Thursday morning headlines

Stocks little changed: Maybe everybody is too busy deciphering the Obama speech. The Dow is up modestly in early trading.

Sluggish retail sales: The May numbers are just a reminder that we're still in a recession and folks are being careful about how they spend. Target and Costco reported worse-than-expected results. From Reuters:

Upscale department stores posted some of the steepest drops in sales at stores open at least a year, or same-store sales. "The high end continues to struggle, those in the discretionary spend segment are really continuing to get clocked," said Ken Perkins, president of Retail Metrics.

More media victims: The trade publication Radio & Records closes its doors and THR goes through its fourth round of layoffs in the past year. Both are owned by Nielsen. From The Wrap:

As advertising revenues -- and ad pages -- suffer a nearly-unprecedented decline this year, The Hollywood Reporter has been seeking to change its business model away from print. "Nielsen is looking extremely hard at all of their publications, and they are determining that digital is the way to go," said one high-level source at The Hollywood Reporter. "They are re-evaluating what staff is really needed to do what's done on a daily basis." The source also said that the Hollywood Reporter has been having routine discussions about the paper's publishing frequency.

County delays note sale: Finance officials want to provide more information about the potential effects from state budget cuts. Yields on the state's general obligation bonds have jumped, though L.A. County has a solid financial reputation on Wall Street. (LAT)

Court hears Taster's Choice case: The issue is whether the coffee company had the right to use the face of a model on its jars. A jury award of $15.6 million was overturned by an appeals court. In yesterday's oral argument, the state Supremes appeared divided. (LAT)

Reviews for Palm Pre: The NYT's David Pogue and the WSJ's Walt Mossberg take the new smart phone for a test drive and they mostly like what they see. From Pogue:

The Pre, which goes on sale Saturday, is an elegant, joyous, multitouch smartphone; it's the iPhone remixed. That's no surprise, really; its primary mastermind was Jon Rubinstein, who joined Palm after working with Steve Jobs of Apple, on and off, for 16 years. Once at Palm, he hired 250 engineers from Apple and elsewhere, and challenged them to out-iPhone the iPhone. That the Pre even comes close to succeeding is astonishing. As so many awful "iPhone killers" have demonstrated, most efforts to replicate the iPhone result in hideous designed-by-committee messes.

Think thin: Flat-panel TVs are about to get even skinnier. The latest liquid-crystal-display and plasma TVs are less than one inch thick and weigh 15 percent to 25 percent less than previous models. From the WSJ:

Flat-panel TVs caught on because they were "so much thinner than the old kind of TV," said Havis Kwon, an executive at LG Electronics Co., the No. 2 maker of TVs by revenue. "But now, thickness is a problem for LCD." Some engineers and analysts worry that manufacturers are sacrificing picture quality to shrink the sets. "A tradeoff happens here and that presents us with a choice," said Mr. Kwon. Some ultrathin models will emphasize style and others that are slightly thicker will emphasize picture quality, he added.