Recent News: Blackstone, Appliances, Rail Cars, Olympics, Lobbying, GE Healthcare, Jeff Immelt: '...cable deals'

Blackstone joins China's Haier in bid for GE's appliances unit
The investment firm Blackstone is joining forces with one of China's largest consumer goods-makers in the $7bn auction of General Electric's appliances unit. Blackstone is drawing up plans to invest with Qingdao Haier, China's biggest white goods-maker, and hopes to build a global enterprise to compete with rivals such as Maytag and Electrolux...

General Electric may dump its rail car division
General Electric Co. may be close to selling its rail car leading division to GATX Corp. According to Bloomberg, GATX plans to "invest more aggressively" during a financial slowdown...

NBC sees new media habits form with Olympic games
About half of the people who are using mobile phones to pull down video or information about the Olympics have been trying out that technology for the first time, NBC said on Wednesday.
NBC Universal, a unit of General Electric Co., has been using the Olympics as something of a research lab to track the adoption of new media technology. Since the opening ceremony last Friday, the company has made content available online, through video on demand and via cell phones along with traditional TV...

General Electric spent nearly $5.4M lobbying in 2Q
General Electric Co. spent nearly $5.4 million in the second quarter lobbying on everything from patent reform to the fiscal 2009 defense spending bill, according to a disclosure report....

For Olympic Marketers, Emotions Pay
For many Olympic swimmers in Beijing, Speedo LZRs have helped produce record times. For winning advertisers during the Games, the key ingredient is proving to be emotional ads...

Huge Olympic Success To Add One Penny To GE's (GE) Bottom Line
The Olympics were far from a sure thing for NBC Universal. American interest in the games had been waning for years, and the prospect of a Chinese crackdown on protestors made many network bigwigs nervous...

U.S. FDA warns GE Healthcare unit over records
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has warned GE Healthcare's Integrated IT Solutions unit about a dozen manufacturing violations including improper record keeping that could result in further action from the agency....

Immelt: GE ‘Not Done Doing Cable Deals’
General Electric chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt said that on the heels of NBC Universal’s acquisition of The Weather Channel, there may be more cable deals on the horizon. And he told CNBC’s Carl Quintanilla Monday morning that he is satisfied with the strategy of partnership arrangements such as the one formed for the TWC purchase.