Wake Forest University and Notre Dame University have agreed to a home-and-home football series beginning with Notre Dame’s visit to BB&T Field on Nov. 5, 2011. Wake Forest will return the game in South Bend during the 2015 season.
Wake Forest and Notre Dame had previously agreed to play in South Bend on Nov. 17, 2012. This two-game home-and-home series is separate from the 2012 game.
“This is an excellent opportunity for our football program to compete against one of the most-storied football programs in the nation,” said Wake Forest Director of Athletics Ron Wellman payday loans. “Notre Dame has long been recognized for its excellence both academically and athletically and we expect that our fans will thoroughly enjoy having the Fighting Irish come to BB&T Field.”
Wake Forest will return the game in South Bend on Nov. 7, 2015.
For information on 2011 Wake Forest football season tickets, visit WakeForestSports.com/2011football.
YRC Worldwide Inc. says it has reached a tentative agreement with its largest labor union about restarting employee pension contributions and other initiatives “to address the company’s competitiveness.”
In a release late Friday, the Overland Park-based company (Nasdaq: YRCW) provided few details of the agreement, which it said still needed approval from leadership committees for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and YRC’s board. Both approvals are expected next week.
Once approved, the agreement would be presented to Teamster members for a vote, which the company said it expected would be completed by late October.
The union plans an update about its discussions with YRC on Wednesday and had asked its local unions to schedule membership meetings in October, presumably to vote about the agreements.
“This tentative agreement is an important step toward the completion of our comprehensive recovery plan,” YRC COO Mike Smid said in a release. “As our business continues to improve, the implementation of this tentative agreement will allow us to continue to provide our customers with a comprehensive portfolio of services that is competitive and reliable.”
Last year, Teamster members approved two rounds of concessions to help YRC avoid a bankruptcy filing. Those amounted to a 15 percent pay cut and an 18-month waiver of the company’s obligation to pay into employee pension funds.
That 18-month waiver ends in December, and the company has said it probably can’t afford to restart the pension payments of approximately $30 million a month.
Teamsters for a Democratic Union, a dissident union group, earlier this month reported that its sources in the union said any new agreement would hinge on YRC agreeing not to renew the employment contract of Chairman and CEO Bill Zollars, which expires Dec. 31. YRC and the Teamsters haven’t commented about the claim.
President Obama will announce Friday that he’s appointing Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren to play a key role in crafting the consumer financial protection bureau that was her idea in the first place.
Warrren, 61, said she "enthusiastically agreed" to serve as a special adviser in the Obama administration, in a blog post appearing on the White House Website.
"He has also asked me to take on the job to get the new CFPB (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) started right now," said Warren. "The President and I are committed to the same vision on CFPB, and I am confident that I will have the tools I need to get the job done."
Arriving at the White House for the Friday announcement, Warren told CNN’s Ed Henry that she’s "very confident" she will have real power to get the new consumer protection agency set up with some teeth, based on reassuring conversations she has had with the president.
She told Henry that, unequivocally, she’s fired up and ready to "get some things done" immediately.
The job gives the outspoken Warren - who also heads the Congressional Oversight Panel overseeing the $700 billion bank bailout - a unique insider’s megaphone within Treasury and the White House, while sidestepping a Senate confirmation battle. Her title will be Assistant to the President and Special Advisor to the Treasury Secretary.
Warren envisions the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as a regulatory body that will ensure consumers don’t "learn about an unfair rule or practice only when it bites them way too late for them to do anything about it," she wrote.
"The new law creates a chance to put a tough cop on the beat and provide real accountability and oversight of the consumer credit market," she wrote on the Website. "The time for hiding tricks and traps in the fine print is over."
In released remarks slated for delivery later Friday, President Obama described what’s in store at the new consumer bureau, which was the signature piece of the Wall Street reforms signed into law over the summer.
"Never again will folks be confused or misled by the pages of barely understandable fine print that you find in agreements for credit cards, mortgages, and student loans," Obama said. "The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will be a watchdog for the American consumer, charged with enforcing the toughest financial protections in history."
The Treasury Department has been laying the groundwork for the new consumer agency to be housed inside the Federal Reserve. Warren will report to the president and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, sources have told CNN.
This announcement does not mean that Warren will run the new consumer bureau once it’s up and running. But she remains a candidate for that job as well, sources have told CNN.
The new job provides a temporary end run around the Senate, where hundreds of presidential nominees, including three up for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, await confirmation.
Warren remains controversial in Washington. Left-leaning groups adore her, are thrilled about her new gig, and are still pushing for her to run the agency.
"Elizabeth Warren is exactly the right person to set the new Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection on the right course," said Lisa Donner, executive director for Americans for Financial Reform, a coalition of consumer, investor and union groups.
But her tough-love attitude toward banks and her sheer popularity among the masses make many in the banking industry nervous.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce released a statement opposing the president’s move to make her an adviser.
"This maneuver is an affront to the pledge of transparency and consumer protection that’s purported to be the focus of this new agency," said David Hirschmann, president of the chamber’s center for Capital Markets Competitiveness.
Some, including Senate Banking chief Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., noted that Obama’s move doesn’t solve the question of who will ultimately run the agency.
"There’s always been discussion about having Elizabeth involved in some way," Dodd said. "The issue still remains, who are we going to consider."
Other candidates to run the bureau include Michael Barr, Assistant Treasury Secretary for Financial Institutions, as well as Deputy Assistant Attorney General Gene Kimmelman.
– CNN’s Ted Barrett and Ed Henry contributed to this report.
The nation’s poverty rate jumped to 14.3% in 2009, its highest level since 1994, and the 43.6 million Americans in need is the highest number in 51 years of record-keeping, the government said Thursday.
The Office of Management and Budget defined the poverty threshold level as less than $21,954 for a family of four in 2009 and $10,956 for an individual. The poverty rate increased for all racial groups except Asians.
The jump, reported as part of a regular annual Census Bureau report on income, poverty and health insurance, was not unexpected. The U.S. economy went through a very rough 2009.
"The Census Bureau released data that illustrates just how tough 2009 was, " President Obama said in a statement.
"Even before the recession hit, middle class incomes had been stagnant and the number of people living in poverty in America was unacceptably high, and today’s numbers make it clear that our work is just beginning," the president added.
Many Americans lost their jobs during 2009. The unemployment rate jumped from 7.7% at the beginning of the year to 10.1% by October, before inching down to 10% the rest of the year.
Poverty increased less than many experts were projecting beforehand. David Johnson, chief of the bureau’s Housing and Household Economic Statistics Division, said that the rate would have been higher except that it declined substantially for elderly Americans, falling to 8.9% from 9.7%.
He also said increases in employment benefits brought many people out of poverty.
The income used to calculate poverty status includes earnings, workman’s compensation, unemployment insurance, Social Security, veteran’s payments, pensions, interest and dividends, and just about every other source of cash.
It does not, however, include capital gains, so, theoretically, millionaires could qualify as poor if they lived solely by selling off investments.
Non-cash benefits, such as food stamps or subsidized rents, also do not count as income.
Poverty is expected to continue climbing, reaching a high of about 16%, over the next decade, according to an analysis by Isabel Sawhill and Emily Monea of the Brookings Institution, the Washington-based think-tank online payday loan lenders. The researchers say that, as a result, another 10 million Americans - including 6 million children - will be in poverty.
"The recession makes finding jobs very difficult and has hit low-income families especially hard," said Sawhill.
The Census report said that the poverty rate for children under age 18 grew faster in 2009 than it did for the population as a whole, increasing 1.7 percentage points to 20.7%.
Regionally, the South was the poorest area of the country, with a rate of 15.7%. It also experienced the biggest jump in poverty, 1.4 percentage points from 14.3% in 2008.
The West had a poverty rate of 14.8%, the Midwest rate was 13.3% and the Northeast rate was 12.2%.
Mississippi is the poorest state in the nation with an average of 20.6% of the population earning less than the threshold rate over the past two years. Arizona, at 19.6%, and New Mexico, at 19.3%, also recorded much higher poverty than the national average.
New Hampshire, at 7.3%, had the lowest percentage of poor residents with Connecticut, at 8.3%, and Utah, at 8.6%, also scoring well.
The state comparisons may not be very fair, according to Sawhill. They make no provisions for differences in living costs. Groceries, housing, prpoerty and sales taxes and lots of other costs can vary greatly.
"I think we need to revise the poverty measure to take into account regional cost differences," she said.
Census seems to agree. It announced an initiative to work with other agencies to develop a supplemental poverty measure that will incorporate non-cash factors, as well as cost of living differences, to better describe economic well-being. The new gauge will not replace the poverty report.
The government also said the number of Americans with health coverage dropped for the first time since record-keeping began in 1987. (more on Census health care data)
Inflation in China accelerated last month, as rising food prices pushed overall prices higher.
The consumer price index increased to 3.5% in August, compared to a 3.3% annual rate in July, China’s National Bureau of Statistics reported on Saturday.
The global economy has become increasingly dependent on China’s rapid expansion as an engine for growth.
But prices in the fast-growing Chinese economy have been outpacing most western economies; U.S. prices were up only 1.2% over the 12 months ending in July.
That has raised some concerns that the Chinese government might take steps to slow down growth in order to keep prices in check.
"China has to be careful," said Robert Brusca of FAO Economics. "Their big objective is domestic stability, and domestic stability requires employment. But they can’t let inflation get away from them. So they have a tiger by the tail."
Separately, China reported that the country’s industrial output increased 13.9%.
The increases in Chinese consumer prices have been driven by higher food prices, up 7.5% in the last 12 months. Food makes up about a third of the overall consumer price index in China, compared to only 14% of the official mix of prices in the United States. Fresh vegetables have shot up 7.7% in the last month and further price increases are expected due to a poor wheat harvest in Russia.
There is little the Chinese policymakers can do to control food prices other than provide subsidies, said Virendra Singh, director in international economics for Moody’s Economy.com.
But he said there is concern that rising food prices could spill over to the rest of the economy as workers demand higher wages online cash advance.
So his firm is expecting the People’s Bank of China to move soon to raise interest rates.
In fact, the August price report got particular attention when China moved up the release of the data by two days, prompting some to speculate the move was done to give financial markets a chance to digest the news and possibly pave the way for the People’s Bank of Chinato raise interest rates.
But Jay Bryson, international economist for Wells Fargo Securities, isn’t convinced China is getting ready to raise rates because of uncertainty about the strength of the global economic recovery. And he said even if it does raise rates, the impact will be more symbolic than substantial.
"The Chinese have always had a bias toward growth rather than keeping inflation in check," he said. "[A rate hike] could send a signal that these guys are getting serious about inflation."
The Chinese central bank has left rates unchanged since September 2008 when it cut rates in the face of the global financial meltdown.
There isn’t an overnight lending rate in China comparable to the U.S. Federal Reserve’s benchmark fed funds rate, which has been near 0% since December 2008.
By comparison, the People Bank of China’s one-year lending rate has been at 5.31%, but that relatively lofty rate has done little to slow the economy overall.
China’s gross domestic product, the broadest measure of the economy, was up 10.3% in the second quarter compared to a year earlier.
Juliana Simone, owner of Sunset Homes, is moving ahead with plans to develop Anahulu Centre, a three-story commercial building along Kamehameha Highway on Oahu’s North Shore.
The Haleiwa landowner bought the 7,299-square-foot lot at 66-030 Kamehameha Highway seven years ago to build the Anahulu Centre. The parcel is behind an existing single-story building that houses her real estate firm.
The tiny structure was built in 1932 and once was the site of a First Hawaiian Bank branch.
Simone is seeking a special district permit from the City and County of Honolulu to put up the building. The city Department of Planning and Permitting will hold a public hearing on the request at 10:30 a.m. Tuesday, Sept. 14, in the City Council committee meeting room at Honolulu Hale.
Simone said she obtained the required permits to construct the building three years ago, but her architect failed to apply for an extension and the permits expired last year small personal loans. She said she has no timetable as to when construction can begin on the building, which she estimated would cost about $2 million to construct.
Once completed, the Anahulu Centre would have parking on the ground floor and almost 4,190 square feet of space on the two upper levels. Simone said the center is designed to match the existing building.
“The Anahulu Centre would be a combination of the two buildings,” she said. “The new building is designed so it looks like it was always there. It’ll look like a mother and daughter.”
When Americans debate the impact of fuel emissions on the environment, they usually talk about cars and trucks. But what about smaller vehicles like motorcycles, scooters, lawnmowers and ATVs?
Riding a lawn tractor for just an hour spits out as much pollution you’d get from driving a car for hundreds of miles, according to former Ford Motor Co. engineer Kyle Schwulst.
"It’s something that people don’t realize, but the traditional automobile has come a long way in becoming much cleaner than smaller engines," Schwulst says. "So much attention has been paid to automotive engines, but the smaller ones are much more harmful to the environment."
That’s why Schwulst, 30, founded ElectroJet, a 10-person company that develops electronic fuel injection systems for small engines.
For the non-gearheads out there: Fuel injection systems regulate the mix of fuel and air that goes into internal combustion engines. They make engines more efficient and less polluting. For that reason, fuel injectors replaced carburetors in most trucks and automobiles by the end of the 1980s.
But most small-engine vehicles still use carburetors. That’s why they emit so much pollution.
In 2003, Schwulst launched ElectroJet in Brighton, Mich., a distant suburb of Detroit. Now, seven years later, he is going global.
In June, Schwulst signed a partnership agreement with Magneti Marelli, a multibillion-dollar Italian manufacturer of high-tech auto components. The two companies have teamed up to develop an electronic fuel-injection system for the world’s two largest motorcycle markets: India and China. Together, those nations build more than 40 million new motorcycles — equivalent to 75% of the global total — each year.
New rules limiting motorcycle emissions took effect in China this July. In India, similar regulations are expected to go into effect next year. Both policies closely resemble restrictions that are currently in place throughout much of Europe.
Asia’s potential market is vast. "If we look at 40 million vehicles needing our product worldwide each year, with an average sale price around $50 each, that is a $2 billion market," Schwulst explains.
But courting an Asian audience comes with challenges. The biggest? Keeping down costs. A new motorcycle in China typically costs $600 or more — roughly equivalent to an average citizen’s annual wages. Any feature that even slightly increases the price will hurt sales in the Chinese market.. For that reason, ElectroJet’s new devices will mimic the size and shape of carburetors in existing motorcycle designs, allowing them to be swapped into production with minimal disruption.
Within the U.S., ElectroJet has been successfully convincing investors it has what it takes to grow. The company has raised about $2.6 million in outside capital. Of that money, the state of Michigan kicked in $1 million in loans and investments; the rest came from private investors, Schwulst says.
ElectroJet’s longstanding clients say the company’s products are well-designed and flexible, which bodes well for their adoption on a global scale.
One of those clients, Sonex Research, is a company in Annapolis, Md., that designs engine combustion chambers for military drones and other specialized vehicles. Sonex uses ElectroJet products to control fuel delivery.
Schwulst and his team designed ElectroJet’s fuel injection systems to work with the four-stroke engines traditionally used in automotive applications. But Sonex engineers have found ways to pair them with the military’s preferred two-stroke engines, which typically run on heavy, kerosene-based fuels.
"That’s nothing short of amazing," Pouring says, referring to the fuel injectors’ flexibility. "It really speaks to the superior design used to create the fuel injection systems. That really is why the company has such a bright future."
Schwulst agrees. Now, thanks to "the partnership with Magneti Marelli, one of the largest suppliers in the market, we have the resources to deliver," he says. "It’s a game-changer for us."
Unemployment would be above 14 percent in Pennsylvania and approaching 16 percent nationally if not for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and other federal action taken in the wake of the recession, according to a new report released by the Keystone Research Center Thursday.
But still more needs to be done, said the Harrisburg-based think tank in its annual “State of Working Pennsylvania” report.
"Our economy is a product of conscious policy choices," Mark Price, labor economist for the center, said. "Federal policy stopped the economic free fall. And policy choices at the national and state level will powerfully shape the future health of the economy for middle-class families."
Actions taken by the Federal Reserve, Bush and Obama administrations, and Congress have all helped curb unemployment, Price said. Early last year, before passage of the federal Recovery Act, Pennsylvania was losing nearly 30,000 jobs each month. The state by contrast has added 64,000 jobs during the first half of this year. Pennsylvania also benefited from Congress’ recent extension of federal Medicaid assistance to states and additional school funding to preserve teacher jobs, which kept the state from losing as many as 12,000 more jobs.
But Pennsylvania needs to add about 300,000 jobs to replace those lost since the recession began. The state’s unemployment rate, which as of July was 9.3 percent, is expected to be at 7.2 percent in 2014 — a full seven years after the recession began. The state’s job deficit and a deficit in the buying power of the middle class are both greater threats than closing the federal deficit, according to Stephen Herzenberg, center economist and executive director.
"The federal deficit is the wrong enemy," Herzenberg said. "Our economy will recover only when we put Americans back to work and pay them a fair wage."
Several recommendations were made in the report, including: Extending resources for Pennsylvania’s Way to Work Program set to expire Sept. 30, access to capital for small business, extension of unemployment insurance benefits as long as unemployment remains so high that it is impossible for many jobless workers to find jobs and allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire and repurposing the funds to other areas to create jobs.
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