British police say a sixth man has been charged with murder in the deaths of three men in a hit-and-run attack during riots in the English city of Birmingham.
West Midlands Police said Wednesday the 29-year-old man will appear at Birmingham Magistrates court on Thursday in connection with the murders of 20-year-old Haroon Jahan and brothers Shazad Ali, 30, and Abdul Musavir, 31.
The trio were killed after a car, allegedly containing several looters, struck them at high speed as they stood guard in front of a row of Pakistani-owned shops paydayloans.
Five other men ranging in age from 17 to 30 have already been charged with murder. All remain in custody.
The Bank of Italy has warned that the government’s revamped austerity plan must not cut back on the proposed euro45.5 billion ($65.9 billion) in new taxes and spending cuts needed to meet European Central Bank demands for a balanced budget.
Premier Silvio Berlusconi and his allies late Monday revised the planned austerity measures after widespread public anger, deciding to scrap a special tax on high earners and spare small town governments from consolidation and cuts.
The new measures tinker with retirement age and call for a reduction in the number of lawmakers, among other things fast cash loans.
The Bank of Italy’s vice chief Ignazio Visco told parliament committees Tuesday that he hoped the market’s response to the fiscal retreat “isn’t too penalizing.” He said the overall austerity plan “cannot be reduced.”
Damage from Irene appears to be less than feared, a bit of reassuring news for a fragile economy.
Insured damage from Irene will range between $2 billion and $3 billion, and the total losses will likely be about $7 billion, according to preliminary estimates by Kinetic Analysis Corp. a consulting firm. Both figures are less than had been feared and will likely have little impact on the nation’s $14 trillion economy.
“Irene left several places with black eyes, but it doesn’t seem to have delivered an economic knockout,” said Ryan Sweet, an economist at Moody’s Analytics.
The estimates from Kinetic Analysis, based in Silver Spring, Md., suggest that Irene will have caused far less insured damage than the $6 billion the industry paid out after Hurricane Isabel struck the East Coast in 2003.
The long-term costs of Irene will grow as storm-ravaged areas deal with lost business, insurance claims, dislocated workers and transportation disruptions _ costs that will take months to fully calculate.
Still, rebuilding and repairing the damage from the storm will likely be enough to boost economic output in the final three months of this year, economists say.
For now, power outages and flooding will close some businesses, costing workers lost pay and likely boosting temporary layoffs. Transportation and shipping may also be disrupted.
Chuck Watson, Kinetic’s director of research and development, noted that the impact on businesses was limited, in part, because the impact was felt on a weekend payday loan. Even so, Watson and Sweet said small businesses on the North Carolina coast will likely lose two weekends of tourist activity, including the travel-heavy Labor Day weekend.
Millions of people have lost power from the storm, and analysts said the length of the outages and the extent of disruption to public transportation in cities like New York will help determine the economic damage.
Crews are already restoring power in Southern states hit by the storm and are starting work in the northeast.
Irene slammed into a region that is key to the nation’s economic health. The mid-Atlantic and New England are home to several major cities and account for about 16 percent of the nation’s economic output, Sweet said. The region also has about 14 percent of the country’s workforce.
That led many analysts to worry about the potential impact of a major hurricane. The economy is struggling. Any major shock could tip it back into recession. The economy expanded at a meager 0.7 percent annual rate in the first six months of the year.
Watson said his firm initially feared Irene would be much more powerful when it made landfall in North Carolina and would remain strong by the time it pummeled New York City. That could have caused damage of as much as $30 billion, he said.
But by Friday it was apparent the storm had weakened and would cause much less damage.
The Dow Jones industrial average ended another turbulent week with a strong gain Friday after Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said the U.S. was headed for long-term economic growth. It was the first winning week in a month.
Trading volume was light, a sign that many traders were leaving New York ahead of Hurricane Irene. The storm is expected to reach the region late Saturday night. A spokesman for the New York Stock Exchange said trading is expected to open as usual Monday.
Bernanke announced no new economic stimulus measures during his speech at a conference in Jackson Hole, Wyo., as some investors had hoped. He did leave open the possibility of more action if another recession looks likely.
Indexes fell sharply as the speech was released at 10 a.m. and it became clear that Bernanke was not promising additional support of the economy. The Dow Jones industrial average was down about 78 points shortly before the speech started and slumped as many as 220 points shortly after Bernanke started speaking. It recovered within an hour and stayed higher the rest of the day.
The Dow Jones industrial average rose 134.72 points, or 1.2 percent, to close at 11,284.54. It was up 4.3 percent for the week after being down the past four.
The Standard & Poor’s 500 index rose 17.53, or 1.5 percent, to 1,176.80. It rose 4.7 percent for the week, its biggest gain since the week ended July 1. The technology-heavy Nasdaq composite index rose 60.22, or 2.5 percent, to 2,479.85.
Boeing Co. rose 2.8 percent, the most of the 30 stocks that make up the Dow. Tiffany & Co. rose 9 percent, the most of any of the 500 stocks in the S&P index, after the luxury retailer raised its profit forecast for the year.
In his speech, Bernanke focused on the long-term strengths of the U.S. economy. He said the “do not appear to have been permanently altered by the shocks of the past four years.” That shot of optimism helped lift markets.
“In the American economy, the only thing that’s really lacking right now is confidence,” said David Kelly, chief market strategist at JPMorgan funds. “People who understand the limits of monetary policy also understand that the economy has what it takes to grow.”
Other analysts said Bernanke’s speech helped lift investor sentiment. Liz Ann Sonders, chief investment strategist at Charles Schwab, said Bernanke’s speech was an “acknowledgement that the Fed is not out of tools and that they stand ready” to act if needed.
Underscoring how fragile the U.S. economic recovery is, early Friday the government said the nation’s economy grew at an annual rate of just 1 percent in the April-June quarter, weaker than the government’s first estimate of 1.3 percent. The report renewed concerns that the U.S. might be headed for another recession.
The Fed has said it plans to keep short-term interest rates low until mid-2013. Low rates on investments like bonds make higher-risk bets such as stocks more attractive. At last year’s conference in Jackson Hole, Bernanke signaled the central bank would buy more government bonds to lower long-term interest rates.
The government lowered its estimate for economic growth in the April-June quarter because of fewer exports and weaker growth in business stockpiles. That means the economy expanded at an annual rate of only 0.7 percent in the first six months of the year, the worst pace since the recession ended in June 2009.
The yield on the 10-year Treasury note spiked in the hour after Bernanke’s speech. It was 2.13 percent just before the speech and rose to 2.22 percent in the hour after the text was released. The yield was 2.19 percent late Friday.
The last time the New York Stock Exchange was closed due to weather was Jan 8., 1996, when the opening was delayed until 11 a.m. due to a snowstorm. Hurricane Gloria caused a shutdown on Sept. 27, 1985.
Five stocks rose for every one that fell on the New York Stock Exchange. Volume was relatively light at 4.2 billion.
Corporate culture doesn’t change overnight, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak says in reflecting on the company’s post-Jobs future. But the signature Jobsian quirks might.
Google vice-president for engineering Vic Gundotra reflected Thursday on an urgent cellphone call from Jobs one Sunday to insist that the hue of yellow on one of the O’s in Google wasn’t just right.
“So Vic, we have an urgent issue, one that I need addressed right away,” Gundotra said Jobs told him.
“I’ve already assigned someone from my team to help you, and I hope you can fix this tomorrow. I’ve been looking at the Google logo on the iPhone and I’m not happy with the icon. The second O in Google doesn’t have the right yellow gradient. It’s just wrong and I’m going to have Greg fix it tomorrow. Is that okay with you?”
It was, Gundotra wrote on the Google+ site, “a lesson I’ll never forget. CEOs should care about details. Even shades of yellow. On a Sunday.”
Jobs’ legendary obsession with detail and secrecy were two ingrained Apple traits that some industry observers saw receding just a little the day after the 56-year-old founder stepped down as CEO.
The website AllAboutSteveJobs.com documented the cult of secrecy.
“Software engineers work on big boxes and hardware engineers never see the software that will run on their machines — less than a dozen people had actually seen an actual iPhone before Steve unveiled it at Macworld 2007.”
A Time magazine article described One Infinite Loop, the Apple Cupertino, Calif., headquarters, after Jobs returned as CEO in 1997:
“Executives feed deliberate misinformation into one part of the company so that any leak can be traced back to its source.” Employees “are monitored by cameras, and they must cover up devices with black cloaks and turn on red warning lights when they are uncovered.”
The other Steve – Wozniak, who with Jobs’ created Apple in Jobs’ parents garage in 1976 – said Being Steve Jobs took its toll.
“He really has had to sacrifice a lot to run Apple,” Wozniak told Byte.com shortly after Jobs announced that his role at Apple would be confined to Chairman of the Board.
“Steve needs now to just have some ‘Steve time,’ Wozniak said.
“He was surrounded by great, great people at Apple . . . and those people are still there,” Wozniak said. “I don’t think the core Apple culture will change because of (Jobs’) leaving, not for a long time.”
New CEO Tim Cook has been running Apple’s daily operations since January when Job went on his third medical leave. He’d first stepped up to the job in 2004, when Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
Cook, 51, was in charge when the iPad 2 was unveiled, when iCloud was announced, and when Apple, two weeks ago, briefly became the world’s most valuable company.
Before that, Cook restructured Apple’s manufacturing methods and its supply chain. He is, by all accounts, a logistics maestro.
“You kind of want to manage it like you’re in the dairy business,” he was quoted as saying in a CNN 2008 profile payday loans. “If it gets past its freshness date, you have a problem.”
And he has his own nascent cult of personality.
“In meetings he’s known for long, uncomfortable pauses, when all you hear is the sound of his tearing the wrapper of the energy bars he constantly eats,” CNN wrote. One executive was quoted as saying, “I’ve seen him shred people. He asks questions he knows you can’t answer and he keeps going and going.”
A tidy, often-repeated Cook story has him remarking at a meeting on Asia’s terrible distribution network, “Somebody should be in China driving this” and then, 30 minutes later, asking operations executive Sabihh Khan, “Why are you still here?” As the story goes, Khan left the meeting immediately to grab a plane to China, without even a change of clothes.
As low-key as Jobs is a showman, Cook has made clear he’s steeped in the philosophy of Apple, which he joined in 1998, when “the company was commonly thought to be on the verge of extinction,” he said in a 2010 commencement speech at his alma mater, Auburn University.
“The word ‘complete’ is not in our dictionary,” he said at the Goldman Sachs tech conference in San Francisco in 2010. “We’re innovators. Which means many times we end up ‘obsoleting’ ourselves.
“We say no to great ideas every day. And we do that in order to keep the amount of things we focus on very small so that we can put all our energy behind the ones we do choose.”
Steve Jobs’ Apple “has never been afraid to cannibalize its own business,” said MSNBC tech writer Wilson Rothman. “The iPhone eats more and more into iPod sales every quarter. The iPad is a low-prices alternative to a Mac. One of the things Jobs’s rivals will never be able to stomach is his ability to make his own products obsolete.”
Jobs helped change computers from a geeky hobbyist’s obsession to a necessity of modern life at work and home, and in the process he upended not just personal technology but the cellphone and music industries, the Associated Press reported.
The Apple II hit the market in 1977, making Jobs a multi-millionaire by age 25. The Macintosh exploded onto the scene in 1984 and then, in 1998, came the candy-coloured iMacs, which sold about 2 million its first year.
In this century, iTunes changed the way people bought music, and the iPhone changed the way they communicated. Jobs’ career, said The Mac Observer, has been “a revolution every other year.”
Indeed, the day before Jobs stepped down, a Japanese website reported Apple was working on a new Mac line that would be “completely different” from anything on the market now.
“No one can replace Steve Jobs, but (Cook) is good at what he does, which is make sure the right people have the right jobs,” said Jeff Gamet, managing editor at The Mac Observer.
“It’s not like as of today everything for Apple changes. It’s going to feel a little different, though, because Steve won’t have the CEO title.”
Annual retail sales rose 4.6 per cent to $37.8 billion in June, compared to the year earlier period, driven mainly by strong gains in sales at motor vehicle and parts dealers, Statistics Canada said Tuesday.
On a monthly basis, sales rose 0.7 per cent in June compared to May, the third month in a row that retail sales made gains, the agency said.
All of the gains were driven by strong sales in automotive and gasoline. Excluding sales at motor vehicle and parts dealers, retail sales decreased 0.1 per cent month over month.
Higher sales and lower prices at new car dealers accounted for most of the 1.6 per cent increase in volume terms over May.
Gains were reported in 6 of 11 subsectors. On a month over month basis, the largest increase was registered by motor vehicle and parts dealers, up 3.4 per cent. New car dealers led the gain with growth in sales of 3.3 per cent, the third increase in four months. Sales at used car dealers rose 10.4 per cent in June, more than offsetting the declines in the three previous months.
Building material and garden equipment and supplies dealers registered a second consecutive increase, rising 2 no faxing 1 hour payday loans.1 per cent. Stronger sales of hardware and home renovation products continued in June.
Sales at food and beverage stores rose 0.3 per cent, after three months of declines. Higher sales at supermarkets and other grocery stores accounted for most of the gain.
Receipts at gasoline stations fell 1.3 per cent after four consecutive monthly increases. This was the second decline in 12 months.
Electronics and appliance store sales declined 3 per cent in June. Sales in this subsector have been relatively flat since the third quarter of 2010.
Miscellaneous store retailers reported a 2.4 per cent decline in sales, offsetting gains made in April and May. Stores in this subsector include office supplies and stationery stores, gift stores and pet supplies stores.
Retail sales rose in seven provinces in June. Ontario retailers registered sales gains of 0.5%, a third consecutive monthly gain. Sales in this province have been on an upward trend since early 2009.
Pyongyang’s vow Monday to scrap all South Korean property at a joint mountain resort could mark the end of what was once a rare haven for curious southern tourists within the borders of North Korea.
For a decade, visitors from the South came in droves to Diamond Mountain, essentially a modern South Korean resort an hour’s drive into the North, where they could play golf, relax in hot springs and soak up the folklore of the beautiful nearby mountain.
However, one of the few bright spots of cooperation between the divided countries has been on hold since a North Korean soldier shot and killed a South Korean woman visiting the resort three years ago.
North Korea is now threatening to end it completely by getting rid of South Korean assets and opening up the resort to international investors. On Monday, Pyongyang ordered all South Korean workers at the resort to leave within 72 hours and banned any South Korean property from being removed.
The North is angered by Seoul’s refusal to resume the lucrative tours until Pyongyang formally apologizes for the shooting death and allows a joint investigation.
Diplomats from the United States and the two Koreas are separately pursuing tentative talks meant to jump-start North Korean nuclear disarmament talks, but the meltdown at Diamond Mountain of what was once a promising symbol of potential inter-Korean cooperation shows how deep animosity runs on the Korean peninsula.
The South immediately expressed regret Monday about the North’s comments on Diamond Mountain and voiced its intention to seek international mediation.
Nestled near a craggy mountain range that stretches down to the sea, the resort drew hundreds of millions of dollars of South Korean investment until the shooting death brought cross-border tours to a halt in July 2008.
Diamond Mountain tours kicked off in 1998 under the initiative of a South Korean tycoon with roots in the North. Nearly 2 million South Koreans flocked to the resort, eager to see its beauty and be part of a spirit of reconciliation that blossomed during two liberal South Korean governments’ engagement with the North.
Often hailed as the peninsula’s most beautiful peak, Diamond Mountain has been a subject of praise by both ancient and modern Korean musicians, painters and historians. The North’s media often tout its beauty, describing the way white clouds drift over its saw-toothed peaks.
The land around Diamond Mountain, however, has been seen tension since the 1950-53 Korean War. Thousands of troops died fighting to conquer hills lying south of the mountain during the war. Two years before the tours began, a group of armed North Korean infiltrators slipped south of the border aboard a submarine, rattling South Koreans until most of the agents were killed.
The start of the tours led to many of the troops guarding the border to fall back and allowed South Korean businesses to capitalize on a tourism asset they had long eyed.
The languishing resort appeared in fair condition last year when family members separated by the truce that ended the Korean War were briefly reunited under a Red Cross program. A handful of workers were stationed there by South Korea’s Hyundai Asan company, the resort’s operator. Slogans were carved into hillside rocks, with propaganda billboards hailing North Korean leader Kim Jong Il as “the sun of the 21st century.”
Ties between the Koreas frayed badly last year. The North bombarded a South Korean island last November, killing four people. It also denies responsibility for the sinking of a South Korean warship that killed 46 sailors in March last year.
North Korea in June told the South to draw up plans to salvage its assets. Hyundai Asan estimates $370 million in sales have been lost since the tours were suspended. North Korea had annually won tens of millions of dollars from the tours, analysts believe.
Hope that tours could be revived followed a meeting of nuclear envoys from North and South Korea held in Indonesia last month. A later visit by a high-level North Korean diplomat to New York was another sign that a thaw could be looming in the Korean peninsula’s icy ties.
But last month the two countries failed to agree on an additional round of talks on the fate of the resort.
“The Diamond Mount program is holding on to its last breath,” Kang Sung-yoon, a North Korea professor at Seoul’s Dongguk University, said.
Federal finance minister Jim Flaherty and Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney will do their best Friday to calm investors
An Exxon Mobil Pipeline Co. executive says the cleanup of a major oil spill in the Yellowstone River has proven to be more difficult than expected and could go on for several more months.
Company vice president Geoff Craft said Thursday that areas hit hardest by the July spill should be cleaned up by the first half of October. That includes a 20-mile stretch of the Yellowstone from Laurel to Billings.
But scattered sites would need to be dealt with, including contaminated river sections downstream of Billings. Craft says work in those areas could continue until Thanksgiving.
Exxon Mobil had been ordered to complete work on the 1,000-barrel spill by Sept 9. Removing crude from hundreds of debris piles created by spring flooding has slowed the company’s efforts.
Scandinavian airline group SAS AB posted its best earnings since 2008 during the second quarter of the year on the back of more passengers and lower costs.
The forecast-busting second-quarter results helped the company’s stock to soar more than 27 percent to 15.60 kronor ($2.43) on the Stockholm stock exchange.
SAS also pleased the market by reiterating its outlook for 2011, saying it expects to record a profit for the full year.
The Stockholm-headquartered company reported a second-quarter net profit of 551 million kronor ($86 million), a marked reversal of last year’s equivalent 502 million kronor loss, when operations were badly hit by the volcanic eruption in Iceland which cost the airline hundreds of millions of kronor.
Revenues in the three-month period were also up to 11.23 billion kronor from around 10 billion kronor last year.
Although costs fell in the April to June period, SAS said adverse effects stemming from the earthquake in Japan and the implementation of the group’s restructuring program weighed somewhat on the results.
The airliner said its cost-cutting program, dubbed Core SAS, is near completion. So far, it has reduced unit costs by 23 percent since 2008. Costs related to the measures are still expected to cost another 100-200 million kronor in 2011, it said.
SAS CEO Rickard Gustafson called it the “best result since 2008″ and was positive about the prospect of continued traffic growth in the second half of the year, particularly on U.S. routes.
But, he said, the positive result is still only “a step on the way” and that SAS will continue to keep a sharp eye on the development of both sales and costs.
In the second half of the year, Gustafson said SAS is due to launch a new strategic approach that will succeed Core SAS. The program will focus on profit growth, more cooperation and clearer customer focus.
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