Free Republic

Boeing said Thursday evening that the first flight of its 787-8 long-range jet is set for 10 a.m., Dec. 15 in Everett, Wash. The first of six test airplanes, ZA001, is due to take off from Payne Field next to the airplane's final assembly factory north of Seattle. Chief Pilot Michael H. Carriker and copilot Randall Neville will conduct low- and high-speed taxi tests that take the airplane to the threshold of flight in preparation for Tuesday's events. Once airborne, Carriker and Neville are not expected to return ZA001 to Everett. They will land at Boeing Field in Seattle, headquarters...

A number of recent headline stories out of China about joint ventures and acquisitions involving American companies didn't seem to get much attention in the US media, yet these stories indicate that the current economic recovery will remain jobless for some time. Is China a lifeboat for US firms, or the tugboat pulling the entire wounded US economy back to shore? The biggest news came out of the automotive industry, where Beijing Automotive announced its intention to acquire all or part of Saab from General Motors which also announced a joint venture with Shanghai Automotive to sell small cars...

Mumbai: Two weeks ago, AGL Resources Inc., an Atlanta, US-based natural gas distribution company, decided to shift its call centre operations from India to the US. The centre was operated by India’s third largest information technology (IT) services company, Wipro Ltd. Along with similar instances of Delta Airlines Inc., United Airlines Inc. and Chrysler Group Llc reported earlier in the year, this could raise a flag for Indian business process outsourcing (BPO) firms which earned nearly $15 billion (Rs69,450 crore today) from such back-office work in the year to March AGL said that were no consumer satisfaction issues. “Wipro employees...

OAKLAND -- KTVU News has learned a key section of that bridge has been delayed again and Caltrans now is bracing for a new cost over-run in the tens of millions of dollars. The history of the new Bay Bridge has been a troubled one from the time the state decided to replace the old eastern span after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. The original price tag of a little more than $1 billion has exploded into more than $6 billion along with numerous delays. Now Channel 2 News has learned that next Wednesday, state and local transportation officials are...

As Britons, we tend to think about our economy in the same way as our national sports teams. We know we should be world-beaters, but deep down suspect we're doomed to perennial disappointment...As the official statistics confirmed yesterday, ours is the only one of the world's top seven economies still stuck in recession. You might have been aware that Britain was one of the world's biggest chemical producers, thanks to companies such as GlaxoSmithkline, AstraZeneca and the thriving biotech firms that cluster around universities. You probably knew we sold plenty of Scotch and ale overseas. But did you know that...

Playboy to outsource most magazine ops: report Tue Nov 24, 1:40 am ET (Reuters) – Playboy Enterprises Inc will outsource most of the business operations of its namesake magazine in an effort to curb losses, the Wall Street Journal said on Tuesday. Playboy will turn over all magazine operations, except its editorial operations, to Florida-based American Media Inc, according to the paper. The deal reached last week is expected to be funded in part from Playboy's advertising sales, the paper said. Playboy has about 30 full-time employees working in the operations that will be outsourced, and most will be let...

China State Construction Engineering Corp, the largest contractor in China, has bagged a subway ventilation project worth about $100 million in New York’s Manhattan area, marking the construction giant’s third order in the United States’ infrastructure space this year. The contract was given to China Construction American Co, a subsidiary, the Wall Street Journal quoted a source as saying. “The new project, along with the $410-million Hamilton Bridge project and a $1.7-billion entertainment project it won earlier this year, signals China State Construction’s ambition to tap the American construction market,” said Li Zhirui, an industry analyst at First Capital Securities....

Until several years ago, I was fortunate to have several people working for me who were talented, intelligent, creative and energetic. They also appreciated the limits of their knowledge and strived constantly to maintain and improve their skills. What they didn’t know about the core business we worked in they learned. They were all American citizens by choice, not by accident of birth. Most importantly, they were not the product of the American education system. In other words, they did not suffer from inflated estimates of their importance, intelligence or self-esteem. Unfortunately, most college graduates today are unsuitable for productive...

On September 9, the giant data storage hardware and software company EMC announced it would spend $1.5 billion to further develop its R&D capabilities in India. A new research facility will employ 2,000 engineers and scientists with the potential for an additional 1,500. A day earlier, EMC announced a R&D alliance with the Indian Institute of Information Technology-Bangalore, one of a constellation of Indian research universities equivalent to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, albeit with harder admissions requirements. Such announcements are usually met with despair and anger. The decision to domicile those jobs in India nails yet another in the...

Fear of offshoring may force its way back onto policy agendas soon. This column uses a survey of individual workers to measure the offshorability of particular jobs and says that about 25% of US jobs are offshorable. Surprisingly, routine tasks are not more offshorable but those held by more educated workers are. Although overshadowed by the financial crisis and the world recession right now, the debate over offshoring – that is, outsourcing work to foreign (often poorer) countries – seems poised to stage a comeback as a public policy concern in the not-too-distant future. Indeed, with so much protectionist talk...

Christians, are you there? Are you out there? Are you listening to what you just read? Are you angry? Are you fed up with our rights being stripped away and trampled on by the enemy? If this country is going to preach tolerance, then where is the so-called tolerance for Christianity? I mean talk about biased. We have allowed ourselves to be blocked out. The ones who constantly complain about us not being tolerant are not being tolerant at all. So to them I say, “Practice what you preach!” To my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, I say, “Shame...

Reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan - It's 8 o'clock on a Sunday night in the Pakistani capital, but collection cowboy Sharoon Hermoon is living on U.S. time. Headset in place, feet on his desk, he aims his speed dialer at a debtor in Fort Worth, Texas. "Hello, ma'am, how ya doin' today?" he says in a convincing American accent. "My name is James Harold and you owe us $11,000." There's a deer-in-the-headlights moment at the other end, then a deep breath, then a torrent of excuses. "I don't know what you're talking about," she says. "It's someone else. My husband's identity...

My son is returning from Japan and needs info regarding international shipping. Any help would be appreciated. He has about three cubic meters of "stuff".

The entire article is well worth the read but this is the most important information: " U.S insurers are beginning to test programs to pay for elective medical work overseas. The incentive for patients may include elimination of deductibles and travel for a spouse, as well as paying the cost of hotel and travel. In these insurance programs, the operative words are "non-emergency" and "cost-effective," according to Dr. Virginia Cardin, a senior healthcare consultant with Frost & Sullivan. The latter involves measuring immediate outcomes and required follow-up care that would be done in the U.S. "

U.S. IT providers continue to push jobs offshore, while Indian firms work to refine the amount of work they complete overseas. Although Congress may force the Indian firms to hire more Americans -- and Indian companies have been telling investors that they may have to indeed do that -- the change won't likely affect the overall trend and the shift in jobs outside the U.S. Okay, so where are U.S. jobs going? What's the data show? Data prepared by Everest Group Inc., a research and outsourcing consulting firm, shows in broad brush fashion the shift of jobs overseas by some...

More than 100 jobs at the British Council are to be outsourced to India as part of a massive cost-cutting drive to save the taxpayer money, The Times has learnt. The decision to recruit local Indian workers to fill finance and IT posts has infuriated unions, who fear that this could be the blueprint for Whitehall. It is believed to be the first time that the Civil Service or a quango has directly exported jobs to save costs. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office, which funds the British Council, is exploring similar options. A spokesman said that administrative jobs could be...

General Motors is spending more money where it counts: Latin America. The Latin American market has been generous to the struggling automaker despite struggles at home. Today, GM announced a $1 billion plan to expand its vehicle lineup in Brazil. "We believe the Brazilian market will be very strong, will continue to grow at a rate of at least 5 percent a year and we also believe in the prospects for exports of the new models," Jaime Ardila, GM's chief executive for Brazil and the Mercosur region of South America, said in a statement. Ardila added that GM showed record...

d out which companies in your area are endangering workers' health or involved in cases of violations of workers' rights under the National Labor Relations Act. The database contains information on more than 60,000 companies nationwide. More on Job Tracker sources and data. Enter your ZIP code, state or company name below, or search by specific industry to see the detailed information.

Posted on Tue, Aug. 05, 2003 Macon mayor defends trip to Africa Ellis says Ghana could process city's parking tickets By Mike Donila Telegraph Staff Writer Macon Mayor Jack Ellis on Monday defended his plans to visit Africa, saying that his mission, in part, is to encourage Ghanian officials to import more goods from Middle Georgia. Ellis also said that during his weeklong trip he will lay the groundwork to possibly enable Macon's Ghanian sister city of Elmina to process local parking tickets. "Ghana is very important to the city, the state - even the region where we live. They...

Citing a backlash from customers who complained that they were finding Indian accents hard to understand, Delta Air Lines has dropped the use of Indian call centers to handle sales and reservations. Delta is retaining its call centers in Jamaica and South Africa, which generate far fewer complaints. Under criticism from angry Florida lawmakers, JP Morgan has also announced that it will no longer route food stamp recipient calls to Indian call centers. The company services Florida’s Electronic Benefit Transfer program. The company directed overflow calls from EBT card holders to two Indian call centers. Sen. Ronda Storms, R-Valrico, said,...

Outsourcing's third wave May 21st 2009 From The Economist print edition Rich food importers are acquiring vast tracts of poor countries' farmland. Is this beneficial foreign investment or neocolonialism? Click to enlargeEARLY this year, the king of Saudi Arabia held a ceremony to receive a batch of rice, part of the first crop to be produced under something called the King Abdullah initiative for Saudi agricultural investment abroad. It had been grown in Ethiopia, where a group of Saudi investors is spending $100m to raise wheat, barley and rice on land leased to them by the government. The investors are...

Indian IT firms would not be impacted by the tax reform proposal of US President Barak Obama, Infosys Technologies chairman and chief mentor N.R. Narayana Murthy told President Pratibha Devisinh Patil Friday. “Obama’s tax proposal will not impact Indian firms as they already pay taxes in the US. It is only American firms operating in India who would have to repatriate taxes on profit earned outside the US when it becomes a law,” Murthy told Patil at an interactive session at the Infosys campus. The president, who is on a three-day visit to Karnataka since Thursday, paid a visit to...

Yesterday I happened upon a post by a fellow FReeper. In retrospect, I am sorry for responding rudely to their post - and I hope they happen upon this apology. The post was presenting their heartfelt opinion that American industry and our system itself must be allowed to come apart so that something better can replace it. It was a Rand-ian position. The system is becoming oppressive, therefore we must weaken it.

I imagine myself a cracker-jack vulture capitalist in need of a dandy new investment to beat MARR and make my money work for me – not vice versa. You couldn't put a gun to my head and make me invest it in the manufacture of wheeled conveyances at US plants. It’s nice when a major corporation full of professional money managers agrees with one of my simple hunches. It tickles my masculine ego. Regrettably, that major corporation with $15Bn to invest was General Motors. The $15Bn they’ve decided to invest in Brazil, S. Korea, Canada and Mexico came from US...

Volcanoes that erupted in India about 65 million years ago were instrumental in the extinction of dinosaurs, according to new research. For the last thirty years scientists have believed a giant meteorite that struck Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula was responsible for the mass extinction of dinosaurs, the Daily Telegraph reported on Wednesday. But now Gerta Keller, a geologist at Princeton University, New Jersey, says fossilised traces of plants and animals dug out of low lying hills at El Penon in northeast Mexico show this event happened 300,000 years after the dinosaurs disappeared. Keller suggests that the massive volcanic eruptions at the...

The Satyam scandal rocked the global business community and threatened to stifle the Indian outsourcing industry. But as the dust settles, the forces driving outsourcing are as strong as ever, with benefits for both India and the West. On January 7, Ramalinga Raju distributed a four-and-one-half-page letter to members of the Bombay Stock Exchange and then went into hiding. In the letter, the chairman of multi-billion dollar Indian IT company Satyam told of how a small accounting discrepancy, created by a sleight of hand that artificially pumped sales numbers, turned into a gaping hole in the company’s balance sheet. After...

The Pentagon views China as the country most likely, at some point down the road, to acquire the capacity to challenge the U.S. military on a global scale. The U.S. in recent years has moved to strengthen its forces in the Pacific and urged its ally Japan to do the same. Washington and Tokyo are working together to boost anti-missile defenses, to defend against threats from both North Korea and China. And some in the Defense Department talk up the "China threat" to justify greater spending on new weapons systems. This week, Adm. Wu Shengli, the top officer in China's...

Indian IT services company Infosys has sacked over 2,000 people after an appraisal of 60,000 workers revealed underperformers. Indian IT service providers are attempting to cut costs as business levels fall in the face of their international business customers cutting their IT budgets. Infosys head of HR Mohandas Pai told the The Wall Street Journal, "The tolerance for non-performance has come down to zero. "The appraisal was conducted for 60,000 of our employees. At the bottom, some 3.5% of the employees were either outplaced or left the company. It is an annual scenario after every performance assessment. In fact, normally...

NEW DELHI — India’s Central Bureau of Investigation concluded its investigation of the outsourcing company Satyam Computer Services on Tuesday, and charged nine people including auditors from PricewaterhouseCoopers with forgery and fraud. After a 45-day investigation, the bureau said it was charging six people from Satyam Computer Services, two suspended auditors from PricewaterhouseCoopers and an outside adviser with “criminal conspiracy, cheating, cheating by personification, forgery of valuable security, forgery for the purpose of cheating, using a forged document as genuine, falsification of accounts and for causing disappearance of evidence.” Satyam, one of India’s top outsourcing companies, has been struggling since...

---snip---DR. BERNSTEIN: Next we have a video question from Harriet in Georgia about bringing jobs back to America: "Hello, President Obama. Here is my question for your online town meeting. When can we expect that jobs that have been outsourced to other countries to come back and be made available to the unemployed workers here in the United States? Thank you so much for all your hard work. God bless you. Bye-bye." THE PRESIDENT: Well, I appreciate that. Let me talk more, first of all, broadly about what's happening in the job market. We have had just a massive loss...

IBM will cut about 5,000 jobs in the United States, adding to similarly large cuts in the past few months, sources with knowledge of the matter told Reuters on Wednesday. The job cuts will account for over 4 percent of IBM's U.S. workforce, which totaled around 115,000 at the end of 2008. The sources, who were not authorized to speak publicly on the issue, said the cuts will mostly be in IBM's global services business, which includes outsourcing and consulting services. An International Business Machines Corp spokesman declined to comment. The company, which had a total workforce of 398,455 as...

International Business Machines (IBM: 97.89, -0.41, -0.42%), a blue-chip tech company that has managed to continue to grow despite the global recession, is expected to eliminate a large number of U.S. employees from its global-business services unit, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. Weeks after slashing nearly 5,000 jobs, IBM is expected to shift the work of a large number of U.S. workers to IBM employees working in India, the latest example of a successful company that is continuing to slash costs and take advantage of cheap Asian labor, the Journal reported. Representatives from IBM did not immediately respond to...

New York: The Bank of America has pulled back job offers made to foreign students graduating from US business schools this summer, becoming the first American bank to do so. With Congress making it harder to hire foreigners during campus placements, the American dream has soured for some Indian students. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A bank spokesman told reporters that provisions of the 'Employ American Workers Act' in the stimulus bill prevent institutions like the Bank of America, which have received bailout funds from the government's Troubled Asset Relief Programme (Tarp), from applying for H-1B visas for immigrants. "As foreign students we don't...

Nakheel Hotels has bought a 50 percent interest in the Fontainebleau Miami Beach resort for $375 million. The iconic hotel is in the midst of a $500 million renovation and is expected to open during the second half of 2008. Aventura-based Turnberry Associates bought the hotel in 2005. The Dubai emirate manages Nakheel, the hotel group's parent company. It developed the Palm Islands in Dubai and recently partnered with Busch Entertainment Corp., the family entertainment division of Anheuser-Busch Cos., to put four theme parks on the man-made islands. "We are extremely pleased to have a world-class organization such as Nakheel,...

This poster recognizes there are a lot of very well-intentioned, principled conservatives who believe to the very core of their being, that "free trade" is by definition, a good thing. If trade were in fact free - that would arguably be the case.

One of the things liberals love to do when making shrills against conservatives is to claim that they are backed by big business corporate capitalist elitists. Conservatives they say are interested in advancing the agenda of the rich against the poor. Conservatives are champions of the rich while they crap all over the poor. They only want to protect the privileged and elite. They give tax cuts to the super rich by cutting programs and putting our nation in debt. Also according to liberals, by electing Barack Obama, we would undo this and require that the rich pay their share....

As far back as May of last year, Boeing publicly discussed that the brake control system was a key pacing item for the 787 program. Tracing the evolution of this issue, which Crane and Boeing have stated is resolved, today we find Crane announcing they need to develop a new version of the software, potentially for the 787-9, later blockpoint 787-8s, or even an additional evolution for initial certification. The recipient of the new software is unclear at this point, but it certainly something to be aware of moving forward. ... Crane Co. CEO Eric Fast - February 18, 2009:...

It's protectionism, say Indian critics, that Congress has banned companies receiving bailout money from hiring foreigners on H-1B visas With the economies in the U.S. and India both struggling and with unemployment rising,the outsourcing of American jobs to Indian workers has become an even more explosive issue. That's leading business leaders,politicians,and ordinary citizens in both countries to focus on a controversial visa program,the H-1B, that allows a limited number of foreigners to work at U.S. companies for up to six years. Critics have long claimed the program allows high-paying software-writing and engineering jobs at companies and state governments to go...

“Oh, God,” why did he have to use that word? According to MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, the GOP “outsourced” the Republican response to a young, successful Indian-American governor who “had nothing to do with Congress.” They had to outsource the response tonight, the Republican party. They had to outsource to someone who had nothing to do with Congress because the Republicans in Congress had nothing to do with the programs he was talking about tonight or the record he referred to. First of all, one might point out that Piyush “Bobby” Jindal was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives...

TV Newser: MSNBC's Chris Matthews has responded to his uttering of the words "Oh God" just as Gov. Bobby Jindal emerged to deliver the GOP response last night. TVNewser has obtained some of what Matthews will say on "Hardball" tonight: "I was taken aback by that peculiar stagecraft, the walking from somewhere in the back of this narrow hall, this winding staircase looming there, the odd anti-bellum look of the scene. Was this some mimicking of a president walking along the state floor to the East Room?"

What's with the personal attacks against Bobby Jindal, who gave the Republican response to Obama's speech last night? The MSM and faux conservatives (CINO's) are piling on Jindal with Ad Hominem attacks, with one calling Jindal's speech "almost childlike," and are focusing on the delivery of his speech, rather than on the particulars in his speech. What is it with this liberal obsessive fixation on how something is said (the delivery) - which seems to be the case when Obama gives a speech - rather than on what is said?

Bobby Jindal must be doing something right: Chris Matthews is making ugly remarks about him. On this evening’s Hardball, Matthews accused the Louisiana governor of “stupid talk.” It got even better for Bobby: Dem Gov. Ed Rendell announced that “I’m voting for Charlie Crist” over Jindal. Thank you, Ed! Rendell was a guest on this evening’s Hardball, and Matthews played a clip of Jindal and Crist’s contrasting comments on the stimulus plan. Jindal was critical, Crist thought it was great. MATTHEWS: Governor Rendell, that’s cartoon talk by Jindal. Nobody’s talking about a train or a light rail from Disney World...

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- American Home Mortgage Servicing Inc., owned by vulture investor Wilbur Ross, will pay Citigroup $1.5 billion for the rights to service 185,000 home loans, Ross said Thursday.

IBM employees being laid off in North America now have an alternative to joining the growing ranks of the unemployed - work for the company abroad. Big Blue is offering its outgoing workers in the United States and Canada a chance to take an IBM job in India, Nigeria, Russia or other countries.

For the two out-of-work engineers, it's a race against time. They've lost their Silicon Valley jobs and need to quickly find others at a time when companies everywhere are tightening their belts. Both are Indians whose advanced degrees were earned at American universities. And both are facing the inflexible rules of their H-1B work visas. Technically, as soon as they lost their jobs, they were required to leave the country. In reality, they can probably wing it for a week or two, but not much longer. This stark dilemma is being repeated with increasing frequency across SiliconValley, according to immigration...

Outsourcing, Indian-style, is challenged as never before by an erosion in business confidence that makes corporate spending, even to generate quick cost-savings, harder to justify. “No New Investment” is the order of the day; cost avoidance, the mantra; zero percent, the growth target in the current era of uncertainty. Software service providers emerged out of the 2000-2002 technology spending bust with sales growing up to 50 percent a year as they won over companies to contract out inefficient operations instead of managing them in-house. But shocks to the world economy seen over the past 18 months are triggering reassessments of...

The specter of outsourcing has cast a long shadow over American industry for many years. Some protestors have decried the trend, while corporations have claimed that it is just one more indication of a global economy. Certainly, there have been longstanding jokes about people in the United States calling about a new computer and finding themselves speaking with someone in New Delhi. But many of us in the newspaper business incorrectly thought ourselves immune from this tendency. Several readers of the Cape Cod Times have recently said that they have called in for certain subscription services, only to find themselves...

Satyam Computer Services, a leading Indian outsourcing company that serves more than a third of the Fortune 500 companies, significantly inflated its earnings and assets for years, the chairman and co-founder said Wednesday, roiling Indian stock markets and throwing the industry into turmoil. The chairman, Ramalinga Raju, resigned after revealing that he had systematically falsified accounts as the company expanded from a handful of employees into a back-office giant with a work force of 53,000 and operations in 66 countries. Mr. Raju said Wednesday that 50.4 billion rupees, or $1.04 billion, of the 53.6 billion rupees in cash and bank...

NEW DELHI:  In another successful anti-piracy operation, Navy warship on Saturday repulsed an attack on a merchant vessel in the Gulf of Aden and nabbed 23 Somali and Yemeni sea brigands, in a show of resolve to weed out the menace that affected maritime trade in the region. The pirates on two speed boats had surrounded the merchant vessel flying the Ethiopian flag around noon, when INS Mysore warship intervened and warded off the attack, Navy spokesperson said. The pirates had fired at the merchant vessel with their small arms, when it sent out a rescue call and the Indian...

How’s this for noche buena? Mother, father and sister carry packed food in plastic containers and then alternate between walking and taking public transportation, seemingly off to a special mission. Just outside a building, they prop up a table with a few chairs. They set the dishes they have brought. Brother, a call center agent, is in the graveyard shift; there are no holidays in his job. But when he sees his family outside, waving at him, he puts down his headset, turns away from his computer and walks out the door of his office for a little break. Of...