Business

"The U.S. economy has continued to recover, but economic activity appears to have decelerated somewhat during the first half of this year," Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke tells Congress this morning in testimony prepared for his semiannual report on economic conditions and monetary policy.

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RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

Today's last word in business could be several things: abundance mentality or win-win.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

Or maybe sharpening the saw. Those are all aspects of "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People." The author of that business Bible died yesterday. Stephen Covey was 79.

MONTAGNE: He wrote "The 7 Habits" in 1989. Years later, Covey appeared on this program. He was asked what skills of leader should have.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED INTERVIEW)

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RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

And in Silicon Valley, the buzz is the latest hire by Yahoo. Marissa Mayer is the new CEO. Yahoo lured the 37-year-old away from Google, were she was one of that company's most prominent executives. She studied computer science at Stanford, was hired on as employee number 20 at Google, and as NPR's Steve Henn reports, she is something of a rock star in the tech world.

STEVE HENN, BYLINE: For years the rap on Yahoo has been: this company lacks focus.

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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

And we're here next about a new educational partnership with Silicon Valley. It's what the University of Virginia. You may recall last month, UVA's board of governors fired and then rehired President Teresa Sullivan. One reason some board members say they called for her ouster in the first place was that she had not moved quickly enough to expand the university's online courses. That has prompted new initiative being announced today, as NPR's Claudio Sanchez reports.

Europe's largest bank allowed drug cartels to launder billions of dollars through its U.S. operations, and skirted bans against transactions with Iran. Those are among the findings of a Senate investigation of London-based HSBC. Executives from the bank are in Washington for a hearing on the probe.

There's something new to prevent HIV infections.

The Food and Drug Administration on Monday approved a once-a-day pill that can drastically lower a person's risk of getting the virus that causes AIDS.

It's called Truvada — the first HIV prevention pill.

It's not cheap — around $13,000 a year — and it's not clear what insurers will pay for it. And there's worry that people taking the pill might relax safe-sex precautions.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney says he can do better than President Obama at finding jobs for unemployed Americans. One way he would do that is by bringing back personal re-employment accounts.

When people lose their jobs, one of the first places they turn to is their state unemployment office, where they can sign up for unemployment benefits; they often can enroll in some kind of retraining class as well.

In 2004, the Bush administration conducted an experiment to begin privatizing a small part of the federal retraining program.

Yahoo is turning to a longtime Google executive to try to turn around the ailing company. Effective tomorrow, Marissa Mayer will be Yahoo's new chief executive. She will be the fifth CEO in as many years.

According to Yahoo's press release, Mayer was one of Google's first employees and most recently she was responsible for the company's local, maps and location services.

Mayer's job, reports the AP, is to help the company "rebound from financial malaise and internal turmoil."

Plenty of young aspiring lawyers dream of landing a job at a high-powered, big-city firm after graduation. So an internship in a sleepy, rural town might not sound like a dream summer job. But that's just what three law schools in Iowa and Nebraska are encouraging their students to consider.

With recent law school grads facing mountains of debt and one of the worst job markets in decades, practicing law in smaller towns is becoming more attractive for some young lawyers.

Kicking The Tires

Robert Siegel talks to Lowell Bergman about a ProPublica investigation into billionaire and Republican political contributor Sheldon Adelson. There are concerns that Adelson may have violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in his payments to a Macau lawyer who represented his firm's interests in the booming gambling capital. Bergman co-reported the story with Stephen Engelberg and Matt Isaacs for the Investigative Reporting Program of the University of California at Berkeley and PBS Frontline.

The increasing debt load of college graduates has affected young people's lives in untold ways, from career choices to living arrangements. Now add another impact on a key part of young adult life: dating and marriage.

Rachel Bingham, an art teacher in Portland, Maine, learned this a few years back, when a guy broke it off after four months of a budding relationship. Among other reasons, he cited her $80,000 in student loan debt.

"He said it scared him," she recalls, "that it really made him anxious. And he just did not want to take on my responsibility."

With all the talk about what to do with the Bush tax cuts — and whether they should be extended for no one, everyone, or everyone under a certain income cutoff — we thought it made sense to check in on how much Americans actually make.

Roughly $50,000. That's how much the median households makes in income and benefits per year. In other words, half of American households made less than $50,000 and half made more.