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Eighteen months after Peninsula Community Foundation and Community Foundation Silicon Valley merged to become one of the largest community foundations in the country, the united organization has settled on its new grantmaking strategies.

Silicon Valley Community Foundation, as the merged entity is called, has settled on five key areas that will be the focus of its discretionary grantmaking, which will total between $8 million and $10 million this fiscal year.

“Quality takes time, and I feel good about where we landed,” said Emmett Carson, CEO and president of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. Determining these funding areas has been a major undertaking of Carson’s and the organization since the merger became official in January 2007.

The funding areas are:

• Economic security, specifically toward foreclosure prevention counseling, asset building and financial education.
• Immigrant integration, to help immigrants fully participate in their communities and thus improve their economic status.
• Community opportunity fund, which will help meet basic service needs in these times of increased demand and shrinking government funding. A $1 million fund will be paid out by the end of 2008 to support such basic services as food and shelter.
• Education, and in particular closing the middle school achievement gap in math between low-income or students of color from middle class and white students so that all are prepared for college.
• Regional planning, particularly in the areas of affordable housing, transit-oriented development and access to green space.

The first requests for proposals are being issued today. Until settling on these new funding areas, SVCF stuck to the grant guidelines of each parent organization, awarding $12.3 million form its endowment fund between January 2007 and July 2008 faxless payday advances. The endowment currently stands at $162 million.

These five areas are the result of numerous community meetings of various sizes and input from hundreds of community leaders on nine issue areas that the community foundation considered.

As for areas that the community foundation considered funding, but discarded, “We either felt like we didn’t the resources or expertise on the issue, or it was bigger than we as a region could figure out,” Carson said. “For example, accessible health care. It’s big and it ought to be addressed, but we can’t solve it as just San Mateo and Santa Clara counties.”

For the issues it couldn’t make a priority focus, the foundation hopes to leverage partnerships and to form special initiatives.

As a rule, the foundation will focus on programs rather than infrastructure grants. It also will fund a quarterly “best new idea” program.

Carson hopes that the defined focus of the community foundation will excite the existing 1,500 donors and will inspire new ones to partner with Silicon Valley Community Foundation.

“With the release of these guidelines, we’re devoting a lot more attention now to the external work of making the community a better place and moving away from the internal work of the mechanics of the merger, and that’s a good place to be,” Carson said.

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Ford Motor Co. will keep investing in new fuel-saving technology even if it doesn’t get any government loan guarantees, but the loans will help the automaker get the technology to market more quickly, Executive Chairman Bill Ford said Friday.

Congress reconvenes next week, and the auto industry plans an aggressive campaign to get lawmakers to guarantee up to $50 billion in low-interest loans. Auto executives say the money would help modernize assembly plants and develop next-generation vehicles.

Ford, in an interview at an event marking the upcoming 100th anniversary of the Model T, said the loans are important to help the industry deal with higher fuel economy standards, carbon dioxide emissions limits and a marketplace that has shifted from trucks to more fuel-efficient cars.

"I think it’s important to our whole industry, all the retooling we’re doing as an industry, to really meet the future demands of fuel economy and CO2 and all the new technology that’s really going to be needed to achieve that," Ford said.

The company that bears his family’s name, he said, will go on without the loan guarantees, but its work will be tougher.

"We’re fine, but this certainly would help," he said after signing hats, books and business cards for many of the more than 100 Model T owners who had gathered outside the company’s world headquarters. "It would just make everything more difficult, and we may have to go slower, and that’s clearly not what society wants."

Ford said the company doesn’t have a number in mind for how much it would borrow. But he said the government-backed loans, which Ford (F, Fortune 500) intends to repay, would mean the difference between single-digit interest rates and the double-digit rates now available in a tight credit market. That potentially could save the troubled automaker millions of dollars.

Ford has lost $23.9 billion in the past 2 1/2 years and has had to mortgage its assets to stay in business as the U.S bad credit payday loans. auto market has shifted away from profitable trucks and sport utility vehicles to more fuel-efficient models.

Mark Fields, Ford’s president of the Americas, said the loan guarantees are good for the country because they would help preserve an industry that is responsible for one in 12 U.S. jobs. They’re not a bailout, he said.

"This is not about benefiting Wall Street, like maybe some of the other actions that have been taken," Fields said. "This is benefiting Main Street, the working men and women. The auto industry is part of the backbone of the U.S. economy."

The federal government estimates that fuel efficiency and other requirements in the energy bill passed earlier this year will cost the auto industry around $100 billion, but Ford’s estimate is higher, Fields said.

He said the loan guarantees should be open to all manufacturers, whether foreign-based or domestic.

Bill Ford said the loans are important if the U.S. wants to have a strong industrial base, as other governments have financially backed their manufacturers. He also said the government should help decide what fuel-efficient technology U.S. automakers should embrace, so they can focus their capital investments.

Ford wouldn’t predict the chance of the loan guarantees getting through Congress.

"I’m very happy that both presidential candidates have endorsed this," he said. "The leaders of both parties are embracing this as something that they believe in, so that’s got to help us." 

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Boeing Co’s 27,000-strong machinists’ union walked off the job on Saturday after the plane maker failed to improve its contract offer after two days of emergency talks.

At midnight, a crowd of more than 100 employees gathered near the entrance of Boeing’s factory in Everett, Washington, whistling, honking and waving picket signs as the strike got underway. A small police presence ensured the scene was calm.

“Despite meeting late into the night and throughout the day, continued contract talks with the Boeing Company did not address our issues,” Tom Wroblewski, the IAM’s Seattle-area president, said in a letter to members. “The strike is on.”

The vast majority of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers’ (IAM) members voted to reject Boeing’s “best and final” offer on Wednesday, but postponed a strike for 48 hours to give negotiators more time.

Boeing and IAM negotiators, along with federal mediators, met near Orlando, Florida in a last-ditch effort to hammer out an agreement.

“Over the past two days, Boeing, the union and the federal mediator worked hard in pursuing .. same day payday loans. options that could lead to an agreement. Unfortunately the differences were too great to close,” said Scott Carson, the head of Boeing’s commercial plane unit, in a statement.

No further talks are scheduled. Both sides said they were waiting for the other to make the first move. Boeing spokesman Tim Healy said the company was “open” to hearing from the IAM.

“If this company wants to talk, they have my number, they can reach me on the picket line,” the IAM’s Wroblewski said in a message to union members. 

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A Mainland lender has foreclosed on a Kauai hotel owned by a subsidiary of developer Brian Anderson’s Anekona companies.

Wells Fargo Bank, N.A., filed the lawsuit in 1st Circuit Court in Honolulu on Aug. 29 claiming Anderson and Anekona Aloha Ownership LLC owe $13.66 million on a mortgage for the Aloha Beach Resort Kauai.

Anderson’s Anekona Aloha Ownership purchased the 216-room hotel in April 2006 for $9.2 million, according to public records. The hotel, whose 10.36-acre site next to the Wailua River and Lydgate Park is on land leased from the state, came under the Resortquest flag on Feb. 1.

According to the lawsuit, Anderson borrowed $13.66 million on April 27, 2006, from American Property Financing, Inc., which later assigned the note to Wells Fargo. The full amount of the loan was due on May 8.

The Wells Fargo lawsuit is the third foreclosure action filed against Anderson and one of his companies in the last two months.

Last month, iStar Financial of New York filed a foreclosure claiming Anderson and two of his companies were in default for $72.6 million on the residential and retail units they own at the Ilikai hotel-condominium in Waikiki.

In July, iStar foreclosed on the Kauai Beach Resort, claiming Anderson and his KB Resort LLC were in default on nearly $29.5 million.

Honolulu attorney Gary Dubin, who is representing Anderson and his companies in the foreclosure lawsuits, declined to comment because he said Anderson hadn't yet been served with the court papers cash advance loans. Anderson has previously said he was negotiating with his lenders and told PBN last month that he felt “very good that we’re going to work all this out.”

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The News & Observer is offering voluntary buyouts to 320 employees – the latest effort at cost-cutting at the daily newspaper.

Employees were given word of the voluntary buyouts Wednesday morning, the newspaper reports. Every member of the news staff will be offered a buyout.

In all, the newspaper is offering buyouts to roughly 40 percent of its employees.

According to The N&O, Publisher Orage Quarles III expects a small percentage of the people offered buyouts to take them. By way of comparison, of the 200 people who were offered voluntary buyouts in April, 33 wound up taking the packages and leaving the newspaper.

Like most daily newspapers, The N&O is suffering from an advertising slump fueled by an economic downturn and competition from online ads paydayloans. In addition to the April buyouts, the newspaper also cut 70 jobs in June. Then, in August, parent McClatchy Co. (NYSE: MNI) said it would freeze wages for a year.

The N&O also has shut down its Durham office, moving those workers into the offices of its Orange County bureau in downtown Chapel Hill.

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The former administrator of an adult day health care center in Sacramento was sentenced Tuesday to five years probation for falsifying records to make patients appear sicker than they were so the center could collect government aid for their care.

Miron Balyasny, 57, of San Francisco, would spend six months of that time confined to his home with electronic monitoring, and must pay a $4,000 fine, the U.S. Attorney's office in Sacramento said. Balyasny entered a guilty plea March 28 to a single count of making false demands against the United States and could have been sentenced to a year in prison.

Balyasny was manager and administrator from 2001 through 2004 for Altamedix Inc., which ran an adult day health care center in Sacramento; his wife was listed as a one-third owner of Altamedix.

In that role, Balyasny prepared documents to support bills submitted for reimbursement to Medi-Cal, California's health care program for the poor. Program rules required that Altamedix could only collect reimbursement if the patients met certain medical criteria and would likely be in an institution if not for the day health care program.

Balyasny falsified records to indicate that the patients were sick, could not feed or dress themselves or couldn't walk instant payday advance. In one case in 2004, prosecutors said, Balyasny listed a patient as having senile dementia, chronic headaches, shortness of breath, chest pains and had to be supervised when walking, when none of those things were true.

Medi-Cal investigators interviewed the man and reviewed his files and found that "In fact, the patient, who had been a medic during World War II, frequently takes nature walks on his own for leisure activity," investigators said.

Altamedix was named in a civil whistle-blower suit by a physical therapist who made similar allegations of falsified records. Altamedix and its owners agreed to pay the government $450,000 to settle that case, but deny wrongdoing or liability.

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Health care fraud may be one of the biggest factors driving up health care costs, to the tune of billions of dollars, new research indicates.

Resolved health care fraud cases alone in the previous decade involved $9.3 billion in damages paid to both federal and state government, according to researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Results of the study are slated to be published in the Sept. 2 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine.

But the researchers said the data suggest hat there is likely much more unrecognized fraud still going on within the health care system, adding countless inefficiencies that drive up costs.

“We are interested in exploring how … targeting health care fraud may be best utilized to play a role in controlling inefficient health care spending,” said lead study author Dr. Aaron Kesselheim in a statement.

The researchers, along with their counterparts at the University of Melbourne in Australia, looked at all 379 federal health care cases resolved between 1996 and 2005 initiated by whistle-blowers who know about the fraud, such as executives, physicians or internal employees payday loans application. They found that those cases led to $9.3 billion in financial recoveries, with $7.2 billion being returned to the federal government and $861 million going to state governments.

They also tracked who perpetrated the fraud.

According to the study, pharmaceutical manufacturers represented 4 percent of the defendants but nearly 40 percent of the money recovered. Billing organizations were frequent defendants as were laboratory service providers, hospitals, and medical equipment companies.

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Prosecutors will argue to an appeals court that jurors would have convicted ex-Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio on 19 felony counts even if a procedural error that excluded defense testimony had not been made in the executive's 2007 insider-trading trial.

The Denver-based 10th Circuit Court of Appeals holds a rare second oral arguments session Sept. 25 on Nacchio's appeal, which succeeded in reversing his conviction earlier this year.

The U.S. Attorney's Office submitted its brief for the hearing Friday, detailing in 72 pages why the Denver-based federal appeals court's March order for a new trial was in error.

A panel of three 10th Circuit judges overturned Nacchio's conviction March 17 in a 2-1 vote and ordered a second lower-court trial on the grounds that one defense witness, Daniel Fischel, an expert on stock market trends, had been improperly excluded from testifying before the jurors.

That jury convicted the former head of Denver-based Qwest Communications International Inc. (NYSE: Q) of fraudulently making $52 million from selling Qwest stock in 2001 while keeping shareholders in the dark about increasingly dire internal forecasts about the telecom's prospects.

The appeals court panel ruled that U.S fast cash online. District Court Judge Edward Nottingham didn't follow proper procedure when he decided that Fischel's testimony would confuse jurors and was unnecessary.

At the prosecution's request, the 10th Circuit agreed to reconsider the ruling, and next month judges on the court will review the decision instead of the typical three.

The government's filing for that hearing argues jurors would have convicted Nacchio even if Fischel had testified in 2007 and that, even if the appeals court thought Fischel could have swayed the jury, the appellate court should have simply ordered a new lower court hearing on the suitability of Fischel's testimony without demanding a whole new trial.

The hearing brief for Nacchio's defense is expected to be filed before midnight Friday.

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Achievo Corp. of San Ramon has opened a software development center in Wuxi, China, the company said Friday.

“Wuxi’s proximity to Shanghai offers an advantage for Achievo’s Japanese customers, as Shanghai is an important hub for Japanese business interests in China,” said Robert Lee, Achievo’s chairman and CEO.

Lee stated he believes that establishing R&D centers in cities outside China’s large urban centers shields the company from the “rapid inflation seen in larger metropolitan centers,” allowing it to offer better value to customers and better compete with Indian software outsourcing and IT service providers payday loans in 1 hour.

Achievo’s new 32,300-square-foot Wuxi offices are located in iPark, a new 1.6 million-square-foot technology center which houses more than 40 companies engaged in software development, IC design and digital animation.

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The McClatchy Co. is expected to announce a deal for its Real Cities Network early Thursday, ending months of rumors about the newspaper publisher selling the once-popular online network, according to a media report.

Chicago-based Centro, an online media buying company that connects media agencies and newspapers, will likely announce the purchase Thursday. Financial terms were not disclosed.

McClatchy executives confirmed discussions – and being close to a deal – several weeks ago, but said negotiations stalled. Company officials were not available for comment late Wednesday.

The Sacramento-based company – publisher of The Sacramento Bee, Miami Herald and 28 other daily newspapers – acquired Real Cities as part of its Knight Ridder Inc. purchase in June 2006. Knight Ridder, formerly the nation’s second-largest newspaper chain, created the Real Cities Network several years ago and reports 44 million monthly unique visitors per month, according to PaidContent.org, which first issued the report late Wednesday cash til payday loan.

Cash-strapped McClatchy continues to cut costs – recently detailing the elimination of 10 percent of its work force – and looks to increase revenue.

Shares of McClatchy (NYSE: MNI) inched up 1 cent to $3.90 in trading Wednesday, much lower than its one-year peak of $24.05.