J.J. McGrath

The magnitude of Mitt Romney's landslide win in Puerto Rico's Republican presidential primary election on Sunday indicates Rick Santorum's gaffe about the territory's principal language and its effect on the potential for statehood probably had an impact on the results.

Apple Inc. -- the world's most valuable publicly traded company by its market capitalization of $545.97 billion -- will conduct a conference call to announce the outcome of discussions concerning its cash balance on Monday at 9 a.m. EDT, which is before the U.S. equity-market open.

Apple Inc. said it would host a conference call on Monday morning to discuss the outcome of discussions about its cash balance as investors clamor for a return from its massive holdings.

Both front-runner Mitt Romney and chief challenger Rick Santorum have added campaign events in Illinois over the next few days in anticipation of the state Republican Party's presidential primary election on Tuesday.

A source at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. who has been neither charged nor identified in a broad U.S. insider-trading probe was heard via wiretap leaking secrets about Apple Inc. and the Intel Corp., an attorney for former Goldman Sachs board member Rajat Gupta said in court on Friday.

The American soldier alleged to have carried out the massacre of 16 civilians in Afghanistan last weekend -- an event that has rocked already-shaky relations between the two countries -- was identified as U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales on Friday.

Conflicting reports surround the killing of 15 Afghan civilians in Kandahar province this weekend.

Call us crazy, but the two most recent major economic data releases by China -- the consumer price index on Friday and the trade balance on Saturday -- indicate there could be a case to be made for monetary stimulus in the world's second-largest economy.

One year after the Tohoku earthquake, the associated Pacific Ocean tsunami, and the related Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident, many Japanese spent Sunday at community gatherings, demonstrations, and memorial services in observance of the first anniversary of the triple disasters.

A U.S. soldier in Afghanistan is believed to have killed at least three Afghan civilians after leaving his base in Kandahar province, the BBC reported. Following the incident, the soldier surrendered to U.S. military authorities, the BBC said.

Both Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum claimed victories in Republican Party presidential-nomination contests conducted Saturday, as the former won the caucuses in Wyoming, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, while the latter won the caucuses in Kansas.

In the latest attempt to bring the bloodshed in Syria to a speedy conclusion, Kofi Annan, the United Nations-Arab League special envoy, met with Bashar al-Assad, the country's president, in the capital city of Damascus on Saturday -- with little or no success.

The $25 billion settlement between five large U.S. banks accused of abusive mortgage practices on the one side and federal and state government officials on the other side that was announced Feb. 9 will be filed in federal court on Monday, people familiar with the matter said.

The privately held Sientra Inc. on Friday joined the publicly traded Allergan Inc. and Johnson & Johnson (Mentor Worldwide LLC) as the only three companies to have won U.S. Food and Drug Administration approvals to market controversial silicone gel-filled breast implants.

In a stunning move, China's trade balance fell to a deficit of $31.5 billion in February from a surplus of $6.5 billion in January, according to data in multiple media reports on Saturday -- and the country's trade deficit may be its largest in the 21st century.

With Japan observing the one-year anniversary of its extraordinarily deadly 3/11 triple disaster on Sunday, the English-language online sites of three of the country's largest-circulation newspapers are all now covering various aspects of the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdowns associated with last March 11.

As many as 200 people were killed on Sunday when an ammunition dump exploded in Brazzaville, capital of the Republic of Congo, according to multiple media sources. The incident was reportedly caused by a fire at the ammo dump.

Rush Limbaugh, host of Clear Channel Communications Inc.'s The Rush Limbaugh Show, apologized Saturday for unflattering statements he made on his radio talk show Thursday about Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown University law student and women's-rights activist. The apology wasn't enough for some show sponsors.

The burning of Qurans at a NATO base in Afghanistan helped the Taliban's cause and any repeat of similar negligence by Western forces would be disastrous, the country's army chief of staff told Reuters in an interview on Saturday.

Natural catastrophes in the United States caused $35.9 billion in insured losses last year, significantly higher than the 2000-2010 annual average of $23.8 billion (in 2011 dollars). The Insurance Information Institute has some advice to speed the insurance-claims settlement process, should one of them happen in your neighborhood.

With Mitt Romney springing ahead and Rick Santorum falling behind, the Republican Party's presidential primary election in Ohio is looking like a dead heat, setting the stage for a cliffhanger of a contest on Super Tuesday this week, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released Sunday.

Symbolic of the drama surrounding the Costa Concordia shipwreck in Italy, the initial hearing of the criminal investigation into the cruise-ship disaster was conducted Saturday not in a courthouse but in a theater. Outside the venue, one story line has the cruise ship's skipper not wearing his eyeglasses on the evening of the accident.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel faces an unexpected challenge in getting new euro-zone budget-discipline rules approved at home, after the government confirmed on Saturday the new treaty will require a two-thirds majority in both houses of parliament.

Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may be the biggest loser -- and the country's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei may be the biggest winner -- in the parliamentary elections conducted Friday, but the final results will not be known for two or three days.

Syrian forces pounded the battered city of Homs Saturday as they blocked Red Cross/Red Crescent aid from reaching civilians stranded for weeks without food and fuel in the former rebel stronghold -- the country's third-largest city -- activists and aid workers said.

Stocks have proven the naysayers wrong so far in 2012. And the February employment situation summary on Friday could be just the ticket to keep the bulls going next week. Besides the jobs report on Friday, next week brings an ADP private-sector employment report on Wednesday.

Even as a national debate rages over contraception insurance, tens of thousands of low-income women and teenagers across the United States have lost access to subsidized birth control as states slash and restructure family-planning funds.

Powerful tornadoes ripped through the nation's midsection on Friday, killing at least 27 people in Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio as they splintered homes, damaged a prison, and tossed around vehicles. At least 13 people were killed in Indiana, another 12 in Kentucky, and two more in Ohio.

Richard Parsons will step down as chairman of Citigroup Inc. at its annual meeting in April and be succeeded by Michael O'Neill, the former CEO of the Bank of Hawaii Corp., Citigroup said on Friday.