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Seattle Police say a man is in safe-keeping after throwing a pregnant woman from the top to the bottom of a flight of cement stairs and stabbing her in the abide early this morning.

The incident occurred at about 12:30 a.m. in the 1400 block of North 49th Street.

The victim, who is six months pregnant, was taken to Harborview Medical Center by life-threatening injuries. Police said they do not know the circumstances of the fetus.

The attacker fled the scene, but Seattle Police later arrested a male animal suspect in the 4600 block of Stone Way North. He was booked into the King County Jail.

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A husband jumped from each Interstate 5 overpass in South Snohomish County this morning, the Washington State Patrol said.

The man’s identity wasn’t released. He was rushed to Harborview Medical Center, his condition unknown.

There were no other injuries. The State Patrol is investigating whether a semi-truck struck the man as he fell.

The collision occurred soon after 9 a.m. when exposed to the 236th Street overpass on southbound I-5.

Southbound I-5 was closed briefly after the relating. All lanes were reopened as of 10:15 a.m, the State Patrol declared. Traffic had backed up for four miles.

At many persons MBA programs, which used to be a brief meet-and-greet period is now any education in itself

by Francesca Levy

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On a recent warm day in Pittsburgh, as one attendee recounts it, a middle-aged man with tufts of white hair and a broad grin, elicited a pledge of allegiance from about 200 incoming MBA students at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business. "He talked about commitment, and he asked, ‘are you ready?’" says Wendy Hermann, the school’s adviser of pupil services. "And they all said, ‘we are ready!’"

No, this was not a tent resuscitation, nor a motivational seminar. John Mather is the executive director of master’s programs at Tepper, and his demonstration was a receive to the incoming MBA class at their fall orientation. "It was a very church-like moment," says Hermann.

For multiplied who attended business school more than five or 10 years ago, MBA orientations may seem unrecognizable. What was formerly a few days tacked in continuance at the forehead of the semester, used since a time to share names, explain the course lade, and distribute a picture of the school grounds, has morphed into something altogether different. For many schools, orientation is now a highly programmed, committee-designed, and rigorous projection. Administrators use the orientation time to accomplish a host of weighty goals—from instilling a sense of ethical responsibility in students to helping them seizure up on first principle math skills and prepare for an ever-earlier recruiting record (BusinessWeek.com, 6/8/08).

In order to accommodate these mounting demands on student reflection, a sum up of MBA programs have stretched their orientation schedules out by days or even weeks. Orientations at the top profession schools are often two-week programs, and some stretch to a month long—meaning "fall orientation" frequently begins in late July.

This year alone, many programs have lengthened their fall orientation to grant leave to their career-services departments to play a greater role. Tepper, in quest of case in point, doubled its program from last year’s single week to two weeks this year—and that’s up from three days in 1993. New York University’s Stern School of Business added three days to its orientation, lengthening it to more than a week. At Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, what once was a one-week MBA orientation is now a three-week preceptive "pre-term" including required coursework.

Many programs have beefed up the career-services portion of orientation, incorporating a self-evaluation and assessment into the career department’s semblance. "Our career services has refocused their core programming to be more self-reflective for students," says Ann Harvilla, associate dean and dean of students for full-time MBA programs at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business. "We ask: What does it feel to be a leader? What are your weaknesses, and what can you work on?"

International students are a particular focus of orientation. Virtually all MBA programs have advance programming exclusively for international students. These students have an steady heftier schedule, as their need beneficial to orientation—figuring gone out where they are in relationship to where they’re going—is often somewhat more literal. "For nine days in August, we teach a select group of international students who haven’t had of the college experience in the United States about communication, culture, and conversable norms," says Amy DiMattia, associate director of MBA pupil affairs at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

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Seattle has officially washed its hands of the five self-cleaning toilets.

The toilets cost the city $5 million. They sold on eBay Thursday evening for $12,549.

All five were sold to Racecar Supply, of Rochester, in Thurston County, with winning bids ranging from $1,625 to $4,899 per commode, declared Pat Miller, prolocutor for Seattle’s Fleets and Facilities Department. “What a buy,” said Racecar Supply owner Butch Behn. “Wouldn’t you hold it’s a really good deal, considering what they paid since them? It was a benefaction.”

Behn related he likely will install at least two of the toilets at South Sound Speedway, a racetrack the company owns in Tenino. He said he might sell the others, perhaps keeping common for gifts.

“I’m thinking they’re pretty spendy to restoration,” Behn before-mentioned.

The high-tech public toilets, with sanitizing take in water jets and automatic doors, were installed in 2004 to accommodate tourists and transients in Pioneer Square, Capitol Hill, the central waterfront, Pike Place Market and the Chinatown International District. But the city canceled its contract this spring after the commodes became foul hide-outs for drug use and prostitution.

The city tried to sell the toilets on eBay in July, nevertheless nobody coughed up the $89,000 least part bid. In its second attempt, which closed Thursday, the city offered no minimum, and 148 bids were cast.

“We sold them for what the market determined them to be worth,” said Andy Ryan, spokesman for Seattle Public Utilities. “Did we get hosed? I’m not sure.”

Miller said he wasn’t disappointed through the return on the city’s $5 a thousand thousand investment.

“The loss is not in the sale of them,” he said. “The loss was in the provisions of them as antidote to years and years and years, in my opinion.”

The city paid more than it planned to take care of the toilets. Workers had to clean the stalls after trash clogged the self-cleaning mechanism. Losing the toilets will save the city some $4.5 million forward the remainder of its operating contract and in cleaning costs excessively the next different years.

But the incorporated town still has to dispose to remove the toilets, what one. were closed to the public earlier this month. And it will cost an estimated $250,000 to restore the park sites where the toilets were installed.

B-school researchers find green companies be the subject of lower cost of capital. Plus, thoughts of death and cookies, and a reason to give a firm handshake

by Francesca Di Meglio

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New careful search from the University of Oklahoma’s Price College of Business shows that for companies being greensward might not be untroubled, but it can pay by lowering their require to have being paid of capital.

Mark P. Sharfman, professor of strategic skill, and Chitru Fernando, the Michael F. Price Professor of Finance at Price and a visiting professor at Southern Methodist University’s Cox School of Business, teamed up to study market reaction to green initiatives at 267 S&P 500 companies. They suggest that investors factor in improved management of environmental risks when evaluating companies, resulting in lower risk premiums on equity and higher levels of leverage for the firms, lowering the companies’ overall cost of first-rate.

Often, companies await internally to see the benefits of their efforts to help the environment—such as becoming more efficient users of resources. But the professors found that financial markets, particularly equity markets, also reward new efforts. These not fully grown firms tend to have higher costs of debt, but that’s partly because they are permitted to carry more debt, which reduces charge burdens, according to the inquiry. "Such increased amounts of liability also should allow firms to ‘leverage’ up their go on equity," according to a brief the researchers wrote about their work, that appeared in its entirety in the Strategic Management Journal in June.

In adding, when a company improved its environmental performance, it attracted a higher level of ownership amidst individual investors, that lowered the cost of its equity capital. As a result, stocks of these companies are high performers and investors see them as less risky investments because going unripe often means reducing government penalties, the number of possible accidents, and therefore the threat of lawsuits. "It’s pretty clear to anyone looking at the scrutiny that if [firms] lower environmental risks, they’ll be dexterous to raise equity capital more cheaply," says Fernando. "Obviously if require to be paid of essential goes down, it’s a great serve."

The researchers also say that there is make manifest that companies also benefit from the good press they receive for their inexpert efforts, but they have not yet confirmed this with a study. They are, however, replicating the study they conducted in the U.S. by looking at about 950 companies worldwide to see if new efforts get the same kind of reaction from markets abroad. Also, the duo decision look at market reaction to companies that are specifically addressing climate change.

They saw their purpose is a practical one. "We’ve broadened the ability of firms to bring into being an question for environmental efforts," says Sharfman.

Thoughts of death may spur you to shop until you very little and overeat, according to research recently conducted by professors at the RSM Erasmus University in the Netherlands and Arizona State University’s W.P. Carey School of Business.

Motivated by dint of. reports showing a high etc. of consumerism in the U.S., especially on luxury items and food, proximately following 9/11 (BusinessWeek.com, 1/17/08), Dirk Smeesters, associate professor at Rotterdam, and his sharer Naomi Mandel, marketing professor at Carey, set out to incline suppose that thoughts of death trigger the need to consume.

In the August Journal of Consumer Research, the researchers explain that, among other things, people exposed to the idea of their own death ate more cookies and bought further stuff. The researchers split up participants into two groups and gave cropped land a writing assignment.

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A Lynnwood girl injured in a motorcycle crash this week in Edmonds remains in each induced coma at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle and likely won’t come public of it instead of at least a year, her family said Friday.

Melanie Thielman

Police said the crash happened about 10 p.m. in the 9000 block of Olympic View Drive.

Melanie was riding on the back of a motorcycle through a 23-year-old man at the time that he crashed into a benefit pole, said Edmonds police Sgt. Don Anderson.

Both were wearing helmets.

She was “thrown straight up in the air, like a missile, and came straight down,” said Calvin Thielman, Melanie’s father.

Melanie and the man were transported to Harborview. She is in intensive care and was listed in serious grade Friday morning, according to a hospital spokeswoman.

No condition or information was take advantage of for the furnish with men. Police did not release his name, and Thielman declared he didn’t understand who he was.

Thielman, a single engender, said doctors put his daughter her in a coma “to relax the brain” and stabilize a blood clot in her brain. Her long-term odds for retrieval remain unclear, he said.

“Last darkness they told me there’s a strong chance of her being in a coma for 12 to 18 months,” Thielman said. “The best scenario is if she wakes up.”

Thielman said he and his clan have been leaning on the bear up of friends who come to see her. “There have been droves and droves of people, about 100 a lifetime,” he declared. “She’s very well-loved.”