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Retail investors of modest means have long had to sit on the sidelines when it came to Berkshire Hathaway. That's recently changed as the common "B" shares of Warren Buffett's firm have become affordable for investors with portfolios of all sizes. But just because you can buy Berkshire doesn't mean you should.

Reply, a marketplace that offers local advertisers cost-per-lead transactions, on Monday filed to go public in a bid to raise as much as $60 million. San Ramon, California, Reply allows advertisers seeking local customers to buy and sell online clicks and leads. For the quarter ended December 31, 2009, the company said it delivered more than 4.9 million such leads serving better than 5,000 advertisers, according to its U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

BAGHDAD — Even with Iraqi security forces on a heightened state of alert in advance of Sunday’s national elections, dozens of Iraqis were killed on Wednesday in a devastating series of suicide bombings in the restive city of Baquba northeast of Baghdad.

Heavy snowfall hurt apparel retailers in February, particularly in the Mid-Atlantic, but receipts reveal the beginning of renewed consumer interest in mid-priced and luxury goods. Clothing sales fell 1.8% last month from the same month last year and were down 13.4% from February 2008, according to figures released Wednesday by MasterCard Inc.'s consulting unit MasterCard Advisors.

LIMA, Peru — As Chile grappled with a rising death toll and more reports of looting, three aftershocks struck Monday morning, complicating rescue efforts in the aftermath of the earthquake that devastated much of the country on Saturday. Chilean officials said Monday that the death toll had reached 711 and was likely to rise. President Michelle Bachelet on Sunday issued an order that will send some 10,000 soldiers into the streets in the worst-affected areas to both keep order and speed the distribution of aid. Source: The New York TImes Link Below

March 1 (Bloomberg) -- Citigroup Inc. said Chief Executive Officer Vikram Pandit deserved a bonus last year for the money- losing bank’s success in raising capital, selling assets and repaying $20 billion of taxpayer bailout money.

While everyone else was watching the Olympics on TV this week, TV and movie industry executives were watching a deal between Wal-mart and a little-known Silicon Valley startup. That’s because Wal-Mart said Monday it is buying Vudu, whose embedded technology enables viewers to buy or rent HD movies from a catalog of 16,000 titles via a broadband connection.

Last Wednesday Los Angeles film production assistant Jaime Davila, 25, logged on to Facebook to discover more than a hundred new messages, none of which were for him. As the result of an embarrassing code glitch, the social networking web site briefly misrouted messages to a small number of users. All of those messages were personal, and some were even salacious. Source CNN Money Link Below

Outsourcing means jobs go overseas, right? Not always. At this Orlando summit, Monty Hamilton, CEO of Atlanta-based Rural Sourcing, will explain how U.S. firms can save by moving work to the South. Rural Sourcing has centers in Arkansas and North Carolina handling IT for firms such as GlaxoSmithKline and Reynolds. It charges $50 an hour for programming work -- only $15 more than a typical outfit in India. "There are no language barriers," Hamilton says, "and we're not 11 time zones away, so we can collaborate with a client in normal business hours."

Eric Loewen won't even utter the words "spent nuclear fuel." That's the industry term of art for the nuclear fuel bundles that are pulled out of today's reactors after they're done making electricity. Loewen, a nuclear engineer at General Electric ( GE - news - people ), doesn't see them as "spent" at all. He sees them as raw material for a new type of nuclear reactor. "It's used, but it's an energy asset," he says. Source: Forbes Link Below