Business

Two NBA stars who are certainly past their primes and almost over the hill signed huge new contracts this week.

Make no mistake, Kevin Garnett and Steve Nash are still world-class basketball players. But it's been eight years since Garnett won his Most Valuable Player award, and it's been six years since Nash won back-to-back MVPs. Garnett is 36 years old, and Nash is 38.

"At 38, you're an active senior in NBA terms," sports writer Dave Zirin of The Nation magazine says. "You might as well be playing shuffleboard."

"I will be outspent." This simple phrase headed an email President Obama recently sent to supporters.

"We can be outspent and still win," the message read. "But we can't be outspent 10 to 1 and still win." Obama asked for donations of as little as $3 to compete against the deep pockets of Republican challenger Mitt Romney and the super political action committees that back him.

The city of Scranton, Pa., sent out paychecks to its employees Friday, like it does every two weeks. But this time the checks were much smaller than usual. Mayor Chris Doherty has reduced everyone's pay — including his own — to the state's minimum wage: $7.25 an hour.

Doherty says his city has run out of money.

Scranton has had financial troubles for a couple of decades — the town has been losing population since the end of World War II. But the budget problems became more serious in recent months as the mayor and the city council fought over how to balance the budget.

Yahoo and Facebook have agreed to re-sheath their patent swords and play nice — at least for now.

The two companies have struck a broad advertising partnership as part of a deal to end a patent dispute, Kara Swisher reports on the technology blog All Things Digital, quoting "sources close to the situation."

The biggest scandal in the world right now has nothing to do with sex or celebrities. It's about an interest rate called LIBOR, or the London Interbank Offered Rate.

Most Americans probably never heard of LIBOR. When I first moved to New York, I hadn't. Back then, I could barely afford my apartment and got an adjustable rate mortgage. And so I wondered: When my rate adjusts, how will I know how much I'll be paying?

I searched through all the documents and it was right there — LIBOR. I would be paying a few percentage points above whatever LIBOR was.

Losing your job is rarely good. Not being able to find one for months can be disastrous for individuals, and bad for society as well. Yet during the recent recession and the current anemic recovery, more people in the U.S. have been unemployed for longer than at any time since 1948.

Of all Americans who were unemployed in June, almost half had been without a job for 27 weeks or longer. In other words, 5.4 million people have been jobless for more than half a year.

Job growth was even weaker than economists feared in June as public and private employers added just 80,000 jobs to their payrolls, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this morning. They had been expecting BLS would say there were closer to 100,000 more jobs in June than in May.

A separate BLS survey showed the nation's jobless rate remained stuck at 8.2 percent. It's been above 8 percent since February 2009.

The Planet Money team digs into the rate-setting scandal engulfing the British bank Barclays. Emails reveal bank employees were shockingly casual and explicit in their communications about manipulating one of the key financial benchmarks in the global economy.

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LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:

The United Nations Human Rights Council has declared people have a right to freedom of expression on the Internet. This is the first time that the council has extended the definition of human rights into the virtual world. And as NPR's Laura Sydell reports, the resolution had nearly universal support, even from countries which censor the Internet.

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LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:

This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Linda Wertheimer with Steve Inskeep. The U.S. economy gained 80,000 jobs in June, that's the latest word from the Labor Department and it is another disappointing month of job growth. The number was slightly below expectations. The employment report is closely followed by economists. Job growth, of course, is front and center in the presidential election.

Joining us are NPR's political reporter Tamara Keith and economics correspondent, Chris Arnold.

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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

And today's last word in business takes us to London, where Europe's new tallest building has been inaugurated. It's called the Shard. Maybe that's because it sort of looks like a giant shard of glass, 1,016 feet tall. It stands out in a city with a relatively low skyline. It towers over the Tower of London, and the Shard brings many metaphors to mind.

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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

NPR's business news starts with a retail's lousy summer.

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INSKEEP: It's been sunny in much of the country, but inside many stores, the attitude is gloomy - or at least it was during the month of June. The latest sales figures are in, and they show many consumers were not in a buying mood last month. NPR's Wade Goodwyn has more.

President Obama's campaign bus rolls from Ohio into Pennsylvania Friday. He is trying to make the case that the U.S. economy is slowly but surely on the mend. While touring Ohio's manufacturing belt Thursday, he highlighted the rebound of the auto industry.