Credit Herald

CanWest Global Communications Corp. has found a buyer for two local TV stations in Hamilton and Montreal and the new owner has big plans to change directions radically in those markets to turn around money-losing operations.

Toronto-based Channel Zero Inc. has agreed to buy CHCH-TV in Hamilton and CJNT-TV in Montreal for an undisclosed purchase price, the companies announced yesterday.

The stations are among five money-losers CanWest put up for sale in February, to stop more red ink bleeding from its troubled empire. The move is part of a broader shakeup of its broadcasting and publishing businesses in Canada and abroad.

"From CanWest’s perspective, it’s more a strategic decision than a monetary one," said analyst Chris Diceman, senior vice-president at bond-rating firm DBRS.

"They’re getting out of channels they couldn’t turn a profit on. It’s not going to help the company in terms of saving their financial situation, to say the least," he said.

The deal is subject to certain conditions, including that unionized employees at CHCH agree to a renewed collective agreement maintaining all current provisions of the labour contract except for any potential changes to pensions and benefits, said Cal Millar, vice-president and general manager of Channel Zero.

Assuming the conditions are met and the deal gets approval from CRTC, the federal broadcast regulator, the private Toronto company specializing in old movies and short films says it would offer employment to all current employees at CHCH and CJNT.

"The reality is that these stations have not been profitable, so what we are reducing is drag on profitability," said CanWest spokesman John Douglas.

Douglas said the company continues to seek buyers for the remaining three stations but will wind them up if they cannot reach a deal paydayloan.

Channel Zero, founded in 2000 and located on Dundas St. W., proposes that CHCH broadcast all news, all day – until about 8 p.m. – then provide "well-known movie favourites" in the evening from its arsenal of specialty digital movie stations including Movieola and Silver Screen Classics, said Millar.

The move is a "complete about-face" from CanWest’s recent pullback at CHCH on the local news side and its Hollywood-style programming under the E entertainment banner, which was not working in terms of attracting much-needed advertisers, said analyst Diceman.

Meanwhile, CJNT will broadcast original foreign movies and multicultural music videos, with "vibrant, fresh multicultural hosts" for its Montreal viewers, said Millar. Currently, the station has a format that includes a lot of local talk television.

"By enhancing and energizing the format, we know that both stations will have huge appeal to their core audiences and will be very advertiser friendly," he said.

Channel Zero also agreed to honour the existing licences of the two stations, which call for 13.5 hours of local ethnic programming a week at CJNT and 36.5 hours of local programming a week at CHCH.

The CanWest media chain has been trying to avoid collapsing under massive debt as it struggles with sharp advertising declines due to the recession.

The deadline for reaching a deal with its creditors has been extended several times already.

Source

Roger L’Heureux and his two sons specialize in going with the flow – of water.

Their privately owned family business has supplied fountains, or "water features," as they are often called, to 30 countries on five continents.

And their work produced nearly $20 million in revenues last year for their Concord, Ont.-based Crystal Fountains Inc.

L’Heureux, who started the company in 1967, recalls one financial dry spell that lasted three years. Indoor fountains are a marketing asset and functionally often double as humidifiers in a northern winter, but they’re not essential.

In 1965, L’Heureux, an engineer, installed a fountain in his employer’s backyard – he worked at a Toronto indoor drain company – and freelanced on others before he started his own company.

"In those days, there were no courses to take and only a few books on the subject. You just pushed water at high pressure to as high as it could go," he says.

"There also wasn’t much serious competition in those days because there wasn’t nearly as much demand from developers, architects and municipalities as there is today."

He was in the right place at the right time. Toronto sculptor Gerald Gladstone brought him in to collaborate on three fountains for Expo 67 pavilions in Montreal. Either with Gladstone or on his own, L’Heureux later did a number of fountains in Toronto shopping centres, intimate spaces like the Coffee Mill in Yorkville, downtown apartment tower lobbies, courtyards and public buildings.

Perhaps his crowning achievement in Canada is the Toronto Eaton Centre fountain, which opened in 1975 and still entertains millions of visitors every year with its 10-minute cycle of a water column that shoots up 21 metres and then collapses into a six-metre diameter basin – without spectators below getting splashed.

His sons Paul, the CEO, and David L’Heureux, director of commercial products, immersed themselves in the business since their early teens and were ready to take the business further when their father retired to Phoenix, Ariz., in 1987.

By 2002, Crystal Fountains had sold parts, entire fountain systems and design/consulting services to more than 800 museums, parks, recreation centres, commercial and municipal buildings, hotels, casinos and shopping centres around the world.

The most expensive one they’ve built cost "about a million dollars,” Paul L’Heureux says.

George Ayer, vice-president, operations, programming/choreography, says about 20 per cent of the company’s income is generated by design services and the rest comes from selling nozzles, lights, junction boxes, drains, sequencing devices and other parts to other companies in the business.

The company could have refrained from export markets, but the temptation to go global was too strong to resist. Besides, much larger markets beckoned.

"Toronto is not a big fountain city," explains Paul L’Heureux.

"Not like some overseas cities and Kansas City, which is called the City of Fountains," where one wall fountain in a science centre looks as if it’s defying gravity by running up, not down cash loans till payday.

Today, the 52-person staff (including a few posted to Dubai and the Cayman Islands) design and machine parts for the L’Heureux projects at the company’s Concord head office/manufacturing plant. The hydraulics and mechanics of new fountains, new architecture, lighting and different water orchestrations in a simulated fountain basin are also tested there.

Compared to the current generation of fountains, 18th- and 19th-century versions were less ingeniously mechanical but much more ornate, with elaborate statuary and water sprays in, for example, Rome’s Trevi fountain.

Remember Swedish movie star Anita Ekberg frolicking in that fountain in the movie La Dolce Vita? They don’t build them like that any more, but rather in a contemporary, modern, high-tech design.

The L’Heureux brothers consulted on one such project – the Crown Fountain in Chicago’s Millennium Park. Two 50-foot high glass block towers with built-in fountains that are covered with LED screens, upon which videos of Chicagoans are projected, give the illusion that water is spouting out of their mouths.

Crystal Fountains, in fact, does more and typically larger-scale work in the United States than in Canada.

Everything is going green in the fountain business, Paul L’Heureux says.

"Our industry has for years been using coloured LED lighting, which doesn’t use a lot of electricity. Nozzles have also been changed to create a spray effect, but with less water discharged.

"Pumps that push water through the nozzles are smaller and use less electricity. There are also fountains run by solar power, and other water and energy conservation features in development," he said.

Robert Mikula, the company’s senior creative supervisor of projects, adds that "water is typically recirculated and reused. LED lighting helps reduce energy consumption and cuts down on maintenance, which used to be every two years instead of every five years today.

“We can also reduce power needed for the water pump and shut off water displays when they aren’t needed," he said.

Such environmental and sustainable features are also of great interest in eastern Europe, and "in trying to bring their standards up (to North American levels)," says Simon Gardiner, Crystal Fountains’ creative design director. "They want new malls, and world-class water features, new ways to show water," he says.

Ayer summed it up this way: "Humans need a pleasing environment to live in. The best things that have happened in architecture is that we live in a place where there is a healthy tension between pure engineering and pure art."

Source

The window might be quickly closing on consumers’ opportunity to refinance at great rates — not their home mortgages, but their term life insurance, experts say.

For the first time in a long time, premiums are on the rise.

Over the last several years, prices on simple term life insurance have been plummeting. Premiums in recent years could be less than half of what they were in the early 1990s. For example, the same policy that had an annual premium of $1,400 back then might have cost $350 last year.

The price drop represented easy savings for consumers, who could simply buy a new, lower-priced policy — even with the same insurer — and then cancel their old one.

That’s changing. Here’s what you need to know about term life insurance:

— The pressure is on classic car insurance. Since the start of the year, insurance companies have started raising premiums for new policies — most often by 5 percent to 15 percent.

— Lock in now. Rising rates do not affect most term policies already in place because premiums are level, meaning they stay the same for the duration of the policy.

— Opt for longer terms. Consider buying a policy with a longer term, such as 20 or 30 years, to lock in today’s relatively low prices.

— Shop around. Premiums can vary widely for the exact same coverage.

Source

President Barack Obama signed an emergency war-funding bill late Wednesday that contains nearly $2.2 billion for eight more of Boeing’s C-17 transport planes.

While the additional C-17 Globemaster III planes and some international orders will allow Boeing to keep its production line going through the summer of 2011, the aerospace company and its supporters are pushing for as many as 15 additional C-17s in next year’s defense budget.

The C-17 supports 5,000 jobs at Boeing’s final assembly plant in Long Beach, Calif., and an additional 900 in St. Louis, where the plane’s cargo door, cargo ramp, landing-gear pods, nose and engine pylons are built. Boeing previously said its line would be shut down in January 2011 if it received no more U.S. orders.

"Boeing is grateful for the bipartisan congressional support the C-17 program continues to receive, along with the recognition that funding for additional C-17s is crucial at a time when America’s need for airlift is growing," the company said in a statement.

Boeing produces about 15 of the planes a year, and the C-17 line has been extended through similar supplemental defense spending measures since 2006.

But this year, Defense Secretary Robert Gates proposed capping production of C-17s at the 205 that are in the fleet and are in the pipeline.

Boeing spokesman Jerry Drelling said the U.S. Air Force orders help keep the price affordable for sale to international customers. Next month, Boeing will deliver the first of three C-17s this year to the NATO-led Strategic Airlift Capability consortium, he said paydayloan.

Qatar has ordered two of the aircraft, and the United Arab Emirates has announced its intent to buy some of the aircraft. Negotiations are under way, Drelling said.

U.S. Sen. Christopher "Kit" Bond, R-Mo., called the eight aircraft in the emergency funding bill a "win" for national security and St. Louis area defense workers.

"Looking forward, to preserve our nation’s only large airlift line in production, we will need a combination of foreign and Department of Defense sales," Bond said. "Our military and national security will be better served with a force mix of more C-17s and fewer of the obsolete and unreliable C-5As."

U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., said the C-17 is "important to jobs in St. Louis and important to our national security," but she added that the program to fund more of the cargo jets faces significant headwinds in the future.

In signing the bill, Obama said the legislation "will make available the funding necessary to bring the war in Iraq to a responsible end, defeat terrorist networks in Afghanistan and further prepare our nation in the event of a continued outbreak of the H1N1 pandemic flu."

Source

OTTAWA–Total non-farm payroll employment fell by 51,400 in April, down 0.4 per cent from March, Statistics Canada said yesterday.

The agency said the number of employees has fallen every month since the figure peaked in October 2008, bringing total losses over the period to 376,500.

There were job losses in 64 per cent – or 195 of 305 – industries, unchanged from a month before.

The agency said the highest number of industries cutting payroll employment during the current economic downturn took place in January, when 229, or 75 per cent, shed jobs.

StatsCan reported most of April’s job decline came in the service sector, particularly in universities, food and beverage services and truck transportation – the first month since the start of the decline in which service-sector job losses outpaced those in the goods sector. April losses in the goods sector came mainly in support activities for mining, oil-and-gas extraction and specialty trade contractors, while manufacturing had its smallest job decline since the start of the recent economic downturn.

The provinces with the largest declines in non-farm payroll employment in April were Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia and Manitoba. Employment in the other provinces was little changed in the month.

Average weekly earnings, including overtime, of payroll employees was $820.53 in April, up 1.4 per cent from a year earlier.

Meanwhile, the number of Americans filing claims for unemployment benefits unexpectedly rose last week, and the total number receiving payments increased, indicating the labour market may take longer to stabilize pay day loan.

Initial jobless claims rose by 15,000 to 627,000 in the week ended June 20, from a revised 612,000 the week before, the U.S. labour department said yesterday.

The number of people collecting unemployment insurance increased by 29,000 in the prior week, to 6.74 million.

Recent economic data show some areas of the economy, such as housing and manufacturing, are seeing a smaller pace of decline, and the Federal Reserve said Wednesday after a two-day meeting in Washington that the economy’s slump is "slowing." Even so, companies have been loath to hire new employees, in part because they are waiting for demand to rise.

Yesterday’s report is "just a reminder that the labour market is still in serious trouble and the unemployment rate will continue to increase into 2010," said Ryan Sweet, an economist at Moody’s Economy.com.

While the trend in recent weeks shows a slower pace of claims, "hopes for a quick rebound in the labour market are overly optimistic."

A separate government report showed U.S. gross domestic product shrank at a 5.5 per cent annual pace in the first quarter, less than the 5.7 per cent pace previously estimated. The change was spurred by a smaller trade deficit.

From the Star’s wire services

Source

CHICAGO–Boeing Co. has again delayed the first test flight of its long-awaited 787 Dreamliner jet in the latest setback for an aircraft that has bolstered the company’s order book and redefined the way it builds planes.

The Chicago-based aerospace giant said yesterday it needs to reinforce small areas of the plane before conducting the test flight, which Boeing had insisted would occur before July. Boeing said a revised schedule for the flight, as well as first deliveries to customers, will not be announced for several weeks affordable health insurance north carolina.

The announcement comes as Boeing, the world’s second-largest commercial airplane maker, and European archrival, Airbus SA, grapple with slumping orders as the recession dampens demand for air travel and cargo services. Tight credit markets also have weighed on orders for new planes. The test flight of the 787 was originally planned for late 2007.

Source

The Sara Lee Corp. confirmed Monday the loss of 273 jobs that provide information technology and financial services to the international food, home and personal care conglomerate from a facility in Earth City.

In late 2008, Sara Lee announced a three-year cost-cutting initiative that would eliminate 700 positions in its North American and European Finance divisions as well as its Global Information Services.

The company estimated the outsourced jobs could lead to savings of $200 million to $250 million. The layoffs in Earth City began June 1 and will continue until May 1, 2010.

In anticipation of the work force reduction, Sara Lee spokesman Mike Cummins said the company nine months ago began offering additional software training aimed at improving the marketability of the Earth City employees cheap cash advance.

The company will also provide the employees with a severance, services to bolster r

Ontario’s pension benefits guarantee fund was empty before the latest recession and pension crisis.

Now some nagging questions are being asked that will be important to those counting on a bailout and to those who would pay for it.

Should taxpayers backstop the fund, and should companies pay more in future to replenish it? Should the maximum guarantee be raised from $1,000 a month to $2,500, as an expert commission recommended last fall? Should we instead have a national guarantee fund, as in the United States? If nothing is done, will pension members be victims?

No! No! No! No!

Not according to James Pesando, a University of Toronto economics professor, pension expert and an aging member of a generous but underfunded pension plan.

His do-nothing approach may seem cold and uncaring. But he sees it as putting the economy, and the greater good, ahead of the interests of an essentially privileged group, a subset of the minority of workers with a pension plan.

"I think the guarantee fund is a gross mistake of public policy, a view widely shared by people knowledgeable in the area," he says bluntly, despite having once collected $1,000 a day to consult on the U.S. Pension Benefits Guaranty Corp.

Pesando argues that there should be no controversy that government has no role in subsidizing a privileged group. Yet, Ontario loans are likely to find their way into the sadly underfunded General Motors of Canada pension plan.

The alternative is to make a guarantee fund self-supporting, with premiums charged to employers. Pesando says they should be scaled in line with the risk of company failure, the degree a plan is short of funds, and the percentage of assets invested in stocks, but that is simply unworkable.

When companies become sick they cannot afford to fund their pension plans, let alone higher premiums to a guarantee fund quality business cards. A prime example is Air Canada, teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, negotiating a moratorium on pension contributions.

So, either the government steps in to support a guarantee fund, or healthy companies are dragged down to mop up the mess for declining industries.

This is not inspired industrial policy.

Pesando does not see GM’s unionized pensioners as victims. He argues that their leaders never bargained the wage concessions they knew would be required to pay for repeated retroactive improvements to pension promises. He assumes they made a rational choice, and now their members must live with the consequences.

He does acknowledge there was a failure of public policy, however. Pension plans such as GM’s hourly plan should be required to fund all retroactive increases in benefit promises within a couple of years, instead of over 10 years, he argues.

In addition, he says, if unions and workers want risk-free pensions, they should shoulder the extra cost of investing entirely in government bonds.

GM’s plan was invested 69 per cent in stocks, and union leaders should have known the risk of reduced pensions when they saw in annual actuarial reports what the company was doing.

Of course, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. So, as pension plans disappear from the private sector, it would be economically rational for more workers to question the inequality in the tax treatment between pension plans and registered retirement savings plans.

They might also question the true cost of compensating public-sector workers, like Pesando, with their far superior pension funds.

jdaw@thestar.ca

Source

An Alabama court Thursday found former HealthSouth Corp. Chief Executive Richard Scrushy liable for fraud related to the company’s massive accounting scandal and ordered him to pay $2.9 billion.

"The judgment is hereby entered in favor of the plaintiff and against Richard M. Scrushy in the total sum of $2,876,103,000," said the judgment by Alabama state Judge Allwin Horn.

"Scrushy knew of and actively participated in fraud," the judgment said in a civil case brought against him by HealthSouth stockholders payday loans.

He was acquitted of criminal charges related to the fraud in 2005, but is serving a seven-year prison term in a bribery case.

Scrushy, who came to court in leg shackles in May to testify in the civil case, said he had no knowledge of financial problems at HealthSouth (HLS), reiterating the argument used at his 2005 criminal trial. 

Source

some rays of hope for the unemployed. Can the recovery last? Most important: Where are the jobs?

Get the answers when Anderson Cooper and Ali Velshi host our panel of experts and check in on virtual town halls across the country.

Thursday, June 18 at 8p.m. ET

Photos

Ford’s fuel efficient future

Ford is taking a measured approach to rolling out electrically driven cars. We got to drive a few of the vehicles that the company has up its sleeve.

View photos

Detroit Three’s survival report card

GM, Ford, and Chrysler, the former Big 3 now dwindled to the Detroit 3, have gone in such different directions they don’t seem to be on the same planet - let alone the same city. Will they make it? Fortune grades each on its performance and prospects.

View photos

DETROIT’S DOWNFALL

• Chrysler set to reopen most plants
• Ford’s bumpy road ahead
• More auto industry bankruptcies loom
• Chrysler restarts with the Viper
• Will GM, Chrysler leave injury lawsuits behind?

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — For much of the last year, Ford Motor has been the strongest U.S.-based automaker.

But with Chrysler already out of bankruptcy and General Motors possibly six weeks away from its own exit from bankruptcy, Ford could soon find itself in the weakest position of the traditional Big Three.

The problem for Ford is that its strength was only relative to the greater problems at GM and Chrysler. Ford built its cash reserves not through profits, but by mortgaging most of the company’s assets before the credit crisis of 2008 cut off funding for the other automakers.

That pile of cash gave Ford (F, Fortune 500) the ability to ride out the sharp plunge in auto sales without turning to the government for help — at least so far. But it also left Ford with about $32 billion in debt on its books at the end of the first quarter.

With GM (GMGMQ) and Chrysler using the bankruptcy process to shed much of their own debt cheaply and quickly, Ford has gone from the automaker with the most cash on hand to the one with the most debt on its books no fax cash advances.

GM will have only about $17 billion in debt if it can follow its planned emergence from bankruptcy. Chrysler left bankruptcy with about $11 billion in debt, and a new partner, Italian automaker Fiat, it did not have previously have.

Ford also hasn’t been able to cut its manufacturing capacity or its bloated dealership network as Chrysler and GM through bankruptcy reorganization.

Ford officials insist the company remains in a strong competitive position against its Big Three rivals — despite all the help they got from the government and the bankruptcy courts.

"We don’t know what the implications are going to be, but one thing’s for sure: I like our position," said Ford Chairman Bill Ford at a conference in Detroit Monday.

But others worry that Ford’s debt level could soon become the same kind of burden that plagued GM and Chrysler before their bankruptcy filings.

"It’s a huge issue," said David Cole, chairman of the Center for Automotive Research, a Michigan think tank. "GM and Chrysler are showing how you can do things in bankruptcy you can’t get close to outside of bankruptcy."

Other auto industry experts say that even if Ford can manage its debt level, it will soon find itself in need of a bailout or possibly bankruptcy if auto sales don’t start to rebound in the next year.

"Leverage is a concern, but it’s not the primary concern. The greater concerns are low sales and underused capacity," said Gregg Lemos-Stein, credit analyst with ratings agency Standard & Poor’s, which rates Ford’s corporate credit as CCC+, deep into so-called "junk bond" status.

Lemos-Stein said while the company still has a better cash position than its rivals, "they don’t have an indefinite supply of cash, especially since we expect the outflows of cash to continue."

Still, some experts believe Ford’s future looks brighter than its rivals because it has a better lineup of vehicles in the showroom and its pipeline. While GM is busy shedding weaker brands and Chrysler is shifting away from trucks towards smaller cars, Ford has already adapted to changing demands from customers.

"They’ve managed their product portfolio pretty well. That’s very important," said Tom Libby, president of the Society of Automotive Analysts.

Libby said that product development at GM and Chrysler took a hit as the companies rushed to slash costs in recent months. That could leave Ford with newer, more attractive products for at least a few years.

"They are not being forced to make changes at gunpoint," added Subroto Banerjee, a partner at business research firm Frost & Sullivan. "They’ve done it very smartly, without all the problems and distractions of the process at GM and Chrysler."

Libby conceded that some of the market share gains Ford has achieved in recent months came because buyers were worried about the future prospects at GM and Chrysler.

If those concerns are now put to bed by those companies’ quick trips through bankruptcy, Ford will lose a marketing advantage it once had.

And all three Detroit rivals face the problems that brought the U.S. industry to its current crisis — a weak economy, an historic plunge in auto sales and a decades-long trend of losing market share to importers like Toyota Motor (TM) and Honda (HMC).

So even if Ford is still stronger than GM or Chrysler, it may not be strong enough to buck those three powerful headwinds. 

Source