COMPANIES

Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (NYSE:BRK.B) dumped its shares of Intel Corporation (Nasdaq: INTC) last quarter and cut its stake in The Procter & Gamble Company (NYSE: PG) while boosting its exposure to oil refining and oil services.

Police said a burglar stole the wallet of the late Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL) Chairman Steve Jobs July 17, when he broke into his empty residence in Palo Alto, Calif. The wallet had $1 inside along with Jobs’s California driver’s license.

Ikea, the Swedish store known for its affordable DIY home furnishing, is branching into a new arena: the hotel business.

Wall Street powerhouse Standard & Poor’s lowered its opinion of Dell (Nasdaq: DELL), the No. 3 PC maker, because it’s becoming “more bearish of the PC industry in general,” the ratings agency said Wednesday. It trimmed its 12-month target price for Dell shares to $14 from $15.

Betty Smithey has spent the last 49 years locked up in the Arizona State Prison Complex in Perryville, Ariz. The almost 50 year stint makes Smithey the nation's longest serving female inmate. But on Tuesday, the 69-year-old who was convicted the 1963 New Year's Day murder of Sandy Gerberick, woke up a free woman.

The Carlyle Group (Nasdaq: CG), a global asset manager, and Getty Images management said Wednesday they formed a partnership to acquire privately held Getty Images Inc. from Hellman & Friedman for $3.3 billion.

The South Korean car manufacturer Kia has become an unexpected success with its Forte Koup and Optima cars on the Grand Am and Pirelli World Challenge racing circuits.

Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO), the No. 1 provider of Internet gear, is scheduled to report fourth-quarter results Wednesday that are expected to be much better than last year’s when CEO John Chambers said the company was overmanned and was in the midst of layoffs and retrenchment.

According to a recently released report by Forrester Research, mobile banking is growing both in the United States and in Europe. By 2017, there will be 108 million mobile banking users in the U.S., accounting for about 46 percent of all bank account holders in the country.

Mac OS X Mountain Lion has out for about three weeks now, and millions of downloads later, it looks like Apple is getting ready to release the first major maintenance update for the new platform. Apple seeded OS X 10.8.1 to developers on Friday, but what exactly is Apple planning to fix in 10.8.1? Here are 4 major bugs, errors and issues that Apple definitely needs to fix in the 10.8.1 update.

The once-noisy din surrounding user-generated contests has somewhat quieted in recent years, but Canon U.S.A. on Tuesday announced that it has wrangled up five disparate celebrities to direct short films under the tutelage of the Oscar-winning director Ron Howard.

Malaysian netizens, opposition politicians, well-known bloggers and non-governmental organizations staged an Internet blackout on Tuesday to protest and raise awareness about legislation that could threaten free expression on the Web.

Some of the China's largest solar manufacturers are facing huge debt liabilities, and one of them, Suntech Power Holdings [STP.N], is potentially on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars after it disclosed potential fraud by a partner.

British Standard Chartered Bank, which had been accused by New York state's top banking regulator of engaging in illegal money-laundering on behalf of the Iranian regime in an explosive legal filing last week, id settling charges for a fine of $340 million.

Changing room voyeur faces compulsory treatment at sex clinic after pleading guilty to spying on Chinese women athletes in Leeds sports centre.

Two unpaid interns who last year sued Fox Searchlight over work they say they should have been paid for are looking to expand the case to include all interns who participated in programs run by Fox Entertainment Group.

Market researcher Gartner Group (NYSE: IT) said global smartphone sales eased 2.3 percent in the second quarter to 419 million units, accounting for a record 36.7 percent of all mobile phone sales.

The cost of the 2009 bailout of the U.S. automotive industry by the federal government will cost the country $3.4 billion more than was previously estimated, reports said Tuesday.

Shares of Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), the No. 1 search engine, set a new record high of $672.23 Tuesday, a day after the Mountain View, Calif., announced it would take a $275 million charge for firing 4,000 employees of its new Motorola division.

Bankrupt imaging giant Eastman Kodak Co. (Pink: EKDKQ) said it extended the auction for its 1,100 patent portfolio beyond Monday’s deadline because it was talking to rival bidders. Citing “a complex and dynamic process,” the company didn’t disclose more information.

At a time when big banks are constantly raising fees or imposing new ones to help them recover lost revenue from new regulations, not-for-profit credit unions are booming.

Shares of Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL), the world's most valuable technology company, have recovered lost ground and are trading not much below their record high of $644 set on April 10. Despite a setback when third-quarter earnings fell shy of estimates last month, they could set another record again this week.

The studio is reportedly citing declines in the home entertainment industry as its reason for shuttering six-year-old label Warner Premiere.

On Monday, a spokesperson for the struggling cable network quickly downplayed a New York Post story that claimed it was developing reality-TV shows as part of a massive programming overhaul.

Helen Gurley Brown, the legendary editor of Cosmopolitan magazine who helped usher in the sexual revolution, died on Monday at the age of 90.

Two officers shot during an incident on Fidelity Street in College Station have died.

We're about a month away from the alleged date when Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL) is expected to debut the iPhone 5, and fans are very excited to see what Apple's design wizards have come up with for this year's model. On Monday, French site NowhereElse posted pictures from Chinese forum Weiphone showing different angles of what appears to be the iPhone 5's new logic board. The logic board in question matches perfectly with previous rumors, specs, and features of the iPhone 5 prototypes....

Police have taken into custody a gunman they believe to be responsible for an "active shooting" at or near Texas A&M University where "multiple people" were shot , the school said on its website.

Knight Capital Group Inc. (NYSE:KCG) saw shares in the company drop precipitously early Monday -- at one point losing over 7 percent of their value -- as the bruised-up broker-dealer continued to pick itself up less than two weeks after a trading algorithm gone berserk saddled the firm with $440 million in losses.