A small solar power company hopes to become a winner in a market littered with losers.

San Jose, Calif.-based SoloPower is opening a $60 million manufacturing facility in Portland, Ore., Thursday as it works toward receiving a major government loan — like the one given to now-bankrupt Solyndra. SoloPower thinks it has a strategy to succeed where Solyndra failed.

On April 11 of this year, an extraordinary cluster of earthquakes struck off Sumatra. The largest shock, magnitude 8.7, produced stronger ground-shaking than any earthquake ever recorded. And it surprised seismologists by triggering more than a dozen moderate earthquakes around the world.

The quakes are also a sign of big changes to come in the Earth's crust.

At Fort Myer, Va., a small Army base across the river from Washington, D.C., Chaplain Mark Worrell is talking to about 100 soldiers, reciting the grim numbers.

"This year, 2012, there have been more suicides in the Army than combat deaths," he says.

Worrell paces in front of the stage in a small auditorium and talks with the soldiers for more than an hour about the warning signs of suicide. He asks them what they would do if a friend starting selling his tools and lost interest in his favorite hobbies.

Rent-to-own companies may have a right to use software to track the computers they lease out — and disable them remotely if a customer stops making payments.

But they don't have the right to spy on their customers, which is exactly what the Federal Trade Commission says took place. The agency found that the compromised data included everything from passwords to highly personal images.

Mezzo-soprano Kelley O’Connor has received international acclaim performing with the world’s premier orchestras and conductors, premiering exciting new works, and breathing new life into familiar favorites.

Update at 3:30 p.m. ET, Sept. 27

Alleigh Marre, a spokeswoman for Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown's campaign, released a statement, saying:

This week on Valley Writers Read, we hear the works of two local authors. The first story, Joe Hemphill's "A Good Ending to a Story", describes a man with cerebral palsy who refuses to resume his physical therapy. And in the second story, Bill McDougle's "Bertha in Stillwell", the life of a woman named Bertha is chronicled as she grows up in Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl era.