Word: blues
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Amid a drumbeat of grim financial updates, two blue-chip companies announced plans for massive layoffs last week, spurring fears that the bloodletting on Wall Street could be just a prelude to deeper job cuts across the nation. American Express announced that it will slash 7,000 positions - some 10% of its staff - as part of an effort to save $1.8 billion next year as a counterweight to the rising number of consumers defaulting on their payments. Within hours of that announcement, communications giant Motorola Inc., which cut some 2,600 jobs in April, said it would trim an additional...
...wilder in the ballroom of a Hilton hotel in downtown Cleveland as the number 270 got closer and closer. Meanwhile, about 45 excited students packed into a dormitory lounge on the Drake University campus in Iowa to watch election results roll in on CNN, nibbling on red, white and blue food (red salsa, graham crackers with white frosting and blue - O.K., technically purple - grapes) and drank red and blue Hawaiian punch. "It's just so inspiring to have this as your first election. It's exciting and humbling," says Hope Ashley, 19, who voted early in her bellwether home state...
...convinced by their children to vote Democratic. "They showed me how much he cared about the underprivileged and middle-class," she says. Nearby, Marlise Radix, an Irish immigrant who, with her family, became a citizen to vote for Obama, took photos of chanting voters while children threw red and blue balloons to one another below the cheering crowd. Outside the ballroom, fans called friends on cell phones: "We won Virginia - can you believe it?" a young caller exclaimed, jumping up and down...
...that sent an Obama delegate to the Democratic National Convention and will more than likely go for Obama on Election Day. But his homestead is actually in a little town 8 miles from Sedona called Cornville, in Yavapai County. Until recently, it was hard to imagine Yavapai, an old blue collar farming and mill town that used to supply the nearby copper mines, ever voting for a Democrat. The county went 59% for Bush in 2000 and 61% for him in 2004. But the demographics of the county - much like Arizona's and the Southwest's as a whole...
...well. Moscow's major annual antique fair had stunning pieces on offer last month, though there didn't seem to be many takers. That's hardly surprising, of course: while banks and companies are laying off managers and white-collar staff by the hundreds, heavy industries are laying off blue-collar workers by the thousands. The GAZ auto works in Nizhni Novgorod has shut down its assembly lines; the giant Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works in the Urals has placed 3,000 workers on forced leave...