Scott Neuman

Target has Walmart's price-conscious customer base in its sights, and its aim is improving, analysts say.

Minneapolis-based Target Corp., the nation's third-largest retailer, reported profits up 3.7 percent to $704 million for the quarter ending July 30 over the same quarter last year. Although profits for Wal-Mart Stores Inc. were even better — profits for the quarter were $3.8 billion, up 5.7 percent from a year — the company's sales at U.S. stores open for more than a year fell for the ninth consecutive quarter.

Broker and financial adviser Jim Lacamp has been in the business long enough to remember when Americans had little stake and even less interest in the stock market.

It was a time when "people had a pension and profit-sharing plan that was run by [their] company," says Lacamp, senior vice president at Fort Worth, Texas-based Macro Portfolio Advisors. "They might see what a stock did on the news, but it didn't really have an impact on their daily lives."

The sight of Hosni Mubarak bedridden and caged in a Cairo courtroom as his trial opened this week was perhaps an unbelievable moment for Egyptians who lived for decades under the former president and his feared secret police.

For others around the world, the images of Mubarak, his sons and other co-defendants held behind interlocking steel mesh have been shocking.

Defendant's cages like the one that housed the 83-year-old former leader may not be common outside Egypt, but they're still in use in parts of the Middle East, Latin America and Eastern Europe.

There's one thing that freshman Republicans and the old-guard GOP leadership can agree on — the Class of 2010 fundamentally changed the focus of the debate over taxes and spending.

In a key test of their clout, the group of congressional newcomers largely stuck to their guns through tense negotiations, forcing a first-ever cap on discretionary spending and staving off tax increases.

When McDonald's announced Tuesday that it would make the standard child's Happy Meal more healthful, company officials said they were responding to the desires of its customers. But the move also makes business sense, analysts say.

"This is good publicity and if you sell more happy meals, you're likely selling more Big Macs to the parents," said Peter Saleh, a restaurant analyst with Telsey Advisory Group in New York.

If the shooting and bombing rampage that killed dozens of people in Norway last week had happened in the United States, the man who confessed to the assault could be facing the death penalty. Instead, the maximum sentence Anders Behring Breivik faces — at least initially — is 21 years.

The massive heat wave that has baked much of the country's eastern half has scorched millions of acres of farmland, threatening crops and likely leading to higher prices at the supermarket, experts say.

Corn, which is at the crucial pollination stage in many areas of the Midwest, is especially vulnerable, but experts warn that if the high temperatures persist into August, the soybean crop could also take a hit.

Ratings agencies Standard & Poor's and Moody's both have warned that they might downgrade the United States' AAA bond rating if a deal between the White House and Congress on raising the debt ceiling isn't reached before an Aug. 2 deadline. NPR asked a trio of economists what it would mean if the bonds were downgraded. The economists are Edwin Truman, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington; Gregory Dago, principal U.S.

Judging from the comments left on the Netflix blog post announcing the company's move toward unbundling its mailed DVD and online streaming services, a lot of customers are not happy.

"Way to go again Netflix — Divide and Conquer — EPIC FAIL!!" was the response from one mildly disgruntled customer. Several others directed Netflix to dispose of their accounts in ways that we wouldn't want to detail on a family website like NPR.org.

The assassination of Afghan President Hamid Karzai's influential brother leaves a power vacuum in the country's south just as stability seemed to be returning in the region that once served as the Taliban capital, Afghanistan observers say.

Ahmed Wali Karzai — a onetime Chicago restaurateur who returned to Afghanistan after the 2001 fall of the Taliban — was killed Tuesday at his home in Kandahar. Some reports suggested the assassin may have been one of Ahmed Wali's own bodyguards. He had narrowly escaped earlier attempts on his life.

If employment is going to improve in the second half of the year, as many economists had forecast, there was no hint of it when the Labor Department released June's employment report Friday.

"It's a very discouraging report. It's much worse than expected and it's really hard to see any silver lining," said Nigel Gault, chief U.S. economist at IHS Global Insight.

The department said hiring last month nearly ground to a halt, slowing to a pace not seen in nine months. The unemployment rate pushed up to 9.2 percent from 9.1 percent in May.

A court order for the Pentagon to stop enforcing "don't ask, don't tell" is likely the last gasp of the 17-year policy that was repealed by Congress in December but remained temporarily in effect, experts and activists said Thursday.

Wednesday, the White House has unveiled a new counterterrorism strategy that would focus more on drone strikes and special operations and less on large-scale ground conflicts. NPR spoke with two experts in national security — Sean Burke, a vice president and senior fellow for the Center for National Policy and Ken Gude, managing director of the National Security and International Policy Program of the Center for American Progress — to get their thoughts on the strategy.

Realtors are hoping an uptick in home prices reported on Tuesday is the beginning of a turnaround, but industry experts say it's too soon to tell if the improvement is anything other than a seasonal blip.

The Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller home price index reported that prices in April rose in 13 of the 20 cities tracked. Washington, D.C., saw the biggest price increases, followed by San Francisco, Atlanta and Seattle.

The index, which covers metro areas that include about 50 percent of U.S. households, rose 0.7 percent, the first increase since July 2010.

Greece's day of reckoning is very nearly at hand.

Bright anger has spilled onto the street, as the country tries to dig its way out of an economic crisis. Prime Minister George Papandreou's government survived a key confidence vote, which he had called to help him pass deeply unpopular austerity measures. European Union ministers have threatened to cut off billions in bailout money if Greek legislators don't pass wage cuts and other painful austerity steps.

When Steve Jobs walked onstage last week to introduce the iCloud, the feeling of anticipation was palpable. Apple's version of "the cloud," he said, would "demote the PC" and usher in the next big revolution.

Jobs said nothing about the cloud-based computing revolution that is already under way — the one taking place in the company boardroom and IT department. Google, Amazon and IBM, among others, are serving a burgeoning market for business-oriented cloud services, which offer corporate clients the promise of cost savings and new capabilities.

Since turbid floodwaters drove Debbie Leach from her residence near Vicksburg, Miss., she has struggled to find a place to call home, even a temporary one, as she waits for the Mississippi River to recede and expose what may be left of her personal belongings.

Leach left her mobile home on Eagle Lake, an oxbow on the river that sits right on the Mississippi-Louisiana border, last month when the water level started to rise. Since then, she has bounced from staying with family to a Red Cross shelter.

As the bloated Mississippi River crests at near-record levels in Memphis, Tenn., Southern states are bracing for the slow-moving wall of water expected to soak towns from Illinois to Louisiana in flooding unlike anything seen in the better part of a century.

"The Mississippi is mighty, it's wicked ... and right now it's in a rage," Bob Nations Jr., director of the Office of Preparedness in Tennessee's Shelby County, told NPR this week.

The U.S. economic recovery continued to chug along as employers added jobs for a third-straight month.

The economy created a robust 244,000 jobs in April across a wide range of industries, according to a Labor Department report Friday. Gains in private-sector hiring — 268,000 jobs — was especially encouraging, although the number was offset slightly by jobs lost in state and local governments.

The new system of homeland security alerts unveiled Wednesday replaces one that critics said was vague and confusing — but it's not yet clear whether the simplified version can do any better job of keeping the public safe and informed.

The Department of Homeland Security announced Wednesday that the familiar red, orange, yellow, green and blue alerts will be supplanted by just two alerts: "Elevated Threat," warning of a credible terrorist threat against the United States, and "Imminent Threat" for a credible, specific and impending threat.

McDonald's Corp.'s super-sized effort to hire 50,000 new employees in a one-day blitz Tuesday has two purposes, company officials say — one obvious and one not so obvious.

The first, of course, is to fill open slots. The other is to help the company challenge its stereotyped image as an employer of last resort.

CBS' 60 Minutes has broadcast a damaging segment on Greg Mortenson, the author of the New York Times best-seller Three Cups of Tea, alleging that many of the stories in the book are exaggerated or outright fabrications and questioning the financial practices of his charity, the Central Asia Institute.

Questioned is the seminal story in the book telling how Mortenson stumbled into the village of Korphe after failing to summit Pakistan's K2.

More on those tornadoes that hit the south over the weekend, killing at least 45 people.

The bright spot in the tragedy is the 100 or so customers and employees in a Lowe's Home Improvement store in Sanford, N.C., who managed to save themselves through quick thinking.

A series of powerful tornadoes that swept across six states has left a path of death and destruction unparalleled since the mid-1980s, killing at least 45 people. The violent weather, described by witnesses as like something out of 'The Wizard of Oz' began Thursday but continued through the weekend, spawning 240 tornadoes in the south — including Oklahoma, Virginia, Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi.

Military intervention in Libya was supposed to be a quick mission: Use missiles and airstrikes to knock out Moammar Gadhafi's firepower and prevent attacks on civilians. Nearly a month in, Libyan rebels and government troops are stalemated and the NATO-led coalition is showing strain.