The Internet has managed to disrupt many industries, from publishing to music. So why not lending?
Google is teaming up with the nation's largest peer-to-peer lender. The search and tech giant is investing $125 million in Lending Club, which gets borrowers and lenders together outside the conventional banking system. Google's move and the actions of other big players reflect a growing interest in peer-to-peer lending.
Students associated with "Brown Divest Coal" protested in front of the Brown University president's office during a rally May 3. The group is demanding that the university stop investing in certain oil and coal companies.
Credit Courtesy of Brown Divest Coal
Brown University senior Emily Kirkland, right, speaks with a student newspaper reporter. Kirkland, who studies environmental science, has been leading a divestment campaign at Brown and says she's seen how powerful such protests can be. "Our administration is taking us very seriously," she says.
At about 300 colleges across the country, young activists worried about climate change are borrowing a strategy that students successfully used in decades past. In the 1980s, students enraged about South Africa's racist Apartheid regime got their schools to drop stocks in companies that did business with that government. In the 1990s students pressured their schools to divest in Big Tobacco.
This time, the student activists are targeting a mainstay of the economy: large oil and coal companies.
When you arrive in Myanmar, you can see how eager the people are to do business. At the airport in Yangon, new signs in English welcome tourists. A guy in a booth offers to rent me a local cellphone — and he's glad to take U.S. dollars. But when I pull out my money, he shakes his head.
"I'm sorry," he says.
He points to the crease mark in the middle of the $20 bill. No creases allowed.
Garment workers sew T-shirts at a factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 2009. Bangladesh, the world's second-largest clothing exporter, has lured clothing makers through a combination of low wages and light regulation.
Eight people died Wednesday in a fire at a Bangladeshi sweater factory. This follows the much deadlier collapse of the Rana Plaza building, where more than 900 people died.
The deaths are taking place in a garment sector that has seen explosive growth over the past three decades. The country has managed to lure clothing-makers through a combination of low wages and light regulation.
As a manufacturing center, Bangladesh has little to recommend it. The roads are poor. There's no port to speak of. The electricity is notoriously unreliable. It's politically unstable.
Taxpayers help subsidize crop insurance premiums for farmers to the tune of about $9 billion dollars, a figure that's growing each year. These policies protect farmers from major losses, and help support their income even if there's no loss of crops.
And in return? Well, environmentalists argue that farmers who receive this financial supportshould be required to be good stewards of the land.
This is the tale of turkey tail — it's convoluted arrival, disappearance and highly anticipated return to the Pacific island the Republic of Samoa (not to be confused with American Samoa).
It's hard to pinpoint precisely when turkey tails started being imported into Samoa from the U.S. and when they became a favorite, affordable dish. Meat byproducts (Spam and fatty lamb cuts from New Zealand) started showing up sometime after World War II, and turkey tails came shortly thereafter.
Eight people in New York have been charged as part of what prosecutors say was a global ring of cybercriminals who stole $45 million by hacking into prepaid credit card accounts and then using the data to get cash from thousands of ATMs around the world.
U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Loretta Lynch described the alleged scheme as "a massive 21st century bank heist that reached across the Internet and stretched around the globe. In the place of guns and masks, this cybercrime organization used laptops and the Internet."
Let's start with a brief tour of streaming television online.
For quite a while, streaming television meant sitting and watching it on your computer. It wasn't ideal, for obvious reasons. Then, it got easier to sit and watch it on your phone. That wasn't ideal, either, if you liked the living-room experience. Tablets do a better job than phones of delivering a portable but less tiny experience.
Note: As often happens, the previous week's figure is a slight revision from what was reported earlier. Initially, the ETA said there had been 324,000 first-time claims during the week ending April 27. Now, it says there were 327,000 that week.
Home foreclosure filings in the U.S. have fallen to their lowest levels in more than six years. They're down more than 20 percent from last year, according to the company RealtyTrac. Inexpensive mortgages and a rising demand for homes seem to be at play here.
Steve Inskeep talks with Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus of Montana and House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp of Michigan about their bipartisan efforts to rewrite the tax code. On Thursday, the lawmakers launched TaxReform.gov in an effort to solicit direct input from Americans on simplifying the tax code.
Some progressive groups are angry with Facebook for running ads supporting GOP lawmakers on board with the immigration overhaul bill. The left-wing groups have turned a blind eye to what Facebook gets out of the overhaul measure, and what it may cost American tech workers.
The Internet spreads information too quickly for some people — especially people who don't want to find out the ending of a show they haven't seen yet. A high school senior in New Hampshire has solved that problem with an app.
Royal Dutch Shell is pushing ahead with plans for the world's deepest offshore oil and gas production facility. It will be nearly two miles beneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of Louisiana. It is testing the bounds of the oil and gas industry's capability to drill ever deeper.
There's a debate across the country over how well universities are preparing graduates for the real world, and whether colleges should operate more like businesses. That debate is particularly heated in Texas, where Gov. Rick Perry wants big changes at state colleges, including the flagship University of Texas.
