The news at a glance

Apple: Mastering the art of tax avoidance

Apple may now be the most profitable tech company on the planet, said Charles Duhigg and David Kocieniewski in The New York Times, but it doesn’t pay a lot of taxes. The company has pioneered legal tax strategies that reduced its corporate tax on last year’s profits of $34 billion to just 9.8 percent, compared with 24 percent for Walmart. The company created a now-popular accounting technique known as the “Double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich,” which cuts taxes by routing profits through subsidiaries in Ireland, the Netherlands, and the Caribbean. It has also shunted some functions from its California headquarters to tax-free Nevada. Apple’s tax-reducing strategy “presents a conundrum for lawmakers overseeing corporate taxation.” Technology is the country’s most valuable industry, but many tech companies “are among the least taxed.”

Apple had better watch out, said Darius Dixon in Politico.com. The Times’ story raised eyebrows in Congress, with powerful Republican Sen. Tom Coburn saying it made him “livid.” Under the current tax code, Coburn said, “everybody that’s really successful worldwide is keeping their capital out of here, and that capital is being invested somewhere other than America.” Coburn said he would urge the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship to take up the matter of foreign tax havens.

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E-publishing: Microsoft joins up with B&N

Software giant Microsoft and bookseller Barnes & Noble this week announced a new partnership that will give “both companies added ammunition in their battles against Amazon.com and Apple,” said Janet I. Tu in The Seattle Times. Microsoft agreed to invest an initial $300 million, and a further $180 million in coming years, in the B&N subsidiary that makes the Nook, the bookseller’s answer to Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iPad. B&N’s stock price surged on the news. “This is yet another tactical manifestation of the battle for control of everything you do digitally,” said John Jackson, an analyst with CCS Insight.

Economy: Growth slows in first quarter

The U.S. economy grew at an annualized rate of 2.2 percent in the first three months of the year, said Peter Whoriskey in The Washington Post, slower than the 3.0 percent rate of the previous three months. The Commerce Department’s first-quarter numbers showed consumer spending up, however, suggesting that “fortitude at the cash register is energizing the recovery” despite rising financial pressures on U.S. households. The U.S. economy “is far from booming, but it doesn’t seem headed into another recession.”

Automobiles: Chrysler on a roll

Just three years after almost going under, Chrysler last week announced “its best quarterly profit in 13 years,” said Tom Krisher in the Associated Press. The company’s first-quarter profits of $473 million were four times what it made a year earlier, and the brightest spot was U.S. sales, up 39 percent in the first three months of the year. “I have no bad news to tell you,” Chrysler chief executive Sergio Marchionne told reporters. The company is about to launch a revamped Dodge Dart, “its first decent compact” since the mid-1990s.

Airlines: Delta buys oil refinery

The country’s second-largest airline is buying an oil refinery to save money on fuel, said Charisse Jones in USA Today. Delta Air Lines announced this week that it would pay $150 million for a mothballed Phillips 66 plant in Trainer, Pa. CEO Richard Anderson called the purchase “an innovative approach to managing our largest expense.” Fuel accounts for up to 40 percent of the carrier’s costs, and the company said the facility’s output would cover 80 percent of its U.S. needs. Other airlines will be watching and “may eventually follow Delta’s lead.”