By Stockpickr Staff
Posted at 11:18 a.m. EDT on June 23, 2009

Boeing (BA) was falling more than 9% on Tuesday morning after its announcement that its 787 aircraft's first flight will be delayed again. A recent test flight revealed a need to reinforce part of the plane. The flight, originally schedule for 2007, had been delayed various times and was last rescheduled for June 2009.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Motorola (MOT) smartphones will run on Google's (GOOG) Android operating system.

In analyst upgrade-downgrade news, Friedman Billings Ramsey upgraded E*Trade (ETFC) from underperform to outperform with a $2 price target. JPMorgan upgraded FedEx (FDX) from neutral to overweight and raised its price target on the stock to $66 from $60. UBS upgraded ConAgra (CAG) from neutral to buy with a $24 price target, and Merrill/Bank of America upgraded Motorola from neutral to buy, with a price-target increase to $9 from $7.

With this in mind, we thought we'd take a look at some of the stocks in the news and see what Jim Cramer's had to say about them lately.

These stocks could be in the news for a number of reasons. Some require immediate attention; others may not. Regardless, it never hurts to hear what Cramer (or any professional investors) has to say about them. The key is to gather as much information as you can in order to make the most informed investment decisions you can.

In a recent post to his RealMoney blog, Cramer wrote:

"Nortel's a reminder that owning tech can be such an incredible losing proposition. For much of the 1990s it was a given that Nortel was going to be the biggest competitor if not the destroyer of Cisco (CSCO), Motorola (MOT) and certainly of Lucent and Alcatel. It seemed to have the inside track on everything that would make the Internet better and faster and more compelling. It was the pin-up for the hottest in communications tech and you had to be long it at all times.

"But Nortel became the poster boy for something else in the early 2000s, the sign that I keep on my PC -- 'Accounting irregularities equals sell.' While Nortel's business, along with all of the network and dot-com-related businesses crashed badly in the wake of Net crash, Nortel was never able to get back in the game because of some accounting irregularities so broad that it brought down all of the executives who ran the company.

"I know. I bought the stock for Action Alerts PLUS when I saw the initial scoundrels were thrown out and I thought they could put the woes behind them.

"It was a major mistake. The rot was too deep, the executives too in on it.
Nortel never came back from that accounting morass. In many ways Nortel was every bit as bad as Enron and Worldcom.

"But there was one difference. At the time the accounting disaster occurred, Nortel was at the top of its technological game. No one thought it was being left behind. No one thought that NT was anything but the top of tech, a true rival even though its accounting problems were deep.

"But they lost their step and they were history. (You could argue that the same thing happened to Lucent, too -- part accounting morass, part tech.)

"I think that Nortel's liquidation can be laid at the feet of the crooks running the joint. But it is worth remembering that the best tech -- which Nortel had -- meant nothing in the end, and five years after it had the best tech, the tech was just worthless. No one would pay for it.

"No one.

"So when you own tech stocks, even with installed bases, you don't own much at all, particularly if there is real competition. You can be wiped out much faster than in almost any other industry.

"And Nortel went down real fast. That $250 billion company had, in the end, nothing anyone wanted. The cycles were just too quick, the machines just too worthless.

"I am sure that many people will say that Cisco was the big winner from Nortel's woes. But here's something telling, too: You haven't made any money with Cisco either during this era.

"I think the real takeaway is to remind you that tech's tougher than any other sector, and the while the reward is high, the risk is much, much higher."

(Editor's note: At the time of publication and/or original publication of his posts and shows, Cramer owned Cisco for his Action Alerts PLUS charitable trust.)