The woman whose sexual harassment allegations led to the ouster of former Hewlett-Packard Co. CEO Mark Hurd claimed her work with the company dried up because she rebuffed Hurd's advances, a person close to the investigation told The Associated Press.
The substance of the complaint that led to Hurd's resignation from the world's largest technology company had not been publicly known until late Tuesday.
2010-08-06 Investors Are Still Behaving Badly
Every year the research firm Dalbar does a study that tries to quantify the impact of investor behavior on real-life returns by comparing investors' earnings to the average investment (using the S&P 500 as a proxy).
The latest study looks at the 20-year period that ended Dec. 31, 2009:Average investment return = 8.20%Average equity investor return = 3.17%
2010-07-30 Wall Street Ends July With Best Dow, S&P Performance in a Year
News that economic growth slowed during the spring gave the stock market a fitting end to a choppy July -- yet another back-and-forth day.
The Dow Jones industrial average, down almost 120 points in the first minutes of trading, recovered and seesawed throughout the session. The Dow was up 17 in late afternoon. The other major indexes also rose modestly. Traders opted for the safety of Treasury bonds, and that sent interest rates lower.
2010-07-29 Toyota recalls 412,000 cars in US, 16,000 in Japan
Toyota is recalling 412,000 passenger cars, mostly the Avalon model, in the U.S., and another 16,420 vehicles in Japan for steering problems, the automaker said Thursday.
The 373,000 Avalons being recalled in the U.S. range from the 2000 model year through to 2004 and have improper casting of the steering lock bar -- a component for the steering system -- causing cracks to develop on the surface.
2010-07-25 How profits, stocks can rise as economy stumbles
With earnings season in full swing, bulls and bears are combing through reports to arm themselves in what's become the mother of all stock market debates: Does the recovery gain steam, sending shares aloft? Or does it remain sluggish, or even stall, and push them down further?
A third possibility: Maybe the economy doesn't matter so much.
Larry Hatheway, an economist at UBS, says economic growth means companies selling more things. But he thinks that is not as important as it used to be to generating the profits needed to send stocks higher. That's because U.S. firms have mastered the art of pulling more and more money from each dollar of sales.
2010-07-22 Microsoft Tops Expectations With 48% Profit Gain
Microsoft Corp. said Thursday that its net income surged 48 percent in the most recent quarter, the latest sign that businesses are again spending money on technology.
Strong sales of Windows, particularly to Microsoft's corporate customers, helped boost results in the fiscal fourth quarter. Microsoft said it has sold more than 175 million licenses of the newest version, Windows 7, since it went on sale last year.
2010-07-21 Yahoo 2Q earnings climb 51 pct, but revenue modest
Yahoo Inc.'s turnaround effort wavered in the second quarter as the Internet company's lackluster revenue growth overshadowed a surge in net income.
The results released Tuesday could cause some investors to doubt the strategy of Yahoo's no-nonsense CEO, Carol Bartz, who was hired 18 months ago to lead the company out of a prolonged financial funk that has depressed its stock.
Bartz has been able to boost Yahoo's earnings by cutting costs, but so far hasn't been able to produce dramatic revenue gains.