While the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index touched a fresh five-year high shortly after opening, it failed to hold those gains as investors sought to assess the impact of President Barack Obama’s second-term initiatives. With a focus on renewing America’s middle class, President Obama announced in his State of the Union address last night plans to lift the minimum wage …

Livestock Improvement Corp, which compensated some farmers for selling bull semen that caused ‘hairy calf’ mutations, increased first-half profit 7.3 percent as dairy farmers raised their herd investment, even as farmgate prices fell. Net profit rose to $30 million, or $1.017 a share, in the six months ended Nov. 30, from $28 million, or 94.7 cents, a year earlier, the …

NZ Inc was blown away when shown through ‘Banyan Tree on the Bund’  – a terrific six-star hotel towards the mouth of the Huangpo River – during a recent research trip to China.  The developer is Pengxin better known in Shanghai as a real estate developer than as the buyer of the Crafar farms. online marketing jobs Pengxin chairman Jiang …