ease the housing crunch be included, and how many tax breaks should businesses get?
Rebates would be smaller but go to more people. The Senate proposal would offer rebates to seniors whose primary income comes from Social Security. Under the House bill, rebates would go only to households with earned income.
The Senate proposal also eliminates income caps on who would qualify for a rebate, which means all tax filers, not just low- and middle-income households targeted by the House plan, would receive one.
Under the Senate plan, most tax filers would receive slightly less than they would under the House plan. For example, a married couple filing jointly that makes enough to be in at least the 15 percent tax bracket would get $1,000 under the Senate proposal versus $1,200 under the House bill.
Unemployment insurance. The Senate proposal would offer at least 13-week extensions on unemployment benefits. The House bill has no such extension.
Housing provisions. The House bill calls for the caps on the size of loans that may be purchased by Fannie Mae (FNM) and Freddie Mac (FRE, Fortune 500) to be raised from the current level of $417,000 to nearly $730,000 in the highest cost housing markets. It also calls for an increase in the size of loans that would be eligible to be insured by the Federal Housing Administration. The Senate proposal as mapped out by Baucus contains no such provisions.
Business tax breaks. The Senate proposal has the same breaks as the House bill but adds one more: the so-called net operating loss carryback (NOL). The NOL provision would extend to five years from two the number of years a company may apply its losses to past tax bills.

Yahoo disappoints, to cut jobs

CEO Jerry Yang says company faces 'headwinds' this year. Struggling search engine plans 1,000 job cuts in February. Stock sinks on weak 2008 sales guidance.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Search engine Yahoo announced it would lay off 1,000 employees by mid-February, even as it reported fourth quarter earnings Tuesday that beat expectations.
During the company's conference call with analysts, chief executive Jerry Yang warned that the company faces "headwinds" this year and confirmed the upcoming layoffs, which had been rumored for the past week.
Yang said the company would make the job cuts as part of a "workforce realignment."
The stock plunged more than 10% after-hours on the news.
Yahoo's sales came in at $1.8 billion, up 8% from a year ago. Excluding advertising sales that Yahoo shares with its partners, the company reported revenue of $1.4 billion, roughly in line with Wall Street's expectations of $1.41 billion, according to estimates from Thomson First Call.
The company reported net income of $206 million, or 15 cents per share, beating analysts' forecasts for 11 cents per share.
For the full year, Yahoo's revenue, excluding ad sales it shares with partners, came in at $5.11 billion, up 12% from a year ago. Total sales rose 8% to $7 billion. Full-year profit was $4.13 billion, a 10% increase from 2006.
But Yahoo also said it expects 2008 annual revenue, excluding sales shared with partners, of anywhere from $5.35 billion to $5.95 billion. Wall Street had been expecting sales of $5.9 billion before the report.
"While we will continue to face headwinds this year, we believe that the moves we are making will help us exit 2008 stronger and more competitive and return to higher levels of operating cash flow growth in 2009," Yang said in a written statement.
Yahoo is the number-two search engine in the world. But it lags arch rival Google by a wide margin. Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) reports its own fourth-quarter results Thursday. Yahoo also faces competition from social networking sites like Facebook and News Corp (NWS, Fortune 500).-owned MySpace. The company's own attempt at a social network, called 360, flopped.
Yang, who replaced Terry Semel as CEO last June, promised investors a 100-day review of the company shortly after taking over. Some analysts have said that investors are growing impatient with Yahoo as it continues to lose ground to Google and others.