Mary McLeod Bethune surely would have been one of The Network Journal’s “25 Influential Black Women in Business” honorees were she alive today.

When New Jersey entrepreneur Avis Yates Rivers started her first business more than 20 years ago, she ran it part time out of the basement of her home and still worked a full-time job. After a series of setbacks and comebacks, Rivers managed to parlay her business acumen into a successful multimillion-dollar technology business.

In one of the latest cases of biopiracy, Tanzania is being pressured to do battle in court to stop the United States and Brazil from patenting a gene isolated from a variety of sorghum grown by farmers in southern Tanzanian.

The year of 2010 looks to be a little brighter, at least when it comes to the job market. Employers are starting to consider hiring strategies that could protect the future growth of their companies, according to CareerBuilder’s 2010 Job Forecast, which questioned more than 2,700 hiring managers and human resource professionals.

With developed markets still recovering from the Great Recession and emerging markets developing bubbles that may soon burst, investors may have to look to the frontier markets in Africa and the Caribbean to diversify their portfolios.

At January’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the five co-chairs, including Aetna Chairman and CEO Ronald A. Williams, shared their thoughts on actions most urgently needed as we revamp the global financial regulatory framework and try to extract ourselves from the economic morass into which we have sunk.

It’s no secret there are a lot of highly educated folks out there looking for work: The supply of college and postgraduate degrees is far exceeding the demand for those degrees. But a lot of those degrees are utterly worthless.

There’s a lot of talk these days both on the street and in the news that the United States is poised to enter a season of inflation. Some insist that things are so economically serious we need to get prepared for “runaway inflation.” Inflation is, by definition, “a general increase in prices and fall in the purchasing value of money.”

Exports often get little attention from trade critics, but President Obama used his State of the Union address to stress the opportunities for economic growth through exporting.

Inner-city companies attract 31 percent less growth capital than average U.S. businesses, according to a report by Inner City Capital Connections, a partnership between the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City and Bank of America that educates inner-city businessowners about equity financing and connects them with providers of such financing.

With big banks extending fewer loans to small businesses, community banks are emerging as the best hope for these businesses as they seek credit to help them grow and expand.

You own a small retail business and you plan major improvements to the premises. You apply for a loan at the bank you’ve been using for years. It’s the first time you’re applying for a loan but you’re not bothered by all the hand-wringing over tightening credit. All of your financial statements are in order, your checking account has a decent balance and the business is profitable.

Like many working parents, Beverly Flaxington armed her daughter with a cell phone in fifth grade, when the time came for her to venture out alone. At first, it was a great way to stay in touch.

Everywhere you look in Cape Verde, there’s construction: condos, malls, high-rise bank buildings, sprawling corporate centers. Anticipating a boom in tourism, the 10-island nation located just 320 miles off the coast of Senegal is on a building frenzy.

Finding a diet that’s right for you can be a challenge, especially if you’re looking to quickly shed pounds packed on over a long period of time. If you’re like most people, you’ll try the latest fad diet. It’s usually the one that promises the quickest results.

Langston Hughes, famed Harlem Renaissance poet of the 1920s and 1930s, understood the life and struggle of someone who wants to pursue his or her artistic passions. “An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose,” the poet once said.