COMPANIES

For every man who sits gaping at a Victoria's Secret model prancing in her colorful bra and panties, a child in Africa pays a price. Bloomberg has uncovered Victoria's real secret, exposing the use of child labor to produce cotton in Burkina Faso.

Relativity Media has entered into a joint venture with German distributor Senator Entertainment, the studio announced Wednesday.

Stocks rose on Thursday as signs of strength in the economy and higher-than-expected profit at FedEx outweighed a stark warning from the IMF about inaction over Europe's debt crisis.

Apple's dominance reached outside the bounds of the tech industry, as the company's mythological iPhone 5, deceased CEO Steve Jobs and iPad 2 took three out of the 10 spots in the Google Zeitgeist 2011.

Amazon.com Inc said on Thursday it is selling more than one million Kindle devices a week, an unusual disclosure from the largest Internet retailer that comes in the wake of some negative reviews of its new Kindle Fire tablet.

Although still at levels above the five-year national average, natural gas inventories shrunk in the week ending in Dec. 9 from previous weeks, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Morgan Stanley's announcement that it is slashing 1,600 jobs is only the latest in a late-year blizzard of pink slips being floated among people at the heart of American high-finance. Bonuses are also down sharply. Is the economy Grinch stealing Wall Street's Christmas?

Amazon, the No. 1 e-retailer, reported shipping more than three million Kindle Fire tablet devices, its $199 media tablet priced to compete with Apple’s iPad 2.

Overall U.S. foreclosure activity fell in November compared to the previous month, but auctions hit a nine-month high, according to RealtyTrac.

General Motors confirmed the addition of a 2013 Buick Encore on Thursday morning, a brand-new crossover addition to the Buick lineup.

At a depth of 12,461 feet, the company found more than 400 feet of natural gas roughly 180 miles offshore of Exmouth near the Carnarvon Basin in the northwest of Western Australia.

U.S. 30-year fixed-rate mortgage rates fell in the week ending Dec. 15 to 3.94 percent, matching an all-time historic low, according to Freddie Mac.

The Seattle-based online retailer announced Thursday that customers have been purchasing Kindle products at the rate of more than one million a week for the past three weeks, with its Kindle Fire the best selling product on its Web site since the product was released in late September.

Brazilian antitrust authorities approved the merger of Chili's LAN Airlines and Brazil's TAM Airlines creating the third-largest airline in the world.

Apple was named the 10th best place to work in America, from a survey of more than 250,000 employees from more than 65,000 companies.

ExxonMobil and the Iraqi central government have been at odds with each other since November, after the U.S. oil company signed contracts for several exploration rights in the semi-autonomous region of the country.

Morgan Stanley (MS) announced plans to cut 1,600 job globally Thursday. Another axe fell on Wall Street.

Apple will launch the iPhone 4S in Brazil on midnight Friday, even though the phone will be costly and won't yet feature a working version of Siri.

Bankrupt American Airlines' $30 million London townhouse was apparently overlooked in cost-cutting efforts.

Two recent reports on the attitudes of the "mass affluent" revealed that consumers in this wealth bracket have a relatively high level of apprehension about their financial future.

Glassdoor, a jobs and career community where employees can anonymously rate companies and chief executive officers, has released its fourth annual Employees' Choice Awards, which lists the 50 best places to work, based on surveys collected from U.S. employees through 2011.

The iconic blue hedgehog of the early 90's is all set for a comeback, following video game developers SEGA's announcement that Sonic CD - a critically acclaimed platform game - would venture into mobile and console territory.

Into just his fourth month as head of Sony's videogames unit, Welshman Andrew House has to plot a much-needed success story for the new PlayStation Vita handheld games device, negotiating a minefield of consumer gloom and competition from smartphones and tablet PCs such as Apple Inc's iPhone and iPad.

The whistleblower in Japan's Olympus Corp scandal, ex-CEO Michael Woodford, blasted Japanese shareholders Thursday for failing to stand up for him, amid signs that domestic and foreign investors are split over his campaign to be reinstated.

Apple will open a research and development center in Israel that will focus on semiconductors, the Globes business daily reported on Thursday.

Sony Corp said it was keeping to its target to sell 15 million PlayStation 3 game machines in the year to end-March, even as a long-running debt crisis grips Europe, one of the Japanese electronics group's most important markets.

Nokia is back with a bang in the smartphone market. The Finnish cellphone manufacturer and T-Mobile announced Wednesday that the Lumia 710 will be retailed at $49.99 on a two-year contract, starting Jan. 11.

Japan's disgraced Olympus Corp said Thursday it would consider reinstating its sacked CEO, Michael Woodford, but the gesture failed to erase doubts that it would ever rehire the foreigner who blew the whistle on its crooked accounts.

Fifty-five-million and counting. That's the number of people looking for love, and they're doing so through Are You Interested?, the second-most popular Facebook app, made by the development team at Snap Interactive. Are You Interested? has been one of the most popular apps on Facebook Platform since 2007, when Facebook first released their application platform to developers, and the dating service is showing no signs of slowing down anytime soon.