UNITED STATES

Johnson & Johnson posted a 5 percent drop in second-quarter earnings on Tuesday, but profit and revenue beat analysts' forecasts thanks to surprisingly resilient pharmaceutical and consumer product sales.

The U.S. government's fragmented system for protecting financial consumers is designed to fail and must be replaced by a single, powerful new agency, a senior U.S. Treasury official said on Tuesday.

Comcast Corp has signed up CBS Corp as the first broadcast network to participate in the cable company's technical trial of a program to make more television shows available to Internet users.

Bernard Madoff's prison life began on Tuesday, a long way from the luxury homes, sleek yachts and precious designer watches and clothes he accumulated in the years he ran Wall Street's biggest investment fraud.

U.S. stocks were little changed on Tuesday as positive news from the corporate earnings season offset data pointing to weak consumer demand.

A painfully gradual U.S. recovery should start in the third quarter, even as the job market is still weakening, said an economist with the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank.

Goldman reports soaring 2Q profits, Treasury Sec. says economy improving quicker than expected, J&J beats expectations

Shares of small-business lender CIT Group Inc jumped Tuesday amid hopes that the company can access government aid or otherwise restructure debt to forestall a liquidity crisis.

A jump in auto and gasoline sales salvaged an otherwise lackluster June for U.S. retailers, while an inflation gauge jumped by twice as much as expected, suggesting a long-awaited economic recovery will be sluggish.

Swindler Bernard Madoff was temporarily moved to a prison in Atlanta from New York and was in transit to yet another facility on Tuesday, a U.S. official said.

President Barack Obama will unveil a $12 billion initiative on Tuesday to boost community colleges and propel the United States toward his goal of having the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020, administration officials said.

The current U.S. system of consumer financial protection is designed to fail and needs replacement with a dedicated new agency that can respond more quickly to emerging problems in the financial sector, a senior U.S. Treasury official said on Tuesday.

Jailed author of the biggest Ponzi scheme in U.S. history is on his the move again. He is currently being transferred from a medium security prison in Atlanta to an undisclosed location, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

Improving conditions for Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank prove that a Palestinian state can be built from the bottom up while it's being negotiated from the top down, Tony Blair said Tuesday.

Oil prices rose by around 1 percent to above $60 on Tuesday as renewed confidence across financial markets helped to reverse some of last week's falls.

Jailed author of the biggest Ponzi scheme in U.S. history is on his the move again. He is currently being transferred from a medium security prison in Atlanta to an undisclosed location, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, CNN reported. Madoff arrived at the Atlanta prison on Tuesday after he was moved from his New York jail cell.

A former interrogator at the Khmer Rouge's notorious S-21 prison on Tuesday expressed no remorse for the deaths of thousands of Cambodians who he said had all committed crimes.

Oil giant Exxon Mobil Corporation announced Tuesday it will invest more than $600 million and partner with biotech firm Synthetic Genomics Inc.to develop biofuels from photosynthetic algae at a large scale.

Facebook netted a $6.5 billion valuation for its common shares on Monday, further underscoring the fast-growing Internet social networking site's high rank among technology and media industry heavyweights.

Johnson & Johnson posted a 5 percent drop in second-quarter earnings, but profit and revenue beat analyst forecasts helped by surprisingly resilient pharmaceutical and consumer product sales.

Stocks fell on Tuesday, weighed by data pointing to weak consumer demand and by profit-taking in banks after a run-up in anticipation of strong results from Goldman Sachs Group .