Business

The gross domestic product fell seven-tenths of a percent from the first quarter — much more than expected, and the most in three years. Output shrank in part because of unusually rainy weather and the extra public holiday because of the Queen's Jubilee.

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RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

Millions of people lost power in the Derecho storm that lashed the mid-Atlantic last month, and a big reason for that was trees falling on power lines. Utility companies have been criticized for that. So some have been aggressively removing trees to prevent future damage and they're getting criticized for that, too, as Sacha Pfeiffer of member station WBUR reports.

SACHA PFEIFFER, BYLINE: There's a strange site rolling through Boston's suburbs lately. It's called a Brontosaurus, and it's a massive tree-cutting machine.

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LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:

Today, we conclude our series about an attempt to diversify Silicon Valley. It's called NewME, which stands for New Media Entrepreneurship. Seven entrepreneurs, women and African-Americans, are getting a crash course on how to launch a start-up. And as Amy Standen from member station KQED reports, one of them is getting more attention than he bargained for.

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LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:

Also disappointing, Apple's earnings report yesterday. Wall Street was underwhelmed.

And as NPR's Steve Henn reports, Apple's shares fell more than 5 percent.

STEVE HENN, BYLINE: Apple brought in $35 billion in revenue, but the company still managed to disappoint Wall Street analysts, like Walter Piecyk at BTIG.

WALTER PIECYK: Apple missed on iPhones - they only sold 26 million. The street was expecting much more.

Apple reported its financial results for the quarter ended June 30, and depending how you look at it, they're either amazing or disappointing.

The company says it made $8.8 billion in profits over the course of three months. That's more than enough to buy every share of Alcoa, the global aluminum giant, which was worth just under $8.6 billion when the stock market closed this afternoon.

Ford Motor Co. intends to prove that good things come in small packages — really small packages. The company has taken engine downsizing to a new level with its new three-cylinder EcoBoost engine, which has been introduced in Europe and is set to hit the U.S. market next year.

The EcoBoost offers more power than many conventional four-cylinder engines, with fuel economy numbers a hybrid could envy. Early fans are calling it a modern "little engine that could," and Ford is betting that American customers are ready to embrace a three-cylinder engine.

President Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney have been trading attacks over the issue of American jobs being moved overseas.

The president has pounded Romney for the investments made by his former firm Bain Capital in the 1990s. Not to be outdone, the Romney campaign has suggested most of the money from the president's stimulus program went to create jobs overseas.

Mark Thomas is using a pay phone, but he isn't paying. And physically, he's not even that close to the phone.

He's sitting on a bench on the street in Astoria, Queens, checking email on his netbook. It's grabbing an Internet signal from a military-grade antenna on top of a pay phone down the block.

"It's not the speediest but you can't complain about free, right?" Thomas says.

A spike in iPad demand wasn't enough to offset slower iPhone sales in the third quarter as Apple Inc. reported lower-than-expected revenues, sending its after-hours stock price on a 5 percent dive.

The company announced third-quarter revenue of $35 billion, or $9.32 per share; earlier, Bloomberg had projected $37.22 billion, or 10.37 per share.

For today's show, we've collected three Planet Money radio stories never before heard on the show. All of them deal with people who handle other people's money — a politician's, a workforce's, and even a continent's:

Just How Blind Are Blind Trusts, Anyway?: With questions swirling about Mitt Romney's investments, a look at how blind trusts really work.

This week in The New York Times Magazine, Adam Davidson opens a hard-to-trace offshore company in Belize, which turns out to be a piece of cake:

Lego Group, maker of those iconic plastic building blocks, inspires an almost fanatical following in some quarters. But as a business, it turns out, it came close to going bust by following the hot advice of the day — and then recovered by turning to a more prosaic playbook.