Robert Galbraith/Reuters

A new app does the dirty work of vacuuming spam from your inbox.

ON A recent morning, I woke up to 55 unread emails—and just a few of them from family and friends. The rest was unsolicited mail from strangers or publicists.My inbox had been overrun by hordes of email marketers hoping to catch a second of my attention.LinkedIn wanted me to endorse a few former colleagues; a music promoter suggested I check out a new track; oh, and from LivingSocial: did I want a discount on a massage?I’ve been subscribed—both willingly and unwillingly—to hundreds of various newsletters over the past few years.

Edward Linsmier/Redux

American retirement is in free fall, and even the safest plans are turning out to be dangerous.

WE SCRIMP. We save. We plan. And we dream that when we retire—at 50 or 70 or 90—we’ll ride off into the sunset on a chariot made of our sequestered gold.But you can stop the dream right there.It turns out that for all our good intentions, American retirement is in free fall. The problem isn’t just the well-documented coming crisis in Social Security. Rather, by any measure, all the promises we made ourselves about the golden years of leisure are turning out to be empty.

Brian Finke/Gallery Stock

Impatient investors. Volatile markets. Why the speed of business is dooming CEOs.

RON JOHNSON was supposed to be the genius retail mind who would save the declining department-store chain JCPenney. The veteran Apple executive had presided over the creation and rollout of that company’s spectacularly successful retail operations: Apple’s 300-plus stores are paragons of clean design and high-level customer service and boast sales-per-square-foot levels twice those of jeweler Tiffany. In the fall of 2011, William Ackman, the cocksure hedge-fund manager who had a 17 percent stake in JCPenney, recruited Johnson in the hopes he could do for the retailer what he had helped Apple do for electronic stores—turn a dowdy, low-margin no-hoper into an upscale money gusher.

Photo illustration: NWDB. Photos: AP, Getty (2)

From the hunt for the world’s best trader to the post-resignation blues of a former bank CEO, the Daily Beast brings you the best of business and finance journalism for the week of May 4.

The Hunt For Steve Cohen Bethany McLean and Bryan Burrough, Vanity FairHedge fund Steve Cohen got off the hook when his firm, SAC, paid $616 million to the SEC to settle insider trading charges. But was that the beginning of the end for the world’s greatest trader?Robert Diamond’s Next Life Andrew Ross Sorkin, New York Times MagazineWhen Robert Diamond was CEO of Barclays, he didn’t know how the LIBOR submission process worked. One $450 million settlement later, he was out of his job at the behest of the governor of the Bank of England.

David Duprey/AP

Americans’ fuel consumption is dropping—and so is the number of spots to fill up. From electric vehicles to natural-gas-powered fleets and Costco, a look at the culprits.

Say goodbye to the good old American gas station.In April, The Wall Street Journal reported that the gas station on the corner of Houston Street and Lafayette in lower Manhattan—now a BP but formerly the iconic Gaseteria—would likely be closing soon. The city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission approved a plan to knock it down and put up a seven-story building on the site it occupies. Last week, The Washington Post reported that gas stations are disappearing from D.

Sean Gallup/Getty

There’s a high cost to the iTunes Store’s cornucopia of cheap music, writes longtime D.C. musician Justin Moyer.

In 1997, when I was a college senior living in New England, I wanted to hear The Stooges, the iconic 1967 debut album by Iggy and the Stooges. This wasn’t easy.The record store in town didn’t have a copy. Neither did my college’s radio station, the library, or any of my friends. To get the record, I had to (1) find a phone book; (2) call a bunch of record stores in Connecticut—shops with limited shelf space that might be taken up by Barbra Streisand, the Grateful Dead, or N.

Damage from plant explosion in West, Texas on April 25. (Charles Dharapak/AP)

The explosion may have caused $100 million in damages.

One million bucks ain't gonna cut it. According to a lawyer filing suit against the owners of the Texas fertilizer plant that exploded last month, the plant only carried a $1 million liability insurance policy. The blast last month killed 14 people, injured 200 more, and destroyed blocks of nearby property. An estimate by an insurance industry group puts the damages at $100 million.

Read it at The Associated Press

Bangladeshi with photo of missing relative in Dhaka on Friday. (Munir Uz Zaman/AFP/Getty)

Following building collapse that killed 500.

Proof of how reliant Bangladesh is on the garment industry: the country begged the European Union not to institute "harsh trade conditions" after a factory building collapse that killed over 500 people. It was the worst industrial accident in Bangladesh's history. The top civil servant in Bangladesh's Commerce Ministry worries that if sanctions are imposed "millions of workers"—who earn as little as $38 per month—"will lose their jobs." The European Union, which gives preferential access to Bangladeshi garments, hopes to press authorities to improve safety standards in response to the horrific accident.

Read it at Reuters

Dimon on Capitol Hill on June 19, 2012. (Jacquelyn Martin/AP)

Over complaints about management.

JPMorgan Chase’s Chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon, is far from out of the woods. The financial world’s “last man standing” is scheduled for a meeting next week with dozens of bank examiners from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, including junior examiners who don't usually interact with CEOs. It's yet another show of the kind of close inspection he and his bank now face nearly three weeks after the OCC and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York told him they don't trust his management. But the upcoming meeting may be a step in the right direction: it was suggested by the bank, not the authorities, and was allegedly initially scheduled in advance of the complaints.

Read it at Wall Street Journal

Solar Impulse/AP

A solar-powered plane that can fly through the night has started its slow transcontinental journey.

The first electric plane that can fly both day and night with only the power from the sun’s rays began its first transcontinental flight Friday. The Sunseeker Duo from Solar Flight is flying from San Francisco to its final destination in Washington, D.C.—it’s expected to touch-down there mid-June—stopping at Phoenix, Dallas, and St. Louis along the way.The plane can theoretically fly continuously, but its pilots will only fly it at 12 hour spans.