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ST. LOUIS • Not as well-known and certainly not as big as A-B InBev and Monsanto, Gonzalez Cos. is tucked between the two other businesses on a list of top sponsors of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Metropolitan St. Louis.

Sure, says company founder Anthony Gonzalez-Angel, the $10,000 a year his construction management firm pays to be a member helps promote his business. But he could do that with a lesser level of giving, or in different ways.

Gonzalez-Angel says he wants the chamber to have the tools it needs to continue its transition from more of a social entity to an agency that helps build and promote Hispanic businesses — and one that works to bridge the gap between small companies and large corporations.

“Economic empowerment leads to social empowerment,” Gonzalez-Angel said.

The chamber, around for three decades, has in the last few years raised its profile significantly. It has seen a surge in membership, made plans to buy its rented office space, scheduled a large-scale job fair for next month and has launched its first Latino Leadership Institute, supported by the chamber’s largest sponsor, Centene Corp.

In late 2009, the chamber moved into nearly 3,200 square feet of office space in the old South Side National Bank on South Grand Boulevard, not far from Cherokee Street, the unofficial Hispanic neighborhood of St cash advances pay day loan. Louis. Earlier chamber locations included a small office on the University of Missouri-St. Louis campus, and the basement of a bank on Gravois Avenue, about a block from the current offices.

The chamber has just begun a $300,000 capital campaign to buy the office space.

“It shows that we have a home, a set place,” Ramirez said, “and that we are a committed part of the community.”

The chamber received a $500,000 federal grant to lease the space as well as the build-out and furniture.

GROOMING LEADERS

John Sondag, president of AT&T Missouri, said the chamber is making moves that position it to be more influential in the region’s business world.

Sondag was one of several corporate executives asked about a decade ago to sit on a chamber advisory committee. The chamber wanted to better tap into corporate St. Louis and better define its role, Sondag said.

“Up until then, it was more of a social club,” Sondag said. “Members would join but do more socializing rather than traditional chamber work to develop businesses. It’s important for us as a business to help other businesses grow. If the communities we serve grow, we all prosper and benefit.”

A grant from AT&T in 2009 was used to buy 30 computers for the chamber’s technology center. The chamber’s board president, Emma Espinoza, is an AT&T manager. And the company is sending one of its customer service representatives through the chamber’s Latino Leadership Institute, a nine-month professional development program which began in October with 11 applicants.

Ramirez hopes the institute becomes a staple of the programming and training offered through the chamber. The goal is to groom young Latinos early in their careers to better navigate the corporate world and become community leaders.

“Ten years from now, think about the difference that would make in St. Louis,” Ramirez said.

Longtime chamber board member Michael Zambrana said corporate involvement with the chamber is about more than offering experience, money and other resources.

“There is a more fundamental reason and that is for recruiting purposes,” said Zambrana, president and CEO of Pangea Inc., a construction and environmental services firm. “A lot of these companies do international business. They are looking for a connection to bring culture into their companies. It’s required in the international marketplace.”

CREATING VALUE

Ramirez said joining is appealing because it allows members to “tap into the workforce and the Hispanic buying power” and “helps companies with their diversity initiatives. Value means different things to different people.”

At La Vallesana, a Mexican restaurant on Cherokee Street, owner Hilario Vargas says the chamber has been a supportive partner in promoting the expansion of his business. The chamber held a ribbon-cutting to coincide with the September opening of the new addition. Two more expansions, including enlarging the dining room and adding a courtyard, are expected to be completed by summer. The dining guide will be an easy way to update the restaurant’s progress, Vargas said.

“They helped get the word out that we are no longer a little taco stand and now we’ve grown,” Vargas said of the chamber, with translation help from a manager.

The job and business fair next month at a downtown hotel is expected to have at least 60 vendors. Ramirez said it will be the largest hiring event held yet by the chamber, and one that he wants to grow each year.

“I genuinely believe diversity is valued in this region,” Ramirez said.

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St. Louis • It took less than 90 minutes - with a 20-minute break - for the city on Monday to sell off 162 acres of land it had spent decades accumulating.

In a series of unanimous votes, three city panels agreed to sell developer Paul McKee 1,233 pieces of land, and an option to buy the massive former Pruitt-Igoe site, for $3.2 million and promises that his stalled NorthSide Regeneration project will start to move forward.

Altogether, the purchases will more than double McKee’s holdings on the city’s near north side, where he has been working for eight years to assemble land for a project he says could transform some of St. Louis’ most battered neighborhoods. Taking on hundreds of city-owned parcels, most of which have long sat vacant, will enable him to market larger sites - in some cases whole blocks - to potential tenants, McKee said. That should make more deals feasible, he said.

Largely unmentioned was the ongoing lawsuit that has slowed the project. It has been nearly two years since a city judge tossed out $390 million in tax increment financing, which has stalled road and sewer work in the area. An Appeals Court heard oral arguments in the case earlier this month; a decision is expected soon.

In the meantime, McKee keeps talking with prospective tenants, and he shared more details Monday.

Grace Hill Health Centers is planning a clinic in the project area, he said, and Sunshine Ministries is preparing to move into 40,000 square feet of new space. A biotech company McKee wouldn’t name is interested in a project near the old Carr School, and various office and retail users are looking at sites.

“We have had interest (from tenants) all over the project area,” he said.

While McKee already owns about 103 acres of the project’s 1,500-acre footprint, it was always clear that he would need more land. He has been talking with the city about buying its property for years.

But the agreement was only announced on Friday, when agendas were posted for special meetings of the three city agencies that own the land. The meetings themselves had all the markings of a done deal, with a few questions by board members but no real debate, and unanimous votes all around.

While about a dozen of McKee’s consultants and lawyers showed up, no neighborhood residents or McKee critics attended the mid-afternoon meeting at the St. Louis Development Corp. offices downtown. The only skeptical note was sounded by Alderman Marlene Davis, who represents a small part of the project area. She asked that 31 parcels in her ward be held out of the sale for other development, which the city permitted.

“If I were sitting in your chair I probably wouldn’t do this,” she told the three members of the Land Reutilization Authority (LRA). “But it’s not my call.”

Rodney Crim, Mayor Francis Slay’s top development official, said the agreement was a good one. It moves more than one-tenth of all city-owned property off the books, adding $100,000 to the tax rolls and saving the cost of mowing and maintenance. Some of the $3.2 million proceeds will pay to demolish more crumbling city-owned buildings across north St. Louis, freeing up more land for redevelopment. And much of the ground has been up for sale for decades, with no credible buyers, until McKee.

“The market hasn’t addressed this issue,” Crim said. “Now we have a developer who plans to address the whole area and is ready to move forward.”

The agreement requires that McKee create more than 160 jobs and get his first wave of projects well underway by 2016. But the developer said he’s moving on a much faster timeframe.

“I need this to happen tomorrow,” he said.

It won’t take long to be official. Monday’s votes were the only public action required for the sales. Now McKee’s lawyers and city officials will iron out details. They plan to close by the end of February.

Then McKee will have two years to find something to do with Pruitt-Igoe. The infamous former housing complex sits at Jefferson and Cass Avenue, the heart of his project area, and is a key piece of ground. But it’s also likely polluted ground, with unknown debris from the demolition of its high-rise apartment towers in the 1970s. McKee bought a two-year option on the site for $100,000, to buy time while he looks for cleanup funding and markets the site to tenants. Taking control for good will cost him an additional $900,000.

Crim said the prices were determined through LRA’s standard appraisal process, which is based on comparable property nearby and other factors. The city included Pruitt-Igoe in the deal, Crim said, because it wants a comprehensive approach to the area.

“It has to fit in. It can’t be an individual use,” Crim said. “And this developer has a lot of business ties that will help him to market the site.”

TERMS OF THE DEAL

Three city agencies agreed to sell 1,233 parcels of land - totaling 162 acres - to Paul McKee’s NorthSide Regeneration LLC, for $3.2 million. The deal includes $100,000 a two-year option for the 33-acre Pruitt-Igoe site. To close the sale, NorthSide must pay an additional $900,000. NorthSide must demolish 200 buildings by the end of 2013 and rehab 75 buildings. NorthSide must perform regular maintenance and mowing, hold job fairs and offer training to local residents. NorthSide must complete three-fourths of its first round of projects and create 168 jobs by 2016. The second round must be half-complete by 2020. Failure to meet terms means the city can buy back the land at the purchase price.

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Nokia Corp. plans to stop assembling cell phones in Europe by year-end as it shifts production to Asia and will cut another 4,000 jobs, its latest attempts to cushion itself from stiff competition in the smartphone sector.

The Finnish company said Wednesday it will make the new job cuts at three plants in Finland, Mexico and Hungary this year as it reorganizes global manufacturing operations to compete better with the likes of Apple Inc.’s iPhone and handsets using Google Inc.’s Android operating software.

The cuts come on top of nearly 10,000 layoffs announced last year.

Nokia said it had increasingly shifted cell phone assembly from Europe to Asia, where the majority of component suppliers are based, to help it reach markets faster. The company said it would not close the three factories, however.

“There will be no assembling of mobile phones at our plants in Europe after this,” Nokia spokesman James Etheridge said. “We plan to focus product assembly at our plants in Asia where the majority of our suppliers are based, while our facilities in Salo, Komarom and Reynosa will focus on the software-heavy aspects of the production process.”

Neil Mawston from Strategy Analytics said Nokia’s move “made sense” and was in line with what other cell phone makers had been doing for years, such as Samsung Electronics Co., Motorola Inc., and Sony Ericsson, which had large assembly plants in Europe.

“It’s an unstoppable trend really. Essentially, labor costs, land costs and other associated costs are so much lower in Asia,” Mawston said. “Also, Asia is so much closer to the biggest pool of users now so from a supply and demand side Asia looks a lot more attractive than Europe.”

Nokia said the shift to Asia would enable it to introduce innovations into the market more quickly and “ultimately be more competitive.”

Once the bellwether of the industry, Nokia has lost its dominant position in the global mobile phone market, with Android phones and iPhones overtaking it in the growing smartphone segment. It’s also been squeezed in the low-end by Asian manufacturers making cheaper phones, such as ZTE.

Nokia has been the leading handset maker since 1998 but after reaching its global goal of 40 percent market share in 2008, the company has gradually lost overall market share. It plummeted to below 30 percent last year.

In an attempt to remedy the slide, Nokia launched its new Windows Phone 7 in October, eight months after CEO Stephen Elop announced a partnership with Microsoft Corp. That heralded a major strategy shift for the Espoo-based company as it adopted the Windows operating system in its new phones.

But analysts have said it could take a few quarters before Nokia’s success can be measured.

Last month, Nokia reported that smartphone sales plummeted 23 percent globally in the fourth quarter as net revenue fell 20 percent to euro10 billion ($13.11 billion) compared to a year earlier.

Nokia share price closed up slightly at euro3.88 ($5.09) on the Helsinki Stock Exchange.

Nokia, based in Espoo near the Finnish capital, employs 130,000 people _ down from more than 132,000 a year ago.

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Online:

http://www.nokia.com

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Companies slowed their hiring in January, according to a report by payroll processor ADP.

The private sector added 170,000 jobs in the month, ADP said Wednesday, missing forecasts of 200,000 jobs that economists polled by Briefing.com had predicted.

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Obama battles job crisis

Before Obama even took office, America had lost 4.4 million jobs. Track his progress since then.

The previous month was also weaker than originally reported. December’s strong number — first reported as 325,000 jobs — was revised down to 292,000.

In January, small businesses — those with fewer than 50 employees — made up more than half of the job gains, hiring 95,000 people.

"Those jobs were mostly in the services sector and match some optimism we have seen in small business lending," Diane Swonk, chief economist for Mesirow Financial, said in a note.

A Federal Reserve survey released earlier this week showed demand for small business loans picked up in the fourth quarter — a trend that could reflect growing optimism about the economy.

Meanwhile, the report showed large companies with 500 or more employees hired only 3,000 new workers, and medium-sized businesses added 72,000 to their payrolls.

ADP typically sets the tone for the government’s highly anticipated monthly jobs report, due Friday, but its figures aren’t always a good predictor of the government’s numbers.

Economists surveyed by CNNMoney expect the Labor Department’s data to show 130,000 jobs were added last month, including 150,000 from the private sector and a loss of government jobs.

That would mark a steep slowdown in hiring from December, when 200,000 jobs were created.

The unemployment rate is expected to rise to 8.6%. 

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Payments processor MasterCard says it took a $495 million charge in its fourth quarter to cover potential losses from an ongoing lawsuit brought by merchants over the fees they pay on credit card transactions.

The Purchase, N.Y.-based company says the charge represents the after-tax portion of a potential settlement in the case. Wall Street had speculated the bill would run about $1.2 billion to $1.8 billion if MasterCard Inc. and rival Visa Inc. settle the suit.

The charge reduced MasterCard’s fourth-quarter profit. The company earned $19 million, or 15 cents per share, on revenue of $1.73 billion. Removing the charge, it says profit came to $4.03 per share,

Analysts were expecting profit of $3.92 per share, on revenue of $1.73 billion.

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A four-year economic crisis has left societies battered and widened the gap between the haves and have-nots, financial leaders conceded Wednesday _ with one suggesting that Western capitalism itself may be endangered.

With the global economic outlook gloomy at best as Europe struggles with its debt crisis, there’s a sense at the heavily guarded World Economic Forum in the Swiss Alps that free markets are on trial.

There’s a widespread acceptance that more must be done to convince critics that Western capitalism has a future and that it can learn the lessons of its massive failures.

For David Rubenstein, the co-founder and managing director of asset management firm Carlyle Group, leaders must work fast to overcome the current crisis or else different models of capitalism, such as the form practiced in China, may win the day.

“As a result of this recession, that’s lasted longer than anyone predicted and will probably go on for a number more years … we’re gonna have a lot of economic disparities,” said Rubenstein.

“We’ve got to work through these problems, if we don’t do in 3 or 4 years … the game will be over for the type of capitalism that many of us have lived through and thought was the best type,” he added.

His stark appraisal may have been an outlier, but there was a clear defensive posture among many participants on this opening day of the World Economic Forum in Davos.

There were numerous references to the need to innovate, the need to consult with employees and the realization that power in the world is shifting from the west to the east. While the traditional industrial economies of the United States and Europe have limped through the last few years, often from one crisis to another, many economies in Asia and Latin America have been booming.

As Ben Verwaayen, the chief executive of Alcatel-Lucent, said, there’s a “very different view” of capitalism in Brazil.

“This is a very different discussion depending where you are,” Verwaayen said.

Many rejected the suggestion from Sharan Burrow, the general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation, that capitalism has lost its “moral compass” and needed to be “reset.” Still, representatives of the business community insisted they were learning from the mistakes that dragged the world into its deepest economic recession since the World War II.

Bank of America’s CEO Brian Moynihan said the excesses of banks in the run-up to the banking crisis of 2008 reflected the economies they were operating in, so it was important that policymakers don’t overreact.

Moynihan, whose bank was forced to back down on plans to start charging a $5 debit card fee after protests by the Occupy movement and others, said banks have “done a lot” to reduce excesses. He also noted that boom and bust cycles are a part of the Western capitalist structure.

Many outside the confines of the Davos conference center disagree, after years of crisis in which hundreds of millions of people have lost their jobs even as top executives have continued to reap huge pay packets.

Davos activists on Wednesday sent aloft big red weather balloons carrying a huge protest banner reading “Hey WEF, Where are the other 6.9999 billion leaders?”

The activists were from the Occupy WEF movement, a small group camping out in igloos here and following in the footsteps of the Occupy Wall Street movement that spread to cities around the world.

Davos is a hard-to-reach place to protest, tucked in the Swiss Alps. Some 2,600 of the world’s most influential people are gathered for the forum this week, amid increasing worries about the global economy and social unrest due to rising income inequalities.

The CEO of accounting giant Deloitte, Joe Echevarria, talked about developing “compassionate capitalism.”

“You’re going to have to deal with regulation _ balancing the need to protect society along with stifling growth,” he told The Associated Press in an interview. “I think that has to manifest itself through the choices that governments and businesses make.”

While the bigwigs debated at Davos, key Greek bondholders were holding closed-door meetings in Paris to discuss how _ and whether _ to continue talks central to resolving Europe’s debt crisis that would forgive 50 percent of Greece’s enormous debt.

Mark Penn, global CEO of the public relations firm Burson-Marsteller, told AP “the whole crisis has raised larger questions about how is capitalism working, how do you redefine fairness in the 21st century?”

Later Wednesday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel may chart her course for Europe’s crisis in her keynote speech at the Davos forum.

In an interview with six European newspapers published Wednesday, Merkel drove home the need for reform in debt-troubled eurozone nations instead of spending more to beef up the region’s bailout fund.

Surveys ahead of the meeting showed pessimism among world CEOs and plunging levels of public trust in business and government leaders and concerns that fragility in the U.S. and European economies will bring the whole world’s economy down.

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Sales of previously owned homes rose to an 11-month high in December and the supply of properties on the market tumbled to a near 7-year low, pointing to a nascent recovery in the housing market.

The National Association of Realtors said on Friday existing home sales increased 5 percent month over month to an annual rate of 4.61 million units.

November’s sales pace was revised down to a 4.39 million-unit pace, previously reported as a 4.42 million-unit rate.

Economists polled by Reuters had expected sales to rise to a 4.65 million-unit sales pace. Sales in December were up 3.6 percent from a year ago. A total of 4.26 million homes were sold in 2011, up 1.7 percent from the prior year.

“A sector of the economy that has been a large weight on growth has started to stabilize over the last few months and we will continue to look for momentum in 2012,” said John Doyle, currency strategist at Tempus Consulting in Washington.

The third straight month of gains in sales added to hopes that a tentative recovery in the housing market was starting to take shape, but progress will be painfully slow given a glut of unsold properties that is weighing down on prices.

Data this week showed single-family home starts rose for a third straight month in December and optimism among builders this month was the highest in four-and-a-half years.

But the sector, responsible for the 2007-09 recession, remains challenged by an oversupply of homes amid an 8.5 percent unemployment rate. In addition, declining prices have left many Americans with homes that are worth less than their mortgages.

But there are tentative signs of improvement. There were 2.38 million unsold homes on the market last month, the fewest since March 2005. That represented a 6.2 months’ supply at December’s sales pace, the lowest since April 2006, and compared to 7.2 months’ supply in November.

However, the inventory of unsold homes tends to decline in winter. A supply of 6 months is generally considered as ideal and anything above indicates further declines in house prices. The median sales price fell 2.5 percent to $164,500 from a year ago.

Sales last month rose across all four regions, with gains in both the multifamily home and single-family home segments.

Single family home sales rose 4.6 percent, while multi-family dwellings advanced 8.7 percent.

But the road to recovery will be bumpy. Distressed properties, foreclosures and short sales which typically occur at deep discounts, accounted for 32 percent of overall sales last month, little changed from November.

A third of pending existing home sales contracts were canceled, the NAR said.

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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.

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Frances D’Emilio contributed to this story from Rome.

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Several times each year, the nation faces a widespread, food borne illness crisis. But there’s an easy, cheap technological solution that could stop scares and outbreaks in their tracks.

A relatively simple system of QR codes — those funny-looking, two-dimensional barcodes you see everywhere today — could instantaneously link a product sold on store shelves back to the farm where it was grown or raised with a snap of a smartphone camera. It would no longer take days or weeks to determine what food is safe and what isn’t.

The system could even prevent the contaminated food from reaching store shelves in the first place.

IBM (, Fortune 500) has developed a technology called the InfoSphere Traceability Server, which assigns unique barcodes to every step of the food distribution chain.

The farms, slaughterhouses, food palates, shipping containers, trucks, grocery stores and individual products that are using InfoSphere are all affixed with QR codes and tracked. Even specific animals are being tagged and scanned, so you could find out which specific cow your milk came from or which pig became your pork.

Using this system, the orange juice crisis could have potentially been avoided. Rather than halting all shipments of orange juice to test for a fungicide and testing OJ at grocery stores, as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has done, the juice could have been scanned and instantly linked back to a particular farm.

How RFID tags will change the future

"Someday soon, this will become the minimum requirement to participate in the food supply chain," said Paul Chang, IBM’s traceability program director.

But the system has yet to be widely adopted. There are some high hurdles to mass-adoption, most notably that for the system to work, every actor in the supply chain has to participate. And participation requires some level of investment in order to feed data into the network and extract results.

IBM already has a small handful of large retailers in the United States and Europe on its system, including Germany’s Metro Group, the third-largest food retailer in the world. But IBM believes it has found a way to get even the smallest mom & pop shops and farms on board as well.

IBM developed the InfoSphere system as a cloud-based service, meaning the only infrastructure needed to operate it is an Internet connection and a smartphone.

Though IBM’s Chang wouldn’t get specific about pricing, he said the costs are "minimal," pointing to the fact that that there are already small, rural farms in Thailand using the system no fax needed payday loans.

"We’ve developed the technology in such a way that it’s just a nominal cost to share and access information," Chang said. "We’re at an inflection point where this could be deployed more broadly."

But even if the majority of vendors, farms, shipping companies and grocery stores adopt it, it would really take everyone to join in to link your OJ to a particular farm.

To make such a global food traceability network a possibility, the food industry has developed an open standard for data recording and tracking. That means customers using IBM rivals’ systems could communicate with the InfoSphere server so a farm, a supplier and a grocery store all doing business with one another would not necessary need to be using the same system.

IBM says a very small percentage of companies in the food industry have adopted the technology so far. But with recalls happening on a weekly basis, and costs of technology falling, some regulators are becoming tempted to impose requirements that companies adopt traceability systems. IBM said is currently working with a small number of government regulators from around the world.

If widespread adoption does occur, it may help stop outbreaks before they start.

Today, testing products for contamination is a difficult and ineffective process. Food companies can’t test every batch, so choosing which ones to test is essentially random.

For instance, Coca-Cola (, Fortune 500) tested its batch of orange juice and found that the fungicide was present. But it also noticed that competitors’ juice was contaminated as well and had gone unnoticed.

Using advanced analytics, companies could know exactly which batches to test. As an example, a sensor in a shipping container of tomatoes that is several degrees warmer than normal could tip off the company to check the product that was shipped on that vessel. With QR tags, testers could know which palates were on that container and test them before they reach store shelves.

The technology is cheap and easy to implement. But until everyone adopts it, contaminated food outbreaks will continue. 

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