NAVARRE, Ohio/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The busy shop floor at Miller Weldmaster Corp could make a great location for an Obama campaign ad. As workers assemble the family-owned company's hot-air fabric welders, used to manufacture everything from inflatable rafts to truck tarps, it's hard to know the recession of 2007-2009 ever happened. Ten clocks on the wall of the plant in Navarre, Ohio, show local time from Norway to New Zealand and tell Miller Weldmaster's comeback story in a word: exports. Sixty percent of the company's business now comes from outside the United States. ...

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan's economy bounced back in the first quarter from a year-end lull, powering ahead of other major industrial nations thanks to rebuilding of the tsunami-battered northeast, solid private spending and some improvement in exports. The world's third-largest economy grew 1.0 percent in the January-March quarter, just above a median forecast of 0.9 percent. A 0.2 percent contraction in the economy reported for the final three months of 2011 was revised up to flat in the government data released on Thursday. ...

A Malaysian court convicted three Mexican brothers and two other people Thursday and sentenced them to be hanged for drug trafficking.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Occidental Petroleum was among the first major U.S. oil drillers to make a big bet on the resurgence of domestic production, spending billions to grab oil patches from Texas to North Dakota. Now, as it bemoans steep costs and moves its rigs out of the Bakken shale oil fields, some analysts wonder if the company has lost its clairvoyance. After two years of unyielding gains, costs are bound to fall, they say. The California-based energy giant is beset by escalating labor costs in North Dakota, which has the lowest unemployment rate in the country. ...

SINGAPORE/HONG KONG (Reuters) - Royal Bank of Canada and Credit Suisse are among suitors who have put in initial bids to buy the non-U.S. wealth management business of Bank of America in a deal that could be worth about $2 billion, sources said. Swiss bank Julius Baer was also keen to bid for some of BofA's units in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and Asia excluding Japan, the sources, who had knowledge of the matter, told Reuters. It was not clear whether Switzerland's third-biggest bank had submitted an initial bid. ...

For the first time, racial and ethnic minorities make up more than half the children born in the U.S., capping decades of heady immigration growth that is now slowing.

(Reuters) - It's the biggest parlor game on Wall Street: Estimating how large JPMorgan Chase & Co's trading loss will be from a hedging strategy that went wrong. The biggest U.S. bank by assets has already disclosed $2 billion of paper losses, and Chief Executive Jamie Dimon said it could lose another $1 billion or more. The losses will grow, some traders say, because it appears JPMorgan has only sold a small portion of its position, leaving it vulnerable to price swings in a thinly traded market. Others are not so sure the bank will suffer much more than it already has. ...

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts (Reuters) - The Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Wednesday named Rafael Reif, an electrical engineer born in Venezuela who has been the university's provost since 2005, as its 17th president. Reif, 61, replaces Susan Hockfield, the first female president of MIT, who announced in mid-February that she was stepping down after almost eight years leading one of the most prestigious universities in the United States. Reif will take up his post at the Cambridge, Massachusetts, university on July 2, the first MIT president not to be a native English speaker. ...

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts (Reuters) - The Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Wednesday named Rafael Reif, an electrical engineer born in Venezuela who has been the university's provost since 2005, as its 17th president. Reif, 61, replaces Susan Hockfield, the first female president of MIT, who announced in mid-February that she was stepping down after almost eight years leading one of the most prestigious universities in the United States. Reif will take up his post at the Cambridge, Massachusetts, university on July 2, the first MIT president not to be a native English speaker. ...

Divisive Republican primaries, an out-of-nowhere GOP retirement in Maine and an unexpectedly competitive race in North Dakota add up to an unpredictable battle for control of the Senate this fall, confounding early forecasts that an era of Democratic rule was inevitably coming to an end.

What only weeks ago was seen as a serious threat to the economic recovery could now turn into a stimulus everyone can love.

FRANKFURT/ATHENS (Reuters) - The European Central Bank has stopped offering liquidity to some Greek banks it does not consider solvent, and international concern about the euro zone rose as Athens called new elections that look set to be won by parties opposing austerity measures. Fears that Athens is on the brink of crashing out of the euro zone and igniting a renewed financial crisis have rattled global markets and alarmed world leaders, with Greece set to figure high on the agenda at a G8 summit later this week. ...

TOKYO (Reuters) - Asian shares on Thursday recovered a bit of the ground lost in the previous day's sell-off, but investors found no reason to bet on risk amid deepening turmoil in Greece and fears of contagion to other stressed euro zone economies. MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan rose 0.5 percent on short covering, after sliding more than 3 percent - its biggest one-day drop in six months - on Wednesday. The index hit a new 4-month low on Wednesday, and has shed 9.6 percent since May 2. ...