At Tomorrow's Harvest farm, you won't find acres of land on which animals graze, or rows of corn, or bales of hay. Just stacks of boxes in a basement and the summery song of thousands of chirping crickets.

When the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) and Staples birthed a retail partnership in 2013, USPS said "it's time to celebrate." But now, that program has been sentenced to death and it is postal labor leaders who are rejoicing. They cheer the demise of a program that had been the target of a vigorous campaign by postal unions that don't want the post office privatized.

The Obama administration has finalized new fuel-economy standards for large trucks, buses and other heavy-duty vehicles, the latest in a series of efforts aimed at slashing greenhouse gas emissions and weaning the nation from its dependence on fossil fuels.

Next time you're at the mall, take a closer look at the paper price tag dangling from the clothes you take into the dressing room. If you hold the tag up to a light, you might see a dark, salt-grain-sized speck in it. Or, if you run your thumb over the tag, you might feel an almost imperceptible bump.

Now that retailers have put their Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales behind them, many are gearing up for another potential holiday season gauntlet: A possible crush of procrastinators hitting their stores and websites at the last minute.

NASA on Tuesday awarded a pair of much-anticipated contracts, worth up to $6.8bn combined, to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station to Boeing and SpaceX in a deal that would allow the U.S. to launch astronauts into space from U.S. soil for the first time in years.

Big-box electronics giant Best Buy reported sagging second-quarter sales Tuesday amid increasingly intense competition from rival retailers. The company's comparable sales dipped 2 percent in the U.S., though it still managed to post $146m in profit, largely thanks to a long-term cost-cutting program. But with few new electronics products to capture consumers' attention, the rest of 2014 isn't looking any sunnier.

On the eve of his inauguration and his party's return to power, Mexico's new president, Enrique Peña Nieto, vowed to reshape his country's education, business and energy sectors in ways that could have profound effects on the United States.