National News

Two hedge funds affiliated with SAC Capital Advisors have agreed to the settlements. They did not admit any wrongdoing.

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China's new president has vowed to crack down on corruption. One widespread practice involves paying bribes to get high-level positions in politics or the bureaucracy.

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China's new president has vowed to crack down on corruption. One widespread practice involves paying bribes to get high-level positions in politics or the bureaucracy.

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Canadian officials are investigating a "highly unusual" incident in which a driverless van traveled across the runway at Toronto's Pearson International Airport, at the same time an Air Canada flight was landing. The plane's pilots did not heed commands to abort their landing.

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If signed into law by Gov. Martin O'Malley, which is expected, Maryland will become the 18th state to end capital punishment.

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Senate investigators held a hearing today on JPMorgan's estimated $6.3 billion loss on risky trading connected to Bruno Iksil, a trader known as the "London Whale." But new evidence from internal emails and phone calls suggests that even bigger fish may be involved.

"The details of this report were incredibly damning and they really portrayed a bank that showed an impressive amount of hubris and incompetence -- senior managers that were misleading to the public, misleading to the regulators," said FT Alphaville's Cardiff Garcia. "This is going to be a really powerful selling point for advocates of that particular policy [to break up the big banks]."

And yet, many analysts believe this incident still may not cause any major changes.

"Jamie Dimon and the bank have acknowledged over and over again that this was an enormous mistake," Fortune's Leigh Gallagher said. "On the other hand, this $6 billion loss -- they have billions more. This was not damaging materially to the company. It was damaging to its reputation...It did not take the company down in any way, shape or form -- and it wouldn't, because it's so big."

Listen above for more analysis of this week's business news. Meanwhile, check out the #longreads suggestions for the weekend.

Cardiff Garcia suggests:

• A scholar goes on the road to play a classic economics game -- similar to the prisoner's dilemma -- with indigenous villagers, and winds up making a remarkable contribution to the study of how culture affects cognition.
• Wanna know what it's really like to climb the ladder at an investment bank? The Epicurean Dealmaker explains what happens at each rung.
• The science of sleeplessness is a bit more strange than most people realize.

Leigh Gallagher has these reads:

• A look into the team behind Magic Johnson's winning bid for the Los Angeles Dodgers -- the Guggenheim Partners.
• Fortune's Patricia Sellers explores the similiarities and differences between two of the most powerful women in business today: Yahoo's Marissa Mayer and Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg.
• And the New Yorker hitches a ride on a megacommute with Rebecca Davis O'Brien.

The comet's now putting on a show in the Northern Hemisphere's night sky. Using its orbiting observatories, NASA captured a stereo view from space that offers a unique perspective.

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North Korea has been increasingly hostile, warning of a preemptive nuclear strike on the U.S.

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When you think about poverty you might think about hunger and homelessness, but you also should think about the tough financial decisions that families in need have to cope with. A new HBO documentary, "American Winter" takes a look at the tough choices Americans face. The documentary follows the stories of eight families struggling to survive in the aftermath of the Great Recession, and reveals the impact of cuts to social services, the decline of the middle class, and the fracturing of the American Dream. The makers of that documentary, Joe and Harry Gantz wanted to make the documentary to provide an intimate snapshot of the state of the nation's economy as it is playing out in the lives of many American families.

 

"We saw that so many people were losing homes, losing jobs, working in jobs that didn't support a family even if they were working overtime. Then we saw that that was followed by cuts to social services across this country. With more need than at any time over the last 80 years, with all these cuts going on, we decided that we would do documentary that kind of looked at the human side of the equation. There's been films and books written about how Wall Street's affected, how banks were affected, so we wanted to look at how ordinary American families were affected across the country," says Joe.

How did the Gantz brothers find the families?

"We actually found all the families through monitoring calls at the 211 service in Portland, Ore. 211 is the number you call in most cities -- some cities it's 311 -- if you need some type of social services. We listened to hundreds of calls a day and asked some of them if they'd be willing to allow us to come out and film their attempt to get social services and get back on their feet," says Harry.

The families gave filmmakers intimate access into their lives.

"Once we worked with them, we worked by staying in the background. We don't tell them anything about what we would like them to do or not do. We just stay completely in the background and film their lives over three, four, five, six months. We were let into every aspect of their lives. There were some very difficult times going on for these families. We had to watch them decide whether they were going to pay their electricity bill or rent, whether they were going to move out of their apartment, whether they were going to lose their home altogether and have to go into a shelter," says Joe. "And then also families who didn't have enough to eat, needing to go to food banks to keep their families fed. That's difficult, very difficult, to be there so intimately in their life and watch this go on."

Joe says the stress of these families having to face tough choices -- like buying groceries or paying for rent -- day in and day out really affected him. Harry says many families in the documentary struggle with having to ask for help from the government or their own family members.

"You'll see many people discuss that in the film, where they felt they would never be in a position where they would ever ask the government for anything," says Harry. "Another gentleman is talking about asking his father to help him pay an electric bill and how that just pains him so much."

The documentary "American Winter" premieres on March 18, 2013 on HBO.

This week, the so-called Gang of Eight Democratic and Republican lawmakers unveiled a bipartisan plan for immigration reform. That news, plus a helpful assist from St. Patrick, got us thinking about immigrants and money.

It's difficult to be the newcomer in any setting. To adjust, you study your surroundings and learn ways to make yourself fit in and make others around you comfortable. So consider for a moment the immigrant experience and all the things newcomers to America must become aware of to survive in this country. But there are countless ways Americans can learn from immigrants as well. And it goes far beyond food and language. Different cultures carry customs from their homelands that, when observed and imitated, can help Americans strengthen their family life, their health and even their financial status.

What cultural wisdom found in immigrant communities can help improve our lives? For that, we turn to Claudia Kolker, author of "The Immigrant Advantage: What We Can Learn From Newcomers to America About Health, Happiness and Hope" and a contributing editor at the Houston Chronicle.

"I think we're not considering [the benefits of immigration] as much as we could. Honestly, that in a lot of ways is human nature. I don't think we've ever considered it very much, but it is useful because there is so much evidence that on an entrepreneurial level, a business-formation level, a preventive health care level, that the immigrants who are here in this country already -- people we already here can track and know about -- have enriched us both metaphorically and literally. So it is a good time to look around us and see the ways that immigrants are succeeding in the things that we want," says Kolker.

Kolker says although the immigrant experience is typically viewed through an economic lens, their stories are not always ones of hardship. When Kolker looked at her immigrant friends, she realized that they had all sorts of achievements in terms of their children, families, savings, even their meal-time habits that she wanted. That's why she says this book is based, in part, on envy.

"In reporting [this book] I would ask foreign-born people, 'What's the smartest thing that people in your country do that we in the United States should emulate even as you hang onto them?' And the interesting thing is that everybody had a quick answer," says Kolker.

For example, in her book, Kolker discusses the Vietnamese money club, something similar to a rotating credit association or loan club. In the club, each person commits to giving a certain amount of money every month until 12 months have passed. Each month, one person walks home from the meeting with all that money and cash. But then that person has to keep paying back for the next 11 months until all of his or her friends in the group have gotten their pot of money. Kolker says it uses positive peer pressure and is very powerful. Even to forget your money one time, you'll destroy your credit with your best friends, she says.

This week, the so-called Gang of Eight Democratic and Republican lawmakers unveiled a bipartisan plan for immigration reform. That news, plus a helpful assist from St. Patrick, got us thinking about immigrants and money.

It's difficult to be the newcomer in any setting. To adjust, you study your surroundings and learn ways to make yourself fit in and make others around you comfortable. So consider for a moment the immigrant experience and all the things newcomers to America must become aware of to survive in this country. But there are countless ways Americans can learn from immigrants as well. And it goes far beyond food and language. Different cultures carry customs from their homelands that, when observed and imitated, can help Americans strengthen their family life, their health and even their financial status.

What cultural wisdom found in immigrant communities can help improve our lives? For that, we turn to Claudia Kolker, author of "The Immigrant Advantage: What We Can Learn From Newcomers to America About Health, Happiness and Hope" and a contributing editor at the Houston Chronicle.

"I think we're not considering [the benefits of immigration] as much as we could. Honestly, that in a lot of ways is human nature. I don't think we've ever considered it very much, but it is useful because there is so much evidence that on an entrepreneurial level, a business-formation level, a preventive health care level, that the immigrants who are here in this country already -- people we already here can track and know about -- have enriched us both metaphorically and literally. So it is a good time to look around us and see the ways that immigrants are succeeding in the things that we want," says Kolker.

Kolker says although the immigrant experience is typically viewed through an economic lens, their stories are not always ones of hardship. When Kolker looked at her immigrant friends, she realized that they had all sorts of achievements in terms of their children, families, savings, even their meal-time habits that she wanted. That's why she says this book is based, in part, on envy.

"In reporting [this book] I would ask foreign-born people, 'What's the smartest thing that people in your country do that we in the United States should emulate even as you hang onto them?' And the interesting thing is that everybody had a quick answer," says Kolker.

For example, in her book, Kolker discusses the Vietnamese money club, something similar to a rotating credit association or loan club. In the club, each person commits to giving a certain amount of money every month until 12 months have passed. Each month, one person walks home from the meeting with all that money and cash. But then that person has to keep paying back for the next 11 months until all of his or her friends in the group have gotten their pot of money. Kolker says it uses positive peer pressure and is very powerful. Even to forget your money one time, you'll destroy your credit with your best friends, she says.

Silicon Valley may be the financial center of the tech industry, but lately San Francisco is earning a reputation as the heart and soul of it. Tech workers who don’t want to live in the Valley’s sprawling suburbs have migrated northward. And hundreds of tech-related businesses have set up shop in San Francisco too. But the culture of tech that's taking hold in in the city hasn't come without controversy.

If you’re a young professional employed by one of the big tech companies, contemporary San Francisco is a carnival of delights. On a given weekend, you might choose from the soft opening of a high-end neighborhood grocery store, a pricey music festival rollicking through landmark city parks, or a party for a podcasting startup at a tri-level downtown club. Thousands of tech workers live in vibrant neighborhoods like San Francisco’s Mission District, and commute in corporate shuttles to their jobs in Silicon Valley.

Just a couple of miles away, there’s a neighborhood where all of this growth has been conspicuously absent -- the Tenderloin District. A quarter of Tenderloin residents live under the poverty line. Social service centers are clustered in this neighborhood, alongside drug activity, and immigrant families who can’t afford most other areas.

Walk a few blocks, and you hit a stretch of Market Street, San Francisco’s main thoroughfare, that’s also been untouched by growth until recently. Nearly two years ago, Twitter leased a building here. To get Twitter to stay, and grow, in San Francisco, the city gave the company tax breaks on its stock options and payroll.

Twitter's press office didn't respond to requests for comment, but there are plenty of other people talking up the potential transformation the company could bring to this moribund stretch of Market Street.

SF Gentrification 2.0 -- For Better or Worse? from Turnstyle Video on Vimeo.

"The youthful energy that comes with a project like this -- or any place where you’re going to put 7,000 employees on a city block that’s been essentially vacant for a decade -- will create an energy for the area that we haven’t seen here," said Tom McDonnell, V.P. of Leasing for Shorenstein. The development firm renovated this art deco building for Twitter, and other tech companies followed, renting space near “the cool kids.” Microsoft’s Yammer is here. So is the online retailer One King’s Lane. Forty-five-hundred residential units will soon go up near Twitter’s headquarters.

"That building jacked up the rents astronomically," said writer and Tenderloin resident Joseph Thomas. "All my merchant friends on Market Street, two or three of them are out of business." Thomas says the area is becoming unaffordable for middle and low income residents.

San Francisco Board of Supervisors president David Chiu says the explosion of the tech sector is directly responsible for a positive change: "Our budget deficit today is a quarter of what it was four years ago." Welcoming companies like Twitter here, says Chiu, brought in revenue that allows San Francisco to strengthen its social safety net -- access to homeless and mental health services, child care, at-risk youth programs.

Another ripple effect Chiu cites: job creation. The Bay Area Council Economic Institute found that for every new tech industry job, four non-tech jobs opened up.

Critics say those new jobs aren't necessarily good-enough jobs.

Sara Shortt heads the Housing Rights Committee, an advocacy group. "There will be lower paying jobs ...opportunities to service those tech workers. But those are exactly the kind of jobs that won't sustain families trying to afford rents in this market." Shortt says many of San Francisco's bus drivers or janitors have already been priced out of living in the city where they work -- and more will follow.

For many people born and raised in San Francisco, its new economy is at odds with the city's reputation for progressive social change.  For many people whom tech has delivered here, the city’s future is bright. The mid-Market area is only  the latest neighborhood where how much money you have may determine whether you get to stay.

Researchers say the war will cost the U.S. $2.2 trillion, a figure that far exceeds the original government estimate of $50 to $60 billion. If you factor in borrowing costs, the U.S. will end up paying nearly $4 trillion for the invasion.

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The father of Guffran, then a 9-year-old Iraqi girl, was gunned down in a Baghdad street in 2006 at the height of the war. She continues writing letters to him, just as she did when he was alive. Now, she lives in one room with her mother and brother. She wants to study but faces difficult odds.

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Scientists say the discovery of more carbon than oxygen and no methane in the atmosphere of a gas giant favors one theory of solar system formation.

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Jeb Bush is popular in conservative circles and is the third member of the Bush family to be seen as a presidential contender. (The last two were elected.) So is there some sort of How to Be President checklist somewhere in the Bush house? If so, it might look something like this.

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Jeb Bush is popular in conservative circles and is the third member of the Bush family to be seen as a presidential contender. (The last two were elected.)

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French researchers confirm that the immune systems of 14 adults are apparently controlling HIV without medication. It's further evidence that early treatment may prevent the virus from establishing "reservoirs" of HIV-infected cells in the body.

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Is it the message or its delivery? That's one of the questions being debated as Republicans — like all parties out of power — plot their comeback. Some think they need to take a new tack on issues; others believe that the GOP's core conservative principles are still political winners.

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The NHL will shuffle its teams before next season, moving from three divisions in both the Eastern and Western Conferences to a total of four divisions. The league's owners approved the plan Thursday; the players' association gave its OK last week.

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