News In Brief

MID-DAY UPDATE: LinkedIn IPO soars, Barnes & Noble gets an offer

Katharine Crnko May 20, 2011

Here are today’s top headlines from the Marketplace Morning Report and from around the web.

LinkedIn’s IPO yesterday was a hit — with it’s share price rocketing up 100 percent in just one day of trading — thanks in part to pent-up demand for shares in tech start-ups. Here is Marketplace’s coverage.

Bookseller Barnes and Noble may be getting a new owner soon. The retailer has an offer of more than $1 billion on the table from Liberty Media. Here is Marketplace’s coverage.

Oil giant Royal-Dutch Shell will spend at least $10 billion to build a giant ocean vessel designed to liquify natural gas at sea. The vessel, called Prelude, could dramatically increase the supply of off-shore natural gas. Here is Marketplace’s coverage.

London’s summer Olympic games are more than a year away, but ticket requests are already flooding in to see Jamaican champion Usain Bolt. With many tickets going automatically to sponsors, though, fans may not get to see the event. Here is Marketplace’s coverage.

Health advocacy groups have been petitioning McDonald’s to retire the company’s famous clown mascot, and to stop using advertising geared towards children to sell calories, fat and salt. But the company says the clown is “an ambassador for good,” and that they have no intentions of giving him the boot.

Oil fell sharply today — U.S. light crude tumbled more than $2 to close to $96 a barrel.

To New York City, where a famous landmark is slated to be closed down due to budget cuts. I’m not talking about the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building. I’m talking about the TriBeCa firehouse that was used in the 1980s classic “Ghostbusters.” It’s one of 20 fire companies expected to be closed down to save the city $55 million. If you do have a ghost problem, I guess you’ll just have to call Mayor Bloomberg directly.

And finally… Robert Spearing and his wife traveled to Chicago from Ontario, Canada, to see Oprah Winfrey’s star-studded farewell spectacular. But they didn’t have tickets to the event. Spearing thought he could buy tickets from a scalper outside. But when that plan failed, he tried something else — like telling police he’d been robbed of Oprah tickets. Even going as far as cutting and scraping himself to make it look authentic. He finally confessed to the fake mugging and spent the night in jail. Spearing said he didn’t want his wife to be angry for not seeing Oprah.

You can read the rest of today’s stories from the Marketplace Morning Report here.

There’s a lot happening in the world.  Through it all, Marketplace is here for you. 

You rely on Marketplace to break down the world’s events and tell you how it affects you in a fact-based, approachable way. We rely on your financial support to keep making that possible. 

Your donation today powers the independent journalism that you rely on. For just $5/month, you can help sustain Marketplace so we can keep reporting on the things that matter to you.