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ZOO NEWS: Susan Gallagher, the longtime voice and face of Ameren, is the new director of public relations for the St. Louis Zoo.

Gallagher, who was at Ameren for just over 20 years, retired as director of corporate communications. In that capacity she oversaw advertising, internal and external communications and media relations. Until 2009, Gallagher’s voice was the one you would hear on the radio telling you where Ameren was experiencing outages and what the outlook was for repair times.

Although her official retirement date is Oct. 31, Gallagher started work at the Zoo on Oct. 17. She describes the new job as a post-retirement position, and said she doesn’t want people thinking she’s making the same kind of salary she made at Ameren, because she’s not.

“This is a government job, and I understand that,” Gallagher added with a laugh. “It’s more of a mission for me. I’ve loved the Zoo since I was 10 years old. When I was a little girl in Arkansas my family would come up to St. Louis and we’d visit the Zoo. I have home movies of me at the Zoo. I’ve always loved it.”

Gallagher is replacing Janet Powell, who retired Sept. 30 after 38 years at the Zoo. Powell was the Zoo’s first public relations professional. Powell, of Kirkwood, plans to spend some time in retirement doing volunteer work in the soup kitchen at Centenary United Methodist Church in downtown St. Louis.

Gallagher is married to St. Louis Post-Dispatch business reporter Jim Gallagher. They have two grown daughters.

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Rupert Murdoch jousted with disgruntled shareholders Friday as the 80-year-old chairman and CEO of News Corp. defended his handling of a phone hacking scandal in Britain and deflected any notion that he plans to step down soon.

More than 100 protesters gathered outside the 20th Century Fox studio lot where News Corp. held its annual shareholders meeting. Inside, with his sons Lachlan and James seated before him in the front row, Murdoch parried allegations that he had poor oversight of the company, sometimes cutting off speakers to jab in an insult or dispute a fact.

Votes from the shareholders were still being counted in the afternoon but the company said a proposal from the Christian Brothers Investment Services to force the company’s chairman to be an independent director had failed. Few had held out any hope they could overcome Murdoch’s control of 40 percent of voting shares through a family trust, or the 7 percent stake Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal had almost certainly cast in support of him.

“It was pretty perfunctory,” said Rev. Seamus Finn, who attended on behalf of the organization. “It was a nice meeting, but it didn’t offer much in terms of how they’re going to put this behind them.”

Questions and comments from shareholders focused on the phone-hacking scandal, which caused the company this summer to shutter the tabloid News of the World and drop its $12 billion bid for full control of British Sky Broadcasting. Britons and other people worldwide were outraged to learn that a private investigator hired by the paper had hacked into the cellphone voicemail of 13-year-old Milly Dowler, potentially impeding a police investigation and giving false hope to her family. Dowler was later found to be murdered.

The phone hacking scandal has forced the resignation of two of London’s top police officers, ousted top executives such as Dow Jones & Co. CEO Les Hinton, and claimed the job of Prime Minister David Cameron’s former spin doctor, Andy Coulson, an ex-News of the World editor. The company said in London on Friday that it had agreed to pay 2 million pounds ($3.2 million) to her family and 1 million pounds ($1.6 million) to charities the family will choose.

Friday marked the first time Murdoch faced shareholders with small stakes in the company since the scandal broke in July.

Outside the studio lot, some demonstrators carried anti-Murdoch signs, including one that stated “Fire the Murdoch Mafia.” Another read, “Rich media equals poor democracy.” Some of the demonstrators were from an organization that has been staging rallies recently to demand good jobs.

Tom Watson, a member of Parliament with Britain’s Labour Party, flew to Los Angeles to make a new allegation about covert surveillance techniques by company employees.

Watson asked Murdoch if he was aware that a person who had left prison was hired by News Corp.’s British newspaper unit and hacked into the computer of a former army intelligence officer. He later said the incident happened around 2005 and that evidence of the computer hacking is with London’s Metropolitan Police. He said it could lead to the discovery of further victims of computer hacking. Watson said he has made the allegation before but it hasn’t been widely reported.

Watson represented nearly 1,700 non-voting shares for labor group AFL-CIO and got up twice and spoke for a few minutes during the 90-minute meeting. He is been a key driver of a 2 1/2-year probe into phone hacking and alleged police bribery at the company’s British newspaper unit.

Murdoch said he wasn’t aware of the allegation, and board director Viet Dinh said the company would look into it.

“I promise you absolutely that we will stop at nothing to get to the bottom of this and put it right,” Murdoch said.

Watson evoked private investigator Glenn Mulcaire, who was jailed in 2007 for eavesdropping on the phones of royal staff. He warned that this investigation could mean more problems ahead for the company.

“News Corp. is potentially facing a Mulcaire 2,” Watson said. “You haven’t told any of your investors about what is to come.”

Several shareholders took issue with a chart Murdoch put up showing the stock’s upbeat performance compared with most media peers since the beginning of the year and since the beginning of July. They said its performance over 10 years or more lagged its peers. Murdoch said the chart was to address criticism that the company had been hurt by the hacking scandal.

Edward Mason, secretary of the Ethical Investment Advisory Group, which advises the Church of England’s investments, began speaking about News Corp.’s shareholder returns when Murdoch butted in, saying “Your investments haven’t been that great, but go on.”

Stephen Mayne, a journalist and shareholder activist who once worked for News Corp.’s Australian newspapers, protested when Murdoch tried to bring the meeting to a close.

“Never before have you attempted to shut it down quite like this,” Mayne said.

Murdoch retorted: “You had a lady friend who shut you down in the past.”

Murdoch then got a laugh when he claimed he was being as open and fair as possible in letting critics air their concerns. “We even had Mr. Watson on Fox television this morning,” he said. “It’s called fair and balanced.”

Despite the circus-like atmosphere, several large shareholder groups quietly registered their concerns, including Todd Mattley, investment officer for the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, which has some $225 billion in assets.

Mattley said CalPERS voted its 1.4 million voting shares in favor of the Christian Brothers’ proposal demanding an independent chairman. Although he said he knew the vote was “symbolic” he said later, “This is something we’ve said is a governance best practice.”

The company also came under renewed fire for its dual-class share system, which allows the Murdochs to control the company despite owning voting shares that account for less than 15 percent of the company’s total $44 billion market value.

Dinh said the last time the company voted on the dual-share structure was in 2007, when it passed with 77 percent of the votes.

News Corp.’s non-voting shares are down about 5 percent from when the scandal broke in early July, although they have been buoyed recently by a $5 billion share buyback plan that is about a third complete. On Friday, News Corp.’s stock rose 35 cents, or 2.1 percent, to close at $17.20.

Proxy advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services had recommended voting out all existing board members, including Murdoch and his sons James and Lachlan. Two other firms, Glass Lewis and Egan-Jones, recommend voting against the sons, among others.

Although the vote count hadn’t yet been tallied, the company said all of its director nominees had been elected.

Jay Eisenhofer, co-lead attorney in a shareholder lawsuit against News Corp. on charges of mishandling the affair, said on a conference call with Watson on Thursday that if even 20 percent of votes are cast against the re-election of Murdoch and his two sons, it would be a victory. That’s because that would be nearly half the 53 percent of votes unaffiliated with the family, he said.

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Alarmed by dismal economic conditions around the world, Toronto economist David Rosenberg asserts that “it’s time to start calling this for what it is: A modern day depression.”

Rosenberg made his reputation as a globally esteemed economist in New York as one of the top economic forecasters at Merrill Lynch & Co. When the Toronto money management firm Gluskin Sheff recruited Rosenberg home to his native Canada to continue his sage analysis from a slightly more Canadian perspective, I regarded this as a public service.

When someone of Rosenberg’s stature, even discounting his characteristic bearish sentiment, starts using the D-word, one can assume it will start popping up in the reports of securities analysts and macroeconomists worldwide.

There’s no question we’re in a world of hurt, from which Canada is not isolated.

Jim Flaherty, the federal finance minister, tried to slap down Peggy Nash, the NDP finance critic, in the Commons earlier this week by accusing her of “badmouthing” the economy. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) had just downgraded its forecasts of Canadian GDP growth — from 2.8 per cent this year to only 2.1; and to a mere 1.9 per cent next year from an earlier forecast of 2.6 per cent.

If Nash is badmouthing the economy, then so are the IMF and David Rosenberg. Spitting on the messengers doesn’t change the fact that for the almost 1.4 million Canadians who are unemployed, we are indeed in a depression. And that about one million children in this country are living in poverty.

Our jobless rate, at 7.3 per cent, remains higher than the 6.0 per cent of October 2008, when the Great Recession began. And Canadian household debt is at near-record levels, as the income of middle- and working-class Canadians has continued its 30-year stagnation.

The U.S. and Europe, markets we rely on for export revenue, are in economic crisis.

Yet for all that, we are not in a depression, nor bound for one. Not remotely.

Put aside that the same IMF report that downgraded our GDP growth also forecast that it will continue to outpace our G7 peers over the next two years. And that Flaherty remains convinced GDP growth will be strong enough to enable him to keep his pledge to eradicate the last of the deficit accumulated in 2009-10 within three to four years.

The crippling North American jobless rate during the Depression ranged from 17 to 28 per cent. It was much higher in the hardest-hit regions like Appalachia and in “Dust Bowl” communities where family farms perished by the thousands.

Not until 1954 did the stock markets recover to their previous peak at the time of the Crash of ’29 — a span of a quarter century.

Today’s stock market, despite a slide over the summer, is trading at 2000 levels — not shabby given the epic global financial meltdown of 2008-09. U.S. banks failed by the thousands in the Depression. Today’s U.S. banks are sitting on about $2 trillion in idle reserves they refuse to lend until they’re absolutely certain that the meltdown will have no second act.

Similarly, corporate profits have soared, recovering to record levels in many industrial sectors. And perhaps most important is the absence of Depression-era trade wars, regarded by most economic historians as the chief cause of the Depression’s depth and duration.

There was, of course, no elaborate social safety net in place during the Depression, an unprecedented failure of cowboy capitalism that caused us to bring about those protections.

If you look beyond the admittedly discouraging conditions of the moment, you can see the European powers — chiefly all-important Germany — overcoming their reservations about reinventing the eurozone, to resolve that crisis and emerge with a far stronger common currency zone than they first conceived only 12 years ago.

And concern about the so far “jobless recovery” has lately pulled governments in Canada, the U.S. and Britain away from their sole obsession — as recently as a few months ago — with balancing the books.

The Depression was wholly different. In 1932, the Saturday Evening Post asked John Maynard Keynes, the great British economist, if the Depression had any precedent. “Yes,’ he replied. ‘It was called the Dark Ages, and it lasted four hundred years.”

It’s hubris to say a Depression could never happen again. Yet in these troubled times, we are dealing mostly with familiar problems, to which there are solutions that have reliably worked in the past.

We are, it’s true, in the grips of economic malaise. And the lack of urgency in curing us of it is a temptation to strong words. But since the crisis is more political than economic, better that we hold to account the powers that be and not go into rhetorical overdrive about the conditions themselves.

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General Motors announced it will invest $380 million and will add a second shift to its assembly plant in Wentzville as part of a new contract under negotiation with the United Auto Workers.

If union members vote to approve the four-year contract next week, it will mean 1,850 new jobs for the Wentzville assembly plant, said UAW Local 2250 chairman Mike Bullock, who is in Detroit for GM’s announcement today. Local 2250 represents hourly workers at the Wentzville plant.

The expansion will be for production of a 2014 mid-size pickup truck and and a full-size van, although GM did not release which models.

Bullock said if the contract is approved, the second shift will be added at the first part of 2012. Local 2250 will vote on the contract Monday and all votes are expected to be completed by next Tuesday.

“This will be a real shot in the arm for Wentzville and the St. Louis area,” Bullock said. “This really is a tribute to the men and women who work at the Wentzville assembly center and produce the best quality product at the best cost payday loan.”

Last week, Wentzville’s board of aldermen approved tax abatement for expansion of the Wentzville plant, which currently has a single shift and 1,300 employees.

GM makes Chevrolet Express and GMC Savana full-size vans at the plant, about 40 miles west of St. Louis.

At GM’s press conference today, the Detroit-based automaker outlined investments at several other plants nationwide, including plans to invest $925 million at three Michigan factories that will create 900 jobs during the life of the contract. 

Including the Wentzville jobs, GM also outlined plans for investing in plants in Spring Hill, Tenn., and Fort Wayne, Ind., that will create or preserve a combined 3,700 jobs.

Check back on stltoday.com for updates to this story.  

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Consumers spent less on autos, clothing and furniture, leaving retail sales unchanged in August. The lack of growth in retail sales during a month of wild stock market fluctuations may increase recession fears.

The Commerce Department says retail sales showed no growth in August and demand in July was weaker than first thought.

Auto sales fell 0.3 percent. Sales at clothing stores declined 0.7 percent. Gasoline sales rose.

The flat reading in August was a surprise given reports from retailers that back-to-school shopping and auto sales were strong during the month compared to a year ago.

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Uncle Sam wants you to know more about what you’re eating.

The Food and Drug Administration wants to revise the nutrition facts label _ that breakdown of fats, salts, sugars and nutrients on packaging _ to give consumers more useful information and help fight the national obesity epidemic.

A proposal is in the works to change several parts of the label, including more accurate serving sizes, a greater emphasis on calories and a diminished role in the daily percent values for substances like fat, sodium and carbohydrates.

It’s the latest attempt to improve the way Americans view food and make choices about what they eat, and comes in the wake of major advances in nutrition regulations by the Obama administration.

Calorie counts are popping up on menus of chain restaurants across the country and the longstanding food pyramid was toppled this year by the U.S. government in favor of a plate that gives a picture of what a healthy daily diet looks like.

The struggle to redesign the labels on every box, can and carton has been in the works since 2003, and some of the changes could be proposed as soon as this year. FDA Deputy Commissioner Michael Taylor cautions not to expect a grand overhaul, but the revamped label does mark a shift to create a more useful nutritional snapshot of foods millions of Americans consume every day.

“There’s no question obesity is a central public health concern that the nutrition facts panel can play a role in. It’s obviously not a magic wand but it can be an informative tool,” said Taylor.

For two decades, the black and white label has offered a glance of nutritional information about what’s inside each package, including calories and grams of fats, cholesterol, protein and carbohydrates. Critics have complained it’s confusing and doesn’t offer a simpler way to make a choice about whether it’s good for them _ a judgment the industry wants to leave to consumers.

The proposed label is likely to produce several changes, said Taylor.

For starters, portion sizes should better reflect reality. The 2.5 servings listed on a 20-ounce soda bottle are typically slurped up by an individual in one sitting rather than split between a couple and their child. The same goes for a can of soup, where one serving is often listed as two-fifths of a can.

The FDA is also likely to find a way to emphasize calories, which many people rely on for weight control. Other items likely to disappear or change because they haven’t proven useful include calories from fat and the daily percent value numbers that show how much what an average diet should include.

Still, some wish the revisions would go further to list information about the amount of preservatives in a food and the degree of processing it has undergone. Health activists say such changes could help trim waistlines in America.

The food industry wouldn’t like to see many major changes. The current label is easily recognizable and adaptable to food packages of different sizes because it’s simple, said Regina Hildwine, director for science, policy, labeling and standards at the Grocery Manufacturers Association.

Hildwine says her Washington-based group, which represents 300 top food, beverage companies _ including Nestle, General Mills Inc., and Coca-Cola Co. _ has provided extensive feedback to the FDA in the run-up to their proposed rule.

“I personally talk with FDA on a regular basis to share views and get information and sometimes they call me,” said Hildwine.

Advocates believe that the government and industry are too cozy, and that food companies are reluctant to overhaul food labels for fear of their profits being hurt paydayloans.

“It’s against the industry’s interest to help the consumer make better choices because then they’ll sell less food,” said Kelly Brownell, director of Yale University’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity. “If the population is going to lose weight, it’s going to eat less food, so that means less business for them.”

There’s no shortage of ideas on how to improve the label. A recent contest by the University of California, Berkeley and Good Magazine yielded 60 colorful new designs.

A familiar theme popped up: red, yellow and green colors of a traffic light to indicate whether a food is good or bad. Another offered thumbs up and thumbs down on nutrients, depending on how much.

Manufacturers don’t think a stoplight system would work because most foods have a mix of nutrients and diets are not the same for everyone, Hildwine said.

“A color-coded scheme would not be as helpful to consumers as a fact-based approach,” she said.

The winning design was created by Renee Walker, whose label is topped by a large blocks of color above the nutrient listing, with each block representing an ingredient. For example, a jar of peanut butter would typically have a big box for peanuts, a smaller box for sugar, and other blocks for other ingredients.

The FDA has long avoided putting qualitative judgments about food on labels in favor of a simple listing of macronutrients, said contest judge and Center for Science in the Public Interest executive director Michael Jacobson.

Before the FDA first introduced the nutrition facts label in 1992, choosy Americans puzzled over a tiny printed listing of ingredients on packages to help determine what to feed their families.

As a result, Americans often relied on gut feelings to choose their diets at a time when the obesity epidemic was taking root.

Dr. David Kessler served as FDA commissioner during what he called a “battle royale” over the first label.

“Every change is a battle with the food industry,” said Kessler. “The food label that we implemented _ did it harm the food industry in any way? No. In fact, I’m sure they profited from it.”

Kessler, now a University of California, San Francisco professor and author, says the label is due for an update.

Like many experts, he’d like to see the new label address how much ingredients are processed.

A pie-chart could, for example, show how much of a jar of tomato sauce is from actual tomatoes, and how much is sugar, fats, sodium, water and whatever else may be in it.

Not that all food processing is bad. Skim milk and lean meat have been skimmed and trimmed of fat. Frozen vegetables are typically captured at peak ripeness without introduction of preservatives or sodium.

But many highly processed foods are stuffed with unpronounceable and nutritionally questionable substances. Add fat, sugar and salt, as processed foods so often do, Kessler said, and you have the perfect recipe for an American-style obesity epidemic.

“Twenty years ago, you would have maybe 20 to 30 chews per bite of food,” said Kessler. “Today, food is so highly processed and so stimulating it goes down in a wash (of saliva), like we’re eating adult baby food.”

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Official figures show that British government borrowed far less in July than it did in the same month a year ago.

The Office for National Statistics says Friday that public sector net borrowing, which excludes financial interventions such as bank bailouts, was 20 million pounds ($33 million), way down on last year’s equivalent 3.5 billion pounds ($5.8 billion). It was also much lower than the 2.5 billion pound ($4.1 billion) shortfall expected in markets.

The statistics office said the levy on banks’ balance sheets contributed some 660 million pounds ($1.1 billion) in July while public finances were also boosted by larger corporation tax receipts, sales taxes and lower spending by local government.

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`I feel confident this will pass,” declared Vice President Joe Biden, dispatched by the White House to lobby disgruntled Democrats in the Capitol.

At the same time, House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio pressed Republican conservatives behind closed doors to support the deal he sealed with a phone call Sunday night to President Barack Obama. At a news conference, he said the legislation would “solve this debt crisis and help get the American people back to work.”

The measure would cut federal spending by at least $2.1 trillion over a decade - and possibly considerably more - and would not require tax increases. The U.S. debt limit would rise by at least $2.1 trillion, tiding the Treasury over through the 2012 elections.

Moving with unusual speed, Republican leaders ordered debate to begin on the House floor at mid-afternoon. That followed public pledges of support from some first-termers as well as veteran defense hawks - two areas of concern with the agreement.

Rep. C.W. (Bill) Young, chairman of the committee that handles the defense budget, said, “We’re confident that we can make this happen without affecting readiness and without affecting any of our soldiers.”

There were Republican critics, as well, but they were harder to find than last week when they derailed an earlier bill Boehner brought to the floor payday lenders.

“I’m looking for a reason to vote yes,” said Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas, shortly before debate began on the measure. “I haven’t found it, and I’ve been looking since 2 a.m.”

After months of wrangling over a deal, there was little time left for lawmakers to decide.

Without legislation in place by the end of Tuesday, the Treasury would run out of cash needed to pay all its bills. Administration officials say a default would ensue that would severely damage the economy.

Beyond merely avoiding disaster, Obama and congressional leaders hoped their extraordinary accord would reassure investors at home and around the world, preserve the United States’ Aaa credit rating and begin to slow the growth in America’s soaring debt. In a roller-coaster day on Wall Street, the Dow Jones industrial average surged, then sank and finally finished down for a seventh straight session but only slightly.

There was little suspense about the outcome for the debt-limit legislation in the Senate, where Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., announced a vote would occur either Monday evening or on Tuesday.

A member of the Republican leadership in the Senate predicted strong GOP support. “Maybe 35 (of 47) will support it in the end. There will be some who will pull back,” said Sen. Mike Crapo of Idaho.

 

WASHINGTON

ATHENS

More likely than not, Missouri legislators will meet in a special session this summer to focus on state tax-credit programs, including the proposed Aerotropolis tax credit designed to boost Lambert-Louis International Airport as a cargo hub.

At least that’s the view today by Sen. Brad Lager, who rates the chance of a such as session as “60-40″ in favor.

“I think we’re definitely leaning toward it happening,” said Lager, R-Savannah.

Whether such a session occurs depends on the Senate’s ability to work out with the Missouri House a framework of tax credit changes to a program that costs the state hundreds of millions of dollars a year. A legislative deal must also be something Gov. Jay Nixon would sign.

No tax-credit changes were enacted during this year’s regular legislative session because of disagreements between House and Senate versions. A casualty was the $360 million Aerotropolis tax credit that focused on making Lambert a center for Chinese cargo flights. Aerotropolis would provide tax breaks to companies engaging in foreign trade and subsidize the construction of millions of square feet of warehouse and factory space in areas across the St. Louis region.

Lager, who is among the senators in the middle of the tax-credit debate, said the timing of a special session–if one is called–remains up in the air. It might happen with the legislative veto session, already scheduled for September. But it might take place earlier, says Lager, depending on when the Chinese government completes its five-year “master plan” of projects.

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