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Struggling retailer American Apparel is eyeing a move out of its downtown Los Angeles manufacturing facility for a lower-wage part of the country, according to two sources familiar with the company. The Los Angeles clothing maker, which emerged from bankruptcy in February, is contemplating a move to a state such as Tennessee, North Carolina or South Carolina, where the minimum wage is $7.25, said one source, who requested anonymity due to pending litigation. That would be a significant savings once California’s minimum wage climbs to $15 an hour in 2020. In a statement, American Apparel said it “does not comment...

Today, the Virginia House of Delegates passed a bill to authorize the farming, and production of industrial hemp in the state for commercial purposes, setting the foundation to nullify in practice the unconstitutional federal prohibition on the same. The vote was 98-0. Introduced by Del. Brenda Pogge (R-Norge), House Bill 699 (HB699) would amend current state law on hemp by removing a provision that authorized the licensing of hemp farming only upon approval of the federal government.

...A team of scientists have identified a nearly 7,000-year-old reed mat discovered in east China, offering a rare glimpse into a very early stage of the civilization's textile making. Objects such as baskets woven from plants are among the oldest human technologies. Their origin is believed to be related to the rise of agriculture, which fueled the need for grain and seed containers. Yet a lack of surviving items has long hampered studies. According to an article published in the journal Scientific Reports, Zhang Jianping and his colleagues dated the remains of a woven mat unearthed at a Neolithic settlement...

Spiders sprayed with water containing carbon nanotubes and graphene flakes have produced the toughest fibers ever measured, say materials scientists. Spider silk is one of the more extraordinary materials known to science. The protein fiber, spun by spiders to make webs, is stronger than almost anything that humans can make. The dragline silk spiders use to make a web’s outer rim and spokes is amazing stuff. It matches high-grade alloy steel for tensile strength but is about a sixth as dense. It is also highly ductile, sometimes capable of stretching to five times its length. This combination of strength and...

The old textile mills here are mostly gone now. Gaffney Manufacturing, National Textiles, Cherokee — clangorous, dusty, productive engines of the Carolinas fabric trade — fell one by one to the forces of globalization. Just as the Carolinas benefited when manufacturing migrated first from the Cottonopolises of England to the mill towns of New England and then to here, where labor was even cheaper, they suffered in the 1990s when the textile industry mostly left the United States. It headed to China, India, Mexico — wherever people would spool, spin and sew for a few dollars or less a day....

NOTE The following text is a quote: www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releases/Pages/jl2002.aspx Treasury Targets Major Money Laundering Network Operating Out of Colombia 7/9/2013 Trade Based Money Laundering Network Supported Narcotics Traffickers Ayman Joumaa and Evaristo Linares Castillo WASHINGTON – The U.S. Department of the Treasury today announced the designation of Colombian nationals Isaac Perez Guberek Ravinovicz and his son, Henry Guberek Grimberg, as well as 29 other individuals and entities, including companies located in Colombia, Panama, and Israel, as Specially Designated Narcotics Traffickers (SDNTs). These 31 individuals and entities together form a money laundering network responsible for laundering hundreds of millions of dollars in...

I've got a very successful westernwear product that my company manufactures in the United States. Sparkle is very popular and even a necessity with at least some of the line. Our customer is thrilled with the work we've done and is in the process of greatly expanding the line. They can't keep it in stock. The problem is, we cannot locate a better metallic yarn than just your standard Lurex. It's scratchy, yarn breaks are a problem during manufacturing, so profitability takes a hit whenever we use it. We've tried coverd nylon, no improvement. We've tried importing sheen yarn, but...

Textiles and rope fragments found in a Peruvian cave have been dated to around 12,000 years ago, making them the oldest textiles ever found in South America, according to a report in the April issue of Current Anthropology. The items were found 30 years ago in Guitarrero Cave high in the Andes Mountains. Other artifacts found along with the textiles had been dated to 12,000 ago and even older. However, the textiles themselves had never been dated, and whether they too were that old had been controversial, according to Edward Jolie, an archaeologist at Mercyhurst College (PA) who led this...

Within the next few months, Pisgah Yarn & Dyeing will effectively shut down its operations in Old Fort. Jack Lonon Jr., president of the family-owned company, told The McDowell News on Thursday that the company’s assets will be sold to Spinrite Yarns of Canada. The sale will become final on Feb. 25. After that, the future of the business will be uncertain.

IT COULD have been a scene from Gabriel García Márquez’s novella, “Chronicle of a Death Foretold”. But there was nothing magical about the realism of the video recorded by Rodrigo Rosenberg, a Guatemalan lawyer, four days before he was shot dead on Sunday May 10th while cycling on a busy avenue. “If you are hearing this message,” he intoned, “it is because I, Rodrigo Rosenberg Marzano, was assassinated by the president’s private secretary, Gustavo Alejos, and his partner, Gregorio Valdez, with the approval of Álvaro Colom and Sandra de Colom [Guatemala’s president and first lady]”. Political murders are sadly nothing...

RALEIGH, N.C. - Crystal Lee Sutton, whose fight to unionize Southern textile plants with low pay and poor conditions was dramatized in the film "Norma Rae," has died. She was 68. Sutton died Friday in a hospice after a long battle with brain cancer, her son, Jay Jordan, said Monday. "She fought it as long as she could and she crossed on over to her new life," he said. Union organizers had targeted J.P. Stevens, then the country's second-largest textile manufacturer , because the industry was deeply entwined in Southern culture and spread across the region's small towns. However, North...

The Dutch Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld the war crimes conviction of a businessman for selling chemicals to Saddam Hussein that his regime in Iraq turned into poison gas and unleashed on Kurds and Iranians. ... In May 2007 a Hague appeals court upheld Van Anraat's 2005 conviction for complicity in war crimes and increased his sentence from 15 to 17 years. ... Presiding Judge Leo van Dorst said that from the mid-1980s Van Anraat was Iraq's sole supplier of a chemical called TDG, or thiodiglycol, for its mustard gas production program. "The suspect knew ... the TDG he was...

A glove that works as a cell phone, a vest that senses danger and a tank top that measures heart rate. It seems that the hi-tech textiles by Swedish School of Textiles researcher Lena Berglin could turn anyone into a superhero.

Georges Marciano, a co-founder of the Guess clothing empire, is the latest person seeking to become governor of California. The one-time fashion magnate's paperwork was recorded on Monday with the secretary of state's office, allowing him to run as an independent in 2010, when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is termed out. The 62-year-old Beverly Hills resident plans to campaign on a platform that focuses on exposing and eliminating political corruption and putting "the power of government back in the people's hands," said his publicist, Rod Harrell. "He doesn't really want to be tied into the same old good-old-boys network," Harrell said....

To believers it is the burial cloth of Jesus Christ, miraculously marked with his image. But the Turin shroud was widely dismissed as a hoax in 1988 when scientific tests found it could not be more than 1,000 years old. Now one of the scientists who first studied 12 foot-long sheet has spoken - from beyond the grave - of how he came to believe that it could be genuine. A video made shortly before Raymond Rogers died in 2005 has been discovered, in which the U.S. chemist reveals his own tests show the relic to be much older -...

The Other American Auto Industry Plenty of car makers make a go of it in this country--they're just non-union and not headquartered in Detroit. West Point, Georgia Drew Ferguson IV is a 42-year-old dentist whose family has lived in this town, population 3,300, "since God put us here." To be precise, the family arrived eight generations ago. Ferguson went off to the University of Georgia, then on to dental school, after which he came back to West Point. He and his wife, whom he met in college, have four kids. A year ago, Ferguson was elected mayor. "There's a reason...

WASHINGTON - The American flag has many labels: Stars and stripes. Old Glory. And sometimes, made in China. Congress can't halt the flow of Chinese-made flags, but lawmakers can try to control where they are flown. The House declared Monday that any flag flown on federal property should be made in the U.S.A. "It's not a major problem facing the nation," admitted Rep. Bob Filner, D-Calif. "But it's an irritant." Chinese-made flags seemed to pop up everywhere after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. People rushed to show their sense of patriotism by buying American flags, and U.S. manufacturers couldn't...

In a recent editorial, writer Jesse Patrilla somewhat sarcastically commented on the consequences of a proposed economic boycott of China. "No large U.S. retailer is willing (read: stupid enough) to not carry Chinese products, " he wrote. "In the year following their 2004 joining of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and consequent release from quotas, the volume of Chinese clothing exports increased over 500 percent, and prices dropped almost 50 percent. If that’s just numbers to you, do this experiment: Check the perimeter to see if your boss is out of the way, duck in your cubicle and start checking...

In what would be the biggest commitment to ending child labour ever undertaken by a major retailer, Gap Inc is drawing up plans to label its products 'Sweatshop Free'. The ambitious pledge, which would place the firm at the forefront of the battle to end sweatshops, comes in response to an undercover Observer investigation which last week exposed one of the firm's Indian suppliers employing children as young as 10 to make garments. Yesterday, Gap's senior vice president, Stanley Raggio, flew from San Francisco to New Delhi to meet the anti-sweatshop charity the Global March Against Child Labour, to hammer...

Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega has accused foreign textile companies, mostly Taiwanese, of "enslaving" workers and leaving the country instead of paying higher wages. Ortega said several industries closed in free zones following the government's recent decision to increase the minimum wage by 18 percent. "There is talk that the companies are going to leave the free zones, that people are going to be left unemployed," the leftist Ortega said in a speech late on Wednesday. "When they find that they have to pay more, it is no longer worthwhile and they leave," he said. The president said the owners of...