This past week, President Obama traveled to Hawaii for the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation conference, visited Australia for meetings with Prime Minister Julia Gillard and an address to Parliament, and Friday in Indonesia for the East Asia Summit. Check out the highlights below:
While in Indonesia, President Obama talks about his administration’s work opening up markets to support thousands of American jobs and keep us on track to double American exports by 2014 for this weeks Weekly Address:
A special deficit-reduction supercommittee appears likely to admit failure on Monday, unable or unwilling to compromise on a mix of spending cuts and tax increases required to meet its assignment of saving taxpayers at least $1.2 trillion over the coming decade. Failure by the panel would trigger about $1 billion over nine years in automatic across-the-board spending cuts to a wide range of domestic programs and the Pentagon budget, starting in 2013, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The committee faces a Wednesday deadline. But members would have to agree on the outlines of a package by Monday to allow time for drafting and assessing by the Congressional Budget Office. Read more here.
This week, Gov. Bev Perdue helped three companies celebrate grand openings at new or expanded manufacturing facilities in North Carolina.
The three companies — Medicago in the Triangle, Siemens in Charlotte and Caterpillar in Kernersville — are in the process of creating 1,300 jobs and contributing $572 million in new investment to North Carolina. “There’s a big reason these companies chose North Carolina,” Gov Perdue said. “We have a productive and well-trained workforce, and we know how to make things, we know how to manufacture.”
- Siemens will begin engineering and manufacturing gas turbines at its site. The latest expansion brings the company’s Charlotte facility to more than one million square feet. The site is the company’s largest energy manufacturing facility in the U.S.
- Caterpillar’s facility will be used to assemble, test and paint axle assemblies for large mining trucks. Caterpillar currently employs more than 1,000 people in Wake, Johnston, Lee, Macon and Burke counties. The new plant is the first in the Triad region.
- Medicago is a biotechnology company that develops vaccines. Medicago recently received a grant to improve the process of large-quantity H1N1 vaccine production using greenhouse-grown tobacco plants. The Canadian company’s expansion into North Carolina will create 85 new jobs. The company’s Research Triangle Park facility will have the capacity to produce more than 40 million doses of seasonal flu vaccine a year.
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