Companies

On a recent Friday morning, a classroom of teenagers at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School broke up into small groups and spent an hour not answering questions about Albert Camus's "The Plague. " It wasn't that the students were shy, or bored, or that they hadn't done the reading. They were following instructions: Ask as many questions as they could, and answer none of them. The kids wrote in rapid fire on sheets of butcher paper. "Why is everyone acting normal when people are dropping dead?"

Shocked that Liberty Mutual paid its former chief executive roughly $50 million a year, three Massachusetts senators have proposed budget amendments to discourage other mutual companies from awarding outsized pay packages in the future. State Senator Brian A. Joyce, Democrat of Milton, would require mutual companies, both insurers and banks, to publicly disclose compensation for top executives, just as publicly traded companies are required to do. Senator Mark C. Montigny, a New Bedford Democrat, would give policyholders at mutual insurers a chance to vote on executive compensation,...

Facebook was supposed to soar. Instead, it plunged. After the social network's stock fizzled on Friday in its long-awaited debut, its stock fell 11 percent on Monday, even as the rest of the stock market rallied. The downward spiral has left some people sitting on big losses, and others scratching their heads. After all, nothing fundamental has changed at Facebook in the days since the much-hyped company came to the stock market — Facebook still has more than 900 million users, its 28-year-old founder Mark Zuckerberg controls the company, and it is still one of the few...

A Massachusetts-based video game company held a job fair near the headquarters of financially troubled 38 Studios in Providence. The Providence Journal reports ( http://bit.ly/KeQil9) that about 300 people attended Tuesday's job fair by Turbine Inc. at the Hotel Providence. Turbine spokesman Adam Mersky says it wasn't a coincidence that they were looking for talent just a few blocks from Curt Shilling's troubled company. Mersky told the newspaper that turnout was higher than expected and some 38 Studios employees were at the event, but he declined to say how many.

In the final months of two mostly unmemorable terms in office, Rhode Island Governor Donald Carcieri boasted about his little state's big splash - stealing former Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling and his nascent video game company from Massachusetts. "This is a risk worth taking," said Carcieri, a Republican, announcing the 2010 deal that lured Schilling's company, 38 Studios, to Providence, and put Rhode Island taxpayers on the hook for up to $75 million in guaranteed loans to an athlete who liked video games but had never developed one. "I think the governor...

Mitt Romney has long called himself a venture capitalist, experience he says helps him understand the economy better than other candidates for president. But he spent much more of his career in leveraged buyouts than in the investments in start-up companies known as venture capital. Romney's one true venture deal was Staples Inc., the office supply superstore, two years after he started Bain Capital. He wasn't the first to discover Staples; another Boston venture firm introduced him to Staples founder Tom Stemberg.

Raising levels of "good" cholesterol may not be so good for you after all. A study published Wednesday by Boston-area scientists challenges the long-held idea that HDL cholesterol actively protects against heart disease, finding that people with genes that boosted their HDL did not have a lowered risk of heart attacks. In the study in the medical journal The Lancet, a team led by researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital and the Broad Institute examined the health of more than 100,000 people, some of them with genetic variations that elevated their...

I assumed I had seen it all with Liberty Mutual. Once you learn about the chief executive's $50 million-a-year compensation package, the fleet of corporate jets, the $90,000 flights to Hawaii, the tens of millions of dollars for senior managers, the board of directors that doesn't feel the need to utter one public word of explanation, what more can there be? But as we've seen, there's always more, a fact that was never more apparent than when I was flipping through a mound of permit applications, building records, and engineering drawings on file in...

In late 2009, Dassault Systèmes, France's largest software company, launched a search for a location to establish a headquarters for its rapidly expanding operations in North and South America. It already had operations in Los Angeles, Charlotte, N.C., and Auburn Hills, Mich. But ultimately, the global technology firm decided there was only one place to be: Route 128. Dassault creates software that helps companies conceive, design, make, and improve products, and Route 128 has become the world's undisputed epicenter of this fast-growing technology, known as Product Lifecycle...

Medical device maker Medtronic Inc. said Wednesday that federal prosecutors have closed their investigation of the company's InFuse bone graft. The world's largest medical device company was being investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts. The government first subpoenaed documents from Minneapolis-based Medtronic in October 2008. InFuse contains a genetically engineered protein that can stimulate bone growth. In June, a medical journal alleged that Medtronic downplayed the risks of InFuse and did not disclose...

Shares of some top specialty retail companies are mixed at 10 a.m.: Autozone Inc. rose $1.36 or .4 percent, to $369.91. Bed Bath & Beyond Inc. rose $.25 or .4 percent, to $70.04. Best Buy fell $.22 or 1.2 percent, to $17.95. Home Depot Inc. rose $.14 or .3 percent, to $47.75. Lowe's Cos. rose $.08 or .3 percent, to $25.68. OfficeMax rose $.01 or .2 percent, to $4.88. RadioShack rose $.02 or .4 percent, to $4.76. Staples fell $.01 or .1 percent, to $13.34.

A look at how selected companies providing computers, components, services and related software are faring: April 11: Research groups Gartner and IDC estimate that PC shipments in the first quarter were ahead of their expectations, though growth was modest in light of competition from smartphones and tablet computers. Hewlett-Packard Co. appeared to have regained some of the business it had lost as it was weighing whether to dump its PC business. Lenovo Group Ltd. showed strong gains over last year.

Call them the pipeline companies. To qualify for the Globe 100, companies must have traded stock for the full previous calendar year. But what about companies that went public between January 2011, and now? They're in the pipeline. In fact, they could be the future stars of the Globe 100. As they grow, they will help boost the state's economy. Look for them on next year's list. The Globe gathered together three top executives from such companies: Jeremy Allaire, chief executive of Boston-based video services provider Brightcove Inc., which went public in February 2011; Robert...

MANY BOSTONIANS over the age of 40 can recall the ease of finding summer employment during their teenage years. But it's not so for today's teens, especially without the help of city officials who employ young people in city work crews or match them with corporate partners. Today, scores of Boston teens from the Dorchester-based Youth Jobs Coalition are scheduled to demonstrate for summer jobs in the Financial District. They are targeting Fidelity Investments, which last year employed only a handful of teens through the city's summer jobs program, according to city officials.