Yahoo (YHOO) has jumped into the throng of companies bidding for streaming video site Hulu, according to AllThingsD.

When CEO Marissa Mayer (pictured) goes shopping, she doesn't mess around. Yahoo just announced it would buy the Tumblr blogging site for $1.1 billion. If she's also interested in Hulu, we are starting to get a real sense of the ambitious plans she has for her company.

But Yahoo's got plenty of competition in this one. A number of heavyweights are lining up to make offers for Hulu as well, AllThingsD reports, including DirecTV (DTV), Time Warner Cable (TWC) and some well-heeled private equity companies such as KKR (KKR).

That's got to make Hulu's owners -- News Corp. (NWS), Disney (DIS) and Comcast (CMCSA) -- feel pretty good about their asset. 

Apple's (AAPL) fans are known to be a devoted lot with deep pockets, and that's playing out in the skyrocketing auction prices for the few remaining original Apple 1 computers hitting the block. 

Adding to the appeal is the scarcity of the machines, produced in 1976 by Stephen Wozniak and the late Steve Jobs. With Wozniak creating the hardware, Jobs was the business visionary behind the design, which produced only 175 to 200 of the machines in the Jobs family garage, The New York Times notes. 

Only six working models are known to exist, and one is hitting the block Saturday at the German auction house Breker, which has placed the opening bid at $136,000. The estimated sale price is pegged as high as $453,000. The original cost of the computer was $666.66, or about $2,700 in inflation-adjusted dollars.

 

It's pretty miraculous no one died and only a handful of people were injured Thursday night, when the Interstate 5 bridge over the Skagit River in Washington state collapsed. Officials are blaming the collapse on an oversize truck that apparently struck one of the bridge's key supports.

But the accident should be a wake-up call that the nation's aging infrastructure -- which recently received an overall grade of D+ from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) -- can no longer be ignored or used as a political football. America's transportation network is too crucial to safety and economic strength.

Let's start with the Skagit River bridge. Data from the National Bridge Inventory notes the span, built in 1955, was evaluated as "functionally obsolete" during its 2010 inspection.

 

Why does Lois Lerner, the Internal Revenue Service official at the center of the scandal over the agency's targeting of Tea Party groups, still have a job? Somehow she has hung on even though she has created a nightmarish public relations disaster for the agency -- and now stands accused of misleading Congress.

Lerner was placed on administrative leave Friday, one day after refusing to answer questions before a congressional committee investigating the IRS' action. Acting Commissioner Daniel Werfel asked her to resign, but Lerner refused, according to an account Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, gave the Washington Post.

For now, Lerner, who has worked for the government for 34 years, will continue to collect her salary and benefits despite some members of Congress believing that she lied to them. They also were steamed that Lerner originally disclosed the Tea Party targeting by having a friend ask her a question about it during a news conference. 

Updated 2:05 pm ET.

What might be nickels and dimes for you will end up as hundreds of millions for a corporate giant. Just ask AT&T (T), which has put into play a sneaky new fee. 

The telecom giant this month is adding a 61-cent "below-the-line" charge to the bills of its wireless contract customers in a move that could bring in more than $500 million of new annual revenue, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Such fees earn their names for their placement at the bottom of a phone bill, where companies hope customers will overlook them. After all, what's profitable for wireless carriers isn't necessarily well liked by either consumer groups or the companies' subscribers. 

 

Say you're broke and are about to lose your home. You have a valuable painting that's been in your family for generations. Should you sell it to raise money?

That's the question stirring up controversy in Detroit, which is nearly bankrupt and could run out of cash within weeks. Last month, the city had only $64 million in cash but $226 million in bills. Its libraries are shutting down, and its Police Department can't even pay for gang squads anymore.

So the city's new emergency manager, Kevyn Orr, is floating a proposal to sell some of the pieces of art in the multibillion-dollar collection at the Detroit Institute of Arts. The city owns the building and the collection, after all -- a collection that, by the way, includes amazing works from the likes of Vincent van Gogh and Henri Matisse. 

If self-flagellation were an Olympic sport, Sears Holdings (SHLD) CEO and top shareholder Eddie Lampert would surely be a gold medalist.

Lampert has yet again apologized for quarterly results that were dreadful, even by the low standards of Sears. Lampert called them "unacceptable." Although that candor seems remarkable for a CEO, keep in mind that he has been saying more or less the same thing for years. It's easy to see why.

The venerable retailer lost $279 million, or $2.63 per share, versus net income of $189 million, or $1.78 per share, a year earlier. Revenue plunged by 9% to $8.5 billion. Same-store sales, a key metric of performance at stores open for at least a year, tumbled 3.6%.   

In another sign that America's health care system needs healing, a new study suggests that overworked hospital emergency rooms have evolved into the main entrance point for most patients and that the ER is where most hospitals need to work on controlling costs.

The Washington Post notes that trips to U.S emergency rooms have soared in recent years, from 67 million in 1996 to 119 million in 2008. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality estimates emergency department costs account for up to 5.8% of total health care spending -- or up to $151 billion.

"The ER has become increasingly important as a place where people go for acute unscheduled care," Michael Lee, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at Brown University's Warren Alpert Medical School, told Business Insider. "However, there has been little rigorous analysis of its cost structure."