May 7, 2024

You are here: Home / Archives for tiny portion

American Delegation Arrives in North Korea on Controversial Private Trip

January 7, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Mr. Richardson, who has visited North Korea several times, called his four-day trip a private humanitarian mission and said he would try to meet with Kenneth Bae, a 44-year-old South Korea-born American citizen who was arrested on charges of “hostile acts” against North Korea after entering the country as a tourist in early November.

“I heard from his son who lives in Washington State, who asked me to bring him back,” Mr. Richardson said in Beijing before boarding a plane bound for Pyongyang. “I doubt we can do it on this trip.”

In a one-sentence dispatch, the North’s state-run Korean Central News Agency confirmed the American group’s arrival in Pyongyang, calling it “a Google delegation.”

Mr. Richardson said his delegation planned to meet with North Korean political, economic and military leaders and visit universities.

Mr. Schmidt and Google have kept quiet about why Mr. Schmidt joined the trip, which the State Department advised against, calling the visit unhelpful. Mr. Richardson said Monday that Mr. Schmidt was “interested in some of the economic issues there, the social media aspect,” but did not elaborate. Mr. Schmidt is a staunch proponent of Internet connectivity and openness.

Except for a tiny portion of its elite, North Korea’s population is blocked from the Internet. Under its new leader, Kim Jong-un, the country has emphasized science and technology but has also vowed to intensify its war against the infiltration of outside information in the isolated country, which it sees as a potential threat to its totalitarian grip on power.

Although it is engaged in a standoff with the United States over its nuclear weapons and missile programs and habitually criticizes American foreign policy as “imperial,” North Korea welcomes high-profile American visits to Pyongyang, billing them as signs of respect for its leadership. It runs a special museum for gifts that foreign dignitaries have brought for its leaders.

Washington has never established diplomatic ties with North Korea, and the two countries remain technically at war after the 1950-53 Korean War ended in a truce.

But Mr. Richardson’s trip comes at a particularly delicate time for Washington. In the past weeks, it has been trying to muster international support to penalize North Korea for its launching last month of a long-range rocket, which the United States condemned as a violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions banning the country from testing intercontinental ballistic missile technology.

North Korea has often required visits by high-profile Americans, including former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, before releasing American citizens held there on criminal charges. Mr. Richardson, who is also a former ambassador to the United Nations, traveled to Pyongyang in 1996 to negotiate the release of Evan Hunziker, who was held for three months on charges of spying after swimming across the river border between China and North Korea.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/08/world/asia/bill-richardson-and-eric-schmidt-of-google-visit-north-korea.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Global Business Tagged With: , ,

Foundations Come to the Aid of Companies

November 25, 2011 by Leave a Comment

The foundation bought its shares using a program-related investment, or an investment that can be counted toward federal requirements that it pay out 5 percent of its assets each year.

A growing number of foundations are using such investments, known as P.R.I.’s, to connect with profit-making ventures that advance their missions. But as they become more popular, some officials in the nonprofit field worry that this and other newer mechanisms are blurring the lines between profit-making businesses and charitable work.

“Equity investments, and sometimes debt instruments, are ways to tap into the private sector when we think it will add to the work we are doing and leverage private flows of capital to advance our work in global health, global development and U.S. education,” said Jeff Raikes, chief executive of the Gates Foundation.

The Liquidia investment was made from a $400 million program-related pool the foundation created in 2009. Now, the foundation is increasing that pool to $1 billion, a quarter of which will be used to make equity investments or to finance debt instruments in profit-making ventures.

Its investment in Liquidia piggybacks on capital supplied to the company by traditional investors and is meant to ensure that the technologies the company develops for better delivery of vaccines not only benefit what Mr. Raikes calls “the rich world” but also serve the poor, who are the foundation’s target.

I’m not going to say we couldn’t do this through a nonprofit, but it would certainly be more difficult,” Mr. Raikes said.

Investments like the Gates Foundation’s stake in Liquidia compose but a tiny portion of all program-related investments. About 5 percent, or $37.2 million, of all P.R.I.’s made in 2006 and 2007 was used to buy shares, according to research by the Foundation Center.

The rest of the Gates Foundation’s $1 billion pool, for instance, will go toward more traditional types of program-related investments, like the one it made to guarantee a bond offering by KIPP, a nonprofit manager of charter schools.

But interest is growing rapidly in using P.R.I.’s to buy stakes in businesses that can help foundations achieve their missions, experts say, and the Gates Foundation alone will change the dynamics.

The foundation also put money into two funds that invest in Africa — $7 million in one targeting health-related businesses and $10 million in another aimed at small businesses — and used a $2 million P.R.I. to buy a stake in Inigral. That represents almost the total of all such investments made in the period covered by the Foundation Center report.

Added to about $20 million that the Omidyar Network, the philanthropic investment fund set up by the eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, has put into equity funds and other investments, the amount already exceeds that for program-related investments in the Foundation Center’s last report.

“We made our first equity P.R.I. a little more than four years ago, and after that I got maybe one call a month asking how we did it,” said Will Fitzpatrick, general counsel of the Omidyar Network. “For about the last year and a half, though, those calls are coming in at a rate of one or so a week from a combination of large and smaller foundations thinking about making similar investments.”

Diana Aviv, chief executive of the Independent Sector, the nation’s largest nonprofit trade association, said such investments reflected a broader trend.

“Foundations are increasingly agnostic about how they achieve their goals,” Ms. Aviv said. “If their purpose is, say, to eliminate food deserts, they may see supporting a grocery store chain as the best way of doing that rather than funding a nonprofit program.”

That trend concerns her at a time when government financing for nonprofits is declining and the charitable deduction is under fire. “It’s part of this slow erosion of nonprofit funding streams that threatens to undermine organizations that have been built over decades to meet high standards of public trust,” Ms. Aviv said.

For example, Gerard Cafesjian, who made more than a billion dollars through the sale of a publishing empire, formed a family foundation that has invested and made loans to a variety of companies in Armenia, from a financial services business to extensive media holdings and real estate. Its Web site says it has a total of $128 million invested in that country.

The foundation’s 2009 tax form, the latest available, showed that it used P.R.I.’s to make some $53 million in investments that year, about $42 million of which were equity investments. In contrast, it made just $178,000 in grants.

GLC Enterprises, which manages the foundation, did not respond to a list of questions about its investments.

In most cases, program-related investments pale in comparison to grants. Some foundations, like the David Lucile Packard Foundation, do not even count them toward the payout requirement.

It first used a program-related investment in 2009, when it put $1 million into Ecotrust Forest Management, a fund set up by Ecotrust, an Oregon-based nonprofit conservation organization.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=a9a330f1b9a65c1cab8c1fd92489414b

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: , ,

Georgia Jobs Program Draws Federal Attention

September 24, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Whether the program can be replicated on a scale big enough to make a dent in the unemployment rate, though, is far from clear.

Since the recession began, the Georgia program has been held up as a national example, and a close look shows that it has pleased employers and produced steady paychecks for workers. But economists say there is little evidence that participants find work faster. And a lack of promotion, limited oversight and budget constraints have limited the program, Georgia Works, to a tiny portion of the state’s nearly half a million unemployed workers. Only about 120 people have been hired because of it this year.

That such a blip of success has been hailed as a central plank of the president’s jobs plan, and one of the few with consistent bipartisan support, shows just how few viable solutions have emerged for perhaps the nation’s most intractable problem — how to get 14 million unemployed people working again.

Already replicated by several other states, the Georgia initiative does not create jobs but allows workers to try out an existing position, unpaid, while continuing to receive unemployment benefits. At the end of eight weeks, the employer may take the worker on permanently. The program is voluntary, and participants may not work more than 24 hours a week.

Since the program began in 2003, only 18 percent of those who completed the training have been hired, according to data released this week by the state labor department. More recently, job placement has declined to about 10 percent. New Hampshire, North Carolina and Missouri report far better results from their programs, though they are still quite small. The Obama administration estimates that if every state opted in, the program would cost $1 billion to $1.5 billion.

Supporters of the effort say that hirings are not the only measure of success. The program keeps the unemployed tethered to a workplace environment. It can provide training — in fact, under federal labor laws that forbid unpaid labor, it is required to, although the state labor department’s own literature refers to it as a “free trial” for employers.

Still, the program has given Lis Cap, 26, who lost her job as a graphic designer in August, the chance to acquire a valuable skill: writing code for smartphone apps. On a recent morning, she sat at a laptop in the dining room that serves as headquarters for a small technology company called AppedOn. From an iPad screen, an AppedOn programmer based in Asheville, N.C., coached her.

“It’s a great opportunity for me to learn all I can about this area that I was interested in but had no solid experience in,” said Ms. Cap, who taught herself to build Web sites but needed help when it came to apps. “Without this, this would not be a job that I could apply for.”

It also might not be a job that AppedOn could fill, said Sosh Howell, the chief executive. App writers are in short supply, even at salaries of $40,000 to $50,000 a year. “It’s so hard to find people,” he said, “that our options come down to training someone, which is something we can’t afford as a small business, or outsourcing to another country, which is not our preferred method.”

At the end of eight weeks, Mr. Howell will either hire Ms. Cap, or she will walk away with what she considers valuable training that she could not have gained any other way.

At Georgia State University, however, the story is different. Georgia State has hired 37 workers through the program, out of 54 who have begun trial periods. But the overseers of the program there acknowledged that for many, the program was more valuable as a foot in the door than as a learning experience. One auditioner was so proficient at Microsoft Access that she showed her prospective bosses how to improve their system. She was hired.

Another employee, Belinda Robinson, said she had repeatedly sent her résumé to Georgia State but heard nothing until she volunteered for Georgia Works, thinking, “I just need to meet someone who’s in a position of power so I can sell myself.”

Unions and labor advocates like the National Employment Law Project have criticized the program as free labor for employers rather than training. The White House has tried to neutralize that complaint by ensuring that under its proposal, called Bridge to Work, the worker would receive the equivalent of minimum wage. States may apply for money to bolster unemployment benefits and to provide stipends for travel and child care, which would come out of a $4 billion federal fund meant to cover that and other re-employment programs in the jobs bill.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=d267c190bab592d09e413be53f424f7a

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: , ,