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After a months-long battle with the city of Irwindale over complaints about a spicy odor, Sriracha sauce creator David Tran said Wednesday that he is now seriously considering moving his factory to another location. Tran responded Wednesday to the politicians and business leaders from 10 states and multiple cities in California who have offered to host the Sriracha factory. He invited them to tour the facility in Irwindale and decide if their communities would complain about the odors that arise during production. Tran stressed that he has not decided whether to move, but would like to explore his options. The...

SPARTANBURG COUNTY, S.C. - Outdoor retail giant Bass Pro Shops is setting up shop in Spartanburg County. The announcement was made Wednesday at a news conference. The company will be building the 120,000 square foot store near the BMW facility at the intersection of Highway 101 and Interstate 85. It is planned to be the anchor for developments including other retail stores, hotels and restaurants. The store, the company's third in South Carolina, is set to open in 2016. “This store will be a tribute to the great sporting tradition and heritage of the region and a celebration of the...

A bombshell revelation has brought the IRS scandal to a new level. Judicial Watch has released internal IRS communications revealing that former Tax Exempt Organizations director Lois Lerner was in contact with the Department of Justice (DOJ) regarding whether it was possible to criminally prosecute tax-exempt groups she believed had “lied” about their political activity. Judicial Watch obtained the documents by successfully filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the IRS in October 2013, following the agency’s stonewall of four FOIA requests dating back to the previous May. Contained in those documents is an email exchange between Lerner...

Russia is rolling out two major projects—a gas pipeline and a Crimea deep water port—with China, as EU countries and the US weigh options on economic sanctions. Russia’s ambassador to the EU, Vladimir Chizhov, told EUobserver on Wednesday (16 April) that work on the “Power of Siberia” pipeline and the Chinese construction of a 25-meter-deep port in Crimea are proceeding as normal despite the Ukraine crisis. Describing the pipeline as a “mega-project”, he said it will pump 60 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas a year from the Kovykta and Tchayandinskoe gas fields to Russia’s far east, with a branch...

... Both the Americans and the Europeans have ruled out the possibility of a military response and instead want to strike Putin where he is most vulnerable: Russia's economic dependency on the West. They want to show the Russian president that the economic damage caused by sanctions will outweigh any regional political advantage won through his actions. The main role here also continues to lie with Germany. The reason is simple: The country has very close business relations with Russia and has the greatest capacity to exert pressure. ... The consequences would be serious -- for both sides. Last year,...

A popular place to buy Easter candy was shut down by the city of Philadelphia on Wednesday. The shelves of Blasius Chocolate Factory on the 1800 block of East Venango Street in Kensington are stocked. However on Wednesday, no one was able to buy anything after the City of Philadelphia moved in with police to shut down the well-known business. “These last four days make or break me. I don’t think I will be able to survive this year,” said Philip Kerwick, owner. Kerwick admits he’s racked up a $12,000 delinquent tax bill. […] Kerwick says he’s tried to negotiate...

The outlook for the president’s health care overhaul suddenly appears brighter, and some Democrats are saying it’s time for the party to openly embrace the law that Republicans consider their best campaign weapon. Activists in one Senate race are doing just that. Other Democratic candidates, however, remain wary, unsure that a modest dose of good news will be enough to offset countless TV ads denouncing “Obamacare.” Those worries are well founded, say Republicans who shrug off the developments Democrats tout. […] Republicans already were pushing their luck by vowing to “repeal and replace” the health care law without having a...

The average price for a kilowatthour (KWH) of electricity hit a March record of 13.5 cents, according data released yesterday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That was up about 5.5 percent from 12.8 cents per KWH in March 2013. ... The BLS’s seasonally adjusted electricity price index rose to 209.341 this March, the highest it has ever been, up 10.537 points—or 5.3 percent--from 198.804 in March 2013. ... per capita electricity production peaked in the United States in 2007.

Alaska Dispatch Publishing LLC, the parent company of the online newspaper the Alaska Dispatch, will purchase the Anchorage Daily News from The McClatchy Co. for $34 million. The sale is expected to close in May. ... Billionaire Warren Buffett's company, Berkshire Hathaway, owns 31 small- and medium-sized daily newspapers. It has bought most of those newspapers since 2011 at bargain prices. Including weekly papers and other publications, Berkshire owns 70 newspapers.

At The Hobby Center in Danbury, Karl LaLonde, the store's owner, holds the Proto X in the palm of his hand. It's the size of a fairly healthy tarantula. LaLonde has decorated it with an orange piece of plastic shaped like a bird's beak. Switched on, its four tiny propellers spin. Under LaLonde's control via a joystick, it lifts off the counter and scoots around the store's airspace. The Proto X costs $50. "You can get a camera to fit it," LaLonde said. It's the smallest of the many UAVs -- unmanned aerial vehicles -- LaLonde sells. Business is good....

The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times (FT) have recently reported frightening food-price inflation. Prices for staples like coffee, oats, milk, meat, vegetables and fruits have increased so far in 2014 by rates as high as 70%. The FT noted that a breakfast now costs at least 25% more than it did in 2013. As expected, media attributed the food-price inflation to droughts and to fast-growing demand in Southeast Asia. For fish, for which prices tripled in recent years, the drought factor does not apply, leaving us with high demand. This explanation fits best with what the US Federal...

Editor's note: Christopher S. Chivvis is a senior political scientist at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation and expert in European and Eurasian security issues. You can follow him @cchivvis. Bonny Lin is an associate political scientist at RAND and an expert on Asia-Pacific security issues. The views expressed are their own. At Sunday night's emergency U.N. Security Council meeting, Western countries denounced Russian efforts to destabilize eastern Ukraine. Depending on your reading of its statement, China either refused to do the same, or refused to back Russia. Either way, the meeting was just the latest example of how the Ukraine...

Ukraine's controversial opposition leader, Yulia Tymoshenko, has formally joined the race to become the country's president, on the same day as the huge task facing the new leadership was underscored by a tough IMF aid package that will foist deep austerity on the country. ... Whoever wins the vote on 25 May will face a tough task. The International Monetary Fund on Thursday offered Ukraine a bailout of up to $18bn (£10.9bn) over two years, in return for harsh economic reforms that may well worsen living standards for the already impoverished population. Further IMF aid will be unlocked if austerity...

China's GDP grew 7.4% in the first quarter amid growing evidence that the powerhouse economy is easing offThe new railway station being built in Shenyang, Liaoning province. Investment in fixed assets dipped in the first quarter. China's annual economic growth slowed to its lowest for nearly a quarter of a century between January and March to 7.4% from 7.7% in the previous three months.

(CNN) – Hoping to help close the gap between workers' skills and the needs of businesses, President Barack Obama on Wednesday will announce he's putting hundreds of millions toward job training programs that produce highly skilled workers. Obama and Vice President Joe Biden will head to a community college in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania to make the announcement. The funding will come in two parts: $500 million toward a new job training competition that pairs community colleges with businesses, and $100 million for new apprenticeship programs to train workers. The White House says the new initiatives are meant to combat a...

A well-loved Maryland supermarket is being forced to limit the amount of full time workers they hire because of the harsh mandates imposed by Obamacare. Snider’s Superfoods, family owned and operated since 1946, says that they will not be hiring any new baggers or cashiers in order to avoid the 50 worker threshold, which under the new Obamacare stipulations, would require that they provide health insurance if they employ 50 or more full time workers. …

Federal systems remained vulnerable to hackers even after researchers identified the bug. Google knew about a critical flaw in Internet security, but it didn't alert anyone in the government. Neel Mehta, a Google engineer, first discovered "Heartbleed"—a bug that undermines the widely used encryption technology OpenSSL—some time in March. A team at the Finnish security firm Codenomicon discovered the flaw around the same time. Google was able to patch most of its services—such as email, search, and YouTube—before the companies publicized the bug on April 7. The researchers also notified a handful of other companies about the bug before going...

In Congress, the vulnerability of the power grid has emerged as among the most pressing domestic security concerns. ... Crain, the owner of a small tech firm in Raleigh, N.C., along with a research partner, found penetrating transmission systems used by dozens of utilities to be startlingly easy. After they shared their discovery with beleaguered utility security officials, the Homeland Security Department began sending alerts to power grid operators, advising them to upgrade their software. The alerts haven't stopped because Crain keeps finding new security holes he can exploit. "There are a lot of people going through various stages of...

For the second time, producers of a planned pro-life film effort have had to switch from Kickstarter to IndieGoGo for their crowdfunding efforts. Filmmakers Phelim McAleer and Ann McIlhenny took their Gosnell Movie project to IndieGoGo after Kickstarter insisted that they could shut down the effort at any time if they didn’t like the language used to promote it, and another pro-life project called Stolen Moments has gotten a rejection letter from Kickstarter as well. The rejection, nearly two weeks ago, was on the basis of the campaign being, er … “self help” (via Katie Pavlich): For the life of...

That honor now goes to New Jersey. Tax reforms passed in the latest budget represent big improvements for corporations, but not so much for individuals. ... Still, New York remains a burdensome place to earn a living. The reforms did not change the state's poor rankings for having high sales taxes (No. 38), individual income taxes (No. 49) and unemployment taxes (No. 45). Meanwhile, the governor announced Tuesday that the state tax department collected nearly $4 billion in evaded taxes in the past year, a 5% or $200 million increase compared to the year earlier.The state collects about $87 billion...