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A day after announcing it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, Aloha Airlines said Friday it is looking for a buyer for all or part of Hawaii’s second-largest airline.

Attorneys for the privately-owned Aloha told a federal bankruptcy judge in Honolulu that the company is seeking a buyer for its passenger, cargo and contract services.

Aloha is owned by a group of private investors, some of whom participated in the rescue of the airline from its previous bankruptcy, which began in late 2004. The biggest investor, The Yucaipa Cos. of California, is apparently unwilling to invest more than the $100 million it has already pumped into the company.

U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Lloyd King was expected to decide late Friday whether to allow Aloha to pay some creditors so that it may continue flying.

Aloha said rising jet fuel costs and a 21-month-long airfare war with Hawaiian Airlines and go! forced the company to enter bankruptcy payday loan low fee. It is the second time in three years the airline has filed for court protection; it last exited bankruptcy in February 2006.

Founded in 1946, Aloha Airlines flew 3.9 million passengers in 2007.

Aloha’s routes link the five major Hawaiian Islands and fly to Las Vegas and Reno, Nev., and San Diego, Oakland, Sacramento and Orange County, Calif.

On March 14, Aloha said it will cancel a daily flight from Sacramento to Orange County on April 1.

Also on Friday, leaders of the Hawaii House and Senate said they are prepared to consider legislation that may assist Aloha in its reorganization.

The lawmakers and Gov. Linda Lingle have expressed concern about the airline’s 3,500 employees, but offered no specific assurances for aiding the airline.

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The much-anticipated privatization of Grady Memorial Hospital shuffled closer to reality.

On Saturday, the Fulton-DeKalb Hospital Authority ratified a lease and financing agreement that preps the transfer of Grady’s daily operational control to a yet-to-be-formed private non-profit management corporation.

The privatization will trigger a private and public sector bailout of the hospital worth more than $200 million.

The lease agreement, however, won’t be executed — or take effect — for a while.

That’s because, for starters, the non-profit board has not yet been formed.

The hospital authority must also first get a firm written commitment for $200 million, including an initial payment of $50 million, according to the hospital authority’s attorney. And, the non-profit must commit to try and raise an additional $100 million.

The non-profit’s 16-member board — which would include five appointees of the hospital authority, at least four of whom must must from the current Grady board — is expected to be named and approved in the new few weeks cashadvance.

Candidate’s include A.D. "Pete" Correll, former chairman and CEO of Georgia-Pacific Corp.; Tom Bell, CEO of Cousins Properties Inc. (NYSE: CUZ); Michael Russell, CEO of H.J. Russell & Co.; and Duane Ackerman, former CEO of BellSouth Corp.; Beverly Hall, superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools; Dr. Louis Sullivan, former secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; and Bill Clement, chairman and CEO of Dobbs Ram & Co.

The lease agreement, ratified Saturday, has patient care and funding provisions that state the non-profit corporation must "irrevocably, absolutely and unconditionally" provide indigent and charity care, and operate Grady as a safety net hospital. It must also consult with the hospital authority before "ceasing any major medical service line."

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Truliant Federal Credit Union has partnered with identity theft protection firm LifeLock to provide services to its members and will host a stop on the company's "Defeat Identity Theft Now" tour next week, according to an announcement.

LifeLock is a private company based in Arizona that claims to help consumers render their personal information useless to thieves, offering a $1 million service guarantee.

LifeLock, which says it has more than 600,000 members, will offer its services at a discount to Truliant's 180,000 credit union members, the announcement said.

Truliant CEO Marc Schaefer said identity theft costs Americans more than $50 billion in 2007 no qualifying payday advance.

"We wanted to offer the very best identity theft service to our members to help ensure that they do not fall victim to identify theft and all the problems associated with it," Schaefer said.

The LifeLock promotional tour includes stops in 10 cities, with the aim of collecting 20,000 signatures for a petition urging Congress to pass more stringent consumer protection laws related to identity theft. The stop at Truliant's Winston-Salem headquarters will take place March 3.

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Southern Methodist University will disclose on Friday the planned details of the George W. Bush presidential library.

According to published reports, the university will announce a 99-year-lease, with available extensions for up to 246 years. Other reports say the library will cost between $200 to $500 million to build. All of the money will come from private donations.

The site selected for the library is near the intersection of Central Expresway and SMU Boulevard.

Final approval for the project, which is expected to take up to five years to complete, must be given from the Methodist Church, which owns the land.

More than 11,500 individuals have signed an online petition urging the church to deny land rights for the library. The petition was launched by a collection of Methodist ministers and church officials http://payday-z.com.

According to recent findings by American Research Group Inc., a national polling firm, President George W. Bush has an approval rating of 19 percent — the lowest in recorded American history.

Still, the library is expected to become a significant tourist attraction for the Dallas area; various projections put the economic impact of the library at several hundred million.

SMU officials involved in negotiations with the Bush Foundation regarding the library were not immediately available to comment on Friday.

President Bush's wife, First Lady Laura Bush, is an SMU alum.

Web sites: www.smu.edu, www.protectsmu.org

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The Austin Museum of Art may soon be a step closer to realizing its decade-old dream of a new home.

Sources say AMOA is close to inking a deal with Hines Interests LP of Houston to develop the downtown block south of Republic Square Park owned by the museum.

The towering project would likely feature about 400,000 square feet of office space, with about 40,000 square feet of that set aside for the museum’s new digs. It’s unclear whether or not the project would include a residential component as a previous incarnation did. But, if realized, it would be the first new office property in downtown Austin in four years since the opening of the Frost Bank Tower.

AMOA, which has a total of 35 employees, has been housed on the ground floor of 823 Congress since 1995.

Museum officials declined to comment on any pending deals with a developer and say the museum is still exploring all options. Sources say the deal with Hines could be announced as soon as early next week.

A spokesperson for Hines says the company "has nothing to announce at this time."

Hines has developed more than 215 million square feet of space over its 50-year history, and re-entered the Austin market last June with the purchase of the 301 Congress building downtown. The company has built properties internationally in a number of arenas, from office to education. According to Hines’ Web site, one of the firm’s specialties is arts and cultural facilities; the company has fielded projects as diverse as the Wortham Theater Center in Houston and the renovation of Postal Square in Washington, D.C., which now includes the National Postal Museum and nearly 1 million square feet of office space paydayloan.

In August 2006, AMOA said it was planning to partner with local developer Tom Stacy on the creation of condo tower and new museum on the site south of Republic Square bounded by Third, Guadalupe, San Antonio and Fourth streets. But that deal never materialized. The museum has sought a new home since the late 1990s, going so far as to launch a $65 million fundraising campaign for a new home off Fifth Street about eight years ago. The museum ultimately had to taper its wishes — and even cut staff — when the economy went south after the dot-com bubble burst.

If Hines and AMOA do partner on the project, sources say it would likely be more than a year before site planning, permitting and other steps were completed, paving the way for construction to begin.

Approximately 290,000 people visited AMOA last year at its downtown location and its Laguna Gloria facility on Lake Austin. The museum reports a $4.1 million operating budget for fiscal year 2008. AMOA anticipates spending 41 percent of that budget on programs, with another 41 percent going to administration and the remaining 17 percent to fundraising.

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Battered by more than two years of losses, Hawaiian Telcom has replaced Mike Ruley as its CEO and replaced him with an expert on fixing broken companies.

The telephone company announced late Monday that Stephen Cooper, chairman of a New York-based advisory and management firm, will serve as CEO. Cooper and his firm, Kroll Zolfo Cooper, are known for cleaning up bankrupt companies and Cooper was appointed as CEO of Enron in 2002 after the Texas energy company imploded.

"Steve Cooper brings tremendous leadership skills and a well established track record of operational excellence," said Hawaiian Telcom board member James Attwood Jr., who also heads a subsidiary of The Carlyle Group, parent company of Hawaiian Telcom.

"We are grateful to Mike for his dedication, leadership and service to Hawaiian Telcom during its transition to a stand-alone company."

Ruley was brought on board in 2004 when Carlyle bought Verizon Hawaii for $1.6 billion.

Cooper previously was a financial consulting partner of Touche Ross, now Deloitee & Touche online cash advance. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Occidental College and an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

"The team at Hawaiian Telcom has been working hard to improve service and responsiveness to customers, but we recognize that there is more work to be done," Cooper said in a statement.

In addition to Enron, Cooper and his company have been paid millions to clean up Polaroid, Krispy Kreme and Laidlaw. His hourly rate at Krispy Kreme was $760, according to a January 2005 story in The New York Times.

"Turnaround artist Stephen Cooper commands top dollar for trying to bring failed companies back to life," U.S. News and World Report said in a 2003 profile.

The company also named Stephen Gray vice chairman of the board.

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Japan's inflation rate doubled in December to the fastest in more than nine years, as companies passed rising oil and commodity costs to consumers.

Core consumer prices, which exclude fresh food, climbed 0.8 percent from a year earlier, the statistics bureau said today in Tokyo. The median estimate of 44 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News was for a 0.6 percent gain.

Central bank Governor Toshihiko Fukui has said rising oil and commodity costs are complicating the task of conducting monetary policy, and today forecast growth will slow and inflation will quicken. The government is concerned that prices are being driven by surging oil, wheat and barley costs rather than consumer spending and business investment.

“The global economy is slowing while prices of food and energy keep advancing,'' said Hiroshi Shiraishi, an economist at Lehman Brothers in Tokyo, who expects the central bank to keep interest rates on hold this year. “That's the worst combination for the Japanese economy, which depends on exports and has stagnating domestic demand.''

Japan's five-year bonds fell the most in 19 months after the inflation report and a rebound in stocks. The yield on the note rose 9.5 basis points to 0.91 percent at 5:37 p.m. in Tokyo. The yen was 107.85 per dollar from 107.12 before the report.

Reduced Bets

Investors reduced bets that the central bank will lower the key lending rate from 0.5 percent later this year. There's a 43 percent chance of a cut by July, down from 67 percent before the inflation report, according to calculations by JPMorgan Chase & Co. using overnight interest-rate swaps.

“The market's been underestimating the BOJ's focus on inflation,'' said Jan Lambregts, head of Asian research at Rabobank International in Hong Kong. “An actual rate cut could produce an increase in inflation expectations, which would only act to depress the consumer further.''

The Bank of Japan raised interest rates from near zero percent in July 2006, predicting that sustained growth will spur profits, feed into higher wages and consumer spending, and lead to stable price increases. Instead, inflation is being driven by energy and raw materials costs, hurting profits and eroding households' spending power.

Fukui said in parliament today that growth will cool to “the low 1 percent range'' in the year ending March. A slowing economy and faster inflation makes it “difficult'' to decide interest-rate policy, he said this month how to get a free credit report.

Negative for Consumers

“Rising daily goods prices are negative for consumer spending when wage growth has stalled,'' Economic and Fiscal Policy Minister Hiroko Ota told reporters today. “We can't say Japan has made a major step'' toward the end of deflation.

Consumer confidence fell to a four-year low in December and wages only rose in two of the first 11 months of last year.

Core prices were unchanged in 2007, today's report showed. Prices started rising in October after eight months of declines. Before then, they either hovered near zero or fell since March 1998, when a sales tax increase pushed gains to 1.8 percent.

Core consumer price gains may accelerate and could even exceed 1 percent, Kazuo Momma, head of the Bank of Japan's research and statistics bureau, said today.

Tokyo's core prices, a harbinger of the nationwide index, rose 0.4 percent in January from a year earlier, following a 0.3 percent gain in December. Excluding energy as well as food, nationwide consumer prices fell 0.1 percent in December. By that measure, they've failed to rise for nine years.

Milk, Beer

Crude oil rose to a record $100 a barrel this month. A UBS Bloomberg index of 26 commodities that tracks the prices of oil, industrial metals, agriculture and livestock climbed to a record on Jan. 14 after surging 22 percent last year.

Dairy farmers in Hokkaido, northern Japan, yesterday raised the price of milk by 3 percent because of higher costs of feed for cows. Kirin Holdings Co., Asahi Breweries Ltd. and Sapporo Holdings Ltd. plan to boost beer prices in the next three months to cover higher malt costs. Nisshin Foods Inc., Japan's biggest macaroni maker, will increase pasta prices as wheat costs soar.

Smaller companies remain unable to pass on costs out of concern that sales may decline, said Ryutaro Kono, chief economist at BNP Paribas in Tokyo.

“Some companies, worrying that worsening performance may force them to go bankrupt, started to raise prices,'' Kono said. “But without wage increases, higher prices will only hurt households' purchasing power and choke off spending.''

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