second monthly increase. stocks are tumbling for a second straight day. take a look at the boards. dow down 200 points standing at 10582. rest of the indexes down, dropped on concerns about how measures are taken to solve the debt crisis in europe and how that might slow the economy there. we ll keep an eye on those boards for you. meantime, t minus three hours and counting for space shuttle atlantis, scheduled to blast off for the final time at 2:20 eastern time today. nbc s jay barberi live for us at cape canaveral, florida. jay, they need those clear skies. how is it looking? reporter: it looks great, about 70% go. countdown right on time. the only thing we see right now that might be a problem for us, nbc s jim olberg, who has excellent contacts in the soviet union, he s located in houston.
calculations of 70,000 per day plus or minus 20%, which puts us in the 56 to 84,000 barrels of oil per day. shell shell that also puts us, relatively speaking with the equivalent of one exxon valdez oil spill every three and a half to four and a half days. meaning we have had four or five exxon valdez spills already with apparently many more to come; is that right? that s yeah, that s what my numbers say. shepard: that s disturbing. yeah. shepard: indeed it is, we have no way to independently verify any of this. we can speak for this professor s credentials. professor wereley thank you very much. thank you. shepard: new word the united states economy son the road to recovery. we have two reports tonight. the first comes from you, the american shopper. according to the commerce department, retail sales rose .4% in april. that s the 7th straight month of
take a look at some of our top stories here. not exactly every day we get a pleasant economic surprise, quite like this one, but take a look at this, retail sales rose 0.3 last month, it doesn t sound like a lot, but most experts felt they would drop by that much, so good news. president obama s pushing his asia-pacific trip back by a few days amid the democrats massive health care push. the president was meant to leave for indonesia, guam, australia on thursday. that s right around the time the house might be voting on the reform package, in washington, stick around for that. just a heads up, most of us have a date with cst this weekend. cst, you ask? daylight saving time, starting early sunday, so it s spring ahead, so, yes, we get one less hour of sleep over the weekend. tomorrow, a national kickoff
there s a lot of work to be done in that regard. all right. dr. sanjay gupta, thank you so much for that. you know it has been a roller coaster ride on wall street this week. the dow dropped on monday. rose on tuesday. dropped again on wednesday. and then rallied back yesterday. so are we done? does this mean we re going to have a down day today? we are expecting a lower open. that s largely because of concerns about what s going on in china. for the second time in a month, china s central bank is forcing banks to increase the amount of cash they keep on hand. it s a way of tightening the money supply and it also limits growth. at home, a sign of hope. retail sales rose by half a percent last month. that s the fifth gain in the past six months and it shows that americans are loosening their purse strings a little bit. warren buffett s company is joining the s&p 500 today and shares are actually affordable.
hasn t been fast enough. fed chair bernanke prediction of the slow growth next year comes true, it could be a problem for the president in 2012. shannon? shannon: wendell goler live at the white house. thank you. core inflation was flat outside the food and energy sector for the second straight month. retail sales rose .6 of a point. business inventory were up .6 of a point. stocks were mixed, the dow lost 31-3/4. the s&p 500 added 2-1/3. bank of america said today it expects review of 100,000 foreclosure affidavits will delay around 30,000 foreclosure sales. the political battle over the foreclosure issue is intensifying. chief washington correspondent jim angle tells us why. something odd happened this week. democratic leaders pushed for action that could daniel obama s chance for re-election. freeze on foreclosures which