Business Briefly
Published 9:00 pm Wednesday, December 10, 2003
Gov. Gary Locke announced Wednesday that 5 million pounds of potatoes are being shipped to South Korea in a $375,000 deal. Although small amounts of potatoes have been sold to South Korea in the past, Locke said this deal is 10 times larger than any past shipment. The potatoes will be made into potato chips there. “This success shows how important our trade missions are in increasing and improving international trade,” Locke said. “Our trade missions yield results.”
A Florida man pleaded guilty Wednesday to registering misleading domain names on the Internet to direct children looking for popular sites such as Disneyland to pornography instead. John Zuccarini, 56, will get about three years in prison when he is sentenced by a federal judge on Feb. 20. He was accused of registering thousands of sites with addresses that slightly misspelled the names of real sites, including those for pop star Britney Spears, cartoon character Bob the Builder and the Teletubbies. The misspelled names led Internet surfers to advertising sites that paid Zuccarini for each user who viewed them.
Freddie Mac will pay a $125 million civil fine and is threatened with possible curbs on its growth as federal regulators blame management misconduct for the mortgage giant’s $5 billion misstatement of earnings. In a report issued Wednesday, regulators accused the government-sponsored company of violating its public trust. A pliant board of directors and a system of compensating executives tied to annual earnings targets contributed to the accounting crisis at Freddie Mac that has brought the ouster of four top executives since June, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight found in its investigation. Freddie Mac agreed to pay the fine in a settlement with the federal agency announced Wednesday.
The 2001 recession, already among the mildest in modern U.S. economic history, was even slightly shallower than earlier estimated, according a comprehensive revision of national income and production figures released Wednesday by the Commerce Department. The drop in the nation’s gross domestic product from the first quarter of 2001 to the fourth quarter, when the recession ended, was only 0.5 percent rather than 0.6 percent, according to the revisions, which are done every five years. However, the update also shows that the economy contracted slightly in the July-September period of 2000, as well as in the first three quarters of 2001.
Herald news services
