LANSING - It began as a decade of exciting firsts for Michigan: setting an all-time record low unemployment rate of 3.2 percent, electing the first Michigan women to be governor and U.S. senator, breaking the 10 million barrier in population, seeing the first African-American to lead a legislative caucus and achieving the highest possible credit
LANSING - Expressing hope that 2010 will be a better year for Michigan following the historic economic travails of 2009, Gov. Jennifer Granholm said the state had to continue to focus on diversifying its economy or face total collapse. A key to that diversification is building a more knowledgeable workforce and key to that, she
LANSING - Good news and very bad news comes from the Senate Fiscal Agency's budget forecast: January should not require the state to enact mid-year budget cuts to schools and state services, but a $1.84 billion gap exists between available revenues for the 2010-11 fiscal year and existing spending levels. The forecast, released Tuesday, is
MOUNTAIN VIEW - As a year winds down in which criticism of Google was perhaps never louder, the company used a quiet preholiday afternoon to post a manifesto on what it means to be "open." Jonathan Rosenberg, senior vice president of product management, originally wrote the "The meaning of open" as a memo to employees,
DETROIT - General Motors Co. has hired an outsider to run its troubled finance operations, bringing in the chief financial officer of Microsoft Corp. Chris Liddell will join GM next year, GM CEO Ed Whitacre Jr. said in a statement Monday. Liddell, 51, brings depth and experience to the job leading GM's global financial and
LANSING - Michigan put together a package of education reforms that should make it more than competitive to win a chunk of the $4.35 billion in federal education money that President Barack Obama is dangling through the "Race to the Top" program to entice states to overhaul public education, officials said Monday. Two days after
LANSING - The Muskegon Correctional Facility will still lose all of its Michigan prisoners as planned, but will take in as many as 1,000 prisoners from Pennsylvania early next year rather than closing, officials announced Monday. The imported inmates are set to begin arriving in February and could remain for as long as three years.
LANSING - The hard-wrought changes to the state's educational system enacted in the "Race To The Top" package completed Saturday could be transformational to the state, legislative leaders said as they completed the exhausting work that left some tempers strained. Some critics said elements of the package were not needed, and that the state had
ANN ARBOR ? When the deadline Dec. 12 passed for business plan executive summaries to be submitted to Great Lakes Entrepreneur's Quest, the awards contest matched the record entries of last spring, when 174 teams competed. "We had more alternative energy teams than in the past," said GLEQ Executive Director Diane Durance. "We also had
SAN FRANCSICO - Twitter stumbled again overnight on Thursday. But this time, it wasn't the work of the "fail whale," the cuddly cartoon personification of the site's excessive technical baggage. Rather, the site was replaced with a foreboding message from "Iranian Cyber Army" before crashing entirely, indicating that it had been the victim of a