February 20, 2012
It's one thing to use a little recycled paper here and there and say you're into sustainability; it's another to get your company certified as environmentally responsible. In January, the Green Press Initiative (GPI)—a nonprofit that works with the book and newspaper publishing industries to conserve natural resources, announced its long-awaited Environmentally Responsible Publisher Certification (ERPC).
Not unlike the U.S...
February 18, 2012
Greece may be scrambling for revenue, but the French treasury has just banked some 550 million euros for doing nothing — simply letting the French franc, created in 1360, finally perish.
Friday was the last day that French francs could be turned into the Bank of France, the central bank, in exchange for the common European currency, the euro, a little more than a decade after it was introduced as bills and coins.
The approximately...
February 18, 2012
Mardi Gras, with its masquerade balls, beads, and floats is a financial fest for New Orleans. One million people will jam the city's streets during the two weeks leading up to Fat Tuesday (Feb. 21), says Jennifer Day at the New Orleans Convention & Visitors Bureau.
In 2011, those visitors had a $300 million economic impact on the city, accounting for 1.5 percent of New Orleans' gross domestic product, according to a study of Mardi Gras...
February 18, 2012
Shortly after noon on Thursday, Sept. 16, 1920, a powerful bomb hidden in a horse-drawn wagon exploded at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in Manhattan. It was a pleasant late-summer day, and throngs of people had been out enjoying a lunchtime stroll, a brief respite from the great money machine, the center of American capitalism.
Now blood ran in the streets where the first U.S. Congress had convened and the Bill of...
February 10, 2012
The U.S. Air Force may buy as many as 18,000 iPad2s in what would be one of the military’s biggest orders of computer tablets, accelerating Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s inroads into the federal government.
The service’s Air Mobility Command plans to issue a request for proposals to buy between 63 and 18,000 “iPad 2, Brand Name or Equal devices” to lighten the load of flight crews, according to a notice...
February 10, 2012
Brewing in Africa is on a roll. With Americans spurning beer for spirits, British pubs closing at a rate of 16 a week and Russia slapping punitive taxes on ale, the $160bn industry is increasingly looking to sub-Saharan Africa.
SABMiller, which began its African adventures in earnest in the 1990s, is pouring $80m into a new brewery in Uganda, doubling the capacity of its Nile Breweries subsidiary. It also brings the ...
February 8, 2012
Brown University, the Ivy League school whose endowment grew to $2.5 billion last year, may boost voluntary tax payments to Providence, Rhode Island, after the city said it was nearing bankruptcy.
Governor Lincoln Chafee last week intervened to restart talks over the university’s so-called payments in lieu of taxes after Mayor Angel Taveras, 41, said Providence was about to run out of cash. While Brown is tax exempt, it has...
February 8, 2012
Much of the camera technology was invented in the United States, but US companies gave it all up.
When American companies move pieces of their operations overseas—often because manufacturing and labor costs are much cheaper—they run the risk of moving the expertise, innovation, and new growth opportunities just out of their reach as well.
Take Eastman Kodak, for example, the 120-year-old American company that filed for...
February 6, 2012
Just because he belongs to it himself does not make Newt Gingrich wrong when he grumbles that America is run by an out-of-touch elite. If you want evidence, the data can now be found in a book published this week by Charles Murray, the co-author in 1994 of “The Bell Curve”, which became controversial for positing a link between race and intelligence. That controversy should not deter you. “Coming Apart: The State of White...
February 3, 2012
Stocks rose after the U.S. economy added more jobs than expected last month, driving the Nasdaq Composite to an 11-year high and sending the Dow near its highest reading in nearly four years.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average advanced 135 points, or 1.1%, to 12838, just shy of the 12876 level reached in May 2008. The Standard & Poor's 500 index tacked on 16 points, or 1.2%, to 1342 and the technology-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index...
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