Monday Business Edition

As cooling exports and flat domestic consumption hit Japan’s growth in April-June, the data pointed to the looming prospect of China overtaking Japan as the world’s second-largest economy.

“The economy is levelling off,” said Keisuke Tsumura, parliamentary secretary of the Cabinet Office.

The U.S. economy appears mired in a troubling limbo, not weak enough to signal an imminent downturn and not sufficiently sturdy to give businesses confidence to begin hiring again.

The latest economic data highlights the shifting fortunes on either side of the Atlantic, with a robust Germany propelling the eurozone as the U.S. outlook looks bleaker.

Traditionally, accounting rules have given companies a lot of leeway in how they record leases for assets ranging from store locations and restaurant equipment to airplanes and machinery. As a result, only certain types of leases appear on the balance sheet, while a majority of a company’s leases can often be kept off the balance sheet and hidden from an investors’ view.

But the Financial Accounting Standards Board, which sets U.S. accounting rules, and the London-based International Accounting Standards Board, which writes accounting rules for more than 100 countries, will aim to change all that this week by proposing to bring many of these assets onto corporate balance sheets.

Industrial production, housing starts and inflation data will come under scrutiny as well, after stocks on Friday wrapped up their worst week in six. Last week’s sell-off also drove stocks back into negative territory for the year.

Technical charts show “sell” signals, indicating more weakness. At the same time, some analysts say the market may be due for a bounce.

You don’t hear that much anymore.

The median age for viewers at those networks and CBS is now 51. The broadcasters’ audience has aged at twice the rate of the general population during the past two decades, according to a new report. It’s a quiet trend with a real impact on the way they do business.

The foreign governments are essentially a decade behind in coming to terms with encryption, a technology that’s fundamental to the Internet as a medium of commerce.

Encrypted communications are scrambled in a complex process to ensure that only the intended recipient can read them, using the proper digital key. This often takes place behind the scenes, without the user needing to do anything. When you submit your credit card number on a shopping site, the communication is encrypted. When you log in to your bank’s site, that connection is encrypted as well.

Early apples are already ripe for picking in the Northeast and Midwest. Sweet corn was a couple of weeks ahead of schedule, as were many tomatoes, blueberries and peaches. And, if the warm weather holds, families might have Halloween pumpkins well before October starts.

Major row crops, such as corn and soybeans, also are a little ahead of season, said Julie Schmidt, a statistician with the National Agricultural Statistics Service. A mild winter let farmers plant early, and warm weather since has helped their growth.

Perhaps the biggest fear is that some fisherman might try to sell oil-contaminated shrimp.

“If you see oily shrimp, you got to throw them back over. Go somewhere else. It’s all you can do. And you hope everyone else does the same,” said Dewayne Baham, 49, a shrimper from Buras.

But four months after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon, regulators have only started to make good on promises to overhaul drilling. Tough measures are stalled in Congress. A $1 billion emergency response network proposed by the industry won’t be operational for another year.

And while doomsday scenarios from the BP spill, like oil washing up the East Coast, have not come to pass, there are no guarantees that drilling will be any safer once it does resume.

Tourists swarmed the town pier in the 1970s and ’80s, snapping pictures and bantering with commercial fishermen as they unloaded another shimmering haul for Secondo’s company, Reliable Fish, to truck to points south.

Secondo is convinced Plymouth tourists went home remembering the fishermen more than Plymouth Rock, which commemorates the Pilgrims’ landing in 1620.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Jeffrey S. White Friday means sugar beet growers won’t be able to use the modified seeds after harvesting the biotechnology beets already planted on more than 1 million acres spanning 10 states from Michigan to Oregon. All the seed comes from Oregon’s Willamette Valley.

Additional planting won’t be allowed until the U.S. Department of Agriculture submits an environmental impact statement. That sort of extensive examination can take two or three years.

It’s nearly four months since stocks reached their 2010 highs and began falling on investors’ doubts about the economic recovery. Some analysts say it could be another year before investors get up enough confidence to restart the rally.

The economy isn’t helping them. Last week, the Federal Reserve and two mass-market retailers, JCPenney Co. and Kohl’s Corp., lowered their outlooks for the rest of the year. The CEO of networking equipment maker Cisco Systems Inc. used the same words as Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke to describe the economy: unusually uncertain.