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Mid-day Update

PODCAST: Best Buy loses a CEO, Aetna gains a company

Mary Dooe Aug 20, 2012
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A pedestrian walks by a Best Buy store on April 10, 2012 in New York City. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Mid-day Update

PODCAST: Best Buy loses a CEO, Aetna gains a company

Mary Dooe Aug 20, 2012
A pedestrian walks by a Best Buy store on April 10, 2012 in New York City. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
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Aetna is buying another health insurer, Coventry. It’s the latest example of a large insurer swallowing up a smaller one to gain its Medicare and Medicaid business. More people are expected to land in those programs once the federal insurance mandate kicks in next year.

Best Buy stock is down more than seven percent so far this morning. Not the kind of glowing reception you would hope when you announce a new CEO. The electronics retailer is going outside the industry, but poaching from a fellow Minneapolis company — Hubert Joly is Frenchman who had been running Carlson — the hospitality company includes Radisson Hotels and TGI Fridays.

In China over the weekend, activists smashed shop windows and overturned cars in a wave of anti-Japanese protests. The protests center around a couple of uninhabited, rocky islands in the East China Sea.

The city of Memphis, Tennessee is dealing with major urban challenges. So the city is launching a PR campaign aimed in part at bringing former residents back to the city.

The Finnish cell-phone maker Nokia may be struggling for market-share. But in Finland it is still tops in at least one category: distance. One teenager hurled his old Nokia handset 333 feet to win the country’s annual mobile phone throwing contest. And you thought there was no use for your old flip phone.

And finally, for the soccer mom who has everything, Lambroghini has just come out with a minivan. The Urus four passenger car will have at least 600 horsepower for the family that tends to run late. But that speed doesn’t come cheap — the Urus will cost more than $200,000 dollars. That actually makes it the cheapest Lambroghini on the market.

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