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New Zealand’s prime minister says that hope is fading for 29 coal miners missing for four days underground after an explosion.

John Key says that police are now planning for the possible loss of life following the massive blast in the mine that is now swirling with toxic gases.

Key told Parliament Tuesday that it is still too dangerous to enter the mine to find what has happened to the men. He says he shares the families’ frustration that a rescue team can’t be sent in because of the toxic gas levels in the mine.

He says the miners are tough, resourceful and stoic men who look after each other in the same way a father looks out for a son.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.

GREYMOUTH, New Zealand (AP) _ The bid to rescue 29 New Zealand coal miners trapped underground by a massive gas explosion ran into more problems Tuesday as a mechanical robot broke down inside a tunnel and hard rock layers slowed progress on drilling to test the air.

Police superintendent Gary Knowles said the army robot sent in to transmit pictures and assess toxic gas levels was damaged by water and out of commission. Authorities were urgently seeking other such robots from West Australia and the United States to replace the broken one, Knowles said.

“I won’t send people in to recover a robot if their lives are in danger,” he said. “Toxicity is still too unstable to send rescue teams in.”

Making matters worse, the drilling team boring into the mine tunnel had hit “very hard rock” overnight, Knowles said. The police superintendent’s statements came as rescuers waited impatiently for a chance to test if air quality underground was safe enough for them to go in to pull out the miners, who have been trapped for nearly five days.

Family members have expressed frustration with the pace of the response as officials acknowledge it may be too late to save the miners, who have not been heard from since a massive explosion ripped through the Pike River Mine on the country’s South Island on Friday.

A buildup of methane gas is the suspected cause of the explosion. And now the presence of that gas and others _ some of them believed to be coming from a smoldering fire deep underground _ are delaying a rescue over fears they could still explode.

A diamond-tipped drill was put to work as workers hit layers of hard rock and came within 33 feet (10 meters) of the tunnel where they believe some of the miners are trapped, police superintendent Gary Knowles said. The 500-foot (160-meter)-long shaft they are creating will allow them to sample gas levels _ including explosive methane and carbon dioxide _ and determine if rescuers can finally move in days after the blast cash advance loans.

Knowles said rescuers planned to drop a listening device down the hole to see if they could hear anything _ such as tapping sounds _ that might indicate that the miners were still alive.

“This is a very serious situation and the longer it goes on, hopes fade, and we have to be realistic. We will not go underground until the environment is safe,” Knowles said.

Two workers stumbled out of the mine within hours of Friday’s explosion, but there has been no contact at all with the remaining 29. A phone line deep inside the mine has rung unanswered.

“The families are showing grief, frustration and probably anger,” said Laurie Drew, whose 21-year-old son, Zen, is among the missing. “I have my moments I can keep it together but deep down my heart’s bleeding like everybody else’s.”

Knowles appealed for patience.

“You can’t put men underground as a rescue team until it’s a safe environment,” he said. “I’ve looked at other rescuers and the chance of rescue teams dying or being critically injured (in a fresh explosion) is great.”

Those trapped include a teenager who was so excited about his new job he persuaded mine bosses to let him start his first shift three days early _ on the day of the deadly gas explosion _ his mother told local media.

Joseph Dunbar was one day past his 17th birthday and the youngest among them when he joined his fellow miners in the pit.

Mine shift supervisor Gary Campbell said Dunbar was desperate to be part of the team.

His mother, Philippa Timms, said her son “got offered this chance to have a career _ and that’s how he saw it, as a career,” she told TV One.

The wait to begin the rescue bid for the men had been frustrating, but Timms said she understood why.

“They can’t just rush in there because, I know right from the word go, I know how it works,” she said. “If the oxygen rushes in and it hits that methane, then bam, they’re gone, (in) another blast.”

Police have said the miners, aged 17 to 62, are believed to be about 1.2 miles (two kilometers) down the tunnel.

Each miner carried 30 minutes of oxygen, and more fresh air was stored in the mine, along with food and water that could allow them to survive for several days, officials say.

New Zealand’s mines are generally safe. A total of 181 people have been killed in the country’s mines in 114 years. The worst disaster was in March 1896, when 65 died in a gas explosion. Friday’s explosion occurred in the same coal seam.

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Ireland won’t be required to raise its corporate tax rate as part of a European Union bailout, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said, addressing an issue that looms as a stumbling block to an aid agreement.

“When you have to tackle a deficit, you have two levers, spending and taxes,” Sarkozy said yesterday in Lisbon at a summit of NATO leaders. “I can’t believe that our Irish friends, in full sovereignty, won’t look at both since they have more room for maneuver given that their tax rates are lower. But that’s not a demand or a condition, just an opinion.”

Irish leaders have said they’ll fight to keep a 12.5 percent corporate tax, which helped make Ireland a destination for investment by companies such as Microsoft Corp. and Pfizer Inc. Austrian Finance Minister Josef Proell and EU Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn have indicated the rate may be increased toward the level in continental nations as part of the financial rescue.

Rehn said Nov. 8 that “Ireland will not continue as a low- tax country.”

Irish officials and experts from the EU and International Monetary Fund are working through the weekend in Dublin, racing to finish an aid deal and avoid a setback in the markets.

Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen said yesterday that the country’s corporate tax rate and four-year budget plan wouldn’t be significantly changed, the New York Times reported. Cowen spoke to reporters on a visit to Arranmore Island off Ireland’s northern coast, according to the Times.

Cabinet Meeting

Cowen said he would return to Dublin for a cabinet meeting today to work out final details of a four-year deficit reduction plan, the newspaper said.

Allied Irish Banks Plc, Ireland’s second-biggest bank, emphasized the fragility of the financial system Nov. 19, reporting a 17 percent decline in deposits this year. IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn said Europe is moving “too slowly” to resolve the sovereign debt crisis that began in Greece.

The deposit outflow at Allied Irish “looks grim,” said Alan McQuaid, chief economist at Bloxham Stockbrokers in Dublin. “It underscores the urgency in the situation and need to reach a resolution. A big package is needed to reassure the markets.”

The aid talks began three days ago after a meeting of EU finance ministers urged Ireland to agree to a package within days. The plan, which will focus on a banking industry reeling from the 2008 property crash, may total as much as 100 billion euros ($136 billion), according to Barclays Capital.

Irish Bonds

Investors dumped Irish bonds this month on concern about the nation’s ability to keep its financial system afloat. They pared some of the loss when Cowen abandoned a refusal to seek assistance. Finance Minister Brian Lenihan said on Nov payday loans. 18 that it was clear the country would need aid as the banks had become “unmanageable.”

The premium that investors demand to hold Irish 10-year bonds over the benchmark German bonds rose 3 basis points Nov. 19 to 544 basis points. The spread, a measure of the risk of investing in Irish debt, declined from a record 646 basis points on Nov. 11 as investors anticipated a rescue.

Amid the talks, Cowen campaigned in Donegal in northwest Ireland before a Nov. 25 election to fill a vacant parliamentary seat. The vote threatens to erode Cowen’s majority. He has the support of 82 lawmakers, including independents, compared with 79 for the combined opposition.

Contingency Funding

Lenihan said last week he would welcome the creation of “substantial contingency capital funding” for Irish banks as Irish officials said they’d resist any demand by the EU to raise revenue by increasing a corporate tax rate.

Ireland’s Trade Minister Batt O’Keeffe said last week the corporate tax rate isn’t “up for negotiation.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel yesterday dodged the question of whether the tax was in jeopardy if Ireland tapped the bailout fund.

“Every country that’s in need of this mechanism can use it,” she said at a briefing in Lisbon. “Everything beyond that is the decision of each individual country.”

A 2011 budget, due for release on Dec. 7, may placate investors concerned over a budget deficit that will be about 12 percent of gross domestic product this year, or 32 percent when the costs of the banking rescue are included.

Irish lenders have become more reliant on European Central Bank funding after being frozen out of wholesale markets. The amount of ECB loans to the country’s banks rose 7.3 percent to 130 billion euros in October from the previous month.

Central Bank Funding

Allied Irish has tripled its reliance on funding from central banks since the end of June as deposits fled. The bank’s dependence on “monetary authorities” rose to 27 billion euros from a “high single-digit” billion-euro amount on June 30, Alan Kelly, general manager of group corporate services at Allied Irish, said in a telephone interview Nov. 19.

Irish banks’ failure to wean themselves off the ECB lifeline prompted EU officials to step in, in an effort to halt the crisis before it spreads across the euro region.

“The current view seems to be if Ireland accepts bailout funds, at least for the banking sector, that might help fend off any move by the bond vigilantes to move onto Portugal,” said James Shugg, a London-based economist at Westpac Banking Corp.

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Federal Reserve Governor Kevin Warsh said he’s concerned the central bank’s expansion of record stimulus may spark too much inflation, fail to aid growth and delay any plans to reduce U.S. indebtedness.

“I am less optimistic than some that additional asset purchases will have significant, durable benefits for the real economy,” Warsh said today in a speech in New York. “Of course, benefits may well be more substantial than I anticipate.”

Warsh’s comments suggest his vote Nov. 3 to support the Fed’s $600 billion of additional Treasury purchases was reluctant. Further disagreement came today from Dallas Fed Richard Fisher, who said the Fed is “monetizing” the government’s debt by printing money to finance the shortfall.

“When non-traditional tools are needed to loosen policy and markets are functioning more or less normally — even with output and employment below trend — the risk-reward ratio for policy action is decidedly less favorable,” Warsh said at the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association’s annual meeting. “These risks increase with the size of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet.

“As a result, we cannot and should not be as aggressive as conventional policy rules — cultivated in more benign environments — might judge appropriate,” Warsh said. The remarks are an expanded version of an opinion column published today in the Wall Street Journal.

Entire Amount

Warsh’s comments mean it may not be a sure thing for the Fed to purchase the entire $600 billion amount of securities, said John Ryding, a former Fed researcher.

“You can chalk his speech up as a soft dissent,” said Ryding, chief economist at RDQ Economics LLC in New York. “He’s raising serious concerns and questions of the kind that weren’t raised by some of the other members of the FOMC when talking about the potential costs.”

Chairman Ben S. Bernanke last week defended the decision, saying Nov. 6 that the “standard considerations suggest that we should be using expansionary monetary policy” and that the move was “nothing extraordinary.”

Fisher said in a San Antonio speech that the Fed may be prescribing the “wrong medicine” for the economy. James Bullard, president of the St. Louis Fed, said in New York that the central bank’s decision will probably stimulate the economy as soon as six months from now.

Hoenig Dissent

Bullard voted Nov. 3 to support the move, while Fisher isn’t a voting policy maker this year. Kansas City Fed President Thomas Hoenig was the only official to dissent in the 10-1 decision. Fed governors and five of 12 regional Fed presidents vote at each meeting; there’s one vacancy among the seven governors.

The minutes from the FOMC meeting, scheduled to be released on Nov. 24, “will try to provide some clarity over the nature of disagreement” among policy makers, Warsh said in response to audience questions after his speech. Overall, “my colleagues are remarkably focused on our statutory mandate” of price stability and full employment, he said.

Warsh’s skepticism about asset purchases isn’t new. In June, he said any decision to expand the $2.3 trillion balance sheet must be subject to “strict scrutiny.”

In today’s speech, he reiterated points from the column that the Nov. 3 decision wasn’t unconditional or open-ended and that the move is “necessarily limited, circumscribed and subject to regular review.”

Potential Risks

“Policies should be altered if certain objectives are satisfied, purported benefits disappoint, or potential risks threaten to materialize,” Warsh said.

The Fed won’t bring down the U.S. unemployment rate to its natural level without reforms in fiscal, trade and regulatory policies, Warsh said in response to questions.

“Monetary policy cannot do it alone,” he said. The Fed “should not be overpromising.”

The expanded stimulus carries “significant risks that bear careful monitoring,” including inflation from a weaker dollar and higher commodity prices, he said. In addition, buying more Treasuries “also runs the more subtle risk of obfuscating price signals about total U.S. indebtedness,” he said.

“Long-term economic growth necessitates putting the U.S. fiscal trajectory on a sounder footing,” Warsh said. “The fiscal authorities need as clear an early warning system as possible, not a handy excuse to delay.”

Treasury Yields

Kurt Karl, chief U.S. economist at Swiss Re Financial Products in New York, said he didn’t think Warsh’s reservations would change the course of the Fed in deciding next year whether to expand the second round of asset purchases. Bonds “didn’t move much today” in response to the remarks, he said. The 10- year Treasury yield rose 0.02 percentage point to 2.55 percent at 5:07 p.m. in New York, according to BGCantor Market Data.

“If it’s very successful, I think dissent will diminish enormously, and if it looks like there’s another one necessary, then we’ll have another one,” Karl said, referring to the program of asset purchases.

Warsh, 40, a former Morgan Stanley investment banker and economic-policy adviser under President George W. Bush, was appointed to the Fed in 2006 and worked closely with Bernanke on the response to the financial crisis in 2008.

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Craft Brewers Alliance, the Portland, Ore.-based operator of the Redhook brewery in Woodinville, has acquired Kona Brewing Co. of Hawaii for an undisclosed price.

The Big Island-based brewery will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Craft Brewers Alliance (NASDAQ: HOOK).

Three years ago, Redhook and Widmer Bros. Brewing Co. of Oregon merged in a $50 million deal and corporate headquarters of the new Craft Brewers Alliance company was located in Portland.

Click here to see a release on the Craft Brewers Alliance-Kona deal.

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The drug-data provider Epocrates Inc. has filed with the SEC to sell up to an estimated $75 million in an initial public offering.

The company plans to trade on the Nasdaq Global Market with the symbol EPOC.

Epocrates, a leading provider of mobile drug reference tools and interactive services, said it will use the proceeds to pay dividends due to the holders of its Class B preferred stock and for general corporate purposes, including working capital, research and development, sales and marketing, and capital expenditures.

J.P. Morgan Securities Inc. and Piper Jaffray & Co. will serve as joint book-running managers no fax pay day loan. William Blair & Co. LLC. and JMP Securities LLC will act as co-managers.

The company has yet to determine the number of shares to be sold and their price range.

Epocrates has more than 1 million users, including more than 40 percent of U.S. physicians, the company said. Its products are used on popular hand-held devices including the iPhone, iTouch and Blackberry, and Palm, Android and Windows devices.

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Nova Engineering, a unit of L-3 Communications, landed a contract worth up to $53.8 million to provide and maintain a remote sensor system for the Department of Defense.

According to a DOD news release, Cincinnati-based Nova will provide the department with equipment, upgrades and repairs, and program management for its Tactical Remote Sensor System payday loans. The technology allows for all-weather remote monitoring of specific areas.

The work will be performed at Nova’s Cincinnati operations and is expected to be completed by July 2015.

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For top executives, ’tis the season to get paid in company stock - unless you happen to work at Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac.

The taxpayer-backed mortgage giants disclosed Thursday that they could pay out as much as $40 million to their top 10 executives for work in 2009.

The CEOs - Fannie’s (FNM, Fortune 500) Michael Williams and Freddie’s (FRE, Fortune 500) Charles Haldeman - are in line to receive as much as $6 million apiece, on an annualized basis (though both will get less this year because they took their jobs midway through the year).

That’s a nice chunk of change for running two companies that together lost $72 billion in the first nine months of 2009 and have received $112 billion in Treasury aid.

But what’s remarkable is that every penny Fannie and Freddie will pay out will be in cash - at a time when the White House is pressuring companies to pay more in stock, in the name of suppressing the bet-the-ranch mentality that helped pave the way for Wall Street’s 2008 collapse.

The government’s pay czar, Kenneth Feinberg, has cut cash payouts at taxpayer-backed companies like AIG (AIG, Fortune 500), Chrysler Financial and GMAC.

But his message has been heard everywhere, notably on Wall Street, where some big banks that have repaid Treasury loans have set plans to offer more compensation in stock.

"It’s amazing that the government is pushing companies with which it has no contractual standing to pay executives in stock, but isn’t doing the same with companies that it actually controls," said Len Blum, a managing director at investment bank Westwood Capital in New York.

For its part, the government agency that oversees Fannie and Freddie notes that this year’s payouts are 40% below the levels that obtained before the government takeover. Much of the money will be deferred over several years and some will be paid only if the companies hit certain targets.

Fannie adds that Treasury, which approved the payouts, prohibits it "from issuing common stock in connection with any new compensation arrangements without Treasury’s prior consent."

That stands in contrast to two of Fannie and Freddie’s big peers in the government-backed stable: insurer AIG and carmaker GM, which are now paying their executives mostly in stock.

AIG chief Robert Benmosche agreed in August to receive an annual salary of $7 million - $3 million in cash and $4 million in common stock. He won’t be able to sell the shares for five years. Benmosche also gets up to $3.5 million annually in stock-based incentive pay.

At GM, new finance chief Chris Liddell agreed this month to receive $750,000 annually in cash salary, $3.45 million in stock salary and $2 million in stock incentive pay.

Even at firms that have repaid their Troubled Asset Relief Program loans, the pay-in-stock message has sunk in.

Goldman Sachs (GS, Fortune 500) said this month it will pay its top executives’ bonuses in stock in 2009, a year in which the big trading firm is expected to set aside some $21 billion for employee pay.

"We believe our compensation policies are the strongest in our industry and … incentivize behavior that is in the public’s and our shareholders’ best interests," CEO Lloyd Blankfein said in a statement Dec. 10.

Of course, there are big differences between these companies and Fannie and Freddie.

Since September 2008, the government has been propping up Fannie and Freddie in the name of stabilizing the financial markets and ensuring that home mortgages remained available for Americans.

With their emphasis focusing from investor profits to supporting home prices, the firms’ financial results have collapsed. Fannie lost $58 billion in the first nine months of 2009 and Freddie $14 billion, as their share of the U.S. mortgage market soared near 90%.

The availability of Fannie-Freddie financing allows loans that "no one would normally make" to be extended, said Blum.

Shares of Fannie traded as high as $70 in August 2007, as the global credit bubble was getting ready to collapse. But in the past year, they have closed above $2 just once.

Even that is probably too high, Blum said, given the companies’ giant debt to taxpayers and the prospect of additional losses should this year’s recovery peter out.

Indeed, the giant paychecks also show little progress has been made in resolving the key conflict at the heart of these firms.

Given their obvious public policy function and their ballooning losses, it makes sense to simply take over Fannie and Freddie and make them into full-fledged government agencies, Blum said.

But in doing so, the government would have to wipe out the shareholders, foreclosing a possible sale of the firms back to the public. And it would have to start paying the firms’ workers on the federal pay scale - which would mean no more $6 million paydays for CEOs.

So as officials in Washington posture about the need to end too-big-to-fail and put the financial system on a sounder footing, action remains in short supply.

"These companies are never going to turn a profit again, but the government hasn’t come clean and wiped out the stock," said Blum. "After the crisis we have had, I don’t understand why we’re still allowing conflicts like this in our financial system." 

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The Federal Reserve is expected to leave interest rates at a record low this week. The big question is whether Chairman Ben Bernanke and his colleagues will hint about when they will reverse course and start boosting rates.

Plans for reeling in the unprecedented amount of money the Fed has plowed into the economy to bolster the recovery are likely to dominate discussions during the two-day meeting, which started on Tuesday afternoon. The Fed is expected to announce its policy decisions later today.

The central bank faces a high-stakes challenge: If it removes the stimulus too soon, it could short-circuit the fragile recovery. But if it moves too late, it could unleash inflation or new speculative asset bubbles.

A new report out Tuesday showed that wholesale prices shot up last month, but most economists think it will prove fleeting payday loan lenders.

Wholesale prices jumped 1.8 percent in November, lifted partly by more expensive energy products, the Labor Department said. That was up from a 0.3 percent gain in October and marked the largest one-month increase since August.

Stripping out energy and food, closely watched "core" prices rose 0.5 percent, the biggest increase in more than a year.

Meanwhile, the Fed reported that industrial production jumped 0.8 percent in November from October, the largest gain since August. Even with the stronger-than-expected showing, activity is still down 5.1 percent from a year ago, showing that the industrial sector is far from running at top speed.

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GMAC Financial Services, a lender that has received $12.5 billion in government bailouts, posted a third straight quarterly loss on Wednesday, hurt by red ink in its mortgage business.

The third-quarter net loss for Detroit-based GMAC totaled $767 million, compared with a loss of $2.5 billion a year earlier.

GMAC’s auto finance unit had a profit of $395 million in the quarter, while its mortgage operations posted a loss of $747 million.

The lender has struggled as the deteriorating auto and housing markets have caused financing volume to decline and credit losses to increase. GMAC’s owners include automaker General Motors GM.UL and the private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management LP CBS.UL.

(Reporting by Juan Lagorio; editing by John Wallace)

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China’s exports face a “hard and tortuous” path to recovery as uncertainties dog the global economy’s gradual return to health, with this year’s trade surplus set to shrink from last year’s record, the Commerce Ministry said.

Commerce Minister Chen Deming told a conference on Saturday that China’s trade surplus was expected to fall to $180 billion to $190 billion this year from last year’s record $295.5 billion.

The surplus was $136.4 billion in the first nine months of the year.

With China’s economic recovery relying heavily on government spending to boost domestic demand, imports have seen greater improvement than exports in recent months.

Exports in September were 15.2 percent below their level a year earlier, beating forecasts of a 21 percent fall, although the government expects a double-digit fall for all of 2009.

In a statement released late on Friday on the ministry’s website (www.mofcom.gov.cn), it said the full-year fall in exports compared with the previous year should be less than 20 percent.

“In 2010, the world economy will hopefully see a gradual recovery, and the environment for Chinese trade will gradually improve,” it said.

“But as there is not yet sufficient strength in the global economic recovery, many problems and contradictions have yet to be basically resolved. The recovery will be hard and tortuous, and it will be hard to see an obvious recovery in international demand in the short term default payday loan.”

Net exports shaved 3.6 percentage points off headline GDP growth of 8.9 percent in the third quarter as Chinese manufacturers continued to reel from a slump in global trade.

Protectionism in these straightened times was a particular worry, as was increasing competition, the ministry said.

“At present some nations are conducting probes into Chinese goods, which is causing yet further obstruction for a recovery in Chinese exports,” it said.

A U.S. trade panel on Friday approved the eighth government investigation this year into charges of unfair Chinese pricing practices in a case in which U.S. companies want a nearly 100 percent duty or more on $382 million of imported steel pipes.

Still, there were signs for optimism, the ministry added.

The government was continuing to provide help to exporters in the form of export tax rebates, and numerous new markets awaited Chinese firms.

“There is a bright future for developing trade with newly emerging markets,” it said.

(Reporting by Ben Blanchard in Beijing and Fang Yan in Shanghai; Editing by Nick Macfie)

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