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

In brief: U.S. jobs picture brightens

From Wire Reports

WASHINGTON – It turns out we may be able to breathe a little easier about the slowdown in hiring last month.

A Labor Department report Tuesday showed that job openings surged 3.4 percent to 5.1 million in February – a 14-year high. That’s a clear sign that companies are willing to boost their staffs.

The figure follows a disappointing jobs report Friday, which showed that employers added only 126,000 jobs in March. That was the weakest number in 15 months, and followed 12 straight months of job gains above 200,000.

The pickup in open jobs, however, suggests that hiring could rebound in the coming months. Businesses have been slow to fill openings for much of the recovery and may start filling more of their open jobs in April.

The sharp rise in available jobs “is a reassuring sign that the fundamentals of the labor market have continued to improve,” said Jeremy Schwartz, an analyst at Credit Suisse.

Bigger burgers coming back

NEW YORK – Bigger burgers will be back on the menu at McDonald’s, at least for a while.

McDonald’s says it’s introducing a trio of “Sirloin Third Pound” burgers for a limited time starting later this month, the latest sign the chain is pushing to improve perceptions about the quality of its food.

The sirloin burgers would have the biggest beef patties on the chain’s menu and come after McDonald’s dropped its Angus Third Pounders in 2013. At the time, some analysts said the Angus burgers were too pricey for McDonald’s customers.

McDonald’s says the sirloin burgers will cost around $4.99, although franchisees can determine their own prices.

McDonald’s is pushing to turn around its U.S. business, which has seen sales and customer visits slip for two years in a row at established locations amid intensifying competition. Already this year, the company has made a number of announcements including a simplified grilled chicken recipe, curbing the use of antibiotics in chicken, and a pay bump and vacation time for workers at company-owned stores.

The chain has said it also plans to expand a program that lets customers build their own burgers by tapping a touchscreen.

Oil spill system introduced

NEW ORLEANS – An oil consortium says an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico today could be cleaned up far faster than five years ago when BP’s Macondo well blew out 45 miles off the coast of Louisiana, spawning the nation’s worst offshore oil spill.

It took BP and the industry’s best containment technology 87 days to contain the deep-water blowout. The Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion and spill April 20, 2010, resulted in as much as 172 million gallons of oil getting into the Gulf of Mexico.

On Tuesday, the Marine Well Containment Co., a Houston-based consortium developing high-tech containment technology, presented its latest pieces of equipment at a business luncheon in New Orleans.

In January, the consortium announced the arrival of an expanded containment system. The containment system is made up of deep-sea capping stacks that fit over an out-of-control well and funnel spewing oil and gas through “umbilicals” to oil tankers waiting at the sea surface.

Started by Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil, the consortium now has 10 members, also including BP, Statoil, Hess, Apache, Anadarko and BHP Billiton.

The company said the system can be used in water depths of 10,000 feet – similar to where the Deepwater Horizon was – and contain 200 million standard cubic feet of gas a day.