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Drugmaker Pfizer Inc., which just bought rival Wyeth in October, said Wednesday that it would scrap testing of roughly 100 experimental drugs from their combined research operations to focus more resources on its priority areas.

New York-based Pfizer said it would continue with about 500 research projects. About 70 percent of those — and 75 percent of its late-stage research — fall within what it calls "Invest to Win" areas because of the great need for better treatments.

They are Alzheimer’s, diabetes and metabolic disorders, pain, cancer, inflammatory disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis, and mental illnesses.

Pfizer will reduce the square footage of its R&D facilities by one-third, eliminating six research sites and an unspecified number of workers.

Pfizer maintains a research facility in Chesterfield, though the company is scaling back those operations. The company announced in November that it would eliminate 600 of the 1,000 jobs at the research center and sell the property to Monsanto.

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Fenton — It has been nearly six months since the last Dodge Ram rolled out of the massive Chrysler plant here.

Now, on a weekday morning, there are perhaps two dozen cars in parking lots meant for thousands. The neat rows of shiny new pickups are gone. The smokestacks stand cold.

And six months after the closure of vast twin auto plants along Interstate 44, there is a growing conversation about just what to do them, how to take this empty symbol of St. Louis’ old economy and use it to help the new one.

It’s a tough question.

There are, after all, few uses for a one-story building the size of 86 football fields, surrounded by acres and acres of asphalt. Throw in environmental question marks and a weak economy, and the options grow even fewer.

But local leaders want to take a hard look at what those options might be.

St. Louis County is applying for a federal grant of nearly $1.6 million to establish a commission to study the site. With cash from the state, the county and the city of Fenton, officials are ready to launch a two-year, $2 million effort to plan incentives, cleanup, marketing and more.

"There’s a lot of things that could happen here," said County Executive Charlie Dooley. "How do we use this land to attract the business we want?"

That question is being asked by many cities these days. At least 20 U.S. auto plants have closed in the last two years, from Delaware to Detroit to St. Louis, and most of them face the same daunting challenges of age, size and a highly specialized use that is no longer needed.

"We’re kind of new in this game right now," said Kim Hill, who heads the Automotive Communities Program at the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich. "Obviously, there are a lot of facilities that shut. There’s a lot of head-scratching going on.

Chrysler alone shuttered eight plants when it filed for bankruptcy in April. It spun them off into a separate company and now must sell them one by one under court supervision. A spokesman for the automaker wouldn’t discuss any specifics about the two Fenton plants but said they were being actively marketed. He acknowledged it would take some "creativity to get them back into productive use."

So far, just one Chrysler plant has found a buyer.

Last month, the University of Delaware closed on a $24.3 million deal for the automaker’s assembly plant in Newark, Del. The 272-acre site is across the street from the university’s campus, and the school hopes to expand there, said spokesman Dave Brond.

"It provides generations of capacity for us to grow," he said. "It adds 22 percent to the size of our campus."

The university hopes to take advantage of an Amtrak line that runs by the plant to build offices and stores around a rail station, and to partner with a medical school and a nearby Army base on research and teaching facilities.

"It was an opportunity we couldn’t pass up," Brond said.

Still, he expected it would be three or four years before any buildings were complete. And Delaware officials knew the closure was coming and started talking with Chrysler 20 months ago, eight months before the plant actually closed. That’s a contrast with St. Louis, where local leaders had focused mainly on getting Chrysler to keep operating in Fenton almost until the day of the shutdown.

That may have been a long shot, but given the thousands of good-paying jobs Chrysler supported here, it was one worth taking, said U.S. Rep. Russ Carnahan, D-St. Louis.

"Unfortunately that didn’t work," he said. "Now we’re at Plan B."

Some, such as Carnahan, say Plan B might be a next-generation automaker’s moving into Fenton, something like Fisker Automotive’s decision to buy a GM plant in Wilmington, Del., to build plug-in hybrid vehicles.

But those opportunities are few, and the longer the plant sits empty, the less appealing it becomes payday loan.

So when it comes to finding a new use, Dooley said, pretty much everything is on the table.

He will have the commission study cleanup costs and potential incentives for a developer, the prospect of breaking the 5-million-square-foot building up for several tenants, or knocking the thing down and starting over.

"We will do everything we possibly can to make something happen there," Dooley said. "That’s too much space to leave undone."

But one thing that won’t happen is the county’s taking over the site itself. It’s just too complicated, Dooley said. A private company will have to lead any project.

That’s what has happened in Hazelwood, where Ford Motor Co. closed a plant in 2006. California-based Panattoni Development Co. bought it two years later and has since demolished the 3.5-million-square-foot structure. It plans to turn the 160-acre site into Aviator Business Park, an 11-building, $200 million complex of office and warehouse space.

Site work is basically complete, said Mark Branstetter, a senior vice president in Panattoni’s Clayton office, and the company will start marketing it to tenants in early 2010. It will have some nice things to offer, he said: a good location on Lindbergh Boulevard near Lambert-St. Louis International Airport and Interstate 270, a rail line, tremendous power and water connections, and a 25-year tax abatement negotiated with the city of Hazelwood.

Even with all that, Branstetter said, it made no sense for Panattoni to keep the old buildings in place. The plan was always to tear them down.

"These buildings really aren’t made for any sort of adaptive reuse," he said. "They’re simply an envelope around a bunch of equipment. And once that equipment goes out, it has no use."

Then there’s what lies beneath the envelope.

Most auto plants made cars for decades. The ground underneath may include metals, dangerous chemicals, all sorts of things. Often, no one is quite sure what is there, or who would be liable for pollutants two or three owners down the road.

If the concrete slab is taken up, cleanup costs could easily run $10 million or $20 million, Hill said. That makes buying one without some sort of insurance or cleanup fund a risky proposition.

"That is probably the No. 1 issue in moving these properties," he said.

In Hazelwood, Branstetter said, Panattoni did extensive testing when it took over the property. It thinks it knows what is in the ground. In Delaware, Brond said, the state took on the risk and factored it into the price.

In Fenton, that is still in the future. It will be part of the task of Dooley’s commission — if it gets funding. The county executive said he hoped to hear on that by the end of the year. Carnahan, who is supporting the application, said it might be January. Either way, they want to get started.

Meanwhile, the bankruptcy court is in the process of hiring a broker to market the site, and several people close to the process say a number of potential buyers are taking a close look.

"There’s been enough interest that (advisers for the bankruptcy court) believe it’s going to be sold, probably sooner rather than later," said Fenton Mayor Dennis Hancock.

If it is, the challenge will become what happens next, and how this place that may well have put out its last-ever vehicle six months ago can find a new reason for being.

"The obstacle is in people believing that something is going to go there," Dooley said. "To a lot of people, a church is a church and a school is a school and a plant is a plant. We’ve got to figure out how to turn it into something else."

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As President Barack Obama said in his recent jobs summit, future jobs will be found in cultivating alternative energy sources to create a cleaner environment. According to the Renewable Energy Policy Project, efforts to rein in Missouri’s carbon emissions have the potential to generate more than 22,000 manufacturing jobs in wind, solar, geothermal and biomass industries.

In addition to job creation, carbon reduction and energy savings are among the key reasons green training is important.

The potential for new jobs in Missouri spurred the IBEW/NECA Electrical Industry Training Center to consolidate 70 courses into one comprehensive green curriculum to keep pace with rapidly changing technology that includes greater understanding of energy-conversion rates of solar panels. Traditional solar cells are comprised of crystalline silicon, which has a relatively poor light absorption rate, requiring considerable thickness just to harness 11 percent to 16 percent of the sun’s rays. With silicon accounting for half the cost of a solar cell panel, we are now training on "thin film" technology installment payday loans. "Thin film" panels are less expensive, easier to install, more durable and have the potential to capture up to 35 percent of the sun’s rays.

Another part of green training is the study of advances in geothermal energy, which taps the steady flow of heat from the Earth in winter and displaces heat in the summer. This advanced training is applied to geothermal pump installations that can reduce utility costs up to 70 percent, compared with conventional systems.

Also key is understanding the dynamics of energy transfer in wind turbines, which convert the wind’s kinetic energy into electricity for homes and businesses.

The next phase of green training will be smart grid technology. It will produce a network among electric utilities to distribute power more efficiently while modifying consumer use to control energy costs.

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Wall Street’s image, battered by the financial crisis, may take years to recover as its executives themselves are the first to acknowledge.

Executives from a range of financial companies — both on and off Wall Street — told the Reuters Global Finance Summit in New York that the recent economic crisis has shaken outsiders’ faith in the industry.

It has also damaged high-profile executives’ reputations and spoiled what little goodwill others had for the industry, they said.

Repairing the damage will take time, executives said, and may be impossible in some cases.

“We had a saying that it takes years to build a reputation and you can lose it overnight,” said Joe Perella, CEO of Perella Weinberg Partners and a long-time Street veteran. “And it’s hard to repair it overnight after what’s happened.”

FAILURES

Critics — from Main Street to the halls of Congress — said the industry is out of touch and ignored significant risks in the pursuit of profit, placing the global economy at risk.

The broader financial sector’s failures, critics said, are widespread check cash advance.

Mortgage companies implemented too-loose lending standards, bolstered by Wall Street’s demand for mortgage-backed securities to bundle and sell across the globe.

Even ratings agencies often failed to identify the risks being created by a handful of industry professionals.

The crisis created the largest bank failure in U.S. history and six of the ten largest bank failures since 1934, as well as the largest recession since the Great Depression.

Merrill Lynch & Co did an eleventh hour deal with Bank of America at the depth of the crisis, in part to avoid a possible collapse.

CRITICISM DESERVED

Industry executives said the ongoing furor is at least somewhat justified.

“The criticism is definitely deserved,” said Lee Fensterstock, CEO of Broadpoint Gleacher Securities Group Inc, a New York-based boutique investment bank. “I don’t know what these guys were thinking about.” 

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Alison Cooper is set to become the youngest female chief executive of a FTSE 100 company as she looks to put sales growth at the top of her agenda for the world’s No 4 cigarette group Imperial Tobacco Plc

Cooper, 43, was widely tipped to take over the top job at the maker of Lambert & Butler and Gauloises cigarettes next year after shadowing current CEO Gareth Davis for eight months.

Davis is set to retire next May, the day before his 60th birthday.

“Alison has worked closely on all the big deals with Gareth so the transition at the top of Imperial would appear to be very smooth,” said one tobacco industry analyst.

When she takes over, Cooper will join three other female CEOs of Britain’s top 100 companies, and become the second woman to run a big tobacco company following Susan Ivey at United States-based Reynolds American Inc.

In her ten years at Imperial, Cooper has worked closely on the two big acquisitions that transformed Imperial into a world tobacco player - Reemtsma and Altadis — but as big tobacco deals start to dry up her emphasis will be on sales growth.

“Imperial’s highlights have been on acquisitions and cost control, now we will look for growth with our expanded business in different geographies,” Cooper said on a conference call.

She is set the join Angela Ahrendts at luxury goods group Burberry Group Plc, Cynthia Carroll at mining group Anglo American Plc and Marjorie Scardino at publishing group Pearson Plc as female CEOs at FTSE 100 groups.

Davis has led Imperial since its demerger from the sprawling Hanson empire in 1996 where he embarked on a series of acquisitions to put the cigarette maker on a faster growth path than its arch British rival Gallaher no credit check payday loans.

Accountant-trained Cooper was appointed No 2 to Davis in March in a new role as chief operating officer, and with Davis long expected to retire around his 60th birthday it seemed only a matter of time before she got promoted.

Davis had dropped heavy hints about his hopes that his successor would come from within the Bristol-based cigarette maker because of the challenges and stoicism needed in a industry under attack from anti-health groups and governments.

“I am a massive advocate of internal succession,” Davis said in May soon after Cooper’s appointment as his number two.

Cooper has been at the heart of expansion of Imperial Tobacco buying Germany’s Reemtsma in 2002 and Franco-Spanish Altadis in 2008 which transformed Imperial into the world’s number four cigarette company from a largely domestic player.

Cooper joined the maker of Embassy and Richmond cigarettes in 1999 from accountants PricewaterhouseCoopers after having worked with Davis and his team for a number of years. She became group financial controller in 2001, before becoming director of finance and planning in 2003.

Cooper, married with two daughters, became sales and marketing regional director for Imperial’s Western Europe region in 2005 and, two years later, joined the four-strong Imperial executive board in a new role as corporate development director. 

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Britain’s gross domestic product suffered another decline in the third quarter of 2009, figures showed Friday, meaning the country remains mired in recession.

GDP decreased 0.4% in the third quarter, according to preliminary estimates from Britain’s Office of National Statistics.

Some analysts had expected Friday’s GDP figures to show the recession in Britain was over.

The British economy officially entered recession in January after two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth, which is the traditional definition of a recession.

For the third quarter of 2009, statistics showed the biggest declines occurred in the hotel and restaurant industry, which fell by 1%; construction, which decreased by 1.1%; and agriculture, forestry and fishing, which declined by 1.6%.

There was zero growth in government and other services — a marginal increase from the previous quarter — with the health industry making the largest contribution to that figure, statistics showed. 

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As the unemployment rate climbs toward 10 percent, President Barack Obama is facing a rising clamor from within his Democratic party to take new steps to lift the economy and jump-start job growth.

But soaring budget deficits are likely to constrain Obama’s options as he considers ideas ranging from bolstering safety-net programs and extending a popular tax credit for first-time home buyers to new initiatives such as tax incentives to encourage business hiring.

“The administration and the country are in a very difficult situation,” said William Galston, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and former policy adviser to President Bill Clinton.

“All of the projections known to me suggest we are in for a very extended period of higher-than-average unemployment, a more extended period than we’ve endured for a very long time.”

On the other hand, Galston said, “You run up against the stubborn fact that our budget deficit is already sky high.”

He and other analysts said the means to alleviate the economic distress are by no means clear. Ideas such as a tax credit for job hiring face questions about their effectiveness and would be costly.

Still, the bleak jobs picture could put some of Obama’s Democratic allies at risk in next year’s congressional elections, unless voters are convinced they are doing all they can to help the economy.

Obama met on Wednesday with the two top Democrats in Congress, House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, to discuss the economy no fax pay day loan. The meeting took place at the lawmakers’ request.

INEFFECTIVE STIMULUS PACKAGE

The White House has emphasized its discussions on how to spur job growth are still in the preliminary stages.

One dilemma for Obama is that Republicans, seizing on the rise in the unemployment rate to 9.8 percent, argue that the $787 billion stimulus package passed earlier this year was ineffective.

The White House says the stimulus plan cushioned a blow to an economy that was in dire straits and would have been in far worse shape without the package.

Still, perhaps out of wariness of giving Republicans further ammunition, the Obama administration has steered clear of using the term “stimulus” to describe the additional moves it is considering for the economy.

Some measures, such as extending safety-net programs, could be adopted quickly, while other proposals may not be put forth until Obama’s State of the Union address in January.

One step that enjoys strong support is extending jobless benefits for those who may have already exhausted them. 

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Ford Motor Company unveiled a new small car at a press conference in Delhi, India on Wednesday. The subcompact, which is called the Figo, will be produced in India for the Indian market, as well as for export to other Asian countries and Africa.

The Figo’s launch "signals Ford’s intention to compete in India’s largest and most important small-car market segment," the Dearborn, Mich.-based automaker said in an announcement.

A little over 1 million passenger cars are sold in India each year, according to Ford spokesman Mark Schirmer. The automaker expects India to become the third largest market for small cars, behind the U.S. and China, by 2030.

India-based Tata Motors and Japan’s Suzuki Motors are currently among the country’s biggest-selling carmakers.

Ford (F, Fortune 500) has invested $500 million in its factory near Chennai, India, to prepare it for high-volume production of the Figo, the automaker said, doubling the plant’s capacity to 200,000 units per year.

The Figo was designed and engineered in India, Ford said, but it’s based on the existing small-car engineering platform that’s already used for the Ford Fiesta.

Ford currently sells a version of the Fiesta in India, as well as three of its other car models. While all of these Ford models would be considered small cars in the U.S., they’re each bigger than the Figo, which is about the size of a Honda Fit.

According to Ford, small cars like these makes up about 70% of the Indian car market. "[That’s] where the meat of the Indian market is," Ford spokesman Mark Schirmer said of the Figo.

No additional details about the car — such as what size engine it will use, its fuel economy or its price — were revealed.

"We’re confident that the new Ford Figo will be extremely attractive to Indian car buyers," said Michael Boneham, president and managing director, Ford India. "It’s going to be very competitive with the current market leaders and offer a tremendous value story for our consumers. We believe Ford Figo is a big game-changer for Ford that will help transform our brand into a volume player in India."

The car represents a major shift in Ford’s India strategy, the automaker said in its announcement. India will now become Ford’s "regional center of excellence" for small car engineering and production.

For the past several years, Ford Motor Co. has been moving toward a global structure in which different facilities around the world become "centers of excellence" for different types of vehicles, responsible for engineering that is shared throughout the company. Australia, for instance, is a "center of excellence" for rear-wheel-drive cars, while U.S. engineers concentrate on trucks.

The Figo will go on sale in early 2010. Ford has not announced any plans to sell the car outside markets in Asia and Africa. 

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Barrick Gold said on Tuesday it will issue $3 billion in stock and use the proceeds to buy back all of its fixed-price gold hedges and a portion of its floating hedges.

Barrick, the world’s top gold producer, will take a $5.6 billion charge to its earnings in the third quarter as a result of a change in accounting treatment for the contracts, it said.

Barrick’s gold hedges, entered years ago to finance projects, have weighed on the company’s shares as the price of the metal has more than tripled over the past seven years payday loans.

Barrick will issue 81.2 million shares at $36.95 a share, a 6 percent discount to the stock’s closing price on Tuesday.

($1=$1.08 Canadian)

(Reporting by Cameron French; Editing by Frank McGurty)

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H&R Block Inc posted a wider-than-expected quarterly loss on Friday, hurt by a larger loss in tax services, and said it expects tax returns filed to fall about 1 to 2 percent in the coming tax season.

Shares of the largest U.S. tax preparer fell as much as 3 percent.

The Kansas City, Missouri-based company said it would close about 300 traditional offices prior to the tax-season and added that the company has no plans to open a “significant” number of new stores this year.

H&R Block is working on the specifics of its pricing strategy, and would offer some targeted price value schemes for the client segment most affected by the global economic meltdown, a company official said on a conference call with analysts.

The company provides tax return preparation services in person, and online through its TaxCut software.

H&R Block chairman Richard Breeden, who once chaired the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, has refocused the company on tax preparation after taking charge in 2007, shedding a money-losing subprime mortgage unit and a securities brokerage and reducing mortgage exposure at its H&R Block Bank unit.

On Thursday, smaller rival Jackson Hewitt Tax Service Inc said it could be forced to revisit pricing as its bank partners look to restructure certain refund programs, and posted a seasonal quarterly loss.

Q1 DISAPPOINTS

For the first quarter ended July 31, the company incurred a net loss of $133 business card.6 million, or 40 cents a share, compared with a net loss of $132.7 million or 41 cents a share, a year ago.

Revenue from continuing operations grew 1.3 percent to $275.5 million.

“Improved pre-season results from business services and lower corporate expenses were partially offset by an expected larger loss in tax services,” the company said in a statement.

Net loss from continuing operations was $130.6 million, or 39 cents a share, compared with a loss of $128.4 million, or 39 cents a share last year.

Analysts were expecting the company to report a loss of 37 cents a share, according to Reuters Estimates.

Loss from tax services was at $172 million, up from $163.7 million last year.

For fiscal 2010, the company maintained its view on earnings from continuing operations to be in the range of $1.60 and $1.80 per share.

Shares of the company were down about 2 percent at $16.70 Friday morning on the New York Stock Exchange. They touched a low of $16.53 earlier in the session.

(Reporting by Anurag Kotoky and Brenton Cordeiro in Bangalore; Editing by Jarshad Kakkrakandy, Ratul Ray Chaudhuri)

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