Wilbraham, MA, United States (AHN) – The Friendly’s restaurant chain is preparing for a possible bankruptcy filing as early as next week, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday.

The Wilbraham, MA, company best known for its hamburgers and sundaes employs roughly 10,000 people and operates more than 500 restaurants.

Economic conditions have weighed heavily on the chain. Fewer consumers are spending money to dine out and rising commodities prices for staples such as corn, butter and coffee have drained the company of cash. Other restaurant chains have faced similar fates, such as Quiznos and Sbarro.

Friendly’s has more than $250 million in debt on its books. The company is in talks with Wells Fargo for $70 million in debtor-in-possession financing that would keep it above water during bankruptcy proceedings.

Friendly’s had humble beginnings. It began as a small ice cream shop opened by the Blake brothers during the Great Depression in Springfield, MA. It expanded along the East Cost and was sold to Hershey in 1979. Friendly’s changed hands again before eventually being taken private by Sun Capital Partners Inc. of Boca Raton on 2007.

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Cairo, Egypt (TML) – Egypt’s decision to reject loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank may save the government unwelcome political controversy at home, but it risks undermining the country’s already severely strained economy, economists warned.

The terms of the IMF financing as well as the government’s plan to substitute it with lower spending and domestic borrowing remain murky. But economists said that without IMF help Egypt would almost certainly be saddled with higher debt costs and inflation. Furthermore, private business will now have a harder time raising capital for its own investment needs.

Less than three weeks ago, Cairo gratefully accepted an IMF offer to make $3 billion available at a very low interest rate of 1.5%. Egypt was also discussing a $2.2 billion two-year loan with the World Bank. But on Saturday, Finance Minister Samir Radwan said the government had changed its mind. Instead, it would cut its budget deficit for next year and borrow money at home.

“We do not need to go at this stage to the Bank and the Fund,” Radwan told the Reuters news agency.

The loans and aid are part of a wide-ranging effort by the U.S and other Western powers to help Egypt and the other Arab Spring economies make an orderly transition to democratic rule. But the assistance, particularly from the IMF and World Bank, has aroused the suspicions of many Egyptians, who fear that the aid will come with strings attached.

“There was a lot of excitement,” Magda Kandil, executive director of the Egyptian Centre for Economic Studies, told The Media Line. “They tried to appeal to these concerns saying that it was gesture of goodwill without any commitments to anything problematic.”

At the Group of Eight summit last month, leaders said that Egypt and Tunisia could receive as much as $20 billion total in loans from institutions like the World Bank

The U.S. has also promised a $1 billion debt-for-investment swap, about which few details have been given, and an additional US$1 billion in loans. Arab states, such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia, also offered support.

Egypt isn’t rejecting all of this largesse, but for now, Radwan said, instead of IMF funding Egypt would cut government spending in the next fiscal year. The original 2011/12 budget, approved June 1, contained a whopping 25% increase in spending to create jobs and subsidies for the poor. But last week just before it turned down the IMF loan, the government revised its plans, trimming 36 billion Egyptian pounds ($6 billion) from its deficit to 134 billion pounds, the equivalent of 8.6% of GDP.

In addition, the government will increase borrowing in the domestic market, Radwan said.

The problem is that borrowing in the domestic market means that Egyptian businesses will have to compete harder to get the investment capital they need to expand production and hire more people, Kandil said. She said it also threatens to add to inflationary pressures, creating a burden to Egypt’s hard-pressed poor. Government spending cuts may further undermine the economy.

With a gross domestic product forecast by the IMF of 1% this year as inflation reaches 11.5%, Egypt can’t afford to exacerbate either trend. Furthermore, another 700,000 Egyptians are entering the job market every year, further swelling the ranks of the unemployed.

While the mass protests that brought down President Hosni Mubarak are over, Egypt continues to suffer strikes, disorder and arrests of allegedly corrupt businessmen that have kept tourists and investors away.

The slowdown threatens to exacerbate the poverty and unemployment that helped spur the unrest to begin with, undermining political stability. Yet higher global prices for food and energy have forced the government to spend more on subsidies, diverting resources away from productive investment.

Egypt is already carrying about $35 billion in foreign debt and another $155 billion in internal debt, according to the Central Bank. Egyptian banks enjoy considerable liquidity that would enable them to provide more loans. But domestic borrowing will cost more than borrowing from the IMF, which will mean higher repayments for the government in the future.

“It may satisfy the financing needs of the government, but it will be problematic because you are financing at a higher cost and therefore burdening the government with future debt costs,” Kandil said.

The IMF usually conditions help on governments cutting their budgets, laying off civil servants and trimming or eliminating subsidies, earning the wrath of politicians and ordinary people targeted by the austerity measures. But the IMF’s June 5 announcement of the $3 billion in standby credit didn’t contain any explicit conditions and included the IMF view that “immediate implementation of such reforms is not feasible.”

Nevertheless, the deal did spark concerns in Egypt.

“I believe that this country’s future lies not with the same highly paid, unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats of the IMF, nor with their sacred indicators of budget deficits and market economics. Our future lies with a new home-grown economics that caters for the majority of Egyptians,” Wael Khalil, a socialist activist and blogger at Waelk.net, wrote in British daily The Guardian.

Fayza Abul-Naga, Egypt’s minister of international cooperation, felt compelled to answer critics of the deal by saying that Egypt wouldn’t “kneel” to dictations of the World Bank or the IMF. Kandil said it was possible that Cairo learned after agreeing to the IMF terms that there were indeed conditions attached that if found unacceptable.

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Washington, D.C., United States (AHN) – Two federal appeals court judges ruled Friday that government financing for human embryonic stem cell research can continue in many cases.

The judges, with the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, ruled that government money can go toward research on stem cells that were created from embryos that had already been destroyed.

The ruling overturned U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth’s injunction last year of all grants for embryonic stem cell research. He said the grants may violate a congressional ban on using government money for research involving destroyed embryos.

The 2-1 decision in the appeals court blocks Lamberth’s injunction while an appeal is pending.

The two judges based their decision partly on a National Institutes of Health interpretation of laws regarding federal funding of stem cell research.

The NIH said stem cells should not be considered embryos. And while federal funds cannot be used to kill embryos while taking stem cells, money can be used for existing stem cells.

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Self employed people can be businessmen, contractors or freelancers and they can avail loan amount from reputed banks, financial institutions and other firms. In the loan market, numerous online and offline lenders are available that approve loans for self employed.

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Sacramento, CA, United States (AHN Sports) – The Sacramento Kings’ run in the NBA may soon be coming to an end.

According to a report on ESPN.com Sunday, the Kings are considering applying to the NBA by the March 1 deadline to relocate to Anaheim next season.

The organization is in the process of doing its due diligence involved in trying to move to Anaheim’s Honda Center at season’s end after a 26-season run in Sacramento and numerous failed attempts to secure the financing needed for the construction of a new modern arena.

“We have to look at all of our options at this point,” Kings owner Joe Maloof told ESPN.com. “But we also want to concentrate on our team right now. Any of the arena stuff, we’ll talk about that later.”

Maloof also reiterated comments he’s made to the Sacramento Bee newspaper about the Kings being approached by “many cities” besides Anaheim.

The Kings have been trying for nearly a decade to replace outdated Arco Arena (soon to be renamed Power Balance Pavilion).

The Kings are 13-40 this season and it will be their fifth straight season out of the playoffs after a run that took them to the brink of the NBA Finals in an unforgettable seven-game series with the Los Angeles Lakers in 2002. The dry run has hurt attendance.

Even NBA commissioner David Stern, who has been a proponent for keeping the team in Sacramento, has backed away from his support.

“All I’ll say is that we and they have tried very hard over the years to see whether a new building could be built, and with the collapse of the last attempt — which took a few years, and several million dollars, on behalf of the league — I said we are not going to spend any more time on that,” Stern said at a new conference during All-Star weekend. “That is for the Maloofs and the people of Sacramento.”

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