The Spanish company Inditex, which owns Zara among other chain stores, has just unveiled an impressive set of figures: a 22 percent jump in profits.

The Dublin-based online trading platform Intrade ceased all trading activity Sunday, citing “circumstances” that may include financial irregularities. Meanwhile, many academics and journalists who used the site to gauge public sentiment lose a source of data.

For IT professionals, Microsoft has invented a holiday -- of sorts. The second Tuesday of every month is the day Microsoft releases the latest batch of security patches for it's software: Patch Tuesday. This week, the company has more than half-dozen security fixes, as cyber threats mount for Microsoft and Apple software.

A currency war sounds weirdly abstract, like a game played by rival politicians -- but it can have devastating effects in the real world. And it’s not all that different from a rivalry of different kind – a hypothetical sibling rivalry.