AP - Israeli drug maker Teva has beaten out rivals Pfizer and Actavis to acquire German generic drug maker Ratiopharm GmbH — in a deal announced Thursday worth some euro3.6 billion, or nearly $5 billion.
AP - President Barack Obama says his health care overhaul would be the most significant effort to reduce the nation's deficit since the balanced budget act of the 1990s.
Reuters - A Lehman Brothers bankruptcy examiner's report will help securities regulators in their investigation of large financial firms involved in the Wall Street meltdown, a top regulator said on Wednesday.
Reuters - Presidents of regional Federal Reserve banks on Thursday defended their role in supervising small banks, and said ending it would cut a link between the central bank and the national heartland.
Reuters - Winnebago Industries posted its first quarterly profit in nearly two years as sales of its largest and most expensive motorhomes rebounded modestly.
AP - Greece warned Thursday that it will be forced to turn to the International Monetary Fund if the EU can't agree to a bailout plan next week that will help reduce its market borrowing rates.
Reuters - Current Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgage-backed securities are likely to retain U.S. government backing should Congress create a new system for financing U.S. homes, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke said on Wednesday.
Reuters - U.S. bank regulators may extend a guarantee program set up at the peak of the financial crisis, fearing that ending the program could spark liquidity failures at small banks.
AFP - Spain's Inditex, Europe's biggest clothing retailer and the company behind Zara, posted Wednesday a rise in profit as strong sales abroad, especially in Asia, offset sluggish domestic demand.
Reuters - A U.S. federal judge dismissed a shareholder lawsuit accusing Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce and four executives, including Chief Executive Gerald McCaughey, of misleading investors about the bank's exposure to subprime mortgages.
BusinessWeek - Tinashe Chinyanga describes his childhood in Zimbabwe as fairly standard, working in the fields every morning before walking to school in a nearby village. But the rest of his education has been a world away from his village friends: boarding school, then a medical degree, and now the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business (GSB). Education was his ticket out of an early grave, says 28-year-old Chinyanga. "Most of my peers have HIV, if they're not already dead." Chinyanga owes his more fortunate path in part to his father, who was a teacher and pushed him to succeed. ...