Caroline Mayer reports in the Washington Post on a lawsuit brought by the Minnesota attorney general against Capital One.

The ads suggest that Capital One's cards, unlike its competitors', would bear interest rates that remain at 4.99 percent, the lawsuit said. However, it alleged, for many consumers, the interest rates went up -- in some cases they could have increased to 25.9 percent -- if they were just a day late in paying their bills or if they exceeded credit limits.

Joseph Menn reports on Microsoft's announcement that it is abandoning its efforts to persuade others to adopt its Passport service.

Passport probably drew few new customers to Microsoft products. But it was initially seen as strategically important because it could have helped the Redmond, Wash.-based company put itself in the middle of most electronic transactions.

Because it would keep track of credit card numbers and passwords as people moved from Web site to Web site, Microsoft had predicted that Passport would smooth the way for widespread use of Web services based on a person's identity instead of those linked to information stored on a specific PC.

Bankrate has announced the results of its annual New Year's Resolution poll.

According to a national survey conducted by Roper for Bankrate, 36% of Americans polled are focused on weight loss as opposed to 31% who are concerned with eliminating outstanding debt. This is a significant change from the 2003 poll in which 37% of those polled were more concerned about their debt, while only 29% were concentrating on losing weight. In fact, this is the first time in the three years that Bankrate has conducted the survey that Americans have chosen weight loss over controlling debt as their New Year's Resolution.

VeriSign has announced some of the results its payment processing unit saw during the 2004 holiday shopping season.

"The 2004 online holiday shopping season has proved highly successful, with virtually every indicator showing growth. From spikes in merchant categories to new shopping phenomena like 'Black Monday,' we continue to observe the impact the online marketplace has on traditional shopping-behavior patterns," said Trevor Healy, vice president of payment services, VeriSign.

"Through the online data we collected, we have seen clear changes in consumer behavior such as accelerated weekday shopping activity, more confidence in buying digital goods from e-commerce sites, an increase in gift-certificate purchases as well as the direct impact of shipping lead times on sales."