Business

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Today's last word in business is: The Cat's meow.

Last summer, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis hosted the first-ever Internet Cat Video Festival. Yes, that happened. The festival featured 70 minutes of Internet cat videos.

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Giant financial data company Bloomberg is acknowledging that some of its subscribers were tracked by the company's reporters. The reporters were allowed to see what kind of information the subscribers were looking at and how long it had been since they logged on. The tracking came to light after Goldman Sachs Raised questions about the practice. Over the weekend, the Federal Reserve said it is looking into whether its employees were tracked as well.

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NPR's business news starts with a big recall for jeeps.

Chrysler is recalling about 470,000 Jeep SUVs worldwide. Certain Jeep Grand Cherokees and Commanders are being recalled because the transmission could shift by itself - from park into neutral - with no warning to the driver. The source of the problem: cracks in the circuit board that can cause a faulty signal on start-up.

Google Glass isn't even for sale yet, but it's already facing backlash.

Drivers will find this summer's gas prices are lower than last year's, the result of a spike in crude oil production. Government forecasters say a gallon of regular gasoline will cost about $3.50 this summer — a slide of more than 10 cents from last year.

With a haul of $45 million, it's being billed as possibly the biggest cyber-heist in history. But in reality, experts and authorities say, it was thousands of small but highly coordinated thefts.

As we reported on Thursday, federal prosecutors charged eight people with being the just New York cell of an operation that allegedly encompassed criminal cohorts in 26 countries.

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And the deaths in Bangladesh have prompted a number of American clothing companies to disclose where their products are made. Everlane is an online clothing retailer based in San Francisco that has always done that. Michael Preysman is the CEO and founder of Everlane, and we asked him where and how his company's T-shirts are manufactured.

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

NBC was once must-see TV. Now, the network's ratings have slipped behind Spanish Language TV. What happened to this once mighty TV network?

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Our last word in business today is a tribute to a father of Italian high-fashion. Ottavio Missoni died yesterday at age 92.

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Now before he was a fashion mogul, he ran track in the 1948 Olympics - which is where he met his wife, whose family owned a textile mill in northern Italy.

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Here's what's big in Japan - inflation. That's the start of NPR's business news.

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INSKEEP: OK. The Japanese currency, the yen, is falling like crazy against the U.S. dollar - which is just the way the Japanese central bank planned. The economy has been stagnant for nearly two decades, and a weak yen makes Japan more attractive to tourists and foreign investors.

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All right, prosecutors are calling it the biggest bank heist in New York City since the 1970s. They say a gang of cybercriminals drained $45 million from ATMs around the world.

Here's NPR's Joel Rose.

JOEL ROSE, BYLINE: United States Attorney Loretta Lynch says the eight men charged in New York were able to withdraw $2.8 million in cash in just one day, in February.

LORETTA LYNCH: This was a 21st century bank heist. But instead of guns and masks, this cybercrime organization used laptops and malware.

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.

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.

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 support should 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.

There were 323,000 first-time claims for unemployment insurance last week, down 4,000 from the week before, the Employment and Training Administration says.

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.

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.

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One reason the world is not yet running out of oil and gas is that energy companies keep finding ways to extract those resources from more and more difficult places, including far under the ocean. Royal Dutch Shell announced plans, yesterday, for the world's deepest offshore floating oil and gas facility.

NPR's Debbie Elliott reports.

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It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm David Greene.

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And I'm Steve Inskeep. It's college graduation season, a time when young people stop worrying about final exams and start worrying about getting a job. In a minute we'll hear some popular career advice dished out by commencement speakers. First, there's an ongoing debate over how well universities are preparing graduates for the real world and whether colleges themselves should operate more like businesses.

A while back, Max Kornblith sent the following email to Tyler Cowen, an economist who blogs at Marginal Revolution:

1) As a fairly recent graduate of an Ivy League institution (with a bachelor's degree), most of my classmates seemed to have some idea that career and life path choice should be driven by a "passion" such that the right choice is self-evident to the chooser. What does this belief mean to you as a social scientist? ...

YouTube is expected to announce in the coming days that it will launch paid subscription channels, a first for the online video platform that's been around since 2005. But, with the growing number of subscription services available for entertainment, shopping and news, some consumers say they're reaching digital subscription overload.

Former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling could have his more than 24-year prison sentence reduced by as many as 10 years under a deal announced Wednesday by the Justice Department.

The agreement with Skilling's lawyers, which still needs the approval of a federal judge, would reduce the former Enron chief's sentence to between 14 and 17 1/2 years.