Verizon announced Tuesday that its new unlimited calling plans, Verizon Freedom Essentials and Verizon Freedom Value, are now available in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Delaware, Virginia and Washington, D.C., offering unlimited local and long distance calling from $29.95 per month.

Call forwarding lets you forward incoming calls to your phone to another telephone number. Most companies offer a wide range of call forwarding options, at varying monthly charges.

On Monday over 300 New York employees of Verizon Information Services, which produces the Verizon SuperPages yellow pages directories, went on strike. They had been working without a contract since Oct. 19.

The Federal Communications Commission on Monday approved the mergers of Verizon with MCI and SBC with AT&T, with only minimal conditions applied to the mergers.

The U.S. Department of Justice on Thursday approved the mergers of Verizon with MCI and SBC with AT&T without significant conditions such as the divestiture of assets that critics had asked for.

Verizon’s Message Alert service, which sends a text message to subscribers’ wireless phones when their landline phone receives a voicemail, is now available to all Verizon residential and small business customers nationwide.

Verizon has moved into Chicago and begun competing with SBC for medium-to-large business customers there, marking the first time one of the former Baby Bells has competed directly with another in any market.

Verizon has received the first Quills Corporate Literacy Award in recognition of the company’s support of literacy programs throughout the United States.

The Verizon One integrates a DSL modem, 802.11g wireless router, 5.8 Ghz cordless phone, color-touch screen, Super Pages features and more. It is one of this year’s recipients of a Frost and Sullivan Product Innovation Award and will be featured this weekend at the Digital Life Expo, a consumer electronics show in New York City.

Sources told the Washington Post Friday that Federal Communications Commission chairman Kevin Martin would recommend approving the mergers of SBC with AT&T, and Verizon with MCI, without imposing conditions on the mergers.