Business News Headlines

NEW YORK (Reuters) - At the auction for Nortel Networks' wireless patents this week, Google's bids were mystifying, such as $1,902,160,540 and $2,614,972,128.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama moved to fill two key posts in the ranks of financial regulators as officials work to complete new rules required by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street oversight law.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Zynga Inc, developer of popular Facebook games such as FarmVille and Mafia Wars, could be the best proxy for investing in Facebook until the world's largest social network goes public itself.

DETROIT (Reuters) - The auto industry sputtered to its second consecutive month of weaker-than-expected U.S. sales in June, marked by disappointing results from General Motors Co, Ford Motor Co and the big Japanese automakers, as the weak economy and tight supply of cars left buyers wary.

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Eurogroup President Jean-Claude Juncker moved forward a meeting of euro zone finance ministers scheduled for Sunday in Brussels and changed it to a conference call on Saturday, his spokesman said on Friday.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn was released from house arrest on Friday after prosecutors said the hotel maid who accused him of attempted rape lied to a grand jury and made other false statements.

Nissan's plant is busily rolling out the Leaf electric car and other models on a Saturday, having shifted production schedules for an aggressive nationwide effort to fight the power crunch created by a tsunami-crippled nuclear plant.

A few dozen members of Cuba's small but growing Twitter community have met in real space for the first time. They got to put unfamiliar faces with familiar user names, and they commiserated about the woeful Internet access on an island that has the second-worst Web connectivity rate in the world.

Minnesota lawmakers headed home for a long holiday weekend, bracing for likely public anger as some of them meet constituents for the first time since a failure to reach a budget agreement forced a government shutdown.

When Unit 2 began to shake, Hiroyuki Kohno's first hunch was that something was wrong with the turbines. He paused for a moment, then went back to logging the day's radioactivity readings.

Call it an Independence Day discount.

An air safety watchdog on Saturday grounded all Australian domestic flights of a Tiger Airways subsidiary for the next week, saying the budget airline twice flew under the minimum allowed altitude. About 35,000 passengers are affected, and more could follow if the airline fails to quickly address regulators' concerns.

The hotel maid who accused former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn of sexual assault may have inflicted fatal damage on her own case by lying to prosecutors about her life story and what she did in the moments after the suspected attack, legal experts said.

This is one anniversary few feel like celebrating.

German conglomerate Bayer CropScience agreed Friday to pay up to $750 million to settle several lawsuits with U.S. farmers who claimed a strain of the company's unapproved genetically modified rice contaminated the food supply and hurt their crop prices.

The Federal Aviation Administration announced new steps Friday to help prevent air traffic controllers from falling asleep on the job, including allowing controllers to use sick or annual leave time if they are too tired to work.

Nissan's plant is busily rolling out the Leaf electric car and other models on a Saturday, having shifted production schedules for an aggressive nationwide effort to fight the power crunch created by a tsunami-crippled nuclear plant.

Nissan's plant is busily rolling out the Leaf electric car and other models on a Saturday. The weekend schedule is part of an aggressive nationwide effort to fight a power crunch caused by nuclear reactors in meltdown from a recent earthquake and tsunami.