Your customized headlines for Sun, Apr 22, 2012

Last week in these pages, The Post ran a profile of John Jumper, the straight arrow former Air Force general who was brought in as chief executive of local contracting giant SAIC in the wake of an embarrassing overbilling scandal involving bribery, kickbacks, foreign shell corporations and a safe deposit box stuffed with $850,000 in cash.

We know from numerous reports that the housing crisis hit minority families pretty hard. Minority homebuyers by the tens of thousands were trapped in predatory mortgage loans and, as a result, their communities disproportionately felt the impact of foreclosures.

The United States and Europe face several years of economic pain to become competitive in a global economy where growth and financial clout are shifting to Asia and other emerging nations, Tharman Shanmugaratnam, Singapore's finance minister, said at the close of International Monetary Fund meetings that were dominated by lingering concerns over Europe.

Every year, Americans pay $700 million more for cholesterol-lowering drugs than they need to. The reason? Abbott Laboratories.

Abbott Labs is a pharmaceutical company based in Illinois. About a decade ago, in 2000, it faced a problem. The company had recently acquired exclusive rights to sell Tricor-1, a cholesterol-fighting drug. It was profitable, which was nice, but the best part was this: It was a name-brand drug and Abbott was the only company with rights to sell it.