JetBlue inaugurated new service between Orlando and Montego Bay, Jamaica, on Feb. 8 with a daily round-trip flight out of Orlando International Airport.
Montego Bay is the 23rd nonstop destination served by JetBlue from Central Florida. The airline offers flights to six other destinations in the Caribbean and Latin America: Bogota, Colombia; Cancun, Mexico; Nassau, Bahamas; San Jose, Costa Rica; Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic; and Aguadilla, Ponce and San Juan, Puerto Rico.
JetBlue Airways (Nasdaq: JBLU) currently serves 60 cities with 600 daily flights.
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Investor Stacy Hastie says One City Centre will soon look more like 600 Washington, the new name given to the downtown St. Louis office tower, which will undergo a $29 million overhaul.
An investment entity managed by Hastie bought the 25-story building Wednesday by placing the only bid — $12.7 million — at a foreclosure sale. The sale extinguished the interest held by Pyramid Cos., which had planned to renovate One City Centre as part of its ambitious Mercantile Exchange project. Financial problems forced Pyramid to close in 2008.
Hastie is part of the effort to redo One City Centre and St. Louis Centre, a former mall that will be converted largely to parking. He said the foreclosure "is a big step forward" and means work is about to begin to move the building’s entrance to Washington Avenue. The building’s new name will reflect the reconfiguration.
In two weeks, the law firm Lewis, Rice & Fingersh will move to One City Centre, while LarsonAllen, an accounting firm, will move its St. Louis County offices to the building by June 1, Hastie said.
The foreclosure occurred a day after the Missouri Development Finance Board, a state agency, approved a $5 million loan for the One City Centre overhaul. It will be packaged with about $15 million in funds and debt from Hastie’s entities and $10.1 million in tax credits and city funds to pay for the rehab.
Less certain is the future of the Arcade building, at 800 Olive Street, which another Hastie-run investment entity bought out of foreclosure Wednesday. Hastie’s $9 million bid gave him control of the building, which Hastie plans to sell to another developer.
Earlier this week, investment entities managed by Hastie agreed to pay off the loans Bank of America made to Pyramid for the One City Centre and Arcade projects. Conversion of the Arcade into condos was under way in 2007 when Pyramid halted work. Bank of America filed a foreclosure notice in early December.
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Missouri may have given birth to “Mad Men” star Jon Hamm and Grammy-winning singer Sheryl Crow but the state ranks 44th on a list of the best-looking states.
In light of Miss Virginia winning the Miss America crown Saturday, The Daily Beast ranked the states based on the hometowns of the winners of the Miss America and Miss USA pageants for the past decade, more than 300 male and female fashion models and the 125 men mentioned in 10 years’ worth of People’s “Sexiest Man Alive” issues. The list also factored in health and fitness data for each state from 2006-2008, ranked by the Trust for America’s Health.
Illinois, home of supermodel Cindy Crawford, comes in at No. 11.
Washington, D.C., ranked No. 1 for its beautiful people, and North Dakota came in last.
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Kinder Morgan Energy Partners LP, one of the nation’s largest pipeline companies, agreed to buy four terminals from St. Louis-based Slay Industries for $98 million.
The assets include a river terminal in Sauget, a liquid bulk terminal and a warehousing distribution center in St. Louis and a terminal in Muscatine, Iowa.
The purchase gives Kinder Morgan a toehold in the St. Louis terminal market and "unparalleled access to major markets via rail and waterway," Jeff Armstrong, president of the company’s terminals business, said Wednesday in a statement.
Houston-based Kinder Morgan and Slay Industries also formed a joint venture at Slay’s Kellogg Dock coal terminal in Modoc, Ill., and new North Cahokia terminal in Sauget, which includes 175 acres for development.
Slay Industries was founded 90 years ago as Slay Motor Freight and generates annual revenue exceeding $125 million, according to the company’s website.
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Job hunters may be better off being unemployed and searching for permanent work rather than taking temporary positions, a new study contends.
“It’s not that temp work is bad, per se,” said David Autor, who co-wrote the study. “It’s that people who are successful as temps, would tend to be far more successful in direct hire jobs. It’s the opportunity cost rather than direct harm.”
Autor, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and colleague Susan Houseman carried out a broad study of outcomes for 37,000 job seekers. The study group comprised clients of Work First, a public job-placement service operating in Detroit whose goal is to get people off welfare.
Applicants were randomly assigned to jobs; some were temporary positions doled out by agencies, others were direct hires to participating companies. All the jobs were relatively low-wage, low-skill labour.
Autor found that those workers who lucked into direct-hire employment, on average, earned 30 to 50 per cent more over the next two years than workers who took temp jobs. They found that earnings for temp workers tended to jump at the outset but then settled back when those jobs ended after a few days or weeks.
“The average outcome is that people placed in temp jobs do less well than they would have if they had just spent the extra time to search for a direct-hire position,” Autor said from his office at M.I.T. on Monday.
“Holding the temp job has two consequences: First of all, it’s very difficult to search for a job while you’re working. Second, when you’re connected to a temp agency, you may have the illusion a job is about to show up. They say, ‘We’ll call you when we have something.’ I wouldn’t call it ‘complacency,’ but it may create the sense that you’re doing something when you’re not payday loans guaranteed no fax.”
At the root of all this is the onerous nature of the job hunt itself.
“We know from all kinds of studies that people … hate searching for work. They hate it much more than working.”
Temp work, it seems, jolts people out of a job-hunting state of mind while offering no long-term benefits.
“Direct-hire placements give people stability. Stability is very valuable,” Autor said. “People often talk about the benefits of flexibility and so forth. Most of those benefits are actually for the employer rather than the employee.”
One of his conclusions is that government should not be in the business of trying to place people in temp jobs.
“You don’t need a government agency to connect you to a temp agency. Everybody knows where they are,” Autor said. “What is hard is connecting workers directly to employers.”
The participants in the study were a very particular kind of worker – one with little training. But Autor believes the study’s findings apply to a broad economic spectrum.
He is very careful not to suggest that people who need to put food on the table should be turning down any sort of job. But he gently suggests that the goal should be a successful job search, not a short one.
“What I’d like (job seekers) to take from this is that although temporary work sometimes leads to a direct-hire position, that’s probably not the most fruitful way to get them, relative to the sort of painful work of a direct-hire search,” Autor said.
“Don’t view temp work as the on-ramp into the labour market.”
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NBC fired back at Conan O’Brien Wednesday as negotiations between the outgoing host of "The Tonight Show" and the network stalled over how much O’Brien’s staff would be paid under a potential severance deal.
"It was Conan’s decision to leave NBC that resulted in nearly 200 of his staffers being out of work," a network representative said in an e-mailed statement. "We have already agreed to pay millions of dollars to compensate every one of them."
O’Brien is reportedly close to signing a $40 million deal to walk away from "The Tonight Show," which he has hosted since June. The network tried to push the show to a later time slot.
But talks have been held up by disagreements over, among other things, how much the show’s staff is entitled to as well.
Gavin Polone, O’Brien’s manager, told the New York Times that some wrangling over staff compensation was to be expected given the dismal job market. But, he added, "We’re fighting to do better for them fast cash online."
The weeks-long dispute has roiled the entertainment industry and galvanized fans of the show, who held rallies in cities across the nation Tuesday in support of O’Brien.
According to NBC, O’Brien raised compensation issues a few days ago, and it is only one of many points still being negotiated.
"This latest posturing is nothing more than a PR ploy," the NBC representative said.
The rebuke comes one day after O’Brien took the network to task during his nightly monologue, saying "NBC is headed downhill faster than a fat guy chasing a runaway cheese-wheel."
O’Brien is widely expected to cede the show later this week. "I’m just three days away from the biggest drinking binge in history," he said Tuesday night.
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SHANGHAI—Google is investigating whether one or more employees may have helped facilitate a cyber-attack from China that the U.S search giant said it was a victim of in mid-December, two sources told Reuters on Monday.
Google, the world’s most popular search engine, said last week it may pull out of the world’s biggest Internet market by users after reporting it had been hit by a “sophisticated” cyber-attack on its network that resulted in theft of its intellectual property.
The sources, who are familiar with the situation, told Reuters that the attack, which targeted people who have access to specific parts of Google networks, may have been facilitated by people working in Google China’s office.
“We’re not commenting on rumour and speculation. This is an ongoing investigation, and we simply cannot comment on the details,” a Google spokeswoman said.
Security analysts told Reuters the malicious software (malware) used in the Google attack was a modification of a trojan called Hydraq. A trojan is malware that, once inside a computer, allows someone unauthorised access. The sophistication in the attack was in knowing whom to attack, not the malware itself, the analysts said.
Local media, citing unnamed sources, reported that some Google China employees were denied access to internal networks after Jan. 13, while some staff were put on leave and others transferred to different offices in Google’s Asia Pacific operations. Google said it would not comment on its business operations.
TALKS SOON
Google, which has denied rumours that it has already decided to shut down its China offices, said on Monday it contacted the Chinese government last week after the announcement.
“We are going to have talks with them in the coming few days,” Google said.
Google is also still in the process of scanning its internal networks since the cyber-attack in mid-December.
China has tried to play down Google’s threat to leave, saying there are many ways to resolve the issue, but insisting all foreign companies, Google included, must abide by Chinese laws.
Washington said it was issuing a diplomatic note to China formally requesting an explanation for the attacks.
The Google issue risks becoming another irritant in China’s relationship with the United States. Ties are already strained by arguments over the yuan currency’s exchange rate, which U.S. critics say is unfairly low, trade protectionism and U.S. arms sales to Taiwan.
Washington has long been worried about Beijing’s cyber-spying programme. A congressional advisory panel said in November the Chinese government appeared increasingly to be penetrating U.S. computers to gather useful data for its military.
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European exports declined for a second month in November as the euro’s strength made goods from the region more expensive abroad.
Exports from the euro area dropped a seasonally adjusted 0.4 percent from October, when they decreased 0.1 percent, the European Union’s statistics office in Luxembourg said today. The trade surplus narrowed to 3.9 billion euros ($5.6 billion) in November as imports rose 0.3 percent from October, when they fell 1 percent. European inflation accelerated to 0.9 percent in December, a separate report showed.
The euro’s 10 percent advance against the dollar in the past year is threatening to undermine the region’s recovery by making exports less competitive. While European services and manufacturing industries expanded at the fastest pace in more than two years in December, the economy still faces a “bumpy road” ahead, European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet said yesterday.
“The exports-driven recovery of the preceding two quarters is fading,” said Dominique Barbet, an economist at BNP Paribas SA in Paris. “Imports’ lack of dynamism suggests lackluster domestic demand.”
December inflation was the fastest since February 2009, with energy prices rising 1.8 percent from a year earlier, the statistics office said. Core inflation, excluding volatile costs such as tobacco, food and energy, accelerated to 1.1 percent in December from 1 percent in the previous month.
Greece’s Struggles
The euro fell the most in almost a month against the dollar today as Greece’s struggles to cut its budget deficit dented investor confidence in European assets. The 16-nation currency traded at $1.4366 at 3:43 p.m. in London, down 0.9 percent on the day.
The ECB yesterday left its benchmark interest rate at a record low of 1 percent and signaled that officials will wait for more signs of recovery before withdrawing emergency measures further, with Trichet citing “a great level of uncertainty” surrounding the economic outlook short term personal loans. The central bank forecasts growth of about 0.8 percent this year and around 1.2 percent in 2011.
European Aeronautic, Defence & Space & Co., the parent of Airbus SAS, on Jan. 12 reported its steepest annual revenue drop since the company went public a decade ago, partly because of a weaker dollar. Eckhard Cordes, chief executive officer of Metro AG, Germany’s biggest retailer, said on Jan. 12 that he anticipates economic conditions will remain “challenging” in 2010 after currency swings eroded fourth-quarter revenue.
Biggest Economy
Economies around the globe are emerging from the worst recession in six decades, led by China, where exports gained for the first time in 14 months in December. The Asian nation overtook Germany as the largest exporter of goods in 2009. Industrial output in the U.S., the world’s biggest economy, rose in December for a sixth month, data showed today.
Euro-area exports to the U.S., the region’s second-biggest trading partner, dropped 20 percent in the first 10 months of 2009 from a year earlier, today’s report showed. Shipments to the U.K., the largest market for euro-area goods, declined 24 percent, while exports to China rose 1 percent. The detailed country data are published with a one-month lag.
To help shore up earnings, companies have been cutting costs and paring wages. European unemployment rose to 10 percent in November. That’s the highest in more than 11 years. Koenig & Bauer AG, the world’s third-biggest printing-press maker, said last month that it plans to eliminate more jobs.
“China and other emerging countries bring in volume but not necessarily profit,” Koenig & Bauer CEO Helge Hansen said on Dec. 4 in Wuerzburg, Germany. “They help retain jobs, but they don’t help in terms of a positive balance.”
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Bucks County drug-discovery company BioLeap raised $5 million in a venture capital financing Tuesday.
The financing was led by Quaker BioVentures of Philadelphia and Adams Capital Management of Sewickley, Pa.
BioLeap, of New Hope, Pa., plans to use the funding for business development, to support continued development of its computational fragment-based drug design and to pursue alternative models of early drug discovery.
The fragment-based drug design process involves using the company’s in-house computer cluster and proprietary algorithms to rapidly calculate the potential for small molecular fragments of biological compounds to bind to, and inhibit, targeted proteins.
David Pompliano, CEO of BioLeap, said, “We are using our computational method to design novel drugs for specific diseases, and to build the foundation for the next generation of drug discovery.”
Brenda Gavin, founding partner of Quaker BioVentures, said BioLeap, since its creation in 2004,
has demonstrated its ability to save drug discovery costs for pharmaceutical and agricultural chemical companies. “By minimizing nonproductive guesswork during the drug discovery process, BioLeap assists in bringing better drug candidates to market in a shorter period of time,” she said.
Gavin and William A. Frezza of Adams Capital Management will join BioLeap’s board of directors.
The government is expected to unveil a new program in the next couple of months that if approved may reimburse homeowners for up to half the cost of making their homes more efficient, but don’t start shopping for new kitchens just yet.
Homeowners will get the most return for the money in simple upgrades like caulking the windows, putting insulation in the attic, and changing the light bulbs - not new windows, refrigerators or dishwashers.
What’s on the table
The average American home wastes a lot of energy.
A complete energy retrofit - which could include caulking and insulation as well as new windows, appliances and boiler, could slice a home’s energy consumption in half, according to Lane Burt, manager of building energy policy at Natural Resources Defense Council.
But getting all that work done might run into the tens of thousands of dollars. And any new federal program - which is still being drafted and is not guaranteed to become law - would cap the government reimbursements at $12,000, said Burt.
Homeowners need not despair. There are some simple improvements that are relatively cheap and can pay for themselves quickly.
Just adding the insulation, caulking and lights might run an average homeowner $5,000 to $7,000, he said. That could shave about 30% off a home’s energy bill each month. And if the government picks up half the cost, the payback time for homeowners would be just a few years.
"It’s a win-win-win," said Burt. "It creates jobs, it saves energy, and it saves consumers money."
Consumer watchdog groups back up Burt’s claim.
"I don’t know of anyone who’s looked at them and said they are not a good idea," said Mark Cooper, director of research for the Consumer Federation of America. "The average consumer can save a big chunk of change by getting the work done."
What to look for
Experts say there are a few things to look for when getting an energy audit and retrofit work done.
First, find a contractor licensed by the Building Performance Institute or the Residential Energy Services Network. These contractors have been trained to first test a home and see how much energy it is losing, then make renovations on all the systems in the building instant payday loans.
As of now there are no incentives in the proposed program for do-it-yourselfers. That’s partly because the program is designed to create jobs by putting out-of-work contractors back on the job. But it’s also done to ensure the work is done right - a house that’s sealed up too tight could rot from mold or trap too much carbon monoxide.
Second, hire an energy contractor using the same diligence you would with any other contractor. Call around for price quotes and check references. If you have any problems report them to your state’s attorney general.
The big picture
The proposed program is part of a broader jobs initiative designed first and foremost to put people back to work.
The original proposal, which called for $23 billion to be spent on energy retrofits, was estimated to create over half a million jobs, according to CleanEdison, an association of green building professionals.
Those familiar with the proposal say the final bill may set aside $10 billion for energy retrofits. Still, it’s a lot more than is currently being done - while some states have reimbursement programs, there is no federal plan. The original stimulus bill contained $5 billion for low income homeowners and money to retrofit federal buildings, but nothing for middle income Americans. The new proposal has no income restriction.
But in addition to creating jobs and saving consumers money, it also lays the framework for an energy efficient economy and achieving the 80% reduction in greenhouse gases most scientists say is necessary to avoid the worst impacts of global warming.
That’s a target that can’t be hit with building wind farms and solar plants alone.
Some 40% of all energy used in this country goes to buildings, mostly in the form of heating, cooling and lighting.
"You don’t get an 80% reduction by 2050 without retrofitting nearly every building in the country," said Burt.
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