SodaStream to move its West Bank factory in 2015

JERUSALEM — Israeli drink maker SodaStream International Ltd. will relocate a factory next year that activists criticized for being in an Israeli settlement in the West Bank, a representative said Wednesday.

Nirit Hurwitz said that the decision to move the facility to Lehavim in Israel's southern Negev region is for "purely commercial" reasons and is not connected to pressure from Palestinian activists who had boycotted the company because of its location.

Activists launched a campaign boycotting the company because of the factory being in an Israeli settlement in the West Bank, a territory captured by Israel in 1967 that's claimed by the Palestinians.

Hurwitz said the new location received a $20 million grant from the Israeli government. The new location "will become our flagship manufacturing site and is expected to deliver operational excellence and result in savings of 2 percent across our entire cost base." she said.

The Palestinian boycott campaign welcomed the announced move, saying its boycott caused retailers to drop SodaStream.

SodaStream says it employs hundreds of Palestinians and gives them equal benefits as Israeli workers. Most of them are from nearby West Bank towns. For Palestinian workers from Ramallah, the new facility will be 107 kilometers (66 miles) away. For those from Hebron, it will be 48 kilometers (29 miles) away.

"We are offering all employees the opportunity to join us in Lehavim, and specifically, we are working with the Israeli government to secure work permits for our Palestinian employees," SodaStream CEO Daniel Birnbaum said.

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Rescuers press to save 18 trapped Turkish miners

ISTANBUL — Rescue workers desperately pumped water out of a coal mine in southern Turkey on Wednesday as anxious relatives huddled nearby after surging waters trapped 18 Turkish miners deep underground.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan cancelled a national holiday reception and was to visit the town of Ermenek in Karaman province where the mine is located close to Turkey's Mediterranean coast, Turkish news agencies reported.

Turkish officials say the workers' chances of survival are slim unless they managed to reach a safety gallery at the Has Sekerler mine. The regional governor said about 20 other workers either escaped or were rescued Tuesday as the disaster unfolded.

Emergency workers worked all through the night using huge pipes to pump water from 350 meters (380 yards) underground. Turkey's emergency agency, AFAD, said a broken pipe in the mine caused the flooding but did not elaborate. It sent 225 emergency workers from neighboring regions and mines to help the rescue effort.

The flooding has renewed questions about Turkey's poor workplace safety record.

In May, a fire inside a coal mine in the western town of Soma killed 301 miners in Turkey's worst mining disaster. The fire exposed poor safety standards and superficial government inspections in many of the country's mines.

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Chrysler recalls over 566,000 trucks, SUVs

DETROIT — Fiat Chrysler is recalling more than 566,000 trucks and SUVs in two recalls for malfunctioning fuel heaters that can cause fires and a software glitch can disable the electronic stability control.

The recalls bring the newly merged company's total for the year to 6.4 million vehicles worldwide and 5.1 million in the U.S. as it continues to struggle with reliability problems. It was not immediately clear whether those totals were annual records.

On Tuesday, its longtime quality chief abruptly left after Fiat Chrysler performed poorly in Consumer Reports magazine's annual reliability rankings.

The largest of two recalls announced Wednesday covers almost 382,000 Ram 2500 and 3500 pickups and Ram 4500 and 5500 chassis cabs from 2010 through 2014.

In trucks with 6.7-Liter Cummins diesel engines, corrosion on a fuel heater terminal could cause overheating, fuel leaks and fires. Chrysler is not aware of any fires or injuries. Owners could be warned by an odor of diesel fuel.

Customers will be notified by letters starting in December. Dealers will install upgraded terminals and fuel heater housings could be replaced.

The second recall covers more than 184,000 Jeep Grand Cherokee and Dodge Durango SUVs from 2014. A debris cover over a circuit board in the steering column control module can disrupt communications and disable the stability control. The problem was discovered when dealers started getting reports from customers that electronic stability control warning lights were coming on.

Fiat Chrysler says it knows of no crashes or injuries caused by the problem. Technicians will upgrade software to fix the SUVs, and customers will be notified in December.

Fiat Chrysler has issued 33 global recalls and 27 in the U.S. so far this year. Doug Betts, its longtime quality chief, left the company to pursue other options after Consumer Reports' survey-based rankings this year showed four Fiat Chrysler brands at the bottom of its list. Dodge, Ram, Jeep and Fiat performed worst of 28 brands ranked by the magazine.

Company spokesman Eric Mayne said Fiat Chrysler's recalls average fewer than 200,000 vehicles each, below the industry average of 301,000. That means the company is responding quickly to problems, he said, adding that eight of its 27 U.S. recalls were announced before the company received any consumer complaints.

Chrysler is not alone with a high number of recalls so far this year. Stericycle, a company that tracks recalls, says companies have called back more than 52 million vehicles so far this year, breaking a record set in 2004.

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Correction: Apple Pay-Retail Skirmish story

NEW YORK — In a story Oct. 29 about Apple Inc.'s new payment system, The Associated Press misattributed a quotation from an Apple Pay user in Indianapolis. The speaker was Thomas Pritchard, not Ben Heyman.

A corrected version of the story is below:

Retail skirmish blocks Apple Pay at checkout line

Mobile payment fight heats up as some retailers nix enabling terminals to work with Apple Pay

By MAE ANDERSON

AP Technology Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — Plan on paying in stores with your shiny new iPhone 6? Not so fast.

Retailer resistance to Apple Pay had been expected because Apple hasn't offered incentives to install pricey point-of-sale terminals and train staff on its new mobile payment system. But the decision to not accept Apple Pay by retailers that already have contactless terminals in the checkout line is a "skirmish" rooted in competition.

Big merchants like McDonald's, Macy's and Foot Locker are all accepting Apple Pay. But a consortium of retailers called Merchant Customer Exchange plans to offer a rival mobile payment system next year which could direct debit customers' checking accounts, instead of using a credit card. It also will be designed to track customer buying patterns to be able to offer targeted promotions. In the meantime, some of the group's biggest members, like CVS, 7-Eleven, Best Buy and Wal-Mart, are nixing so-called NFC payments even though they already have the point-of-sale technology in stores. Other retailers that aren't part of MCX, like Starbucks and Taco Bell, are opting to develop their own mobile payment services, and so aren't taking Apple Pay either. Queries into Merchant Customer Exchange were not returned.

"Retailers (that are part of Merchant Customer Exchange) are certainly going to give it a go on their own, they spent the last few years and money developing this," said eMarketer analyst Bryan Yeager. "Ultimately if there's enough consumer demand for it in the long run, maybe they will accept Apple Pay, but they're very much intent on trying to make a go at their own mobile wallet."

Although nascent, the appetite for mobile payment is growing. Mobile commerce is expected to total $305.7 billion in 2014, up 15.7 percent from the prior year, according to eMarketer.

Apple Pay launched Oct. 20. On Monday, Apple CEO Tim Cook said the new mobile payment system had over 1 million activations in the first three days after it became available, and is now more widely used than any competing payment system. He called the dispute with retailers a "skirmish."

"We've got a lot of merchants to sign up, a lot more banks to sign up and we have the whole rest of the world," he said at the WSJD Live Conference in Laguna Beach, California. "So we're just getting started."

Thomas Pritchard, 20, lives in Indianapolis and has used Apple Pay twice at McDonald's with no problem, once he figured out how close to hold his phone to the reader. He's originally from England, where contactless payment is more common, so he'd like to see it in wider use here.

"If it was in every shop I would use it everywhere," he said.

By next October, retailers will be required to have point-of-sale terminals that work with the new EMV chip-and-pin security standard for credit cards. Those terminals usually also have the "near-field communication" capability to work with Apple Pay, Google Wallet and Softcard systems, but they aren't automatically enabled to work with NFC. Is it really in retailers' interest to block customers from using mobile wallet services other than their own?

"Blocking mobile payments providers will deprive consumers of their preferred method of payment," said Jason Oxman, CEO of the Electronic Transactions Association, a trade organization for the payment-processing industry. "With more than 300 million mobile devices and more than one billion credit and debit cards in American consumers' pockets, the future ubiquity of mobile payments is certain."

Mallory Duncan, general counsel of retail lobbying group The National Retail Federation, defends retailers' choice.

"It is easy to second guess why a specific retailer chooses one technology or another, or what payments they will or will not accept, but you can be sure that the bottom line consideration is what is best for their company and their consumer," he said.

Travis Wacker, 25, from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, has used Apple Pay at Whole Foods, where he is a customer service supervisor.

"I'd prefer to be able to use it at all retailers, but it's not like make or break for me," he said. "I'm still going to shop at stores that don't let me use Apple Pay. I don't have an issue with swiping a card."

___

Online:

Apple Pay Partners: http://www.apple.com/apple-pay/?cid=wwa-us-kwg-features-com

Merchant Customer Exchange merchants: http://www.mcx.com/

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Russians deliver space station cargo after US flop

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Just hours after an American cargo run to the International Space Station ended in flames, a Russian supply ship has arrived at the station with a load of fresh supplies.

The Russian supply ship launched early Wednesday from Kazakhstan and arrived at the orbiting lab six hours later with 3 tons of food, fuel and other items. The smooth flight was in stark contrast to Tuesday evening's explosion of a commercially provided cargo ship.

Orbital Sciences Corp.'s unmanned Antares rocket had just lifted off from Wallops Island, Virginia, when it exploded. The rocket was carrying a Cygnus capsule loaded with 2½ tons of station experiments and equipment for NASA. Ground teams were finally getting access Wednesday morning to the damaged pad and fire-stricken area. No one was injured.

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Orbital Sciences' stock plummets after explosion

NEW YORK — Shares of Orbital Sciences tumbled in Wednesday morning trading after the aerospace company's unmanned rocket bound for the International Space Station exploded moments after liftoff on Tuesday evening.

No injuries were reported.

The Orbital Sciences' Antares commercial supply rocket blew up over the beachside launch complex at Wallops Island in Virginia. The company said everyone at the site had been accounted for, and the damage appeared to be limited to the facilities.

NASA is paying billions of dollars to Orbital Sciences and the SpaceX company to make deliveries to the Space Station, and it's counting on SpaceX and Boeing to start flying U.S. astronauts to the orbiting lab as early as 2017. This was to be the fourth flight by Orbital Sciences to the Space Station.

Until Tuesday, all of the supply missions by Orbital Sciences, based in Dulles, Virginia, and Elon Musk's SpaceX, had gone off with no major problems.

Orbital Sciences carried insurance on the failed Tuesday mission, and Executive Vice President Frank Culbertson said that it would not fly until it understands the root cause of the incident.

Howard Rubel of Jefferies said in a client note that the rocket's failure "may hamper, but not prevent, Orbital from signing contracts with additional customers for Antares."

For some context, Rubel said that the last time Orbital had a major rocket failure was in 2011 during a Taurus XL launch. The day of that failure, Rubel said, Orbital's stock fell as much as 8 percent but wound up making back some ground, closing down about 1.6 percent.

In the 2011 failure, a climate satellite fell into the Pacific shortly after lifting off.

Shares of Orbital Sciences Corp. dropped $4.35, or 14.3 percent, to $26.02 in early trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday.

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Fiat Chrysler to spin off luxury brand Ferrari

MILAN — Fiat Chrysler Automobiles plans to spin off sports car maker Ferrari into a separate company, a way to unlock value in the luxury brand and distinguish it from its mass-market parent.

The company said Wednesday that spinning off Ferrari was part of a plan to raise capital to support the new merged carmakers' expansion plans. Fiat Chrysler's five-year plan calls for increasing net income by five times by 2018.

Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne said in a statement that it was "proper that we pursue separate paths for FCA and Ferrari" following the completion of the merger of Chrysler and Fiat with a listing on the New York Stock Exchange earlier this month.

Fiat Chrysler will sell 10 percent of Ferrari's shares in a public offering, with the remaining 90 percent distributed to its own shareholders. The board intends to complete the move during 2015, and said shares would be listed in the United States and with a possible double listing in Europe.

A Ferrari spinoff had long been speculated by industry experts as Marchionne seeks to maximize values from the group's various brands. However, Fiat Chrysler's other luxury brands, including Alfa Romeo and Maserati, will remain part of the parent company.

The decision to break off Ferrari comes about two months after an awkward management transition at Ferrari that saw the longtime chairman Luca di Montezemolo resign after a public spat over strategy with Marchionne, who has taken over as chairman of Ferrari.

Marchionne has been vocal in his displeasure over Ferrari's long absence from the Formula One car racing winner's circle, and has pledged to get the team back to the top. The last time it won the driver's championship was in 2007.

Also Wednesday, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles N.V. announced it returned to a profit in the third quarter thanks to a good performance by its luxury brands and gains in North America and Asia.

It reported a net profit of 174 million euros ($221 million) for the three months ending Sept. 30. That compares with a loss of 15 million euros in the same period last year.

Revenues rose 14 percent to 23.5 billion euros. Luxury brand sales increased 35 percent, North America saw a 20 percent gain and Asia was up 30 percent. Latin American revenues dropped 12 percent in a weak market.

Deliveries rose 9.7 percent to 1.1 million vehicles.

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Ford recalls 205,000 SUVs for fuel tank leaks

DEARBORN, Mich. — Ford is recalling about 205,000 SUVs in cold-weather states and parts of Canada to fix gas tanks that can rust, leak and cause a fire.

The recall affects Ford Edge and Lincoln MKX vehicles from the 2007 and 2008 model years.

The company said Wednesday that it traced the problem to rust under some mounting brackets in areas where salt is used to clear snow from the roads.

Ford said that it knows of one fire due to the problem, but no crashes or injuries.

The SUVs are being recalled in Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Washington, D.C. Also covered are the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Prince Edward Island and Quebec.

Dealers will inspect the fuel tanks and repair or replace them at no cost to owners.

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Casino servers settle lawsuit over skimpy uniforms

ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. — Forty women employed at an Atlantic City casino have resolved their discrimination lawsuit over skimpy uniforms.

The lawsuit was filed in 2011 after Resorts Casino Hotel adopted a roaring '20s theme after the popularity of the HBO series "Boardwalk Empire," which was based on Prohibition-era Atlantic City's reputation as the vice capital of the East Coast.

The uniforms were short, skin-revealing black dresses with deep open backs. Waitresses also wore fishnet stockings and ornate Jazz Age hats.

Older servers claimed they were told they had to audition for their jobs in the new skimpy flapper costumes. They said they were given costumes too small for them and were photographed in awkward poses that emphasized body fat.

A panel put together by an outside modeling agency recommended who should stay and who should go based on photographs of the auditions, according to court documents.

The workers' lawyer, Kevin Costello, tells The Press of Atlantic City  the case is resolved, but he can't comment on the terms.

Resorts vice president and general counsel also confirmed the case was settled but wouldn't comment.

A Resorts statement in 2011 said the auditions were done "in a fair and objective manner."

"Boardwalk Empire" ended its run Sunday.

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Information from: The Press of Atlantic City (N.J.), http://www.pressofatlanticcity.com

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UPS predicts 11 percent hike in December packages

ATLANTA — UPS expects to deliver more than 34 million packages on the busiest day of the holiday season, double the amount on a normal day.

The company expects the peak delivery day to be Monday, Dec. 22. Six days are expected to top last year's single-day record of 31 million packages.

United Parcel Service Inc. said Wednesday that it will handle 585 million packages worldwide in December, which would equal the 11 percent increase that the company predicted last week.

Rival FedEx Corp. expects a busy holiday season too, with December shipments up 8.8 percent from the same month last year.

Both companies scrambled last year, adding more seasonal workers than they had planned. After a surge in last-minute online shopping, the companies failed to deliver an estimated 2 million packages — including 1.3 million carried by UPS — as promised by Christmas Eve, according to tracking firm ShipMatrix.

UPS said it will hire up to 95,000 seasonal workers, has opened or expanded 47 facilities to boost capacity, and has worked with retailers to improve forecasting. Last week, executives said they might turn away shipments or impose surcharges on retailers who drop off more packages than expected.

Shares of Atlanta-based UPS fell 40 cents to $102.50 in midday trading. They began the day down 2 percent in 2014.

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