Robert Siegel speaks with Ken Bensinger, business reporter for the Los Angeles Times, about used car sales lots known as "Buy Here Pay Here" dealerships. Bensinger has written a three-part investigative series on this type of business. He tells Robert that "Buy Here Pay Here" lots are very common, and they prey on people with low incomes and bad credit. They charge high prices and very steep interest rates. And in many cases the buyer defaults on the loan, and the car is repossessed and resold again and again.
Guy Raz speaks with Leslie Bruce, senior writer the Hollywood Reporter, about the money behind reality star Kim Kardashian's wedding to basketball player Kris Humphries. The reportedly multimillion dollar wedding actually earned the Kardashian family money through various deals with entertainment television and magazines. But Kardashian filed for divorce Monday after 72 days of marriage.
Markets slumped from Asia to Europe to the U.S. on word that the Greek prime minister will put the European Union rescue package to a referendum. What now? Guy Raz speaks with NPR's Eric Westervelt for more.
At the heart of every convention worth its salt is the exhibit hall. But only at the American Public Health Association annual meeting can you find a plush heart for sale. Along with stuffed spleens, brains and uteruses.
And you know the game where you guess how many candies are in a jar and win something cool? Well, at the APHA meeting, the anti-tobacco American Legacy Foundation is giving away a new Kindle, if you can guess how many cigarette butts are in a huge jar.
Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain speaks Monday at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. During a question and answer portion of the program, Cain called the accusations of sexual harassment against him "a witch hunt."
The lawyer for a woman who settled a sexual harassment complaint against Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain in the late 1990s says that Cain may have violated the confidentiality terms of the agreement by commenting on its specifics over the past 24 hours.
"Herman Cain and others have already disclosed that there was a confidential settlement," says Joel P. Bennett, a Washington-based attorney specializing in employment law, who also represented the woman when she negotiated her settlement.
In a lawsuit filed against one of the largest private mortgage brokers in the country, the United States alleges fraudulent lending practices by Allied Home Mortgage Capital Corp. cost the government $834 million in insurance claims paid by the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Roll Call, a newspaper that specializes on reporting from Capitol Hill, digs through the personal financial disclosure forms of elected officials every couple of years to look at trends in the aggregate.
In its analysis of this year's data, it found that "members of Congress had a collective net worth of more than $2 billion in 2010, a nearly 25 percent increase over the 2008 total..."
