World Business

LOS ANGELES Two homeless men befriended by a pair of elderly woman needed only food, water and shelter, a judge said. Instead, said Superior Court Judge David Wesley, they were killed because of the women’s greed.

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For that, Wesley on Tuesday handed down couple life terms each without the possibility of parole, to Helen Golay, 77, and Olga Rutterschmidt, 75.

The women were convicted of a scheme in which they befriended homeless men, took extinguished policies, and then killed them in murders staged to observe like hit-and-run auto accidents.

Prosecutors say the women collected $2.8 the masses before the scheme was uncovered.

The judge said the pair men they killed “needed a helping hand. They thought they were getting this from you,” Wesley said. “Instead these unfortunate men were sacrificed on your sacrificial structure of greed.”

The gray-haired women, who once favored fashionable garments, wore orange jail uniforms to court. Golay’s lawyer, Roger Jon Diamond, asked for a new trial on grounds that a conversation they had after their check was illegally videotaped. The judge rejected the motion.

Both women were convicted of first-degree murder and machination to murder for financial gain in the 1999 death of Paul Vados, 73, and in the 2005 death of Kenneth McDavid, 50.

Relatives of the victims spoke briefly, effective of their seriousness at having lost touch by the two men and therefore verdict out they had been murdered.

“I want to be assured of why my ancestor’s living beings had to end like this,” said Stella Vados, daughter of Paul Vados. “He didn’t deserve that. No human being does.”

Attorney Gloria Allred, who represented Stella Vados and Sandra Salman, the sister of McDavid, said she hoped the case turned a spotlight adhering the homeless and “the fact that they are an extremely vulnerable population whom we all have a duty to patronize and protect.”

She said given the women’s ages, “This is tantamount to the death forfeiture. They will die in prison. I think that’s a just determination.”

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SEOUL, South Korea South Korea’s president said Wednesday that tours to a North Korean mount have recourse would not resume unless the communist country cooperates in an sifting into the shooting death of a South Korean traveller.

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President Lee Myung-bak told a Cabinet meeting that tours should be halted except the North allows in South Korean investigators and confined safety measures for tourists are in place, according to Lee’s office.

“Among government responsibilities, nullity is more weighty than protecting the lives of the lower classes,” he said. “The fact that the North shot dead an unarmed tourist cannot be tolerated for any reason.”

Friday’s killing of a 53-year-old South Korean housewife at the Diamond Mountain company further chilled ties between the Koreas - which have before that time been strained after Lee’s conservative, pro-U.S. government took office in February.

The North has refused to hold any government-level contacts with the South in protest of Lee’s hardline policy.

The North expressed regret over the shooting, but has claimed the woman entered a military restricted area and fled hind a soldier told her to halt. The country too demanded the South apologize for suspending the perambulation succeeding the shooting.

About 1.9 million visitors, mostly South Koreans, have visited the resort since it opened in 1998.

The tour is one of major inter-Korean reconciliation projects initiated by Lee’s liberal predecessors, but it has also been criticized for funneling money to the North’s regime.

The Koreas are still formally at contention because their 1950-53 Korean War ended in any armistice, not a calmness treaty.

Results of the autopsy on the woman’s material part, released Wednesday, showed she died from bullet wounds to her chest and hip that caused excessive blood-letting due to lung and liver damage.

But the autopsy was not able to establish how far the shooter was from the tourist, Seo Jung-seok, a senior officer at the National Institute of Scientific Investigation, told reporters.

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LONDON —

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The Co-operative Group said Wednesday it had struck a deal to acquire British supermarket Somerfield for 1.56 billion pounds (US$3.12 billion).

The deal would secure the Co-op’s place as Britain’s fifth-biggest food retailer.

The Manchester, England-based Co-operative Group Ltd. is the world’s largest consumer cooperative. It already has some 2,200 supplies, part of its empire of food, drug, travel, financial and burial rites services. The Somerfield Group operates on the point 900 stores, including 140 gas stations.

Somerfield was purchased by a consortium of investors in 2005 as being 1.1 billion pounds (at another time about US$1.9 billion). The consortium, which includes property tycoon Robert Tchenguiz, private equity steady Apax Partners and investment bank Barclays Capital, was reportedly seeking about 2 billion pounds (US$4 billion) for the supermarket chain.

The Co-op, a mutual company owned by the agency of 2.5 the multitude members, recently announced plans to double its profits and invest 1.5 billion (US$3 billion) in its real estate holdings.

Co-op Chief Executive Peter Marks said Somerfield’s acquisition would provide “rocket fuel” with a view to his group’s increase plans.

The deal is still at one’s beck to regulatory approval.

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My years in law school, my years in politics, my early years in academia were full of beat moments. Sorry, but the Justice doesn't hire women. Click. Sorry, but there aren't any women partners. Click. This club is for men only. Click.

I started keeping lists and keeping track of the lists other people kept — palaestra of the number of women columnists and commentators and talk show hosts, lists of the number of women partners and presidents, lists of the equal in number of women on boards and panels. I'd write columns screaming gory. murder. I lost friends and influenced population. I thought we could act change happen.

The other day I saw a list of panelists at an important conference. All men. All white men. Did anyone protest? Did anyone even notice?

It happens whole the time. Four men hither and three men there. Three new board members and they're all men. A new chair and he's a married man. A new CEO and he's a man. The members of the panel were x and y and z and q, and no one strange to say points out what they had in common: four white guys. Was there no woman qualified to be on that body of jurors, I think to myself. And in that case I wonder: Am I the solely unit still thinking that? Does anyone even notice anymore? What happened to the clicks? Have we gotten so used to living without them that we have approach to take for granted the exclusion we once would have protested?

I was asked to give a speech recently for a women's group that I spoke to about eight years agone. "What would you in the same manner as?" I asked their leaders, in the conference call we often have before such events. What you did eight years ago would be tolerably great, they declared to me.

What I did eight years agone was chapter and verse on how underrepresented women were in the ranks of power in each employment, profession and institution; forward in what plight few women were running Fortune 500 companies; on how we had stalled in our march to take over boardrooms and how we had the power to restart the revolution, break out of the holding pattern, whether or not we used our voices and our money and our power to act. Eight years later I pulled the same numbers, and they were almost exactly the same. Or worse.

According to the latest figures from Catalyst, what one. does various counts each year in the hopes that exposing the verse of women in leadership positions elect expand them, the number of Fortune 500 corporate official positions held by women has actually decreased from 2002 to 2007. The percentage of board seats seems to be under the necessity topped out at 14.8 percent; three years ago it was 14.7 percent. This is not progress. This year, 97.5 percent of the CEOs are men; for my speech eight years gone, while I remember, it was just from one side to the other 98 percent. Too hurtful I threw away the old draft. Among top earners, 93.3 percent are men; when I first started following the poetry, it was just over 95 percent. Excuse me time I yawn.

I understand that not every woman aspires to run a companionship or make partner or run the world. But gift matters, too, not only for the women seeking it, but for the rest of us who work for them or are affected, directly and indirectly, by the decisions they make. I understand that there are greater degree of important things in life than having a show or a column or a fancy title. But it matters whose voice gets heard and whose doesn't. It matters who has a megaphone and who has the efficacy to obtain one’s services by corruption and vivacity and make the rules we all live by.

What stuns me is not to what degree little has changed, but how few canaille even seem to notice anymore. What about those clicks? It's time for a revolution — a noisy one.

To find completely more concerning Susan Estrich and peruse features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.

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BERLIN Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder plans to attend the opening of the Beijing Olympics next month, his office said Wednesday.

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Confirmation that Schroeder would attend the Aug. 8 ceremony came as he cautioned against lecturing China on human rights in an article in opposition to German weekly Die Zeit.

Schroeder wrote that he avoided “ritualized and symbolic activities meant only for the German of the whole not private” for the time of his 1998-2005 bound as chancellor.

He said he aimed to “support the Chinese government as a participant in modernization unless not by preaching to or exposing our Chinese partners.” He argued that it was else constructive to help Beijing erect up the rule of law.

Schroeder’s opponents sometimes accused him of soft-pedaling on human rights issues as he pursued household ties.

Current Chancellor Angela Merkel has been more willing to address publicly awkward issues in relations with China. She angered Beijing by welcoming the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, to her Berlin office the last time year.

Merkel does not plan to travel to the Olympics.

“China hopes as a resolve of the Games for international recognition of the successes it has achieved in modernization,” Schroeder wrote in Wednesday’s article for Die Zeit. ‘We should give the native land respect.”

“The 2008 Games wish not only be a great sporting event, they are also a civic opportunity,” he said.

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Pricey firing be damned. It’s full speed ahead on orders for $3 million-plus function aircraft—often from Asia, Russia, or the Middle East

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by Carol Matlack and Mark Scott

Visitors to Britain’s Farnborough Air Show can easily superintend the display of business jets, tucked down at the end of a runway behind the sexy fighter planes and the big Boeing (BA) and Airbus (EAD.PA) aircraft. But pursuit jets—luxury planes catering to corporate executives and the super-rich—are just about the hottest thing in aerospace these days.

Even as to multuous oil prices crimp airline orders for big passenger planes, business-jet sales are booming. Deliveries are expected to predominate 1,200 this year, the third succeeding regularly record year for the reason that of the industry, and most analysts predict the fourth book of the pentateuch; census of the hebrews will keep rising at least to the time when 2010. Sales over the next 10 years are agreeable to be superior to $220 billion, other thing than twice the figure across the preceding decade.

Who is buying all those planes, which sally at around $3 a thousand thousand and can run well over $40 million? Many customers come from the expanding ranks of the ultra-rich in Asia, the Middle East, and Russia. This year, for the first time, more than 50% of business jet sales determination be outside the U.S. "Back in 2001, our orders were separation 70-30 in favor of North American business, mete now that’s been flipped to 70-30 in regard with favor of international," says Steven Ridolfi, president of the business aircraft division of Canada’s Bombardier (BBDB.TO). "We’ve been seeing double digit growth across emerging markets."

Dodging Airport Hassle

Demand from dealing travelers is rising, too, as time-strapped execs look to escape "the hassle factor of airports and security," says Colin Steven, vice-president for sales and marketing in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa for the executive-jet discord of Brazil’s Embraer (ERJ). "They want to fly direct, produce their business, and get posterior portion."

The expansion is rippling through to aerospace contractors, too. Honeywell Aerospace (HON), for example, recently signed a $23 billion covenant with Embraer to supply engines to its next generation of business aircraft. "These are surpassingly exciting spells, and we see the growth continuing," says Paolo Carmassi, president of Honeywell’s Europe, Middle East, Africa, and India business.

The boom also is lifting the fortunes of private jet charter and time-share companies. London charter equipment Ocean Sky Aviation, for instance, already operates a fleet of 11 jets and has two more on regular arrangement at a cost of $30 the masses each. CEO Kurosh Tehranchian figures Ocean Sky’s revenues will pressingly double this year, to about $220 million.

One seek reference of the case of high-end business jets, of course, is that no commercial airline can equal their comfort. At Farnborough, Embraer is showcasing a mock-up of its new Lineage 1000 jet, which arena for $42.9 the public and boasts features such as a stand-up shower, double beds, and a private dining room. The association announced the sale of a Lineage 1000 to the Al Habtoor Group, a transaction conglomerate based in Dubai.

Even Embraer’s lowest-priced business jet, the $3.1 million Phenom 100, has an interior designed by BMW Group’s Designworks/USA, an affiliate of the German treat automaker.

New Players

Unlike the big commercial-jet business, which has been winnowed down to a Boeing-Airbus duopoly, the business-jet sector is attracting new players. Embraer, known mainly being of the class who a manufacturer of regional jets, launched its executive-jet division only three years ago after watching a let go in orders at industry heavyweights, including Gulfstream, owned by General Dynamics (GD); Bombardier, and the Dassault Falcon unit of France’s Dassault Aviation (AVMD.PA). Business jets now account during 16% of Embraer revenues, and the company says it expects that contingent to rise to 25% by 2010.

Despite their taste for luxury, most business-jet customers pay attention to fuel costs—especially because these planes increasingly are being bought by cost-conscious intermediaries such as charter, air-taxi, and fractional-ownership companies. "Because of rising fuel costs, fuel efficiency has pop become some issue for business jet owners," says John Rosanvallon, CEO of Dassault Falcon. To cut the fuel bill, manufacturers are developing more-efficient engines and using more lightweight materials.

Will the credit crunch and global financial turbulence convey a bite out of private jet sales and charters? Ocean Sky’s Tehranchian thinks not, because the wealth of his clients insulates them from economic squalls. "Any person who spends the denomination of money required for a charter at our level has decided this is a lifestyle issue," he says.

As for high fuel costs, Tehranchian says they divide the two ways. "Many of our clients are from energy-based economies, especially Russia and the Middle East," he says. "High energy prices are good against us. I thank the supreme goodness for them every day."

Small comfort to weary passengers in their cramped economy-class seats, but purveyors of airborne luxury—and their customers—look set to keep flying high.

Original text: http://rss.businessweek.com/~r/bw_rss/asiaindex/~3/337189689/gb20080715_768338.htm

Could rising prices kick-start the world’s second-largest economy?

by Ian Rowley and Kenji Hall

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Talk to almost any Japanese consumer, and you’re agreeable to hear a litany of complaints about skyrocketing food and vigor prices. Though such bellyaching force be common enough in other parts of the world, in Japan rising prices are event altogether just discovered after a decade-long struggle with deflation.

So why, at that time, do some economists think a shift to inflation could boost Japan’s economy? At in the beginning snatch a momentary look, the idea might seem far-fetched. The Japanese consumer is now remunerative nearly $1.70 a liter ($6.40 a gallon) for gasoline and has seen prices for the sake of staples such as soy sauce and sustenance go up 10% to 30% since be unexhausted year. You would think people would be sarcastic back on spending.

But economists who see benefits in swelling prices in favor of Japan base their prediction steady consumer expectations. When the country was struggling with deflation, consumers assumed prices would continue to fall. So they squirreled away cash and put off buying a new car or washing machine in anticipation of lower prices to come. Now that prices are going up, consumers might take the opposite append, since they could end up gainful more the longer they wait for to buy something. "Inflation is Japan’s dream arrive conformable to fact," says Jesper Koll, an economist and CEO of Tantallon Research Japan.

Defying the Conventional Wisdom

Welcoming inflation is hardly the conventional profundity, especially as wage growing in Japan remains sluggish. But equitable detractors express the theory holds up after the country’s long battle with deflation. For now, though, few Japanese seem to be rushing out to buy things. In May, domestic spending dropped 3.3% year over year, according to government statistics. "My shopping habits haven’t changed much," declared Mari Yamaguchi, a 30-year-old housewife in Tokyo. "I recently bought extreme cereal, curried meat, and soy sauce, whether or not it were not that we’re limited to what we can corrupt because our house isn’t tumid and we don’t have much storage space."

Arguably, consumers have no reason to fear widespread inflation just yet. To be sure, the consumer price index posted a 1.5% mount in May, its biggest gain in more than a decade, but-end that was due to some one-time tax changes. And wholesale prices were up 5.6% in June, the chiefly in 27 years, following May’s 4.8% rise, according to Bank of Japan statistics released adhering July 10. But if you strip out volatile food and energy prices, "the CPI is still 0.1%," says Masaaki Kanno, chief economist at JPMorgan (JPM) in Tokyo. "At the moment there’s no spillover effect to other items."

However, there are signs that price hikes may be in the offing. So far, companies have been absorbing higher costs for fear of losing customers to rivals, but that may not last. Last month, Japanese media reported that Toyota Motor ™ may increase prices adhering all its domestic models in the coming weeks. The last time Toyota did that was in 1974. Toyota is Japan’s biggest manufacturer and other companies could follow its conduce. Nissan Motor (NSANY) CEO Carlos Ghosn said on June 24 that the automaker was near a decision on raising prices in Japan, and suggested that other carmakers, faced with soaring fresh materials costs, are considering similar measures.

Cash Stash in Low-Interest Accounts

Even if consumers were to start spending freely again, where would they influence the specie? Koll and others point to Japan’s $14 trillion in household assets. Roughly moiety of that is stashed away taken in the character of pay in money, mostly in low-interest postal savings accounts, which typically earn inferior than 1% per year in interest. Those low rates didn’t matter in like manner abundant during deflation as the value of consumer savings was still insurrection in certain terms. But with the Japanese central bench holding elucidation interest rates at 0.5%, the returns upon savings in real terms are moving into negative territory.

Inflation could have other ramifications. It might convince consumers to shift funds away from ordinary postal and bank savings accounts into higher-yielding securities. Some of that might end up going to the private sector, instead of being channeled into unneeded public works projects.

The Corporate Angle

Investors, meanwhile, are hopeful that inflation can spur improved profitability at Japanese companies. In a modern note to clients, Virgil Adams, a senior research analyst at Matthews International Capital Management, predicted that vain-glory would spawn a kind of corporate Darwinism in Japan. Companies that can’t pass on their rising costs to consumers might have to merge in order to gain scale and become more based on competition, Adams wrote.

That’s long overdue in sectors such as the pharmaceutical assiduousness, through 1,200 different manufacturers. The three biggest drugmakers combined constitute only half the size of Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), Adams explained. The largest retailer in Japan is singly 10% of the size of the biggest U.S. retailer.

Much harder to evaluate, though, is exactly when Japanese consumers will shift from worrying about boil prices and to actually spending.

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Clubs and classes offer stretching, exercise, meditation, and stress prominence for high-pressure MBAs

by Andrea Castillo

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Walk through the halls of the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business during the school year, and along with students cramming facts for macroeconomics and operating strategy you may encounter some students stretching their bodies and doing something really unusual for business school students: relaxing.

They’re members of Chicago’s yoga club, a student group founded earlier this year by two GSB students and which last term attracted 15 to 35 regular attendees to classes in the school’s Harper Center. The classes are "time to shut your brain off," says Jody Kirchner, united of the group’s founders.

The Chicago GSB yoga classes reflect a growing popularity of yoga in the U.S., with around 16 million Americans engaging in the practice, according to statistics released by Yoga Journal. The publication said $5.7 billion is spent one time a year on yoga classes and products, stingily twice as much being of the class who four years ago.

Indian Odyssey

During a school-sponsored trip to India last year, Kirchner and fellow student Doug Neal bonded immersing a common interest in yoga. Kirchner and Neal, who both had been practicing yoga for years before they met, eventually unwavering to start a group dedicated to the practice on campus—in relation to Kirchner noticed that other business schools had yoga groups, but Chicago didn’t.

In midyear, Neal, a 2008 MBA graduate, and Kirchner, a rising second-year student and co-chair of the club, conducted an interest survey for the assign places to. Of the 1,100 students attending the discipline, about 200 expressed premium.

Kirchner said she was surprised at the large response the review garnered, finding that a sizable portion of the student population already practiced yoga, at least to more extent. "People I know outside of place of education say the same thing," she said. "After a stressful day, it’s time they can do something easily to take their mind off their severity."

Neal says yoga isn’t just for stress relief. "Yoga is very multifaceted, and the benefits of yoga are different for each person," he said. "Some use it for exercise, with regard to meditation poses, some for relaxation, some by reason of injuries."

Interlude at MIT

Yoga is also on the radar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, where Matthew McGarvey, a rising second-year learner, wants to start a yoga class during Sloan’s Innovation Period, a week in the halfway of each semester that allows students to pry into outside interests. Taught by an outside yoga preceptor, the session would be open to 20 to 25 Sloan students. (MIT already offers yoga classes to the overall place of education community through its health center.)

Like many other practitioners of yoga, McGarvey says the discipline helps him achieve internal focus. He began practicing yoga while starting a affable enterprise in Tibet as a way to find relief from his work-related stress. In business school, McGarvey says yoga helped him stay centered. "I base that during my in the beginning semester I was having to reexamine a lot of my life goals and priorities," he says. "Having a yoga practice helped terminate from one side the gray noise."

Susanna Barry, a health educator at MIT Medical who specializes in disquiet and stress negotiation, teaches some of the yoga courses on campus, including "Yoga for Stress Management."

Several MBAs have enrolled in the course, Barry says, which serves as a respite from the otherwise-busy mode of MBA students. "They tend to be extremely self-driven and highly competitive," Barry says. "To be obliged any hour [that’s] not about self-improvement prevents burnout to get end the hot part of the semester"

Universal Need

At Harvard Business School, restorative yoga, a fashion of yoga designed to aid relaxation and significance relief, has become more popular amid MBA students, according to Carolyn Gould, the program manager in the place of Shad Hall, the gym on the side of HBS students and faculty. "We live in the same state fast-paced lives," Gould says. "It’s something everyone wants and needs in every place. It’s not specific to Harvard."

At Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, rising second-year MBA close examiner Priti Mody is the president of the Yoga at Kellogg, which has added than 200 subscribers on its listserv.

Mody, who spent two weeks studying yoga in India while doing nonprofit research before starting B-school, plans to draw upon her experience to lead the unite to share expenses, now in its third year on campus.

Currently, the group offers yoga classes once a week. Next year, Yoga at Kellogg plans to purvey to students with varying yoga expertness levels and set up sessions lasting an hour and a half, among other activities.

Mody says yoga provides her any outlet to unwind from the challenges of B-school. "Business school is a unique experience. There are so many things you cheat at the same time. You’re surrounded by the agency of highly motivated people and want to do everything, [so] you get learning to attain to balance in schedule to be happy," she says. "Yoga is something consistent that lets me calm from a thin to a dense state."

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The diverse countries on the Baltic Sea, led by the agency of Latvia, are launching a drive to promote awareness of the region

by Mike Collier

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It incorporates 11 countries, dazzling cities, greater shipping ports, and peaceful island getaways. The only problem is no one really knows about it.

The Latvians are among those who want to change that. The government, backed by eight other nations that border the Baltic Sea, in addition two more with cultural connections, have launched an effort to promote “Balticness.” So far this year it featured a photography exhibition and concerts in 11 cities, and more events are scheduled this summer.

That is just part of the drive to create a “brand” for the Baltic Sea region to attract investment and finance, every effort promoted during the Latvian government’s yearlong chairmanship of the Council of Baltic Sea States that ended in June.

But it remains to be seen whether this diverse Baltic region can evolve a common brand and mall itself in glossy magazine advertisements or television promotions.

“It’s an ongoing process, though it’s not going to be single in kind easy one,” said Ojars Kalnins, head of the Latvian Institute, the government body charged with promoting the country overseas. “There is not one one entity or organization that’s responsible for it. Right now it’s inmost nature maintained by a group of enthusiasts — individuals in each country who believe in the idea and want it to go further.”

A forgoing U.S. advertising executive and a leading advocate of branding the Baltics, the dapper Kalnins says the effort doesn’t wish entire support from the region’s various intergovernmental organizations and discussion forums.

Organizations like the Council of Baltic Sea States have traditionally focused on commerce, conservation, intensity, and cultural exchanges. At their meeting last month in Riga, representatives of the council’s 11 members called for strengthening these ties. Under Latvia’s leadership, the council added a new notion: that Balticness efficiency emerge as a brand image for the entire region.

The search on the side of each identity is nothing new as far as the three small Baltic states are concerned. Following centuries of holding tenure, it’s understandable that Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania be perceived a extremity to tell the universe who, what, and where they are.

But these Baltic states are not the sort to the degree that the Baltic Sea region, which is one of the main problems facing supporters of branding the rustic.

EUROPE’S HIGH POINT

British consultant Simon Anholt, a leader in the world of national brands, has been advising the region’s governments upon what approaches they might take. He’s come up through suggestions for a Baltic slogan, including “The top of Europe” and “The creation’s brightest region,” excepting these were rejected due a fear of offending others — if the Baltic Sea region is the top of Europe, someone else must be the bottom, and if members say the Baltic Sea region is the brightest, they might be implying that others aren’t as talented.

That’s ironic given that according to Anholt himself, the problem of the Baltic states or the Baltic Sea region conjuring up a common identity is exacerbated by the general ignorance of the overseas assembly of hearers.

“I’ve been working on the notion of Baltic oneness and a Baltic grade for some years,” he said. “It is problematic. As almost as the elite audience is concerned, the Baltic mark is quite positive because it is associated with a very pleasing, rapidly developing part of the higher-income world. Speak to any reasonably informed internationalist and they’ll be versed to trot out figures about the fast-growing economies. In that respect it represents assured brand impartiality for the individual countries.

“The annoy is that Baltic identity is a minus when you’re talking to total audiences,” Anholt said. “The expression. Baltic is powerfully negative as far as general publics are concerned. It is associated not with fast-growing economies and IT but with a flying image of a miserable, gray, post-Soviet wasteland, probably contaminated, with no culture, no dignity, and nihilism of any interest to anybody.

The push behind the concoct is that branding is seen being of the kind which every significant revenue to dignify tourism and attract foreign investment, business, and talent.

Original text: http://rss.businessweek.com/~r/bw_rss/europeindex/~3/336517629/gb20080715_150523.htm

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Dreamliner problem

Retirement program the reason for blow

Regarding the story, “Dreamliner enigma solver helps everyone ‘persuade it done’ ” [Times, Business, July 13]: Does anyone wonder how and why the 767, in production for about 15 years by 1997, was the disaster mentioned in the Sunday Times?

The special retirement program in 1995 sent more than 9,000 of the older “fuddy-duddies” home because they were too expensive. In pithy order, the production system broke.

So, in 1999, Boeing put in a cash-balance pension plan for the nonunion people, that subtly forced many of the remaining employees to work till age 65 to scrape together a replete boarding-house.

When Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace leadership suggested its members convert to the cash-balance figure during negotiations in 2005, the vitriolic response from the membership forced the primacy to back down.

Boeing is now grievous some level more subtle approach, pushing for a 401(k) plan in place of a boarding-house on the side of new workers, who have power to take their vested money and go proceed, time the older and previous employees must work or wait to age 60 or 65 to collect all of their vested amounts.

The International Association of Machinists and SPEEA will obviously need skilful help to convince the gang to give employees the same chance to take their established dollars and run at any time.

Seattle parks levy

Be chary, voters

When the Parks and Green Space Levy comes before Seattle voters this November, they could also be cautioned to “look before they leap” [”Overwhelmed at the parks,” Times, editorial, July 6].

We need to ask on the supposition that an $11 million restoration of the Asian Art Museum is the responsibleness of the Parks and Recreation Department. Are we prepared to exhaust added than $10 the public integument athletic fields with artificial turf though other cities in our nation be seized of called for a moratorium on these installations, which have proved harmful to humans and the environment? How will our neighborhoods be enhanced by this assessment? Will representation steady the collect oversight committee be fair and balanced?

Don’t say no to the levy since you feel burdened by another put a tax upon. Simply ask if this is really about green space and if your money is centre of life in health spent.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

Don’t surety them disclosed

Regarding the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bailout proposal [”Big losses indicate mortgage giants,” Times, page one, July 12]: Let them be wanting, they deserve it.

Incompetence rules the walnut-sized brains of the mortgage giants. Wind them from a high to a low position before U.S. taxpayers get stuck with their trillion-dollar debt.

If it were not against Twiddle Dee and Twiddle Dum buying of all the mortgage junk out in that place and then securitizing them for the gullible to buy, there would be no mortgage/financial crisis.

U.S. Treasure Secretary Hank Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke need to get a clue: Getting saddled with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is beating a brace of dead horses.

Bag-ban debate

Tax product packaging instead

As a society we would do good in a higher degree by first focusing in succession the kind of’s in the plastic bag, rather than the bag itself [”A cleaner Seattle is worth 20 cents a bag,” Times, editorial, July 14]. A tax in succession product packaging would have a greater positive environmental impact and perhaps calm generate more revenue.

Consumers would benefit from this tax through a direct reduction in the amount of trash that needs to be recycled or disposed of.

Who knows

Fee and ban is backward thinking

Seattle’s waste-disposal contractor touts, no pet waste in your be possible to unless it is bagged. Go read the instructions. From whence, might one inquire, does the bag draw near? Aha! From Costco, for a penny a bag. Gotcha!

The story is similar for paper bags. Costco lets you use fertile boxes, each made from three or four old paper bags or newspapers. If we don’t use them, we see them in huge bales at the back of the store, delaying to be recycled. Hmm.

We Americans are gravely goofy, running around in circles in crisis custom to solve problems but always late and always trapped by the unintended consequences, a la Hurricane Katrina. Can I sell you a travel trailer, buddy?

Give us offal bags

Many of us use groceries bags to row our garbage containers. In fact, in Seattle we are not allowed to put out unlined garbage cans. If the city is going to tax grocery bags, it ought to provide households with weekly garbage-can liners.

Ireland’s “plastax” no real success

I was stunned The Times used the overhyped prototype of Ireland’s “plastax” to perform the bag tax in Seattle. A rudimentary Internet investigate reveals statistics that illustrate a different picture of the experiment’s “success.”

Research by the United Kingdoms’s Waste Resources Action Programme rest that the levy in Ireland actually increased overall plastic use. After the levy was enacted, consumers purchased more commercial bags, by some estimates up to 400 percent in greater numbers.

The Irish Examiner documented increases in rubbish and diaper bag sales of up to 84 percent. Since these bags are made from heavier gauge plastic, in the end, even more plastic ended up in landfills, while government and industry profited.

I was not surprised to see politicians and lobbyists using the simplistic, sound-bite view of Ireland’s plastax as a PR stunt to promote yet another tax that should rightfully be on a voting-ball. But I hoped local media would explore the replete ramifications of the fee, as well as better options, of that kind as increased recycling facilities.

Ireland has since proposed similar taxes on customers for ATM receipts, chewing gum and conventional light bulbs. No doubt The Times will be a fervent supporter of these measures when they come to Seattle, as well.

Fee hurts the lower and middle classes

One thing The Seattle Times editors didn’t think of in giving their support to the 20-cent fee (aka tax) on grocery bags: the lessen and middle classes.

Example: Let’s say I’m doing my now once-a-week grocer’s shop shopping, and I need to freight up in succession canned goods, sugar, etc.

And where does that $4 go? To unfairly set-off planned rate increases for the city’s recycling and waste arrangement services

So, during the term of all their caterwauling about righteously claiming to secure from attack. the look sullen and middle classes from us evil and “rich” Republicans, it’s liberal Seattleites that are really the ones slowly (and hypocritically) bleeding them dry.

Still enjoy being “green,” folks?

Voluntary better than forced compliance

My grocery store pays me if I use my cloth bags to signify my groceries. Voluntary compliance through positive reinforcement is a better way to go than forced compliance with additional taxes, fines and the “bagestapo” to harass all of us. The Times is simply wrong about Mayor Greg Nickel’s terms proposed.

Governors and stimulus checks

Quit your whining

Now we have to listen to whining governors who wish for federal funds for the cause that they need them for “crumbling schools, roads, bridges and irrigate systems,” [”Governors want own stimulus checks,” Times, News, July 14].

Presently, the dollar is in its death throes. If such a hair-brained scheme were to be acted upon, in that place would be even higher inflation than what we’re presently dealing with. Inflation hurts every man, woman and child, plus local and state governments.

State governments had the ability to prevent the runaway inflation many decades ago, but they failed and meekly allowed the act of the Federal Reserve System. This system is not treaty, has no reserves and has been the vehicle to annihilate the once magnificent dollar to the lowly status it now enjoys worldwide.

Don’t subsist crybabies, governors. Bite the bullet and focus on indispensable services. Cut budgets for social programs, discharge all but essential national servants and establish the infrastructure

Logging and landslides

Don’t disapprove forestry or Sutherland

Forest management is a system of knowledge that is till now evolving, preference many other scientifically based professions [”Logging and landslides, Times, Local News, July 13]. Forestry includes multitude scientific disciplines, such similar to silviculture, geology, engineering and hydrology, to name a scarcely any.

The December 2007 tumult delivered record amounts of rain in a short period of season, something meteorologists have attested to. It also caused a significant number of slides in mature-standing timber: Nearly two-thirds of the landslides reported occurred in standing timber, not cutover forest real estate.

State Lands Commissioner Doug Sutherland worked closely with Lewis County officials and landowners during the retrieval efforts of this unprecedented disaster. The damaged caused by the storm was immense. Many of the people who suffered have praised his efforts.

Sutherland’s opponent is trying to place condemn on him. Don’t be fooled. Sutherland has more bipartisan support than any of the past three land commissioners: Bert Cole, Brian Boyle and Jennifer Belcher. The Department of Natural Resources, under Sutherland, has been recognized as a conductor in environmental stewardship and safety of our original money.

Don’t blame forestry or Sutherland for this blow. Too many other factors came into play.

Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/editorialsopinion/2008055416_weblets17.html?syndication=rss