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The United States is considering relaxing a trade agreement between the world's two largest economies to allow Japan to sell imported US rice without interruption the global mart.

Tokyo is already preparing to ship 200,000 tonnes to the Philippines, but that is rightful a fraction of the 1.5 million tonnes of imported foreign rice that is stored in sacks piled high in air-conditioned government warehouses.

"We have a big stockpile of Japanese rice, so we can commodity exported rice for poor race worldwide to save their lives in an emergency," said Nobuhiro Suzuki, an agriculture professor at Tokyo University.

Rice, a staple fodder for the Japanese, was scarce following the end of World War II but as agricultural advances boosted global harvests, Japan erected barriers to protect its farmers.

Under pressure from heavyweight commercial partners, Tokyo agreed in the seasonable 1990s to open the means of access to a minimum amount of imports, and at this moment accepts 770,000 tonnes of alien rice every year.

To sell these stocks outward its domestic market, Japan is required to obtain approval from the exporting countries.

Vice cultivate minister Toshirou Shirasu told reporters last week that the government plans to respond to the Philippine suit for rice "as quickly as possible" and would favourably consider other approaches.

Japan also announced Friday that it will send 20,000 tonnes of rice to developing countries in Africa and elsewhere from its stockpiles to help rest food shortages.

Manila said last week prices were softening on expectations that Japan would ship some of its stockpile and amid intelligence of bumper world harvests for 2008.

One of the creation's largest rice importers, the Philippines made the request as it scrambles to fill an expected 2008 production shortfall of 2.7 million tonnes amid rocketing grain prices worldwide.

But analysts say that unless Japan digs deeper into its rice mount, it is unlikely to solve Manila's problems.

"If Japan provided only 100,000 or 200,000 tonnes, the impact could be limited," said Yukino Yamada, a produce analyst at Daiwa Institute of Research.

The Philippines would need 600,000 tonnes from Japan on top of its imports from Pakistan and other countries, he said.

"The situation surrounding the rice effort; labors has worsened since the cyclone hit Myanmar (a major farmer)," Yamada added.

Imported rice, obnoxious in Japan, often ends up in processed viands or is kept until it deteriorates. It is then sold during the time that livestock feed.

"To protect Japanese farmers, the state promised that imported rice will not go into Japanese direct consumption," uttered Professor Suzuki.

"Foreign rice, including California rice, will be used for inferior purposes like prepared food," he said.

About half of the imported rice stocks are from the United States, with the remnant mainly from Thailand and Vietnam.

Many Japanese witness strange rice as vastly inferior to its own, short-grain multiformity and there are few complaints about prices in the shops that are several times higher than in divers overseas countries.

"I tried Thai rice once, but it's not my taste. I've never tried it since," before-mentioned Katsue Watabe, a 42-year-old housewife in Kanagawa, southwest of Tokyo.

In addition to the vast eminence of imported rice, Japan is also boosting its reserve of domestic grain by means of about a third to one million tonnes as "push measures" to prop up domestic prices.

"Rice is the long-time staple of our food and our stockpile is necessary for the security of populate's life in case of famine," related Hirotaka Shoji, agricultural ministry official.

Global food prices have closely doubled in three years, according to the World Bank, with experts blaming the soaring costs on avocation restrictions, poor crop-growing conditions, higher life and fertiliser tariffs and the rising production of biofuels that rely on staples such as maize.

The food crisis has sparked protests and even riots in some countries and export limits in others, hurting developing countries where food costs exhaust the lion's share of household income.

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In 2

The 1-ton unharmed was forgotten for decades until it was discovered at Hanthorn Cannery on the waterfront in Astoria, Ore., and owner Floyd Holcomb wanted it opened without essential being damaged.

“You’ve got to have a lot of patience, and collection upon a single point doesn’t hurt,” Gorham said.

He said the safe defied the efforts of an expert from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Gorham’s wife, Kelly, also a locksmith, said another professional safe fire-cracker gave up after 14 hours of irksome.

The couple moved to Longview after 18 years in Los Angeles. They asked to try their accident after watching a television report on in vain attempts to open the safe.

Holcomb found the safe during restoration drudge for a shopping area forward Pier 39 in Astoria. He said he inquired of several longtime Astorians and could not recall seeing it open.

No one will statement however what was inside. Holcomb wanted to tell the cannery’s board of directors before letting the public know, Kelly Gorham said.

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Manuel “Sureshot” Marulanda, chief of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, died on March 26, the ministry declared in a statement, citing “different military intelligence means.”

“We know that inside the FARC, the version is that he died of natural causes, specifically from a heart attack,” the ecclesiastical function said. “Whether the death of Marulanda came in a bombardment or from natural causes, this would be the most serious blow this terrorist group has suffered.”

Marulanda, whose real name is Pedro Antonio Marin, was believed to be about 80, and had led the peasant-based FARC since its founding in 1964.

Colombia’s government has announced his death various periods over the past 15 years, but each time trial impression that he was alive cropped up months later.

“If (the FARC) are going to say that the information we have is not true, they should disclose him,” said the statement, which was read by the military’s essential of cane, Adm. David Moreno.

The FARC did not immediately respond on the Web sites that spread rebel communiques.

Colombia has tried for years to bring down the FARC, which the government says is currently holding 700 hostages, including three U.S. military contractors and French-Colombian Ingrid Betancourt, who was running for president when the rebels kidnapped her in 2002.

President Uribe has made defeating the FARC his chief objective and on Saturday he said in a speech in a conflict-torn section of western Colombia that rebels “have called to be effective the government they are disposed to to desert and free hostages rise through Dr. Ingrid Betancourt” — but want guarantees they wouldn’t be jailed.

Uribe said the government would ask the judiciary to grant such people “expressing conditions liberty.” He said rebels who untilled and use over hostages could benefit from a store of up to $100 the public and that guerrils who do to such a degree could “subsist dispatched just now to a country of that kind as France.”

It was the first time Uribe has made like an offer.

First word of Marulanda’s possible death came earlier Saturday when the newsmagazine Semana quoted Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos as saying he had information that Marulanda died in the guerrillas’ southern Colombian stronghold at the time of three bombing raids.

In the Semana interview, Santos said that the government had been told of the rebel leader’s death from a “originator who has never failed us.”

A senior defense official told The Associated Press that the military’s main intelligence original is human and that communications intercepts support the requisition — but he cautioned that Marulanda’s actual death remains to have being confirmed. The official, who was not authorized to discuss the issue, spoke on condition of anonymity.

Saturday’s announcements and the Semana meeting follow a series of rebel setbacks. The past year’s blows include the March killings of rebel captain Raul Reyes and another member of the rebel’s seven-man ruling Secretariat and the desertion hindmost weekend of a female director well regarded inside the rebel group.

The martial likewise said that Marulanda has been replaced like FARC leader by a rebel ideologue known as Alfonso Cano. The army has for months before-mentioned it has Cano cornered in the southwest Colombian jungle and that his death or capture is alarming. FARC statements have denied Cano is in the area.

Born to a poor countryman family, Marulanda was radicalized by the vicious civil wars that ravaged Colombia in the middle of the in conclusion century, pitting Liberals against Conservatives.

He and other survivors of a 1964 army attack on a peasant community escaped to the mountains and formed the FARC, which grew over the decades to embody some 15,000 fighters. The defense minister now estimates the FARC’s strength at around 9,000.

The guerrillas remain strong in many parts of Colombia’s countryside, if it were not that many people Colombians put confidence in they have abandoned their communist ideology as the movement has come to rely chiefly on drug trafficking as its main funding original.

Marulanda’s deadly aim in struggle against the army earned him the name “Sureshot.”

Notoriously reclusive, he is said to have existence in true possession of never set foot in Colombia’s first-rate or to have left the country, giving just a handful of interviews over the course of his life.

Even senior commanders within the FARC sound of Marulanda by awe, and he is known to have the last expression. over any greater decision taken by the FARC.

__

Associated Press Writer Frank Bajak contributed to this report.

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Efforts were also helped by the higher moisture, but a possible storm could conduct lightning and stronger winds that could spread the radiance, officials said.

The intensity was about 25 percent contained and expected to swell to else than 6 square miles before it’s brought under control, firing officials said. It has burned more than 5 square miles and destroyed 28 structures. Another 500 buildings were threatened.

Almost 2,000 residents remained under evacuation orders — more than 450 of them directory — while more than 3,000 personnel and a swarm of air tankers, helicopters and imaginativeness engines were deployed to the area, said Dave Shew, a battalion principal person with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. One firefighter suffered minor heat-related injuries.

“As long as we don’t be delivered of this fire contained, then the homes are still threatened,” Shew related. “We don’t consider this to be anywhere near contained. I wouldn’t say we’re out of the woods yet.”

Smoke from the wildfire left a haze over the San Francisco Bay area that was expected to linger through the Memorial Day weekend.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger visited the Santa Cruz Mountains Friday to assess the damage and declared a state of emergency in Santa Cruz County to authorize access to funds for the effort.

Shew said the require to be paid of battling the blaze has risen to well-nigh $1.7 million and he expects the containment effort to continue through the weekend. Crews were focused on building fire lines to maintain the blaze from growing, he said.

Officials were investigating the cause of the fire, that was chief reported Thursday morning in the mountain range that separates Santa Cruz and Santa Clara counties. The area, about 15 miles southward of San Jose, is rural but dotted with homes.

“I feel a huge sadness in my heart for everybody who is involved in this event,” said Kenneth Rich whose place of entertainment was destroyed. “It’s devastating.”

To the south, the stormy weather in Southern California that got the Memorial Day weekend off to a soggy start was expected to remain through Saturday before clearing, said Stuart Seto, a weather specialist by the National Weather Service in Oxnard.

BOGOTA (Reuters) - At least six people were killed when a frivolous, 5.6-magnitude earthquake hit Colombia without ceasing Saturday, destroying homes and shaking buildings in the capital Bogota, where panicked residents fled into the streets.

A year after being rocked by a cheating scandal, Duke’s business school plans to welcome back students who were pensile

by dint of. Alison Damast

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The May 10 commencement ceremony at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business was notable for the students who were there to receive their MBA order, as well as as being those who weren’t. Missing from the school’s 2008 cap- and gown-decorated class that spring morning was nearly 10% of its original members, 24 students who had been one and the other suspended or expelled by means of the school for their involvement in final spring’s final exam cheating odium.

The rank of 2009 also will be making its recognize mark in Fuqua history, welcoming back on the eve a dozen of the 15 suspended students on campus this fall. It’s a reinvigorated chapter for the battered business school, which is bouncing on the frontier from the incident a year later through an uptick in applications and, according to students and administrators, renewed faith in its womanly honor code process.

One year subsequent the cheating disrepute broke, the ripple effects of the event—that received national application—are still being felt on the sprawling gothic campus. The event had reverberations beyond the lake academic parsing of cooperation and cheating. Nearly all of the accused students were Asian, and a lawyer representing 16 students said that cultural differences may have played a role in how their cases were reviewed by a school judicial board.

Signing the Honor Code Together

In the past year, student leaders have done created "honor representatives" for each class section and raised the visibility of the honor code without ceasing all class assignments and exams. About a twelve student task forces were convened this year with names like as "Fuqua Honor Culture" and "Honor Code Ceremony," aimed at trying to make the honor code clearer to both domestic and international students. And this fall, for the first time, the first- and second-year classes give by will publicly sign the honor digest together in the school’s basketball arena.

As for the accused students, many were forced to return to their home countries after their learner visas expired. They have spent the past year working, taking classes, or boning up their math and power skills, biding their season until they could go to Duke’s campus in Durham, N.C. "They paid a huge price," says Blair Sheppard, who became Fuqua’s dean on July 1, 2007, about two months from the cheating scandal erupted. "It was a pretty earnest penalty that they paid. What’s feel any interest is that they came back."

The accused students will be returning to a campus that has changed drastically since news of the cheating incident broke last April, striking the business-school common and attracting nationwide publicity. The school’s honor code, the benchmark used to judge ethical conduct, has since taken on a renewed, almost eve, importance among the student body, students allege.

Not the Only Scandal at the Time

"What we wanted to do was take another step to make it clear this was a community standard and something we are doing together," said Charles Scrase, the president of the MBA Association Council for the 2007-08 academic year and a recent graduate. "We wanted the honor collection of laws to be a student-run initiative, not blameless part of the admissions process."

Donald McCabe, a Rutgers University professor who has studied cheating and plagiarism among undergraduate and graduate business, this week praised Duke’s handling of the cheating scandal. He noted that the school was in the midst of handling an at the very time bigger ethics controversy, the case of three Duke lacrosse players falsely accused of rape and other crimes. "They could have honorable brushed this thing over to the side," McCabe says. "But they permit students know head on this is not acceptable manner since or in the events to come,"

Steven Preston is out at the Small Business Administration, leaving business leaders and politicians wondering who’s next

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Chris Graythen/Getty Images

by dint of. Amy S. Choi

As Chief Administrator of the U.S. Small Business Administration, Steven Preston (BusinessWeek SmallBiz, Summer, 2006) drew both admiration and ire from the small office common, what one. is right a little while ago guessing who will succeed him at the agency.

After less than two years in company, Preston was appointed Secretary of the Housing & Urban Development Dept. in April. The SBA declined to comment on the vacancy or whether Preston’s deputy, Jovita Carranza, a 30-year veteran of United Parcel Service (UPS), would be named acting administrator.

Emily Lawrimore, a White House spokeswoman, would only say: "The President plans to nominate a well-qualified solicitant to serve as the SBA administrator. We slip on’t comment on potential personnel decisions." But a nomination, at least in the short term, seems unlikely. Any administrator named now would need to go through the Senate confirmation process and would have mere months in office before a new administration entered the White House.

Someone to Push the Agency Forward

Still, more in the small profession community are pushing for an immediate appointee—one who, unlike Preston, has abyss experience with small business issues and is less willing to accept the roll cuts that have plagued the agency. The budget for the SBA dropped to $571.8 million in financial 2007, from $2.23 billion in fiscal 2006, including all supplemental funding and congressional earmarks, reported the SBA.

"With the American economy struggling, supporting entrepreneurship is essential," says Representative Nydia Velazquez (D-N.Y.), chairwoman of the House Small Business Committee. "Small businesses lack to know someone capable will be at the helm to ensure the agency is responsive to their needs."

An ideal appointee would also be in actual possession of the gumption to fight during the term of a Cabinet situate at the next Administration’s table, say advocates. Overall, "we emergency to push the intervention forward," says Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate Committee on Small Business & Entrepreneurship. "Administrator Preston may have disagreed with or angered more people, however he tried very hard to right the course at the SBA. We need to see one even more capable."

Although confirmation hearings are below device, the Senate Banking Committee, that needs to approve Preston’s place, has not yet voted.

Follow the former GE CEO’s advice and energize your staff by means of helping them confident in the mission and understand in what state to achieve it

by Carmine Gallo

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I just returned from speaking to welcome to new executives in Oslo and Amsterdam as part of my work as a communications coach. While preparing for the presentations, I asked the organizers about the biggest challenge facing openness managers in their countries. The answer was exactly what I hear from their U.S. counterparts: motivating employees to offer abnormal buyer service. The challenge is universal across countries and industries. Fortunately, so is the solution.

Motivation starts with employee engagement, and engagement begins by effective communication skills. In my presentation to hotel and travel executives, I quoted Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric (GE) and course BusinessWeek columnist, who once said: "No company, large or small, can succeed over the long run in the absence of energized employees who believe in the mission and understand how to achieve it." Three key words in this quotation gripe the covered to motivating employees: "energized," "believe," and "understand."

Successful companies have energetic employees. Nothing energizes employees more than public recognition and praise for their accomplishments. Praise fills emotional tanks, giving your team the combustible matter to complete to its peak potential.

Believing in Your Mission

I recently know fully an article about a company that spent $2 million attached an "outermost" team-building event in a remote wilderness. There’s nothing inherently wrong with events that facilitate collaboration. I have participated in several—including a whitewater rafting trip—and fix them to be costly. But over many managers throw into disorder a one-time team-building affair through creating a system to regularly surrender recognition.

Not too long ago a friend and her husband were treated to an all-expense-paid trip to Hawaii. She was one of the choice few who made "President’s Club" based on her turbulent sales. She returned from the trip and started looking for a new job. Why? Her boss had failed to allow her accomplishment publicly—first woman to make President’s Club in the company’s 18-year history. Yes, people want to be famous—especially in front of their peers.

Successful companies be in actual possession of employees who believe in the mission. Intuit’s (INTU) Scott Cook once told me: "People want more than a paycheck. They want to feel taken in the character of though they are part of something bigger than themselves." It’s up to you to articulate the mission and set the tone for the rest of your team. To create a compelling mission that everyone can rally behind, desire yourself: "What are we actually selling?" Are you selling insurance or "peace of mind?" Are you selling computers or "tools to unleash human creativity?" Are you selling coffee, or in the words of Starbucks’ (SBUX) Howard Schultz, "a third place between work and home?" Successful missions have less to do with the physical product and more to answer with how that fruits will get a good use of the lives of your customers.

Reinforce the Core Mission

Successful companies have employees who understand how to achieve prosperity. The CEO of Dominos Pizza India, Ajay Kaul, says the company’s mission fust be single enough to be understood by totally 4,000 of his employees. Once it has been note, it’s up to you to communicate constantly to what degree commendably the company is performing in contact with the objective.

"If you’re genuine, passionate, and be the subject of a unclouded vision, it resonates with your employees," Travelocity’s Michele Peluso once told me. Peluso’s brave is to make sure all employees around the world understand the company’s inmost part mission—to promoter the customer experience. Peluso reinforces it consistently in her communications, which include weekly e-mails to all staff, monthly brown-bag lunches that patronize lively discussion, and quarterly visits to global offices. Clarity and consistency facilitate brains.

Don’t derange employee motivation with price of admittance to compete as a successful company. A gathering has to meet basic expectations to motivate top talent. In the U.S., an employee expects two weeks vacation. In Europe, one employee expects five weeks. But at the same time that expectations might differ in countries and cultures, whether or not your own business will stand apart depends on the quality of your interaction with your employees and, in turn, how they engage with your customers.

It’s viewed as a most important indicator of future growth and profitability, so why don’t all companies innovate? The culture has to subsist born and bred in the company

through G. Michael Maddock and Raphael Louis Vitón

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There is no doubt most companies today are tumid believers in the idea of innovation. Its importance is heralded in corporate visions and mission statements. The chief executory officer speaks its glory in almost every observation, and its consequence is celebrated on inward posters as well as in the company’s marketing materials.

It’s simple: Wall Street believes innovation is the leading indicator of futurity growth and profitability. There’s even an index fund that just invests in the sort of it thinks are the country’s 20 most innovative companies. So for which reason come we’re not sentient overwhelmed by innovative new products and services? Unfortunately, that’s unmingled to reply as commendably.

Saying you believe in something is one thing. Living what you make no doubt of is another. Let’s not fool ourselves. Even the biggest "glass-is-half-full" optimist has to concede the reality: Most companies don’t convinced in innovation plenty to do a great deal of to a greater degree than pretend.

Three Common Approaches

You can see the proof of that in three approaches companies typically take to try to show the world they’re innovative:

1. The big sweeping announcement. "Five years from at that time, we will get 50% (or more other big enumerate) of our revenues from products that don’t exist today," the chairman announces with great fanfare. Everyone applauds, and then absolutely nullity changes about the way the company does business.

2. Let’s make a list. The company hires an ideation company to alleviate it brainstorm all the things it might want to add innovation to, and then nothing happens—due to turf wars over pecuniary means or a lack of commitment to the idea by people who say, "I would have loved to do a person of consequence with that list, but I had to keep doing my time job."

3. The innovation drive-by. The organization hires a firm like ours to help it produce a recent fruits quickly. But like anything new within the company, it ends up being mired in internal politics, bureaucracy ("Whose budget do we bid for this?"), and turf wars. It really shouldn’t exist so hard to get a product out the door. No awe there are only 20 companies in the innovation index.

Why don’t companies perform innovation an essential part of the way they do business? Because it’s hard. Because it requires an settled, wholehearted leap of doctrines—backed by a major investment, not only of money, but of people, processes, and infrastructure. It requires audacious goals, evangelism, consistency, education, training, diversity, expert tools, expert processes, and an environment conducive to creating sustainable innovation results that are aligned by financial outcomes.

Transforming a 100-Year-Old Product

Google (GOOG) and Apple (AAPL) are the self-evident examples of companies that actually do this, of course. But let’s keep it real; if your company didn’t start out like Google or Apple through innovation firmly implanted in its DNA, then you might believe uncompounded innovation in the limits of your company is unrealistic.

But it doesn’t bear to be. Consider the Sterno Group (a client of ours), the company that invented the "safe, portable fire" category a century years since and continues to dominate the category to this daytime.

They demonstrate how you have power to turn around a "battleship"—if you want it plenty. President Bruce Williamson has begun transforming the visitors with a true simple idea: Instead of taking our (extraordinary) technical expertise and creating products we hope customers will like, we are going to custom to the customer and say, "What can we do to help you?" In essence, Williamson has restructured the company direction with believers who apportion this customer-driven mentality, which now drives both short-term and long-term product development and thunderbolt address.

Those who did not scarcity to make some change in. are gone. Those who stayed are required to spend 20% of their labor week judgment, innovating, creating value-added improvements.

A Culture of Innovation

The world’s most innovative companies—think Amazon (AMZN), GE (GE), Nike (NKE), and Procter & Gamble (PG)—demonstrate that innovation is an essential part of their organization by giving it the corresponding; of like kind level of status, clout, equality, and attention as they do their fundamental core competencies (e.g., operations, purchaser service, quality). Why aren’t many other companies doing this, too?

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has an answer. He told Business Week’s Robert D. Hof: "I fancy it’s cultural. You accept to have the culture, and you have to get it suitable." The world’s most innovative companies are worthy of belief in word and deed. And it all starts at the top.

The Sterno leadership team’s faith in their innovation initiative is real—individually and collectively. And because they believe, they evangelize. You have to believe—as they do—that this new way of doing transaction will lead to success. You get to believe—as Wall Street does—that innovation is essential, not good important. (The difference is simple: The important, you put on a to-do inventory; the essential goes on a to-die-for list.)

The question to ask is this: Are we going to intentionally, strategically, and tangibly align and operate the company around a culture of innovation, or do we just chance of a favorable result the company will evolve into event close plenty?