Lenon’s main business news

European officials said the euro region

Coast guard divers searching the submerged part of the Costa Concordia on Sunday found the bodies of two elderly men still in their life jackets, authorities said, raising to five the death toll after the luxury cruise liner ran aground and tipped over off the Tuscan coast.

Divers scouring the bowels of the ship in the murky, cold sea discovered the bodies at the emergency gathering point near the restaurant where passengers were dining when the ship carrying more than 4,200 people hit a reef or rock near the island of Giglio, Coast Guard Cmdr. Cosimo Nicastro said.

The discovery reduced to 15 the number of people still unaccounted for after an Italian who worked in cabin service was pulled from the wreckage Sunday and a South Korean couple on their honeymoon were rescued late Saturday in the unsubmerged part of the liner when a team of rescuers heard their screams.

“We are still searching” for any bodies, “but (also) in the hope that there might have been an air pocket” to allow the survival of others, Nicastro told Sky TG24 TV dockside.

Authorities are holding the Italian captain for investigation of suspected manslaughter and abandoning his ship among other possible charges. According to the Italian navigation code, a captain who abandons a ship in danger can face up to 12 years in prison. A coast guard official said Sunday officers exhorted Francesco Schettino to return to his ship as panicked passengers desperately fled the cruise liner.

The chaotic evacuation has added to the difficulty in tracking down survivors _ with six of those unaccounted for crew members and the others passengers. Two of the unaccounted for passengers are American, the U.S. Embassy in Rome said.

In the first hours after the accident late Friday night, three bodies were found in the waters near the ship. The victims discovered Sunday were two elderly men who were wearing life vests, said Coast Guard Cmdr. Francesco Paolillo.

“The divers had to remove the life vests to get the bodies out,” he said, because they could have floated away. Their nationalities were not immediately released.

The divers’ search through the ship, which is lying on its side with a huge gash, was already dangerous because of the risk the vessel could suddenly move and sink into waters over a nearby lower sea bed.

Their safety was increasingly threatened by floating objects in the belly of the 290-meter (nearly 1,000) foot long liner, as well as muck drastically reducing visibility, Nicastro said.

“There are tents, mattresses, other objects moving which can get tangled in the divers’ equipment,” Nicastro said. Officials were going to huddle soon to see how long the underwater search could safely continue, he said.

Divers say they are using a kind of long cord they hook near the point of entrance and unroll as they work, so they can find their way out when finished.

Prosecutor Francesco Verusio confirmed reports that prosecutors are investigating allegations the cruise liner’s captain, Francesco Schettino, abandoned the stricken liner before all the passengers had escaped.

Asked Sunday by Sky TG24 about the accusations, Grosseto prosecutor Francesco Verusio replied, “unfortunately, I must confirm that circumstance.”

Paolillo said the captain was spotted on land during the evacuation. Officers had urged him to return to his ship and honor his duty to stay aboard until everyone else was safely off the vessel, but Schettino ignored them, he said.

“We did our duty,” Paolillo told The Associated Press.

A French couple who boarded the Concordia in Marseille, Ophelie Gondelle and David Du Pays of Marseille, told the AP they saw the captain in a lifeboat, covered by a blanket, well before all the passengers were off the ship. They insisted on telling a reporter what they saw, so incensed that _ according to them _ the captain had abandoned the ship before everyone had been evacuated.

“The commander left before and was on the dock before everyone was off,” said Gondelle, 28, a French military officer.

“Normally the commander should leave at the end,” said Du Pays, a police officer who said he helped an injured passenger to a rescue boat. “I did what I could.”

Schettino has said the ship hit rocks that weren’t marked on his nautical charts, and that he did all he could to save lives.

“We were navigating approximately 300 meters (yards) from the rocks,” he told Mediaset television. “There shouldn’t have been such a rock.”

He insisted he didn’t leave the liner before all passengers were off, saying “we were the last ones to leave the ship.” That clearly wasn’t the case as the finding of the three survivors aboard Saturday night and Sunday showed payday loan no faxing.

Coast guard spokesman Capt. Filippo Marini told Sky Italia TV that Coast Guard divers have recovered the so-called “black box” with the recording of the navigational details from a compartment now under water.

A Dutch firm has been called in to help extract the fuel from the Concordia’s tanks before any leaks into the area’s pristine waters. No leaks have so far been reported.

While ship owner Costa has insisted it was following the same route it takes every week between the Italian ports of Civitavecchia and Savona, residents on the island of Giglio said they had never seen the Costa come so close to the Le Scole reefs and rocks that jut from Giglio’s eastern side.

“This was too close, too close,” said Italo Arienti, a 54-year-old sailor who has worked on the Maregigilo ferry service that runs between the island and the mainland for more than a decade. A now-retired Costa commander used to occasionally do “fly-bys” on the route, nearing a bit and sounding the siren in a special salute for his hometown, he said. Such a fly-by was staged last August, but there was no incident, he said.

He said the cruise ship always stayed more than five to six nautical miles offshore, well beyond the reach of the “Le Scole” reefs, popular with scuba divers.

The terrifying escape from the luxury liner, which was on a weeklong Mediterranean cruise, was straight out of a scene from “Titanic.” Many passengers complained the crew didn’t give them good directions on how to evacuate and once the emergency became clear, delayed lowering the lifeboats until the ship was listing too heavily for many to be released.

Several other passengers said crew members told passengers for 45 minutes that there was a simple “technical problem” that had caused the lights to go off.

Amateur footage taken aboard the ship showed the situation immediately after it ran aground, as an announcement in various languages tells passengers the liner is having electrical problems and “the situation is under control.” When a man asks a crew member in Spanish why he is wearing a life vest, the crew member doesn’t answer and continues on his way.

Other video shows people crowded together in life jackets, apparently calm and waiting to disembark the ship. A third video taken from a lifeboat, shows mostly darkness as people shout and scream in panic.

Passengers said they had never participated in an evacuation drill, although one had been scheduled for Saturday. The cruise began on Jan. 7.

Costa Crociera SpA, which is owned by the U.S.-based cruise giant Carnival Corp., defended the actions of its crew and said it was cooperating with the investigation. Carnival Corp. issued a statement expressing sympathy that didn’t address the allegations of delayed evacuation.

Some 300 of the crew members were Filipinos and three of them were injured, the Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs said.

The captain has insisted that the reef was not marked, but locals said the stretch of sea is not difficult to maneuver. Anello Fiorentino, captain of a ferry that runs between Giglio and the mainland, said he makes the crossing every day without encountering problems.

“Yes, if you get near the coast there are reefs, but this is a stretch of sea where all the ships can safely pass,” he said.

Islanders on Giglio opened up their homes and businesses to accommodate the sudden rush of survivors. Rossana Bafigi, who runs a newsstand, said she was really moved by the reaction of the passengers.

She showed a note left by one Italian family that said, “We want to repay you for the disturbance. Please call us, we took milk and biscuits for the children. Claudia.”

At Mass on Sunday morning in Giglio’s main church, which opened its doors to the evacuees Friday night, altar boys and girls brought up to the altar a life vest, a rope, a rescue helmet, a plastic tarp and some bread.

Don Lorenzo, the parish priest, told the faithful that he wanted to make this admittedly “different” offering to God as a memory of what had transpired.

He said each one carried powerful symbolic meaning for what happened on Friday night: the bread that multiplied to feed the survivors, the rope that pulled people to safety, the life vest and helmet that protected them, and the plastic tarp that kept cold bodies warm. “Our community, our island will never be the same,” he told the few dozen islanders gathered for Mass.

_____

Frances D’Emilio contributed to this story from Rome.

Source

HEAD NORTH: More than just northside visitors, merchants, residents and this colyumnist are impressed with development of the Old North St. Louis community.

St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay and Sean Thomas, head of the Old North St. Louis Restoration Group, are in D.C. today to receive the 2011 National Award for Smart Growth Achievement, which was given to the community by an office of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Old North was given the Award for Overall Excellence in Smart Growth, which is the highest honor that is given out by the EPA’s Office of Sustainable Communities. The award “recognizes an outstanding comprehensive approach to growth,” the EPA said. The selection committee also noted that the award “is for the best overall approach to implementing smart growth on a variety of fronts …”

Among factors that contributed to the community’s selection was the 28 percent population gain the area has seen in the past decade. Winning projects must have an impact on the community, and not merely be a design for development, the Old North restoration group said in a post on its website.

The restoration group is the not-for-profit that laid the foundation for the development, which used strategies that promote walking, rehabilitate vacant buildings and establish green spaces, the EPA said.

A specific effort cited by the EPA was the revitalization of two main blocks of the neighborhood — 14th Street north from Warren Street to St. Louis Avenue (nearly to the door of the Karandzieffs’ venerable Crown Candy Kitchen) — into something called Crown Square. The $35 million project involved the redevelopment of 27 buildings along 14th Street and surrounding side streets. It resulted in 80 new households in an area that had been largely abandoned, and the opening of a growing number of new locally owned businesses.

There are also new sidewalks, benches, trees and lights and newly cultivated community gardens sprinkled through the neighborhood. The area includes a North City Farmers’ Market and a community-owned Old North Grocery Co-op.

Source

U.S. builders started slightly fewer homes in October but submitted plans for a wave of apartments, a mixed sign for the struggling housing market.

Builders broke ground on a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 628,000 homes last month, down 0.3 percent from September. That’s roughly half the 1.2 million homes that economists say must be built to sustain a healthy housing market.

Building permits, a gauge of future construction, rose nearly 11 percent. The increase was spurred by a 30 percent increase in apartment permits, which reached its highest level in three years.

New-home construction and sales are in the midst of one of its worst years in history. Demand for new homes is weak and historically-low mortgage rates and plunging home prices have done little to help.

Source

Thailand’s prime minister is urging people in flooded areas to be patient because the government is working as hard as it can to drain the water.

Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra said Monday the flooding situation that has plagued the country since late July is improving as waters recede. However, she noted that water spreading across western Bangkok could drain more slowly than in other areas of the capital.

She urged people to “tolerate the flooding situation and turn unity into power to struggle through the crisis payday advance low fees.” Yingluck made the comments on her Facebook page.

The national death toll from Thailand’s worst floods in more than half a century has reached 562. The floods are still affecting 22 of the country’s 77 provinces.

Source

Martin Nisenholtz., a New York Times Co. executive who engineered the newspaper publisher’s expansion on the Internet and mobile devices, is retiring at the end of the year.

Times Co. Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and CEO Janet Robinson announced Nisenholtz’s retirement as senior vice president of digital operations in a memo to employees on Monday.

Nisenholtz, 56, was hired in 1995 to launch The Times Co.’s digital business.

Since Nisenholtz oversaw The New York Times’ debut on the Web in 1996, the company has built a popular digital network that has become an increasingly important source of revenue. The Times Co.’s websites include About.com as well as The New York Times, The Boston Globe and 16 other newspapers. Combined, they attracted nearly 73 million U.S. visitors in September, according to the most recent data from the research firm comScore Inc.

Last year, the Times Co. got about 16 percent, or $387 million, of its revenue from its digital operations. But the growth in that business hasn’t been enough to offset the steep decline on the print side.

With Nisenholtz in charge, the Times Co. began charging for unlimited access to The New York Times’ website in March in an attempt to increase revenue. At the end of September, The Times had 324,000 digital subscribers, including 43,000 who signed up since July 1.

The Times Co. hasn’t identified Nisenholtz’s successor.

Nisenholtz “leaves a lasting legacy that will be felt for a very long time,” Sulzberger and Robinson wrote in their Monday memo. “He developed a strong roster of executives and a deep bench of managers who are recognized leaders in our industry.”

Source

Americans are making a little more money and spending a lot more.

Under normal circumstances, that would be a troubling sign for the economy. But a closer look at some new government figures suggests another possibility: People are saving less money because they’re earning next to nothing in interest.

Saving is already difficult because of more expensive gas and food. It’s even tougher because of the lower returns _ the flip side of super-low interest rates that the Federal Reserve has kept in place since 2008 to help the economy.

Critics say the Fed is punishing those who play by the rules _ those careful enough to set aside money for savings or people who built up a nest egg and are living on fixed incomes that depend on interest.

Americans spent 0.6 percent more in September, three times the increase from the previous month, the government said Friday. Spending was especially strong on durable goods _ things like cars, appliances and electronics.

At the same time, what they earned was mostly flat. Pay increased 0.3 percent, and overall income just 0.1 percent. After deducting taxes and adjusting for inflation, income fell for a third straight month.

So to make up the difference, many have cut back on savings. The savings rate fell to its lowest level since December 2007, the first month of the recession _ and right about the time the Fed started its dramatic series of interest-rate cuts.

Considering how little you can get for parking your money at a bank, it hasn’t been a tough choice.

“Consumers have hit a level of saturation in their savings,” said Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst with market research firm The NPD Group. “The propensity is to spend.”

The annual yield on six-month certificates of deposit was unchanged this week at 0.23 percent, according to Bankrate.com. Five years ago, it was 3.62 percent. If you put your money in the six-month CD today, you’d make about enough to buy a burger.

Paul Ashworth, chief U.S. economist at Capital Economics, said the trend could mean more spending by Americans. But it will take robust personal spending _ along with improvement in the depressed housing market _ to get the economy going again.

Ashworth said his firm is not too concerned with the decline in savings because it partly represents “a sharp decline in debt servicing costs.” In other words, low interest rates mean it’s cheaper to borrow money.

The Fed began cutting interest rates four years ago at the start of the financial crisis. The rate cuts took the federal funds rate, the key for short-term interest rates, from 5.25 percent down to near zero, where they have stayed since December 2008.

The central bank has said it will keep rates super-low into 2013 as long as the economy stays weak. While that means low returns for savers, it is designed to encourage people and businesses to borrow more.

Many borrowers tend to be young families who are spending most of their income anyway. The loss in interest income tends to hit older households, which are saving for retirement and counting more on bonds and other fixed-income securities.

Consumer spending is closely watched because it accounts for about 70 percent of economic activity. A sharp rise in spending over the summer helped the overall economy grow in July, August and September at the fastest pace in a year.

Still, the economy would have to grow twice as fast to put a dent in the unemployment rate, which has stayed near 9 percent since the recession officially ended more than two years ago.

At the same time savings accounts and other fixed-income investments are paying less, the cost of food and gas has gone up.

Elizabeth Smith, who works in teacher education at the University of Arkansas, has cut her monthly contribution to her retirement savings in half to meet necessities.

“Every time I go to the store, butter, cheese and milk are more expensive,” she said. Child care costs for her two children have also risen this year.

On the other hand, Smith has benefited from lower interest rates. She and her husband refinanced the mortgage on her home a year ago, which lowered their monthly payments by $200, freeing up more cash.

The Fed’s policies are “designed to reward spending and effectively punish savers,” said Eric Green, chief U.S. economist at TD Securities.

Source

Sheila Mauricette was at work when a door-to-door seller came to her home. Now she

Some 55 million women across North America read other women

Valet parking, celebrity chefs and bacon marmalade will be on the menu at an exclusive dinner party to launch Canada’s first super-premium supermarket brand.

Loblaw Cos. Ltd., the country’s largest grocery chain and long-time leader in private brands, is introducing President’s Choice Black Label, featuring products normally found in specialty gourmet stores.

To give the brand immediate cachet, President’s Choice is launching the line at a dinner party on Thursday, Sept. 22.

Billed as an epicurean adventure, the company has commissioned some of the city’s best-known chefs — Marc Thuet, Bertrand Alépée and Anthony Walsh, as well as pastry chefs Bobette & Belle — to create a tasting menu based on the products.

To be held in the avant garde art gallery, Neubacher Shor Contemporary, in Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood, the guest list includes a who’s who of 40 to 50 food writers, influencers and media.

From the smoky bacon marmalade, to the crumbly eight year old cheddar, to the cherry shiraz fruit jelly, Loblaw hopes the line will also appeal to ordinary consumers with a sense of culinary adventure despite the current challenging economic times.

“We’ve always seen a market for premium items even in tough economic times. A number of specialty stores have come into the market in the last couple of years,” said Ian Gordon, vice-president Loblaw Brands Ltd.

“We look at this is as a bit of affordable indulgence. They may not be able to afford a trip to Italy. But they can experience it,” said Allan Lindsay, Loblaw’s vice-president marketing.

Priced from $1.99 to $24.99, they’re meant to sell for less than in specialty gourmet stores. The bacon marmalade, for example, is priced at $4.99 for a 370 ml jar.

The line is scheduled to begin appearing the first week of October in 140 select Loblaw stores in select neighbourhoods in Ontario and Quebec.

Starting with 200 items, the group will represent a niche product amid Loblaw’s private label line, from its value priced No Name brand to its PC organics specialty segment.

In the stores, the Black Label products will be supported by displays that tell their story, how they were sourced, from whom, and how they might be used to transform an ordinary meal into a masterpiece, Lindsay said.

Reaching back into its past, Loblaw isn’t using the words “Black Label” on its packaging, but rather letting the packaging speak for itself. On a plain black background, the label features high end photos and a few simple descriptive words.

“It goes back to our first successful controlled brand product in a yellow and black package with no name on it. It wasn’t until six years later that we actually put “No Name” on the packaging,” Gordon explained.

While Loblaw is the first to offer a premium in house food product in Canada, British food retailer Tesco has been doing so for some time, said Jeff Doucette, a principal in the consulting firm Sales Is Not Simple.

Adding them to Loblaw’s existing portfolio of private label brands “will have a huge positive halo effect on the brand overall, whether they sell well or not, initially,” Doucette said.

TV food shows and specialty magazines have boosted demand for specialty food products previously unavailable at the supermarket, Doucette noted.

“You get the Food and Drink magazine from the LCBO and it’s asking for something unique like this and it’s an extra stop. Now, I don’t need to go anywhere else to get these things,” he said.

And while many debt-laden consumers are trying to cut their household spending, the brand is positioned as better value for money, he noted.

“Yes, there’s a debt crisis in Greece. But if this truffle aioli whipped dressing is cheaper at Loblaws than at my favourite gourmet store, I don’t have to give up great tasting food, just because I’m a little over-invested in European mutual funds,” he said.

The market for private label food in Canada is $11.4 billion a year, according to the Nielsen company. Loblaw’s share is $8.2 billion.

Source