Finance & Business World

OTTAWA

NATO warplanes struck Moammar Gadhafi’s compound in Tripoli on Saturday, as the new rebel administration warned it was fast running out of money because countries that promised financial aid have not come through.

Ali Tarhouni, the rebel finance minister, complained that many countries that pledged aid have instead sent a string of businessmen looking for contracts from the oil-rich country.

“They are very vocal in terms of (offering financial) help but all that we have seen is that they are … looking for business,” Tarhouni told The Associated Press on Saturday.

Tarhouni recently returned to Benghazi, the rebel bastion, from a trip overseas to drum up aid that included a visit to Rome where the 22-nation Contract Group on Libya promised to set up a fund to speedily help finance the rebel administration.

“I think even our friends do not understand the urgency of the situation. Either they don’t understand, or they don’t care,” Tarhouni said.

Tarhouni singled out Qatar and Kuwait for their “generous, very generous help.” He did not specify the aid these countries have offered, but Qatar has sent fighter jets, airplanes full of food and medical aid as well as helping the rebels market their oil.

Tarhouni also praised France, which was the driving force behind the U.N. no-fly zone. But “other than that, everybody is just talking,” he said. “So far, nothing has come through and I am fast running out of cash.”

Tarhouni emphasized that the rebels’ National Transitional Council will be signing no long-term contracts. While the rebel administration will honor previously signed contracts, Tarhouni indicated a new democratically elected government might do otherwise.

“Right now, I am not going to sign any contract that has any consequences for the future of Libya, with the exception of what I need in terms of food, medicine, fuel,” he said.

Before the conflict, Libya, an OPEC member, produced about 1.6 million barrels per day, just under 2 percent of world production.

Meanwhile, nearly two dozen Libyan soldiers, including a colonel and other officers, fled their country in two small boats and took refuge in neighboring Tunisia, where thousands fleeing the fighting in Libya have taken refuge.

A person who met with some of them says they fled rebel-held Misrata, arriving at Ketf port, near Ben Guerdane, on the Tunisian side of the border. The person who met with them Saturday asked to remain anonymous for security reasons. The group turned over their weapons to the Tunisian Army.

The official TAP news agency said 22 military, some ranking officers, arrived Friday in boats carrying a dozen civilians, two with bullet wounds.

Three dissident officers from Moammar Gadhafi’s army reached Tunisia in a boat May 15.

Also Saturday, an alliance spokesman said NATO fighter jets struck Gadhafi’s Bab al-Aziziyah compound in Tripoli in the early hours Saturday. He said the Libyan leader was not a target and there was no way to know if he was there at the time of the attack.

The spokesman said that around noon a vehicle storage area in the same area was hit.

The strike sent a shuddering boom through Tripoli and rattled windows. Such a daylight attack is fairly unusual since NATO began its aerial attacks over Libya three months ago.

Airstrikes over the past week have pounded the large barracks area that lies close to the Gadhafi compound. The same compound was badly damaged by U.S. warplanes 25 years ago in response to a bombing that had killed two U.S. servicemen at a German disco.

Saturday’s airstrike came after leaders at a summit of the Group of Eight world powers reiterated that Gadhafi had to leave power.

Russia, a leading critic of the NATO bombing campaign and one-time Gadhafi ally offered to mediate a deal for the Libyan leader to leave the country.

Speaking at the summit in Deauville, France, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, said Friday he was sending an envoy to the rebel stronghold of Benghazi immediately to start negotiating, and that talks with the Libyan government could take place later.

National Transitional Council head Mustafa Abdul-Jalil said Saturday the rebels would accept negotiations led by anyone willing to find a solution _ as long as it requires the departure of Gadhafi and his sons.

Speaking to reporters in Benghazi, Abdul-Jalil said the transition to democracy would take at most one year after Gadhafi’s removal from power. He also said the council had decided to ban all current members “from running for any positions in the transitional period following the fall of Gadhafi.”

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Chris Housand dumped his job as a forklift operator in January to seek skills that would make him valuable over a lifetime.

“Being 22 and with two kids and a wife I had a lot of weight on my shoulders,” said the Tarboro, North Carolina, resident. Warehouse work “was pretty much a dead-end job.”

He enrolled in electrical-lineman school at Nash Community College in nearby Rocky Mount. After graduation on May 6, he was hired into a four-month paid internship program that holds the promise of a permanent position, at a time when 16.1 percent of men in his age group are jobless.

Housand is catching a wave of demographic change that’s likely to benefit younger workers. A generational replacement cycle is taking hold as companies such as General Electric Co. (GE), Norfolk Southern Corp. (NSC), Boeing Co. (BA), American Electric Power Co. Inc. and Dominion Resources Inc. all try to hire skilled younger staff to prepare for a wave of retiring workers.

“Firms will increasingly find that the outflows of retiring workers are bigger than the inflows of younger workers,” said Nicole Maestas, a labor economist at the RAND Corporation, a Santa Monica, California-based policy group cash advance loans. “Nobody is immune to these basic demographic facts.”

GE doubled its U.S. college hiring program to 1,278 in 2010. The world’s biggest maker of jet engines, gas turbines, and medical-imaging equipment scouts some 40 U.S. universities to replenish its pipeline of engineers and future managers and spends $300,000 per student in its two-year trainee program.

‘Big Swings’

“We can afford to take some big swings, and investing in people and growing talent is what we do best,” said Steven Canale, manager of global recruiting and staffing for Fairfield, Connecticut-based GE. “The workforce is getting older.”

The median age for the U.S. population climbed to a record 37.2 in 2010, according to the Census Bureau, and the workforce in several industries is even older.

The median age in aerospace manufacturing was 47.9 in 2010, meaning half the workforce in Boeing’s industry was older than that; in electrical power generation it was 45.4; and in rail transportation it was 46.5, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

Norfolk Southern let its staff shrink through attrition and retirement during the recession that began in December 2007. The economy has since expanded for seven quarters, and demand for natural resources and exports has snapped back.

Coal Facility

The Norfolk, Virginia based railroad, which owns the largest coal-export facility in the northern hemisphere, hired 2,800 people last year and has plans to hire 4,000 this year, according to Cindy Earhart, vice president of human resources.

One goal is to rebuild the ranks of young managers. The company is seeking about 300 college graduates to replace the 6 percent of 4,800 managers who will retire this year.

Companies such as Dominion Resources in Richmond, Virginia, are also looking for young “gray-collar” workers for jobs that require both physical ability and technical knowledge. Matt Kellam, supervisor in charge of strategic staffing at Dominion, says finding a supply of linemen and engineers is a priority.

“A good number of our lineman are 45 years and older,” Kellam said, adding that community college graduates and military veterans can provide the company with the skilled technicians it needs.

The firm has about 48 people in its lineman training program. Starting salaries are about $33,000 in the industry, Kellam said, and can rise to $80,000 or more with overtime for a journeyman.

Dropout Rates

At Nash Community College, instructor Bob Schubauer says about 30 students enroll in his lineman classes each semester. Rigorous climbing in the rain, cold and heat, and demanding engineering math, usually cut that number by two-thirds by the time his 16-week certification program is over.

In an 8:30 a.m. class, Schubauer barks orders to his students after he asks them to diagram an electrical network on the white board.

“I don’t want any confusion, I don’t want any assumptions. I want these diagrams to speak for themselves,” he says. “I don’t want to see any inconsistencies.”

Housand approaches the board and begins to draw how he would configure a bank of three transformers to go from high to usable voltage. Some of the diagrams the students draw involve about two dozen calculations.

Schubauer wants the students to know the theory behind what they are handling even though most linemen head into the field with detailed plans. The cost of a mistake is blown transformer, a power outage, injury or death, he said.

Cold Climbing

An hour later, Housand and his classmates are cinching a BuckSqueeze, a climbing belt made by Buckingham Manufacturing Co. in Binghamton, New York, around 40-foot poles, then inchworming their way up. His internship at the City of Rocky Mount lasts for 16 weeks. Four other classmates also found work.

“It is very reasonable to expect, if we have an opening, for Chris Housand to be hired unless another applicant has a lot more experience,” said Darryl Strother, Rocky Mount’s electric superintendent.

Housand worked at a cotton gin right out of high school. Now, he calls himself a “linegineer,” his term for a job that requires physical stamina and engineering knowledge.

“We do not have a labor shortage in America, we have a skill shortage,” said Boeing’s Stephens. “The key is will there be enough people to meet our needs?”

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The economy hit a soft patch in the first three months of this year, caused by a big jump in oil prices, and the impact of those higher prices are likely to weigh on growth for the rest of the year.msg

After growing at an annual rate of 3.1 percent in the final three months of last year, the economy slowed to just 1.8 percent growth in the January-March period.

The Commerce Department is scheduled to revise that figure Thursday. Analysts surveyed by FactSet are looking for an upward revision to around 2.2 percent growth, still a lackluster pace.

Going forward, many analysts believe the economy will perform only slightly better in the current April-June quarter and in the second half of this year. They see overall growth, as measured by the gross domestic product, bumping along at an annual rate just below 3 percent.

“The rest of this year is not going to be a barn burner,” said Sung Won Sohn, an economics professor at the Martin Smith School of Business at California State University. “The higher energy prices are going to continue to cascade throughout the economy.”

And in addition to higher energy prices, there are also concerns that the European debt crisis could once again threaten to derail the U.S. economy, just as it did in the spring of 2010.

Analysts are also concerned about how much of an impact the supply disruptions stemming from the March earthquake and tsunami in Japan will have on U.S. manufacturing, especially factories making cars and electronic products that depend on component parts from Japan low fee payday loans.

Some analysts think that Japan’s supply chain problems could shave as much as one-half percentage point from growth in the April-June period.

David Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor’s in New York, said he believed economic growth in the current quarter will come in at an annual rate of 2.5 percent, little changed from the first quarter.

He said he looked for growth in the second half of the year to strengthen slightly to around 3 percent as the manufacturing supply disruptions ease and auto plants and other factories get back to full production.

Wyss said he saw growth for the whole year at around 2.7 percent, slightly below last year’s 2.9 percent growth.

“There are just too many headwinds for the economy to fight against at the moment,” Wyss said.

Some economists are more optimistic that the economy will be able to shake off all its problems and grow at a faster rate in the second half of the year.

Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, is forecasting growth will average close to 4 percent from July through December.

“For this year, the first quarter will be the low point but the final quarter will be the high point, providing good momentum going into 2012,” Zandi said. “I am looking for 2012 to be a good year.”

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Energy company El Paso says it’s planning to separate into two publicly traded businesses by the end of the year.

The Houston company’s stock jumped more than 7 percent to $20.35 in pre-market trading.

The company’s board approved plans to spin off its exploration and production business. Terms were not disclosed.

After the spinoff, El Paso Corp. will include its pipeline group, its midstream group and its general and limited partner interests in El Paso Pipeline Partners LP on line pay day loans. Doug Foshee will remain chairman and CEO.

The new publicly traded exploration and production business will be led by the unit’s president, Brent Smolik, as CEO.

The separation is subject to market, regulatory and tax approvals.

Williams Cos. and Marathon Oil Corp. underwent similar separations this year.

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If you’re thinking of buying a car soon, here’s some advice: Don’t.

“If you can wait, wait,” says Jeremy Anwyl, CEO of Edmunds.com, the car-buying website.

The Japanese earthquake is raising prices and cutting selection

Despite the collapse last week of a tax credit bill designed to help them build a cargo hub in St. Louis, Chinese airline officials are still heading here to talk about flights.

So said Steve Stone, a Clayton attorney and member of St. Louis’ negotiating team with China Cargo Airlines. Stone confirmed the visit is still on after a talk this morning about the cargo project to a group of local construction contractors in Des Peres. The Chinese delegation is set to arrive Tuesday. But, he said, the visit was to be largely technical in nature and may not directly advance negotiations over flights.

Local officials pushing the hub had hoped to have the $360 million so-called Aerotropolis tax credit package in hand when the Chinese team arrived Tuesday. The measure died last week in an impasse between Missouri lawmakers over a broader economic development bill.

Developer Paul McKee, who with Stone was one of the original architects of the hub project, shared the podium with Stone. He used the opportunity to urge the audience of approximately 150 to call their state lawmakers and Gov. Jay Nixon and urge them to hold a special session to finish the economic development bill - something Nixon has said he won’t do without “broad consensus” from the House and Senate.

“We need to do this,” McKee said. “If we’re negotiating with the Chinese, we can’t come to the table without any chips.”

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Ivory Coast’s president has formally requested that the International Criminal Court investigate crimes committed during the five-month postelectoral crisis, which ended with the former president’s arrest last month.

In a letter published on the ICC website late Wednesday, President Alassane Ouattara said that his country’s judicial system isn’t capable of investigating all the crimes committed since last November’s presidential election.

More than 1,000 civilians were killed in the interim, first by security forces loyal to former president Laurent Gbagbo and later by rebel forces fighting to install Ouattara.

Human rights groups allege that both sides are guilty of crimes including kidnapping, rape and summary execution.

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JACKSON, MISS.

J.C. Penney Co. says its first-quarter net income rose nearly 7 percent because of cost-cutting and strong reception to its exclusive merchandise.

The company says it earned $64 million, or 28 cents per share, for the three months ended April 30. That compares with $60 million, or 25 cents per share, in the same period last year.

Revenue edged up to $3.94 billion from $3.93 billion. Penney’s revenue at stores open at least a year rose 3 cash advance america.8 percent. The gauge is a key indicator of a retailer’s health.

Analysts had predicted earnings of 26 cents on revenue of $3.94 billion, according to FactSet.

The company also issued profit guidance in line with analysts’ projections.

J.C. Penney is based in Plano, Texas.

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