When the wealthy come to visit Indian River County on Florida’s Treasure Coast, they can sleep in million pads on Ocean Drive in Vero Beach or hit the holes at the Indian River Club.

For Matthew Martone, 47, who has been homeless since August, the options are more limited.

“It is kind of hard to pedal out to the beach to shower, and pedal by all those beautiful homes, and just be grateful that you have a bar of soap in your bag,” he said.

Amenities for poor people in the county, one of the country’s 100 richest, are limited. There is only a shelter for those with children. For people without children, the options include crashing on a friend’s couch at night or sleeping in the library during the day. Martone has done both but he refuses to do what some in his situation are turning to: pitching a tent in the acres of private, undeveloped land nearby.

“They have no safe, legal housing options whatsoever,” said Sonya Morrison, executive director of the local Christian homeless charity The Source. “The best I can offer them is a tent, some bug spray and send them off into the woods.”

For many people in Florida, this is the picture that homelessness is now taking on — not of people crowding into a city shelter but rather of individuals pitching a tent in the woods. Across the country, federal efforts to ease homelessness will help only 1 out of 10 of those lacking housing, according to the National Coalition for the Homeless. The question is what to do for the rest.

The housing downturn has hit all of Florida’s Treasure Coast especially hard. In Indian River County, home to Piper Aircraft and citrus growers, but also including large residential swaths, local industry has struggled to make up for job losses.

About a year ago, The Source’s Morrison came up with an alternative to dispensing bug spray. Since 2007, a Catholic charity near St. Petersburg has offered homeless people land to pitch a tent or simple wooden sheds. Tents have also been adopted in sections of California with a warm climate. Now The Source is seeking to build its own tent city, a place to be called Camp Haven.

The arrangement is a far cry from more permanent housing, but national homelessness experts say this is better than nothing.

“There’s not enough money for shelter,” said Neil Donovan, executive director at the National Coalition for the Homeless. “So we’re really left with having to think outside the shelter.” He would like the country to take a far more comprehensive look at the root economic causes of homelessness. Until then the tent camp alternative is “far from an ideal, but it’s viable. And when you’re presented with difficult options, sometimes that’s the best you can ask for.”

While living in the woods, friends of Martone have been bitten by snakes and brown recluse spiders, Martone said. And when the sheriff comes along to break up camps on private land, the squatters are simply pushed deeper into the woods or to The Source, which currently offers no beds. Morrison has arrived at work to find 30 people on her doorstep, desperate for help, she said.

Being homeless comes with a litany of hardships, which Martone had never encountered until a few months ago, he said. Ever since he was young, he has held jobs — as a welder, a mechanic and a crane operator. Though Martone had weathered precarious times before, the lingering effects of the recession and a recent breakup resulted in his landing on the streets this time.

Martone’s story is hardly unique: Seasonally unadjusted unemployment in Indian River County reached 11.4 percent in December, far above Florida’s 9.7 percent average.

Over the past few months Martone has had his share of unpleasant experiences: He was jumped outside a 7/11 by some young kids just for being homeless, he said. He is now accustomed to others taking one look at him and deciding who he is. In contrast, the help offered at The Source — temporal and spiritual — has been a great comfort; there, homeless people can find a welcoming community, he said.

“When you have a comfortable life and you’ve got the steady job and security and all of that, you don’t think all that much about God, because you’re doing your thing and everything’s covered,” Martone said. “When you find yourself sleeping in a laundromat, you tend to ask yourself, How did I come to this?” Martone is confident, though, that when he finds a job, he’ll be able to house himself, he said.

But for homeless people living in the woods right now, “it is a full-time job to live like that,” Marone said. “You have to walk all of your food and things into the woods.” Once Camp Haven gets set up, “that would be organized; that would be different,” he said.

In December The Source received a ,000 donation for the Camp Haven project. Morrison is now in the process of looking for land, gaining community support and figuring out how to navigate the county’s zoning process.

Camp Haven has many hurdles yet to cross, but the community’s reaction so far has been warm, Morrison said. “In some ways the economy has been good for our mission,” she said. “A few years ago the reception was different. There tended to be the idea that homelessness was the result of some sort of character defect.”

These days, everyone understands that these are tough times and that almost anyone could find themselves homeless, Morrison added. “There has been a tendering of the heart toward the plight of the homeless,” she said. “People understand it’s not a character defect; it’s a reality of the times we’re living in.”

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East Room

7:22 P.M. EST                      

THE PRESIDENT:  Thank you!  (Applause.)  Thank you so much.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Everybody, please have a seat.  That sounded pretty good.  (Laughter.)  I might try that instead of ruffles and flourishes.  (Laughter.) 

Well, first of all, I want to wish everybody a happy Mardi Gras.  I hear Trombone Shorty brought some beads up from New Orleans.  And I see that we've got some members of our Cabinet here.  We’ve got some members of Congress.  And we have elected officials from all across the country.

One of the things about being President — I've talked about this before — is that some nights when you want to go out and just take a walk, clear your head, or jump into a car just to take a drive, you can’t do it.  Secret Service won't let you.  And that’s frustrating.  But then there are other nights where B.B. King and Mick Jagger come over to your house to play for a concert.  (Applause.)  So I guess things even out a little bit.  (Laughter.)

In 1941, the folklorist Alan Lomax travelled throughout the Deep South, recording local musicians on behalf of the Library of Congress.  In Stovall, Mississippi, he met McKinley Morganfield, a guitar player who went by the nickname Muddy Waters.  And Lomax sent Muddy two pressings from their sessions together, along with a check for .

Later in his life, Muddy recalled what happened next.  He said, “I carried that record up to the corner and I put it on the jukebox.  Just played it and played it, and said, I can do it.  I can do it.  In many ways, that right there is the story of the blues. 

This is music with humble beginnings — roots in slavery and segregation, a society that rarely treated black Americans with the dignity and respect that they deserved.  The blues bore witness to these hard times.  And like so many of the men and women who sang them, the blues refused to be limited by the circumstances of their birth. 

The music migrated north — from Mississippi Delta to Memphis to my hometown in Chicago.  It helped lay the foundation for rock and roll, and R&B and hip-hop.  It inspired artists and audiences around the world.  And as tonight’s performers will demonstrate, the blues continue to draw a crowd.  Because this music speaks to something universal.  No one goes through life without both joy and pain, triumph and sorrow.  The blues gets all of that, sometimes with just one lyric or one note. 

And as we celebrate Black History Month, the blues reminds us that we’ve been through tougher times before — that’s why I’m proud to have these artists here — and not just as a fan, but also as the President.  Because their music teaches us that when we find ourselves at a crossroads, we don’t shy away from our problems.  We own them.  We face up to them.  We deal with them.  We sing about them.  We turn them into art.  And even as we confront the challenges of today, we imagine a brighter tomorrow, saying, I can do it, just like Muddy Waters did all those years ago. 

With that in mind, please join me in welcoming these extraordinary artists to the White House.  And now, it is my pleasure to bring out our first performer to the stage, the King of the Blues, Mr. B.B. King.  (Applause.)

END
7:26 P.M. EST

White House.gov Press Office Feed

NEW YORK — The Dow Jones industrial average made a run at 13,000 on Tuesday, powered higher by a long-awaited bailout deal for Greece and strong corporate earnings reports at home. The Dow came within five points of the milestone an hour and a half into the trading day. Just after 11 a.m. EST, the [...]
Business

Optimistic entrepreneurs are the most successful kind. They are energetic and fun to be around, and it is exciting to be party to their startup endeavors. Sure, they require a good heaping dose of realism, too, but their passion and conviction ooze through every pore of their being and their enthusiasm is downright contagious.

One might wonder if my colleagues and I simply see the world through rose-colored glasses, especially in a questionable economy. I say, we’re seeing things in their appropriate light. Just last week, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, in conjunction with LegalZoom, released its inaugural Startup Confidence Index. The results mirror my own experience — entrepreneurs today are surprisingly optimistic about 2012. In fact, more than 25 percent of them plan to expand their staffs in the next several months, and twice as many of them — 68 percent — expect the economy to improve or stay the same during the year.

In my own work with the FastTrac program, where we open a portal to the entrepreneurial ecosystem for current and aspiring business owners — before, during and after the startup process — I am exposed to this type of optimism on a daily basis. Nothing gives me a greater charge than to hear from one of our entrepreneurs around the world — their willingness to share their successes, their setbacks, how they are moving forward and their ideas to help other entrepreneurs. It is incredibly inspiring.

But, let’s face it; optimism alone is not enough to ensure business success. I am often asked if there is a checklist — some source code to determine what it takes to cut it as an entrepreneur. Unfortunately, there is no magic bullet. However, there are some indicators of entrepreneurial potential.

Successful entrepreneurs develop feasible ideas into profitable businesses. They recognize opportunity; consider and implement sales and marketing plans; convert prospects into customers; locate and acquire financial capital; build solid, effective management teams; and they ably manage risk. In fact, speaking of risk, it is critical for an aspiring entrepreneur to identify his or her risk tolerance level. He or she might ask:

• Do I often seek out and try new and different things?
• Do I enjoy the challenge of finding a solution when I encounter a problem?
• Do I embrace the discomfort associated with trying something new or different as part of the learning process?
• Am I open to asking others for help or guidance?

There is no hard and fast rule for whether the answers to any of these questions will help an individual to succeed as an entrepreneur, but a “Yes!” response to questions like these indicates a person’s ability to work through the uncertainty associated with entrepreneurship with confidence, perseverance and aplomb.

An individual with a strong desire to succeed coupled with passion for what he or she is doing helps to get the entrepreneurial ball rolling. I have discovered, too, that the best entrepreneurs I have encountered exude determination, physical energy and resiliency — they tirelessly pursue a vision and readily overcome the setbacks and disappointments often experienced when launching or growing a business. They are always selling — they have their stories down cold and are eager to share their vision with anyone who will listen, making them interesting and persuasive and compelling. They hold themselves accountable for achieving results and have the self-discipline necessary to move the business forward, to shift gears as necessary and to take action even in ambiguous, confusing environments. They are a confident breed, and others gain energy from simply being around them.

That, of course, brings us back to optimism. Above all, great entrepreneurs are optimistic. Their passion, their belief, their can-do attitude all lead to a positive vision for the future.

In fact, you might wonder, what is better than an optimistic entrepreneur? The answer: Many optimistic entrepreneurs! The point here: Don’t go it alone. Entrepreneurship by its very nature can be daunting and lonely and risky and scary. There is no need to go through it by oneself — in fact, I don’t recommend it. Instead, an entrepreneur should surround him/herself with the best — the best support network (family, friends, informal advisers, and mentors), the best business partners and employees (people who care [nearly] as much as you do), the best board of directors or advisory board (be sure that they are fully committed to supporting you and truly enthusiastic about your success and the success of your business). Indeed, optimism and enthusiasm and a positive attitude feed on themselves and regenerate, leaving more of the same! Part of success is simply believing — truly, deeply in your heart of hearts, in your gut — that you will succeed.

So count me in. I stand by the optimistic entrepreneurs. Like them, I have high confidence in the future, and 2012 is a perfect place to start — and to ’startup’ your idea.

Business on HuffingtonPost.com

In an effort to boost access to federal contracts and financial assistance, the Small Business Administration recently changed its definition of “small business” in a variety of industries for the first time in about 25 years.

Small-business advocates, however, aren’t yet sure if or how the move will affect small businesses’ ability to get federal government contracts. The SBA released 37 updated revenue-based size definitions of small businesses in 34 professional, scientific and technical services sectors, after starting work on the definitions in 2007. The new size standards take effect March 12.

The SBA took into account factors such as inflation and current economic conditions, as well as federal contracting trends, average firm size and degree of competition within the individual industries, and was motivated to make the changes by the Small Business Jobs Act of 2010, which requires the SBA to continue a comprehensive review of size standards for the next several years, according to an SBA spokesperson.

The SBA, which negotiates small-business contracting goals with various federal agencies, estimates the new definitions will make as many as 8,350 more firms eligible for contracts and financial assistance. “It allows small businesses to retain their small-business status and contracting officers to have a larger selection of small businesses to choose from for contracting opportunities,” the spokesperson said.

But the National Small Business Association isn’t so sure these changes will be beneficial to small businesses. Although the NSBA is planning a thorough analysis, the Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group cited “a couple areas of concern,” NSBA spokesperson Molly Brogan said. “Some industries, such as architecture and engineering, are grouped together, and the combination can cause some issues. Another concern is there may be enhanced competition from businesses on the larger end of the scale that are now classified as a small business. For the majority of businesses that have about nine to 11 employees, it’s hard to compete against a company that has 500 employees.”

While the National Federation of Independent Business, a Nashville, Tenn.-based advocacy group, doesn’t define small business by size, about 70 percent of its members have 10 or fewer employees, according to NFIB spokesperson Cynthia Magnuson. Still, Magnuson said government contracts aren’t necessarily what will help their small-business members. “We represent 350,000 small businesses and not a tremendous number of them vie for government contracts,” Magnuson said. “Our top priorities tend to be things that affect our whole membership, like taxes, health care and regulation.”

By contrast, Brogan of NSBA said leveling the playing field for small-business contracts is one of its members longtime concerns. “Our board has revised our top priority issues for 2012, and contracting is among those,” Magnuson said. “Ensuring small businesses do have an equal opportunity through small business set-asides is a big issue.”

This definition of small businesses in relation to federal contracts is also being addressed by the House Small Business Committee. The Protect American Small Businesses Act, introduced by Reps. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) and Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), would require that the size standard be assigned by each group’s North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) code. “My bill ensures that small businesses do not have to compete with global corporations to create jobs in our local communities,” Walsh said in a statement. “Size standards assure the viability of America’s biggest job creators — small businesses.”

Business on HuffingtonPost.com

Would you support the death penalty for bankers or corporate executives who cheat clients, customers or the government out of millions, or even billions, of dollars? That’s the question that is raging through China these days as 30 year old multi-millionaire Wu Ying, once one of the richest women in the country, was sentenced to death for swindling million from investors.

While million sounds like chump change compared with the billion that Bernie Madoff stole from investors, the Chinese take both economic crimes and the death penalty quite seriously. Around 4,000 people are executed each year in China, some for economic crimes, and the death penalty has the general support of the public.

The problem, of course, is the issue of selective enforcement. The crimes that Wu Ying is accused of committing — including “underground banking” (lending money outside the officially sanctioned government system) — are widely practiced in China and are only selectively punished. And the death penalty seems to be employed arbitrarily against a variety of citizens, including in some cases political dissidents.

Fewer than half the countries in the world — and a minority of nations — continue to apply capital punishment. The European Union bans capital punishment and the United Nations has passed resolutions calling for a global ban on the practice. Yet the United States and China — arguably the most powerful nations in the world — continue to employ capital punishment, although in markedly different ways.

The United States spends billions of dollars to enforce the death penalty. The state of Maryland, for example, estimated the cost of pursuing a total of five executions to be 6 million. California spends 4 million per year prosecuting and housing death row inmates, and estimates that the cost of thirteen executions over thirty years has been 0 million per execution. China, on the other hand, which dispenses with much of the niceties of due process, can say that it has a much more streamlined and cost-effective system.

What about the effectiveness of the death penalty as a deterrent? People have argued for years that the death penalty can be an effective deterrent against crime, but the facts certainly don’t do much to support that argument. Extensive research into the “deterrence effect” show that it has very little weight. Studies show that most murders, for example, are committed in the heat of passion or under the influence of drugs or alcohol. The likelihood of execution is one of the last things that murderers consider when they kill someone.

The fact that China employs the deterrence argument in the case of economic crimes raises an interesting question for Americans, who have generally accepted the policy of giving white-collar criminals who steal billions nothing more than a slap on the wrist. Even though a few of the most egregious offenders have ended up behind bars, an argument could be made that if they had committed the same crime in China, the Bernie Madoffs of the world would be facing a firing squad. And perhaps a few Wall Street bankers would be asking for a last meal.

The truth is that the deterrence argument probably doesn’t work much better for economic crimes than it does for murder or other capital offenses. While the Chinese government hopes to send a strong message to the business community to play by the rules, the fact is that Wu Ying was clearly singled out because she crossed some powerful people in the Chinese power structure. Although her conviction — and possible execution — will send a chill through the hearts of Chinese entrepreneurs, it will likely do little to stem the practice of underground banking and loan sharking, not to mention the greed and corruption of elements of Chinese society.

There may be a lesson for Americans here. The outcry over the minimal — or non-existent — punishment of American bankers and Wall Streeters is clearly justified. The idea that the rape and pillage of the American financial system, not to mention the American public, by a bunch of overpaid bankers and corporate executives, who after getting a bailout from American taxpayers rewarded their misdeeds with millions in bonuses, is galling to say the least. And it is tempting to contemplate sentencing these criminals to life in a prison cell, or even an ignominious death.

However, as in China, the solution to the problem is not simply to lock up or execute the offenders, although justice would certainly dictate much harsher punishment than was meted out to those bankers whose greed and deceit cost us so many billions and nearly wrecked our financial system. No, the answer is to reform the system so that criminals can no longer benefit from their misdeeds. And only the federal government has the power to carry out those reforms.

The Republicans have argued that government regulation of the financial industry will stifle the free market, but nothing could not be further from the truth. The reforms during the administrations of both Theodore Roosevelt (a Republican) and FDR (a Democrat), which regulated financial activity in new and unprecedented ways, was greeted with dire warnings from the financiers and robber barons about the collapse of the American economy. However, the reforms actually led to unprecedented growth in financial markets and the American economy.

The Obama administration has taken a few tentative steps in the direction of greater regulation of financial markets and institutions, but much more needs to be done. However, as long as politicians depend on the good graces of wealthy people and institutions to stay in office, real reforms will never take place, and those who game the system, or even violate the law, will swindle the rest of us with impunity. We may long to put the bums in jail and throw away the key, but until the government becomes an honest, impartial referee in the financial markets, there will be more swindlers taking the place of those we locked up.

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WASHINGTON — Michigan has become squirm central for Republican presidential candidates who are trying to explain their opposition to the auto bailout before the big primary in the home of automakers. Their tale is terribly tangled, and President Barack Obama isn’t telling it straight either.

Obama, in taking credit, and Republicans, in assigning blame, have ignored one driving force behind the love-it-or-hate-it bailout: George W. Bush in the waning days of his presidency. Moreover, GOP rivals Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum would have people believe the United Auto Workers union runs General Motors and the government “gave” it away, neither true.

The issue is a particularly nettlesome one for Romney, Detroit-born son of a Michigan governor and auto company chief executive. His provocatively headlined 2008 article, “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt,” has made for tortured explanations in the campaign for the Feb. 28 primary – though the prescription he preached back then is not wholly at odds with what the government finally did.

Then again, Romney is hardly out on a Republican limb. Santorum opposes the bailout on similar grounds. As for the other candidates, Newt Gingrich raised the wild idea that Washington might force people to buy GM cars, and Ron Paul believes the market should let companies rise or fall without the government’s intervention.

A look at some of the persistent claims about the bailout and how they compare with the facts:

___

ROMNEY: “If General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed.” – Nov. 18, 2008, New York Times op-ed article.

SANTORUM: “If they’d have gone through the orderly bankruptcy process, gone through a structured bankruptcy, they’d have come out in the same place, only we would have kept the integrity of the bankruptcy process without the government putting its fingers into it.” – June 13 New Hampshire debate.

THE FACTS: No one can know what would have happened absent the bailout. But it’s a distinctly minority view that the private sector, raked then by the financial crisis, would have nursed Detroit back to health without a massive infusion of federal aid. In late 2008, banks weren’t making many loans, much less to companies that were out of cash. The Bush administration moved fast because it saw no time to let an orderly bankruptcy unfold, even if banks had the money and the will to steer automakers through the process.

Romney’s grim prognosis, before GM and Chrysler took the aid, is in stark contrast with the turnaround that followed. Last week GM reported a record profit for 2011, two years after the company’s near-collapse, and said 47,500 union workers will get ,000 profit-sharing checks, the most ever.

Despite the bold headline – now making headlines of its own – Romney laid out some nuanced ideas, including substantial federal aid.

He called for the government to guarantee post-bankruptcy financing and to back up warranties so people would not be afraid to buy cars from the fragile companies. And he proposed a fivefold increase in federal research spending on energy.

___

OBAMA: “On the day I took office, our auto industry was on the verge of collapse. Some even said we should let it die. With a million jobs at stake, I refused to let that happen. In exchange for help, we demanded responsibility. We got workers and automakers to settle their differences. We got the industry to retool and restructure. Today, General Motors is back on top as the world’s No. 1 automaker. Chrysler has grown faster in the U.S. than any major car company. Ford is investing billions in U.S. plants and factories. And together, the entire industry added nearly 160,000 jobs. We bet on American workers. We bet on American ingenuity. And tonight, the American auto industry is back.” – Jan. 24 State of the Union speech.

THE FACTS: Lost in Obama’s victory lap was the fact that Bush passed him the baton.

Pushing against a reluctant Congress, Bush steered .4 billion in emergency loans to GM and Chrysler in his final weeks in office, on condition they shrink debt, negotiate wage and benefit cuts with workers and submit plans to achieve “long-term viability, international competitiveness and energy efficiency.”

The new Obama administration followed with more than billion in aid, more expansive requirements and hands-on management of the crisis.

With hundreds of thousands of jobs at stake, ideology took a back seat. “Sometimes circumstances get in the way of philosophy,” Bush said in a speech this month. “I didn’t want there to be 21 percent unemployment.”

Steven Rattner, who led Obama’s auto task force, credited Bush with giving his team “a little breathing room” to restructure the companies and for providing a framework of “expected sacrifices that paved the way for our demands for give-ups from the stakeholders.”

Obama’s account of the automakers’ recovery is true enough but skips key points.

For one, “we” had nothing to do with Ford, which declined a bailout and climbed back on its own. Second, viewers of the speech might not know that Chrysler is an Italian-owned company now.

Obama frequently invokes the unspecified “some” who thought the industry “should die” in what is a veiled swipe at Republicans who oppose the bailout, Romney prominently among them. But like the other GOP candidates, Romney never expressed a death wish for the auto industry. Nor did Republican congressional leaders.

At most, some were willing to take that risk by having automakers try to restructure in bankruptcy without a bailout. It’s a course few believed would work in 2008. But bankruptcy is intended as a second chance, not an execution. It’s the path Obama followed, though with massive federal aid that sweetened the odds.

___

SANTORUM: “All the federal government did was basically tip to the cronies, tip to the unions, gave the unions the company.” – June 13 New Hampshire debate.

ROMNEY: “The idea of billions of dollars being wasted initially – then finally they adopted the managed bankruptcy. I was among others that said we ought to do that. And then after that, they gave the company to the UAW. They gave General Motors to the UAW and they gave Chrysler to Fiat.” – Nov. 10 Michigan debate.

THE FACTS: These are distorted accounts of complex arrangements by which the companies, unions, government and courts fashioned a plan to lighten staggering health care and pension costs at the heart of the automakers’ decline.

A trust owned by the United Auto Workers – but not directly managed by the union – received a 17.5 percent ownership stake in GM in return for taking over the health care costs of blue-collar retirees. That stake declined as the company left government ownership by selling stock to the public; it’s now about 10 percent. In return for its share, the UAW could not strike over wages at Chrysler or GM in the last round of contract talks, and it gave other concessions too.

Just as the government did not give GM to the union, it did not give Chrysler to Fiat.

Chrysler and Fiat have paid back all but .3 billion of Chrysler’s .5 billion bailout – with taxpayers likely to be out the rest. The Italian automaker got control of Chrysler by buying 23.5 percent of the company from the U.S. and Canadian governments, after receiving an initial 20 percent stake in exchange for management expertise and technology, then 15 percent for meeting performance targets.

The government has recouped more than billion of its nearly billion GM bailout, after agreeing to take stock in return for most of its investment. The government would get an additional .5 billion if it sold its remaining stock at current value. It is waiting for the stock price to rise before doing so, meaning the final cost to taxpayers is unknown.

___

GINGRICH: “Having become deeply involved in GM’s operation, the federal government has a vested interest in the company’s success. So what is stopping it from requiring all Americans – under threat of penalty – to buy a GM car?” – In his book “A Nation Like No Other,” published last summer.

THE FACTS: This is called Newt being Newt.

___

Krisher reported from Detroit.

Business on HuffingtonPost.com

After months of delays, arguments and doubts, euro-zone finance ministers agreed on a second, 0 billion bailout of beleaguered Greece in the early hours of Tuesday morning. The agreement will not only provide fresh financing for the debt-stricken government but also some much needed debt relief. A hefty chunk of the new bailout package will [...]
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CULVER CITY, Calif. — YouTube is enlisting Hollywood’s help to reach a generation of viewers more familiar with smartphones than TV remotes. The online video giant is aiming to create 25 hours of programming per day with the help of some of the top names in traditional TV. The Google-owned site is spreading its wealth [...]
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SHANGHAI — Apple’s dispute over the iPad trademark deepened Monday after the Chinese company that claims ownership of the name said it won a court ruling against sales of the popular tablet computer in China. Xie Xianghui, a lawyer for Shenzhen Proview Technology, said the Intermediate People’s Court in Huizhou, a city in southern China’s [...]
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