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Emerson said today that is has purchased the Marine Container and Boiler business of Johnson Controls, Inc.
The Ferguson-based manufacturer said it made the acquisition to expand its refrigeration technology offerings to shippers. Terms were not disclosed.
The Johnson unit is based in Denmark and supplies equipment that runs refrigerated sea containers and marine boilers, as well as equipment that monitors the temperature of shipping containers on land or at sea payday loan lenders. The technology is connects more than 650,000 containers and 2,200 ships to a centralized monitoring server.
It will become part of Emerson’s Climate Technologies division.
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The solar storm that seemed to be more fizzle than fury got much stronger early Friday before fading again.
At its peak, it was the most potent solar storm since 2004, space weather forecasters said.
No power outages or other technological disturbances were reported from the solar storm that started to peter out late Friday morning.
Solar storms, which can’t hurt people, can disturb electric grids, GPS systems, and satellites. They can also spread colorful Northern Lights further south than usual, as the latest storm did early Friday.
And more storms are coming. The federal government’s Space Weather Prediction Center says the same area of the sun erupted again Thursday night, with a milder storm expected to reach Earth early Sunday.
The latest storm started with a flare on Tuesday, and had been forecast to be strong and direct, with one scientist predicting it would blast Earth directly like a punch in the nose. But it arrived Thursday morning at mild levels _ at the bottom of the government’s 1-5 scale of severity. It strengthened to a level 3 for several hours early Friday as the storm neared its end. Scientists say that’s because the magnetic part of the storm flipped direction.
“We were watching the boxer, expecting the punch. It didn’t come,” said physicist Terry Onsager at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s space weather center in Boulder, Colo. “It hit us with the back of the hand as it was retreating.”
Forecasters can predict a solar storm’s speed and strength, but not the direction of its magnetic field. If it is northward, like Earth’s, the jolt of energy flows harmlessly around the planet, Onsager said. A southerly direction can cause power outages and other problems.
Thursday’s storm came in northerly, but early Friday switched to the fierce southerly direction. The magnetic part of the storm spent several hours at that strong level, so combined with strong radiation and radio levels, it turned out to be the strongest solar storm since November 2004, said NOAA lead forecaster Bob Rutledge.
Skywatchers reported to NOAA shimmering colorful auroras in Michigan, Wisconsin and Seattle _ areas that don’t normally see the Northern Lights _ Rutledge said. Other space weather enthusiasts reported auroras in Alaska, Minnesota, and North Dakota and in the southern hemisphere in Australia and New Zealand.
“Up north, they got a great display,” said NASA solar physicist David Hathaway.
By late Friday morning the storm was essentially over, forecasters said. But they had a new flare from the same sunspot region to watch. Preliminary forecasts show it to be slightly weaker than the one that just hit, arriving somewhere around 1 a.m. EST Sunday.
The storms are part of the sun’s normal 11-year cycle, which is supposed to reach a peak next year.
“This is what we’re expecting as we approach solar maximum,”" Onsager said. “We should be seeing this for the next few years now.”
The shopping carts at Ross Dress for Less have long, skinny poles on them so they don’t easily fit through the door — and don’t face the risk of never finding their way back inside.
It’s one of a number of ways that the California-based off-price retailer, which is making its St. Louis area debut, tries to shave off costs.
So when the company officials boast about “no frills” stores, they mean it. The stores, which are similar in concept to T.J. Maxx and Marshalls, also have centralized checkouts and simple displays.
Ross says it’s able to offer 20 to 60 percent off department store prices because of making those choices as well as by negotiating with manufacturers and buying opportunistically.
The retailer’s first stores in the St. Louis market have gone into the former Linens ‘n Things locations in Chesterfield and Fairview Heights. The stores had a soft opening on Friday.
Fred Shuey, the company’s vice president for the Midwest region, said Ross is very excited about coming to St. Louis and sees a lot of room for expansion here.
“This is two of many” for the St. Louis region, he said at a breakfast for fashion bloggers.
So how many?
“A lot,” he said vaguely, smiling.
Most Ross Dress stores are in the West and the South. But the company is now making inroads to the Midwest, starting with 12 stores that opened last fall in Chicago, one of its first new markets in about a decade, Shuey said.
“When you look at a map, we’re in the form a smiley face – from Seattle to Princeton, New Jersey,” he said. “Now we’re going to fill in the rest of that smiley face.”
Ross is one of a number of discount-oriented retailers that have been growing at a time when many other retailers have been in hibernation or closing stores.
It has added more than 200 stores in the last few years and is now up to more than 1,040 locations, making it the largest off-priced store in the country.
Here’s a couple of other interesting factoids I picked up at the breakfast and during a store tour:
– Ross stores get merchandise deliveries five days a week. So they have a “treasure hunt” feel to them.
– Each store usually starts out the same in terms of the merchandise mix. But after about 60 days, they will begin altering the balance to cater to what has done well in that particular store.
– Only about 75 Ross stores have fine jewelry. Neither of the local stores do, but they do have costume jewelry.
– Women make up about 80 to 85 percent of its shoppers. So not surprisingly, the men’s section is fairly small.
CRESTWOOD COURT MAKEOVER
A bowling alley, a new movie theater, and restaurants could fill the space currently occupied by the mostly-vacant Crestwood Court.
The property’s owner, Centrum Properties, met with Crestwood city officials this week to chat about its redevelopment plans to turn the shopping center into an entertainment-based destination.
Petree Eastman, Crestwood’s city administrator, said the new tenants aren’t set in stone yet, but Centrum officials told the city that they are close to signing a couple of deals.
“It will not look or feel like the old Crestwood mall,” Eastman said. “I think parts of it will be razed to give it a fresh face-lift. I think they want to have more of a pedestrian outdoor component. But until they sign their various renters, we can’t know what it will look like definitively.”
She said Centrum folks indicated they hoped to bring a redevelopment plan with more details before the city at a board meeting the last week of March.
Of course, the mall already has an AMC movie theater. But it sounds like the movie theater being proposed as part of the redevelopment plans would be more upscale and modern.
DEALS SITE BACK UP
The St. Louis Daily Deals website – stlouisdailydeals.com – was indeed put back up on Thursday as its operators had promised.
“We are sad to close our website and thank you for your support of St. Louis Daily Deals,” the site says in bold letters.
It goes on to recommend that consumers print out any unused coupons in their account. But it doesn’t say anything about whether or not those vouchers will be redeemable since many vendors have said they will not honor them until St. Louis Daily Deals pays them what is owed to them.
The daily deal site recently shut down amid financial difficulties, leaving consumers and merchants in the lurch. The operators have pledged to settle up all of its accounts, but hasn’t given a timeline for doing so.
So we’ll have to wait and see if they follow through on their promise.
Iran is poised to greatly expand uranium enrichment at a fortified underground bunker to a point that would boost how quickly it could make nuclear warheads, diplomats tell The Associated Press.
They said Tehran has put finishing touches for the installation of thousands of new-generation centrifuges at the cavernous facility _ machines that can produce enriched uranium much more quickly and efficiently than its present machines.
While saying that the electrical circuitry, piping and supporting equipment for the new centrifuges was now in place, the diplomats emphasized that Tehran had not started installing the new machines at its Fordo facility and could not say whether it was planning to.
Still, the senior diplomats _ who asked for anonymity because their information was privileged _ suggested that Tehran would have little reason to prepare the ground for the better centrifuges unless it planned to operate them. They spoke in recent interviews _ the last one Saturday.
The reported work at Fordo appeared to reflect Iran’s determination to forge ahead with nuclear activity that could be used to make atomic arms despite rapidly escalating international sanctions and the latent threat of an Israeli military strike on its nuclear facilities.
Fordo could be used to make fissile warhead material even without such an upgrade, the diplomats said.
They said that although older than Iran’s new generation machines, the centrifuges now operating there can be reconfigured within days to make such material because they already are enriching to 20 percent _ a level that can be boosted quickly to weapons-grade quality.
Their comments appeared to represent the first time anyone had quantified the time it would take to reconfigure the Fordo centrifuges into machines making weapons-grade material.
In contrast, Iran’s older enrichment site at Natanz is producing uranium at 3.4 percent, a level normally used to power reactors. While that too could be turned into weapons-grade uranium, reassembling from low to weapons-grade production is complex, and retooling the thousands of centrifuges at Natanz would likely take weeks.
The diplomats’ recent comments came as International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors are scheduled to visit Tehran on Sunday. Their trip _ the second this month _ is another attempt to break more than three years of Iranian stonewalling about allegations that Tehran has _ or is _ secretly working on nuclear weapons that would be armed with uranium enriched to 90 percent or more.
Diplomats accredited to the IAEA expect little from that visit. They told the AP that _ as before _ Iran was refusing to allow the agency experts to visit Parchin, the suspected site of explosives testing for a nuclear weapon and had turned down other key requests made by the experts.
Iranian officials deny nuclear weapons aspirations, saying the claims are based on bogus intelligence from the U.S. and Israel.
But IAEA chief Yukiya Amano has said there are increasing indications of such activity. His concerns were outlined in 13-page summary late last year listing clandestine activities that either can be used in civilian or military nuclear programs, or “are specific to nuclear weapons.”
Among these were indications that Iran has conducted high explosives testing and detonator development to set off a nuclear charge, as well as computer modeling of a core of a nuclear warhead. The report also cited preparatory work for a nuclear weapons test and development of a nuclear payload for Iran’s Shahab 3 intermediate range missile _ a weapon that could reach Israel.
Iran says it is enriching only to make nuclear fuel. But because enrichment can also create fissile warhead material, the U.N. Security Council has imposed sanctions on Tehran in a failed attempt to force it to stop.
More recently, the U.S., the European Union and other Western allies have either tightened up their own sanctions or rapidly put new penalties in place striking at the heart of Iran’s oil exports lifeline and its financial system.
The most recent squeeze on Iran was announced Friday, when SWIFT, a financial clearinghouse used by virtually every country and major corporation in the world, agreed to shut out the Islamic Republic from its network.
Diplomats say the choke-holds are being applied in part to persuade Israel to hold off on potential military strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities _ among them Fordo, a main Israeli concern because it is dug deep into a mountain and could be impervious to the most powerful bunker busting bombs.
Diplomats told the AP earlier this month that Iran had added two new series or cascades of old-generation IR-1 centrifuges to its Fordo operation, meaning 348 centrifuges were now operating in four cascades.
Olli Heinonen, who retired last year as the IAEA’s chief Iran inspector, recently estimated that these machines, and two other cascades at Natanz can produce around 15 kilograms (more than 30 pounds) of 20-percent enriched uranium a month, using Iran’s tons of low-enriched uranium as feedstock.
The low and higher enriched uranium now being produced “provides the basic material needed to produce four to five nuclear weapons,” Heinonen said.
But he suggested “an altogether different scenario” _ a much quicker pace of enrichment to levels easily turned into weapons-capable uranium if Iran starts using newer, more powerful centrifuges at Fordo. That, said the diplomats, is exactly what Iran appears to be on the verge of doing by finishing preparatory work recently for new centrifuge installations.
Fordo, which can house 3,000 centrifuges, was confidentially revealed to the IAEA by Iran in 2009, just days before the U.S. and Britain jointly announced its existence.
Iran announced last year that it would move its 20-percent uranium production to Fordo from Natanz and sharply boost capacity. It started making higher grade material two years ago saying it needed it to fuel a research reactor.
But the U.S. and others question the rationale, pointing out that Iran rejected offers of foreign fuel supplies for that reactor and is making more of the higher-enriched material than that small reactor needs.
A storm of criticism in China over share listing plans by a company that sells tonics made with bear bile is highlighting the increasingly affluent country’s changing attitudes toward the environment and wildlife.
Reports Friday said dozens of well-known entertainers, writers and other celebrities signed a petition to the China Securities Regulatory Commission urging it to withhold approval for the initial public offering by Guizhentang, a Chinese medicines maker. The company is awaiting approval for a share listing in Shenzhen.
Hundreds of thousands of comments on “weibo,” the Chinese version of Twitter, blasted the company for extracting bile from bears.
Animal rights groups contend the practice of bear bile farming is cruel because the animals are confined to small cages and milked of bile through catheters inserted into fistulas, or permanent wounds, in their gall bladders.
They say that antibiotics used to counter chronic infections from the practice, and other contaminants in the bile, also pose a hazard to human health.
A photo on the front page of the state-run newspaper China Business News on Friday showed a satirical photo montage of a caged bear, its muzzle bloodied, with a picture of the head of the China Association of Traditional Chinese Medicines, Fang Shuting, quoted as saying that bears are “very comfortable” while the bile is extracted.
News reports cited Fang as saying China has 68 licensed bear farms and more than 10,000 bears farmed for their bile, which can cost up to 4,000 yuan ($635) a kilogram.
A spokesman for Guizhentang, who gave his surname as “Xu,” refused comment.
“It is not the right time for an interview now. We will let you know when we want to do an interview,” Xu said.
Officials at the CSRC said they could not comment on an IPO plan under consideration.
Animal rights are gaining increasing attention in China, with public figures like basketball star Yao Ming and actor Jackie Chan speaking out against eating shark fins and other customs that many view as cruel or a threat to endangered species.
The change reflects both a growing awareness of the need to protect the environment and wildlife and also increasing affluence among many ordinary Chinese who now keep pets, travel overseas and have changing attitudes toward traditions they may not have questioned in the past.
In recent years, for example, animal protection groups have staged mass releases of cats and dogs caged for shipment to restaurants and markets, where they are slaughtered for dishes considered to be delicacies or especially nourishing.
The petition to the stock watchdog from more than 70 celebrities and environmental protection groups seeks to block the IPO and urges the use of synthetic substitutes for bear bile, which is a digestive substance made in the liver and stored in the gall bladder.
The main active ingredient in the bile is ursodeoxycholic acid, or UDCA, which is thought to act as an anti-inflammatory and is used to treat gall stones and liver ailments. It is mainly taken from the Asiatic Black Bear, a protected but not endangered species in China.
Chinese media reports cited Fang as defending Guizhentang’s bile collecting practices in a news conference in Beijing, after visiting its facilities in southeast China’s Fujian province.
“Collecting bile is like turning on a tap. It’s painless, natural and simple. I didn’t see bears suffering in the process,” Caijing magazine quoted Fang as saying.
“After the bile is extracted, bears can still drink milk and honey and have fun in the farm.”
Fang argued that bear farms helped to protect wild bears by discouraging poaching, and that China must preserve its unique, ancient medicinal practices. Animal rights groups contend that poaching continues because buyers view wild bear bile as more potent.
Farmed bears live about four or five years, while those in the wild live up to 30, according to the Animals Asia Foundation, which has been working to close down bear farms and rescue the animals.
A few members of the Federal Open Market Committee meeting said the central bank may soon have to consider more asset purchases, while others said the economic outlook would have to deteriorate first.
A few members said economic conditions
The Bank of England will raise its target for asset purchases next week as the debt crisis in Europe may have already pushed Britain
During her four years at Missouri State University, Rachel Kuenzler gravitated steadily toward the transition from college student to the full-time job that would signal her official entry into adulthood.
Her diligence paid off when, a week following graduation, Kuenzler found work.
And in a corporate environment - where colleagues the age of her parents outnumber twenty-somethings - Kuenzler was confronted with a dilemma that was left unaddressed by her college professors.
“I thought they wouldn’t take me seriously,” said Kuenzler, 25, an associate software engineer at MasterCard International operations center in O’Fallon, Mo.
The gap between neophytes and experienced employees has been around as long as people have been reporting to places of work.
Last year, MasterCard addressed with a “reverse mentoring” program that asks younger employees to, in effect, take older workers under their wings.
Peer-to-peer coaching is not unusual in corporate or even small business settings. But in most cases the programs call on seasoned employees to impart the wisdom of experience to younger colleagues.
MasterCard, in a concerted effort to retain and promote its younger workers, provided them with an opportunity to share their thoughts and observations on the workplace environment.
The coaching program at MasterCard may be reversed, but the strategy remains the same, said Rik Nemanick, an adjunct instructor at Washington University and a principal with The Leadership Effect, a St. Louis business consultancy. He has developed and facilitated coaching programs at Anheuser-Busch, Monsanto and other area corporations.
Mentoring programs help firms identify and develop existing talent, accelerate professional growth, nurture company loyalty and retain valuable employees, Nemanick said in a recent presentation to the St. Louis chapter of the Human Resource Management Association.
“When talented individuals reach the juncture when they might leave, it’s good that they have someone they can go to - someone they trust to discuss the situation,” he said.
At Monsanto, experienced technology division employees have tutored younger workers since 2003. The program began with 30 matches. This year, there are 70 selected from a pool of 150 applications.
“It has become part of the developmental culture within the organization,” Monsanto executive Maggie Morris told the human resources organization.
The reverse mentoring at MasterCard matched Kuenzler with Keith Martin, a 46-year-old team leader who joined MasterCard 20 years ago. The program placed 18 younger mentors with 11 supervisors.
Kuenzler saw the two-way conversation as an avenue to help Martin, and by extension other MasterCard supervisors, understand the conditions young employees seek in order to advance themselves along with the interests of the company.
“Younger employees like more openness, they are tech savvy and they don’t necessarily want to always be in meetings,” said senior human resources business partner Wanda Davega.
For example, Kuenzler and Generation Y prefer open work spaces that encourage collaboration.
Whereas Martin is admittedly more inclined to hole up in a cubicle.
Martin wasn’t exactly venturing into foreign territory when his monthly lunch meetings with Kuenzler began about a year ago - he has a daughter slightly older than his mentor.
But their meetings highlighted to him the difference between being a parent and being a colleague or supervisor.
He learned that the young people now moving into the workforce have little interest in easing into the corporate whirlwind.
“They like to move at a quick pace and effect change,” Martin said. “They basically want to jump right into the fire. They don’t want to hold back or want to hear, ‘Why don’t you wait three months to find your way around.’”
Nemanick traces the roots of the mentoring movement to a commitment to furthering the careers of minority employees at large and small businesses alike.
As the success of the programs became evident, many companies made the initiatives available to all workers.
In light of a Millennial Branding survey that this month revealed that young, recent hires comprise only 7 percent of the workforce at Fortune 500 companies, the opportunity to learn from a mentor is especially attractive to young people.
“It shrinks the big organizations,” Nemanick pointed out. “It crosses boundaries that (employees) wouldn’t normally cross.”
Its success in O’Fallon prompted MasterCard to offer reverse mentoring to employees at its global headquarters in Purchase, N.Y.
Eighteen months into her first job, Kuenzler already has a sense that her monthly meetings with Martin are making a difference.
She recently learned of plans to open her workspace by removing the wall of the over-sized cubicle she shares with several other young employees.
More important, to Kuenzler, are the chats with Martin that have brought about the removal of a more symbolic wall.
“Being able to share our thoughts with supervisors, getting their take and seeing that they are taking notes and listening, I’m already seeing a difference,” she said.
It’s been three months since MF Global became the eighth-largest bankruptcy in U.S. history. Did anyone see this coming?
Well, a few people had some idea, and a congressional subcommittee heard from them on Capitol Hill Thursday.
Michael Roseman, MF Global’s former chief risk officer, warned early of the dangers in the firm’s massive bets on troubled European debt. He clashed with ex-CEO Jon Corzine over the strategy before being replaced early last year by Michael Stockman, who also appeared at the hearing.
"I discussed my concerns about the positions and the risk scenarios with Mr. Corzine and others," Roseman told the subcommittee. "However, the risk scenarios I presented were challenged as being implausible."
Under questioning, Roseman said he believed his views on risk "certainly played a factor" in the firm’s decision to dismiss him.
MF Global () filed for bankruptcy on Halloween following a frantic week in which executives including Corzine, the former CEO and an ex-governor and senator from New Jersey, attempted to offload assets and sell the business.
The firm had come under intense pressure in the previous days after its $6.3 billion investment in European debt came to public notice. Trading partners called for increased margin payments and clients took their business elsewhere, leaving the firm scrambling for cash to meet its obligations.
"It almost looks like that they took Mr. Roseman out and replaced Mr. Roseman with a ‘yes man,’" Rep. Stephen Fincher said.
Stockman responded that he had initially signed off on the European bets, but later raised concerns and recommended bringing the firm’s risk down in July of last year.
Corzine, for his part, has acknowledged pushing the aggressive European strategy after arriving at MF Global in 2010, anxious to take it to the ranks of Wall Street’s elite.
The investments themselves didn’t actually lose money, as Corzine noted in Congressional testimony in December. None of the bonds MF Global held came from countries that have defaulted and all were set to mature before 2013. But Europe’s precarious finances and the massive leverage MF Global took on spooked investors and ultimately helped doom the firm need a personal loan with bad credit.
While an examination of MF Global’s risk management may have been the main focus of Thursday’s hearing, for the firm’s former customers, the bigger question is what happened to their money.
Customer funds at futures brokers like MF Global are supposed to be protected even in the event of a bankruptcy. In MF Global’s case, however, staffers were unable to account for roughly $1.2 billion in customer money that is now suspected to have been unlawfully appropriated for the firm’s own purposes.
Ratings agencies under fire: Others facing scrutiny Thursday were rating agencies Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, which waited until just days before MF Global’s bankruptcy to flag its European exposure even though the firm had disclosed it back in May.
By the time the rating agencies acted, the bets were already sparking concern among MF Global’s trading partners. The downgrades then sharply acclerated the firm’s downward spiral.
"[T]he abruptness of the downgrades and the suddenness of MF Global’s collapse raise questions about why the credit rating agencies did not consider MF Global’s exposure to European sovereign debt until late October," the House committee said in a memo last week.
Also appearing Thursday was James Gellert, head of the smaller ratings agency Rapid Ratings International, which maintained a grim outlook on MF Global long before its larger counterparts did. Gellert noted in his testimony that MF Global’s business model had been deteriorating for several years prior to its failure, and that the new risks in the European strategy only made its situation more precarious.
"Had MF Global offered a lower risk foundation, MF Global might have been able to withstand the failure of the new business strategy," Gellert said. "As it was, Mr. Corzine inherited an unhealthy company and made it worse by some high-stakes gambles."