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Media
Rupert Murdoch: Not ‘Fit,’ but Still ‘Proper’ — for Now

Olivia Harris / Reuters
By Sam Gustin

News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch received a startlingly strong rebuke Tuesday from a committee of British parliamentarians, who bluntly said the media magnate “is not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company.” It was the harshest fallout yet for Murdoch over a phone-hacking-and-police-corruption scandal that seems to get more dramatic by the week. But despite his increasingly plaintive displays of contrition, the octogenarian mogul shows no signs of stepping down from the company that he built from a single Australian paper over 50 years ago, which is now one of the most powerful media empires in the world.

Economy
What Chen Guangcheng Means for the Global Economy
By Michael Schuman

Chinese human-rights activist Chen Guangcheng is a brave man who has taken on China’s brutal authoritarian government and suffered personally for it, but beyond winning the hearts of sympathetic admirers around the world, his impact has largely been local. That changed, however, when he made his dash for safety from his house-prison last week and ended up under the protection of the U.S. Of course, from his standpoint, it makes perfect sense to seek out the Americans. Who else has the political will, economic clout and just plain chutzpah to stand up to China on his behalf? Yet in making that fateful choice, he has inserted himself into the complicated U.S.-China relationship, and therefore, into the global economy.

Europe
4 Ways the Euro Could Fail
By Michael Sivy

All courses of action appear to lead to an eventual financial crisis of some sort. But moderate progrowth policies are the best bet to minimize the damage
Europe

Democracy Could Destroy the Euro

Wealth

Is Romney the Wrong Kind of Rich?

Careers & Workplace

Business Etiquette: 5 Rules That Matter Now

How Baby Names Can Help Marketers Predict the Next Big Thing

Few parents would admit to naming their baby after a hurricane. But unconsciously that might be exactly what many of us are doing — or at least appropriating the sounds of a name that, if the storm grows large enough, is uttered over and over on the news and in the course of casual conversation.

+Wall Street & Markets | 16 hours ago

Dow Jones Average Hits Highest Mark Since ’07

By Associated Press

NEW YORK — The fastest growth in U.S. manufacturing in 10 months gave stocks a lift Tuesday and pushed the Dow Jones industrial average to its highest close in more than four years.

Manufacturing expanded last month at the strongest pace since June, according to the Institute for Supply Management. Orders, hiring and production all rose.

+Muppets | 19 hours ago

7 Twitter Accounts Goldman Sachs’ New Social Media Guru Must Follow

By Sam Gustin

Photo-Illustration by Alexander Ho; Getty Images

Goldman Sachs, the most powerful investment bank on Wall Street, is getting into the social media game. In a job posting on the company website, the bank said the ideal candidate will be responsible for “monitoring online conversations and participating in those conversations to build brand visibility and thought leadership.” It’s just the latest step in an image campaign launched by newly-installed PR honcho Jake Siewert designed to rehabilitate the company’s image after years of public scorn in the wake of the financial crisis.

+Management Tip of the Day | 23 hours ago

Turn Your Employees into Company Advocates

By Harvard Business Review

Loyal, passionate employees benefit a company as much as dedicated customers. They stay longer, work more creatively, and go the extra mile. So how do you turn employees into advocates for your company and its work?

+Economy | 24 hours ago

Europe Workers Denounce Austerity on May Day

By Associated Press

MADRID — Banging drums and waving flags, tens of thousands of workers marked May Day in European cities Tuesday with a mix of anger and gloom over austerity measures imposed by leaders trying to contain the eurozone’s intractable debt crisis.

Taking the baton from Asia, where unions demanded wage increases as they transformed the day from one celebrating workers rights to one of international protest, workers turned out in droves in Greece, France and Spain, the latest focus of a debt nightmare that has already forced three eurozone countries to seek financial bailouts.

+Wall Street & Markets | 1 day ago

FRONTLINE Preview: “I felt like I was doing something immoral.”

By Sam Gustin

Six weeks ago, a young, Stanford-educated Goldman Sachs employee named Greg Smith wrote a scathing op-ed in The New York Times decrying his firm’s “toxic culture” — and then promptly disappeared from sight. The New York Post soon reported that he’d parleyed his poison-pen into a $1.5 million book deal with a top Manhattan-based publisher. Unlike Smith, the highly-educated young people in the video above – an excerpt from tonight’s Frontline: Money, Power and Wall Street, (Part 2) — are willing to show their faces on camera. Million-dollar book deals may or may not be forthcoming. But if they share anything with Smith, it’s a sense that something went very, very wrong on the way to their Wall Street dream.

+Investing | 1 day ago

Companies, Flush with Cash, Share More With Shareholders. Finally.

By Nancy Miller

Corporate America, flush with cash, is finally sharing a bit more with shareholders. It’s about time. U.S. corporations are on track yet again to report amazing returns for the first quarter. And they have tons of cash — about $3.6 trillion.

+Food and Beverage Industry | 1 day ago

Prices Go Thigh-high as Consumers Seek Dark Meat

By Associated Press

MINNEAPOLIS — Pat LaFrieda Jr. can’t get enough chicken thighs. If his family business featured on the new Food Network series “Meat Men” orders 100 cases of boneless, skinless thighs, his supplier might deliver only 60.

That’s because consumers have discovered something chefs have long known about dark meat: “It was always the least expensive protein that you could buy, but it had the most amount of flavor,” LaFrieda said.

+Apple | 1 day ago

Apple’s Tax Avoidance: Evil Scheming, Good Business, or Both?

By Sam Gustin

The New York Times is out with the latest installment of its iEconomy series, which focuses on Apple, the world’s most profitable company. The article details the elaborate — and legal — ways that Apple, and other tech companies, minimize their tax bills. The piece raises several questions: Is Apple to be condemned for its tax-avoidance strategies, or praised for maximizing profits for shareholders? (Is it even possible for a corporate giant to be both “evil” and “good” at the same time?) Is the real culprit the complex U.S. corporate tax code? Or is this just an example of one of the world’s best-performing companies taking advantage of a globalized, increasingly digital economy to push the limits of U.S. tax law?

+Europe | 1 day ago

Why We Should Worry About Spain’s Economic Pain

By Michael Schuman

Protesters raise their fists as they sing "The Internationale" during a May Day demonstration on Labour Day in central Madrid May 1, 2012.

Two years ago this month I was in Madrid reporting a story on the troubles of the Spanish economy and what they meant for Europe and its debt crisis. And here I am today writing about the troubles of the Spanish economy and what they mean for Europe and its debt crisis. I usually don’t like to repeat myself, but the fact that I am anyway shows just how badly Europe’s strategy for resolving its debt crisis is failing.