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Probe Begins After Conn. Commuter Trains Crash

2014-10-18T09:35:00.001-07:00

Probe Begins After Conn. Commuter Trains Crash

(FAIRFIELD, Conn.) — Two commuter trains packed with rush-hour commuters collided in an accident that sent about 70 people to the hospital, severely damaged the tracks and threatened to snarl travel in the congested Northeast Corridor.
Three patients remained in critical condition Saturday morning, with two of those stable, according to officials at two Bridgeport hospitals.
The crash happened Friday evening on the Metro-North Railroad, which serves the northern suburbs of New York City.
Passengers described a chaotic, terrifying scene of crunching metal and flying bodies.
“All I know was I was in the air, hitting seats, bouncing around, flying down the aisle and finally I came to a stop on one seat,” Lola Oliver, 49, of Bridgeport, told The Associated Press. “It happened so fast I had no idea what was going on. All I know is we crashed.”
About 700 people were on board the Metro-North trains when one heading east from New York City’s Grand Central Station to New Haven derailed about 6:10 p.m. just outside Bridgeport, MTA and Bridgeport officials said.
The train was hit by a train heading west from New Haven to Grand Central on an adjacent track, MTA spokesman Aaron Donovan said. Some cars on the second train also derailed as a result of the collision.
“We’re most concerned about the injured and ultimately reopening the system,” Connecticut Gov. Dannel P. Malloy said from the scene about three hours after the crash.
A team from the National Transportation Safety Board was headed to the area to survey the crash site Saturday morning with Malloy, U.S. Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy and other Connecticut officials, according to Malloy’s office.
Officials planned to update journalists on the crash following the tour.
Malloy said most people in the crash were not seriously hurt. Among those critically injured, he said, one’s injuries were “very critical.”
The nursing supervisor at St. Vincent Medical Center said Saturday morning that 44 people from the crash had been treated there, and that five of those were admitted. One of the five remained in critical condition but was now stable, the supervisor said.
Bridgeport Hospital spokesman John Cappiello said two patients were admitted in critical condition, and one of those was now stable. The hospital treated 24 other patients from the crash, and many had been released already with the rest expected to be released by late Saturday morning, Cappiello said.
The Metro-North Railroad, a commuter line serving the northern suburbs, described it as a “major derailment.” Photos showed a train car askew on the rails, with its end smashed up and brushing against another train.
Malloy said there was extensive damage to the train cars and the track, and it could take until Monday for normal service to be restored. He said the accident will have a “big impact on the Northeast Corridor.”
Amtrak, which uses the same rails, suspended service indefinitely between New York and Boston.
Bridgeport Mayor Bill Finch said the disruption caused by the train accident could cost the region’s economy millions of dollars.
“A lot of people rely on this, and we’ve got to get this reconnected as soon as possible,” Finch said.
Investigators Friday night did not know what caused the first train to derail. Malloy said there was no reason to believe it was anything other than an accident.
Passenger Bradley Agar of Westport, Conn., said he was in the first car of the westbound train when he heard screaming and the window smash behind him.
“I saw the first hit, the bump, bump, bump all the way down,” he said.
Agar had returned to work this week for the first time since breaking his shoulder in January. And since he was still healing, he thought it would be safer to take the train than drive.
The area where the accident happened was already down to two tracks because of repair work, Malloy said. Crews have been working for a long time on the electric lines above the tracks, the power source for the trains. He said Connecticut has an old system and no other alternate tracks.
By late evening, Bridgeport Police Chief Joseph Gaudett said everybody who needed treatment had been attended to, and authorities were beginning to turn their attention to investigating the cause.
“Everybody seemed pretty calm,” he said. “Everybody was thankful they didn’t get seriously hurt. They were anxious to get home to their families.”
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority operates the Metro-North Railroad, the second-largest commuter railroad in the nation. The Metro-North main lines — the Hudson, Harlem, and New Haven — run northward from New York City’s Grand Central Terminal into suburban New York and Connecticut.
___
Associated Press writer Michael Melia contributed to this report from Hartford, Conn.

Hiring Trends in the U.S. and Abroad

2013-04-14T07:41:00.004-07:00

Would it surprise you to know half of new employees experienced buyer’s remorse after taking a job offer last year? This statistic is part of Development Dimensions International’s (DDI) latest global research on hiring trends. And those who are dissatisfied are not alone. Many organizations also question whether they have made wise hiring decisions, as one in eight new employees were failures in the last 12 months.
“There is a great paradox in that both unemployment and the number of open positions hover at uncomfortably high levels. Simultaneously, organizations and candidates are shaky about the decisions they made in staffing and accepting roles this year,” said Scott Erker, Senior Vice President of Selection Solutions for DDI and the study’s co-author.
Erker’s group surveyed both staffing directors and new hires. He explains two things that are driving this trend. The first is that candidates are exaggerating their capabilities. They know that getting a job is important and many have been unemployed for three to nine months, so that desperation is driving their motivation to exaggerate. The other factor, Erker explains, is the Internet is empowering people to make those exaggerations more targeted. Because the Internet provides such broad information sharing about what organizations are looking for, candidates are prepared for the hiring process, and are emboldened to answer selection questions in ways they weren’t in the past.

“Such sites as vault.com and glassdoor.com have examples of real candidates giving advice on the questions a prospective employee will be asked, as well as examples from ex-employees saying what it is like to work for certain companies. If you Google ‘how to ace an interview’, you can find hundreds of apps that provide coaching on the subject of how to get a job. So, candidates can be quite prepared coming into an interview.”
“On the other side, companies haven’t updated their selection process to take this into account. Lots of companies have interviews and basic skills tests, and if you go online, you might find candidates are sharing the answers to those tests. They feel they’re doing a favor to the candidate community. These days, the half-life of a secure selection process has been reduced dramatically on the candidate side of the equation,” Erker says.
“Recently, we found that a job candidate put a webcam over his shoulder while he was taking the online test. He posted the test and his answers for all to see. Obviously, that destroys the value for the company of that test. The game has changed. You might think you are hiring one kind of person, but if that person faked his way through the hiring process, you won’t get what you wanted. The need to increase due diligence on prospective new hires and to monitor hiring process security is a trend we’re seeing in talent acquisition.”
DDI’s white paper also found non-U.S. companies use more selection tools, and are more confident about their hiring practices than U.S. companies. “When we ran our survey and compared non-U.S. to U.S. respondents, we found international respondents not only used more tools, but also used other hiring aids such as job simulations more often. In the area of pre-employment assessment, there is a long heritage in Europe to use more than just a job interview to select the best candidate. In some parts of the world, such as India and China, prospective employees are used to having to take a test to get employed. In the U.S. however, people are litigation happy. That litigious environment makes employers risk-adverse. Creating the right hiring practices requires investment of time and money and many U.S. companies don’t do as much as they could to make the hiring process really effective,” continues Erker.
What is the Question?
Erker asserts that bad interview questions still abound, many of which are illegal. Some of the worst he’s recorded are: Do you believe in ghosts? When are you planning to have kids? What church do you attend? If you could be a fruit what kind would you be? There are three main problems with such questions: many are illegal; they don’t predict performance; and they aren’t professional.
“I want to make sure every question I ask is professional and provides a realistic preview of the job for the candidate,” says Erker. “The way to form a good interview question is to think about the job being offered and to clearly determine what capabilities a candidate needs to have in order to perform the job successfully. The questions I need to ask to find the best candidate will give me information about that person and tell me if they have the capability to perform well in the job.”
“There are two other criteria for asking good questions. The interviewers must ask themselves if the answer to that question will predict on-the-job performance and how easy is it to fake an answer to a question. I prefer behavior-based interview questions such as: ‘Tell me about a time when you had to deal with this job challenge.’ I find past behavior often predicts future behavior for job performance or new situations.”
Erker asserts there is no list of magic interview questions, so you have to determine if a question you might ask is the best question for that particular job. Furthermore, he finds it’s not the first question you ask, but the follow-up questions that help decide whether a candidate is well suited for a job.
“As an interviewer you have to think on your feet. It takes practice and feedback. I also like to understand a person’s motivation to see if the job I’m offering will tap into that motivation. I might ask: ‘What did you enjoy about your last job?’ or ‘What did you not like about the last job?’ If a candidate gives me a list of things she likes to do and it fits the job I’m offering, that’s great motivation fit. I also like to explore a candidate’s receptivity to feedback. One question might be: ‘Tell me about a time when you got negative or positive feedback.’ or ‘What did you learn from that feedback that you could use in your next job?’”
Selling the Job
Another interesting finding of the DDI report was the impact of having a good understanding of what was required in the job. Many hiring managers over-sell the job by saying such things as: “You have all these wonderful benefits.” or “I’m sure you’ll be promoted within the first year.” They don’t talk about the negatives and subsequently the new-hire feels there has been a bait and switch, undermining his confidence he’s in the right job and his intent to stay.
Therefore, companies need to assess how they’re selling the job. They need to give a balanced, realistic idea about a specific job. Another technique used by good companies is to have a candidate actually experience the job for a brief period. For example, a call center job candidate would sit next to a call center operator to hear what an angry customer sounds like and how the operator handles that call. Another would be to join a driver on his 5:00 AM route to see what really happens on an icy or rainy day with at least eight to ten hours of deliveries scheduled.
Erker says, “It used to be the way you got hired was to fill out an application and have an interview. We have looked at best-in-class lower turnover rates, as well as high engagement rates for new employees, and the tipping point is the magic number three; using three or more selection tools before hiring an employee. With three tools, an employer has gathered information from multiple perspectives. Not only are multiple methods being used, but employers are looking at a person’s capabilities in different ways. A good interview and pre-employment assessments measure the applicant’s experience, knowledge, competencies, personality, and motivation. If you gather those things, you make a better hire or promotion decision.”
The Role of the Internet
As already mentioned, the Internet is a new frontier in hiring, with pros and cons. The pros include a connectedness that has revolutionized the way we search for potential new hires. Sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook can provide excellent employee referrals. LinkedIn can be a great tool for finding loose connections and driving referrals. On the negative side is the pervasiveness of reviewing online information to evaluate candidates, rather than using proven methodologies such as cognitive ability tests, simulations, and motivational-fit inventories. “Neglecting such proven reliable tests indicates that an organization needs to reevaluate its selection tools and process,” Erker says.
The report also shows that more staffing directors are reviewing candidate information online, which is likely to be unstructured, unmonitored, and include information irrelevant to the job. “You won’t know if the person you’ve found on Google is the same one who has applied for the job, as many people have the same name. It is also difficult to evaluate information gathered in such an unstructured way.”
Such searches tempt the hiring professional to use her personal bias. She might see a website with the potential hire dancing at a club. She might then think, ‘I don’t like that he is dancing around at a party.’ But that judgment may have nothing to do with the job. Regulations say an HR person has to document why she made a certain decision. However, a hiring agent isn’t likely to document that she found a candidate partying on Facebook and she doesn’t like that behavior.
The magic is in the mix of tools you use to gather information about potential job candidates and how you use the data gathered from those various tools to make the hiring decision.

US HOT STOCKS: Hot Topic, PetSmart, Smithfield Foods, Ciena

2013-04-14T07:38:00.000-07:00

U.S. stocks were trading slightly higher Thursday, as the Dow Jones Industrial Average recently added 46 points to 14342, the Standard & Poor's added three points to 1545, and the Nasdaq Composite climbed five points to 3227. Among the companies with shares actively trading are Hot Topic Inc. (HOTT), PetSmart Inc. (PETM) and Smithfield Foods Inc. (SFD).
Hot Topic ($13.86, +$3.11, +28.93%) has agreed to be taken private by New York-based private equity firm Sycamore Partners for about $600 million in cash, a deal the teen retailer said will give it resources for growth. Sycamore--which focuses on consumer and retail investments and has more than $1 billion in capital under management--will pay Hot Topic's shareholders a per-share price of $14, representing a roughly 30% premium to Wednesday's closing price.
PetSmart's ($62.23, -$4.32, -6.49%) fiscal fourth-quarter profit jumped 31% as the specialty pet store's same-store sales and margins continued to grow. However, the company predicted downbeat results for 2013.
Smithfield Foods' ($24.28, +$1.98, +8.88%) fiscal third-quarter earnings rose 3.2% as improved sales of packaged meats helped to mitigate the pork producer's declining fresh pork sales. The company can most thank the tax man for its sizable fiscal third-quarter earnings per-share beat, as income-tax expenses tumbled 68%.
Ciena Corp (CIEN, $16.98, +$2.04, +13.65%) slightly narrowed its fiscal first-quarter loss as the networking-equipment company recorded stronger revenue and margins. Stripping out one-time items, the company swung to a surprise per-share profit. Other networking equipment makers rose on Ciena's results, including JDS Uniphase Corp. (JDSU, $15.19, +$1.04, +7.35%), Finisar Corp. (FNSR, $15.65, +$0.64, +4.26%), Infinera Corp. (INFN, $7.01, +$0.32, +4.78%) and Juniper Networks Inc. (JNPR, $20.85, +$0.73, +3.63%).

 
    Other Stocks To Watch:

Acura Pharmaceuticals Inc. (ACUR, $2.50, -$0.17, -6.36%) filed plans to offer up to $75 million in common stock, debt securities and warrants. The specialty pharmaceutical company plans to use proceeds for general corporate purposes. It has a market capitalization of $141 million, according to FactSet.
DryShips Inc.'s (DRYS, $1.82, -$0.16, -7.95%) fourth-quarter loss widened as the dry bulk shipper recorded losses on the sale of tankers and other charges, and revenue continued to fall.
Fred's Inc. (FRED, $12.98, -$0.57, -4.21%) cut its fiscal fourth-quarter guidance again, this time citing more promotional markdowns and higher-than-anticipated insurance and other operating costs. The regional discount retailer had previously lowered its outlook in January, saying customers were limiting their purchases of discretionary and weather-related merchandise.
Horizon Pharma Inc. (HZNP, $2.18, +$0.13, +6.41%) said the U.K. Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency has granted marketing authorization for the company's osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis treatment, Duexis.
InvenSense Inc. (INVN, $11.73, +$0.50, +4.45%) said it won a motion to stay the patent litigation brought by STMicroelectronics NV (STM, $7.96, -$0.06, -0.75%) while separate proceedings with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office challenged the validity of all of STM's asserted patents.
James River Coal Co.'s (JRCC, $2.29, -$0.26, -10.20%) fourth-quarter loss widened as the coal producer was hurt by a goodwill write-down and lower coal prices and shipments. Results missed expectations and the company failed to issue coal-production or cost guidance for 2013, with chief executive Peter T. Socha saying that "there are just too many moving pieces."
John Wiley & Sons Inc.'s (JWA, $39.02, +$2.45, +6.70%)(JWB) fiscal third-quarter profit fell 9.2% after the publishing company posted a large tax benefit in the prior year, though revenue improved. Earnings and revenue beat analyst expectations.
Kayne Anderson MLP Investment Co. (KYN, $33.18, -$1.93, -5.51%) said its stock offering priced at $33.35 a share, a 5% discount to Wednesday's close. The company also raised the size of the offering to 4.5 million shares, from 4 million. It had about 88.4 million shares outstanding, as of Nov. 30.
Layne Christensen Co. (LAYN, $20.93, -$0.97, -4.43%) expects to report a surprise fiscal fourth-quarter loss as the drilling-services provider said it will book steep losses in its heavy civil segment.

Secret panel can put Americans on "kill list`

2011-10-13T15:01:00.000-07:00

Washington: American militants like Anwar al-Awlaki are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions, according to officials.

There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House's National Security Council, several current and former officials said. Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.

The panel was behind the decision to add Awlaki, a U.S.-born militant preacher with alleged al Qaeda connections, to the target list. He was killed by a CIA drone strike in Yemen late last month.

The role of the president in ordering or ratifying a decision to target a citizen is fuzzy. White House spokesman Tommy Vietor declined to discuss anything about the process.

Current and former officials said that to the best of their knowledge, Awlaki, who the White House said was a key figure in al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, al Qaeda's Yemen-based affiliate, had been the only American put on a government list targeting people for capture or death due to their alleged involvement with militants.

The White House is portraying the killing of Awlaki as a demonstration of President Barack Obama's toughness toward militants who threaten the United States. But the process that led to Awlaki's killing has drawn fierce criticism from both the political left and right.

In an ironic turn, Obama, who ran for president denouncing predecessor George W. Bush's expansive use of executive power in his "war on terrorism," is being attacked in some quarters for using similar tactics. They include secret legal justifications and undisclosed intelligence assessments.

Liberals criticized the drone attack on an American citizen as extra-judicial murder.

Conservatives criticized Obama for refusing to release a Justice Department legal opinion that reportedly justified killing Awlaki. They accuse Obama of hypocrisy, noting his administration insisted on publishing Bush-era administration legal memos justifying the use of interrogation techniques many equate with torture, but refused to make public its rationale for killing a citizen without due process.

PTI

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