Minnetonka-based Cargill said the decision affects 600 unionized employees and 90 management positions. At the same time that Cargill is closing the Toronto facility, it plans to increase operations at its Guelph, Ontario, meat-packing plant, a move that will create an additional 200 jobs.

“The decision to discontinue operations at the Toronto facility was very difficult; however, it was made knowing we had the ability to optimize our supply chain and provide real and enhanced value through leveraging our existing operations in Guelph,” said Jason Kuan, vice president and general manager of Cargill’s Case Ready Canada business.

Cargill said it plans to provide career-transition and family support for the laid-off Toronto workers.

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The complaint, filed in a California district court last Wednesday, alleges that Teachbook is "rid[ing] on the coattails of the fame and enormous goodwill of the Facebook trademark," said the document obtained by Wired.com.

Facebook, based in Palo Alto, throws a slew of accusations at Teachbook, including federal trademark dilution, trademark infringement and unfair competition.

Teachbook, based in Illinois, isn’t launching until fall 2010 and many of the site’s links are dead. Shrader said it is a "teacher’s community" where users can share lesson plans and seek advice from fellow educators.

"[Teachbook] has created its own competing online networking community in a blatant attempt to become Facebook ‘for teachers,’" the suit alleges.

"At the end of the day, they’re just trying to bully us and we’re not going to roll over," said Greg Shrader, a managing partner at Teachbook. "We have every intention of filing an opposition in a month or so."

Shrader said he applied to trademark Teachbook’s name in 2009, and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office said it found "no similar marks" on record. But before the government could make its final ruling, Shrader said, Facebook filed its opposition and sued Teachbook.

The court filing also claims Teachbook has marketed itself as an alternative to Facebook. It alleges a page on Teachbook’s site — which has since been removed — once read, "Many schools forbid their teachers to maintain Facebook and MySpace accounts … With Teachbook, you can manage your profile business card."

Facebook recently hit the 500 million member mark. By contrast, Teachbook’s site said 47 members were online Thursday morning.

A rep for Facebook said the company doesn’t claim to own rights to the word "book," as it has no complaint with titles like Kelley Blue Book.

"However, there is already a well-known online service with ‘book’ in the brand name that helps people connect and share," the Facebook rep said in an email.

Shrader said Facebook’s filing "strikes me as greedy. We’re a two-person company — I don’t know how a multibillion-dollar site sees us as a threat."

This isn’t the first time Facebook has gone after small sites over the -book suffix. The travel site TripTrace — once called PlaceBook — detailed in a post how the social networking behemoth forced it to change its name.

"We didn’t believe anyone could own the word ‘book’ apart from ‘face,’" reads a post on TripTrace’s company blog. "We knew of a number of websites that had similar names that were clearly not copying Facebook: Cookbook, Blackbook, eBook, RunBook … Racebook, Casebook, Tastebook."

But the site acquiesced to Facebook because, "as a start-up we were in no position to fight." Still, TripTrace seems to have the last laugh.

"We still think of ourselves as PlaceBook," the post reads. "Or, if you chose to pronounce it differently so it doesn’t rhyme: PlacéBoök." 

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The donation is valued at $1.1 million, the companies said, and will be installed at the nonprofit’s headquarters on Curtner Avenue in San Jose.

San Jose-based Cypress and SunPower said the system is expected to save the food bank nearly $3 million over 25 years. That equals about 6 million meals for the local community, the companies said.

“We are distributing more than 20 percent more food than last year at this time,” said Second Harvest Food Bank CEO Kathy Jackson, whose organization serves an average of 231,000 individuals each month in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties. “The rooftop solar system so generously donated by Cypress and SunPower will help us to continue meeting the needs of our community, even if this trend should continue easy to get unsecured personal loans.”

T.J. Rodgers, president and CEO of Cypress, said Second Harvest Food Bank "is one of the most efficient non-profit organizations in the country, giving 95 cents out of every dollar it receives back to the community. Cypress is pleased to help reduce the organization’s operating expenses so that it can focus on what it does best — feeding the community.”

Money earmarked for this project includes more than $700,000 that was raised by Cypress and its employees through fundraisers and corporate giving initiatives during the holiday food drive this past Fall. Since 1989, Cypress has donated nearly $5 million in cash and more than one half-million pounds of food to Second Harvest Food Bank, driving 19 consecutive victories for Cypress in the Food Bank’s Corporate Food Bowl Challenge.

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In a tentative ruling Thursday, Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Michael Kenny said he intends to deny the cities’ request.

Oral arguments in the case are scheduled for Friday - at which time the judge likely will issue a final ruling.

The California High-Speed Rail Authority, charged with planning a 800-mile system that can zip riders between the Bay Area and Los Angeles in less than three hours, said it was cheered by the ruling.

“We’re happy that the court has tentatively ruled that the petition fails to meet the standard for reopening a final judgment,” authority chief executive Roelof van Ark said in a statement. “The authority has been committed to transparency in carrying out its environmental analysis and we will continue to work with and gather feedback from residents of the Peninsula and other interested groups.”

A lawyer for the cities, Stuart Flashman, was not immediately available for comment guaranteed payday loans.

The cities, along with transportation and environmental groups, sought to have Kenny reconsider his 2009 ruling on a previous lawsuit. The plaintiffs suggest that the bullet-train route run south from San Francisco along the Peninsula to Redwood City before turning east over the Dumbarton Bridge to the East Bay.

That route, which would add seven miles to the overall route, would still be attractive to riders and come with fewer environmental impacts, the plaintiffs said.

In arguing the 2009 ruling should be reconsidered, the cities said bullet train planners’ ridership projections are “obviously and fatally flawed” and planners should be ordered to consider new studies of an East Bay route before it finalizes environmental studies along the Peninsula.

Flashman, in a previous interview, said it is rare for the courts to void previous decisions. But Flashman said the bullet train ridership modeling data is so crucial to the authority’s environmental reports that it could persuade the judge.

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Networking companies bore the brunt of the drag-down, including Juniper Systems (JNPR), which fell 7%. Shares of Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) dropped 2%, and F5 Networks (FFIV) and Riverbed Technologies (RVBD) fell 6%.

Cisco supplier Netlogic (NETL) fell 8%, with share volume almost five times higher than average, according to Nasdaq.

Hewlett-Packard (HPQ, Fortune 500), which recently scooped up Cisco’s networking competitor 3Com, fell just over 1%.

When it reported fourth-quarter earnings late Wednesday, Cisco (CSCO, Fortune 500) said its profit rose 79%, beating analysts’ forecasts. Sales rose by 27%, falling just $40 million short of expectations.

What worried Wall Street analysts was Cisco’s outlook for the current quarter: The company said it expects revenue to rise between 18% and 20% in the current quarter from last year’s results, slightly lower than the increase of 21% analysts had forecast.

Even though the company is reporting healthy results, the lower-than-expected guidance renewed fears of a slowdown in the global economy.

Other tech stocks fell as well. The Nasdaq Composite Index (COMP), which some use as a gauge for the tech sector as a whole, fell 0.7% Thursday, about double the drop in the Dow Jones industrial average (INDU) and the broader S&P 500 index (SPX).

Several tech stocks actually rose on Thursday. After getting creamed by investors over the past two days on downgrades, chipmakers Intel (INTC, Fortune 500) and AMD (AMD, Fortune 500) both rose about 1%. Verizon (VZ, Fortune 500) jumped 2%, and AT&T (T, Fortune 500) rose about 1%.

Shares of RIM (RIMM) fell 2% on Thursday after India issued an ultimatum to BlackBerry maker Research In Motion. The Indian government said RIM has until August 31 to give the government access to information relayed on two popular messaging services. After that, India said it would take steps to block the encrypted messaging systems that the government says pose threats to the country’s national security.

– CNN Wires contributed to this story 

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According to the latest numbers from the Department of Transportation, Comair’s on-time arrival rate fell to 65 percent in June from 67.1 percent in May. In both months, that was the worst on-time arrival of 18 airlines.

Comair also had the highest rate of canceled flights, according to the DOT, with 4 percent of flights canceled during the month. It was followed by American Eagle Airlines at 3.8 percent of flights canceled and Pinnacle Airlines, at 2.5 percent.

Comair is headquartered at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport.

Comair’s parent Delta Air Lines Inc Payday advance. (NYSE: DAL) didn’t fare much better during June. Atlanta-based Delta ranked No. 15 on the list of 18, with an on-time arrival rate of 70.2 percent.

Hawaiian Airlines (Nasdaq: HA) had the best on-time arrival rate, at 93.6 percent. It was followed by Alaska Air Group (NYSE: ALK) at 88.9 percent and US Airways (NYSE: LCC) at 83.4 percent.

The Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport saw its overall on-time rate decline to 73.4 percent in June from 83.9 percent in May, according to the DOT.

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Politi joined the Greater Boerne Chamber as the vice president of membership development and was named interim acting president in June. She replaces Paula White, who left in April to take a position with GVTC Communications.

Politi had 14 years of experience with the Sedalia Area Chamber of Commerce in Missouri before coming to Boerne.

“Terri has the credentials she needs to partner with the City, the County and the local community and to lead this chamber and our members toward becoming models of prosperity for 21st Century America,” says Susan Allen, chairwoman of the Chamber’s board of Directors.

Boerne is located about 15 miles northwest of San Antonio off of Interstate 10 West.

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Furthermore, little progress has been made over the years to close the income gap. At a per-capita income of $18,054 in 2008, African-American earnings were just 57.9% that of whites’ $28,502. That was a slight improvement over 2007 when black income was just 56.4%, but down from 2005, when it was 59.3%.

Those figures are averages and they can be skewed by the very high income of relatively few individuals. But even examining median incomes, the point in a population where half the people earn more and half less, which should shrink the difference because it gives no extra weight to inflated earners, the racial gap still exists.

According to the latest figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, whites earned a median of $756 weekly during the three months ended June 30, 25% more than blacks, who earned $607.

"There are, of course, individual cases where people can overcome the pay disparity, but unfortunately, we’re still seeing the trend," said Monique Morris, Vice President for Research and Advocacy for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

African-Americans are over-represented in the lowest earnings categories and under-represented in the highest earning ones.

More than half of all blacks, 15 years old or over and working full-time, earned under $35,000 in 2008. Only 35% of white workers earned less than that.

On the other hand, 10.8% of all white workers made more than $100,000 a year, the highest income category in the Census report. That compared with just 3.3% of blacks earning six-figure salaries.

Reasons for the gap

According to Morris, much of the shortfall may be traced to educational achievement. The Census report revealed that only 19.7% of African-Americans had bachelor’s or advanced degrees. That compared with 32.6% for whites. And 17% of blacks had not graduated from high school, exactly twice the rate of whites.

Family wealth, low for blacks, also restricts opportunities; it limits access to good schools growing up and private colleges in young adulthood.

Wealthier families also tend to have wider social networks of successful friends and relatives, often a key to opening a door to a higher-paying career.

Morris said discrimination also plays a role, with the NAACP still documenting cases in which blacks with equal or better qualifications are offered less money to do the same jobs as white colleagues.

And once anyone, white or black, settles for less pay than they deserve, their earnings power can be affected for years. Working a low-paying job usually means climbing the earnings ladder step by step, with income lagging behind other members of an age group every step of the way.

"Part of what you get paid for is your work history," said Morris. The wages for each new job builds on the previous ones.

Ending hiring discrimination and giving job applicants the information they should have concerning pay scales would go a long way toward narrowing the disparity between white and black income, according to Morris.

"When you start out with a level playing field and are transparent about pay during the rest of the hiring process, the outcomes are more favorable for everyone," she said. 

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The Dow Jones Industrial Average finished the trading day at 10,465.94, down 1.22 (0.01 percent).

The S&P 500 closed at 1,101.6, up 0.07 points (0.01 percent).

The NASDAQ Composite finished at 2,254.7, up 3.01 points (0.13 percent).

Among actively traded Colorado stocks, Advanced Energy Industries Inc. (AEIS) led the day’s gainers percentagewise, up 8.04 percent ($1.31) to close at $17.61.

Other Colorado gainers:

• Evergreen Energy Inc. (EEE) — Up 6.68 percent (1 cent) to 17 cents.

• QEP Resources Inc. (QEP) — Up 5.91 percent ($1.92) to $34.42.

• Crocs Inc. (CROX) — Up 2.64 percent (33 cents) to $12.83.

• Ball Corp. (BLL) — Up 2.09 percent ($1.19) to $58.24.

Among actively traded Colorado stocks that declined on the day was Dynamic Materials Corp. (BOOM), down 10.92 percent ($1.80) to close at $14.68. The Boulder company’s stock was downgraded Friday by DA Davidson from “buy” to “neutral.”

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The San Francisco-based financial giant (NYSE:WFC) has 62 offices and more than 2,000 employees in the Silicon Valley county. Now, it wants to add 40 bankers and 10 tellers.

“We’re seeking candidates who have a passion for exceeding customer expectations and interested in building a career at Wells Fargo,” Ken Jones, the bank’s Santa Clara Valley regional president, said in a statement.

Wells Fargo, which has more than 19,000 employees in the nine Bay Area counties, laid off 201 administrative employees in Santa Clara and Palo Alto in spring 2008 Internet Payday loans. The layoffs were part of Wells Fargo’s closure of two former back offices of the Greater Bay Bancorp holding company, which Wells acquired in October 2007.

Wells, which now has 278,000 total employees, has $1.2 trillion in assets.

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