Getting Real About the High Price of Cheap Food

Correction Appended: Aug. 20, 2009 Somewhere in Iowa, a pig is being raised in a confined pen, packed in so tightly with other swine that their curly tails have been chopped off so they won’t bite one another. To prevent him from getting sick in such close quarters, he is dosed with antibiotics.

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Wiedeking involved in VW share probe

German prosecutors are investigating Porsche’s former chief executive Wendelin Wiedeking and other people close to the sports carmaker, alleging market manipulation and passing on inside information in their failed takeover attempt of Volkswagen. Prosecutors in Stuttgart on Thursday raided the headquarters of Porsche, which recently agreed to merge with VW after an attempt to acquire the much bigger rival had pushed it to the brink of bankruptcy. A Porsche spokesman rebuffed the prosecutor’s allegations

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Best Buy will not honor $9.99 big-screen TV deal

The price of big screen televisions has been coming down, but this was ridiculous. Early Wednesday morning, BestBuy.com listed a 52-inch Samsung HDTV for $9.99 — a savings of more than $1600. As customers jumped on the Web site trying to take advantage of the offer, Best Buy announced it was a “pricing error” and was no longer available

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Cash for Clunkers: How Big an Environmental Boost?

Not even the most optimistic greens could have predicted that the federal government’s cash-for-clunkers program would work this well — more than 240,000 Americans have traded in their clunkers so far, and the program has already burned through its first round of funding. But green groups were a bit wary of cash for clunkers at the outset, concerned that the legislation’s requirements on fuel economy were too lax. Under the program, newly purchased passenger cars must have a minimum fuel-economy rating of 22 miles per gallon — hardly superefficient — and they need to be only 4 m.p.g

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What’s Behind Japan’s Love Affair with Robots?

If Japanese engineers had their way, we might soon be cheering on a robotic World Series. Every year or two, Japanese researchers roll out a new robotic invention — the latest to grab headlines earlier this month was a mechanized baseball duo of a batter and pitcher that can throw 90% of its pitches in the strike zone

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How the Housing Market Is Fighting Its Way Back

If you’d like to get a sense of how we’re emerging from our nationwide housing malaise, sit down at Jillian and Aaron Roberts’ kitchen table. As 2-year-old twins Lennon and Miles run by — those divots in the table are their doing — the couple explain that when they first started looking to become homeowners back in 2006, there was little they could afford

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