Jet engine manufacturer Pratt & Whitney Canada says it will lay off more than 400 workers by next year in response to the steep decline in corporate jet purchases.
The subsidiary of United Technologies Corp. said it will lay off 250 workers by the end of the year. It also will shut a plant in Longueuil (Long-ay), Quebec, where Pratt & Whitney Canada is based, by the end of 2010, leaving 160 …
Just at its peak, the cherished tomato plant often begins to sag.It wilts rapidly from a lush, productive bush into a yellow-leafedshadow of its former self.
Several afflictions can damage tomato vines severely enough atthis time of year to reduce or even halt tomato production. Twoblights and a leaf spot named septoria are the three most damaging.
Early blight has concentric rings, each a half-inch to one-inchin diameter, despoiling foliage and fruit.
Late blight is less common but still a risk. It hits in Augustwith gray and brown splotches on the leaves. One method ofidentifying the disease is to pick a suspicious leaf. All blightsand leaf spots …
TRENTON, N.J. (AP) — The nation's financial downturn has forced many states to make tough decisions on expensive but long-untouchable public employee benefits.
Nowhere was the breakthrough more evident than in union-friendly New Jersey, where a Republican governor aided by Democrats enacted sweeping cost-saving changes.
Experts say the overhaul of pensions and health care benefits simultaneously was significant in scope and marked a …
World leaders lined up Sunday behind a bold pledge by rich nations to cut budget deficits in half by 2013.
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, host of a summit of the world's 20 top industrial and developing nations, said at Sunday's session that it's "imperative that we get our fiscal house in order."
The deficit-cutting goal would mean that countries cut their red ink in half within three years and get their total debt stabilized by 2016.
"Advanced economies have committed to fiscal plans that will at least halve deficits by 2013 and stabilize or reduce government debt-to-GDP ratios by 2016," according to a draft …
A 44-year-old man was executed Thursday evening for raping and murdering an 11-year-old girl, despite pleas from his attorneys he was too mentally impaired to qualify for capital punishment.
Bobby Wayne Woods received lethal injection about a half-hour after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to halt his punishment, which was delayed briefly until the high court ruled in his case. His lawyers had argued Woods was mentally impaired, making him ineligible for execution, and that previous appeals to spare Woods' life were unsuccessful because of shoddy work by his lawyer at the time.
Tests administered to Woods put his IQ anywhere from the 60s to the 80s. An IQ of 70 is considered the threshold for mental impairment.
Woods was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to die for the April 1997 slaying of Sarah Patterson, his ex-girlfriend's daughter. She and her 9-year-old brother were snatched from their home in Granbury, near Fort Worth. Sarah's throat was slit with a knife. Her brother was beaten and left for dead but survived to testify against Woods.
Asked by a warden if he had a final statement, Woods lifted his head from the pillow on the death chamber gurney and replied: "Bye. I'm ready."
Eight minutes later, he was pronounced dead.
"I'm not a person that likes harm done to anybody, but I believe in justice being done," Larry Patterson said after watching his daughter's killer die. "She had no choice. She didn't get a second chance."
The execution was the 24th and last scheduled for this year in Texas, where 18 inmates received lethal injection in 2008 in the nation's busiest capital punishment state. At least five already are scheduled for 2010, including two in January.
In the appeal to the Supreme Court, Woods' lawyer, University of Texas law professor Maurie Levin, argued the performance of Woods' state-appointed attorney during earlier appeals was "so egregious" the prisoner's mental impairment claims could not be accurately assessed. She pointed out the attorney has since been removed from a list of lawyers eligible to represent condemned inmates but by the time she got the case, "the damage had been done."
State attorneys told the high court no constitutional right exists for an inmate to have an effective appeals attorney and Woods' claim of due-process violations "does not change that fact." They also argued Woods' mental impairment claims already have been rejected by the courts and the last-ditch appeals improperly duplicated those rejections.
Woods blamed Patterson's death on a cousin who subsequently committed suicide. He said injuries to her brother were the result of an accident.
"We went walking around graveyards, horsing around by a fence," Woods told The Associated Press last year from death row. "Cody jumped on my back and hit a fence post.
"I guess I panicked."
At his trial, Cody Patterson testified Woods attacked him, and prosecutors presented a mountain of evidence implicating Woods in Sarah's killing, including signed confessions.
Richard Hattox, the former Hood County district attorney who prosecuted Woods, said authorities also had DNA evidence of the girl's blood on Woods' knife, her blood on his shoe and his DNA on her panties, which were found in Woods' car.
"How could there be little doubt?" Hattox said Wednesday. "Every bit of his appeal effort has been expended toward his claim of retardation. And there's no proof he is retarded."
As the owner of an 80-year-old family grocery business, John Herr has seen things come and go. Of the vast array of ways he could shape his family grocery store, he's tried to pick and choose, embracing some innovations and rejecting others.
Of one thing, he's certain.
John Herr's Village Market in Millersville could get bigger and perhaps even open other locations. But "you'd have to be nuts to do that," he says.
You really have to walk fast and pay attention to keep up with Herr. Herr, who has been running his own store with 135 employees for 54 years, isn't slowing down a bit. In fact, he's thinking about adding more features to the store that has been located at 25 Manor Ave. since 1974.
"We've got a salad bar and an inhouse bakery and a lot of other things that the big chains have," Herr said. "People don't cook anymore, so we have to do the made-to-order stuff, too."
Conspicuous by its absence, however, is the modern staple of supermarkets. When you check out groceries at John Herr's Village Market, Millersville, a clerk, dressed nattily in a candy-stripped smock, will physically punch the cost into a cash register. UPC symbols are useless here.
Price scanners are nowhere to be seen in Herr's market. In some sense, the lack of scanners give the entire supermarket a "time warp" atmosphere.
However, Herr, and his vice president of 47 years, Jim Eshleman, admit that those days of minimal technology in the store are probably gone.
Maybe.
"We've talked to our customers, and they say they really don't want the scanners," Herr said. "But, it's come to the point where we may have to get them in order to (survive)."
According to both Herr and Eshleman, the scanners are important to the merchandise warehouses and the big chains because they can pinpoint exactly what the buying patterns are of the customers. If a customer has a special "bonus buy" or "gold card" distributed by the chains, it can scan that through at the checkout, which will record the information and know precisely which customer is buying what item.
The scanners, according to the National Cash Register Co., cost between $400 and $2,000 apiece. Only one scanner is placed in each checkout register. John Herr has 10 checkout registers.
"If we want to know what we should carry, we just ask people," Eshleman said, although he noted that as more people move into the area, the supermarket might want to keep closer tabs on what it should be stocking.
The Darrenkamp family has a history similar to Herr's in the grocery market business. The grandfather of the family sold produce and fish from a horse and buggy. That business grew to a store on Lancaster's Union Street in 1932 and has since expanded to three locations: Willow Street, Mount Joy and a new 50,000-square-foot market at Willow Valley.
Darrenkamp's has embraced technology.
"In the long run it's better for the business," said Dave Darrenkamp, coowner with his brothers of Darrenkamp's Mount Joy Market Inc. "At first they may not like it, but they always come around when they see how things are used."
The Willow Valley Darrenkamp's features in-house ATMs, scanners at the checkout, credit card machines for purchases, a full-service restaurant that seats 64, 47,000 different brands and more than a million items overall.
"There are more of us; we have four families," Darrenkamp said. "We have no choice but to grow. Jack (Herr) has taken on the attitude if ain't broke, don't fix it, and he's got a great business. He really does a great job with his store."
But, says Darrenkamp, he was once in the same boat as Herr, struggling to keep up with the surging pace of the marketplace.
"If you would have told me two years ago that we would have 480 employees, in three different stores with all this new technology in the stores, I would have looked at you like you were nuts," Darrenkamp said.
After 80 years and three generations, John Herr's Village Market has survived fairly well. Too much technology, Herr said, might take away from the store's personal touch.
Herr and Eshleman have lowered the ceilings and eliminated as much of the light from fluorescent bulbs as possible. In the big stores, the ceilings are high and aisles wide in order to pack more goods and people in, but that makes the shopping experience impersonal, Herr says.
"We did this intentionally to make the store more comfortable with a more homey atmosphere," Herr said. "We've put in hanging lamps and opened up a bit of space, and to in and our customers, it just feels much more personable."
Service and personality are the calling cards of the market. Baggers are stationed at each of the store's checkout lines. There are also packers just outside the doors to help shoppers load their groceries into their cars. While groceries can be purchased with a MAC card, the store isn't open 24 hours.
"We're not that modem," Herr quips. "We need to sleep sometimes."
The history
The store opened its doors in 1919 when Herr's grandfather, David, bought a broom and harness shop where the Framery, a picture framing store on the corner of Manor and George streets, now stands. Back then, Herr's sold everything from boots to dish cloths.
In 1945, the business was passed on to Herr's father, John Sr., and Herr began working there when he was 16, slicing meats and delivering groceries.
The store was completely remodeled and expanded by 1964, when Herr took over. As to the future, Herr isn't sure. He said he doesn't have family members working at his store.
"We'll worry about that when it comes," he said.
Herr has had a lot of time to reflect on the changes of his business.
"I think the biggest thing that has happened is the frozen-food business," Herr said. "There are so many new items specifically made just for the microwave oven. Everything has to be able to be prepared so quickly because nobody cooks anymore."
Eshleman remembers when people who lived on farms in the outlying areas of the town set aside one day a week to come to town. It was the day when they went to the bank, the grocery store, the barber and the doctor.
Later, the store would stay open until after the last bus from Lancaster arrived in Millersville.
"People got their groceries and walked home with them," Eshleman recalls. "Today, everybody shops with their car, and a lot of people shop almost daily."
Steve Molitor leaned in real close and waited patiently for the response.
Fernando Beltran Jr., his opponent in Saturday's Rumble At Rama IV, had been asked what he planned to do differently than the three previous men who had lost to The Canadian Kid.
"I'm not sure what they did wrong but I'm coming here to win," Beltran said through a translator during a pre-fight press conference on Thursday. "Even if I have to die in the ring, I'm going to win. I'm hungry and I'm going to do it."
Molitor shook his head and smiled when he heard the answer.
The 27-year-old isn't overly concerned about Beltran. He fully expects to stretch his pro record to 27-0 when he defends his IBF junior featherweight title for the fourth time in nine months on Saturday.
"He's no different," Molitor said. "At the end of the night he's going to be a loser just like the rest of them."
Maybe so, but the Mexican challenger is approaching this bout with real urgency.
Beltran (30-2 with one draw) is taking his second shot at a world title and is eager to make amends for the unanimous decision loss he suffered to Joan Guzman in April 2005, when they were fighting for the WBO super bantamweight belt.
"The first time I was inexperienced," explained Beltran. "I was physically prepared but inexperienced. This time is a different story."
He earned the right to a mandatory fight with Molitor by beating countryman Jose Arboleda in December and has spent the past two and a half months preparing for the Canadian.
There's more muscle on his 55-kilo (122-pound) frame than ever.
"He's never been in this shape before," said Fernando Beltran Sr., who trains his son. "It's going to be a great show.
"We know for sure that we're going to win."
The Molitor camp is accustomed to hearing that kind of pre-fight talk.
"I've been in this sport for 27 years and I hope that every fighter who travels so far comes to win," said Chris Johnson, who trains Molitor. "I hope they come prepared."
