In the land of tea, the world’s best-known coffee chain is going to court to protect its name. Seattle-based Starbucks Corp. is suing a competitor in Shanghai over the use of their shared Chinese name, the latest in a growing number of copyright suits involving foreign firms in China. Starbucks said it filed the lawsuit on Dec. 23 against the Shanghai Xingbake coffee shop chain for trademark infringement after it was unable to settle out of court. Both companies use the same three Chinese characters in their names -Xingbake. In Chinese, xing means star and bake (bah-kuh) is a phonetic rendition of
-bucks.
The nation’s unemployment rate fell to 5.6 percent in January, the lowest level in more than two years, as employers stepped up hiring – but not at a brisk enough pace to ease concerns about the prolonged job drought. January’s unemployment rate declined 0.1 percentage point to the lowest level since October 2001, when it was 5.4 percent. Last month’s rate matched the 5.6 percent posted in January 2002, the Labor Department reported Friday. Companies added 112,000 new U.S. jobs overall, marking the fifth straight month of payroll gains and the largest in three years.
The United States and its major economic allies were arguing Friday over how best to deal with the slumping U.S. dollar and America’s soaring budget and trade deficits. The dispute surfaced at the winter meeting of the Group of Seven wealthy industrial countries – the United States, Japan, Germany, France, Britain, Italy and Canada – at a luxury resort on Florida’s Gold Coast. The U.S. delegation, led by Treasury Secretary John Snow and Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, found itself at odds with officials from Europe who contend the dollar’s decline is hurting their growth prospects by jeopardizing European exports.
Prosecutors looking into Italy’s Parmalat scandal ordered documents seized at the Milan offices of Swiss bank UBS, the latest in a series of searches at financial institutions that had dealings with the fraud-riddled Italian dairy giant. A judicial official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said police had been sent to confiscate documents relating to a Parmalat bond issue of about $500 million executed in 2003. The official would not say whether the bank was under suspicion. A UBS spokesman in London confirmed that the bank had put together a 2003 bond offering for Parmalat.
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