Wednesday morning headlines

Market makes another push: Yesterday's strong start ended with a whimper. Today, the Dow is up about 170 points in early trading. We'll see.

Governor's race dead even: Meg Whitman's negative advertising barrage is clearly having an effect: Brown is up by only one point, making the contest a statistical tie, according to the Field Poll. From AP:

Brown has yet to release any of his own advertisements, which has wounded the candidate, said the poll's director, Mark DiCamillo. "You're watching TV, you're picking up messages that are positive for Whitman and negative for Brown," DiCamillo said. "His image rating could go down further if the advertising continues without any answer." While Brown is doing no advertising of his own, independent groups aligned with unions have been airing anti-Whitman television commercials.

Labron to announce decision: He'll do it live on ESPN tomorrow night at 6 p.m. Thursday is the first day that free agents can sign new contracts. (NYT)

iTunes compromised: Apple is instituting new security measures after hundreds of consumer accounts were breached by an app developer. From the WSJ:

While the number of accounts that were breached in the latest incident was small--Apple said about 400 of its 150 million iTunes users were affected--it renews concerns about how well companies and individuals are protecting sensitive data. In a statement, Apple said its iTunes servers weren't compromised, but starting Tuesday it will require more frequent entry of a user's credit-card security code when making purchases on iTunes or accessing the service from a new computer. It said it hoped the changes would "minimize this type of activity in the future."

Is CPK sale fading?: The stock hit a six-month low on Tuesday, which suggests that investors are not expecting the L.A.-based chain to find a buyer anytime soon. Not helping is a company forecast that has second-quarter sales and earnings falling significantly short of estimates. (LAT)

Sony plans two movie channels: One debuts on Oct. 1 and will be devoted to movies (tapping into a large film library). The other new channel is FearNet, a joint venture of Sony, Lionsgate and Comcast Corp. (LAT)

Time erects pay wall: No more freebies - except for snippets, most articles in this week's issue are blocked off (other than those with an iPad app). From All Things Digital:

But here's the thing. Nearly every magazine publisher with a substantial Web site swears that their online audience is different than their print readers. And their sites are certainly designed that way: They're supposed to attract twitchy Web surfers who want to read about something that happened today, not seven days ago. So if that's the case, what the's real downside in keeping the magazine stuff free? Maybe that online/offline split isn't as real as we've been told.

Tesla keeps falling: The stock is under $16 a share this morning. Last week, the California electric car maker began trading as a public company at $19. (Yahoo Finance)