Telephone company to get $25M loan
Southwest Arkansas Telephone Cooperative is one of three small rural telephone companies that will receive federal loans to upgrade copper-line-based systems to fiber-optics that will enable them to improve broadband communication services.
Southwest Arkansas, based in Texarkana, serves nearly 4,500 residential and business customers in Miller, Columbia and Hempstead counties and in one Texas county, Lane Powers, the company's vice president for network services, said Tuesday.
On Monday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced the company will receive a $25 million loan to upgrade its fiber network and convert the remaining portions of its copper-line network to fiber.
Powers said the work will be done over the next five years and represents about 400 miles of in-ground cable across its "very rural" service area.
"This will really allow us to scale up our services" with improved Internet connection speeds, he said.
Other systems receiving federal loans were Mescalero Apache Telecom in New Mexico, $5.4 million, and Minburn Communications in Iowa, $4.7 million.
-- Glen Chase
Shareholder succeeds in RadioShack bid
NEW YORK -- Standard General prevailed in a bid for the assets of bankrupt electronics retailer RadioShack Corp., according to people familiar with the situation.
Standard General was RadioShack's largest shareholder and provided a $535 million rescue-financing package to the Fort Worth, Texas-based retailer last year. RadioShack subsequently filed for bankruptcy protection in February. Any sale requires approval of the bankruptcy court in Wilmington, Del.
RadioShack entered bankruptcy in February with a plan to have a Standard General affiliate take over as many as half of its approximately 4,000 stores in a co-branding arrangement with Sprint Corp. The final package as announced before the auction began in New York on Monday included about 1,700 RadioShack store leases, with inventory the retailer valued at $129.8 million.
Standard General isn't the only investor with plans to use some of RadioShack's real estate to sell phone service. Spring Mobile, a unit of GameStop Corp., the video-game chain, won a previous auction for the right to take over about 160 stores. Spring has about two months to decide which of the locations it wants to keep.
-- Bloomberg News
Fed: No proof '12 leaks were deliberate
WASHINGTON -- An investigation by the Federal Reserve has found no evidence that market-sensitive information was deliberately leaked from its interest-rate policy meeting in September 2012.
The Fed said in a summary of its investigation, provided to Congress on Monday, that any disclosure of information on Fed policymakers' views appeared to have been "unintentional or careless" and did not contain details of policy proposals.
Lawmakers in recent weeks have asked the Fed for the results of its investigation, which was begun in October 2012 at the request of then-Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and completed in March 2013. The summary was submitted Monday in response to those requests.
The Fed inspector general, an independent watchdog, has been reviewing the handling of the investigation amid allegations of possible impropriety cited by a key Republican lawmaker.
The case reviewed by the Fed stemmed from an article published by The Wall Street Journal on Sept. 28, 2012, that reported in detail how Bernanke had achieved consensus among the policymakers on an additional round of bond purchases to stimulate economic growth. A report to clients by a financial intelligence newsletter contained similar information a few days later.
-- The Associated Press
Firms to test computer servers' warmth
THE HAGUE, Netherlands -- An energy company is joining forces with a technology startup to harness computing power to heat homes in the Netherlands.
Eneco, a Dutch-based energy company with more than 2 million customers, said Tuesday that it is installing "e-Radiators" -- computer servers that generate a lot of heat while crunching numbers -- in five homes across the Netherlands in a trial to see if their warmth could be a commercially viable alternative for traditional radiators.
The technology is the brainchild of the Dutch startup company Nerdalize, whose founders claim to have developed the idea after huddling near a laptop to keep warm after their home's thermostat broke and jokingly suggesting buying 100 laptops.
"Ten minutes later, we thought: 'That's not such a crazy idea,'" said Boaz Leupe, one of Nerdalize's founders.
-- The Associated Press
Study: Male nurses make $5,000 more
CHICAGO -- Even in an occupation that women overwhelmingly dominate, they still earn less than men, a study of nurses found.
The gender gap for registered nurses' salaries amounts to a little over $5,000 yearly on average, and it hasn't budged in more than 20 years. That pay gap may not sound big -- it's smaller than in many other professions -- but over a long career, it adds up to more than $150,000, said study author Ulrike Muench, a professor and researcher at the University of California, San Francisco.
"We were somewhat surprised to see that this gap was so persistent over the years, given the female-dominated profession where you would think women may have caught up with men" or surpassed them, Muench said.
The average 2013 salary for male nurses was about $70,000, versus about $60,000 for women. Taking into account factors that influence salary, including geographic location, nursing specialty and years of experience, trimmed that $10,000 pay gap by about half. The gap was smaller in hospitals than in outpatient centers, but it existed in all nursing specialties except orthopedics.
The biggest pay gap by position -- about $17,300 -- was for nurse anesthetists; the smallest -- nearly $4,000 -- was for middle-management nurses.
-- The Associated Press
Business on 03/25/2015