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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

U.S. automakers, Bush to talk currency

The Spokesman-Review

Leaders of the Big Three domestic automakers will bring up currency exchange rates and health care costs when they speak with President Bush on Tuesday, Ford’s top executive said Friday.

“Clearly, having a level playing field is very important,” Ford Chief Executive Alan Mulally said in an interview with the editorial board of the Detroit Free Press.

The leaders of Ford Motor Co., General Motors Corp. and DaimlerChrysler AG’s Chrysler Group tentatively were scheduled to meet with Bush in May, but the meeting was pushed back until after the election. The White House set the date this week.

Mulally, hired recently from Boeing Co., also said he will talk to the president about other free-trade issues that give foreign products advantages over U.S.-made ones.

“It’s all of them. It’s steel. It’s tariffs. There’s all kinds of elements to competitiveness. Exchange rates are important, commodity prices,” he said.

Worcester, Mass.

Judge: Sandwich shop can’t block burritos

Is a burrito a sandwich?

The Panera Bread Co. bakery-and-cafe chain says yes. But a judge said no, ruling against Panera in its bid to prevent a Mexican restaurant from moving into the same shopping mall.

Panera has a clause in its lease that prevents the White City Shopping Center in Shrewsbury from renting to another sandwich shop. Panera tried to invoke that clause to stop the opening of an Qdoba Mexican Grill.

But Superior Court Judge Jeffrey Locke cited Webster’s Dictionary as well as testimony from a chef and a former high-ranking federal agriculture official in ruling that Qdoba’s burritos and other offerings are not sandwiches.

The difference, the judge ruled, comes down to two slices of bread versus one tortilla.

“A sandwich is not commonly understood to include burritos, tacos and quesadillas, which are typically made with a single tortilla and stuffed with a choice filling of meat, rice, and beans,” Locke wrote in a decision released last week.

Houston

Enron’s Fastow to serve in Louisiana

Former Enron Corp. financial whiz Andrew Fastow will serve six years in a federal prison in Louisiana for plundering the company while concealing its feeble financial condition from investors.

According to a posting Friday on the Web site for the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, which decides where inmates are sent, Fastow was assigned to the Federal Detention Center in Oakdale, La., about 200 miles northeast of Houston.

Fastow, 44, had asked that he be able to serve his sentence at a federal prison in Bastrop, Texas, about 30 miles southeast of Austin. U.S. District Judge Kenneth Hoyt made that recommendation when he sentenced Fastow in September.

The Oakdale detention center is part of a prison complex that includes a low-security correctional institution and a satellite prison camp that houses minimum-security male inmates. The entire prison complex has about 2,400 inmates.

Fastow has already reported to the prison.