Gasoline prices drop slightly as home heating oil goes up

AUGUSTA – Gas prices in Maine dropped slightly in the past week, but remain well above the national average. And state energy officials say the price of home heating oil has risen by 3 cents a gallon.

Price-monitoring website MaineGasPrices.com reported Monday that the average retail price of gasoline in the state fell by just over a penny to $3.58. Nationally, the price remained unchanged, at $3.43 per gallon.

Prices in Maine are now nearly 11 cents lower per gallon than a month ago, yet remain more than 18 cents higher than a year ago.

The Governor’s Energy Office said the average cash price for heating oil was $3.67 a gallon in its weekly fuel price survey Monday. That’s 2 cents a gallon higher than a year ago.

As usual, southern Maine had the lowest prices and northern Maine had the highest.

Propane was selling for $2.76 a gallon on average, up 3 cents from a week ago.

Kerosene was selling for $4.12 a gallon, which was also up by 3 cents. 

Intrade closes itself to U.S. after federal complaint filing

WASHINGTON – Intrade, the online prediction market that gained popularity as an informal oddsmaker for the presidential election, shut itself to U.S. customers Monday after regulators charged it with illegally facilitating bets on future economic data, the price of gold and even acts of war.

Hours after the Commodity Futures Trading Commission filed a complaint in federal court, Intrade posted in its user forum and on its news page that it could no longer allow U.S. residents to trade “due to legal and regulatory pressures.”

U.S. residents must begin closing their accounts and withdrawing their funds immediately, the website said. It said customers must resolve open predictions by Dec. 23 or the site would assign them “fair market value” and close them.

The CFTC’s civil complaint charged that Intrade and its operator solicited customers to trade investment contracts that technically are options. Options must be traded on approved, regulated exchanges. 

Wall Street retreats in face of more fiscal cliff worries

NEW YORK – Wall Street came back to work after the Thanksgiving weekend and faced leftover worries about the “fiscal cliff” and the European debt crisis. Stocks retreated after one of their best weeks of the year.

The Dow Jones industrial average fell 42.31 points to 12,967.37. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index declined 2.86 to 1,406.29. And the Nasdaq composite index managed a 9.93-point increase to 2,976.78.

Utility stocks rose the most, while telecommunications companies fell the most.

The major U.S. economic reports were not due until later in the week, leaving investors to rehash the European debt crisis and talks in Washington over the “cliff” of tax increases and government spending cuts due to take effect Jan. 1.

“The themes seem about as recycled as Thanksgiving turkey,” David Kelly, chief global strategist at JPMorgan Funds, wrote in a note to clients. 

Nintendo sells more than 400,000 of new video game consoles

NEW YORK – Nintendo has sold more than 400,000 of its new video game console, the Wii U, in its first week on sale in the United States, the company said Monday.

The Wii U launched on Nov. 18 in the United States at a starting price of $300.

The Wii U is the first major game console to launch in six years. It comes with a new touch-screen controller that promises to change how people play games by offering different people in the same room a different experience, depending on the controller used.

Six years ago, Nintendo Co. sold 475,000 of the original Wii in that console’s first seven days in stores, according to data from the NPD Group. The original Wii remains available, and Nintendo said it sold more than 300,000 of them last week, along with roughly 250,000 handheld Nintendo 3DS units and about 275,000 of the Nintendo DS.

— From news service reports