Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, November 12, 1993                   TAG: 9311120170
SECTION: BUSINESS                    PAGE: A-7   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

IN BUSINESS

WASHINGTON - Interest rates on 30-year, fixed-rate mortgages rose slightly to 7.12 percent this week, the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp. said Thursday.

This week's average was up from 7.11 percent a week ago. It was the third consecutive increase after the average hit a 25-year low of 6.74 percent last month. It was the second week in a row the average has been higher than 7 percent, after 10 weeks below that mark.

On one-year adjustable-rate mortgages, lenders were asking an average initial rate of 4.28 percent, up from 4.17 percent a week earlier.

Fifteen-year mortgages, an increasingly popular option for those refinancing mortgages, averaged 6.64 percent this week, down from 6.65 percent a week earlier.

- Associated Pressi

Wax museum wants to open in Manhattan

LONDON - Madame Tussaud's, the famous London waxworks, is negotiating with New York business and civic leaders to open a wax museum on Manhattan's Times Square, the company said Thursday.

Juliet Simpkins, a spokeswoman for the Tussauds Group in London, said the company had submitted a proposal to the Times Square Development Project.

She wouldn't indicate the size of the investment, how large an exhibition was being planned or when it might open.

Madame Tussaud's, among London's top tourist attractions, draws 2.3 million people annually to the site, where about 350 wax figures are on display.

Tussauds also operates a museum in Amsterdam, Netherlands. - Associated Press

BellSouth to take $1 billion writeoff

BellSouth Corp., Atlanta-based parent of BellSouth Communication Systems of Roanoke, said it would take a $1.2 billion charge against earnings and reduce its work force by an additional 2,200 jobs by the end of 1996.

This latest sign of the pressure on telephone companies to cut costs is all the more striking because BellSouth is the largest and most profitable of the Baby Bells.

All the job cuts, along with 8,000 announced last year, come at BellSouth Telecommunications, the local phone company that provides service to nine states in the Southeast. The total of 10,200 amounts to a 12 percent reduction in the phone company's staff of 82,700.

- The New York Times