Investors are more confident in a Japanese leader than any time since at least September 2010, with optimism about Prime Minister Shinzo Abe
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Hyundai Motor Co. said Thursday its first quarter net profit fell 15 percent as a labor dispute slowed car production in South Korea.
The country’s largest automaker said net profit reached 2.1 trillion won ($1.9 billion) in the January-March period, matching market forecasts. A year earlier, net profit was 2.5 trillion won.
Sales rose 6 percent to 21.4 trillion won. Operating profit declined 11 percent to 1.9 trillion won.
The company blamed its lower profit on declining production at domestic plants, which outweighed increased production from new plants in China and Brazil.
Starting March, Hyundai adopted new schedules for workers to remove overnight shifts but has yet to reach an agreement with its labor union on how to compensate workers for weekend and holiday shifts. The company’s Ulsan plant has not produced any vehicles during weekends since March. Exports of locally produced vehicles during the first quarter dropped 11 percent over a year earlier.
The company said it hopes to reach an agreement with the union soon to resume weekend production Same day payday loans.
“Once we reach an agreement over the weekend shifts at the Ulsan factory, we will be able to meet our annual sales target,” Chief Financial Officer Lee Won-hee said during a conference call with investors. Hyundai is aiming for 6 percent growth in 2013 vehicle sales to 4.66 million units.
Another dent to its bottom line came from foreign exchange rates. Sales costs increased from the local currency’s weakness over a year earlier, the company said. Fears of an outbreak of violence on the Korean Peninsula, stemming from North Korea’s recent threats, eroded the value of the South Korean won.
Hyundai Motor is the flagship unit of the world’s fifth-largest automaker, Hyundai Motor Group.
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BOSTON—In May of 2011, Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, then a senior at a prestigious high school, was awarded a $2,500 scholarship from the city of Cambridge, Mass., to pursue higher education. Now, Tsarnaev is on the run, described as “armed and dangerous” and suspected of the Boston Marathon bombingdescribed as “armed and dangerous” and suspected of the Boston Marathon bombing.
Two brothers, one now dead, one alive and at large. After hours of only grainy images of two men in baseball caps to go on, a portrait gradually started emerging Friday of the men suspected in the attack.
Tsarnaev, 19, and his older brother, Tamerlan, who was killed during a violent night in Cambridge, had been living together on Norfolk Street in Cambridge.
An uncle, Ruslan Tsarni of Montgomery Village, Md., told The Associated Press that the men lived together near Boston and have been in the United States for about a decade. They came from the Russian region near Chechnya, which has been plagued by an Islamic insurgency stemming from separatist wars.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s page on the Russian social networking site Vkontakte says he attended Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, graduating in 2011, the year he won the scholarship, which was celebrated with a reception at City Hall, according to a news release issued at the time.
Before moving to the United States, he attended School No. 1 in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, a predominantly Muslim republic in Russia’s North Caucasus that has become an epicentre of the Islamic insurgency that spilled over from Chechnya.
On the site, he describes himself as speaking Chechen as well as English and Russian high quality business cards. His world view is described as “Islam” and he says his personal goal is “career and money.”
The father of the suspects claims that his son who is still on the loose is a smart and accomplished young man.
Anzor Tsarnaev spoke with The Associated Press by telephone from the Russian city of Makhachkala on Friday after police said Tamerlan had been killed in a shootout and the other, Dzhokhar, was being intensely pursued.
“My son is a true angel,” the elder Tsarnaev said. “Dzhokhar is a second-year medical student in the U.S. He is such an intelligent boy. We expected him to come on holidays here.”
Tsarnaev appeared in the video released by authorities on Thursday, identified as Suspect Number 2, striding down a sidewalk, unnoticed by spectators who were absorbed in the race. He followed Tamerlan by about 10 feet. He wore what appeared to be a grey hoodie under a dark jacket and pants, and a white baseball cap facing backward and pulled down haphazardly.
Tamerlan was stockier, in khaki pants, a light T-shirt, and a dark jacket. The brim of his baseball cap faced forward, and he may have been wearing sunglasses.
According to the website spotcrime.com, Tamerlan was arrested for domestic violence in July 2009, after assaulting his girlfriend.
As the city braces for a spring storm, Toronto Pearson airport has cancelled about 14 per cent of Thursday’s scheduled flights.
The storm, expected to roll into Toronto early Thursday morning, will bring ice pellets and freezing rain.
Schools remain open, but the school bus service is cancelled for the day in York, Halton and Peel, including buses in Brampton, Caledon and Mississauga.
In sports, there’s a playbook for contrition, too.
First, do something that upsets people.
Second, deny.
Third, admit.
Fourth, apologize.
Fifth, win again.
Lastly, heal the scab of the initial misstep by mirroring it, this time with good news.
After more than three years spent wandering the wilderness of scandal, Tiger Woods has finally travelled that circle all the way around in oddly announcing that he is dating Olympic skiing champion Lindsey Vonn.
Much is being made of Vonn’s superficial similarity to Woods’ ex-wife, Elin Nordegren. That’s not the odd part, though it smacks of Cole’s Notes Jungianism. Is it really remarkable that any heterosexual man enjoys the company of attractive Viking women?
What’s odd is that Woods left Vonn to do the announcing, via Facebook.
“I guess it wasn’t a well-kept secret but yes, I’m dating Tiger Woods,” Vonn wrote in part in a Monday post. As per the usual, the kind-hearted community of screamers that infect social media jammed up the comments section with well wishes about STDs.
Once they get you down off the pedestal, it’s always going to be hard to get back on your feet. They’re kicking too hard.
If you’re a romantic, this storyline is easy to understand — a relationship born of shared experience between two public figures. Both were prodigies spurred by over-involved fathers. Both are divorcees. Both are rich and obsessively observed. Both may be the best ever at their profession. They aren’t just alike, they are a ‘y’ chromosome away from being the same person.
Were you a cynic, it’s hard not to gloss over the synergistic opportunities this coupling provides.
Since his libidinous breakdown in 2009, Woods has seemed a curiously distant figure for a purpose-built sporting goods pitchman.
Before the National Enquirer caught hold of the skin of his life and began peeling, that distance allowed Woods to seem steely and purposeful. Afterward, it made him remote and untrustworthy.
Like her new boyfriend, the 28-year-old Vonn is also a bit of a prickly pear. The Minnesota native is famous for her simmering, but always well-publicized, rivalries with teammates and opponents.
Woods was either too good or too removed to ever work up a decent rivalry. Even when his former coach, Hank Haney, went truffling for dirt in a disappointing tell-all, the best he could muster was that Woods nursed a grudge against Ian Poulter after the Englishman “mooched a ride” on Woods’ private jet no fax cash advance.
This lack of a shadow worked against Woods when he fell from public esteem. Had he ever been able to cast himself the hero in any me-versus-him golfing matrix, it would have been harder to subsequently cast him as the villain.
It’s instructive that a key part of Nike’s effort to rehabilitate Woods has been to provide him with a friendly rival — Irishman Rory McIlroy.
Great stars have the knack of seeming human and superhuman in equal measure. Woods could never figure out the first part.
McIlroy is helping with the on-course image rebuilding. Off the greens, it makes sense that Woods should align himself with another transparent, popular extrovert. Aside from being handy on an incline, that’s Vonn’s whole m.o.
The way the pair of them handled the reveal suggests that’s how this will work from now on — Woods keeping quiet; Vonn’s proximity and easy laugh making that silence seem like something other than brooding.
There are worldly considerations as well.
Woods continues to be Nike’s most important salesperson. One scholarly study suggested that the cost of his 10-year, $200 million (U.S.) deal with Nike was recouped in the sale of golf balls alone.
Vonn’s main sponsor is athletic clothier Under Armour.
In the gauzy, professional photos of the new pair that accompanied Vonn’s Facebook announcement, the logos of both warring sponsors are modestly displayed. But that they’re there at all suggests that if this is a fairytale, it’s the sort marketed all to hell by Disney.
The timing is also propitious. Vonn is currently recovering from serious injury, ahead of what is likely her last Olympics in Sochi. That’s 11months away. If she is going to fix herself permanently in the public imagination, she has to do it now. This will help.
After years of post-scandal struggle, now 37 years old, Woods has finally put his game back together. He’s won two of four tournaments in 2013 and the Masters begins in three weeks.
This changes the conversation in the lead-up from ‘When will Tiger Woods figure this out?’ to ‘Has Tiger Woods finally figured this out?’ It’s a small, critical, multi-bajillion dollar distinction.
Is it love? That’s none of our business.
SOUTH BEND, IND.—U.S. officials say two of four people aboard a jet that crashed in a northern Indiana neighbourhood have died.
Authorities say the private jet was apparently experiencing mechanical trouble when it crashed in South Bend no faxing 1 hour payday loans. It struck three homes, becoming lodged in one of them.
Research in Motion executives will face angry shareholders at their annual meeting on Tuesday, following a dismal year that underscored the BlackBerry’s decline.
But if RIM goes under, it’s not only shareholders who will suffer. RIM’s small hometown of Waterloo, Ontario, may feel the brunt of the fallout.
Waterloo’s burgeoning tech scene may have to survive without the influence — and the funding — of the company that spawned it.
Thousands of Waterloo-area residents have already been served up RIM pink slips. In announcing 5,000 job cuts last month — part of an ongoing plan to save $1 billion this year — RIM’s new CEO Thorsten Heins specifically acknowledged the blow to Waterloo.
"It’s difficult for the area," Heins said on a conference call following RIM’s brutal earnings report. "I [assure you] we would not do this if it were not totally necessary."
Is RIM dying? It lost $518 million last quarter and has about $2 billion left in cash. The company’s bankers are exploring "strategic business model alternatives" — corporate-speak for "uh oh" — and its much-hyped potential savior, the next-generation BlackBerry 10 operating system, was just delayed again until 2013. RIM () shares closed Monday at $7.67, down 47% for the year.
Heins insists the business he took over six months ago has stabilized.
"We expect to empower people as never before," he wrote last week in an op-ed describing RIM as a company "at the beginning of a transition that we expect will once again change the way people communicate."
He’ll have a chance to expand on that vision at Tuesday’s annual meeting. Local TV news and radio stations were buzzing Monday night about the highly anticipated gathering.
But the common wisdom is that at some point pretty soon, the Canadian tech icon will cease to exist in its current form. That leaves Waterloo, population 100,000, with a big question: What next?
RIM’s influence is everywhere in Waterloo and Kitchener, an adjacent city of 220,000 residents whose downtown is dotted with small boutiques and new construction.
It’s in the local universities, which have received millions in donations from both RIM and the personal pockets of former co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie. It’s in RIM Park, the 500-acre activity center that’s home to ballfields and an 18-hole golf course.
Perhaps most importantly, RIM’s influence has shaped the local populace. It has long been the company that attracted techie types to the town, and many of those in the Waterloo tech scene are RIM alumni.
Related story: RIM: What the hell happened?
That’s apparent in the epicenter of Kitchener-Waterloo’s tech home base: The Communitech Hub, a 44,000-square-foot startup incubator housed in a reclaimed tannery building.
Communitech offers services to about 800 companies, and nearly 100 are located in the urban-industrial-chic Tannery HQ.
"It would be a challenge to find one [of the 100 resident companies] who didn’t have someone who worked at RIM, or at least did a co-op during school," says Iain Klugman, Communitech’s CEO. "RIM has played an important part in luring talent here with its global reputation."
Following RIM’s series of mass layoffs, part of Communitech’s role has been "absorbing" those workers and keeping the talent in Waterloo, Klugman says.
Like many local residents, Klugman strikes an optimistic tone when talking about the future of RIM. The company’s not dead yet, he says.
Of course, Klugman has a vested interest in speaking well of RIM — the company helped fund Communitech’s new Hyperdrive startup incubator. A few BlackBerry posters adorn a space decked out with a device showcase.
Still, Klugman is adamant that Waterloo is no longer just the town that BlackBerry built.
"If [RIM’s problems] had happened a few years back, then maybe it would be a different story," he says. "About three years ago, [Waterloo] really reached a tipping point and started to become a real startup community."
Beyond startups, big companies including Intel (, Fortune 500) and Sybase have significant operations in the area. Google’s (, Fortune 500) Canadian engineering office is also housed in The Tannery, next to Communitech.
"Once we get VCs or partner companies out to this area, they’re almost always surprised at how active [the tech community] is," Klugman says. "We love surprising them. And we’ll keep doing it."
The town is hoping Heins has a few surprises of his own in store.
After RIM released its disastrous quarterly earnings, thousands of customers and partners emailed RIM employees with words of "support and loyalty," he wrote in his recent op-ed.
"It reminded me just how much opportunity and promise there is within RIM, and how much of what makes BlackBerry special stems from our status as a small-town Canadian company," Heins said. "We do not believe RIM is a company at the end."
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported Kitchener’s population; it is 220,000. The Kitchener-Waterloo metro area has a population of 450,000.
As the nation awaits the Supreme Court’s ruling on health care reform, America’s doctors are debating a serious issue of their own — the possibility of going out of business.
Doctors, especially those operating private practices, said their financial hardship is increasing, making it "harder for them to earn a decent living," according to a new survey of 673 physicians across 29 specialties by MDLinx, a medical reference website for physicians.
Among the reasons doctors cited: significant school debt, rising business expenses and administrative hassles, shrinking insurance reimbursements and costly malpractice insurance. (Read: Exchanges may survive even if law falls)
The survey revealed that doctors operating private practices — both small and large — are feeling more financial pain than those employed by hospitals, said Stephen Smith, chief marketing officer for MDLinx.
In fact, 17% of all doctors with a private practice said they could foresee closing it within a year if their financial situation doesn’t improve, the survey said.
Related: Doctors going broke
"For consumers, the coming retraction from small practices to large clinics that this survey hints at would mean longer drives and less personal, higher cost of medical care for millions of Americans," said Smith.
The survey also revealed a marked disparity on physicians’ financial situation and morale tied to the size of their current work environment.
While a third of smaller practice physicians forecast that 2012 will be one of their worst earnings years ever, Smith said only 13% of doctors at larger practices or hospitals reported the same expectation.
Health reform a hot topic: The survey showed that health reform also remains a hot topic for doctors, with some cheering reform and others lambasting it.
"I support Obamacare completely in theory," one doctor wrote in an anonymous comment in the survey.
"I feel strongly that we need a single payer to compete with insurance companies. [Still] I think the relative lack of physicians in the decision-making entities is a major problem for fixing health care."
"If Obamacare continues, I will leave the field of medicine!," another doctor said.
Related: What health reform could cost you
Yet another physician wrote: "The current state of finances for doctors is getting worse and will continue if Obamacare is not changed."
The Supreme Court, which is reviewing the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, is expected to issue a ruling Thursday.
The court could uphold the law, overturn it partially or completely strike it down.
The MDLinx survey, conducted in early April, polled physicians across all specialties, including those who own small and large private practices or work in hospitals.
Europe needs urgent reforms to revive economic growth and improve competitiveness, the International Monetary Fund said Monday.
The call comes as world leaders gather in Mexico for the Group of 20 summit, at which Europe’s debt crisis will be at the top of the agenda.
The IMF said in a research paper that a revival of growth in Europe is required to reverse "the vicious cycle of poor confidence, flagging growth, fiscal weakness and bank vulnerability."
European countries must undertake coordinated reforms to re-balance demand and competitiveness across the continent, the IMF said. That means allowing for higher inflation and wages in the north, in stronger economies like Germany, while holding down wages in the south, in struggling nations like Italy.
In addition, the paper calls for pension reforms and more flexible labor markets, and says monetary policy should "remain supportive payday loan lenders."
"This is not a recommendation of simple fiscal stimulus — fiscal consolidation is inevitable — but of a combination of efforts to alleviate headwinds," the IMF said.
The IMF’s analysis comes amid increasing complaints that Europe’s leaders have been choking off recovery by pushing austerity measures.
European leaders signed an accord earlier this year that aims to promote greater fiscal discipline by holding countries to budgetary targets.
But many of the continent’s economies have tumbled into recession as austerity measures — budget cuts and tax hikes — take a toll on growth and fuel popular resentment. Countries like Greece and Spain are suffering from unemployment rates over 20%, which have led to worries about social unrest.
In the oil boomtowns of southern Kansas, enterprising residents are turning into real estate moguls, renting out everything from double-wide trailers to rooms in an old bank for as much as $2,000 a month.
Workers flocking to the area seeking high-paying jobs in nearby oil fields and windfarms have created a housing shortage in these small farming towns, causing the rents to skyrocket.
Bobbi Olivier, a native of Harper, Kan., a town nestled right in the heart of the oil activity, left the oilfields of Oklahoma last year in order to buy used double-wide trailers, fix them up and rent them out, among other ventures.
She’s been buying trailers in Wichita and driving them an hour south to a lot near the main drag in Danville, a town next to Harper. She then takes the wheels off and tears them apart, adds plumbing, power, carpeting, mirrors to make the rooms look bigger and extra fixtures to make them feel less like a trailer.
"I tend to be an outside-the-box person," said Olivier, who also operates oil wells on her property and holds local rodeos on her family farm. "My goal was to get housing available as quickly and efficiently as possible. I’ve lived in a modular and a double-wide trailer for a lot of years myself, and they’re very nice."
The four trailers are already booked by oil workers for when they will become available at the beginning of July. Meanwhile, Olivier has been receiving five to 10 calls a week from people who she just can’t accommodate yet.
The trailers, which Olivier typically buys for around $25,000, run from 900 square feet to 2,000 square feet and will rent for anywhere between $1,250-to-$2,100 a month.
That may not sound that pricey for a place like New York, but for Harper and the surrounding towns, where two-bedroom homes have rented for only $400 a month for years, it’s a small fortune.
Yet, as more workers move to the area, $2,000-a-month rents are far more common — and prospective landlords are getting far more creative.
Along with her trailer-home project, Olivier recently converted a former bank into six "executive suites" — each complete with one bedroom, a kitchen and a bathroom — and she has rented all of them to an oil company. The units rent for between $1,750 and $2,100 a month and currently house 14 workers.
America’s biggest boomtowns
Olivier has also bought and renovated four rundown houses and five commercial buildings — including another bank, a dental office and even a laundromat — and fixed them up in order to create housing and office space for oil and wind workers. In all, she said she is currently housing about 35 workers in the ten properties she owns.
But Olivier’s not the only person cashing in on the housing shortage.
After trying to get in on the housing boom in North Dakota, only to find that property values were already too high to make them worthwhile investments, Rocky Hufman, 45, decided to get a fresh start in the new oil play of Kansas.
Hufman has been flipping abandoned homes in Harper County and renting them out for $700 to $1,100 a month since March. He said he’s sure he could get more money for them if he tried, but he doesn’t want to rip anyone off.
A couple of months ago, he bought an unoccupied house for $32,000, touched up the paint, fixed the porch, trimmed the bushes and trees and cleaned the yard — and now he’s renting it to an oil worker for $1,000 a month.
"All the properties were already highly overvalued when I got to North Dakota — it felt like I was two-and-a-half years behind and could never get ahead of it," said Hufman. "I came here to get out in front of this boom. But it’s still a big risk. If this boom goes bust, I go bust."
Farmers hit the jackpot in Kansas oil boom
While it’s been a lucrative business so far, Hufman said he’s determined not to make money at the expense of local residents. After seeing landlords kick people out of their homes in North Dakota because they knew they could get more money from oil workers, Hufman said he refuses to buy an occupied property. He wants to create enough alternative housing for workers that locals won’t get kicked out of their homes this time, he said.
To do this, Hufman is working for builder Vap Property Solutions to build a 60-unit apartment complex from the ground up in Anthony. Each unit is slated to rent for more than $2,000, and the company is in talks with a major oil company about renting the entire complex to its workers.
Meanwhile, the town of Anthony’s decade-old horse and dog racing track is being turned into an apartment complex. In addition, the owners of the constantly-booked Anthony Motel are building a new 45-room hotel to fit the overflow of guests. And the economic development director of Harper County is transforming the 101-year-old Carnegie library into an office for an oil company’s workers.
Oil boom chasers: Next stop, Kansas
Anyone with a little spare space is able to make an extra buck. Ray and Dana Young, ages 69 and 59, respectively, are supplementing their retirement income by renting out four beds in their basement for $500 a month each.
The Youngs put up flyers in local stores advertising the spaces earlier this month, and a group of wind farm workers called to reserve the beds within a week. The $500 monthly rate is a lot better than the $350 a week they were paying to stay at a motel, said Dana.
But even as all of this extra housing is being created for incoming workers, some locals are still losing out. One couple, Eileen and Eddie Morris, said they were even kicked out of the home they had rented for 11 years when the owner decided to take advantage of rising property values and sell it to someone who would pay more money.
"It’s all about the money, it’s all about the greed," said Eileen. "These people that own homes, they want money … now that people have come to town that have money, that’s what they want."
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