In the Region
Southwest to begin daily nonstop trips to Little Rock from BWI
Southwest Airlines will launch daily nonstop service between Baltimore-Washington International Airport and Little Rock, Ark., beginning in February.
Little Rock is the latest in a series of new cities being served by Southwest through BWI. On Sunday, the carrier began offering seven flights per day from BWI to Buffalo, N.Y.
Southwest is the fourth-largest domestic carrier in terms of customers boarded and is the dominant carrier at BWI.
Schneider named CEO of Calif. magazine company
Hilary Schneider, former general manager of The Baltimore Sun Co., has been named chief executive officer of Red Herring Communications, the San Francisco-based magazine and Web site company covering technology and business news.
Schneider, who spent seven years at The Sun, succeeds company co-founder Christopher Alden, who had served as interim CEO. The announcement was made by Anthony Perkins, chairman of the board of directors and co-founder of Red Herring Communications.
Schneider, 39, left The Sun in November to join Times Mirror Interactive, where she served as president and CEO of Times Mirror's interactive media division. Schneider has an MBA from Harvard and a background in media investment banking, publishing and Internet operations management.
Elsewhere
EU ready to pay compensation to end 12-year beef dispute
The European Union is prepared to pay compensation to end a 12-year dispute over beef that has prompted the United States to retaliate on $116.8 million worth of EU goods, Guenter Burghardt, EU ambassador to the United States, said yesterday.
That could pave the way for the United States to remove some or all of the 100 percent duties on EU gourmet food items and other products that have been in place since July 1999.
The United States retaliated in the beef dispute after the EU failed to comply with a series of rulings by the World Trade Organization against the EU's ban on beef from cattle produced with artificial growth hormones. The WTO said the EU failed to show that its ban, begun in January 1989, was based on valid scientific concerns about the safety of eating beef produced with growth hormones.
WHO chief rejects tobacco companies' offer to talk
World Health Organization chief Gro Harlem Brundtland dismissed Big Tobacco's offer of dialogue yesterday and accused it of trying to undermine WHO efforts to hammer out the world's first anti-smoking treaty.
After two days of unprecedented public hearings in Geneva, where tobacco companies admitted that their cigarettes were deadly and called for cooperation with the WHO, Brundtland said the gap between her agency and the industry remained as wide as ever.
"There is one underlying reality we must all keep in mind: Tobacco remains the only legal consumer product that kills half its regular users," said Brundtland, a medical doctor and Norway ex-premier.
Union Carbide shares dip on revised profit forecast
Shares of Union Carbide Corp. dropped almost 10 percent before recovering in the stock market yesterday after the chemical giant's warning that third-quarter profit would be less than half of what analysts had expected.
The Danbury, Conn., company is the latest in a string of chemical concerns, including DuPont Co. and PolyOne, to warn in recent weeks that profits would be hurt by soaring costs of raw materials made from crude oil and natural gas.
The stock is down 45 percent since the beginning of the year, similar to falls seen throughout most of the industry.
This column was compiled from reports by Sun staff writers, the Associated Press, Bloomberg News, Reuters, the New York Times and Bridge News.
