Business

Transcript

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

What if you could know tomorrow's news before anybody else? And if your first thought is, hey, I could get really, really rich, then we have a job for you. You are probably a good candidate for one of the many trading firms that have found a way to do just that. They pay money to get an advanced peek at crucial economic data before anybody else does.

If you thought your coach-class seat lacked legroom now, American Airlines has some bad news: It's probably going to get worse.

American plans to add seats to its Boeing 737s and McDonnell Douglas MD-80s, which account for about two-thirds of the airline's entire fleet of jetliners. The move was disclosed in a regulatory filing on Wednesday.

Here's American vice president of flight service Laurie Curtis quoted in the Airline Biz Blog.

More women are getting into farming, according to a recent analysis from the U.S Department of Agriculture.

The agency crunched numbers from the Agriculture Census and found that the number of U.S. farms operated by women nearly tripled over the past three decades, from 5 percent in 1978 to 14 percent by 2007.

Gannett Co. plans to buy TV station owner Belo for $1.5 billion in cash and $715 million in debt in a deal that will make it one of the nation's largest owners of network television affiliates.

French air traffic controllers are back in their towers. They had been on strike for two days — forcing the cancellation of more than 2,000 flights. But the issues at stake remain unresolved and affect the entire continent. They center on plans to reorganize and streamline the control of European airspace.

Cellphone thefts are now the single biggest source of property crime in many American cities. A recent study found that lost and stolen phones cost consumers close to $30 billion a year. And 10 percent of smartphone owners say they've had a phone stolen.

Almost everyone has a story about losing their phone; even tech reporters are not immune.

NPR's Laura Sydell lost her phone and spent over three hours skulking around San Francisco using an app and an iPad to track her phone thief.

The museum in Paris has unveiled new, sophisticated LED lighting for the painting. They want to bring out her colors — the way Leonardo da Vinci might have seen them.

Just three weeks ago, Japanese stocks were at a multi-year high — raising hopes for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's efforts to revitalize the world's third-largest economy. Since then, the market has dropped more than 20 percent.

In 1965, sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who would later become a U.S. senator from New York, authored a controversial report. It concluded the decline of the black nuclear family was a major component to black poverty. Nearly 50 years later, the Urban Institute has released a follow-up to Moynihan's study that looks at the current barriers poor black families continue to face, and compares those findings to the country's other ethnic groups.