BOSTON — A $1 billion proposal to build the first massive U.S. offshore wind-power farm has moved a step closer to overcoming permit requirements in Massachusetts, where it faces opposition from some influential residents. Cape Wind Associates LLC, a privately funded Boston-based energy company, has proposed constructing 130 wind turbines over 24 square miles (62 sq km) in Nantucket Sound, within view of the wealthy Cape Cod resort region of Massachusetts. The project, designed to power about 400,000 homes, won tentative approval by Massachusetts authorities for a certificate that combines nine state and local permits needed to build the turbines. Cape Wind said in a statement on Friday that Thursday’s ruling by the Massachusetts Energy Facilities Siting Board represented a ‘major victory.’ The board, created by the state legislature, instructed Cape Wind to work with two towns to agree on ‘reasonable and customary conditions’ for permits for burying electric cables, Cape Wind said. Opponents — including some politicians and business leaders with homes on Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket — say Cape Wind’s turbines would kill migrating birds, threaten the region’s lucrative tourist industry and disrupt commercial fishing. They include U.S. Senator Edward […]
WASHINGTON — The American International Group, which has received more than $170 billion in taxpayer bailout money from the Treasury and Federal Reserve, plans to pay about $165 million in bonuses by Sunday to executives in the same business unit that brought the company to the brink of collapse last year. Word of the bonuses last week stirred such deep consternation inside the Obama administration that Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner told the firm they were unacceptable and demanded they be renegotiated, a senior administration official said. But the bonuses will go forward because lawyers said the firm was contractually obligated to pay them. The payments to A.I.G.’s financial products unit are in addition to $121 million in previously scheduled bonuses for the company’s senior executives and 6,400 employees across the sprawling corporation. Mr. Geithner last week pressured A.I.G. to cut the $9.6 million going to the top 50 executives in half and tie the rest to performance. The payment of so much money at a company at the heart of the financial collapse that sent the broader economy into a tailspin almost certainly will fuel a popular backlash against the government’s efforts to prop up Wall […]
OSLO — Norwegian electric car maker Think aims to open a manufacturing plant in the United States to produce 16,000 cars per year in the first phase and more later, the company said on Thursday. ‘U.S. production is expected to start in 2010,’ Think said in a statement, estimating first-year volume at 2,500 units. The company is in talks with eight states, including Michigan, on a site for the facility that would initially employ about 300 workers to build its TH!NK city car, Think said. A technical center in conjunction with the plant would provide jobs for another 70 engineers and electric drive specialists, it said. ‘Plans ultimately call for up to 900 employees and a capacity of 60,000 electric vehicles per year,’ said the company which currently operates a production facility near Oslo in Norway with a capacity of 16,000 units per year. The United States is overtaking Europe as an attractive market for electric vehicles and is an ideal location to engineer and build them, Think Chief Executive Richard Canny said in the statement. ‘We see ourselves playing a small but potentially growing role in re-inventing the U.S. auto industry by bringing […]
Washington Post Co. will combine the business section with its front section Monday to Saturday, dropping it as a standalone from its flagship newspaper to save on paper costs. The plan was announced to employees in a memo from four editors today, said Kris Coratti, a spokeswoman for the Washington-based publisher. The changes, effective March 30, also include trimming stock-price listings to a half-page. The actions ‘allow us to save on newsprint, an important objective in these times, the memo said. ‘These moves will allow us to continue providing the features that our readers tell us they most value in the newspaper. Newsprint prices jumped 32 percent in 2008, according to Foex Ltd. in Finland. The Post will also begin running a daily page devoted to local business, rather than a weekly section. The newspaper will run fewer comics in its Sunday print editions, moving some to its Web site, and will eliminate one of its crossword puzzles. Washington Post fell $10.61, or 3 percent, to $344.34 at 4:02 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. The shares have declined 12 percent this year.
At the end of February, the orchards of California’s Central Valley are dusted with pink and white blossom, as millions of almond trees make their annual bid for reproduction. The delicate flowers attract pollinators, mostly honeybees, to visit and collect nectar and pollen. By offering fly-through hospitality, the trees win the prize of a brush with a pollen-covered bee and the chance of cross-pollination with another tree. In recent years, however, there has been alarm over possible shortages of honeybees and scary stories of beekeepers finding that 30-50% of their charges have vanished over the winter. It is called colony collapse disorder (CCD), and its cause remains a mystery. Add to this worries about long-term falls in the populations of other pollinators, such as butterflies and bats, and the result is a growing impression of a threat to nature’s ability to supply enough nectar-loving animals to service mankind’s crops. This year, however, the story has developed a twist. In California the shortage of bees has been replaced by a glut. Bee good to me The annual orgy of sexual reproduction in the Californian almond orchards owes little to the unintended bounty of nature. Francis Ratnieks, a professor of […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
