National / International News

The prime minister has been criticised after he opposed calls to return the Parthenon Marbles to Greece and the Koh-i-Noor diamond to India.

India's finance minister has announced plans to set up the country's first ever women only bank. P Chidambaram says he hopes that it will be granted a license by October.

Supporters hope it will help women establish businesses and give them financial independence. But not everyone is a fan.

"No, no. I feel it is a very cheap and meaningless gimmick. I find it very strange. I never felt unsafe in a mixed bank. I do not think its necessary," says Rina Nag, who has spent her life working in a bank.

Women's rights have been at the center of a heated debate in India following the gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old woman in Delhi late last year. The government is hoping that the $200 million it's investing to set up the banks signals a committment to women's issues and helps produce a new generation of Indian businesswomen.

Groupon’s board of directors fired the company’s CEO yesterday. Andrew Mason founded the daily deal site. This is, in many ways, a familiar story.

An ideas man builds up a business, takes it public, and then…

“Some kind of infrastructure is needed,” says James Abruzzo, co-founder of the Institute for Ethical Leadership at Rutgers Business School. “And clearly that was the case here."

The same thing happened to Steve Jobs. Apple’s board forced him out in the mid-1980s. Something similar happened at Yahoo! Jerry Yang started that company, and when he was CEO, he opposed a takeover bid from Microsoft. That was it.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a dean at the Yale School of Management, remembers Polaroid founder Ed Land’s last days as CEO.

“Analysts were saying, ‘How about the bottom line?’  He said, ‘The bottom line is in heaven.’”

Founders who become executives have vision. That’s a given, but management consultant and venture capitalist Peter Cohan argues they can be blinded by that.

“They think, I created this thing. I’m the only one who can run it.” 

And the fact is, Cohan says, no one is irreplaceable.

NHS patients are being bombarded with unwanted medical equipment for stoma care, an investigation by Radio 4's You and Yours has found.

The Harlem Shake viral video trend has been going a month. It's been unique in the speed of its spread.

Once again lawmakers are up against a deadline. This time, it looks like they won't strike some sort of deal. That means about $85 billion worth of spending cuts will start to spread across many federal agencies.

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The search is on to find a couple to travel to Mars, but how easy will it be to get along? Explorer Deborah Shapiro provides marital survival tips.

The family of a five-year-old boy who accidentally spent £1,700 on iTunes receives a full refund.

The rate of unemployment in the eurozone rose to a fresh record high in January, climbing from 11.8% to 11.9%.

Opening most of the NHS in England to private firms could alienate doctors and render the reforms "a complete waste of time", a GP who helped draft the plans warns.

The veteran British actress has won rave reviews for her performance in Jesse Eisenberg's new play The Revisionist, in an intimate off-Broadway production.

The cost of prescription charges in England will rise by 20p to £7.85 from 1 April, the government has announced.

Nick Clegg hails a "stunning victory" for the Liberal Democrats in the Eastleigh by-election, as the UK Independence Party pushes the Conservatives into third place.

Two US sailors who pleaded guilty to the rape of a Japanese woman in Okinawa are sentenced to nine and 10 years in prison.

UK house prices rose by 0.2% in February compared with the previous month but were the same as a year ago, the Nationwide says.

At least two Malaysian policemen are reportedly killed in clashes at a village in Sabah province occupied by a clan from the Philippines.

Film studios are starting to target mobile applications that use copyrighted images and film clips without permission.

The Ethiopian Orthodox Church elects Abune Mathias as its new head six months after the death of the previous patriarch.

Yes, the dreaded sequester is finally here, and as you've already heard many times, it's going to hit the Pentagon the hardest, cutting $50 billion or 9 percent of its budget. Putting aside questions of national security, what's that going to do to the economy in places that depend on defense spending?

Defense is big business in St. Louis. Under the sequester many of the 5,000 civilians working at nearby Scott Air Force Base are facing one day of unpaid leave every week.

But is a 20 percent pay cut for a few thousand people really going to hurt consumer spending in a region of 2.8 million?

"I'd say the effect is likely to be fairly minimal," says Glenn MacDonald, a professor of Economics at Washington University.

Defense contractor Boeing is the second-largest employer in the region, with a workforce of 15,000 people. But it's likely to be buffered from the immediate impacts of the sequester.

Roman Schweizer is a Senior Defense Policy Analyst at Guggenheim Securities. He says defense contracts are typically multi-year arrangements.
        
"So the brunt of that 9 percent cut would be spread over the course of anywhere from one to three to five years."

Which leaves plenty of time for Congress to reverse course, take money out of butter, and put it back in guns.

Young voters overwhelmingly supported Barack Obama in each of the past two presidential elections. Making sure they don't vote Democratic again is a top priority for national Republicans. Some young conservatives offer their ideas about what the GOP needs to do to win over their generation.

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