People love Amazon Echo , but more and more people are buying the smaller $50 Echo Dot, which can do all the same things as the Echo but also be plugged into other speaker systems to take advantage of the better audio quality. In fact, the Echo Dot has been the top-selling device on Amazon.com since November 1. As more and more people buy into the Echo family, they’re also learning the nuances of owning these types of devices – specifically, that they can’t always understand you, and don’t always do what you want them to do.

The dropping of the New Year’s Eve ball in Times Square has been a tradition for over 100 years. We spoke with the agent for the ball itself, Jeffrey Straus, and climbed to the top of One Times Square to find out why millions Click below for the top news from around the Bay Area and beyond.

The Bank of Italy said Friday that the cost to rescue failing lender Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena will likely hit a 8.8 billion , a figure that falls largely in line with European Central Bank estimates. BMPS will need around a 4.6 billion to shore up the bank’s capital base and repair its common tier 1 equity ratio, the Bank of Italy said in a statement, and a further a 2 billion to cover retail investors, putting the cost for Italian taxpayers at a 6.6 billion.

As oil prices stabilize and confidence returns to the patch, there’s been an uptick in oil and gas companies filing to go public. With prized assets in the industry’s promised lands, not all of them make it that far.

The Wall Street Journal’s Steven Russolillo tweeted on Thursday that Tesla shares are down at the end of year for the first time since the carmaker’s 2010 IPO. It’s an accurate observation, although one that should be taken with a rather large grain of salt.

Futures are higher late Wednesday but they have been all week and the market went the opposite direction in regular trade. Futures for U.S. markets were higher late Thursday, but they have provided little guidance to Wall Street’s performance in regular trade in the final week of the year as both the Trump and Santa rallies wilted.

Bad debts at Indian lenders, especially those in the dominant state-run sector, have climbed to a 14-year high and could swell further, putting a strain on their capital buffers and profitability, a central bank study showed. The industry’s gross bad-loan ratio jumped to 9.1 percent in September, from 7.8 percent in March, according to the Reserve Bank of India’s Financial Stability Report released Thursday.

People in India have until the end of Friday to deposit discontinued notes in bank and post office accounts, or risk their money becoming worthless. Early last month the government scrapped the 500 and 1000 rupee notes to crack down on undeclared money and fake cash.