World Business

HONG KONG Excessive levels of the industrial chemical melamine in Chinese eggs might be traced to feed given to chickens, the Hong Kong government said late Saturday.

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The ruling power said in a relation it found 4.7 parts per million of melamine in the eggs produced by a division of China’session Dalian Hanwei Enterprise Group based in the northeastern anchorage city Dalian. The legal limit of melamine in Hong Kong is 2.5 ppm.

Hong Kong Secretary for Food and Health York Chow said the melamine may have come from feed given to the chickens that laid the eggs.

“The preliminary opinion experts have given us is that in that place is a problem by the feed,” Chow told reporters.

The new results have prompted officials to expand food testing to meat imports from China, Chow told reporters Sunday.

In an earlier egg-related bread preservation scare, the banned cancer-causing industrial dye, Sudan Red, was used to redness harass yolks.

China is currently caught in a food safety opprobrium over dairy products tainted with melamine. More than 3,600 children remain sick in China from contaminated milk, with three in serious condition, the Ministry of Health said last week. The deaths of four infants have been blamed onward dairy products contaminated with melamine.

Authorities say middlemen apparently added melamine to milk they collected from farmers to sell to large dairy companies. The suppliers are accused of watering down the milk and then adding the nitrogen-rich chemical to make the milk seem higher in protein at what time tried. Protein tests often of itself measure azote levels.

Calls to Dalian Hanwei Enterprise Group Sunday went unanswered.

Chow aforesaid Hong Kong officials will step up checks of eggs imported from China.

Melamine is used in the manufacturing of plastics, fertilizer, paint and adhesives. Health experts say ingesting a small total poses no danger, but in larger doses, the chemical be able to cause kidney stones and lead to kidney failure. Infants are particularly vulnerable.

The Hong Kong government also said it found excessive amounts of melamine in Blueberry Cream Sandwich crackers made by dint of. Philippine company Croley Foods MFG. Corp.

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NEW YORK — Every day in recent weeks, tourists have poured onto Wall Street to catch sight of its demise, only to discover that the financial center of their imaginations, which formerly stretched the duration of the fabled street, has longing since ceased to exist.

Only a few major financial institutions have national headquarters on Wall Street. Others moved superior the decades to more spacious and modern offices in Midtown Manhattan or New Jersey, or to distant outposts such as Iowa and South Dakota.

Wall Street is an increasingly residential strip, with the dogs, babies, fitness clubs and fluid bars to test it.

“Wall Street is shorthand towards an industry that is no longer on Wall Street,” said Mitchell Moss, an urban-planning professor at New York University.

Before Sept. 11, 2001, in that place were 23,000 residents in Lower Manhattan, said Nicole LaRusso, vice president for planning and economic unfolding at the Alliance for Downtown New York, that manages the sphere’s business-improvement district. Now, there are more than 56,000 residents, including those in more than 2,000 apartments in continuance Wall Street.

“Wall Street is the model for the new, 21st-century central business district, where canaille live and moil in the same place,” LaRusso said. “Of beat, 300 years past, this was 100 percent a live-work community. There was no place else to live or work.”

LaRusso said that on the southern side of Wall Street, nearly every building has been converted or is being converted to covering or hotels.

The street has become a mecca for microphones, cameras and visitors, every impulse to bear witness to history. But some experience let from the top to the bottom of, finding that the street is a difficult vantage text from which to view the crisis.

“I’m a little disappointed in Wall Street,” said Richard Whittaker, 26, a doctoral student visiting from the U.K. with a friend. “We thought it’d subsist on a grander scale, less touristy, more profession, more banks.”

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Here’session my motion for Gov. Christine Gregoire and challenger Dino Rossi: Are you sure you really deficiency this job?

The governor’session people between Democratic incumbent Gregoire and Republican Rossi is expected to be one of the closest contests in the country.

The political shorthand is clear: Gregoire the unremitted, long-serving technocrat; Rossi, a master salesman, positioning himself because any agent of change. The chief magistrate, a centrist, seems slow-moving and colorless. Rossi, underneath his GOP fire-brand, offers fairly conventional conservative Republican policies. A career real-estate executive, he is closely tied to the Building Industry Association of Washington.

In other words, it’s 2004 redux, when Rossi lost by 133 votes. If only both victor could count on a 2004 economy. Then, the state was headed into recovery from the annoying tech crash and post-9/11 recession.

The thriftiness would become so strong and diversified, especially in the Puget Sound region, that it would be any of the last to suffer from the general downturn. In boom times, political leadership recedes into the background.

Unfortunately, that’s not the economy the winner will discovery after being sworn in. A projected $3.2 billion shortfall in the next condition bundle, mostly because slowing consumer demand has hammered sales taxes, is only one sign of a potentially tectonic economic shift, in this place and nationally.

The quality has missed two major corporate headquarters, with sum of two units more in danger. Unemployment is sedition. Housing values and sales are falling. Commercial construction is slowing. Even vibrating areas are now acquisition the gap-toothed look of empty storefronts.

As monetary contagious matter spreads, Washington’s enviable send abroad growth is at risk. The credit collapse is now endangering innovative technology companies as well as overstretched homeowners.

More troubling, state and local governments are facing stricken credit markets, with much higher borrowing costs if they can barter bonds at all. Before credit markets appeared to thaw last week, California and Massachusetts were warning that they may go to emergency federal help if they continue to be frozen public of the credit markets.

This is one example of how the general monetary crisis is a new and dangerous event. It resembles a 19th-century financial panic except the federal government still has much of the firefighting apparatus of the New Deal to address it.

Such things as federal deposit assurance have helped stave off another Great Depression. Still, it’s going to be a near thing. We’ve been through a run on a shadow banking a whole that most Americans didn’t even know existed.

Whoever wins the executive’s race will likable be looking at immediate crisis management, with other promises put on hold even as needs rise.

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For all of its astounding profitability and presence, Microsoft’s most important product, Windows, has had a tough bond of years. And the path ahead, which Microsoft plans to lay out at a meeting for consultation this week, is fraught through challenges.

When the company divulges details of Windows 7, the successor to much-maligned Vista, it will do so against a backdrop of growing competition from Apple, a battered Windows brand and the global economic exigency. Meanwhile, the company is positioning itself toward the next lofty make some change in. in computing, which could sap the foundations of the importance of the traditional operating system as the multitude exercise more programs through the Internet.

Today, Microsoft’s operating-system software is thriving. It runs at least nine out of every 10 computers. Vista, in quest of all the criticism, has sold more than 180 million copies since hitting the market Jan. 30, 2007. In the past quarter alone, Windows generated sales of $4.2 billion, 28 percent of Microsoft’s receipts. As it has for years, Windows is fueling the company’s expansion into newer businesses, including entertainment and Internet search.

Past the numbers, however, the Windows franchise, particularly Vista, has taken more than its share of hits. Vista was again and again delayed and stripped of features during a five-year development process that Microsoft has vowed not to repeat. When it finally arrived, the “ecosystem” of companies that make hardware and software for Windows wasn’cheek by jowl in readiness, leading to months of compatibility problems that angered users.

Even though Microsoft and its partners have addressed these issues, and new computers handle Vista smoothly, the bad reputation has been tough to make to tremble.

Some of the credit, or blame, goes to Apple. Microsoft’s longtime rival has aired a series of biting commercials picture PCs being of the kind which uncool and keeping Vista’s faults in front of consumers, even after Microsoft fixed them.

“When I watchfulness people leaving the Apple store, it’s like a kid with a natal day near,” said Michael Cherry, any analyst through Directions on Microsoft, an independent Kirkland research firm. Recent PC purchasers, on the other hand, often look sinewy, as if they’ve overpaid or purchased the maltreat supernatural agency, he said.

Microsoft’s challenges slip on’t stop there, and they’re not lost on the executives and engineers in Redmond cranking out Windows 7, which one longtime company observer called Microsoft’s “most secretive product ever.”

Microsoft will talk about its plans for the new operating classification at its Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles this week, but, before that time, it’s evident that the company has made major changes in how it builds and markets Windows.

Avoid repeating mistakes

In etc. to its high-profile “I’m a PC” advertising campaign — the one that started through Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates — Microsoft worked with more retailers to improve how Windows is presented in their stores. It also wearied months by major PC manufacturers to test and fine-tune their computers for act and reliability.

The effort is focused put on Windows Vista, bound it will carry over to Windows 7, too, executives have said.

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SAN FRANCISCO Zeppelins, the giant floating airships used to carry passengers and drop bombs until the 1930s, haven’t been seen in American skies in the place of more than 70 years.

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Now a California company is bringing the iconic aircraft back to the United States, with plans to offer aerial tours of the San Francisco Bay surface in a newly built zeppelin. It’s one of happy three in the terraqueous globe - the others are in Germany and Japan.

Airship Ventures Inc.’session zeppelin arrived in the Bay Area on Saturday, beyond over the Golden Gate Bridge en route to its new home at Moffett Field, a former naval air station in Mountain View, about 40 miles south of San Francisco.

Fifteen feet longer than a Boeing 747, the 246-foot Zeppelin NT (New Technology) was built in Hamburg, Germany, and transported by container ship to Beaumont, Texas, before a cross-country flight to California.

While they may look like blimps, zeppelins have rigid interior frames that are covered with a canvas hull.

Starting Friday, Airship Ventures will break ground offering rides that provide a bird’s-eye view of Napa and Sonoma wine country, the Big Sur coastline, San Francisco and other parts of the Bay Area. The cabin holds 12 passengers and two crew members, and tickets come into existence suddenly at $495 per person for an one-hour ride.

“It’session a habit to comprehend the globe in a way that you haven’t experienced it before,” said Brian Hall, a software entrepreneur who started the company last year with his wife, Alexandra. “In a zeppelin, you’re flying low and slow. You’re going at a leisurely pace. You’re perception things that you wouldn’t call on from the road.”

Invented by Ferdinand von Zeppelin of Germany in the late 19th century, zeppelins were used towards commercial tourist transport and military operations until the deviate of World War II.

The zeppelin’s golden age ended in 1937 when the LZ-129 Hindenburg - the largest airship ever built - caught fire and burst into flames in front of thousands of spectators in Lakehurst, N.J., killing 35 of 97 populate on board.

A German troop, Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik, began building a new zeppelin near to decade ago and has been offering passenger rides since 2001.

While the Hindenburg was fueled by flammable hydrogen, the modern rendering is kept in the air by nonflammable helium. More than 80,000 passengers require ridden without a close custody problem, Hall said.

The Halls came up through the business plan for Airship Ventures about two years ago after Brian, 43, took his first zeppelin ride in Cologne, Germany.

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LONDON The British Foreign Office says a Briton and a South African were killed in Afghanistan.

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The sum of two units victims worked with the DHL shipping company in the Afghan capital and were killed Saturday outside the office there. The ground for the killings has not been established.

The Taliban trainband has denied any role in the killings. The militia earlier this week took responsibility conducive to the slaying of a Christian aid worker.

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If local layoff word seems to be hitting a depressing renovated high, some statistical perspective may help. Or not.

According to the Washington state Employment Security Department’s database of WARN notices, which tracks the layoff notifications that companies mouldiness file under some circumstances, three of the five subdue months in the more than five years have been in 2008.

And that’session not counting October, which brought a raft of new layoffs — and isn’t over yet.

The Employment Security data, what one. reaches back five years to the start of 2004, peg March of that year as the biggest month beneficial to Washington layoff notices: 2,440, led by 1,000 at Airborne Express and 500 at Todd Pacific Shipyards in Seattle, as issue as 600 at agribusiness giant J.R. Simplot in Quincy, Grant County.

This month’s WARN notices have already reached 1,072 layoffs, the latest heart 162 at Tacoma’session Morning Sun, which screen-prints and embroiders women’s tops.

And that’s without the 475 announced last week at Redmond-based construction-equipment manufacturer Genie Industries. Or the 240 jobs at Seattle’sitting Rosetta Inpharmatics that father company Merck said last week it power of determination move to Boston in 2009, or the 22 people laid against at a Renton metal-frame unit of Worthington Industries.

The WARN given conditions doesn’t capture whole layoffs. To fall under the founded on reporting requirement, a concourse has to have at least 100 employees and the layoff has to affect at least one-third of the employees at a given site or more than 499 people, declared Dennis Birge, part of Employment Security’s response team for layoffs.

So the cuts at Genie, which employed about 3,000, may never be reflected in the data; nor will the small but significant layoffs this month at local Internet startups Redfin and Zillow.

After getting the 60-day WARN notice, not all those notified are actually laid from. But the data is the best available for tracking overall local work at jobs losses.

Birge — who advises companies and workers on finding new jobs, claiming unemployment benefits and seeking retraining — says he too is getting an increased number of calls from smaller companies that aren’t required to file notices but still want help in spite of laid-off employees.

“It seems like the last few months have been busier than usual,” he says.

Russell to WaMu

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A excellence admissions meeting involves asking questions as well viewed like answering them. Here’s how to be prepared

By Dan Macsai

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During every business-school admissions parley, there’s a moment where the tables turn. Usually, it’s near the end, rear you’ve been probed ("What sets you apart?") and prodded ("How was the workforce?"), and you’re ready to head home. "So," the questioner chirps, "do you have anything to sue me?"

This is, of course, an elective request. But it’s also an opportunity to make an impress, or stroke your chances, says Randall Sawyer, superintendent of admissions at Cornell University’session Johnson School of Business. "You have to be prepared," says Sawyer. While asking smart, informed questions can prescribe you apart, soliciting information that’s readily available on a school’s Web site ("What’s your class size?") power irritate your interviewer.

What constitutes a "good" question? BusinessWeek recently spoke with several private consultants and deans of admission, all of whom recommended a variety of questions. Following are a selection, and more tips on to what degree to ask them. And remember, these are general guidelines; the greatest part moving inquiries are case-specific.

What to ask deans, board members, and other officials:

In your opinion, what really sets this school apart?

Officials know this is every material inquiry, especially allowing that you’re choosing betwixt multiple schools. To earn points, Sawyer suggests prefacing your question with some original thought (e.g., "I’ve read that Professor X exact accepted the Nobel prize" or "As an entrepreneur, I was impressed with your ‘Fund My StartUp Program"). Otherwise, you may get the retort: "Well, what do you think sets this school apart?”

Can you talk a little about the student work at jobs scrutinize?

When you’re surrounding to drop $100,000-plus on one MBA, you’re entitled to ask about career prospects, especially during the current fiscal crisis. But tread carefully, says Chioma Isiadinso, the CEO of Expartus, an admissions consulting company. Putting an official on the spot ("Can your school find me a piece of work?") is uneasy and offputting. Before you broach the subject, show enthusiasm ("I’ve heard great things with reference to your alumni network") and emphasize that you’re willing to be proactive.

For students, current and former:

How have you most benefitted from attending this school?

This point is crucial, especially if the interviewer pursued your concentration. According to Sawyer, it shows that you’re "in the game, and interested in success." Be heedful by phrasing, though: "How have you most benefitted?" is much more engaging (and much not so much skeptical) than "Have you benefitted?"

What was your favorite class? Who were your favorite professors?

O.K., these two are pretty visible. But they’re low good bets, says Dawna Clark, director of admissions at Tuck School of Business. Students (and former students) love to impart wisdom, especially by like-minded interviewees. Give them time to shine, and everyone wins: They’ll get to relive a positive academic experience, and you’ll pick out up some inside information.

What’s a typical day like?

Beyond engaging your interviewer, this question shows you care about greater degree of than academic factoids, says Linda Abraham, president of Accepted.com, an online nave for college counseling. After all, you’re applying for an experience. It’s only human to care about the little things, like when and where you’ll eat, sleep, learn, and let loose.

For anyone:

Is in that place anything else I can further address?

This should be your eventual query, says Beth Flye, the assistant dean and director of admissions at . It’s proactive, it’session accommodating, and it’s a renowned way to hint that you’re eager to attend (as opposed to, say, asking when you’ll go your acceptance letter). Also, on the off-chance that you made a mistake on your application, this request could spawn a shot at redemption.

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