PLANYC 2030

SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) – The online payments service PayPal has taken the unusual step of suspending many transactions in India for more than a week.

A spokesman for the service said Saturday that “personal payments” to and from India are being blocked. Transfers to banks in India are being suspended as well.

The spokesman, Anuj Nayar, said PayPal is taking the step while it answers questions that have arisen about the service. He declined to elaborate.

Nayar said the suspensions began Jan. 28. He wrote in a blog post that PayPal, which is owned by eBay Inc., hopes “to resolve the situation as quickly as possible.”

As South Carolina’s cruise industry expands, some worry more ships and people could hurt the charm that draws visitors to Charleston in the first place.

The South Carolina Coastal Conservation League is concerned that the ships bring in too many people too quickly, causing congestion and pollution. The environmental group is suggesting officials approve rules to further regulate the industry.

“What a lot of businesses rely on is keeping that small, historic, unique sense of place that is Charleston,” said Katie Zimmerman, a project manager with the group.

“What does that do when you start bringing people in on these giant cruise ships? When you look at the cruise ship and see it on the skyline, it’s a wall and you can see it from everywhere,” she added.

The South Carolina State Ports Authority is working with the city on redeveloping its existing cruise terminal and 55-acre tract around the terminal and Union Pier on the Charleston Cooper River waterfront.

Officials say a modern cruise terminal is needed to handle the growing cruise business. Beginning this spring, Carnival Cruises will base its 2,056-passenger Carnival Fantasy in Charleston.

Ports Authority CEO Jim Newsome has said the agency will work with the cruise companies and the city to mitigate impacts of additional cruises.

On Monday, Celebrity Cruises‘ Celebrity Mercury, which carries more than 1,800 passengers, made a port call in the city on its way to Key West. Fla.

“We will also continue to work with the community to ensure Charleston gains the economic benefits of the cruise ship industry while maintaining the city’s character and quality,” he wrote in a recent op-ed article.

The Conservation League is suggesting the city limit cruise ships to one arrival at a time, and cap the number of passengers and the heights of the vessels.

Plans for a new cruise terminal include having only one berth for ships so there would only be one there at a time, said Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr.

“I’m confident that what we’re working on with the Ports Authority will balance and scale,” the mayor added, noting the authority expects about 70 cruise calls a year — a little more than one a week.

“I think that’s just right,” he said. “A port city ought to have cruise ships as a natural thing. You want ports and waterfronts to be real activity.”

Authority spokesman Byron Miller said the cruise business is a small but important part of tourism in the city.

“This year Charleston will have 4.2 million visitors. The cruise ship business this year will have 100,000,” he said.

He said cruise lines don’t want to destroy the charm that makes Charleston an attraction.

Charleston will have 67 cruise ship calls this year among the more than 2,000 container and other ships which stop at the state’s ports. A city like Key West, he said, has more than 400 cruise calls a year.

THE nuclear industry got an unexpected boost from Barack Obama in his State of the Union address last month. The president pledged to build a “new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants”. On February 1st he followed that up in his proposed budget for 2011 by tripling to $54 billion the value of loans for new nuclear plants the government is offering to guarantee. Elsewhere, too, prospects for the business look good: the United Arab Emirates (UAE) completed a tender for four nuclear plants in December, Vietnam is planning a similar deal this year and many other countries, from Italy to Indonesia, are hoping to build new reactors soon.

Yet the $40 billion contract in the UAE, won by a consortium led by Korean Electric Power Corporation (KEPCO), South Korea’s largely state-owned electricity monopoly, has caused consternation among the six big firms that have dominated the industry for decades: GE and Westinghouse of America, Areva of France, and Toshiba, Hitachi and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries of Japan. Russian and Chinese firms hope to follow the Koreans’ lead. Suddenly the incumbents are confronted by emerging-market “national champions” with the full backing of their governments—an invaluable asset in a high-liability business like nuclear power.

“If you find out how they won, let me know,” quips Hirotada Nagashima, a senior executive in the nuclear division of Hitachi, whose joint venture with GE lost out to Kepco, as did a consortium of Areva and other French industrial behemoths, including Electricité de France (EDF), Total and GDF-Suez. But there is little mystery. The South Korean consortium, which includes the heavy-industry arms of Doosan, Hyundai and Samsung, three of the country’s biggest conglomerates, and uses some of Westinghouse’s technology, has worked together for decades, building and operating most of South Korea’s 20 reactors. It offered not just to build the plants, but also to run them and even to find the fuel they will need—at a fixed price, for the most part. “It was very easy to bring them together and offer the UAE a complete package,” says Mark Yoon of CLSA, a financial-research firm.

The South Korean government also played its part. The president, Lee Myung-bak, flew off to Abu Dhabi on the eve of the decision to gladhand the locals, promising to help the barren statelet recreate South Korea’s economic miracle. Hiroki Mitsumata, director of nuclear energy at Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), believes that support from the South Korean government may also have allowed Kepco to offer the lowest price, because the state can backstop cost overruns and accident liability.

Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s president, lobbied enthusiastically on behalf of the French consortium, whose leading members are also largely state-owned. It too could offer full service, in that Areva supplies fuel and manages waste in addition to designing reactors, while EDF runs more nuclear plants than any other firm. But the partners originally wanted to sign separate contracts rather than offer an all-in deal. Worse, their bid was 50% more expensive, thanks both to the strong euro and a more steel- and concrete-laden design, which Areva says makes its reactors safer—an idea the authorities in the UAE dispute. EDF has also suffered numerous operational glitches of late, while Areva’s flagship new reactor, under construction in Finland, is woefully over budget and behind schedule. The Koreans, in contrast, have a sterling record in both construction and operation.

EDF has responded to the loss by attempting to unify the French nuclear industry under its control. Last November Henri Proglio, its incoming boss, said the French nuclear industry was dysfunctional and that combining a nuclear-fuel business with reactor design in Areva had been a mistake. Instead he suggested linking design and generation. But Areva argues that adding its reactor unit to EDF would make it extremely difficult for France to export nuclear plants to the utility’s foreign competitors, such as Germany’s E.ON, which is currently a customer of Areva.

In December the French government appointed François Roussely, a former boss of EDF and a friend of Mr Proglio’s, to produce a report on the nuclear industry, which is due in April. Mr Proglio’s ideas have provoked open war between the two firms: in January Areva briefly stopped collecting waste fuel from EDF’s plants following a long-running dispute over prices, until the government intervened.

The Japanese and American nuclear firms, for their part, say they cannot compete with state-backed bids. Danny Roderick of GE’s and Hitachi’s nuclear joint venture thinks the South Korean bid may prove “too good to be true” and wonders whether it will be able to stick to its budget and schedule. Big American utilities have little interest in teaming up with nuclear vendors to mount joint bids abroad; Japanese ones have a distressing record of falsified inspection reports and frequent outages. And the governments in both countries would find it difficult to favour one local nuclear firm over another.

But not all the problems facing the Japanese and Americans are of others’ making. The firms form a noodle soup of alliances and tangled technologies. Despite their joint venture, Hitachi and GE are pushing two competing reactors. They recently developed a third design with Toshiba, but after Toshiba bought Westinghouse in 2006, it also began to promote the latter’s technology. Areva and Mistubishi Heavy have rival designs of their own, but have also set up a joint venture to promote yet another type of reactor. “It’s chaos at the vendor level,” says an analyst in Japan.

The next test of the nuclear vendors’ mettle will be the bidding this year to build four nuclear reactors in Vietnam. Mr Mitsumata of METI thinks the government-run Japan Bank for International Co-operation, an export-credit and project-finance provider, and state-backed trade insurance could be used to boost the Japanese entrants. There is talk of a joint bid with a big utility such as Tokyo Electric Power. The government “is trying to increase the level of industrial support for the Vietnam project and the utility companies have been talking more seriously about that,” he says. But Kepco has hinted that it, too, is eyeing Vietnam—as well as other middle-income countries such as Turkey, Jordan, Indonesia, Thailand and South Africa.

American and Japanese nuclear firms’ chances of maintaining an edge may depend on how far their governments are willing to push nuclear power at home. Mr Obama’s sudden enthusiasm has given the American firms hope. But the Department of Energy has yet to hand out any of the previous batch of loan guarantees approved in 2005. Regulators in Florida have squelched local utilities’ plans to build new reactors. Recriminations about rising costs have held up another project in Texas. It is a far cry from South Korea, where six reactors are under construction and another 14 are on the drawing board.

THE jobless rate in New York City increased from 7% in December 2008 to 10.6% a year later. Some 425,000 New Yorkers are looking for work, more than at any time since the 1970s, and the number is expected to grow. The city budget is a tough one to balance even at the best of times. In the worst of times, it is near impossible without support from New York state and the co-operation of the unions.

So when Michael Bloomberg, who has just begun his third term as mayor, presented his preliminary budget for 2011 on January 28th it wasn’t pretty. The city faces a staggering $4.9 billion deficit for 2011. This year’s $2.9 billion surplus has gone; it was spent on reducing next year’s deficit and paying bills and bond repayments. To close the gap, Mr Bloomberg is ordering every city agency to make cuts—the seventh round he has ordered since early 2007. That should save the city $1.6 billion over the next two years.

The mayor has proposed closing four city swimming pools and a Manhattan centre for the homeless. He has also suggested removing fire-alarm boxes from city streets, to stop hoax calls. Mr Bloomberg wants to reduce the city payroll by 4,286. Every department, from police to libraries, faces cuts. The mayor is postponing the next police academy class. Some 2,500 teachers could be forced out of their classrooms unless their union agrees to a 2% wage increase instead of a promised 4%. Teachers have enjoyed a 43% salary increase during Mr Bloomberg’s tenure.

Earlier, the mayor had painted an even bleaker picture when he testified before a state finance committee on January 25th on the impact of Governor David Paterson’s state budget on New York City. That budget eliminates large chunks of assistance from the state to the city, even though the city provides half the state’s revenues. This, Mr Bloomberg said, would force the city to shed 19,000 city workers, including 8,500 teachers by September. More than 3,100 policemen would lose their jobs, thinning the blue line to 1985 levels. Fire stations could be closed. City funding for soup kitchens, which have never been busier, could go. Rubbish collection would be reduced. (This is all worryingly close to the New York of the 1970s, when rubbish went uncollected, fire stations closed and police officers were laid off.) The mayor also fumed about the “intolerable burden” of state pension obligations, which have risen by 350% since 2002. He wants Mr Paterson to start reforming pensions.

And the politics of this? Doug Turetsky of the non-partisan Independent Budget Office said Mr Bloomberg hoped to send two messages in his two budgets. “Number one, cuts are the state’s fault. And two, labour has got to give.” Blaming the state is an old game; but the unions won’t give in without a struggle.

LG Electronics (LG), the world’s leading innovator of home appliances, will hold the Grand Finale of its inaugural kitchen design competition on February 15th at the Zayed University Auditorium, Dubai.

Entitled “Conceptualife,” the competition gives young and upcoming designers a chance to unleash their creativity and present their vision for the future of kitchen design and appliances.

The three-month hunt, that saw universities from around the region register and submit their innovative and futuristic creations, will conclude next month with twelve shortlisted finalists from South Africa, Iran, KSA and the UAE battling it out for top prizes.

Mr Ki Wan Kim, CEO of LG Electronics Middle East & Africa Company stated: “We want to tap into the youngest and brightest minds across the region and offer them the opportunity to show off their skills to the greater public. This competition will provide us with invaluable insight into where the next generation of consumers perceive product designs and features to be heading.”

On the day, the twelve participants will be required to present their designs to a panel of four judges and explain their creative thought process and vision for the kitchen. Contestants will be judged according to five main pillars; uniqueness of design in terms of layout and individuality from current kitchen designs available; use of innovative kitchen appliances, their features and functionality; use of space, storage, areas and worktops; environmental solutions including the use of recycled material and durability and finally; practicality of the overall design. All these factors will weigh in on the judges decision as they look at the realities of bringing the ideas to market.

Joining the LG judging panel will be Penny McCormick, editor of leading UAE home furnishing publication, Emirates Home and interior design aficionado, June Hawkins. Emirates Home will be the competition’s official media partner; with Penny bringing a wealth of experience as well as insight into design trends like ironing centers and what to expect from kitchen designs of the future. Her expertise in identifying and fostering new talent means that uniqueness and individuality will be highly valued throughout the judging process.

In addition, interior designer June Hawkins’ lifelong passion and success in all things interior will be an excellent addition to the judging table. Bringing not only a unique perspective on what clients want and use, her eye for detail will mean that contestants will not only be judged on creativity but their business sense too.

Mr Ki Wan Kim, CEO of LG Electronics Middle East & Africa Company added: “The level of entries that we have received so far has been outstanding. The judges are going to have a tough time choosing between the highly creative kitchen solutions and the effortlessly practical options. We look forward to celebrating our contestant’s innovations and awarding prizes for their hard work.”

The total number of participants in the Grand Finale will be twelve, made up of two university candidates from KSA, four from Iran, two from South Africa and four candidates from the UAE.

In its first quarterly filing since splitting from Time Warner, AOL Inc. said Wednesday that it swung to a profit in the fourth quarter from a year earlier.

The New York-based company reported net income of $1.4 million, or 1 cent per share, in the three months ended Dec. 31. That compares with a loss of $1.9 billion, or $18.52 a share, in the year-ago quarter.

Sales fell 17% to $809.7 million, led by sharp declines in AOL’s subscriber base. Subscription revenue plunged 28%, while advertising sales were down 8%.

The company continued to lose subscribers as users flock to higher speed Internet connections. AOL’s subscription base fell 27% to about 5 million from 6.9 million a year earlier.

But the overall sales figure was better than expected. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial had forecast sales of $700 million.

“We have made significant progress in support of the long-term vision we see in the future of AOL,” said AOL Chief Executive Tim Armstrong in a statement. “But today’s results continue to reflect the need for our focus and execution on the work required in the turnaround of the company.”

Flying solo

The results reflect AOL’s performance since it regained its independence from media giant Time Warner in December. It is also AOL’s first report as a standalone firm since October 2000, when the company posted a quarterly profit of $350 million.

Time Warner, which owns CNNMoney.com, spun AOL off to shareholders late last year, ending what many experts said was the most disastrous corporate marriage of all time.

AOL has been trying to reinvent itself as a content and advertising company as subscribers to its dial-up Internet access business have dwindled. But the company has lagged rivals Google and Yahoo, in key areas such as display advertising.

AOL’s global display advertising revenue declined 3% to $176.4 million in the quarter. Revenue from international display advertising plunged 22%. On the bright side, revenue from U.S. display advertising rose 1%, marking the first quarter of year-over-year growth in two years.

Search revenue, generated when a user clicks on a text-based ad on their screen, fell 19% to $154.4 million.

The European aircraft maker, Airbus, seems to hold the long-term edge in China, whose ire over U.S. arms sales to Taiwan won’t help Boeing

The last thing Boeing needs now is a new China problem. Over the next two decades, Boeing (BA) expects China to spend $400 billion to purchase 3,770 planes from manufacturers, making China second in size only to the combined market of the U.S. and Canada. With airlines in other markets struggling—and Boeing still trying to recover from its much-delayed Dreamliner 787 project—the U.S. manufacturer could use a Chinese boost. One sign of China’s importance: Boeing, the world’s second-biggest aircraft manufacturer behind Airbus, is now sending a sales director to Beijing to become the company’s first China-based sales executive. Jim Simon, former head of East Asia sales in Seattle, will arrive in Beijing soon, says company spokesman Yukui Wang.

Simon will have his hands full. While the Chinese market is growing fast, Airbus is poised to gain the greatest benefit. The unit of European Aeronautic Defence & Space (EADSY) is winning far more orders than Boeing, which now finds itself a target in a nasty war of words between Washington and Beijing that could put Boeing even further behind its larger rival. On Jan. 29, the Obama Administration informed Congress of plans to sell $6.4 billion in weapons to Taiwan, and the following day the Chinese government said it would punish U.S. companies involved in the sales. That could hurt Boeing, which makes the Harpoon missiles that Taiwan will be purchasing as part of the deal.

Boeing says the Chinese government should not be targeting the company. “Any arms sales to foreign countries or entities are decided by the U.S. government,” says Wang, a Beijing-based spokesman for the company. “It’s a government-to-government issue.”

Boeing is also counting on some protection from its local ties. Any retaliation against the company by Beijing might end up hurting Chinese partners because Boeing buys parts from seven local manufacturers. Indeed, spokesman Wang says Boeing is the Chinese aviation industry’s largest foreign customer. Xian Aircraft Industry, for example, last month delivered 1,500 vertical fins for 737 narrow bodies. Boeing has purchased a combined $1.5 billion in aircraft parts and services from China over the past 30 years, says Wang. That figure “will double in the next few years,” he says. “Chinese suppliers now have a role in all Boeing airplanes.”
Airbus leads in new China orders

By some measures, that effort is paying off for Boeing in China. The company has more planes than Airbus currently operating in the country: There are 736 Boeing planes and another 30 from McDonnell-Douglas (which Boeing acquired in 1997) now in service in China, according to data compiled by Ascend Worldwide, an aerospace industry market research firm based in London. Airbus has only 547. Moreover, Chinese airlines have 18 Boeing and McDonnell Douglas planes in storage, vs. 2 Airbus jets.

Still, the future looks much brighter for the European company than for the American company. Chinese airlines have placed orders for 358 Airbus planes and have options for another 14 more; they have ordered 244 new planes from Boeing and have placed no options for further units. Airbus has letters of intent for an additional 60 planes, compared to 40 for Boeing. For instance, China Southern, the country’s largest airline, announced on Jan. 20 that it would buy 20 Airbus A320 aircraft, paying $76.9 million per plane. On Dec. 28, the country’s second-largest carrier, China Eastern Airlines, announced a $2.6 billion agreement to purchase 16 Airbus A330s, to be delivered by 2014.

China “probably has the most potential of any significant market in the world,” Airbus China President Laurence Barron told Bloomberg News on Feb. 2. He predicts that China will account for 20% of Airbus revenue this year. Boeing derived a mere 4% of its sales from China in 2008, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Beijing rewards with aircraft orders

As it competes for Chinese orders, Airbus enjoys an important advantage over Boeing because the European manufacturer has been more aggressive in helping transfer industry expertise to China. Last year, Airbus opened an assembly plant in the northeastern city of Tianjin. In China, “if you allow for more local production and information-sharing, the purchaser is going to be a lot more willing to accept your aircraft,” says Peter Harbison, executive chairman of the Center for Asia Pacific Aviation in Sydney. That’s a step that Boeing, which suffered through an eight-week strike in 2008, has not taken, adds Harbison, because the company’s unions are concerned about the company shifting jobs overseas.

A local presence is important because decisions about aircraft orders are highly political in China. The three largest airlines—China Southern, China Eastern and Air China—are still controlled by the government, and Chinese leaders like to use big-ticket aircraft orders as carrots to reward foreign governments that treat Beijing well. “When top-level Chinese officials go to France or the U.S., they sometimes come back with big orders for planes,” says Jim Wong, Nomura’s regional transportation and infrastructure analyst in Hong Kong. Deciding between Airbus and Boeing therefore “may not necessarily be a pure business decision.” That could hurt Boeing now if China follows through on its threats to punish U.S. companies for the Taiwan arms sales.

The Chinese government wants investments such as the one Airbus has made to help local efforts to build a viable aviation industry that can compete with the big players. For instance, state-backed Commercial Aircraft Corp. of China (Comac), is working on a midsized jet, the C919, with engines from General Electric (GE). That Chinese plane isn’t scheduled to launch until 2014, though, and the major foreign companies won’t have to worry about local competition until then.

Retailers are likely to close more U.S. stores to cut costs in the months ahead after expanding during the recession, an analysis shows.

Click here for a Bloomberg Multimedia interactive visual analysis of retail store numbers.

HR has yanked the junk food and badgered you to get healthy. Now it’s eyeing your spouse and children

The health nags in human resources have exhausted every possible idea to goad you into good health. At several large corporations, they’ve realized it’s no use turning employees into vegan hardbodies if their dependents—also on the company health insurance plan—are gorging on trans fats and becoming regulars at doctors’ offices.

That’s why the next front in the Wellness Wars is not about you. It’s about your husband, your wife, and your kids. While most big companies already have employee wellness programs, the newest trend is expanding those efforts to include dependents, says LuAnn Heinen, director of the National Business Group on Health, a Washington-based health-care think tank. If you can get your family on its corporate wellness program, Aetna (AET) will give you a $1,200 reward. JPMorgan Chase (JPM) offers health coaches to family members in its plan. This month IBM (IBM) started sending out cartoon-adorned plates to teach kids about portion control. At Dell (DELL), spouses get discounts on medical premiums.

INCENTIVE BACKLASH

In Washington, legislators have been working to give companies more power to tie healthy behavior to financial rewards. The Senate’s health-care bill would increase the amount companies can dole out as health incentives to as much as 50% of the total premium from the current 20%. Not everyone supports the proposal. The American Heart Assn. is mounting a full-scale offensive, saying the rewards could make health care less affordable for the very people who need it the most.

Obviously, this battle is about more than slimming down and lowering blood pressure. Many policy experts believe that workplace wellness programs have great cost-cutting potential. A recent meta-analysis of existing studies by two Harvard professors published in the February issue of the journal Health Affairs found that for every dollar companies spend on employee wellness, medical costs fall an average of $3.27. Such savings are a big reason President Barack Obama met last spring with executives from companies such as Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) and Microsoft (MSFT), which both say their initiatives save them millions annually.

In 2008, IBM became one of the first companies to roll out a children’s health rebate. Doris Gonzalez, a senior manager in IBM’s corporate citizenship department, says she was calorie counting during the workday, but when she returned home to her three-year-old, Milena, the 51-year old single mother felt wiped out. The dinner time tableau featured mother and daughter zoning out in front of the TV and ordering pizza, pasta, or fried chicken from the Dominican joint down the street. “Milena maybe watched a little bit more TV than she should have,” she says.

Now Gonzalez limits takeout to twice a week and restricts TV to weekends. Mother and daughter cook dinner together from the weekly menus IBM drops into Gonzalez’ in-box. Gonzalez has lost 10 pounds, Milena snacks on fruit and pita instead of gummi bears and chips, and each receives a $150 annual rebate. IBM says nearly two-thirds of the kids participating in the program have lost weight.

Jennifer Lechman, an Aetna benefits consultant, told her husband and three kids they would get a cut of the $1,200 incentive if they joined her company’s program. Now the kids try to out-fruit one another. After dinner the family takes walks or jumps on the trampoline. “This outsources the management of it to them,” says Lechman. “I don’t have to nag.”