finance

Investors, whose optimism was recently shaken by surprisingly weak economic data, are now hoping companies can provide some clues about a recovery.

A submarine scouring the Indian Ocean on Sunday heard the signal beacons of the two black boxes from a Yemenia Airways flight that crashed off the Comoros Islands, the French aviation agency said.

Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust began her tenure in 2007 when the university's prosperity seeemed limitless. With its ballooning wealth, Harvard planned almost frenzied growth, from a building boom into Boston to vast increases in financial aid for students.

States that allow debt collectors to seize consumers' wages have sharply higher bankruptcy rates than neighboring states that prohibit or strictly limit the practice, an Associated Press analysis has found.

Hundreds of anxious shoppers watched as city officials used power saws to cut 2-by-4s during Home Depot Inc.'s ribbon-cutting ceremony for its 102,700-square-foot building center in Bismarck. Less than three years later, the home improvement retailer shuttered the underperforming store, leaving a bg orange empty eyesore on the outskirts of town.

The media moguls attending an annual powwow staged by investment bank Allen & Co. used to be able to rest comfortably in the Idaho mountains as they mulled their next moves.

Prehistoric creatures and robots were in a photo finish for the Fourth of July box-office crown Sunday, with "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" and "Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs" tied with $42.5 million each.

The Obama administration "misread" the depth of the economic troubles it inherited and still expects more new jobs in the long term as the spending pace from the $787 billion stimulus plan quickens, Vice President Joe Biden said.

Zimbabwe has promised to withdraw its soldiers from diamond fields in the east, an official newspaper reported Sunday — a week after a rights group alleged the military was committing killings and abuses in the area.

The Washington Post's publisher apologized to readers Sunday for a plan to charge business leaders and lobbyists for intimate dinner discussions with government officials and the newspaper's journalists.

General Motors Europe President Carl-Peter Forster expects to sell German unit Opel to Canadian auto parts supplier Magna soon, he told a German newspaper.

World leaders are bound to express the hope that the worst of the global economic crisis is passing when they meet this week, but they are now under pressure, too, to manage a Chinese challenge to dollar supremacy.

Three more bidders are interested in taking a stake in German sports car maker Porsche, rivaling investment plans by Qatar, German magazine Focus reported on Saturday.

Florida regulators seldom checked the Miami operations of Allen Stanford after giving the accused fraud master unprecedented freedom to send cash overseas and sell investment securities, the Miami Herald newspaper reported on Sunday.

Teck Resources said on Friday it will sell a 17.2 percent equity stake to state-owned China Investment Corp in a deal that will help the Canadian miner pay down its debt while expanding China's portfolio of commodity investments.

About 10 global and Taiwan financial firms have submitted bids to buy troubled AIG's Taiwanese insurance unit, newspapers said on Saturday, in a deal that could fetch up to over $2 billion.

Austrian fund manager Sonja Kohn did not receive any kickbacks from Bernard Madoff to steer Bank Medici customer funds to the swindler's investment business, a Medici lawyer said on Friday.

Several Mexican clients of Stanford Financial Group have sued insurance broker Willis Group Holdings Ltd , contending it was a willing participant in a $7 billion fraud at the Texas-based investment company.

"Go East" is a message being heeded by many Asian professionals in the United States and Europe who see brighter job prospects in a region that is expected to outperform the rest of the world for economic growth.