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Show BUSINESS EDITOR: NANCY BLISS M4-25- THE DAILY HERALD 3 TV B5 SATURDAY, JANUARY 2. Want ads increase 4 points I something to talk about i SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) The cool !new high tech gadget everyone's talking about these days is something ! we've been watching in our living for almost 60 years. But in ;rooms Utah sees decline during November say consumer electronics aficionados, television gets a whole new 11999, look. This new digital television is not said television," your grandfather's Jeff Joseph, vice president of the Consumer Electronics Manufacturers Association in Arlington, Va. "It's YORK (AP) advertising in U.S. newspapers major climbed in November, indicating demand for jobs remains strong, according a to released study Thursday. The Conference Board, a NEW r l amazing. It has an enormous Wow!' factor. Anytime consumers see it, - u V their eyes pop out." tit, a i II i Imi uvn llll fII nearly three dimensional. I III II O) Car makers celebrate sales P DETROIT (AP) Detroit's annual complete with runways, models and an endless array of fashion show curvaceous sheet metal arrives just as the U.S. auto industry celebrates the end of its fifth straight year of strong sales and healthy profits. Industry analysts expect final sales figures to show U.S. light vehicle sales hit a high of more than 15.4 million in 1998. They'll know for sure when figures are released next week during the North American International Auto Show's media pre- or i private business research group, said its monthly I advertising index rose to 91 last month, up four points from 87 in October. The index was 93 in November '; 1997. "The great American job machine is not broken," said Conference Board economist Ken Goldstein. "It isn't even slowing." The nation's unemployment rate in November fell low of 4.4 to a percent, down 0.2 percentage point from 4.6 percent in both the previous month and November 1997. Eight of the nation's nine regions saw an increase in h 10-ye- help-wante- The industry's health is reflected in KEVIN SULLIVAN The Associated Going fast: Press sign advertising oranges picked before the freeze sits in front of Bill Karle's house in Fresno County, Calif., Wednesday. A four-da- y freeze has slowed the picking and packing of oranges to a trickle, causing thousands of workers to be laid off across the Central Valley. California produces 80 percent of the nation's fresh eating oranges. attracting the nearly 6,000 automotive journalists and photographers expected to show up starting Sunday for the four-dapreview. A fruit-killin- g y Orange workers frozen out Computers face 2000 test NEW YORK (AP) With only a year to go until 2000, organizations ning what industry insiders call IW independent verification and validation. And that's after companies and organizations have already spent a fortune to inoculate their computers. But since the alternative is likely worse, a whole "fix and test" industry has sprouted up, manned by an army of programmers who independently check the original programmers' debugging and run computer simulations pretending it's Jan. 1, 2000. Businesses win bowl game As Tennessee PHOENIX (AP) and Florida State fans are poured into Tempe for the national college football championship game, business owners saw money rushing into the local economy. Organizers are hoping the Fiesta Bowl will pump up to $120 million into the economy. An Arizona State University College of Business report on the 1996 Fiesta Bowl said it raised $96.8 million. The researcher behind the report estimates that the amount raised by the championship game this year will be $20 million higher. DuPont agrees to settle i DuPont Co. has ATLANTA (AP) million apiece to agreed to pay $2.5 each of the state's four law schools in an unusual deal to settle charges it withheld evidence during a civil case in 1993. The case involved allegations that the Wilmington, Del. chemical giant withheld soil samples during a lawsuit brought by a group of nurseries, but a federal judge decided DuPont's penalty should make a statement about the importance of legal ethics. which includes The $11 million annual an fund sympoto million $). is so each law school can set sium up a professorial chair devoted to professional ethics. The schools are the University of Georgia, Emory University, Georgia State University 5 and Mercer University. i By The Associated Press ORANGE COVE, Calif. It took Jose Rosas -- years of picking oranges to bring his family to the United States. Together, they worked their way from a miserable apartment where they slept on the floor to a big stucco ranch house with cathedral ceilings and a back yard. freeze But now a four-dathat struck shortly before in here Christmas California's Central Valley has ruined much of the citrus crop and closed down most packing houses. Jose and Alicia Rosas have been laid off along with thousands of other workers. "I don't want to lose our home. I don't want to move out," said Mrs. Rosas, who is studying English at home in hopes of becoming an U.S. citizen. This place is a palace compared to the way we used to live." The economic disaster, now estimated at $591 million statewide, is particularly severe in towns along the Sierra foothills such as Orange Cove, a virtual labor camp for the citrus industry. Private groups and public agencies are marshaling resources, hoping to avoid the trauma of the freeze of 1990, 10 y mid--Atlant- Pennsylvania. The seasonally adjusted advertising index, which stood at 100 in the base year 1987, is derived from measuring the volume of employment ads in 51 major newspapers across the country each month. It is used as a gauge of changes in local, regional and national job No work: Francisco Tabizon, right, provides information to eligibilty worker Juan Ceballos for his application for temporary relief benefits at the Orange Cove, Calif., Community Center, Wednesday. Thousands have been be laid off across the Central Valley. when it took three months for the government to take notice and 12.000 people lost their jobs. Most people haven't fully recovered, city officials say. In 1990, many citrus workers were migrants, and could find work elsewhere. Now, only a quarter of the pickers are. Most of the rest have apartment leases, mortgages, roots. The crigreen cards sis threatens more than just monthly expenses. Officials in Orange Cove estimate that 90 percent of the population depends on California's directly orange industry, which produces 80 percent of the nation's fresh table oranges. With two long harvest seasons for oranges valencias in the summer, navels in the those who can find winter work can earn a relatively good living. Packers usually make minimum wage, while the going rate for pickers is about $12 a bin. A good week in the field can bring in $300 to $400. But unexpected weather ing into a makeshift social service center for emergency food stamps and other temporary relief. Some are turned away for lack of green cards. Others wait for hours, sometimes days, to fill out paperwork. supply. Markets close for holiday ' Major financial markets were closed worldwide on Friday in observance of New Year's Day. On Thursday, blue chip stocks slid into the close of the year, while Nasdaq stocks set another record. The Dow Jones industrial fell 93.21 to average 9,181.43 Thursday. But the average was still 16.1 percent higher for the year, it the fourth making straight year with a gain of 15 percent or more. The Nasdaq composite index rose 25.74 to a record 2,192.69, expanding 1998's gain to 39.6 percent. The dollar fell, gold rose, and bond prices slipped. Oil prices rose. Mergers, acquisitions reach $1.61 trillion, reshape industries ! - V like December's cold snap can be devastating, especially in the San Joaquin Valley, where 90 percent of navel oranges are grown and 65 packing houses employ up to 15,000 pickers and packers. "That's who gets killed in this whole thing, the pickers and the packers," said Nick Hill, whose family has been growing oranges for three generations. "We like to keep these people working. It's not a good thing all around." Orange Cove is a mostly Hispanic community of 8,000 nestled at the foot of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. There's no high school and no drug store, just acre after acre of orange trees, many in orchards owned by corporations or absentee landlords. Most residents do not speak English, and make little more than the average annual income of $4,300 reported in the 1990 Census. Nearly half the town is on welfare. The unemployment rate ranges up to 75 percent. Since the freeze, hundreds of workers have been stream- advertising Nebraska, and the states, including New York and Christmas freeze devastates California citrus crop that say their computers are ready to d sales in November. Only the mountain region, which includes Arizona, Colorado and Utah, saw a decline, and just by one point. The largest increases were in the west north central which includes region, Minnesota, Missouri and view. the millions of dollars automakers are spending on new displays aimed at -Hel- p-wanted ?"Lst Television viewers may think that their football game, soap opera or science show looks fine as it is. But when a show is broadcasted digitally onto a high definition television, the action appears disturbingly lifelike, face the Millennium Bug now face the task of checking the fixes. That means checking millions of lines of computer code, and then run- IW and acquisitions reshaped By The Associated Press NEW YORK Simple tasks like cashing a check, making a phone call or pumping gas are changing for almost everyone because of the sweeping industry mergers and acquisitions of 1998. It was the year of the colossal deal: Exxon-Mobi- Bell Atlantic-GTE- , Daimler-Chrysle- l, Travelers-Citicorr, to name a few. In all, a record $1.61 trillion in U.S. mergers i industries nationwide, a 78 percent increase over 1997, according to Securities Data Corp., a New Jersey-basefirm that tracks deals. The pace of ' combinations corporate shows little sign of slowing in early 1999 asfeompanies take advantage of the stable economy, low interest rates, and a new, single currency in Europe. Even as the year was ending Thursday, there was a d head-spinnin- g report that Bell Atlantic was negotiating the purchase of Airtouch for $45 billion, while still waiting to conclude its marriage with GTE. "People are just feverishly working away on new" deals, said Scott Adelson, managing director of mergers and acquisitions for Houlihan Lokey Howard & Zukin, an investment banking firm in Los Angeles. Some people, of course, have felt the downside of the merger waves. Thousands of people have lost their jobs this year as combined companies cut duplicate operations!. But a low unemployment rate and expansion elsewhere has softened the overall pain and enabled many of the furloughed workers to move to new positions. Many companies have had to merge in order to survive the turmoil in their own oil industries. prices, for instance, drove Rock-botto- Mobil Corp. into the arms of Exxon Corp., and were a factor leading Amoco Corp. to team up with British.-- . Petroleum Co. PLC. And ana- lysts say there may be more ;r such deals in 1999. Excess capacity in the automotive industry is behind ' ,i acquisitions like Diamler Benz AG and Chrysler Corp., and Hyundai Motors Co. and Kia Motors Co. as well as dozens of mergers among auto parts suppliers. v " |