Everett

A hotel-room safe full of jewelry, stolen right under Hollywood’s nose. Was it the Pink Panthers, Colombians, an inside job? Dana Kennedy on the Riviera mystery.

Clutching umbrellas and shivering, Hollywood heavyweights like Nicole Kidman, Harvey Weinstein, Colin Firth, Rooney Mara, Sofia Coppola, and Emma Watson braved the rain and unseasonable cold Thursday night at A-list parties ranging from a rooftop soiree sponsored by Bulgari to a beachside bash held by Calvin Klein at the far end of the Croisette.While a black-leather-clad Kidman worried about her pin-straight hair frizzing up in the rain at Klein’s Women in Film party, neither she nor anyone else at the swanky event on the Plage d’Ecrin had an inkling that one of the biggest jewelry heists in Cannes history was about to unfold a little more than a mile away.

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The controversial military tool is cleared for use domestically in 2015. Miranda Green reports from the House committee charged with what setting the rules on new eyes in the sky.

Congress started it all this year when it voted to allow drones to fly in the U.S. as soon as 2015. Now it’s fighting against its self-imposed deadline to pass legislation that limits the scope of the new technology.At a hearing Friday, the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security, and Investigations discussed what measures should be included in a federal bill that would protect Fourth Amendment rights without limiting the potential benefits of drones.

Volvo

New plug-in hybrid diesel bus could slash fuel consumption up to 80 percent.

When it comes to the electrification of motorized transport, cars like the Tesla Model S, Nissan Leaf, and Chevrolet Volt have received the most attention. But the same technologies are also being put to use in much larger vehicles.Volvo is testing a new plug-in electric hybrid diesel bus in Gothenburg, Sweden. The company says the vehicles can cut fuel consumption and carbon-dioxide emissions by 75 to 80 percent compared with conventional buses.

Ethan Miller/Getty

Adult entertainment is a huge, profitable business. But porn stars and others in the industry often have a difficult time opening business bank accounts.

By Chris Morris Chanel Preston knows not everyone approves of her chosen profession. That's one of the risks that go with being one of the biggest stars in porn. But she never thought it would affect her ability to open a bank account.Preston recently opened a business account with City National Bank in Los Angeles. When she went to deposit checks into the account days later, however, she was told it had been shut down, due to "compliance issues".

Paul Sakuma/AP

North Carolina wants to ban Tesla. It's not going to work.

North Carolina’s legislature is being mocked for a proposed ban on Tesla's electric sportscars. Technically, it’s a ban on automakers selling cars directly to consumers without going through a licensed dealer, but because Tesla is the only automaker that does this, it’s pretty blatantly a Tesla ban. It should also come as no surprise who’s backing it: the North Carolina Car Dealers Association, which, Slate points out, gave $8,000 to state Sen.

Noah Berger/Reuters

Maybe if Walmart paid its workers more, its workers—along with millions of other low-paid U.S. consumers—would buy more stuff at Walmart. Daniel Gross on the company’s profit problem.

One of these days, Walmart will figure out the reason that its U.S. sales suffer, quarter after quarter, year after year. On Thursday, the nation’s biggest retailer posted its quarterly results. They were less than overwhelming. Overall sales for Walmart’s U.S. stores came in at $66.56 billion, up a meager .3 percent from the first quarter of 2012. Same-store sales actually fell 1.4 percent from the year before.In a period of economic growth, that shouldn’t be happening.

via Youtube

by Robert Frank Wealthy Chinese car consumers have a strange way of filing consumer complaints.According to Chinese press reports, a wealthy Chinese businessman hired a crew to smash his Maserati Quattroporte with sledgehammers to protest poor customer service. The highly public supercar execution took place at the Qingdao Auto Show.One of the four men who smashed the car said the owner was protesting "poor sales service" at the Maserati dealership in Qingdao where the car was purchased.

Ron Edmonds/AP

Millions of little gremlins are emerging from the dirt after 17 years of hiding. So fire up the grill! We talked to entomologist Louis Sorkin about the best ways to prepare the little protein nuggets.

A feast is coming.Any day now, millions of cicadas are going to emerge from the dirt and head up into the trees, where they will swarm, sing, mate, and then die. While they are here, predators up and down the Northeastern United States will feast. Wasps, birds, rodents, small mammals, and snakes will all dine on the Magicicadas of Brood II. But what about me? Can humans eat the bugs?Turns out yes, we totally can. And many do! But the prospect of picking a cicada up off the ground and biting into its thorax is rather unappealing.

Noah Millman with a very interesting liberal perspective on immigration and wages over at The American Conservative. Best passage:[I]f we’re going to argue that mass immigration isn’t going to create a fiscal problem so long as we don’t allow class divisions to deepen and fester, then shouldn’t we be doing something to make sure class divisions don’t deepen and fester? Like, make sure wages, even for relatively low-skill manual labor, are high enough to allow a semblance of a middle class existence? If you believe that low IQs are partly caused by growing up poor, then isn’t a low-wage policy even more pernicious than it would otherwise appear, as it hobbles a substantial portion of the next generation as well? Wouldn’t a low-wage policy wind up making it seem like Richwine was right after all?

EPA, via Landov

Sucks to be Venezuelan: the country has run out of toilet paper, thanks to price controls straight out of a Woody Allen movie. Daniel Gross on Bolívar’s backward business legacy.

Venezuela is out of toilet paper. To combat a chronic shortage, the government said this week it would import badly needed supplies of the consumer staple. In a scene reminiscent of Woody Allen’s Bananas, Commerce Minister Alejandro Fleming proclaimed this week that “the revolution will bring the country the equivalent of 50 million rolls of toilet paper."How does a country—an entire country of 28 million people—run short of toilet paper? Absent a sudden, um, run on the product, it shouldn’t happen.