Search results for

Black Friday was not as bad as many retailers had expected. One estimate shows American shoppers spent 3 percent more on the first day of the holiday shopping season than last year. To find out how some retailers did, we check in with a high-end mall in a St. Louis suburb, an outlet mall in San Marcos, Texas, and an online retailer in Boston.

Missouri forecasters said Monday the flooded Mississippi River is about to stop rising. But that news may come too late for some towns. In rural Lincoln County, virtually all of the region's primary levees failed, causing the river to reclaim tens of thousands of acres of floodplain. Adam Allington reports from member station KWMU in St. Louis.

NPR's Philip Reeves reports from Baghdad on the situation in the Shiite Muslim holy city of Najaf, which has calmed down considerably in the wake of several weeks of fighting between U.S. forces and militias loyal to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. The cleric is keeping a low profile, and most Najaf residents are much more concerned about the economy and the notoriously insecure highway that links their city to the Iraqi capital.

Some have turned to their neighbors in Sweden. Demand is so strong that some stores on the Swedish side of the border report running out. Others have limited the number of eggs a customer can buy.

An Ohio man was strolling through a thrift store when he saw a framed poster with Picasso scribbled on it. He bought it for $14.14. The Columbus Dispatch reports an auction house confirmed it was an original design carved by Picasso making the poster worth $6,000.

Police and firefighters in Clarksville were responding to multiple reports of damage in the northern part of the city, which is located north of Nashville near the Kentucky state line.

Royal Dutch Shell can't pay the $1 billion it owes Iran because of sanctions imposed on the Middle East country by the United States and European Union. The sanctions have made it nearly impossible to transfer the money. Reuters reports that Shell is trying to wrap up its business dealings with Iran.

In this series, NPR takes readers and listeners behind the news and explains how we do our journalism. Here, Juana Summers describes what she — and a team from All Things Considered — encountered on a reporting trip to this island of snow and ice, for this week's Reporter's Notebook.

By Angela HattonWashington, D. C. – A report from the Tax Foundation finds Tennessee has the highest combined state and local sales tax rate. The national…

By Chad LampeMurray, KY – Last year Kentucky's public school graduates enrolled in college in record numbers. A Kentucky Education and Workforce…