Amazon's new competition, A&P bankruptcy, and a $100m alien search

Though technically the S&P 500 is trading at or near a new all-time high U.S. stocks (^GSPC, ^DJI, ^IXIC) are pretty flat into the middle of the session with earnings the only catalyst in sight.

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Here are some of the other stories Yahoo Finance is keeping an eye on today.

E-Commerce battle
A new shopping site called Jet.com opens to the public tomorrow. The site costs $50 a year to join and aims to reward those that pay up by undercutting Amazon (AMZN) on the price of tens of thousands of items. Despite the fact that the company has lost tons of cash already, the venture capital world is making some big bets on it, perhaps valuing it as high as $3 billion.

A&P bankruptcy: Part 2
Not too long ago the biggest retailer in the country was not Walmart (WMT), but The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company -- better known as the grocery store chain A&P. Now for the second time in five years the once great grocer is filing for bankruptcy protection.

Airport terminal for the dogs
More than 70,000 animals spend time at New York's John F. Kennedy airport each year, traveling with their owners around the globe. Soon the four legged friends will have their own place to unwind on those long layovers at New York City's busiest airport, and it's part of a pretty big business.

$100 million search for aliens
Russian Billionaire Yuri Milner is known in the business world for big bets on Facebook (FB) and Twitter (TWTR) early in their history - but it's his next project that is really out of this world. Milner is teaming up with Stehpen Hawking and putting $100 million toward efforts to find alien life elsewhere in the universe.

More from Yahoo Finance
Searching for ET: Hawking to look for extraterrestrial life
Grocery store chain A&P files for bankruptcy again
NYC's Kennedy airport building luxury animal terminal