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Retailers never give up fighting the bad guys.

They’re adopting new technologies to protect against credit card fraud and counterfeit bills. Distribution centers are putting smaller, harder-to-detect GPS devices in cargo shipments. Ink-dispensing and alarm-setting bulky tags still keep some goods from walking out the door. There’s even an alarm tag that can go into the meat soaker pad under a packaged T-bone steak.

“Oh yes, food and alcohol are high-theft items,” said Karen Bomber, marketing director at Tyco Retail Solutions, one of the companies pushing its wares last week at the retail industry’s loss prevention conference in Grapevine, Texas.

Retail theft keeps rising. Last year, retailers lost $37.14 billion, or 1.58 percent of sales, up from 1.44 percent in 2009, according to the National Retail Federation and Richard Hollinger, University of Florida professor of criminology payday loan no faxing.

The biggest share of those losses, 44 percent, was from employee theft. Shoplifting was second, with 33 percent, Hollinger said. Administrative errors, vendor fraud and unknown causes made up the rest.

The results are based on survey responses from 124 companies. Almost 19 percent of employee theft cases involved collusion between internal and external sources, he said.

New technology is about to make some efforts to stop retail theft obsolete, though it won’t happen overnight. Take credit cards, said Joe LaRocca, the National Retail Federation’s loss prevention staff expert. “We’ve spent 20 years adding holograms, expiration dates, setting up authentication numbers to call before a new card can be used

ST. LOUIS

Greenpeace says 18 of its members have climbed a 53,000-ton oil rig in the Arctic waters off Greenland to protest deepwater drilling by a Scottish oil company there.

The activists are demanding Cairn Energy release a plan for how to manage a potential oil spill.

The environmental group says activists approached the Leiv Eiriksson rig by five inflatable speedboats and climbed the rig early Saturday before making their way to the drill manager’s office. It says an oil response plan has not been published.

Greenpeace claims an oil spill in the area would be almost impossible to clean up because of the remoteness and the freezing temperatures.

Drilling started this week, and two Greenpeace activists have already been arrested for trying to prevent it.

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If St. Louis hopes to build up its biotech industry, it will need both cash and brainpower. Now the people who are trying to grow it here are using a little of the first to tap a lot of the second.

The BioGenerator, an arm of the Coalition for Plant and Life Sciences, said Tuesday that it is investing $50,000 from its Spark Fund into a new firm designed to help drug startups grow. SARmont will be a contract research organization (CRO) housed at BioGenerator’s Central West End facility. It will work with researchers and investors who are trying to bring new drugs to the market.

“Our sweet spot is in all of the work that needs to get done before a company starts clinical and manufacturing work,” said Chief Executive Randy Weiss. “Our core expertise is drug design.”

That expertise largely comes in the mind of Dr. John Talley, SARmont’s chief scientific officer and the lead inventor of several big commercial drugs, including $3 billion arthritis medicine Celebrex. SARmont will essentially be offering the skills and experience of Talley and his team to consult with others who are trying to do what he has done.

“That’s part of our special sauce. We’ve actually seen molecules go from the lab all the way to the pharmacy,” Talley said. “There aren’t that many folks who can say they’ve done that.”

SARmont is starting small

U.K. retail sales surged the most in five years last month as public holidays and the warmest April on record spurred spending, the British Retail Consortium said.

Sales rose 5.2 percent in April from a year earlier on a like-for-like basis, which excludes new-store openings, the London-based BRC said in a report today. The reading follows a 3.5 percent annual drop in March, and taken together the data suggest sales over the two months stalled, the BRC said.

Britons stocked up on food and clothing during two consecutive four-day weekends at the end of the month to mark Easter and the marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton, the report said. Spending may falter as consumers are squeezed by faster inflation and the government’s fiscal tightening pay day loans.

“Easter and the Royal Wedding bank holiday provided a badly needed boost to many retailers,” BRC Director General Stephen Robertson said in the report. Still, “the underlying pressures on the retail sector of climbing costs and depressed consumer spending will be problems for many months to come.”

Food sales rose an annual 2.1 percent in April, boosted by alcoholic drinks including champagne, the BRC said. Non-food sales fell 1.3 percent.

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Federal health officials have expanded approval of an artery-opening stent from Abbott Laboratories to a larger group of patients at risk for stroke caused by plaque in the neck arteries.

The Food and Drug Administration said it approved the Acculink stent for patients who are at moderate risk of complications if they underwent the alternative surgical procedure. The procedure, known as an endarterectomy, involves cutting open the neck artery and scraping out plaque formations that can block blood flow.

Previously Acculink was only approved for patients at high risk for complications if they underwent surgery.

Stents are mesh-metal tubes used to hold open arteries where plaque is beginning to form. They are threaded up into the artery with a catheter through a small incision made in the groin.

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Expenses associated with winter storm activity contributed to a 30 percent decline in Ameren’s first quarter profit.

The St. Louis-based utility company reported a profit of $71 million in the first quarter that ended March 31, or 29 cents per share, down from a profit of $102 million, or 43 cents per share, in the first quarter of 2010.

Power outages and repairs related to storm activity in Missouri and Illinois contributed to the decline in profit, Ameren said in a statement Thursday, in addition to reduced margins in its merchant generation segment. Mild temperatures in the quarter also contributed to lower profits fast cash.

Ameren’s operating revenue for the first quarter, $1.9 billion, was down from $1.944 billion a year ago.

“Our first quarter 2011 core earnings were on track with our expectations despite being lower than those of last year’s first quarter,” Ameren’s Chairman, President and Chief Executive Thomas Voss said in a statement. Ameren reaffirmed its guidance of $2.20 to $2.60 per share for the year.

Ameren has 2.4 million electric customers and nearly a million natural gas customers.

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Egypt’s benchmark stock index tumbled over 3 percent on Monday, pulling the market lower for a second consecutive day as investor worries mounted that an investigation into the head of a leading Mideast private equity firm signaled a major widening in anti-corruption probes.

The Egyptian Exchange’s benchmark EGX30 was off 3.2 percent by 1:15 p.m. Cairo time, building on the previous day’s 3.43 percent decline.

The drop pushed the index’s year to date losses to over 30 percent _ a clear reflection of the crisis of investor confidence confronting the Arab world’s most populous nation in the wake of the uprising that ousted former President Hosni Mubarak.

Brokers said the drop was fueled by authorities’ decision to ban Ahmed Heikal, the chairman of Citadel Capital, from traveling abroad and a decision late last week by an Egyptian government agency to rescind preliminary approval to sell 20 million meters of land to the Egyptian Resorts Company.

One of ERC’s board members is already under investigation for alleged links to violence against the protesters in the initial days of the uprising.

“It’s clear people are panicked because of these decisions,” said Khaled Naga, a senior broker with Mega Investments.

Egypt’s new military rulers and civilian authorities, under pressure from protesters to move forward more quickly with pledges to hold accountable former regime officials and businessmen seen as benefiting from links to Mubarak and the then-ruling National Democratic Party, have stepped up investigations against these individuals.

In the span of about a week, authorities have ordered Mubarak detained in hospital, placed his two sons in detention in Cairo’s notorious Tora prison and charged a former prime minister and two other ministers with corruption.

Those moves have largely been welcomed as evidence of political reform. But the cozy links between the regime and top businessmen has also sparked worries that the investigations could affect some of the country’s blue chip companies payday loans for bad credit.

Economists and analysts say that the rampant corruption in Egypt under Mubarak meant that success in business involved having to cozy up to the regime. While there needs to be a reckoning, it must be within certain bounds so that the broader economy is not affected, economists said.

“Instead of going after every businessman, they should be much more mindful of fixing the system so that it becomes more transparent,” said John Sfakianakis, chief economist with the Riyadh, Saudi Arabia-based Banque Saudi-Fransi, adding that the new Egyptian government cannot simply “react to popular sentiment” calling for broader crackdowns.

“They should be looking at the system instead of the actors. The system was corrupt,” he said.

The order barring Heikal from travel, announced last week at roughly the same time that a government agency rescinded a deal to sell 20 million meters of land to ERC, appeared to be cases in point of how such allegations of cronyism could impact the market.

The stock market’s big board was awash in red. Of the 181 listed companies, 172 were posting losses, according to the exchange’s Web site.

Citadel’s shares were down 9.59 percent, while investment bank EFG-Hermes saw its shares tumble 9.9 percent, according to information on financial data Web site, Zawya.com.

Heikal, Citadel’s chairman, had been a managing director at EFG before founding the private equity firm and the investment bank’s shares appeared to be taking a beating in part because of his prior links to the institution.

EFG, in a statement filed with the Egyptian Exchange, also said that its brokerage head, Sherif Cararah, had decided to resign effective June 30. The statement did not provide a reason.

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Britons’ inflation expectations rose to the highest level in 2 1/2 years in February, adding pressure on the Bank of England to raise interest rates.

People questioned last month expected consumer prices to increase 4 percent over the following year, the central bank said in a quarterly survey published in London today. That was the highest reading since August 2008 and compares with expectations of 3.9 percent in November.

Consumer-price growth quickened to twice the bank’s 2 percent target in January and officials predict a further acceleration in coming months. A pickup in expectations may require policy makers to increase interest rates by mid-year to prevent a cycle of rising wages and prices, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said yesterday.

“If they don’t take the inflation mandate seriously it is a mistake,” Buiter said. Inflation above the target for so long suggests you’re a “bad forecaster” and “it may communicate to the world that you don’t take the mandate seriously.”

The Bank of England report also showed that the majority of respondents, 65 percent, said they intended to respond to expectations of higher inflation by shopping around for cheaper goods and services. Just 9 percent said they would push for higher wages.

Data yesterday indicated U.K. wage settlements remain subdued. Weekly pay excluding bonuses rose 2.2 percent in the three months through January from a year earlier, compared with a 2.3 percent pace in the quarter through December. Including bonuses, pay growth was 2.3 percent.

Interest-Rate Outlook

Sixty-two percent of respondents in the Bank of England survey expect the key interest rate to rise over the next 12 months, up from 52 percent in November. The survey was conducted by GfK NOP, which questioned 3,929 people aged 16 and over between Feb. 10 and Feb. 22.

Asked about inflation in about five years’ time, the median answer was 3.5 percent compared with 3.3 percent in November. Expectations for inflation in the 12 months from February 2012 rose to 3.4 percent from 3.2 percent.

Asked to give the current rate of inflation, respondents gave a median answer of 4.4 percent compared with 3.9 percent three months previously. The actual rate was 4 percent in January.

‘Futile Gesture’

Bank of England Governor Mervyn King said earlier this month that while raising rates too soon would be a “futile gesture,” there is still a “perfectly reasonable case for doing it now.” He argued the effect of higher commodity prices on inflation will prove temporary.

Central banks around the world are facing increasing inflation pressures as global demand recovers and commodity prices surge. Crude oil has jumped by about 35 percent in the past six months and remains close to $100 a barrel.

Minutes of the Bank of England’s March 10 decision published next week will show whether a four-way split persisted among policy makers as they argue about the need to raise the key interest rate from the current record low of 0.5 percent.

The bank’s central projection, published in its quarterly inflation report last month, showed that price growth will peak at an average of 4.5 percent in the third quarter and ease to the 2 percent goal in 2013.

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JEFFERSON CITY