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The road has been heavily patched, and there’s no room to pull over to change a tire.

Welcome to the twin Interstate 270 bridges over the Chain of Rocks Canal, the 8½-mile, manmade bypass to the Mississippi River.

The Illinois Department of Transportation will soon replace the aging spans in Madison County. Built in 1963, the truss bridges are in need of repair and are too narrow to accommodate more lanes in the future.

Walsh Construction Co. of Chicago has been awarded a $104 million contract to build the new four-lane bridge, which will be just north of the existing bridges.

Traffic will remain on the existing bridges while the new span is built, said Paul Grabowski, an engineer at the Illinois Department of Transportation. He predicted “minimal” effects on traffic while construction is under way. The new bridge should be open to traffic by December 2013.

The plan stands in sharp contrast to the one being used by the Missouri Department of Transportation to renovate the westbound Blanchette Bridge span over the Missouri River between St. Charles and St. Louis counties.

That project, which is also being carried out by Walsh Construction, will require eastbound and westbound traffic to temporarily share the current eastbound span.

For the Illinois bridge, Grabowski said, some earthwork already has begun on Chouteau Island, between the Mississippi River and the canal, in preparation for temporary lanes. Earth is also being moved near the western abutment.

The new bridge will have room for a third lane in the future. Until then, the bridge will have two lanes and an extra merging lane cash advance loan no fax.

Grabowski said the deck was in poor condition and the structural steel needed repair.

The truss spans over Chain of Rocks Canal are similar to the Interstate 35W bridge that collapsed in Minneapolis in 2007. But Grabowski said it was structurally adequate.

The new bridge will be a single span and will resemble the Poplar Street Bridge.

Glenn Scott of Wildwood drives over the two bridges every day while making his 49-mile commute to work in the Metro East.

Although he travels in the opposite direction of the heaviest commuter traffic, he has been caught in traffic jams when highway crews make frequent repairs. That kind of work is usually done at nonpeak times of day.

“It definitely is one of the worst sections of road I drive on on any kind of regular basis,” Scott said. “As often as they’ve worked on that section of roadway, you’d think it would be in pristine shape. But it’s really pretty rough.”

The new I-270 bridge will cross the Chain of Rocks Canal, which opened in 1954. The canal allows barge traffic to bypass a treacherous reach of the Mississippi River just north of St. Louis.

Illinois is awaiting necessary permits from the Army Corps of Engineers. Mike Petersen, a spokesman for the corps, said the agency was reviewing the project before granting IDOT a temporary easement to begin construction.

The current I-270 bridges over the Chain of Rocks Canal carry nearly 55,000 cars a day.

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New York City’s economy faces an “extreme downside risk” from Europe’s debt crisis because its banks hold over $1 trillion of assets in the city, where they are active lenders, according to a new report released on Thursday.

The city’s economy is intertwined with Europe’s because non-financial companies have significant ties to European companies while millions of tourists from this region visit the city every year, according to the report by City Comptroller John Liu.

“In light of these widespread commercial interactions, adverse effects on the City’s economy from Europe’s debt crisis appear alarming and lend greater urgency to addressing existing budget issues,” Liu said in a statement.

This potential problem could bedevil New York City’s finances, which already are being pressured by the job-cutting downturn of its prime industry: Wall Street.

The Democratic comptroller warned that Mayor Michael Bloomberg might be underestimating some risks. The list includes

the difficulty of negotiating labor contracts for teachers and supervisors with no wage increases for the past round of bargaining and the possibility that cash-poor New York state will cut $200 million in aid.

A mayoral spokesman, saying Bloomberg had warned that New York City’s economic outlook was uncertain, added: “He has kept the city’s fiscal house in order while delivering services that continue to produce record results through two historic downturns guaranteed pay day loans.”

The kinds of risks that Liu indentified could help widen the city’s budget gaps to $1.7 billion in the current accord, $3.2 billion in fiscal 2013, $4.4 billion in 2014 and $5 billion in 2015.

The city’s current budget is balanced.

Bloomberg, a political independent, has forecast smaller gaps of $2 billion in 2013, $3.8 billion in 2014 and $4.9 billion in 2015.

On the positive side, the comptroller estimated that the city’s five pension funds will cost less than Bloomberg predicted, which could save more than $1 billion from the current fiscal year to 2015.

Though New York City typically benefits when the stock market rises, as it sweeps in higher tax collections from profitable banks and brokerages and individuals with capital gains, there is a plus to the market’s current roller-coaster ride.

“The Comptroller’s Office believes that continued stock market volatility and low interest rates will further encourage institutional investors to shift portfolios towards commercial real estate, especially in premium markets such as New York City, thereby stimulating transactions of commercial property,” the report said.

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A federal jury on Friday failed to reach a verdict in a Utah company’s $1 billion antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft Corp. in a case so important to the computer giant that it put Bill Gates on the stand for two days last month.

Novell Inc. sued the software giant in 2004, claiming Microsoft duped it into developing the once-popular WordPerfect writing program for Windows 95 only to pull the plug so Microsoft could gain market share with its own product.

Novell says it was later forced to sell WordPerfect for a $1.2 billion loss.

The trial began two months ago with jurors getting the case on Wednesday. After much confusion, and some perplexing questions from the panel, they told U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz they were deadlocked by early Friday evening.

He repeatedly asked them if they could keep trying.

“This has been a very long and expensive case,” Motz told the panel.

Novell attorneys pleaded with Motz to give the panel just one more day. In the end, however, the 12 jurors told the judge they were “hopelessly” deadlocked, and they later told lawyers a single holdout refused to vote in Novell’s favor.

“He had strongly held views about the technical evidence and refused to budge,” Novell attorney Jeffrey Johnson said. Jurors offered no comment after the trial.

Novell was left with little to show for a decade of effort, but the company said it will seek to retry the case with a new jury.

“Although it’s a technically complicated case, we’re hoping to convince another jury that our claims have merit,” Novell’s corporate counsel Jim Lundberg said.

Microsoft said it would file a motion asking the judge to dismiss Novell’s complaint for good and avoid a second trial.

“We remain confident that Novell’s claims don’t have any merit and look forward to the next steps in the process,” said Steven Aeschbacher, Microsoft’s associate general counsel.

Novell waited until 10 years after Microsoft left WordPerfect behind to file the lawsuit. The company said it was waiting for the U.S. government’s antitrust enforcement against Microsoft to wrap up. At first Novell’s case was dismissed, but it was later reinstated on appeal.

Microsoft lawyers have argued that Novell’s loss of market share was its own doing because the company didn’t develop a compatible WordPerfect program until long after the rollout of Windows 95. WordPerfect once had nearly 50 percent of the market for word processing, but its share quickly plummeted to less than 10 percent as Microsoft’s own Office programs took hold.

Gates testified last month that he had no idea his decision to drop a tool for outside developers would sidetrack Novell. Gates said he was acting to protect Windows 95 and future versions from crashing.

He said that the company’s preferred Word software was superior to WordPerfect, which was a “bulky, slow, buggy product” that did not integrate well with Windows 95.

Novell could have worked around the problem but failed to react quickly, he said.

Novell has argued that Gates ordered Microsoft engineers to reject WordPerfect as a Windows 95 word processing application because he feared it was too good.

Novell’s lawsuit is the last major private antitrust case to follow the settlement of a federal antitrust enforcement action against Microsoft more than eight years ago.

Novell is now a wholly owned subsidiary of The Attachmate Group, the result of a merger that was completed earlier this year.

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TNK-BP, a Russian joint venture of British oil giant BP, said Wednesday it will invest up to $10 billion in developing Arctic oilfields.

The company, half-owned by BP and Russian billionaires, said in a statement that up to $10 billion will be spent on building infrastructure at the fields and a pipeline that will link them with the export pipeline.

Russian oil companies have been drawing up plans to move to the oil and gas-rich Arctic as mature fields in Western Siberia are getting depleted.

TNK-BP said an agreement with Russia’s pipeline monopolist Transneft will allow it to connect its Arctic oil fields to the export pipeline in Russia’s Far East mainly aimed at Chinese customers.

TNK-BP will be able to ship oil through the Zapolyaryev-Purpe pipeline, which is expected to be built by 2016 to become a key link between Arctic resources and the main east and westbound pipeline routes.

The company said it expects to start shipments from new fields in the Yamal region in 2015. Its fields in the region are estimated to hold 5 billion barrels of oil.

TNK-BP’s executive German Khan described in the statement cooperation between oil companies and state-owned Transneft as “one of the most important conditions for putting new fields into development and efficiently developing the abundant resources of the region.”

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Premier Mario Monti said Sunday his government of technocrats has approved a package of austerity and growth measures worth euro30 billion ($40.53 billion) to “reawaken” the Italian economy and help save the euro common currency from collapse.

The measures include immediate cuts to the costs of maintaining Italy’s bulky political class as well as significant measures to fight tax evasion, Monti told a news conference following a three-hour Cabinet meeting.

As part of the political cost cuts, Monti said he would forego his salaries as premier and finance minister _ a move he said was a personal decision and not meant as an example for other ministers in the government, which was formed 2 1/2 weeks ago after Premier Silvio Berlusconi’s resignation under market and political pressure.

The package also includes measures to spur growth and competition, while aiming to stamp out rampant nepotism. But it also raises the retirment age and the number of years of service to qualify for a full pension, steps strongly opposed by unions, and imposes new taxes on Italians’ private wealth, including their homes, boats and luxury cars, measures that conservatives have protested.

“We gave a lot of weight to fairness, we had to distribute some of the sacrifices but we took a lot of care to distribute them in a fair way,” Monti said.

Monti will outline the measures on Monday in addresses to both houses of Parliament, which must approve them. Monti said he will appeal to lawmakers’ sense of responsibility.

The Berlusconi government stepped down due to its failure to get tough measures through a fractious Parliament, which remains intact, meaning fault lines could easily reopen.

“A lot depends on how well or not we explain to the citizens what we are trying to do,” Monti said.

The premier, an economist who once was an EU commissioner, has been under extreme pressure to come up with speedy and credible measures that will persuade markets to stop betting against the common currency. Italian borrowing costs have spiked, which could spell disaster if Italy is unable to keep up on payments to service its enormous debt of euro1.9 trillion ($2.57 trillion), or 120 percent of its GDP.

Unlike Greece, Portugal and Ireland, which got bailouts after their borrowing rates skyrocketed, the eurozone’s third-largest economy is considered to be too big to bail out. An Italian default would be disastrous for the 17-member eurozone and reverberate throughout the global economy.

Deputy Economic Minister Vittorio Grilli said the measures passed will ensure that Italy’s budget will be balanced by 2013 through a 2 percent increase in value-added tax from the second half of 2012. Berlusconi’s now-defunct government already raised the value-added tax from 20 percent to 21 percent as part of earlier measures.

In addition, the government adopted austerity measures worth euro20 billion and euro10 billion in measures aimed at boosting anemic Italian growth. They include pension reform, local government spending cuts, the reestablishment of a tax on a first house that was annulled by Berlusconi and new taxes on boats over 10 meters (30 feet) in length and on luxury cars, Grilli said payday loans no teletrack.

At the same time, the measures will reduce the tax on the cost of employment, give fiscal breaks to companies that invest to grow their businesses and increase investments in local public transport.

Monti denied an impression that the measures mostly comprised new taxes.

“There are certainly taxes, we know that in Italy it is easier to reduce the deficit through new taxes than through cutting costs,” Monti said. “But what we did, for example, in terms of rebalancing the pension goes in the right structural direction.”

The government “made a particular effort to make sure that higher taxes did not affect the usual suspects,” Monti said.

The premier spent the weekend briefing political parties, unions, business groups, consumer lobbies and others. Unions were particularly critical of the measures to reform the pension system, saying certain classes of workers, including those who do physical labor, shouldn’t be forced to work extra years, and that women who enter the work force after raising children would have to work well into old age to meet seniority requirements.

The measures raise the pension age to 66 years for men in 2012 and for women by 2018, and also increases to 42 years and one month the years of service for a man to retire with full benefits, 41 years and one month for a woman. Labor Minister Elsa Fornero said it would be possible to retire earlier, “with a small penalty.”

Fornero wiped away a tear when she said that the pension reform would require sacrifices, including a hold on inflation adjustments for larger pensions.

On the fight against tax evasion, Monti said there would be no more tax amnesties, a mechanism used frequently in the past to recover lost revenues. In addition, the measures imposed a 1.5 percent penalty on money that was repatriated in a recent scheme that allowed Italians who had concealed money abroad to repatriate it for a negligible 5 percent penalty.

The measures also limit cash transactions to payments under euro1,000 _ down from euro2,500. In Italy, paying in cash is common as a way to conceal transactions from the government and avoid paying the value-added tax.

After meeting with Monti earlier Sunday, the head of Italy’s industrial lobby said that the survival of the common euro currency depends on Italy’s coming up with very strong austerity and growth measures _ followed by a concerted effort at the European level so that Italian sacrifices are not in vain.

Confindustria President Emma Marcegaglia described the measures as “very heavy.”

The coming days “will decided if the euro will survive or not. The first move to save the euro is in Italian hands, with a very strong measures,” Marcegaglia said. The measures will be “fundamental to saving Italy and to saving the euro.”

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Hundreds of laid-off workers massed Friday outside a Shanghai factory of a Singaporean supplier to major consumer electronics companies such as Motorola and HP _ the latest in a spate of labor unrest in China as manufacturers struggle with higher costs and slowing exports.

Reports of recent strikes at factories and other major employers show the increased pressure on China’s manufacturers and workers amid weak demand in Europe and the U.S. that comes on top of surging costs for labor and materials. The country’s manufacturing contracted in November for the first time in nearly three years, according to a survey released Thursday.

A nervous Beijing has begun reversing a two-year effort to cool the world’s second-biggest economy, seeking to counter slowdowns in factory production and property that are dragging growth lower and spurring unrest.

Some of the 300-400 workers at the factory gate of Hi-P International in the eastern industrial suburbs of Shanghai said it was their third day of protesting over mass layoffs due to the company’s decision to relocate some manufacturing.

They said they were seeking more information, and improved terms for themselves.

A group of the workers, bundled up against the cold, held up a banner demanding: “We want an explanation! We want truth! Where is Hi-P’s truth? Where is the government’s credibility?”

Workers also accused the factory of violating labor standards.

“Sometimes, they ask us to work 18 or 19 hours in a day. Sometimes the overtime is even longer than a normal 8-hour work day,” said Tao Yong, a worker in his mid-30s.

Police in vans and unmarked cars watched but did not intervene. One worker showed bruises he said were from an earlier beating by police.

Company officials contacted by phone in Shanghai and Singapore refused comment on the protest. Shanghai city government and police also did not immediately respond to inquiries about the strike or the workers’ claims of injuries from scuffles with police.

“We all work for this company, and now if the company is going to move, they owe us an explanation. So we are waiting for a solution,” said Chang Yan, a woman in her mid-20s who like most of the others was wearing a blue factory uniform embossed with a red Hi-P logo.

Reflecting the tougher times for manufacturers, Hi-P International’s net profit margin plunged 80 percent from a year earlier in third quarter to 2.1 percent from 11.6 percent _ mainly due to higher costs. Net profit in July-September fell 42 percent to 6.5 million Singapore dollars ($5.1 million) from a year earlier, according to its latest financial report.

The company, founded in 1980 as a tooling factory, said its third-quarter revenue rose 34 percent, but so did costs for materials and taxes.

The New York-based group China Labor Watch said Hi-P was shifting some of its production to the nearby city of Suzhou and had not paid the legally required amount of compensation to workers, who were laid off without notice.

According to its website, Hi-P International is a contract manufacturer for the wireless telecommunications, consumer electronics and computing and automotive industries, with two-dozen factories and about 18,000 employees.

Hi-P has factories in five other Chinese cities besides Shanghai and Suzhou. Motorola and other major electronics companies are among its customers.

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Kellwood Co. is planning to drop Adam, the upscale contemporary sportswear line that it acquired last year, according to a news report.

Women’s Wear Daily reported today that the Town and Country-based apparel company has decided to no longer fund Adam and is exploring various options, including selling the business. Adam employees were told of the decision earlier today, according to the report.

Kellwood acquired Adam, the brainchild of designer Adam Lippes, in August 2010. It was one of the company’s first major acquisitions as it embarked upon a brand-buying spree. Lippes stayed on with the brand to oversee it. Terms of the deal were not disclosed at the time.

“Adam is the first one we’ve nailed, ” Michael Kramer, Kellwood’s chief executive at the time, told the Post-Dispatch. “Hopefully this is the first of many to come.”

Kellwood followed that acquisition with others such as Rebecca Taylor and Scotch & Soda. It has also launched some new in-house brands such as Lamb & Flag.

It’s not immediately clear what dropping Adam might mean about Kellwood’s recent focus on buying more luxury, designer brands. But Kramer, who was spearheading that strategy, has recently left Kellwood to become chief operating officer at J.C. Penney.

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Stocks are opening sharply higher after a strong start to the U.S. holiday shopping season and signs that Europe is getting its debt crisis under control.

Initial reports show a record number of shoppers hit the mall or bought gifts online over the holiday weekend.

Investors are also hoping that recent deterioration in Europe’s debt crisis will get the region’s leaders to agree on a package of measures that can ease market concerns over whether the euro currency itself can survive.

The Dow Jones industrial average is up 274 points, or 2.4 percent, at 11,506 shortly after the opening bell Monday.

The Standard & Poor’s 500 index is up 29, or 2.6 percent, at 1,188. The Nasdaq composite is up 70, or 2.9 percent, at 2,512.

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