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Anchored by Jake Tapper, The Lead airs at 4 p.m. ET on CNN.
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money lead
Inside the Amazon operation
New York (CNNMoney) – The future of Amazon has arrived, and it's not a drone.
The online mega-retailer on Monday unveiled its next-generation fulfillment centers, complete with gigantic robotic arms and machines to help prepare customer orders.
Back-end improvements may never be seen by customers, but will reduce the time between when an order is placed and when it arrives on a doorstep, Amazon said. It may also help prevent the kind of fiasco Amazon suffered last year when many orders weren't delivered in time for Christmas.
money lead
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370: How much will families be paid?
New York (CNNMoney) – To the long list of unanswered questions about Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, add one that can't be answered with search planes, black boxes or satellite data. How much money does the airline owe its passengers' families?
International and contract law provide some answers, but the true figures will likely be settled when insurance claims and lawsuits are filed by relatives of the flight's 239 victims. Some attorneys, citing their past work on plane crashes, say the total for each passenger could vary from $400,000 to $10 million.
politics lead
'Spitzer and Weiner and Filner – Oh my!'
If Eliot Spitzer and Anthony Weiner win their primaries this fall, the races should be slam-dunks for their Republican opponents, right?
Maybe not.
“You can throw in Spitzer and Weiner and Filner – oh my!” Republican strategist and National Review columnist Jim Geraghty said Friday on CNN’s “The Lead.”
Spitzer, Weiner and San Diego Mayor Bob Filner – all Democrats – are each seeking to overcome their own sex-related scandals. Spitzer pledges his is in the past; Weiner says the same, but has weathered a string of new revelations this week; and four new disclosures brought the number of women alleging sexual misbehaviour against Filner to seven.
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money lead
Investors ‘like’ Facebook, and put their money behind it
It suffered a rocky premiere on the open market last year, but the numbers don’t lie: investors “like” Facebook.
“Google has become a verb … but Facebook’s bigger than that,” Rocco Pendola of TheStreet.com said on CNN’s “The Lead.”
Investors indicated the friendship between them and the tech giant was strong by snapping up the stock, sending it up 25% on Thursday after a strong second quarter earnings report came out late Wednesday.
The company beat analysts’ predictions, posting revenue of $1.8 billion and righting its balance sheet by posting net income rather than losses. It prompted major market-watchers to reevaluate their target price for the stock significantly upwards.
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buried lead
More whistleblowers coming forward against investigator, senator says
There may be yet more allegations to come out against the federal inspector general already accused of a cover-up, nepotism and abuse of authority - the sorts of misdeeds he is responsible for outing.
Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisconsin, said Friday on CNN’s “The Lead with Jake Tapper” that since he and Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Missouri, went public with the claims on Thursday that “more whistleblowers are coming forward.”
The two senators wrote in a letter to Charles Edwards, the Department of Homeland Security’s acting inspector general, that they “have been alerted by numerous whistleblowers to allegations of misconduct and abuse by you in your position.”
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