News Today - June 30

* Japan's jobless rate rose to a new 5-1/2-year high in May and job availability sank to record low but government stimulus efforts prompted a modest rise in household spending

*Bernard Madoff, 71, was sentenced to 150 years in prison after defrauding investors of billions in the largest Ponzi scheme in history. He told U.S. District Judge Denny Chin he had no excuses. "I don't ask for any forgiveness," he said. Flanked by federal marshals, he sat silently as former investors assailed him for a fraud that cost many of them their life savings.

* The U.S. economy isn't likely to recover until "well into 2010," Wilbur Ross, chairman and CEO of WL Ross & Co., said Monday.

* Crude oil rose to an 8-month high and is set for its biggest quarterly gain since 1990, as the U.S. dollar declined and militant attacks in Nigeria raised concern that supplies may be disrupted.

* The outlook for emerging markets is “far more optimistic” than for developed economies, Investor Marc Faber said. “We are living through major changes in the world,” said Faber, the publisher of the Gloom, Boom and Doom report. Emerging markets are becoming more significant to the global economy, a trend unlikely to be reversed, he said today at a forum in Seoul.