McDonald’s Ups Price of Double Cheeseburger over $1

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – In a widely anticipated move, McDonald’s Corp said on Tuesday it will raise the price of its flagship Double Cheeseburger to $1.19 and introduce a new “McDouble” burger to its Dollar Menu on December 1.

The McDouble will have two beef patties and one slice of cheese — one fewer cheese slice than the Double Cheeseburger — and will retail for $1. Read more

Stores assure shoppers safe to buy gift cards

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – U.S. retailers are trying to assure customers that buying a gift card this holiday season is still safe amid a flurry of industry bankruptcies and store closures.

Store gift cards had become a popular option in recent years, boosting sales and profits at many a retailer when redeemed in the weeks following the holidays. Read more

Food Pantries: Long Lines, Short Supplies

(CBS) Maria Chavez used to make $10 an hour cleaning houses, but now her customers can’t afford the luxury of hiring her help. She needs work – any work, CBS News correspondent Ben Tracy reports.

She has two kids to feed, and doesn’t want government help.

So the local food pantry is now her family’s lifeline. Today was a good day – they put meat in her bag. Read more

Americans’ Food Stamp Use Nears All-Time High

Food Stamps and groceries

Fueled by rising unemployment and food prices, the number of Americans on food stamps is poised to exceed 30 million for the first time this month, surpassing the historic high set in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina.

The figures will put the spotlight on hunger when Congress begins deliberations on a new economic stimulus package, said legislators and anti-hunger advocates, predicting that any stimulus bill will include a boost in food stamp benefits. Advocates are also optimistic that President-elect Barack Obama, who made campaign promises to end childhood hunger and whose mother once briefly received food stamps, will make the issue a priority next year.

“We soon will have the most food stamps recipients in the history of our country,” said Jim Weill, president of the Food Research and Action Center, a D.C.-based anti-hunger policy organization. “If the economic forecasts come true, we’re likely to see the most hunger that we’ve seen since the 1981 recession and maybe since the 1960s, when these programs were established.”

The Agriculture Department is set to release the new numbers as early as this week. Agency officials declined to confirm the figures but outlined them in a briefing last month for advocates and administrators of state food stamp programs. Breaking the symbolically important 30 million mark comes on the heels of government data showing that 11.9 million people went hungry in the United States at some point last year. That included nearly 700,000 children, up more than 50 percent from the year before.

Food pantries and other charitable organizations are also reporting an increase in demand from those in need. Visits to local pantries are up by 20 to 100 percent over the past six months, and calls to the Capital Area Food Bank’s hunger hotline have jumped 248 percent. Most are from people who have never used food stamps or a pantry before, said Lynn Brantley, the organization’s president and chief executive.

Analysts attribute the jump primarily to rising unemployment, which hit 6.5 percent in October and is predicted to increase to 8 percent by the end of 2009, but rising food costs are also a factor. Although prices have fallen from the levels of this past spring, they remain high. In October, the consumer price index for food and beverages had jumped 6.1 percent over last year.  Staples such as eggs and bread rose even faster.

For low-income families, who spend a higher percentage of their monthly budget on food, that rise has been particularly painful. Food stamp benefits are adjusted for inflation only once a year, and as of September, the maximum benefit fell $64 a month short of the cost of the thriftiest, USDA-established diet for a family of four. The annual adjustment in October of 8.5 percent largely brought the benefit in line with food costs again, but the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan policy group, estimates that if current inflation persists, by December benefits will again fail to match the cost of the thrifty food plan.

“At a time when we have more people turning to the food stamp program, it is less and less able to meet their basic food needs,” said Stacy Dean, the research center’s director of food assistance policy.

To qualify for the food stamp program, whose name was officially changed last month to the Simplified Nutrition Assistance Program, recipients must have an income below 130 percent of the federal poverty level, or less than $27,564 for a family of four. The benefits, which average $109.93 a month per person, are based on a plan set by the government to represent a low-cost but nutritionally adequate diet. Participants apply locally to receive an electronic card that is used like an ATM card to buy food at most grocery stores and some farmers markets. The maximum benefit for a household of four is $588 a month.

At the Department of Human Services on H Street NE yesterday, the benefits office was busy. D.C. resident Harry Washington, 54, had come to apply for food stamps after losing his job at a Dupont Circle restaurant that closed for renovations last month. Over the past three years, he has received food stamps several times to tide him over between jobs. “This all has been going on awhile. It just depends where you are on the totem pole whether or not you have felt it,” Washington said.

Jaqueline Hawkins was also there to sign up. The 47-year-old broke her hip last November, forcing her to leave her job at a Whole Foods Market. Hawkins received short-term disability, then unemployment benefits. Both have run out. “I came for food stamps because my other options have expired,” she said. Hawkins plans to begin looking for work after January 1st.

Benefit applications are up around the Washington area. In the District, the number of applicants in October was 7.5 percent higher than last year’s. In Arlington County, the average number of food stamp applications in the past six months is up 17 percent over applications during the same period last year.

At the Arlington Food Assistance Center, meanwhile, the number of clients has jumped by 25 to 35 percent over last year, said Executive Director Christine Lucas. Lines for food, sometimes with as many as 95 people, begin forming around 7:30 a.m., even though the food pantry does not open until 10.

On a recent morning, one of the early arrivers was Alvaro Ascencio. The 45-year-old, who lost his construction job after 12 years, was hopeful he would find work soon and had turned to the pantry as a stopgap. “If I didn’t know about this, I wouldn’t know what to do,” Ascencio said through an interpreter.

To tackle the problem, supportive lawmakers are pressing to include a temporary bump in food stamp benefits in the next stimulus package. Similar proposals failed to pass twice this year, but there appears to be broad support now for an increase of 10 to 20 percent, advocates and lawmakers said.

Economists say an increase in food stamp benefits would help the economy overall by concentrating relief on those most likely to spend the money quickly, pumping dollars into an economy desperate for demand. According to Mark Zandi, chief economist of the rating agency Moody’s Economy.com, every $1 spent on food stamp benefits generates $1.73 of economic activity, more than extending unemployment benefits or offering state fiscal relief.

“Congress has been focusing on the impact on the financial markets,” said Dean at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “We want them to focus on the supermarkets and help 30 million people.”

In 2009, the new Congress will also have to deal with renewing the Child Nutrition and WIC Reauthorization Act, which includes school breakfast and lunch programs and the Women, Infants and Children program that provides money for specific foods such as milk and infant formula. The act is due to expire in September 2009, and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who chairs the Agriculture Committee, has long been keen to expand eligibility and strengthen mandates for nutritious food in these government-funded programs.

food stamps and groceries

Farmers in US face up to credit squeeze

US farmers face tighter credit conditions as they approach the next crop season, the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City said on Tuesday, in the first concrete sign that the financial crisis was affecting agricultural markets. Read more

Shoppers work for food

Looking to get a deal – and give something back – more New Yorkers are opting to buy their groceries at food co-ops.

“With the economic crisis, people are being more realistic. They realize that community is the answer,” said Ibou Diallo, one of the few who works full-time at the Park Slope Food Co-Op in Brooklyn.

Everyone else pays $125 and has to work in the store for two hours and 45 minutes a month in exchange for lower prices.

Membership discounts are given to those on public assistance. Anyone who volunteers for cleaning duties only has to contribute two hours a month.

Jamie Principe works as a shift manager at the store – but her real job working for an architect at a Manhattan firm.

“I think it’s terrific,” said the 38-year-old mother of two, who says she saves her family about 30% on groceries. The co-op even provides child care while she works.

“It’s being part of a community,” she said. “It’s kind of a back to basics.”

The Park Slope Food Co-Op, which opened in 1973, said its membership has grown to 14,7000 – including a 10% spike in the last year alone – from 5,700 in 2001.

“We try to return what would have been profits by keeping the prices low,” manager Joe Holtz said. The volunteers also help keep overhead costs low, he said.

Food co-ops were popular in the 1970s. They’re owned and operated by their members, sell many locally grown foods and are environmentally conscious. The National Cooperative Business Association says there are more than 500 food co-ops across the country – and many of them opened in just the last few years.

“There’s been a steady growth in co-ops, with a spurt in the past few years,” said Barry Smith, manager of the Flatbush Food Co-Op, which opened in 1976 and requires its members to invest $200 – no labor involved.

“We’re definitely in an upswing,” Smith said.

The National Cooperative Grocers Association, which operates 109 co-ops in 32 states, recently reported annual sales of more than $945 million.

Five New Yorkers started the South Bronx Food Co-Op last year. Now there are 120 members and the store recently expanded its hours to five days a week from just one.

“I’m shocked to see how people have gotten into it,” said South Bronx Food Co-Op Director Zena Nelson. “People want to be part of something. And we’re saving money.”

“It’s a win-win,” she said.

sgaskell@nydailynews.com

40,000 queue up to collect harvest leftovers

Platteville, Colorado, November 24, 2008: The economy is in dire straits all over the world. It has hit every country really hard, especially the U.S. So anything that people get for free is a blessing. This is exactly what happened at a farm in Colorado this Saturday. Read more

RUSSIAN ANALYST PREDICTS DECLINE AND BREAKUP OF USA

St. Basil's Cathedral

A leading Russian political analyst has said the economic turmoil in the United States has confirmed his long-held view that the country is heading for collapse, and will divide into separate parts. 

Professor Igor Panarin said in an interview with the respected daily IZVESTIA published on Monday: "The dollar is not secured by anything. The country's foreign debt has grown like an avalanche, even though in the early 1980s there was no debt. By 1998, when I first made my prediction, it had exceeded $2 trillion. Now it is more than 11 trillion. This is a pyramid that can only collapse." 

The paper said Panarin's dire predictions for the U.S. economy, initially made at an international conference in Australia 10 years ago at a time when the economy appeared strong, have been given more credence by this year's events. 

When asked when the U.S. economy would collapse, Panarin said: "It is already collapsing. Due to the financial crisis, three of the largest and oldest five banks on Wall Street have already ceased to exist, and two are barely surviving. Their losses are the biggest in history. Now what we will see is a change in the regulatory system on a global financial scale: America will no longer be the world's financial regulator." 

When asked who would replace the U.S. in regulating world markets, he said: "Two countries could assume this role: China, with its vast reserves, and Russia, which could play the role of a regulator in Eurasia." 

Asked why he expected the U.S. to break up into separate parts, he said: "A whole range of reasons. Firstly, the financial problems in the U.S. will get worse. Millions of citizens there have lost their savings. Prices and unemployment are on the rise. General Motors and Ford are on the verge of collapse, and this means that whole cities will be left without work. Governors are already insistently demanding money from the federal center. Dissatisfaction is growing, and at the moment it is only being held back by the elections and the hope that Obama can work miracles. But by spring, it will be clear that there are no miracles." 

He also cited the "vulnerable political setup", "lack of unified national laws", and "divisions among the elite, which have become clear in these crisis conditions." 

He predicted that the U.S. will break up into six parts - the Pacific coast, with its growing Chinese population; the South, with its Hispanics; Texas, where independence movements are on the rise; the Atlantic coast, with its distinct and separate mentality; five of the poorer central states with their large Native American populations; and the northern states, where the influence from Canada is strong. 

He even suggested that "we could claim Alaska - it was only granted on lease, after all." Panarin, 60, is a professor at the Diplomatic Academy of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and has authored several books on information warfare. 

Web Sites That Dig for News Rise as Watchdogs

SAN DIEGO — Over the last two years, some of this city’s darkest secrets have been dragged into the light — city officials with conflicts of interest and hidden pay raises, affordable housing that was not affordable, misleading crime statistics.

Investigations ensued. The chiefs of two redevelopment agencies were forced out. One of them faces criminal charges. Yet the main revelations came not from any of San Diego’s television and radio stations or its dominant newspaper, The San Diego Union-Tribune, but from a handful of young journalists at a nonprofit Web site run out of a converted military base far from downtown’s glass towers — a site that did not exist four years ago.

As America’s newspapers shrink and shed staff, and broadcast news outlets sink in the ratings, a new kind of Web-based news operation has arisen in several cities, forcing the papers to follow the stories they uncover.

Here it is VoiceofSanDiego.org, offering a brand of serious, original reporting by professional journalists — the province of the traditional media, but at a much lower cost of doing business. Since it began in 2005, similar operations have cropped up in New Haven, the Twin Cities, Seattle, St. Louis and Chicago. More are on the way.

Their news coverage and hard-digging investigative reporting stand out in an Internet landscape long dominated by partisan commentary, gossip, vitriol and citizen journalism posted by unpaid amateurs.

The fledgling movement has reached a sufficient critical mass, its founders think, so they plan to form an association, angling for national advertising and foundation grants that they could not compete for singly. And hardly a week goes by without a call from journalists around the country seeking advice about starting their own online news outlets.

“Voice is doing really significant work, driving the agenda on redevelopment and some other areas, putting local politicians and businesses on the hot seat,” said Dean Nelson, director of the journalism program at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. “I have them come into my classes, and I introduce them as, ‘This is the future of journalism.’ ”

That is a subject of hot debate among people who closely follow the newspaper industry. Publishing online means operating at half the cost of a comparable printed paper, but online advertising is not robust enough to sustain a newsroom.

And so financially, VoiceofSan Diego and its peers mimic public broadcasting, not newspapers. They are nonprofit corporations supported by foundations, wealthy donors, audience contributions and a little advertising.

New nonprofits without a specific geographic focus also have sprung up to fill other niches, like ProPublica, devoted to investigative journalism, and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, which looks into problems around the world. A similar group, the Center for Investigative Reporting, dates back three decades.

But some experts question whether a large part of the news business can survive on what is essentially charity, and whether it is wise to lean too heavily on the whims of a few moneyed benefactors.

“These are some of the big questions about the future of the business,” said Robert H. Giles, curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. Nonprofit news online “has to be explored and experimented with, but it has to overcome the hurdle of proving it can support a big news staff. Even the most well-funded of these sites are a far cry in resources from a city newspaper.”

The people who run the local news sites see themselves as one future among many, and they have a complex relationship with traditional media. The say that the deterioration of those media has created an opening for new sources of news, as well as a surplus of unemployed journalists for them to hire.

“No one here welcomes the decline of newspapers,” said Andrew Donohue, one of two executive editors at VoiceofSanDiego. “We can’t be the main news source for this city, not for the foreseeable future. We only have 11 people.”

Those people are almost all young, some of them refugees from older media. The executive editors, Mr. Donohue, 30, and Scott Lewis, 32, each had a few years of experience at small papers before abandoning newsprint. So far, their audience is tiny, about 18,000 monthly unique visitors, according to Quantcast, a media measurement service.

The biggest of the new nonprofit news sites, MinnPost in the Twin Cities and the St. Louis Beacon, can top 200,000 visitors in a month, but even that is a fraction of the Internet readership for the local newspapers.

VoiceofSanDiego’s site looks much like any newspaper’s, frequently updated with breaking news and organized around broad topics: government and politics, housing, economics, the environment, schools and science. It has few graphics, but plenty of photography and, through a partnership with a local TV station, some video.

But it is, of necessity, thin — strictly local, selective in what it covers and with none of the wire service articles that plump up most news sites.

VoiceofSanDiego grew out of a string of spectacular municipal scandals. City councilmen took bribes from a strip club owner, a mishandled pension fund drove the city to the brink of bankruptcy and city officials illegally covered up the crisis, to name a few.

A semiretired local businessman, Buzz Woolley, watched the parade of revelations, fraud charges and criminal convictions, seething with frustration. He was particularly incensed that the pension debacle had developed over several years, more or less in plain sight, but had received little news coverage.

“I kept thinking, ‘Who’s paying attention?’ ” Mr. Woolley recalled. “Why don’t we hear about this stuff before it becomes a disaster?’ ”

In 2004, his conversations with a veteran columnist, Neil Morgan, who had been fired by The Union-Tribune, led to the creation of VoiceofSanDiego, with Mr. Woolley as president, chief executive and, at first, chief financial backer.

Most of this new breed of news sites have a whiff of scruffy insurgency, but MinnPost, based in Minneapolis, resembles the middle-age establishment. Its founder and chief executive, Joel Kramer, has been the editor and publisher of The Star Tribune, of Minneapolis, and its top editors are refugees from that paper or its rival, The Pioneer Press in St. Paul.

MinnPost is rich compared with its peers — with a $1.5 million bankroll from Mr. Kramer and several others when it started last year, and a $1.3 million annual budget — and it has been more aggressive about selling ads and getting readers to donate.

The full-time editors and reporters earn $50,000 to $60,000 a year, Mr. Kramer said — a living wage, but less than they would make at the competing papers. MinnPost has just five full-time employees, but it uses more than 40 paid freelance contributors, allowing it to do frequent reporting on areas like the arts and sports.

If MinnPost is the establishment, The New Haven Independent is a guerrilla team. It has no office, and holds its meetings in a coffee shop. The founder and editor, Paul Bass, who spent most of his career at an alternative weekly, works from home or, occasionally, borrows a desk at a local Spanish-language newspaper.

In addition to state and city affairs, The Independent covers small-bore local news, lately doing a series of articles on people who face the loss of their homes to foreclosure.

With a budget of just $200,000, it has a small staff — some are paid less than $30,000 — and a small corps of freelancers and volunteer contributors. It does not sell ads, which Mr. Bass says would be impractical.

“There’s room for a whole range of approaches, and we’re living proof that you can do meaningful journalism very cheaply,” Mr. Bass said.

Crosscut.com, a local news site in Seattle, does reporting and commentary of its own, but also aggregates articles from other news sources. It began last year as a business, but is changing to nonprofit status.

VoiceofSanDiego took yet another approach, hiring a crew of young, hungry, full-time journalists, paying them salaries comparable to what they would make at large newspapers and relying less on freelancers. Mr. Donohue and Mr. Lewis earned $60,000 to $70,000 last year, according to the VoiceofSan Diego I.R.S. filings.

On a budget under $800,000 this year — almost $200,000 more than last year — everyone does double duty. Mr. Lewis writes a political column, and Mr. Donohue works on investigative articles. But the operation is growing and Mr. Woolley says he has become convinced that the nonprofit model has the best chance of survival.

“Information is now a public service as much as it’s a commodity,” he said. “It should be thought of the same way as education, health care. It’s one of the things you need to operate a civil society, and the market isn’t doing it very well.”

2008: The year of global food crisis

IT IS the new face of hunger. A perfect storm of food scarcity, global warming, rocketing oil prices and the world population explosion is plunging humanity into the biggest crisis of the 21st century by pushing up food prices and spreading hunger and poverty from rural areas into cities. Read more

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