Facebook Inc. might be the most anticipated and hyped initial public offering in years, but as a symbol of American industry, the social network's virtual farms, family snapshots and "pokes" aren't exactly Ford Motor Co.

Petrobras sits on an important oil discovery and Brazil's government wants it to play the leading role in developing the resources. So much for diversification. The worry is if profit and cost projections prove too rosy.

Government officials are on the verge of an agreement worth as much as $25 billion with five major banks, capping a yearlong push to settle federal and state probes of alleged foreclosure abuses by lenders.

Facebook runs the world's most popular social-networking service, with more than 800 million active users. But the California company isn't nearly as far ahead in locking up intellectual property rights -- and may even trail rivals such as Yahoo in a patents race.

Sprint Nextel (S) announced a wider loss for its fourth-quarter due to cost associated with offering the Apple (AAPL) iPhone to its subscribers. The company lost $1.3 billion, or 43 cents per share, versus $929 million, or 31 cents per share, in the same period last year. Revenue increased to $8.72 billion from $8.3 billion, beating analyst estimates of $8.69 billion. The iPhone did help Sprint add 161,000 subscribers during the quarter, but this fell short of analyst estimates of ... more