Business Blog

Economist-turned-Fox Business host Stuart Varney likes nothing more than poking an accusing finger at what most of the rest of us take as accepted truths. The conservative commentator who says he left England in 1974 to escape its class warfare” visited Jackson Tuesday to address the Mississippi Council on Economic Education. Of course, the question [...]

Mississippi country singer and “American Idol” Season 11 finalist Skylar Laine dropped by the Mississippi Business Journal newsroom yesterday to catch our readers and viewers up on her life after Idol. The Brandon native is finalizing plans for her first album (look for it next spring) and is continuing a search for a music label that [...]

It’s finally time to reclaim that hour of sleep you lost last spring. Most of the country will turn back the clocks this weekend for the annual shift back to standard time. The majority of folks will do the switch before hitting the sack Saturday night, even though the change doesn’t become official until 2 [...]

Haley Barbour knows a bit about hurricane recovery and working with the federal government to preserve lives and property after a storm, having led Mississippi’s rebuilding from the historic destruction of hurricane Katrina in 2005. So you can understand his irritation at criticism leveled at New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie for his work with President [...]

Had enough of presidential politics? Can’t wait until Tuesday is behind us? No one is more eager to see an end to this stuff than Abigail Evans. She plainly can’t take anymore of “Bronco Bamma and Mitt Romney.” Reassurances that it will all be over soon seem to soothe the child’s discomfort. Check out the [...]

Work has resumed on a runway at Mississippi’s busiest passenger airport after a dispute with the contractor brought construction to a standstill last year. The project to remove bad clay and repave one of two runways at Jackson-Medgar Wiley Evers International Airport stalled over a disagreement about the quality of the asphalt being put down. [...]

Wright Thompson makes the point, “What is the cost of knowing our past, and what is the cost of not?” As Mississippians, we probably don’t talk about the past enough. We want to sweep it under the rug and move on, but in the recently aired “Ghosts of Ole Miss,” ESPN’s “30 for 30” series [...]

If the much-hyped dream of U.S. energy independence must involve hydraulic fracturing (also known as fracking) to extract natural gas from shale deposits deep underneath the surface of the earth, the State of Vermont wants no part of it. Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin signed a law May 16 banning fracking, a practice that involves injecting [...]

In a possible foreshadowing of long-awaited findings by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin has found “no direct link to reports of groundwater contamination” from the controversial natural gas extraction method known as fracking. According to project leader Charles Groat, “From what we’ve seen so far, many [...]

Energy industry stakeholders gathered yesterday at the Unlocking the Value of Natural Gas summit at the Jackson Convention Complex to discuss unique economic opportunities available to Mississippi through the natural gas industry. Michelle Bloodworth, vice president of business development for ANGA, said, “Mississippi is well-poised from an economic development and a recruiting standpoint to take [...]