UPI NewsTrack Business

British consumers favoring 'green' fish

LONDON, July 5 (UPI) -- Food industry officials say fish species once considered good only for cats are making surges in the British market because they're thought to be "greener."

Sea bass and pollack are more plentiful than the current "big three" fish, salmon, cod and haddock, and can be caught or farmed using more environmentally friendly methods, a fact British consumers are latching onto, The Guardian reported Saturday. In fact, cod sales in supermarkets, fish shops and restaurants fell by more than 10 percent in volume last year, while those of pollack went up by more than 150 percent, industry officials say.

The newspaper said Seafish, the British government's Sea Fish Industry Authority, has determined that an overall 5 percent yearly sales jump in the UK seafood market may partly be the result of consumers demanding locally sourced food. It found sales of sea bass rose by more than 30 percent between May 2007 and this May.

The trend is being picked up major fish companies as well. Birds Eye last year introduced a pollack fish finger product touting the benefits of omega 3 fatty acids, caught from Alaskan stocks with green certification from the Marine Stewardship Council.

Report: NBC near Weather Channel deal

NEW YORK, July 5 (UPI) -- Sources say General Electric Co. subsidiary NBC Universal is preparing to pay $3.5 billion to buy the Weather Channel, a U.S. cable television mainstay.

The TV channel, its Web site and related businesses would be part of the deal, The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday, citing anonymous sources. The newspaper said the transaction could be completed by as early as this weekend, more than six months after current owner Landmark Communications Inc. put the Weather Channel up for sale.

NBC Universal and its financial partners, Blackstone Group LP and Bain Capital LLC, entered into exclusive negotiations with Landmark last month after rival Time Warner Inc. pulled out, the Journal said. Landmark had originally hoped to land $5 billion for the cable television franchise.

Included in the sale would be Weather.com and Weather Services International, which provides weather data and services to local television stations, radar maker Enterprise Electronics Corp. and Landmark's interest in Pelmorex, a Canadian weather company.

Part-time workers rising in Japan

TOKYO, July 5 (UPI) -- The Japanese government says part-time, temporary and contract workers now make up a record 35.5 percent of Japan's workforce.

Aging baby boom-generation members and housewives comprise the majority of these kinds of "non-regular" workers, whose popularity among employers has soared since Japan's economic bubble period of the 1990's, Kyodo News reported Saturday.

The hiring of part-timers continued to increase even during last year's economic expansion, the Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications said. It says that of all male workers, 19.9 percent were part-timers or contract workers, while the figure for females was 55.2 percent, both record highs. Those figures stand in stark contrast to 1987, when only 9.1 percent of the male workforce and 37.1 percent of female workers were part-timers.

Kyodo said the government has documented some 19 million non-regular workers in the country's workforce.

Kindle seen as transitional technology

SEATTLE, July 5 (UPI) -- The Amazon Kindle electronic book device is slowly gaining traction among book readers but still may be too expensive for a mainstream audience, analysts say.

The 10-ounce device, which can hold up to 200 e-books, could hit $2.5 billion in sales by 2012, with 40,000 units moving so far this year, Steve Weinstein, an analyst with Pacific Crest in Portland, Ore., told the San Francisco Chronicle Saturday.

Weinstein added that online retailer Amazon, of Seattle, could sell between 700,000 and 800,000 of the devices by the end of 2008. But, he said, "I don't expect it to have the same impact on the industry as the iPod had on the music industry."

One reason is that the Kindle, which originally sold for $399 and has since been reduced to $359, is still too expensive for mass acceptance and could represent a transitional step in a longer-term move toward electronic book distribution, analysts told the newspaper.

"We see (the Kindle) as an incremental change -- it's certainly a device that has energized the digitization of books," said Tim McCall, vice president of online sales at Penguin Group USA.