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The owner of the recently renamed Fontainebleau Apartments for Seniors in University City are trying to take it back to the future. Brentmoor Retirement Communities restored the complex’s original name this month, and it is renovating its older apartments and offering residents more economical rental plans.

“You’ll pay only for what you want,” said Denise Niemann, Fontainebleau’s executive director. “We came up with this concept in response to our seniors’ financial woes.”

Until this year, residents of the apartments at 1001 North Mc-Knight Road, known as Brentmoor Place before the switch, were required to buy a full independent living package that included some meals and activities fees. Monthly rental fees were at least $2,000.

Options still include transportation, housekeeping and parking, for those residents who drive. But the recession has had several residents worried that they wouldn’t be able to make their payments and might have to move, Niemann said.

The new a la carte pricing allows residents to skip the meals and other extras if they desire. Apartments at Fontainebleau now are available for as low as $1,390 a month.

When the Fontainebleau complex was built nearly 50 years ago, it was marketed as an upscale apartment building for everyone. But by the mid-1990s, nearly 90 percent of its residents were over age 70, and it was being advertised as a senior living complex for independent older people.

The property, acquired in 1996 by Brentmoor Retirement Communities, was renamed Brentmoor Place and converted to a seniors-only, limited-service retirement community business card.

By 2007, Brentmoor Place had become an all-inclusive, full-service community, providing meals, transportation and housekeeping for its residents.

Now, the a la carte pricing allows options while maintaining a social environment for residents, who are required to be at least 62 years old.

Niemann said Fontainebleau’s age gives it one distinctive advantage over many newer buildings. “This is a concrete building, so you hear almost no noise from other apartments,” she said. “It’s built like Fort Knox.”

She said that the apartment complex had been known over the years for its social programs and activities and that those would continue. “It’s brain-stimulating; it’s computer classes and trivia events, for example,” she said.

A group of men who live there organized the MOB group, short for Men of Brentmoor, several years ago. “They get out at least once a month and go to places like Crown Candy Kitchen and other St. Louis landmarks,” Niemann said.

A longtime MOB member, Mark Margolies, is a resident coordinator for group activities and helps other residents resolve any concerns. “It gives me something to do,” said Margolies, 75.

He said he has enjoyed living there. “I have no complaints,” he said. “I like the convenience of the apartments, the location and the staff.”

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Last minute shoppers gave merchants a solid lift during the final week before Christmas, according to a report from a mall trade group Wednesday.

Revenue at stores open at least a year rose 0.9 percent for the week ended Saturday compared with the previous week. That is also up 3.4 percent from the week before, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers-Goldman Sachs Weekly Chain Store Sales Index.

Revenue at stores opened at least a year for the week ended Saturday rose 4.5 percent compared with the same period a year ago. The index serves as a sales proxy to 24 major stores including Macy’s Inc. and Costco Wholesale Corp.

“The downs and ups were much more accentuated,” said Michael P. Niemira, chief economist at the council. “It just shows how cautious the consumer is. Consumers are bargain hunters more today than ever before personal loan for poor credit.”

For the week ended on Nov. 26, which included the traditional start of the holiday shopping season on the day after Thanksgiving, stores had the biggest sales surge compared with the prior week since 1993, according to the ICSC-Goldman Sachs weekly index. The cumulative two-week-sales drop-off that followed marked the biggest percentage decline since 2000. Then, during the final two weeks before Christmas, sales surged again, by the highest rate since 2005, Niemira says.

“The holiday season was good but uneven,” Niemira said.

ICSC expects that holiday sales for the November and December combined will be in line with its forecast of 3.5

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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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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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Applause and cheers rang out after Unionized Boeing Machinists voted overwhelmingly to approve a four-year contract extension _ a deal that grants the company labor peace and likely ends a federal complaint that had become a hot topic for Republican presidential candidates.

Boeing promised that if workers approved the pact, the company would build the new version of the popular 737 in the Puget Sound region, while the Machinists said they’d drop their allegations that Boeing opened a nonunion assembly plant in South Carolina in retaliation for previous strike.

“This contract signifies jobs throughout the Northwest, throughout the region,” said the union’s aerospace coordinator, Mark Blondin. “The message of this contract is … Boeing is acknowledging we have the deepest pool of skilled aerospace workers in the country.”

Dozens union members sounded their approval with cheers Wednesday night as Tom Wroblewski, president of Machinists District Lodge 751, announced that 74 percent of voting members chose to approve the deal.

The union represents 28,000 workers in Washington, Oregon and Kansas.

Machinists went on strike in 2005 and 2008. The latter strike helped delay delivery of Boeing’s first 787, costing the company dearly.

“This contract will help secure a better future for our employees, our customers, our communities and our company,” said Jim Albaugh, president and CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes. “It reflects an effort on the part of the company and the union to find a better way to work together and achieve common ground.”

The deal guarantees Chicago-based Boeing a stretch of labor peace at a time when it badly needs it. Competition with European rival Airbus is tight, and looming budget cuts at the Defense Department are likely to cut into the company’s defense business.

In a lawsuit filed this year, the National Labor Relations Board claimed Boeing violated labor laws by opening the South Carolina line. The case became a political issue, with Republican presidential candidates using it to bash the Obama administration. South Carolina Gov cash advance. Nikki Haley and the state’s congressional delegation said the NLRB lawsuit threatened thousands of jobs and millions of dollars invested in the new Boeing facility in Charleston.

The labor board is an independent agency dominated by the president’s appointees. As part of the deal, the Machinists said they’d drop the matter. If the NLRB follows suit, it would remove a potentially damaging element for Obama in the 2012 campaign.

The deal extends the Machinists’ contract to September 2016. It calls for annual wage increases of 2 percent, cost-of-living adjustments, an incentive program intended to pay bonuses between 2 percent and 4 percent, a ratification bonus of $5,000 for each member, and improvements in the pension program. But it also would raise workers’ share of health costs.

Blondin said Boeing’s pension is the most generous in the country, and he hoped the fact that Boeing is retaining it for new hires would prompt other companies to do likewise: “As we all know pension plans have gone away,” he said. “We can get pensions back. They are affordable.”

Crucially for the union, it would ensure that jobs for Boeing’s updated 737 line _ the 737 Max _ stay in the Puget Sound region. Boeing said in July it was studying other locations for the new 737.

“It’s jobs for the people and not having to worry about a strike _ it’s beautiful,” said Gabrielle Rogano, a third-generation Boeing employee who works at a shipping and receiving center in SeaTac.

Wilson Ferguson, a delivery mechanic, wore a Santa suit as he helped count votes Wednesday night _ having come straight from volunteering to pose for photos with children of union members. The 24-year Boeing veteran has participated in the last four strikes, and said it’s a huge relief not to face another.

“Nobody wins, you never recover,” he said. “With this economy, it’s not the time to go on strike.”

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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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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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A string of bombings in a southern oil city killed 19 people Thursday evening and injured dozens more, a grim sign of the security challenges Iraq will face after American troops go home.

The U.S. military is drawing down its troops ahead of an end-of-December deadline to have all American forces out of the country. Incidents like Thursday’s triple bombing in a city seen as key to Iraq’s economic development show the dangerous prospects awaiting Iraqis next year.

Three bombs went off in a popular open-air market in Basra, police and health officials said.

The third bomb exploded a few minutes after Iraqi army and police forces arrived on the scene in response to the earlier blasts, officials said. The third blast caused all the fatalities and almost all of the injuries, the officials said.

Among the dead and wounded were many policemen and Iraqi army soldiers.

The police officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to reporters.

Kamal Ali was working at a clothing shop across the street when the blasts went off. He said after the first explosion, bystanders rushed to help the victims. When another blast went off about five minutes later, the terrified people ran to escape.

Then police and soldiers rushed to the scene before the third and most deadly bomb went off.

“Most of the casualties are police and Iraqi troops who rushed to help the victims and cordoned off the scene no fax pay day loan. They sacrificed their lives for the poor people,” Ali said.

The head of the Basra provincial council, Ahmed al-Sulaiti, confirmed the incident.

“We can’t blame the security forces for this act. They were the people most hurt,” he said by telephone from Basra.

Basra is about 340 miles (550 kilometers) southeast of Baghdad It is considered the center of Iraq’s burgeoning oil sector.

Many foreign oil companies have offices there. The country is relying on foreign companies to bring the money and expertise needed to develop Iraq’s vast oil sector, which has been ravaged by war, sanctions and neglect.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the bombings, and it was not clear whether it was the work of Sunni extremists like al-Qaida, or by Shiite militias. Sunni militants often stagger their blasts in order to cause the most carnage, and they often target security officials, whom they see as propping up the Shiite-led government.

The area where the blasts occurred is also a stronghold for Shiite militia members, who have been known to use violence as they jockey for power and control.

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Associated Press writers Mazin Yahya and Rebecca Santana in Baghdad contributed to this report.

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