Your customized headlines for Thu, Mar 15, 2012

Goldman Sachs on Wednesday rebuffed claims made by a former company executive that the investment bank had morphed into a "toxic and destructive" environment where corporate greed trumped client interests.

A bill the House passed last week to make it easier for companies to raise money could also make it easier for companies to cheat investors, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission says.

The encyclopedia entry on Encyclopaedia Britannica will soon need an update: After 244 years, the famous volumes will be going out of print, another victim of the digital age. The encyclopedia will continue as a digital edition.

The business school might be facing a new business model.

If one area of higher education was reshaped by the Great Recession, it might be the beleaguered B-school. At the peak of the downturn, applications to master of business administration programs hit record highs in the Washington region and across the nation. Then, just as suddenly, demand plummeted.

The Washington City Paper didn't cut any staff positions today. It merely cut the cost of all staff positions: Employees at the region's alt-weekly will take a 5 percent pay cut.

News of the initiative broke on the paper's Web site this afternoon. City Paper is owned by the Creative Loafing chain of alt-weeklies; the other properties in the chain — the Chicago Reader and Creative Loafing Atlanta — will sustain "more extensive cuts to staff," according to the Web site.

— The literary guide to disenchanted Wall Streeters.

— Jeffrey Sachs's campaign to become World Bank president doesn't seem to be working too well.

— Encyclopedia Britannica is going out of print.

— Russia plans to send a man to the moon by 2030.

Strapped for revenue and hoping to make its markets less volatile, the European Union is once again deliberating a financial transactions tax. The proposal — which activists have dubbed the "Robin Hood" tax — would put a levy on all trades of stocks, bonds and derivatives, at a rate as low as 0.05 percent. But with little political consensus behind a full-fledged version of the tax, EU finance ministers are considering an alternative modeled on Britain's centuries-old "stamp duty," the Financial Times notes, which would limit the transaction tax to trades of stocks.

One of the odd features of U.S. transportation policy is that, by and large, there isn't an overarching national policy. States generally get money according to a set formula. Congress tends not to prioritize those projects that advance key economic or environmental goals.