Headlines for Week of April 28
Chicagoans hungry for books about food, publishers happy to serve up more
by Molly Seltzer
Apr 28, 2008
Loaves and popovers grow lofty and puffy because yeast feeds on sugar and releases carbon dioxide. These rising breads are causing something else to rise — the popularity of food books.
In the past decade, interest in food books has skyrocketed for Chicago’s publishers, libraries and bookstores.
Memorabilia market for steroid-tainted ballplayers dries up
by Justin AK Amoah
Apr 30, 2008
Many sports memorabilia dealers say they had a bad feeling three years ago when former Chicago Cubs slugger Sammy Sosa appeared before Congress and denied using illegal performance-enhancing drugs.
“When everything with the steroid scandal started to unload, his prices started to drop like a rock,” said Marc Schoder, sports collectibles investor, who wasted no time selling his stock of about 100 Sosa collectibles but still lost several hundred dollars.
Popping corn prices means little for price of Corn Pops
by Frank N.Carlson
May 01, 2008
Record high corn prices may be tempting some farmers across the Midwest to ramp up corn production, but Peotone farmer Jim Robbins is more cautious.
Last year, Robbins split the corn and soybean crops on his 3,000 acre farm evenly between the two crops, and this year he’s doing the same. As a 28-year veteran farmer, Robbins says that by the time he changes his crop rotation to take advantage of the high prices, those prices might be long gone.
Area landscapers, greenhouses hitting pay dirt in housing downturn
by Maisie Ramsay
May 01, 2008
At the Gethsemane Garden Center in Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood, sales are booming. The business has expanded its offering of outdoor furniture to 2,400 square feet and employee Collette Hogan reports sales of trees and shrubs have shot up.
Chicago-based landscaping company Christy Webber & Co. is booked up until June despite losing 6 percent of its airport landscaping contract with the city of Chicago
Fed rate cuts stimulate growth at home, inflation abroad
by Patrick Temple-West
May 01, 2008
The people seeking discounted eggs who stormed a supermarket in Chengdu, China, last August may not have known the name Ben Bernanke. It’s probable that the demonstrators in the United Arab Emirates or the 12 people who died fighting over food in Yemen did not know what role the U.S. Federal Reserve Board Chairman has in driving their domestic inflation.
A high-tech village flourishes within Skokie
by Manuel Baigorri
May 01, 2008
When Forest City Enterprises Inc., a publicly traded real estate company based in Cleveland, acquired the research and development labs of Pfizer Inc., formerly G.D. Searle & Co., in March 2005, it embarked on one of the most ambitious projects currently underway in the biosciences industry in the Midwest. The idea was to create a high tech park inside the village of Skokie and to bring companies to those facilities.
Tags: agriculture, Ben Bernanke, bookstores, chefs, Chicago, corn, corn prices, CPI, currency, economy, Edgewater, farmers, farming, Fed, Federal Reserve, Food books, Forest City Enterprises, Gethsemane, global economy, Globalization, greenhouses, high tech, inflation, interest rates, landscapers, landscaping, Midwest, nanotechnology, Pfizer, publishing, rate cut, Sammy Sosa, Skokie, Sports, sports memorabilia, steroids, Weekly Headlines
