Stephen Marks | The Images Bank | Getty ImagesAs chief financial officer of a military clothing manufacturer, Steven W. Eisen was accustomed to winning contracts to make garments for the Defense Department. But in December, Mr. Eisen received surprising news. His company, Tennier Industries, which is in a depressed corner of Tennessee, would not receive a new $45 million contract.
Tennier lost the deal not to a private sector competitor, but to a corporation owned by the federal government, Federal Prison Industries. Federal Prison Industries, also known as Unicor, does not have to worry much about its overhead. It uses prisoners for labor, paying them 23 cents to $1.15 an hour. Although the company is not allowed to sell to the private sector, the law generally requires federal agencies to buy its products, even if they are not the cheapest. Mr. Eisen, who laid off about 100 workers after losing out on the new contract, said the system took sorely needed jobs from law-abiding citizens. “Our government screams, howls and yells how the rest of the world is using prisoners or slave labor to manufacture items, and here we take the items right out of the mouths of people who need it,” he said. Although Federal Prison Industries has been around for decades, its critics are gaining more sympathy this year as jobs, competition and the role of government have become potent political issues. Recently, a clothing company complained that the government company had expressed interest in making Air Force windbreakers like one worn by the president. Last month, amid negative news reports and pressure from the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, F.P.I. said it would stop competing for the contract because it could damage the private company that makes the jackets, Ashland Sales and Service. In addition, a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers is resuscitating a bill to overhaul the way the prison manufacturing company does business, proposing to eliminate its preferential status. Under current practice — governed by intricate laws, regulations and policies — an agency must buy prisoner-made goods if the company offers an item that is comparable in price, quality and time of delivery to that of the private sector, with certain exceptions. The company’s prices are not always the lowest, but it frequently has been able to underbid private companies, Congressional aides say. The bill seeks to limit those advantages by putting a limit on F.P.I.’s sales to the federal government, opening more product areas to private companies and strengthening requirements that the prices for prisoner-made products be competitive. The legislation would also impose federal work-safety standards and higher wages, starting at $2.50 an hour. Separately, Senator McConnell has introduced a bill that would subject the Bureau of Prisons, including its manufacturing company, to greater Congressional oversight. F.P.I. has traditionally relied on office furniture, electronics and clothing manufacturing for the bulk of its business, but it has been moving into new industries like renewable energy. The company already has one factory each in New York and Oregon to build solar panels and is looking into making energy-efficient lighting and small wind turbines. “This is a threat to not just established industries; it’s a threat to emerging industries,” said Representative Bill Huizenga, a Michigan Republican who is the lead sponsor of the proposed overhaul legislation. “If China did this — having their prisoners work at subpar wages in prisons — we would be screaming bloody murder.”
Roslan Rahman | AFP | Getty ImagesWilliams found his password and emailed the company, asking administrators to maintain 22-year-old Loren Williams' account so she could pore through his posts and comments by his friends. But within two hours, she said, Facebook changed the password, blocking her efforts. "I wanted full and unobstructed access, and they balked at that," said Williams, recalling her son's death in 2005. "It was heartbreaking. I was a parent grasping at straws to get anything I could get." Now lawmakers and attorneys in at least two states are considering proposals that would require Facebook and other social networks to grant access to loved ones when a family member dies, essentially making the site contents part of a person's digital estate. The issue is growing increasingly important as people record more thoughts and experiences online and more disputes break out over that material. Williams, a second-grade teacher from the Portland suburbs, ultimately got back into her son's account, but it took a lawsuit and a two-year legal battle that ended with Facebook granting her 10 months of access before her son's page was removed. Nebraska is reviewing legislation modeled after a law in Oklahoma, which last year became the first state to take action. "Mementos, shoe boxes with photos. That, we knew how to distribute once someone passed away," said Ryan Kiesel, a former legislator who wrote the Oklahoma law. "We wanted to get state law and attorneys to begin thinking about the digital estate." Under Facebook's current policy, deaths can be reported in an online form. When the site learns of a death, it puts that person's account in a memorialized state. Certain information is removed, and privacy is restricted to friends only. The profile and wall are left up so friends and loved ones can make posts in remembrance. Facebook will provide the estate of the deceased with a download of the account data "if prior consent is obtained from or decreed by the deceased or mandated by law." If a close relative asks that a profile be removed, Facebook will honor that request, too. Like the Oklahoma law, the Nebraska bill would allow friends or relatives to take control of social media accounts if the deceased person lived in the state. The measure would treat Facebook, Twitter and email accounts as digital assets that could be closed or continued by an appointed representative. Omaha lawyer William Lindsay, who specializes in estate planning, said his professional experience has taught him that the issue should be addressed in the law. But he also has a personal interest because of a cousin who died while serving in the Navy. "We wanted to be able to get the email records, but we couldn't because nobody knew the password," Lindsay said. "We wanted to let her friends know she had died, but we didn't know all of them." Sen. John Wightman, who sponsored the measure at the urging of the state bar association, said he expects the Judiciary Committee to approve the bill, sending it to the full Legislature. Facebook spokesman Tucker Bounds said the company was surprised by the Oklahoma law and was working closely with Nebraska legislators on the latest proposal. The company declined to say how many people had requested access to accounts held by Oklahomans, but Bounds said it was relatively rare. "I can tell you there aren't people pouring out into the streets asking for access," Bounds said. Oregon could be the next state to take up the issue. The Oregon State Bar Association has formed a group to work on the matter and hopes to propose legislation next year. Portland lawyer Victoria Blachly said the plan will mirror the Oklahoma law, but it will also include a "virtual asset instruction letter" that lists online information and passwords, along with instructions for when someone dies or becomes incapacitated. "That's the part that social media providers have been wrestling with," Blachly said. Like others, Blachly said she began studying the issue after a young relative died and left social media accounts in limbo. Her top concern is the emotional value of social media accounts. "Some people say, 'Well, if I get hit by a bus, what do I care?"' she said. "The people who love you care very much about it." © 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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The Justice Department approved the $4.5 billion purchase of over 4,000 Nortel patents to major Android rivals like Apple and RIM, guaranteeing no end in sight to the legal battles entangling the mobile industry. 
Google said Tuesday that it rebranded its Android Market, Google Music, and its online eBookstore as a single brand, Google Play. 
President Obama heralded the case as a landmark when he announced it at the White House on Tuesday morning, signaling that the United States and its allies would require China to play by international trade rules.“Our competitors should be on notice: You will not get away with skirting the rules,” he said.But international trade officials, industry leaders and specialists in China and the West noted that Beijing would have a strong hand of cards as it seeks to defend its export policies on rare earths.The metals are needed for making an array of sophisticated products, from smartphones to smart bombs, as well as wind turbines and other green technologies. China is the source of more than 90 percent of the world’s processed rare earth metals.Even if the West and Japan overcome the stiff challenges of winning their case at the World Trade Organization, it could still take several years before Beijing changes its policies — by which time companies in the West and Japan could have moved even more of their factories that use rare earth metals to China.“The filing was too late,” said Karl A. Gschneidner Jr., a rare earths specialist at the Energy Department’s Ames Laboratory in Iowa. China was “cutting off supplies and controlling things in the past couple years,” he said.He noted that this year the reopening of a long-idle American mine at Mountain Pass, Calif., and the opening of another mine in Australia would start putting more rare earths into the global supply chain — potentially enough to meet more than half of the demand outside of China. But many rare earth metal users, including computer hardware manufacturers and producers of energy-efficient lighting, have already shifted operations to China and are unlikely to move soon.But some specialists say that the West has benefited indirectly from China’s quotas, because they drove rare earth prices up by as much as 30 times. That caused a boom in mining investment that is now opening alternatives to China.“I don’t think it’s too little, too late,” said Yaron Vorona, executive director of the Technology and Rare Earth Metals Center at the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, a nonprofit organization in suburban Washington focusing on energy security.Whatever the eventual implications for world supplies of rare earths, in some ways a recent Western victory on a somewhat related trade case may have strengthened China’s hand.The World Trade Organization ordered China last July to dismantle export duties and quotas on nine other industrial raw materials, including bauxite. An appeals tribunal upheld the ruling and added details in late January.China has been able to study those orders as it has redesigned its export restrictions on rare earths. The new quotas are as stringent as the old ones, making it harder for Western manufacturers to obtain rare earths in the quantities and with the timeliness their factories require. But the revamped quota rules could be easier for China to defend in front of a W.T.O. tribunal, than its earlier policies would have been.China, for example, has begun requiring its rare earth exporters to obtain a certificate of environmental compliance before they are allowed to make any overseas shipments. That could strengthen China’s claim that export quotas on rare earths are environmentally necessary. Without dispute, the mining and processing of rare earths have many toxic and even radioactive byproducts — which is one reason the West and Japan for decades were reluctant to produce them.China denies claims by Western trade officials that Beijing has waved the environmental flag to disguise its true motive: to force Western and Japanese factories to move to China to gain access to an uninterrupted supply of low-cost rare earths.The Chinese government has also lent large sums to four state-owned mining companies that are buying many of their smaller, private domestic rivals in rare earths. That raises the prospect that China could assemble a state-owned rare earth oligopoly — one that could effectively limit exports without government policies that mandate the restrictions. W.T.O. rules mostly cover government regulations, not the behavior of oligopolies.“It will be much more difficult for us to win the rare earth case than it was for us to win the previous case,” said a Western trade official, referring to the W.T.O. rulings on industrial raw materials. The official, who insisted on anonymity because the case was diplomatically and legally delicate, added that the rare earth case could still be won because of voluminous files that point to abusive Chinese trade practices.A diplomatic confrontation between China and Japan over disputed islands in September 2010, for example, turned into a Chinese show of force on rare earths. Chinese regulators abruptly summoned the presidents of China’s rare earth mining companies to a secret meeting in Beijing, said a person with a detailed knowledge of the meeting, who insisted on anonymity to avoid angering Chinese officials.The mining executives were told that the Chinese government was about to halt all shipments of rare earths to Japan, where the electronics industry, camera industry and others depended heavily on the materials. The executives were told that if any of their companies stepped up shipments to another country instead, allowing reshipment of rare earths from that country to Japan, then the company would lose its export license. The assembled executives were also warned against speaking to the news media about the coming embargo, this person said.Chinese trade statistics showed that exports of rare earths to Japan dropped to almost zero during the embargo, which continued for two months. Legal shipments to other markets increased little in that period, although smuggling to Vietnam and then to Japan increased.On Tuesday, besides trying to free the global flow of rare earth metals, the United States and its allies demanded that China dismantle export restrictions on two other strategic minerals mined mainly in China: tungsten and molybdenum, which are used to strengthen steel.Mr. Obama also signed a law meant to make it easier for companies and unions to file antisubsidy cases against imports from China and other countries designated by the United States as having nonmarket economies.This story originally appeared in The New York Times 
Penney [JCP Loading... () 
] announced its new pricing strategy in January, as well as a plan to offer "stores within a store" and offer more exclusive goods from such brands as Martha Stewart, in whose company Penney bought a sizable stake.CEO Ron Johnson told CNBC at that time the strategy is "the first key step in the transformation" of the retailer.But in the short term, Clark said, other retailers across the board will be able to profit from Penney's transition. "In the department store space, Macy’s will be a bigger beneficiary than Kohl's because they have a higher store overlap with J.C. Penney," Clark said. Macy’s [M Loading... () 
Shehla Masood was killed outside her home last year Police in India have raided the offices of a legislator in Madhya Pradesh state in connection with the murder of a right to information activist last year in the city of Bhopal.
While the Justice Department's inquiry into the setting of the London interbank offered rate ![[cnbc explains]](C:\Program Files\ABS\Auto Blog Samurai\data\News around the WORLD\CNBC\CNBC_explains_icon1.gif){kind=small}
, or Libor, was known, the criminal aspect of the probe was not.A criminal inquiry underscores the serious nature of a worldwide investigation that includes regulators and law-enforcement agencies in the United States, Japan, Canada and the UK.Several major global banks, including Citigroup, HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland and UBS, have disclosed that they have been approached by authorities investigating how Libor is set.Global Banks Approached by AuthoritiesNo bank or trader has been criminally charged in the Libor probes. It wasn't clear which banks or traders the Justice Department is targeting in its criminal probe.The Justice Department and the banks declined to comment.Libor is set everyday in London for 10 currencies for a range of maturities. The rate is supposed to reflect the rate at which banks lend to one another. Dollar Libor, for example, is calculated after 18 banks submit the costs to borrow dollars.The rate underpins $10 trillion in loans to consumers and companies and another $350 trillion in derivatives. In the derivatives market, Libor is used in the pricing of the massive and popular interest-rate swaps market, where two parties swap floating- and fixed-rate interest payments. Libor typically is used as the basis for the floating rate.The investigations are examining whether traders at the banks tried to influence whether the rate went up or down. A change in the rate could mean a windfall of tens of millions of dollars if a trader has bet correctly on the direction of Libor.Swiss bank UBS is playing a key role in the probes because it agreed to come forward and cooperate in the inquiries.The bank said in a regulatory filing it has been granted conditional leniency or conditional immunity by the antitrust division of the Justice Department and the Swiss Competition Commission.In recent months, probes in Japan and Canada have focused on a group of interest-rate traders who attempted to manipulate yen Libor, according to court and regulatory documents.In Ontario Superior Court, a Canadian antitrust regulator said that a "cooperating party" has provided information on how the alleged manipulation took place. The cooperator is UBS, people familiar with the situation said previously.The Canadian documents provide examples of how a trader at the cooperating bank contacted traders at banks such as RBS to try and influence Libor.Copyright 2012 Thomson Reuters. Click for restrictions.