 |
▣ US delaying currencies report amid China dispute
0 Comments added to this post
- Tags:
- USA
The Obama administration is delaying a report to Congress on currency policies amid calls from some lawmakers that it should cite China as a currency manipulator harmful to the U.S. economy. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Saturday that he will delay publication of the report, due April 15, because several high-level international meetings in the coming months will be a better way to advance the United States' position.
▣ FDA warns of problems with sterilization device
0 Comments added to this post
- Tags:
- USA
The Food and Drug Administration says doctors and hospitals should stop using a device from Steris Corp. to sterilize surgical tools after reports of malfunction.
▣ Are your holiday lights a fire hazard?
0 Comments added to this post
All counterfeit products are illegal. But counterfeit electronics are not just illegal, they are dangerous. “These things can kill you,” says Brett Brenner, president of the Electrical Safety Foundation, an industry-funded organization based in Roslyn, Va. "A counterfeit purse or a CD isn't going to hurt you. But a counterfeit electrical product will hurt you.”
▣ Toyota to recall 110,000 Tundras over rust
0 Comments added to this post
Toyota Motor Corp. will recall 110,000 Tundra trucks from the 2000-2003 model years to address excessive rust on the vehicle's frame. The government urged owners to remove the spare tire from the frame, concerned it could fall onto the road and create a hazard for other vehicles.
▣ CPSC chief: Agency moved too slowly on crib safety
0 Comments added to this post
- Tags:
- USA
A day after the recall of 2.1 million cribs linked to four suffocations, the head of the Consumer Product Safety Commission conceded the agency "hasn't been acting as quickly as it should." Interviewed on morning news shows Tuesday in the wake of the largest-ever recall of cribs, Chairman Inez Tenenbaum pledged that the CPSC would "firmly but fairly" enforce a law Congress passed last year giving regulators greater authority to police the industry.
▣ Link found between Chinese drywall, corrosion
0 Comments added to this post
The federal government said Monday that it has found a "strong association" between problematic imported Chinese drywall and corrosion of pipes and wires, a conclusion that supports complaints by thousands of homeowners over the last year.
▣ Retailers suspend work with Mich. fruit grower
0 Comments added to this post
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. - Wal-Mart, Kroger and Meijer said Friday they are suspending business with a large southwestern Michigan blueberry grower after investigators found children as young as 6 working in the grower's fields. The retailers said, pending further information, they have stopped buying products from Adkin Blue Ribbon Blueberry Co. near South Haven, about 45 miles southwest of Grand Rapids.
▣ U.S. criticizes Toyota statement on floor mats
0 Comments added to this post
- Tags:
- USA
Toyota Motor Corp. released misleading information about an investigation into problems with stuck gas pedals that led to a massive Toyota recall, the U.S. government said Wednesday, stressing the issue is still under review by federal safety regulators.
▣ A drywall between China and the U.S.
0 Comments added to this post
Top U.S. safety officials were meeting with their Chinese counterparts to discuss complaints from American homeowners of illness and other damage from suspect drywall imported from China. Consumer Products Safety Commission Chairman Inez Tenenbaum said Friday that the two sides were talking about the issue while they await results of tests on what is causing the problems.
▣ Recall widens for clothes like robes that killed 9
0 Comments added to this post
- Tags:
- USA
Highly flammable women's robes sold by Blair LLC are now linked to nine deaths, and the company is expanding a recall to include more products imported from the Pakistani manufacturer. Since June, Blair LLC of Warren, Pa., has received four more reports of deaths linked to the full-length women's chenille robes, according to a Thursday announcement from the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Earlier this year, there were reports of five deaths linked to the robes.
▣ Why India's Garment Factories Have Proved Unreliable for New Workers
0 Comments added to this post
Brown light filtered through dust fills a nearly empty railway station in the state of Karnataka in south India. A vendor pours milky, brown tea back and forth between a glass cup and a metal beaker to cool it. He hands it to the stationmaster, who sips and waits. The station, in the town of Gauribidanur, about 45 miles from the technology hub of Bangalore, starts to fill up as men and women arrive by the hundreds. They are on their way to jobs in textile factories in Doddaballapur, about 30 miles away, and in Bangalore.
▣ No one ever wins a global trade war
0 Comments added to this post
- Tags:
- USA
Recent skirmishes in global trade have prompted readers to wonder why protecting American jobs with tariffs is such a bad idea. Unfortunately, in a global trade war, everybody loses.
▣ Skype's Life after eBay: Free in More Ways Than One
0 Comments added to this post
▣ Toyota recalls 3.8 million vehicles
0 Comments added to this post
Toyota Motor Corp. said Tuesday it will recall 3.8 million vehicles in the United States, the company’s largest-ever U.S. recall, to address problems with a removable floor mat that could cause accelerators to get stuck and lead to a crash. The recall will involve popular models such as the Toyota Camry, the top-selling passenger car in America, and the Toyota Prius, the best-selling gas-electric hybrid.
▣ Building Brickwork: How a Former Government Official Found His Entrepreneurial Niche
0 Comments added to this post
- Tags:
- USA
Over the past year, Bangalore-based outsourcing firm Brickwork India, led by Vivek Kulkarni, the founder and chief executive officer, has been working with the University of Pennsylvania's Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI) on a health care research project funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The aim is to help consumers, especially women, in the southern Indian state of Karnataka assess the quality of maternal and neo-natal healthcare offered by hospitals and clinics with less than 200 beds. The study is expected to help empower women to make more informed decisions while choosing a health care facility.
▣ Harley-Davidson trying to ride into India
0 Comments added to this post
Harley-Davidson Inc. said Thursday it will begin selling motorcycles next year in India, the world's second-largest motorcycle market, where the company hopes its iconic, heavyweight bikes will find a niche among the country's rising middle class. The Milwaukee-based company said it has established a subsidiary near Delhi and has begun scouting the country for dealers.
▣ Farhad Mohit: DotSpots and the Wisdom of Crowds
0 Comments added to this post
▣ Role-reversal: Americans provide loans to Chinese
0 Comments added to this post
As Americans struggle to dig themselves out of debt and soldier on through recession, one U.S- based organization is asking them to loan their spare dollars not to the needy at home, but to those residing in the United States’ largest foreign creditor: China. Wokai ("I Start" in Chinese), is a small Oakland, Calif.- based microfinance organization that is working to provide micro loans to an estimated 200 million Chinese who live on less than $1 a day.
▣ China's growth raises hopes for global economy
0 Comments added to this post
China's economic growth accelerated in the second quarter amid a stimulus-fueled investment boom, boosting hopes the world's third-largest economy is emerging from the global downturn. The economy expanded by 7.9 percent in the April-June period from a year earlier, up from 6.1 percent growth in gross domestic product the previous quarter, the National Bureau of Statistics reported Thursday.
▣ Proposed law aims to knock out knock-offs
0 Comments added to this post
A proposed new law that would extend copyright protection to clothing has designers in an uproar and threatens to widen a rift in the American fashion industry. For Maria Cornejo, whose Zero + Maria Cornejo label is a favorite of First Lady Michelle Obama, the Design Piracy Prohibition Act (DPPA) would protect her work for three years from knock-offs.
▣ Smoke alarms, tea kettles, basketballs recalled
0 Comments added to this post
The following recalls have been announced:
* About 94,000 Kidde dual sensor smoke alarms, model PI2000, because an electrostatic discharge can damage the unit, causing it not to warn consumers of a fire...
▣ Breakfast With George Soros
0 Comments added to this post
- Tags:
- USA
This morning The Wall Street Journal hosted a breakfast with über-investor George Soros, the man who "broke the Bank of England" by betting against the pound and earning a billion dollars for himself in the process. Last year, in the midst of a declining market, he came out of retirement to take control of his Soros Fund Management, which was up nearly 10 percent in a year when the S&P 500 shed about 40 percent.
▣ U.S.-China trade tensions starting to boil
0 Comments added to this post
- Tags:
- USA
Long-simmering economic tensions between the U.S. and China boiled over Tuesday as the Obama administration filed its first unfair-trade case against Beijing, accusing it of restricting exports of materials needed to produce steel, aluminum and other products. The administration vowed to protect the rights of American companies, and it got backing from the European Union, which filed its own case on the issue.
▣ Canada to ban phthalates in toys, vinyl bibs
0 Comments added to this post
The Canadian government proposed on Friday to ban the use of chemicals known as phthalates in soft vinyl toys, dolls, inflatable toys and vinyl bibs that could cause problems if sucked or chewed by a child for extended periods. However, the chemical industry said there was no scientific basis for such a ban.
▣ Kids' hoodies recalled for strangulation risk
0 Comments added to this post
The Consumer Product Safety Commission says Macy's will voluntarily recall about 33,000 hooded children's sweatshirts that pose a strangulation risk.
▣ Trade between China and the U.S
0 Comments added to this post
As China and the U.S. continue to explore ways to do business together, an overarching question remains: How to balance the benefits of economic integration -- which accrue to the people of the U.S. and China, as well as American and Chinese businesses -- with concerns about such issues as environmental and human rights protection.
▣ EPA finds suspect materials in foreign drywall
0 Comments added to this post
The Environmental Protection Agency has found suspect materials in a small sampling of Chinese-made drywall, adding weight to fears that the house-building staple may be causing corrosion in homes and possibly sickening people in several states, a report released Tuesday said.
▣ Already ill Mexican economy suffers from flu
0 Comments added to this post
- Tags:
- USA
The music of James Brown plays to an empty Starbucks. A woman has virtually an entire airliner to herself as she flies into Mexico City. Beach chairs go begging on Cancun's sugary sand. Already hammered by the global economic downturn and spiraling drug violence, Mexico now adds a public health crisis to its list of economic plagues. Commerce has come to a crawl in the flu-spooked capital. Tourism is tanking as fears fuel trade and travel bans.
▣ IE Business School's Riordan Roett
0 Comments added to this post
China, the United States and Latin America: Is there any room for Europe in this economic triangle? The presence of China in the Western hemisphere is changing the rules of the game, especially after the intensification of its commercial relations with the Latin American region. Is this a relationship of equals?
▣ Post-crash Scenarios for Commodities and 'Turbo-coupled' Emerging Markets
0 Comments added to this post
According to Ignatius Chithelen, managing partner of Banyan Tree Capital Management, an investment firm in New York City, emerging markets are not de-coupled but rather "turbo-coupled" to developed markets. In this opinion piece, Chithelen describes what he sees on the horizon for emerging markets and for commodities prices in the wake of the global economic crisis. Among his predictions: China will likely emerge as the big winner from the current worldwide recession, and Mexico's recent hedging of its oil exports will lead to a cap on commodities prices over the short to medium term.
▣ Toy makers not playing around in downturn
0 Comments added to this post
There will be fewer $250 dinosaurs and $180 robotic dogs on offer during the next holiday season as toy makers rein in production and trim prices in response to the weakest holiday season in decades. The selection at the industry's annual trade expo American International Toy Fair, which officially starts Sunday, will include Elmo Tickle Hands from Mattel Inc., for instance. They're vibrating, furry red gloves that will stand in place of yet another iteration of the Tickle Me Elmo doll — and cost less too.
▣ China outpaces the U.S. in Car Sales
0 Comments added to this post
It looks like China may have overtaken the United States as the world's biggest auto market. Official figures are due out this week that will show, for the first time ever, more vehicles were sold in China during January than in the United States.
▣ China dismisses US remark on currency manipulation
0 Comments added to this post
A top official at China's central bank has dismissed U.S. Treasury Secretary-designate Timothy Geithner's comment that President Barack Obama believes Beijing is "manipulating" its currency, state media said Saturday.
▣ U.S. hits China with trade violation case
0 Comments added to this post
U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab, in announcing the case, said China was violating global trade rules administered by the World Trade Organization in the way it operates a "famous brands" program to promote the sale of Chinese goods in other countries.