Awards down 52 percent.

April must have seen a lot of worried dinner conversations in McLean, Virginia. As the sequester takes effect, Pentagon defense contracts decreased 52 percent in April to $19 billion from March’s $39.4 billion. The sequester’s reductions, which began March 1, will require $37 billion in cuts to the Pentagon this year. The Defense Department has yet to announce whether or not it will carry out the furloughs requiring unpaid leave for up to 750,000 civilian defense employees. 

Read it at Washington Post

Carlos Osorio/Toronto Star, via Getty

When a billionaire mayor’s news company uses his financial company’s products to spy on the nation’s top bankers and officials, no line is left uncrossed.

It’s the sort of overblown abuse of power we like to laugh at in other countries, confident it could never happen here.A multibillionaire, dissatisfied with being just a business tycoon, starts a media division, brands it with his name and starts to gobble up competition and talent. Then he decides to run for office, knowing his opposition will do the good-citizen thing and stay within the established public-finance law, considered a national model of good government.

Warner Bros. Pictures

Though Luhrmann’s flick has respectable haul.

Tony Stark rained on The Great Gatsby’s parade. Iron Man 3 took an impressive $72.5 million at the weekend box office, beating Baz Luhrmann’s flick’s equally impressive $51.1 million. Despite mediocre reviews for a soap-opera love story, 70 percent of Gatsby viewers were above the age of 25. As expected, the bulk of the movie’s audience came to see Leonardo DiCaprio and listen to the popular soundtrack. It’s a healthy debut for the buzzed-about event of the summer, and Luhrmann’s best opening yet. Iron Man 3 has raked in $950 million globally.

Read it at Los Angeles Times

AFP/Getty; Getty for Netflix

From the continuing subsidies for the nation’s biggest banks to the story behind the billion dollar sale of Instagram, the Daily Beast brings you the best in business and finance for the week of May 11.

Six banks that were rescued from the precipice in 2008 have advantages over their competitors – advantages provided by the public. Just how big? According to one calculation, $102 billion over the last four years.Subprime bond bounces back, leaving behind a subprime borrower Carrick Mollenkamp, ReutersOne of the most profitable trades on Wall Street has been scooping up the toxic assets – securities stuffed with subprime mortgages – at bargain basement prices.

Alex Bamford/Getty

A Wisconsin dairy farmer is set to go on trial for a strange offense: selling raw milk to a group of consumers who were members of a private buyer’s club. Sarah Begley reports on the clash between regulators and foodies.

So in many parts of America, it’s basically legal to grow, sell, and smoke pot. But you can go to jail for selling people fresh milk?Wisconsin dairy farmer Vernon Hershberger, a 41-year-old father of ten, will go on trial later this month for three counts of licensure violation and one count of violating a hold order. The maximum combined penalty: $13,000 and/or two and a half years’ jail time. All for 300 gallons of raw milk.Hershberger started a private buyer’s club for raw milk in 2003 after “some friends from town—who were retired farmers—wanted to continue getting this raw milk that they had for years.

PEDRO ARMESTRE

In the midst of slow economic growth, governments in the U.S. and Europe are slashing spending and raising taxes – with disastrous results. But instead of blaming American Republicans or British Tories, the author of a new book on the history of austerity says the intellectual culprits lie in 18th century Scotland.

“Growth in a Time of Debt,” the much-touted paper by economists Carmen Reinhardt and Kenneth Rogoff, that suggested economic growth stalls once a nation’s debt hits 90 percent of its gross domestic product, has been debunked. But the austerity policies that this research helped undergird are still alive and well. Despite the on-going austerity-driven economic meltdown in Europe, and despite the International Monetary Fund’s recanting of the supposedly positive benefits of cuts, austerity continues, as John Maynard Keynes once put it, “to dominate the economic thought, both practical and theoretical, of the governing and academic classes of this generation.

Could provide access for third world.

Let's see if they can shake up the global satellite network business. Dutch-headquartered O3B Networks is launching a new satellite network that aims to deliver internet access to a section of the populace left without -- the third world. Time will tell, but if successful after its June 24th launch, O3B could be a real game-changer.

Read it at O3B Networks

Reporters monitored data terminal activity.

The mystery of Wall Street was compromised just a bit when Bloomberg News confirmed a breach of ethics and privacy on Friday afternoon. To the financial industry's alarm, Bloomberg journalists have for years been monitoring the company's data terminals—found in nearly every banking and trading company—for user activity. They monitored what functions of the service subscribers were using, including corporate bond trades and equities indexes. The dustup came to light after a reporter pointed out to a Goldman Sachs partner that he had not logged into his Bloomberg terminal lately. Oops.

Read it at New York Times

Jeff Gentner/AP

Donald Blankenship was the most powerful coal mogul in America, but he could soon be indicted, thanks to 14 years of work by two Pittsburgh lawyers. By Lawrence Leamer.

In February former Massey Energy executive David Hughart stood in a courtroom in Beckley, West Virginia and pleaded guilty to obstructing the work of federal safety inspectors. Massey’s chairman and CEO Donald Blankenship, the most powerful coal baron in the history of the American coal industry, ran the company with an iron fist in an iron glove. He had control over even the smallest detail and most likely would have told his subordinate what to do.

Toby Talbot/AP

Two towns in California have passed laws requiring newly built homes to install solar panels. Is mandating green energy the wave of the future?

Can you force people to go green?Two cities in the Golden State have recently made it mandatory that new homes install solar panels.On Tuesday, Sebastapol, a small town in the Sonoma Valley, become the second city in the state to pass an ordinance requiring all new buildings and additions to put up solar voltaic panels.The liberal town of Sebastopol has fewer than 8,000 residents and passed the law with little controversy. Sebastopol’s ordinance orders that the solar systems must provide 2 watts of power per square foot or offset 75 percent of the structure’s electricity use.