NYSE Euronext is in merger talks with the IntercontinentalExchange. (Update: Sold!)

Foursquare starts using Facebook data for recommendations.

General Mills announces more than 100 new products for 2013.

Amazon's Jeff Bezos among retail leaders honored by NRF.

Apple feels heat in Brazil over iPhone brand and sees "pinch to zoom" patent rejected.

Barack Obama pledges to take action on gun control.

Best Buy digital chief resigns.

Darden takes new tack to spur U.S. restraurant brands.

Deutsche Bank image remake suffers.

Disney raises bar on customer experience with new Fantasy Land.

eBay stops advertising inside mobile apps.Continue reading...

GM is buying back $200M shares from the U.S. government.

UBS fined $1.5 billion in growing Libor scandal.

Instagram backpedals following outcry on terms of service change enabling user images for ad purposes.

CW pulls plug on major placement platform with end of Gossip Girl.

DirecTV expands cross-platform reach.

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg donates $500M to charity.

Grammys launches new social trivia game.Continue reading...

Merck chairman and CEO Kenneth C. Frazier was honored in June with the “Good Scout” Award by Philadelphia’s Cradle of Liberty Boy Scout Council. Frazier grew up in North Philadelphia and credits scouting as instrumental in his life. Now Frazier, the first African American to head a major pharmaceutical company, is turning his back on the organization until it reverses its discriminatory policies.

Now Frazier and Merck, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, have joined the growing wave of corporate leaders taking a stand against discrimination towards gay scouts and leaders in the Boy Scouts of America. 

As GLAAD notes of the corporate backlash to the Boy Scouts' anti-LGBT stance, Merck joins Intel and UPS with the following statement: “The BSA's policy of exclusion based on sexual orientation directly conflicts with the Merck Foundation’s giving guidelines.  The Foundation re-evaluated funding for the BSA when the organization restated its policy that excludes members on the basis of sexual orientation.  Merck Foundation has notified the BSA of this decision.” 

Boy Scouts of America director of public relations, Deron Smith, provided the following statement to brandchannel: “Scouting believes that good people can personally disagree on this topic and still work together to accomplish the common good. While not national sponsors, these companies have positively impacted America’s youth through support of Scouting in local communities. We respect their right to express their own opinions.”Continue reading...

President Obama lobbied a group of big business leaders in Washington this week with his views about the looming fiscal cliff. But at least one of the most important heads of a major American business, Ford CEO Alan Mulally, was taking no guff either from Obama or from the leaders of the Senate and House with whom the president is deadlocked — and apparently willing to push to the edge, if not over it, in a political stand-off.

"It's a concern to all of us, because this is a very, very fragile recovery," Mulally said on MSNBC this week. "It's just so important that we come together on a plan to deal with both the revenue side, but also the expense side, because really what we're talking about is keeping the economic development going. That's the most important thing about this issue."

And while so far the U.S. auto industry has more than carried its weight in the nation's sluggish economic recovery, Mulally said that he couldn't guarantee that it would be able to post continued sales increases if Obama and Congress don't deal quickly and decisively with the fiscal cliff.Continue reading...

The heads of more US restaurant brands are taking out their frustrations on Obamacare, with David Overton of the Cheesecake Factory becoming the latest. And even if you agree with their plaint, their actions prompt the question: Are they only hurting themselves by making a campaign out of their oppostion to the Affordable Care Act and to the new costs it places on their chains, however onerous they may be?

Instead of promoting, say, his chain's holiday campaign to give away 2013 cheesecakes on Facebook, Overton aired his grievances on CBS This Morning, saying that "for those businesses who don't cover their employees [with health insurance already], they'll be in for a very expensive situation." He noted that the Cheesecake Factory already provides some health insurance, but he warned that the costs of complying with Obamacare would be passed on to customers by the industry.Continue reading...

What does $2,000 mean to you? Tell us with #My2k twitter.com/whitehouse/sta…

— The White House (@whitehouse) November 28, 2012

"Call your members of Congress. Write them an email. Tweet it using the hashtag #My2K." —President Obama

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) November 28, 2012

In July 2011, President Obama warned House Majority Leader Eric Cantor that he would pressure Republicans to compromise and make a deal by "going to the American people" in order to avoid the so-called fiscal cliff, and he's doing just that.

The White House (with more than 3 million Twitter followers) and Obama (with 23.9 million followers) created a trending topic on Twitter today by promoting the #My2K hashtag to rally support for the president's call for legislation before the year-end fiscal cliff deadline for former president George W. Bush's tax cuts package.

Obama is stepping up his effort to get Americans to lobby their elected representatives to pass the middle class tax cuts, personalizing the message with "My 2K" as a reference to the $2,000 (well, $2,200) that may be coming out of their pockets: "If Congress fails to act before the end of the year, every American family’s taxes will automatically go up. A typical middle-class family of four would see its taxes rise by $2,200 starting in 2013."Continue reading...

In-N-Out Burger caused a "frenzy" last month when it popped up with a stealth five-hour pop-up in London. Now Five Guys, the US burger chain so-named in honor of the male half of the founding couple and their four sons, is about to make its first foray out of North America and into the UK, and it's planning to stick around a little longer.

The word from UK's Marketing magazine is that Five Guys, which has a thousand locations in the U.S. and Canada, is expanding to the UK thanks to a deal that Five Guys has made with Sir Charles Dunstone, the founder of Carphone Warehouse.

The plan is for Dunstone to open a few Five Guys in the UK next year with the first of them being a flagship store in London. And no, Barack Obama's beloved Five Guys won't rebrand as "Five Chaps" for its UK arrival, and we doubt they'll start calling their menu's mainstay "burgers and chips."Continue reading...

The White House today was the scene of the annual pre-Thanksgiving turkey pardon, with Cobbler and Gobbler getting a reprieve — along with a shout-out to New York Times stats-cruncher Nate Silver ("once again, Nate Silver completely nailed it") and Facebook, the platform on which (in a first this year) the turkey pardon was opened to public voting. Portlandia-ready infographics (below) gave more details on each turkey's background to help voters decide. The First Family then went to Martha's Table, a food pantry in Washington, D.C., to help assemble Thanksgiving meals to be distributed to the less fortunate this holiday.Continue reading...