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SAN FRANCISCO -- The United States was battered this year by at least 12 natural disasters that each caused at least $1 billion in damages , the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said yesterday. [More]

Breaking news from your editors at Fast Company, with updates all day. Iran Blocks U.S. "Virtual" Embassy

Crazed radicals (like the president of the Dallas Fed) think banks should suffer the consequences of their actions instead of relying on the government to underwrite executive bonuses. The theory behind bailouts of big financial institutions is that if they collapse they will infect other financial institutions.

Today's top story from France's Le Monde

%excerpt% More here: How Not to Get Sued For Christmas

Rope bridge? Check.

All across the United States, nay all around the world, the message about higher education is uniform: More people should go to university. President Obama has repeatedly stated on record that "by 2020 America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world." The Lumina Foundation is working to increase the proportion of Americans with degrees to 60% by 2025 .

DigitalGlobe, the firm that provides much of the imagery for Google Earth, is launching a next-generation satellite in 2014. However, the super-sharp images of the WorldView-3 aren't for Google and Bing Maps: They're going straight to the military and intelligence agencies

British firm Gamma International was found hawking spyware to foreign intelligence services that installed onto users' computers via an iTunes security hole. The breach has been fixed, but documents indicate that the exploit was used to snoop on the email, Skype, and social media activities of users worldwide

Most would-be parents prefer boys, not girls.

.caption {color:#666;font-size:11px;} .caption img {padding-bottom:2px;} Photo by Benjamin Lowy There are two economies at work in the United States right now. One is traditional, entrenched, powerful, and often highly profitable

By Meredith Wadman of Nature magazine The largest and most high-profile chimpanzee research centre in the United States has acknowledged to Nature that 137 infant chimpanzees have been born to federally owned animals under its care since 2000, despite a government moratorium on such births. [More]

Sageworks CEO Brian Hamilton discusses which industries are hot and which are not in 2012. The year 2011 has seen a surprising amount of growth and recovery among private companies in the United States, reports Brian Hamilton, co-founder and CEO of Sageworks, which tracks the financial performance of privately-held companies. Sageworks, which also ranked No.

Once an unlikely rival for HP and Apple, Chinese computer maker Lenovo has grown and adapted as quickly as its homeland. Now, with a savvy blend of East and West, it's poised to be China's first global brand. Leading the PC maker's pursuit of new markets, CEO Yang Yuanqing believes in "replaying the chess board" to keep improving

The U.S.