Weather-related automobile crashes involving up to 69 vehicles closed westbound Interstate 10 in the downtown Phoenix area Saturday evening, according to media reports and the Arizona Department of Transportation.
Reports said Arizona Department of Public Safety officers, as well as Phoenix Fire Department units, responded to three major crashes between 16th Street and Seventh Avenue about 6 p.m. There were reports of one serious injury business
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More children are crowding into classrooms in Modesto, Calif. Parents are paying extra to send their kids to full-day kindergarten in Queen Creek, Ariz. And the school buses stopped rolling in one St. Louis area school district.
These are but a few of the unwelcome changes greeting children as they start the school year. Tight fiscal times are forcing school districts to lay off teachers, enlarge class sizes, cut programs and charge for services that were once free.
"School districts are going to be stripped down from what there were a few years ago," said Jack Jennings, head of the Center on Education Policy, an advocacy group. "They are really feeling the economic squeeze."
The national economic downturn has sucked state coffers dry, forcing cuts to school districts and municipalities. The Obama administration’s stimulus package softened the impact, but many districts still found themselves having to downsize.
"Every student is being affected in some way or another," said Dan Domenech, executive director of the America Association of School Administrators.
Teachers are experiencing the brunt of the budget cuts this year, even though Congress last week gave states an additional $10 billion to keep an estimated 140,000 educators and support staff employed.
Still, the number of teachers who won’t have a job this school year could be as high as 135,000, experts said.
While grateful for the federal funds, school officials are not sure they will be able to use it to bring back many teachers this year. Many states have yet to say how they will distribute the money and many districts have already started or set up their class schedules.
Some plan to use it to hire tutors, counselors and non-core classroom educators such as art and music teachers. But others say they may hold onto the money until the next school year, when the last of the stimulus money is set to disappear.
"We’re all looking ahead over the next couple of years and not seeing any respite," said Chris Nicastro, Missouri’s commissioner of education.
More kindergarteners per class
The great wave of layoffs means students will have to share their classrooms — and their teachers’ attention — with more of their peers.
In California, for instance, state education officials have approved 23 requests from local districts to increase their average class sizes beyond the maximum allowed. At least 33 more are scheduled to be reviewed in coming months.
This is quite a change from the previous decade, when the state received no requests.
"It’s rising exponentially," said Judy Pinegar, manager of the waiver office at the California Department of Education.
Facing a $25 million budget gap for this year, Modesto City Schools district officials decided to raise the average class size in kindergarten through third grade to 25 kids, up from 20.
The school district was initially looking to lay off one-third of its teachers, or 500 people personal loan for poor credit. But after educators agreed to give up their raises and some retired, only 50 teachers were not rehired for this school year.
Still, the larger class sizes will have an impact, said Megan Gowans, executive director of the Modesto Teachers Association.
"Students are going to feel that they are getting less one-on-one attention," she said.
Neighboring Sylvan Union School District now has elementary school classes with up to 34 students in them. That’s 12 more than the average size last year. The elementary schools now only have one librarian and no dedicated art teachers, when there used to be four of each. In all, there are 19 fewer educators on staff, said Superintendent John Halverson.
The district has gone so far to combine several grades, teaching kindergarten and first graders and first and second graders together for the first time in recent memory.
These moves allow school officials to keep some classrooms dark, helping close a $5 million gap in its $60 million budget. But the changes won’t go unnoticed.
"I can’t say it won’t have an impact because I think it will," said Halverson, who has been in the California school system for 33 years.
Paying for programs
Elsewhere in the nation, school districts have cut back on programs and services or are charging for them.
Take Queen Creek, a small town 38 miles southeast of Phoenix. When the state cut funding for full-day kindergarten programs, Queen Creek took a $900,000 hit, but decided to continue offering it…at a price. Parents have to pay $200 a month to enroll their 5-year-olds.
"Our community was used to having it," said Shari Zara, the district’s chief financial officer. "We thought we’d still offer it for those who could pay."
Some 122 kids signed up for the extended program, while another 216 are in the free half-day class. Charging tuition spared the district from having to cut teachers or programs, Zara said.
Busing is another area that has taken a hit in scores of districts.
In the Bayless school district in the St. Louis area, for example, the board and administrators decided to eliminate bus service instead of laying off staff and raising class sizes beyond the current 25 to 30 per room. The decision affects about 650 of the district’s 1,650 students and saves $240,000 a year, said John Stewart, chief financial officer.
Getting rid of transportation helped close the roughly $650,000 gap in the district’s $14 million budget. Employees also agreed to pay more toward their health insurance.
"We wanted to impact the classroom and educational process as little as possible," Stewart said.
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Hawaii’s initial unemployment claims were down 1.2 percent last week.
The Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism released a report Thursday showing that a total of 2,466 first-time unemployment claims were filed statewide in the past week, compared to 2,497 claims during the same week in 2009.
Oahu, the Big Island and Maui all saw decreases in new claims filed, while Kauai had a significant increase in the number of first-time claims.
Kauai’s 231 new claims was an increase of 90, or 63 saving account payday loan.8 percent, compared to the 141 claims it recorded during the same week last year, according to DBEDT data.
Oahu showed 1,383 new claims last week, a decrease of 2.7 percent from last year. The Big Island recorded 430 first-time unemployment claims, down 12.1 percent, and Maui had 347 new claims, down 7.2 percent from the 374 first-time claims during this week last year.
USD 259 has closed on a deal to buy 127 acres southeast of Wichita for a new high school.
The district bought the property Friday on the southeast side of 127th Street East and Pawnee from Wichita developer Gary Oborny, of Occidental Management.
Oborny declined to release the purchase price. The district has said the price was $1.56 million.
USD 259 plans to build a high school on the property next year as part of its $370 million bond issue. The school is expected to be open by the 2013-2014 school year.
Oborny retained about 30 acres on the corner for a future commercial development. He says the property isn’t likely to be developed for another five years, depending on how fast housing developments pop up in the area, which is mostly rural.
“If it happens sooner, it happens sooner. I can’t imagine it will,” Oborny says.
More information about Oborny’s plans can be found here.
Debbie Yow hasn’t been on the job long, but she’s already making her presence felt as N.C. State’s athletics director.
“We are doing a reorganization,” Yow said in a phone interview Monday afternoon.
Yow, who took the helm of the Wolfpack athletic department in July, already has promoted department veteran David Horning to executive senior associate AD, making him the clear No. 2 administrator in the department. She also is looking to hire at least one, and possibly two, new senior associate ADs.
Additionally, Yow is shifting around some duties and responsibilities. The process will be complete in a couple of weeks, she says, and then the changes will be reviewed again a year from now.
Yow, who previously served as AD at the University of Maryland, says that she doesn’t intend to fire any employees as part of the reorganization and hasn’t heard of any employees that are leaving voluntarily.
Yow replaced Lee Fowler as AD. Fowler stepped down from the post after a decade as AD.
Insitu Inc. has won a $43.7 million contract for up to 56 of its unmanned surveillance aircraft for the U.S. Marine Corps.
Bingen, Wash.-based Insitu, a wholly-owned subsidiary of The Boeing Co. (NYSE: BA), said it will now begin a 24-month engineering, manufacturing and development process to build and test its Integrator unmanned system.
Work on the project will be mostly split between locations in Bingen and across the Columbia River in Hood River and should be completed by September 2012, according to the U.S. Department of Defense website.
The executive who succeeded founder B. Thomas Golisano at Paychex Inc. will exit at the end of this month.
The Rochester-based company announced Monday that Jonathan Judge has resigned as president and chief executive officer, effective July 31. Judge, who joined Paychex in October 2004 as just its second president and CEO, will complete his term as a member of the Paychex board of directors.
Golisano, who owns the Buffalo Sabres, told reporters the resignation by Judge to pursue other interests was straightforward and simple.
“Jon joined Paychex as my successor, bringing with him experience and qualifications gained during his 25-year career with IBM,” said Golisano payday loan lenders. “During his tenure with Paychex, Jon guided our company’s revenue growth from $1.4 billion in fiscal 2005 to $2.0 billion in 2010. He also strengthened our management practices, oversaw key technology advances for our payroll and HR offerings, and led our successful entry into the health and benefits business.”
The Paychex (NASDAQ: PAYX) board immediately began the search for Judge’s successor with an executive committee formed to lead the payroll and benefits company on an interim basis.
Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase are the leading candidates to handle the underwriting of an initial public offering for General Motors, according to published reports.
A move to settle on underwriters would suggest that GM is getting closer to filing for an IPO. A sale of GM stock to the public would help taxpayers start to recoup most of the money GM received as part of a federal bailout.
Still, an offering will not take place before the fourth quarter, according to the Treasury Department, which holds a 61% stake in the company.
Morgan Stanley (MS, Fortune 500) and General Motors declined to comment on the reports in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, while a spokesman for JPMorgan Chase (JPM, Fortune 500) was not available for comment.
It would make sense that Morgan Stanley is in the running. GM’s vice chairman Stephen Girsky was formerly a managing partner at Morgan Stanley.
The Treasury Department also refused to comment on the reports but issued a statement late Thursday that said the selection of underwriters would be GM’s decision.
Treasury added though that the choice of banks would be subject to the department’s "agreement that the selection is reasonable." It also said that Treasury, not GM, will determine the fees paid to underwriters.
Both Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase received their own federal bailout funds Treasury in 2008, although all that money has since been repaid. Still, the department likely has a fair amount of leverage in negotiating fees for the IPO with the banks.
But even a fee of 1% of the offering would likely generate more than $100 million in income for the firms — assuming that GM sells at least $10 billion worth of stock easy payday loans.
Independent International Investment Research estimates that the GM IPO will raise $12 billion, which would be enough to make it the second largest U.S. IPO on record, behind only the $17.9 billion IPO for Visa (V, Fortune 500) in 2008. It would be about 10 times the size of the Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) IPO in 2004.
The IPO is a key step for the Treasury Department being able to recoup some of the remaining $44 billion in taxpayer money the automaker has yet to repay.
While GM has repaid $7 billion in loans it got from treasury, Treasury received $2.1 billion in preferred GM shares along with the 61% stake in GM’s common shares in exchange for the help.
The Treasury Department is expected to sell some, but not all, of those shares in the IPO. Experts say it will take months, if not years, for the government to sell its entire stake.
GM shares would need to have a market value of $69 billion in order for Treasury’s common shares to recoup their portion of the bailout money. Numerous analysts last month estimated GM’s total market value at between $64 billion and $90 billion.
But it may prove difficult for GM to reach that value. The company’s peak market value was $61.3 billion in May of 1999, according to research by the Center for Research in Security Prices at the University of Chicago.
BERLIN — A dark cloud has settled over the world’s financial markets, as growing numbers of people conclude that the debt crisis in Europe could hammer global growth — and even bring back recession barely a year after a patchy recovery took hold.
Government officials — whose job it is to boost confidence — downplay that risk, but many economists are warning that a much-feared "double dip" recession could be starting from Europe.
It would be the next ugly chapter in the global financial and economic turmoil that began three years ago. And now as then, what is striking is the inter-connectedness of everything — how near-default in Greece and weeks of dithering in Germany have affected commodities such as oil and gold and, with demand and confidence waning, have bludgeoned stock markets around the world in a way that rattles ordinary people saving for retirement from Korea to California.
In 2007, the bad debt connected to repackaged subprime mortgages started undermining banks and hedge funds, and by early 2008 confidence in the system was slipping fast. This time it is the exposure of banks everywhere to sovereign debt — the IOUs of governments — whose value has been falling for months.
The sheer size of the European economy is a factor, said Mauro F. Guillen, director of the Lauder Institute at The Wharton School in Pennsylvania. "If European demand goes down, global growth will slow down," he said.
"A European economy that lags is not necessarily enough to put the world economy back into recession," Nicholas Colas, ConvergEx Group chief market strategist, said. "But a European economy that cannot stabilize its currency and capital markets certainly will push the global economy back into the red.
"A double dip is a possibility."
It is a daunting prospect, because having already deployed their best countermeasures — stimulus spending and central bank interest rate cuts — governments everywhere may be out of ammunition.
Stephen Lewis, a London-based economist with Monument Securities, spoke for many of the pessimists Friday after a week of market turmoil in Europe when he saw "no guarantee that the upswing in the global economy from 2009’s low point will be sustained."
At the heart of the crisis are fears that indebted eurozone governments will be unable to pay what they owe. Those fears have sent the prices of government bonds — many of them held by big banks in Germany and France — plummeting. Europe also faces low growth prospects because governments must cut back on spending to pay down heavy debt loads payday loan lenders in states.
If banks in Europe and beyond suffer losses on marked-down government bonds, this would then make them afraid to lend the money that businesses need to operate and expand, choking off growth — a replay, in a sense, of the freezing of credit markets after the Sept. 2008 collapse of the U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers, which led to a worldwide recession. The global economy shrank by 0.6 percent in 2009, its first dip since World War II.
"If sovereign debt concerns are accompanied by worries over bank liquidity any more significant than those currently influencing the credit market, another dip in world economic activity would seem a sure thing," Lewis said.
As fear spreads, stocks and the price of oil, both signs of expectations for future economic growth, have been drawn into the downdraft. And gold, traditionally a safe haven, has hit ominous all-time highs.
Most of the world’s leading stock markets are below where they started the year as investors revise down their growth expectations for the global economy.
Reflecting the optimism that held sway until recently, the IMF slightly raised in April its 2010 global growth forecast to 4.2 percent, although eurozone growth was forecast at only 1 percent. Now even that looks optimistic.
World markets have always affected each other, but instant and constant connectivity and real-time trading and instant information have taken things to a new level; bad news in Milan can trigger instant selloffs in Tokyo or Chicago.
A sell-off in the stock market this week signaled, among other things, a belief that the economy is headed for a slowdown later this year, after having expanded by nearly 12 percent in the first quarter from the same quarter the year before.
Daniel Tarullo, a governor with the U.S. Federal reserve, said the direct effect on U.S. banks of losses on exposure to overextended governments in Greece, Portugal, Spain, Ireland and Italy "would be small." But if problems were to spread more broadly through Europe, U.S. banks would face larger losses as the value of traded assets dropped and loan delinquencies mounted.
Neil Mackinnon, global macro strategist at VTB Capital in London, said it would be a mistake to think the problems on Europe’s periphery represented only a local crisis.
"The problems in the eurozone debt markets, which many people thought was a regional problem, has morphed into a major global problem," Mackinnon said.
VeriFone Holdings Inc. said Monday it expanded into South Korea with the acquisition of Orange Logic Ltd., a payment systems provider in that country.
San Jose-based VeriFone (NYSE:PAY) did not disclose terms of the deal.
With the acquisition, VeriFone said, it gained staff and infrastructure to introduce its secure electronic payment product line into the Republic of Korea, along with an existing domestic product line and customer base.
"Although South Korea is second only to the U.S. market with more than 2.5 million deployed electronic payment systems, only 10 percent to15 percent of those meet government security requirements for compliance with the international EMV standard," the company said.
Orange Logic was founded in 2004 and has primarily been supplying electronic payment devices to customers in the South Korean retail and banking segments.
Orange Logic will operate as VeriFone Korea and will continue to manufacture the existing Orange Logic product family.
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