Business

Tax refunds are the biggest windfall of the year for many American households. And ’tis the season: Through the week ending Feb. 13, nearly 13 million people had received 2025 federal tax refunds averaging $2,476, according to the IRS.

Verizon Communications (NYSE: VZ), which had a recent market value north of $200 billion, provides telecommunications services to millions of consumers and businesses worldwide. Its recent dividend yield of 5.8% should be enticing to income-seeking investors, along with the fact that the telecom leader has increased its dividend for 19 consecutive years. Management appears to be committed to extending that impressive streak of dividend hikes.

The year 2024 may be ancient history to some, but to followers of economic data, it’s like yesterday.

Washington State Parks officials plan to build two more small cabins in Riverside State Park, according to plans submitted to the city of Spokane. 

Google's artificial intelligence chatbot Gemini encouraged a 36-year-old Florida man to embark on violent missions and to take his own life, a lawsuit alleges. The man, Jonathan Gavalas, started using the chatbot in August 2025 to help write, plan travel and assist with shopping. But after he activated Google's most intelligent AI model, Gemini 2.5 Pro, the chatbot's persona shifted. It talked ...

Laid-off tech worker Joseph Tinner has spent almost a year hunting for a job. It has been a depressing crash course on the sea change in Silicon Valley.

U.S. employers unexpectedly cut jobs in February and the unemployment rate rose, pointing to lingering fragility in a labor market that was thought to be stabilizing.

Generic versions of Novo Nordisk A/S’s hit shots Ozempic and Wegovy could be sold for under $3 a month, a new study showed, underscoring their potential to unlock global access to powerful weight-loss drugs.

US gasoline pump prices advanced to the highest level at any time under President Donald Trump, with the conflict in the Middle East disrupting energy supplies.

The Pentagon said it has formally notified Anthropic PBC that it’s determined the company and its products pose a risk to the U.S. supply chain, according to a senior defense official, escalating a dispute over artificial intelligence safeguards. “DOW officially informed Anthropic leadership the company and its products are deemed a supply chain risk, effective immediately,” the official told ...

Brandon Smith, a fourth-generation Connecticut dairy farmer, said that he doesn’t want to see the state’s dairy industry disappear, but that without the state’s intervention, the industry is no longer sustainable.

As the tech industry chases growth in the Middle East through data centers, the companies’ infrastructure is increasingly exposed to conflicts in the region.

Capital One is laying off another 1,139 employees at the former Discover headquarters in Riverwoods, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, a second wave of downsizing following the credit card giants’ megamerger last year.

Anthropic PBC’s clash with the Pentagon is drawing fresh attention to a lightly regulated practice: the U.S. government’s purchase of commercially available information, such as browsing histories and location data, and the growing use of artificial intelligence to analyze it at scale.

U.S. homebuyers had to act fast last week to nab the first sub-6% mortgage rates in more than three years. Now they’re up, and the new conflict in the Middle East threatens to nudge them higher.

The Trump administration’s overhaul of the U.S. visa system for highly skilled immigrants is about to get its first major test. The annual lottery for H-1Bs, the most popular visa for white-collar professionals looking to build a career in the U.S., gets underway with new rules this month. For the first time, successful sponsors for immigrants arriving from another country will need to pay a ...

Oil prices rallied Thursday on growing disruption to global oil supplies caused by the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, with U.S. futures prices rising faster than the international benchmark Brent futures as Washington said it may take action in the futures market to combat rising energy prices.

One of the few Spokane-area businesses that actually takes raw materials and molds them into useful parts for other industries has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy after suffering a series of setbacks, including one from an employee who was charged with syphoning more than $1 million into her own bank accounts.