UncategorizedFebruary 7, 2009 11:38 pm

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. The corresponding; of like kind week that automakers sought billions in aid to keep out of the way of bankruptcy, two states, including Michigan, announced cyclopean alternative power industry investments, by single in kind site being built on real estate once set aside to lure auto manufacturers.

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Manufacturing strongholds hardest hit by job losses years ago began laying the groundwork to land fresh jobs and may now have existence poised for the biggest gains, depending on treaty economic stimulus funding.

The $900 billion housekeeping package before Congress has greater degree of than $50 billion in energy-related incentives.

President Barack Obama has set a post of doubling the use of renewable spirit in three years, potentially placing states with established programs in a position to replace thousands of manufacturing jobs lost over the last decade.

Michigan created a $2 billion fund using tobacco settlement money to target four economic sectors, one being other energy.

The represent fully, which has squandered more than 150,000 automotive jobs over the past eight years, began using community colleges to retrain the unemployed and underemployed beneficial to not fully grown jobs.

“Employers, if you come to Michigan, we will deliver trained employees to you,” Gov. Jennifer Granholm said. “And employees, we will make payment to for your instruction, but the kicker is you’ve got to agree to be educated in an area that we know we have require in.”

The alternative energy industry, like others, is being shaken right now by a wave of layoffs and bankruptcies. Without help from the government, analysts are forecasting insincere digit declines in business and installations.

States continue to look beyond the current economic downturn, however, and multitude expect a boom in alternative force investments ahead.

The competition to lure green endeavors jobs heated up single years ago, and is expected to grow even tighter with more money in play.

Federal proposals include $32 billion to upgrade the nation’s electrical distribution system, more than $20 billion in tax cuts to promote the development of alternatives to oil, and billions more to force public saddle-cloth, federal buildings and modest-income homes more energy efficient.

Glen Andersen, of the National Conference of State Legislatures, said states began lobbying for raw jobs long before it was known that Washington might sweeten the investment pot.

Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2008718505_apstatesgreenjobpush.html?syndication=rss

Uncategorized 10:17 pm

OAK HARBOR, Ohio One person who was among those stuck Saturday on a miles-wide slab of ice that floated away from the Ohio shoreline of Lake Erie has died, while more than 100 others were rescued, authorities uttered.

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The victim fell into the water while close with others for a link to the shoreline, Ottawa County sheriff Bob Bratton said. Others tried CPR before the someone was flown to a hospital and pronounced unprofitable, Bratton said.

Several ships and helicopters from Toledo and Marblehead, and from Detroit, were sent to rescue the people from the 8-mile-wide ice floe. He said 100 to 125 were rescued by late afternoon.

Authorities said fishermen apparently used wooden pallets to create a build a bridge over over a rent in the ice so they could go farther out on the lake Saturday morning. But the planks fell into the water when the coat shifted, stranding the fishermen about 1,000 yards off shore.

Ice on west. occidental sections of Lake Erie is up to 2 feet thick, National Weather Service meteorologist Bill Randel said. He said it started to explosion as temperatures rose above freezing this weekend and coil gusting to 35 mph pushed on the ice.

“The ice just separated and we didn’t even know,” Rich Strickland of Bowling Green, who was among those rescued, told the Port Clinton News Herald.

Mike Sanger of Milwaukee was in the kitchen-yard for walleye fishing.

“We were having a ready age and when it got to be time to come home, it wasn’cheek by jowl so good,” he told the newspaper after being rescued.

Ice fisher who regularly visit the lake have said this winter’s thick ice has lured more population to the lake this year.

“There was a heck of a city out there according to the last week and a half, two weeks,” said 71-year-old Oak Harbor tenant Peter Harrison, who has lived onward the shore for 40 years.

Ohio Division of Wildlife spokeswoman Jamey Graham said the rank annually warns fishermen that there’sitting no such thing in the manner that “safe convert into ice.”

Even in very cold weather, the frosting on western Lake Erie is often unsafe because currents be able to easily mainspring the ice to shift. Firefighters in communities together the lake are trained for rescues from the ice and are often on guard when temperatures rise.

Associated Press composer Kantele Franko in Columbus contributed to this report.

Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2008718807_apicefloefishermen.html?syndication=rss

Uncategorized 9:59 pm

ATLANTA —

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From school lunches to nutrition bars and ice best part, the nationwide salmonella outbreak has reached deep into the American food supply - even though many people had never heard of the small partnership at the center of the investigation to the time when a few weeks agone.

The food manufacturer, Peanut Corp. of America, has proper a few plants scattered across the South, excepting it may be responsible for one of the state’s largest food recalls in history.

Federal investigators on Friday said the Lynchburg, Va.-based company knowingly shipped salmonella-laced products from its Blakely, Ga., plant after tests showed the products were contaminated. Federal decree forbids producing or shipping foods under conditions that could make it harmful to consumers’ health.

So far, the salmonella ebullition has sickened about 575 people in 43 states and may have contributed to at least eight deaths. The Justice Department has opened a iniquitous study and more than 1,550 products have been recalled.

The company has denied any wrongdoing, but said it is investigating.

Before the scandal, Peanut Corp. was a little-known but ambitious company that began in the 1970s considered in the state of a subdivision of an order catering operation.

“We started this business working out of our house in Virginia by my mom doing all the accounting,” company president Stewart Parnell had been quoted on the circle’s Web site.

The peanut processing business grew completely the years. The joint concern bought a plant in Georgia in 2001, opened some other in Texas four years later, and was too running a plant in Virginia.

Friends and office associates said Parnell was dedicated.

“He certainly has gone out and done some things on his own - he didn’t just lay around. He’s been aggressive,” said Eddie Marks, who runs a Virginia storage company and has known Parnell for 15 years.

But so much as as the companionship expanded and began to procedure millions of pounds of peanuts per month, its headquarters was still a two-story building behind Parnell’s house. He even had his own brand of peanut products: “Parnell’s Pride.”

Belying the ambition, there were problems.

Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/politics/2008718136_apsalmonellaoutbreak.html?syndication=rss

Uncategorized 9:13 pm

COLUMBIA, Mo. —

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Mere months past, the University of Missouri routinely touted chemical engineering professor Galen Suppes for his innovative research into renewable energy.

Now the school considers him a renegade scientist irksome to keep the university from getting its fair share of profits from his inventions. Missouri is suing the professor in federal court.

Their deteriorating dependence points to the broader pitfalls of “technology translate,” the augmenting enterprise in which university labs help incubate discoveries that can urge lifesaving drugs and modern conveniences to emporium.

Those innovations can line the pockets of scientists and their literary institution employers with millions in royalties. A prime example is the University of Florida, where the creation of Gatorade nearly four decades ago launched the sports drink industry while earning the school more than $80 very great number.

But for every Gatorade success untruth, missteps or disputes like the one in Missouri are to a greater degree typical.

Often, universities have inflated hopes about the riches they can reap from technology transfer, said Joshua Powers, an Indiana State University professor who studies the subjacent. Powers has found that the top tier of universities such at the same time that Yale, Stanford and California-Berkeley account for 60 percent of all technology-driven profits earned on campuses nationwide. Many other schools lose standard of value vying for their share, for the reason that applying for patents and trying to lawlessness them for commercial use is complex, costly and time-consuming.

“Universities are under enormous pressure to show beyond the possibility of doubt their worth in economic conditions,” Powers said. “By definition, they are involved at the early step of the research process. They often don’t know when a technology is going to be happy.”

Missouri says it is in the midst of those schools profiting from technology transfer. In the utmost recent fiscal year, the campus spent $1.4 million marketing intellectual property while earning $6.2 the public in licensing income.

Making cash with beneficial research was the goal of Suppes and his business partner, William “Rusty” Sutterlin, a former Missouri graduate student and postdoctoral fellow. In 2003, they formed a spin-off company, Renewable Alternatives, to develop dozens of inventions related to combustibles cell technology, nontoxic diesel combustible matter additives and an eco-friendly antifreeze.

Suppes, 45, says that the universal school failed to admit and pursue the engaged in traffic prospects for his research. Yet when he tried to recover his rights to those inventions that the university wouldn’t pursue, Suppes says, the university obstructed him with onerous rules.

Among those requirements: that Suppes take out $1 million to $2 million in liability insurance. Suppes claims that isn’t required of the private companies that sign deals through the university to license technology.

“The Missouri tech transfer program is totally spent and basically beyond repair,” he said.

Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2008718758_aptecpatentfight.html?syndication=rss

Uncategorized 9:04 pm

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It is a well-known risk to destitution unlikeness in an investing. portfolio. Now, couples employed by the same company are learning a similar censure, the acid way.

As layoffs mount across the country and in all sectors, couples who are co-workers are increasingly vulnerable to loss their families’ twin sources of income at once. The lack of class in job skills be able to furthermore make it difficult to bounce remote, especially in a struggling industry.

Such hard times have befallen Clarkston, Mich., turbulent indoctrinate sweethearts Victor and Lauri Cox, who married in 1976 and before long took jobs at the General Motors plant; Pam Podger and John Cramer, who met as reporters at The Fresno Bee in California in 1991; and Chad and Lindsey Lewis, who prospered while selling homes with respect to a Tampa builder if it were not that now confidence a more than 60 percent small quantity in in that place combined income.

Chad Lewis said the actual observation “blow us really hard,” forcing them to dip into savings in regulation to afford health insurance and other necessities. But they have found a silver lining: “There is someone in that place to rely on, to go through this with you.”

It may seem harsh for an employer to lay off the two spouses simultaneously. But companies risk lawsuits and unification contract violations whether or not they consider workers’ family status in determining who to eliminate.

And all that the financial risks, it is simply unrealistic to expect couples who fall in love on the job or while studying the same field in school to be thinking about revenue diversification, said Stephanie Coontz, a subdivision of an order studies professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash.

“I imagine that people will try to be more thoughtful about not putting all their household eggs in the identical basket, but I doubt if they will start trying to meet people outside their field just for economic reasons,” Coontz said.

People searching for a lifetime member of a partnership say the idea of choosing mates based on their careers would add too much complication to an already difficult proceeding.

“Most of the single people I comprehend are happy just to find another single person they get along with, let without another worry about what kind of work at jobs they esteem,” said Margaret Warren, 45, a Pensacola artist and computer consultant who dates a restorer of antique automobiles.

It was a shared love of journalism that helped spark romance between Pam Podger and John Cramer.

When the Roanoke Times in Virginia began cutting costs and offering early retirements last year, the bond thought they had found safe harbor and a fresh start out West at The Missoulian, a 28,000-daily and 32,000-Sunday motion in a circle newspaper in Missoula, Mont.

Less than 10 months later, the publisher laid them off, unsettling the repaired life they had begun with their two toddlers.

Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2008718667_apunemployedcouples.html?syndication=rss

Uncategorized 8:28 pm

LAGOS, Nigeria —

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Assailants attacked a natural gas production plant in southern Nigeria adhering Saturday, but the martial said its forces repelled the onslaught and killed three gunmen.

The district’sitting main fighting group, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, claimed responsibility for the attack, launched the same week after it called off a monthslong cease-fire. But the group denied any deaths among its fighters.

The military prevented the attackers from entering the production facility in Delta state, military spokesman Col. Rabe Abubakar said. He said three attackers were killed and one soldier was wounded.

Anglo-Dutch oil giant Royal Dutch Shell PLC confirmed an incident at the facility run by the agency of its local one at Utorogu. The company said one employee and two contractors were wounded in the invade, but all three had been treated and were in stable condition.

Shell did not say if the attack halted production.

Saturday’sitting gun contend was the latest in nearly three years of violence in the southern Niger Delta, strife that has slashed output from Africa’s biggest oil producer. Oil-industry workers are regularly kidnapped for redemption and energy facilities and transport ships are repeatedly attacked.

Amid the tensions, Nigeria’s oil output has sunk to surrounding 1.8 million barrels per day, or on the eve 25 percent less than its magnitude of 2.5 the public barrels daily.

The militants say they are battling to force the founded on government to send more oil-industry funds to the southern region, which relics deep poor despite its great natural bounty.

The powers that be says the militants are organized criminals engaging in the lucrative overseas trade in crude oil by illegally tapping Nigeria’s vast pipeline reticulated.

Associated Press writer Nathaniel Ibigor in Warri, Nigeria, contributed to this report.

Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2008710775_apafnigeriaoilunrest.html?syndication=rss

Uncategorized 7:59 pm

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. —

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The corresponding; of like kind week that automakers sought billions in aid to avoid bankruptcy, two states, including Michigan, announced huge alternative power industry investments, with one site being built in succession land once set aside to attraction auto manufacturers.

Manufacturing strongholds hardest hit by job losses years ago began laying the groundwork to land green jobs and may now be poised through respect to the biggest gains, depending attached federal economic stimulus funding.

The $900 billion economic package before Congress has more than $50 billion in energy-related incentives.

President Barack Obama has set a mark of doubling the employment of renewable activity in three years, potentially placing states with established programs in a position to take the place of thousands of manufacturing jobs lost over the last decade.

Michigan created a $2 billion fund using tobacco fixture money to target four economic sectors, some being alternative energy.

The state, what one. has lost further than 150,000 automotive jobs over the past eight years, began using community colleges to retrain the disused and underemployed for green jobs.

“Employers, if you draw near to Michigan, we will deliver trained employees to you,” Gov. Jennifer Granholm said. “And employees, we will pay on this account that your training, bound the kicker is you’ve got to agree to be fitted in an area that we apprehend we have need in.”

The other power industry, like others, is life shaken right now by a wave of layoffs and bankruptcies. Without help from the government, analysts are forecasting double digit declines in business and installations.

States continue to look beyond the current economic downturn, however, and many look for a boom in other energy investments ahead.

The competition to lure green industry jobs heated up several years ago, and is expected to grow but also tighter with more money in gambler.

Federal proposals include $32 billion to upgrade the nation’s electrical arrangement system, more than $20 billion in tax cuts to promote the development of alternatives to oil, and billions more to make public housing, federal buildings and modest-income homes other energy efficient.

Glen Andersen, of the National Conference of State Legislatures, said states began lobbying for green jobs long before it was known that Washington might sweeten the investment pan.

Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2008718505_apstatesgreenjobpush.html?syndication=rss

Uncategorized 7:53 pm

BOSTON A street artist distinguished for his red, gray and dejected “Hope” posters of President Obama has been arrested on warrants accusing him of tagging disposition with graffiti, police said Saturday.

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Shepard Fairey was arrested Friday death on his way to the Institute of Contemporary Art with a view to a kickoff event for his first solo exhibition, called “Supply and Demand.”

Two warrants were issued for the sake of Fairey on Jan. 24 after police determined he’d tagged property in two locations with graffiti based on the Andre the Giant street art campaign from his premature career, Officer James Kenneally uttered. One of the locations was the railroad trestle through the landmark Boston University bridge over the Charles River, police said.

Fairey, 38, of Los Angeles, is scheduled to be arraigned Monday in Brighton District Court, said Jake Wark, a prolocutor for the Suffolk District Attorney. Wark before-mentioned Fairey would also be arraigned without interruption a default maintain related to a separate graffiti case in the Roxbury piece of Boston.

Fairey has spent the last two weeks in the Boston area installing the ICA exhibit and creating outdoor art, including a 20-by-50 foot banner on the side of City Hall, according to a statement issued Saturday by the museum.

The museum said Fairey was released a few hours after his arrest. Boston police confirmed Fairey had been released, but did not comprehend exactly while or the amount of his bail.

A man who answered the phone at Fairey’s Los Angeles studio, Studio One, declined comment. Fairey’s publicist and a California limb of the law who has represented Fairey in a copyright suit didn’t just now respond to e-mails seeking comment.

Fairey has been arrested numerous times for drawing on buildings and other private property without permission.

His Obama image has been sold upon the body hundreds of thousands of stickers and posters, and was unveiled at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington before Obama’s installation.

The image is the make liable of a copyright dispute with The Associated Press. Fairey argues his practice of the AP photo is protected by “unspotted use,” which allows exceptions to copyright laws based upon the body, among other factors, how much of the original is used, what the new work is used for and how the original is affected by the new work.

A California lawyer who has represented Fairey in the copyright trial didn’t immediately respond to an e-mail seeking comment on the arrest.

Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2008718578_apobamaposterarrest.html?syndication=rss

Uncategorized 7:49 pm

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It is a well-known risk to lack diversity in an investing. portfolio. Now, couples employed by the same concourse are attainments a similar lesson, the hard way.

As layoffs uprise across the country and in all sectors, couples who are co-workers are increasingly vulnerable to losing their families’ twin sources of gains at formerly. The lack of variety in job skills can moreover make it difficult to bounce back, especially in a struggling industry.

Such hard times have befallen Clarkston, Mich., high school sweethearts Victor and Lauri Cox, who married in 1976 and soon took jobs at the General Motors plant; Pam Podger and John Cramer, who met viewed like reporters at The Fresno Bee in California in 1991; and Chad and Lindsey Lewis, who prospered while selling homes for a Tampa builder but since face a more than 60 percent drop in in that place combined income.

Chad Lewis said the actual observation “hit us really hard,” forcing them to dip into savings in precept to afford soundness insurance and other necessities. But they have found a silver lining: “There is someone in that place to rely on, to go through this by you.”

It may seem harsh for an employer to lay off both spouses simultaneously. But companies risk lawsuits and union contract violations if they weigh workers’ family rank in determining who to get rid of.

And whatever the financial risks, it is simply unrealistic to expect couples who fall in love on the job or while studying the same field in school to be thinking about revenue diversification, said Stephanie Coontz, a family studies professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash.

“I imagine that people will try to have existence more thoughtful about not putting all their relating to housekeeping eggs in the same basket, but I doubt if they will sudden motion wearisome to meet race outside their field just for economic reasons,” Coontz said.

People penetrating for a lifetime partner say the creative of choosing mates based on their careers would add too much combination to one already difficult process.

“Most of the individual people I know are delighted just to find another pure person they get along with, let alone worry about what indulgent of job they have,” declared Margaret Warren, 45, a Pensacola artist and computer consultant who dates a restorer of antique automobiles.

It was a shared love of journalism that helped germ romance between Pam Podger and John Cramer.

When the Roanoke Times in Virginia began sharp costs and sacrifice early retirements last year, the couple thought they had found safe harbor and a fresh start out West at The Missoulian, a 28,000-daily and 32,000-Sunday spread journal in Missoula, Mont.

Less than 10 months later, the publisher laid them off, unsettling the new life they had begun with their brace toddlers.

Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2008718667_apunemployedcouples.html?syndication=rss

Uncategorized 7:07 pm

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These days, you have power to roll up to an ATM at the grocery, the pharmacy, the gas station, the hardware lay in store, the work, flat the ballpark. You can check your Bank of America balance on your iPhone. You be able to text Chase, and Chase will text you back.

That’s banking today: It has grown from some almost quaint dependence betwixt teller and customer into a massive, dizzyingly interconnected netting that touches almost every adult in this rustic.

And right now, the treaty rule - working without a road delineate, and destitute of a net - is putting together a plan to honor U.S. banks from collapsing.

Not just to acquire the banks lending again. To keep them alive.

The government is expected to announce Monday a plan that analysts expect will include lifting soured mortgage assets off selected banks’ books, possibly along with guarantees against other losses and maybe more direct injections of cash.

Financial industry experts say it is a matter of choosing the best of separate options, none of them very palatable.

And no one knows for sure what will work because nothing like this has happened in living reminiscence.

Getting it wrong could trigger a replay of what happened after Lehman Brothers collapsed last fall - the stock mart in free fall, seizure of the carry to the credit of one’s account markets, ripples of layoffs. Perhaps even a run on other banks - with equal reason many customers rushing to shake out their cash that it would make the sandbank run in “It’s a Wonderful Life” look partiality, well, a feel-good holiday movie.

“The banks are at a terrible junction,” says Robert Reich, a labor secretary under President Bill Clinton. “The bottom is falling out. Almost every district of the credit markets, we’re finding mob unable to repay their loans. That means many banks are basically insolvent.”

“If one big shore implodes,” he says, “the reverberations could be endless.”

So how did we possess into this mess?

And how do we acquire out?

Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2008718638_apbanksonthebrink.html?syndication=rss