Business and Finance news

European leaders maintained pressure on Greece to accept terms demanded by international lenders during a weekend of talks to avert a financial collapse.
Interim Greek Prime Minister Lucas Papademos struck a tentative deal with party leaders to boost economic competitiveness and extend spending cuts after euro-area finance chiefs told them an increase in the 130 […]

What Would Jesus … Deduct?
President Obama offered a new line of reasoning for hiking taxes on the rich on Thursday, saying at the National Prayer Breakfast that his policy proposals are shaped by his religious beliefs.

Obama said that as a person who has been "extraordinarily blessed," he is willing to give up some of […]

The official in charge of rescue efforts for the Costa Concordia says unregistered passengers might have been aboard the cruise liner when it struck a reef and capsized.
Civil protection chief Franco Gabrielli also told reporters Sunday that relatives of a Hungarian woman have told Italian authorities that she had telephoned them from aboard the ship […]

British police say they knew that Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World tabloid had hacked into the phone of murdered British teenager Milly Dowler nine years before the scandal exploded.
The chief constable of southern England’s Surrey Police says his force knew as far back as April 2002 that someone linked to the News of the […]

MONTREAL

While Research In Motion Ltd. struggles to contain a service outage that’s affecting tens of million of BlackBerry users around the world, its co-chief executives are most conspicuous by their absence.
Neither Jim Balsillie, who was in Dubai Monday at an industry conference when the outage began, nor Mike Lazaridis, the dual CEOs and co-chairmen who […]

The Federal Reserve said Wednesday it will shuffle $400 billion of its portfolio to try to drive down long-term interest rates and get the economy going. But economists doubted it would do much good, the stock market sold off, and the Fed itself was unusually divided over the strategy.
Lowering interest rates makes it cheaper for […]

If you’re on Twitter, expect to see more ads flowing through your stream of tweets in the next few months.
The ads will show up even if the promotion is from a company that a person hasn’t chosen to follow. Until now, Twitter had only displayed ads that users were tracking.
As has been the case since […]

Congress gave President Barack Obama’s drive to promote jobs growth a boost Thursday by presenting him with a major overhaul of the patent system that the president has sought as a means to spur innovation and put more people back to work.
The Senate voted 89-9 to pass the patent bill and send it to Obama […]

Global stocks fell again Friday as fears of a possible U.S. recession combined with ongoing worries over Europe’s debt crisis, which is stoking acute fears over the continent’s banking sector.
However, a better than anticipated opening on Wall Street helped European markets recoup a large chunk of their earlier losses.
“This week has seen a continuation of […]