Business

In the visitors room of the Women’s Eastern Reception, Diagnostic & Correctional Center in Vandalia, nine women stand dressed in bright blue caps and gowns. They’re the first to graduate from ASPIRE MO, a program designed to teach inmates the entrepreneurial skills to start a business once they leave prison.

The 20-week program teaches them various skills like market projections, advertising and feasibility studies. By the end of the course, they make a comprehensive business plan.

While you’re reading this, Winston Kliethermes is probably thinking about batteries.

He owns B & W Battery & Auto Repair in Jefferson City, and he says he’s been working with car batteries since 1974.

There are a lot more kinds of car batteries around now, but almost all of them have one element in common: lead. Lead-based batteries have long been the standard for transportation like cars or boats, and companies across the globe also use lead-based batteries to power their servers in case of emergency.

It’s a well proven system.

Beth Snyder turned her hobby of printmaking into a career when she started 1canoe2, a print and illustration studio. Her passion for creating prints began when her husband, then-fiancé, bought her a press for about $700 on eBay, for Christmas in 2007. She had wanted to print her wedding invitations using a traditional method.

Strikes and protests are starting up in more than 300 cities around the country today as part of the Fight for $15, the national push to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. The demonstrations started in New York four years ago, and have since expanded to many cities and sectors. Today airport workers like janitors and baggage handlers, as well as Uber drivers, will join the protests for higher wages and better working conditions. President-elect Donald Trump’s opinions on the minimum wage are unclear, but the movement has also condemned his views on immigration and policing. 

For the past few days, millions of consumers have been in spending overdrive.  Storming stores on Black Friday. Working the web on Cyber Monday. And nonprofits that do good works like feeding the homeless and exposing corruption have a message for all of us: don’t stop now.  

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The Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has revised its global economic forecast, and things are looking up. It’s predicting 3.3 percent global growth in 2017, up from 2.9 this year and 0.1 percent higher than the prediction it issued in September. The organization is anticipating some stimulus to the U.S. economy under President-elect Donald Trump, who has promised $1 trillion in infrastructure investments, although the details of that idea are sketchy and subject to a political battle. 

With Fidel Castro's death, what might have been a low priority in the Trump administration is jumping up the agenda: what to do about business deals between the U.S. and Cuba.

John Kavulich, president of the nonpartisan U.S. Cuba Trade and Economic Council, joined us to talk about Cuba's future and what Castro's death means for the country's relationship with the U.S. 

On what's next for Cuba: 

As shoppers hit the stores this Black Friday, many will be paying with the chip cards introduced in the  U.S. about a year ago. Those cards were meant to make in-store purchases more secure. But some cybersecurity experts say chip cards may just push cyber criminals to online or “card not present” transactions.

Americans import about 90 percent of the seafood consumed in the U.S., and about half comes from fish farms or aquaculture.

The Obama Administration wants to decrease our reliance on imported seafood with efforts to allow fish farming in some federal waters — which begin 3 miles off states' shorelines.

Farmed fish create pollution with their waste. But experts say in federal waters — the open ocean — the waste can be diffused more easily than near coastlines.

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On today's show, we'll talk to Business Insider's Ben Gilbert about the market for virtual reality, and play this week's Silicon Tally with with Geoffrey Fowler, personal technology columnist for the Wall Street Journal. 

Happy Thanksgiving! On today's show we're straddling turkey day and Black Friday with stories about football, gift cards and Ikea. Plus, a farm program in southern Oregon that lets former drug addicts grow nutritious food for their families. 

The National Football League has been playing games on Thanksgiving since 1920. But the Detroit Lions were the first team to really embrace the Thanksgiving day game.  They've been playing on Turkey Thursday since 1934. And what began as a ploy to fill a stadium on a day when fans didn't have to go to work , has grown into a full-blown tradition of turkey and pigskin and big money for the NFL.

Remember the housing crisis? Well, for many American homeowners, it’s now squarely in the rear-view mirror. A report from RealtyTrac finds that the percentage of homeowners who are underwater — meaning they owe more on their mortgage than their home is worth — has fallen to about 10 percent. It was 28 percent at its peak in 2012. The main reason: home prices have been rising, for years, helped by low mortgage rates. So homeowners have been able to build wealth through the equity they have in their homes.

Virtual reality gear has been predicted to be a big trend this holiday season. Even though it’s been popularized as the next big thing for gaming, VR has a lot of potential that reaches beyond just entertainment.