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Japanese Finance Minister Taro Aso said that the government won

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A 49-year-old man is facing a second-degree murder charge following the Friday night death of a 50-year-old woman in Clearview Township, just west of Barrie.

On May 24, police responded to a disturbance in the village of New Lowell at around 8:30 p.m. where they discovered the body of a woman at the scene.

Ontario Provincial Police later identified the woman as Deena K. Brooks.

Police say that Mitchell Brooks, 49, has been charged and made his first court appearance in Barrie Saturday.

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Payday loans no faxing fall on the less risky side simply because the money loaned to you is a percentage of your next paycheck.

Stock futures are sinking and it appears major U.S. indexes are heading for a down week roiled by corporate earnings, good and bad, and confusion about what the Fed will do next.

Dow Jones industrial futures are down 56 points to 15,233. S&P futures have lost 8.9 points to 1,641.10. Nasdaq futures are down 15.5 points to 2,976.75.

Retail shares are falling, led by Sears, after it posted a big loss late Thursday. Gap is falling with investors overlooking a strong quarterly report, and focusing instead on an outlook that disappointed some traders credit report.

Investors on Friday were still trying to figure out how committed the Federal Reserve is to its current stimulus efforts, with mixed signals coming from Chairman Ben Bernanke and other Fed officials.

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The Senate Judiciary Committee is aiming this week to pass a landmark immigration bill to secure the border and offer citizenship to millions, setting up a high-stakes debate on the Senate floor.

First, the committee must resolve a few remaining disputes.

One involves amendments over high-skilled immigrant visas sought by the high-tech industry but opposed by labor unions. The bill as written increases the availability of these visas, but includes restrictions aimed at ensuring U.S. workers get the first crack at jobs. Silicon Valley companies view some of the restrictions as too onerous and are lobbying to soften them.

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, seen as a swing vote on the committee, is on the side of the high-tech industry, while Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., is championing the labor position. Lawmakers and lobbyists have been trying to find a compromise that could win Hatch’s support for the overall bill without alienating Durbin, one of its authors.

There’s also a disagreement over whether gay Americans should be given the right to sponsor their foreign-born spouses for green cards like straight Americans can. Gay rights groups are pressuring Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., to offer an amendment allowing this, but Republican authors of the immigration bill insist that they’ll abandon their support for their legislation if such a measure is included.

Both disputes were put off until last week as lawmakers negotiated behind the scenes and weighed their options. The three public work sessions the Judiciary Committee held over the last two weeks featured little suspense, as committee members waded through some of the 300 amendments that were filed to the bipartisan bill guaranteed online payday loans. The legislation seeks to dramatically remake the U.S. immigration system and allow tens of thousands of new high- and low-skilled workers into the country.

Committee members accepted a number of Republican-sought changes to the bill, including provisions tightening up border security. But majority Democrats and the two Republican committee members who helped write the legislation _ Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham _ fended off major changes, branded “poison pills,” that could jeopardize the delicate compromises at its core.

This week, in addition to the high-tech and gay marriage disputes, amendments will focus on the crucial sections of the bill dealing with the 13-year path to citizenship the legislation offers the 11 million people in this country who are here illegally.

Democrats have the votes to ensure committee passage of the legislation by the end of the week, before Congress breaks for its Memorial Day recess. The outcome is less certain on the Senate floor, where Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., has promised the measure will be considered in June. Less certain still is the outcome in the GOP-controlled House, where Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, has not said publicly how or when he’ll proceed with bringing immigration legislation to a vote.

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When a recruiter called last year about a position as a mechanic in British Columbia, Paul Thomas said he could hardly believe it.

Thomas

DHAKA, Bangladesh • As Bangladesh reels from the deaths of hundreds of garment workers in a building collapse, the refusal of global retailers to pay for strict nationwide factory inspections is bringing renewed scrutiny to an industry that has profited from a country notorious for its hazardous workplaces and subsistence-level wages.

After a factory fire killed 112 garment workers in November, clothing brands and retailers continued to reject a union-sponsored proposal to improve safety throughout Bangladesh’s $20 billion garment industry. Instead, companies expanded a patchwork system of private audits and training that labor groups say improves very little in a country where official inspections are lax and factory owners have close relations with the government.

In the meantime, threats to workers persist. In the five months since last year’s deadly blaze at Tazreen Fashions Ltd., there were 41 other “fire incidents” in Bangladesh factories — ranging from a deadly blaze to smaller fires or sparks that caused employees to panic, according to a labor organization tied to the AFL-CIO umbrella group of American unions. Combined, the recent incidents killed nine workers and injured more than 660, some with burns and smoke inhalation and others with injuries from stampedes while fleeing.

Wednesday’s collapse of the Rana Plaza building that killed more than 300 people is the worst disaster to hit Bangladesh’s fast-growing and politically powerful garment industry. For those attempting to overhaul conditions for workers who are paid as little as $38 a month, it is a grim reminder that corporate social responsibility programs are failing to deliver on lofty promises.

More than 48 hours after the eight-story building collapsed, some garment workers were still trapped alive Friday, pinned beneath tons of mangled metal and concrete. Rescue crews struggled to save them, knowing they probably had just a few hours left to live, as desperate relatives clashed with police.

“Improvement is not happening,” said Amirul Haque Amin, president of the National Garment Workers Federation in Bangladesh, who said a total of 600 workers have died in factory accidents in the last decade. “The multinational companies claim a lot of things. They claim they have very good policies, they have their own code of conduct, they have their auditing and monitoring system,” Amin said. “But yet these things keep happening.”

What role retailers should play in making working conditions safer at the factories that manufacture their apparel has become a central issue for the $1 trillion global clothing industry.

The clothing brands say they are working to improve safety, but the size of the garment industry — some 4,000 factories in Bangladesh alone —means such efforts skim the surface. That opaqueness is further muddied by subcontracting. Retailers can be unwittingly involved with problematic factories when their main suppliers farm out work to others to ensure orders are filled on time.

“We remain committed to promoting stronger safety measures in factories and that work continues,” Wal-Mart said in a statement after the Rana Plaza collapse. The world’s largest retailer says there was no authorized Wal-Mart production in the building. One of the Rana Plaza factories, Ether Tex, listed Wal-Mart as a customer on its website.

Labor groups argue the best way to clean up Bangladesh’s garment factories already is outlined in a nine-page safety proposal drawn up by Bangladeshi and international unions.

The plan would ditch government inspections, which are infrequent and easily subverted by corruption, and establish an independent inspectorate to oversee all factories in Bangladesh, with powers to shut down unsafe facilities as part of a legally binding contract signed by suppliers, customers and unions. The inspections would be funded by contributions from the companies of up to $500,000 per year.

The proposal was presented at a 2011 meeting in Dhaka attended by more than a dozen of the world’s largest clothing brands and retailers — including Wal-Mart, Gap and Swedish clothing giant H&M — but was rejected by the companies because it would be legally binding and costly.

At the time, Wal-Mart’s representative told the meeting it was “not financially feasible instant credit report… to make such investments,” according to minutes of the meeting obtained by The Associated Press.

After last year’s Tazreen blaze, Bangladeshi union president Amin said he and international labor activists renewed a push for the independent inspectorate plan, but none of the factories or big brands would agree.

Siddiqur Rahman, former vice president of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association, denied the factories are responsible for killing the plan, saying the problem was that buyers did not want to pay for it.

“We welcome anything that is good for the garment industry and its workers here,” Rahman said. He also disputed several union groups’ figures of dozens of factory fires since November, saying there had been only one.

Global Solidarity, the AFL-CIO group, said its staff in Bangladesh compiled the list of 41 “fire incidents” from local media and counted any incident that caused injury or evacuation as an indication of compromised safety.

This week, none of the large clothing brands or retailers would comment about the proposal.

Wal-Mart spokesman Kevin Gardner did not directly answer questions about the unions’ safety plans in replies to questions emailed by The Associated Press. H&M responded to questions with emailed links to corporate social responsibility websites.

In December, however, a spokesperson for the Gap — which owns the Gap, Old Navy and Banana Republic chains — said the company turned down the proposal because it did not want to be vulnerable to lawsuits and did not want to pay factories more money to help with safety upgrades.

H&M also did not sign on to the proposal because it believes factories and local government in Bangladesh should be taking on the responsibility, Pierre Börjesson, manager of sustainability and social issues, told AP in December.

H&M, which places the most apparel orders in Bangladesh and works with more than 200 factories there, is one of about 20 retailers and brands that have banded together to develop training films for garment manufacturers.

Wal-Mart last year began requiring regular audits of factories, fire drills and mandated fire safety training for all levels of factory management. It also announced in January it would immediately cut ties with any factory that failed an inspection, instead of giving warnings first as before.

And the Gap has hired its own chief fire inspector to oversee factories that produce its clothing in Bangladesh.

But many insist such measures are not enough to overhaul an industry that employs 3 million workers.

“No matter how much training you have, you can’t walk through flames or escape a collapsed building,” said Ineke Zeldenrust of the Amsterdam-based Clean Clothes Campaign, which lobbies for garment workers’ rights.

Private audits also have their failings, she said. Because audits are confidential, even if one company pulls its business from a supplier over safety issues, it won’t tell its competitors, who will continue to place orders — allowing the unsafe factory to stay open.

The Tazreen factory that burned last year had passed inspections, and two of the factories in the Rana Plaza building had passed the standards of a major European group that does factory inspections in developing countries. The Business Social Compliance Initiative, which represents hundreds of companies, said the factories of Phantom Apparels and New Wave Style had been audited against its code of conduct which it said focuses on labor issues, not building standards.

“The audits and inspections are too much focused on checklists,” said Saif Khan, who worked for Phillips Van Heusen, the owner of brands Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein, in Bangladesh until 2011 as a factory compliance supervisor.

“They touch on broader areas but do not consider the realities on the ground,” he said.

Johnson reported from Mumbai, India. AP reporter Farid Hossain contributed from Bangladesh. AP Retail Writer Anne D’Innocenzio in New York and AP Business Writer Kelvin Chan in Hong Kong also contributed to this report.

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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.

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Missouri’s system for receiving electronic income tax filing has “slowed down,” according to the state Department of Revenue, but the department promises not to fine residents who file by tonight’s deadline.

The glitch effects people who filed using computer tax preparation software.  That software sends returns to the federal Internal Revenue Service, which forwards the Missouri return to the state’s computers.

“Over the last few days, there has been a communication issue between the Internal Revenue Service’s MeFile system that has slowed down, but not stopped, the downloading of electronic returns,” said Revenue Department spokesman Ted Farnen in an emailed statement.  “People are able to file electronically, but some of them may not yet have their electronic receipts for their state returns.”

St. Louis resident Larry Smith said he discovered the problem after he filed his taxes using the Turbotax program last Tuesday low interest personal loan.  The IRS promptly sent him an electronic receipt for his federal return, but he received nothing from the state.  Worried, he said he called the Revenue Department today and was told that the system had been down for 10 days.

“What I had to do was print out my 34 pages of tax returns and I ran down to the post office,” he said.  Smith said he was outraged that there had been no public announcement of the problem.  Farnen issued his statement in response to questions from the Post-Dispatch.

The state says it is not necessary to file a paper return. “If a return is filed electronically with the IRS by midnight tonight, it will be also be considered timely for Missouri, and the taxpayer will not be liable for interest or penalties for late filing,” said Farnen.

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A woman in her 40s was confirmed dead after she was struck by a car in the city’s northwest end Friday night.

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A man has been arrested in connection to a real estate fraud investigation by Toronto police.

The alleged fraud occurred last October when five men, including the suspect, answered the victim’s real estate advertisement selling a commercial property.

The suspects befriended the victim and allegedly promised him a large sum of money coming from South Africa to pay for the property, police said.

The money had a dark coating that had to be cleaned off cash advance loan. The victim was promised more money if he covered the cost of cleaning what seemed like wads of cash, police said.

The coated money turned out to be fake and the victim allegedly lost around $450,000.

One of the suspects, Herman Fankem, 32, of Montreal, has been charged with fraud over $5,000.

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