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Federal regulators have indefinitely delayed a decision on the proposed restart of the shuttered San Onofre nuclear power plant in California, raising new questions Monday about whether the twin reactors will produce electricity again.

The seaside plant between San Diego and Los Angeles has been dark since January 2012, after a small radiation leak led to the discovery of unusual damage to hundreds of tubes that carry radioactive water.

Operator Southern California Edison wants permission to restart the Unit 2 reactor and run it at reduced power in hopes of stopping vibration and friction that was blamed for damaging tubing.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission delayed several earlier target dates for a ruling. Its website on Monday listed no date for a restart decision _ only “to be determined.”

Agency spokesman Victor Dricks had no comment.

Last week, the NRC’s Atomic Safety and Licensing Board sided with environmentalists who have called for lengthy hearings on the restart plan after concluding that firing up the plant would allow Edison “to operate beyond the scope of its existing license.”

A statement from SCE spokeswoman Jennifer Manfre noted that NRC Chair Allison Macfarlane indicated earlier that no decision would be made until at least mid-June on the company’s request to change its operating license to run at lower power.

“SCE continues to adhere to the established regulatory process,” the statement said payday loans with no fax. The company “cannot restart Unit 2 until the NRC says that it is safe to do so.”

Last month, SCE’s parent, Edison International, raised the possibility of retiring the plant if it can’t get one reactor running later this year. The company also disclosed that costs tied to the long-running shutdown had hit $553 million.

Edison is facing a tangle of regulatory obstacles that include a separate state investigation into who should pay for the trouble _ customers or shareholders.

Meanwhile, anti-nuclear activists and some lawmakers have said restarting the plant would lead to a disaster.

Friends of the Earth, an advocacy group challenging the restart, believes no decision can be made “until all the safety issues raised by the board are addressed,” spokesman Shaun Burnie said in an email.

Even with San Onofre sidelined, state power officials predict that there should be adequate power supplies in California this summer, but heat waves or wildfires that damage transmission lines could lead to potential shortages.

San Onofre is owned by SCE, San Diego Gas & Electric and the city of Riverside.

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Cisco Systems led the Dow Jones industrial average slightly higher Thursday after the technology company reported higher sales. Mixed corporate earnings and economic reports kept the major stock indexes flipping between slight gains and losses.

Shortly after noon, the Dow was up 12 points at 15,288. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index was up less than a point at 1,659.

The news on the economy Thursday wasn’t encouraging. Applications for unemployment benefits rose last week, and manufacturing slowed in the mid-Atlantic region. The manufacturing report from the Philadelphia branch of the Federal Reserve sent bond prices up in morning trading and turned stocks lower, but not for long.

“We’ve been seeing a lot of that this year,” said Scott King, an investment adviser at Unified Trust Co. in Lexington, Ky. “The news isn’t great, yet the market holds tight.”

Cisco jumped 13 percent, or $2.68, to $23.87. Cisco turned in quarterly results late Wednesday that beat analysts’ expectations, with the help of better revenue from the U.S. and emerging markets.

The networking equipment company sells its routers, switches, software and services to corporate customers and government agencies around the world. As a result, Cisco’s performance is often considered a gauge of how the technology industry is doing.

The Nasdaq rose 8 points to 3,479, a gain of 0.2 percent.

Wal-Mart fell 2 percent, the biggest drop among the 30 Dow stocks. The world’s largest retailer turned in weaker sales and a dim forecast for profits. The company blamed bad weather and delayed tax refunds for earnings and sales that fell short of what analysts had expected. Wal-Mart’s stock lost $1.68 to $78 business card.11.

Companies have reported record quarterly profits this earnings season. Seven of every 10 in the S&P 500 have trumped analysts’ earnings estimates, according to S&P Capital IQ. Earnings have climbed 5 percent over the year before.

But revenue has looked weak: six out of every 10 companies in the S&P 500 have missed forecasts, and revenue has edged up just 1 percent. Without higher sales, companies are getting more of their profits from laying off staff and other cost-cutting moves.

If the market is going to keep climbing this year, King said, sales will have to start rising. Analysts are looking for that to happen as economic growth gains strength later this year.

“It’s hard to see how companies can squeeze more earnings growth out of cost savings,” King said. “At some point, the economic numbers and revenue have to pick up.”

The Philadelphia branch of the Federal Reserve reported that manufacturers in the region said business conditions have slumped this month. Orders for manufactured goods and shipments have been weak.

In Washington, the Labor Department reported that the number of Americans seeking unemployment benefits rose last week to 360,000. That suggests companies are laying more people off, just one week after applications for benefits hit a five-year low.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury note sank to 1.88 percent from 1.94 percent late Wednesday. It’s a sign that traders are shifting money into low-risk investments like U.S. government debt.

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It was a surprising recall and an unlikely major-league start for Ricky Romero on Friday at the Rogers Centre. It wasn’t supposed to be this soon. The Jays’ 28-year-old lefthander remains a work in progress, with a single minor-league start under his belt on the way to his necessary rebuild. But the club decided he was ready to begin the next segment of his career. Romero’s results were mixed.

Facing the Mariners, replacing a disabled Josh Johnson, he lasted just four innings in a 4-0 loss facing the M’s ace, Felix Hernandez. After three shutout innings, looking re-energized and confident, Romero went back out and threw 37 pitches in the fourth, with two visits by a trainer — one for what may have been a blister and the other when his left arm was in the way on a hard comebacker by Jesus Montero. But the best news, the news that matters most to Romero at this point, is that he’s back.

The Jays have avoided any comparisons to the past, the Roy Halladay rebuild, for the obvious reason of not putting pressure on their current down, but not out, still improving starter. But the relationship between the reconstructing Romero and his current minor-league instructor, Dane Johnson, bears a striking similarity to that of their former star, Halladay, and his mentor, the late Mel Queen.

Nobody is suggesting that Romero will ever bounce back to match Halladay’s career numbers — the very comparison the Jays are trying to avoid — but the most important thing for the L.A.-born lefty’s rebuilt psyche is that he’s back in the majors with a new outlook and a new delivery.

The 50-year-old Johnson has been the organization’s minor-league roving instructor since 2004. On March 27, the day after Romero was given the devastating news of his demotion following another failed spring training start vs. the Pirates, Johnson, a second-round pick by the Jays in 1984, was handed the important assignment of fixing what was broken with the two-time opening day starter.

Every day in April, from 9:30 a.m. to noon, in addition to his normal duties seeing kid pitchers at the Jays’ extended spring camp, Johnson and Romero worked alone. Much has been made of several publicized Romero fixes — a more direct line to the plate and hands that never are raised above his head anymore — but there were other factors as important, many involving routine.

“Taking a step back and breaking down throwing programs,” Johnson said of the most difficult part of the rebuild. “Breaking down where the ball should come from, how he’s going to cross the T’s and dot the I’s in his throwing programs and how he was going to work around all the things that needed to be implemented in his delivery online payday loans.

“They came pretty quick, because No. 1 he’s a smart guy. No. 2 he’s a good athlete. No. 3 he’s a pro and when he realized himself that, ‘Hey, I do have to do these things to be able to be effective and throw strikes,’ it started the flow a little bit. He saw the progress. We had little victories along the way. He saw the results and took them into his games and he repeated it and he reaped the benefits of it.”

A lot of the change and the ability to convince Romero of the need for the change came in the video room, finding old video as a kid pro, comparing it to the success of 2011 and the failure of 2012.

“I went back to 2005-06,” Johnson explained. “I broke out the analog equipment. We got those tapes, not necessarily implementing them, we saw an explosive young kid at that particular time who got out over his front side and drove the ball with real great extension.

“That reminded him of a lot of things when he got into his throwing programs of what he could do, what he has to do. Again, it was more attention to detail on his throwing programs, on his (bullpen) sides, on his deliveries, paying attention to those. The focus now seems taken off the mound and going to home plate. Hopefully he has enough reps under his belt doing the things properly, technique-wise, mechanical-wise where he can worry about the hitter and what’s going on at home plate.”

Thus it was that a more confident Ricky Romero strolled with J.P. Arencibia from the bullpen to the dugout after the anthems had been played and then moments later headed out to the mound with a renewed confidence in what he could accomplish against major-league hitters — if he threw strikes.

“The first inning is going to be huge, the first hitter is going to be huge,” Johnson predicted. “Hopefully those go well and we’ll roll from there and I think you’ll see, if that continues to roll, I think you’ll see the guy getting back on the mound and working with good tempo and repeat his pitches.”

Romero’s first was a confidence boost. He retired Canadian leadoff man Michael Saunders on a 3-1 grounder to second base, allowed a line drive single to Kyle Seager, then had Kendrys Morales roll over on a grounder to short for an inning-ending double play. In his mind, he was back.

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The Galaxy S4’s design is virtually unchanged from the Galaxy S III. And when I say virtually unchanged, I mean that you have to be pretty obsessive to notice the differences. Aside from a slightly more rectangular body and a more substantial, metal-esque band wrapping around the sides, there’s little to separate Samsung’s successor from its predecessor.

The most notable improvements to the phone’s hardware guts come in its processor, display and camera. None are revolutionary, but they all match or one-up the Android status quo.

The 5-inch, Super AMOLED display is one of the best Samsung has ever put on a phone, with a 1080p display and a pixel density of 441 per inch — more than enough to eliminate any trace of pixelation. The screen could stand to be a bit brighter, but that’s a minor quibble.

Even with a bigger screen and a beefier battery, the Galaxy S4 managed to get ever-so-slightly thinner, slimmer, and lighter than the Galaxy S III. It also got a power boost.

Smartphone makers have spent the past few years flinging extra cores at everything, so yet another quad-core processor — this time in the form of , Fortune 500) Snapdragon 600 — doesn’t sound all that exciting, especially compared to the “octo-core” Samsung Exynos 5 Octa that international markets are getting. (Geek caveat: Those extra four cores in the Exynos 5 are meant for low-power scenarios, so they don’t provide the massive boost over Snapdragon that you might expect.)

Still, the fact that the Galaxy S4 is more than three times faster than the Galaxy S III when run through the same benchmarking tests is nothing to scoff at.

In using the phone regularly for a week, I rarely came across a moment when it suffered from significant stuttering, lag or overheating. The one noticeable exception was when I played “Real Racing 3,” a graphically intense game that got choppy when too many cars were onscreen. That’s not really Samsung’s fault — Android is notorious for its game lag.

The Galaxy S4’s camera is also improved, though we’re at the point of diminishing returns. On paper, the leap from 8 megapixels to 13 megapixels sounds substantial, but we learned years ago that the megapixel arms race is only part of the story when it comes to camera quality. The Galaxy S4’s best new photo trick is a camera sensor that’s back-illuminated, which means it can capture more light and produce brighter, more-detailed images without the use of a flash.

The camera works well in most normal situations. Its new user interface, pulled from Samsung’s point-and-shoot Galaxy Camera, is nicely laid out and easy to use. The image processing time between hitting the shutter button and having a saved photo isn’t blazing, but also isn’t a nuisance one hour payday loan. A few of the software advances, like being able to erase unwanted objects from an image’s background or create time-lapse action shots, are neat and well-implemented.

Of course, these improvements — especially to the camera and screen — require more power, and Samsung obliged by packing in a bigger battery. With the screen’s brightness ranging between 50% and 75%, 4G turned on, and a few apps and services running in the background (Facebook, Gmail, Google Talk, etc. — the usual suspects), I was still able to get through a full day with moderate use. With heavier usage, I found myself having to recharge after 6 to 8 hours. On the whole, I didn’t notice any huge leap in battery life over the S3, but it certainly wasn’t worse, either.

The features Samsung wants buyers to focus on, though, aren’t the Galaxy S4’s internal guts, which are more or less identical to other top smartphones right now. It’s the software upgrades baked into Samsung’s custom “TouchWiz” interface. The phone’s flashier tricks include pausing video when you look away from the screen, letting you answer the phone by waving in front of it, and activating tilt-based scrolling when eye contact is detected. Samsung also pinched a few features from its Galaxy Note 8.0 tablet, like allowing two apps to simultaneously run side-by-side, and the Airview feature, which detects when your finger is hovering over — but not quite touching — the screen. The gesture can activate a secondary action or menu.

Those are neat tricks, but they’re more like a sword-juggling circus act than the revolutionary breakthrough Samsung would like them to be. They’re interesting, novel and sometimes impressive, but they’re not significant or lasting advances. None are meaningfully better than our existing methods of smartphone interaction.

So, is the Samsung Galaxy S4 one of the best Android phones available? Yes. There are few other phones, period, that are as powerful and capable. But, in line with what we’ve seen from the past few iPhone generations, the improvements here aren’t as pronounced and exciting as in past years. This isn’t a phone that’s going to convert an iPhone user, and current Galaxy S III owners aren’t going to miss out on a whole lot as far as features go.

If you’re ready for an upgrade, and are in the market for an Android phone, there’s no reason why this shouldn’t be one of top two or three phones you consider. It’s not the standout, though, that Samsung needs to remain the preeminent leader of the Android field. Hear that, HTC?

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The Internal Revenue Service will close all of its public operations on five days from now through August because of employee furloughs, acting commissioner Steve Miller told employees in a memo today.

The tax agency will be closed and almost all employees will be furloughed on May 24, June 14, July 5, July 22 and Aug. 30, Miller wrote. The closing will affect operations such as the IRS toll-free lines and taxpayer assistance centers.

As many as two more furlough days may be needed in August and September, Miller wrote.

The accountant and the jeweler were longtime friends and golf partners. But the accountant was passing private information about two companies to the jeweler, who used it to play the stock market. Now they’re both under federal investigation, their reputations unraveling on a very public stage.

The scandal over a KPMG accountant passing information about client companies Herbalife and Skechers has unfolded in pieces this week. Late Monday KPMG announced it fired a partner in Los Angeles who leaked nonpublic information about companies that KPMG worked with. On Tuesday nutritional supplement maker Herbalife and shoe seller Skechers announced that they were the companies whose information was leaked. On Wednesday the fired KPMG partner, Scott London, publicly identified himself through his lawyer and issued a statement saying he deeply regretted his actions and was just trying to help a friend.

Thursday brought one of the remaining pieces of the puzzle. Bryan Shaw identified himself as the friend who got insider information from London.

In a statement through his lawyer, Nathan Hochman, Shaw said he received information from London “about a number of companies” from 2010 to 2012. He said he had “profited substantially” from trading stocks based on that information, but he didn’t provide details.

“I cannot begin to apologize for my incredibly stupid actions,” said Shaw, who runs a wholesale jewelry company. “There is no excuse for my wrongful conduct. I accept full and complete responsibility for what I have done and know that I will spend the rest of my life trying to make up for my tragic lapses of judgment.”

Shaw paid London for the information, but it isn’t clear how much. London’s lawyer Harland Braun has said it was “about $25,000″ over several years.

London said in his statement that he never leaked any documents. He described the interactions as his friend asking whether a stock was a good buy and London offering suggestions.

The FBI, the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission are investigating. Lawyers for Shaw and London said their clients are cooperating.

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On Twitter, negative views of vaccination are more contagious than positive sentiments — and too many pro messages may backfire.

That’s according to Penn State University researchers who tracked about 350,000 tweets from more than 100,000 people during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic. Their study was published Thursday in the journal EPJ Data Science.

The findings have implications that extend beyond the issue of vaccinations.

“People are getting information about how to deal with their health from a variety of sources and increasingly from social media,” said the study’s lead author Marcel Salath

Service industries in the U.S. expanded in March at the slowest pace in seven months as new orders and employment cooled.

The Institute for Supply Management

CHICAGO • United Airlines is delaying its new Denver-Tokyo service — again — because its new Boeing 787 jets remain grounded.

United said Friday that service between Denver and Tokyo’s Narita Airport will begin June 10. The airline had already pushed back the original March 31 start to at least May 12.

The airline said that it was still determined to use the plane on the new route.

The 787, which Boeing calls the Dreamliner, promises a more comfortable ride for passengers and significant fuel savings for airline customers. But All 50 of the planes in airline fleets are grounded because of incidents involving smoldering batteries in January.

Boeing Co.’s fix for the lithium-ion batteries includes putting more space around cells and wrapping the batteries in steel cases.

CEO Jim McNerney said Thursday that Boeing was “very close” to getting the 787 approved for passenger flights. He said Boeing has “a high degree of confidence” in the battery-system changes.

The company conducted a 2-hour test flight of a 737 on Monday over Washington and Oregon and reported that everything went according to plan. The company is doing follow-up work in preparation for another test flight in which it would demonstrate the battery system’s performance for Federal Aviation Administration experts.

Officials in Denver say they’re confident the flights will benefit the city, the metro area and the Rocky Mountain region.

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People often make emotional decisions about their finances. They think with their hearts, not their heads.

Financial planner Chris Snyder has seen all kinds of irrational behaviour among his clients. He gives many examples in his new book, Be Smart with Your Money (Civil Sector Press, $24.95).

“Charles, a doctor, retired to a small town. While he had been an excellent physician, he had very little financial knowledge or acumen,” Snyder writes.

“When it came to investing his money, he didn’t have a clue. What he did know was that if he had $50,000 in his bank account, he had a sense of comfort and security.

“This was something he’d learned from his father, who had gone through the Great Depression in the 1930s.”

Years later, Charles had a stroke. When taken from his small-town hospital to Toronto, he carried his bank book with him as a security blanket.

Keeping a high amount in a liquid, low-paying account was the best thing he could do, even if it didn’t make great sense financially, his adviser says.

“It is possible that over time, his fear could have been reduced and the money invested in a way that gave him a higher return,” Snyder explains, “but there was no doubt in my mind that the $50,000 was where it should be.

“Charles’ need to feel financially secure, combined with his lack of knowledge about things financial, made him rely on the $50,000 in his bank account for security.”

Snyder, now in his 70s, is a fee-only certified financial planner and chairman of ECC Group in Toronto. He’s the author of a Canadian personal finance classic, It’s Your Money, published in 1979.

Many financial practitioners cling to the rational decision-making model. Only a few, such as Snyder, use behavioural economics to make their advice more insightful.

In another example, he talks about a client who refused to open letters from the Canada Revenue Agency because he feared the tax department.

“Once, he opened one after it had been sitting in a pile of unopened mail for six months — and to his surprise, there was a cheque for $1,623 in the envelope. That was the good news.

“The bad news was that it was stale-dated and it took him a further four months to get the cheque reissued.”

Don’t view the CRA as your enemy, unless you haven’t declared all your income or filed your returns, he advises. Be reasonable with the CRA and it’s likely to be reasonable with you.

Among Snyder’s favourite books on how emotions can overrule logic are The Little Book of Behavioral Investing by James Montier and Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein.

Dan Ariely, a U.S. professor of psychology and behavioural economics, has written three bestsellers: Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty (Harper).

On March 25, Ariely is launching an online course, A Beginner’s Guide to Irrational Behavior, which is free and open to anyone.

I signed up for the course, since I admire Ariely’s witty writing style. I also wanted to learn more about MOOCs (massive open online courses), which are gaining traction around the world.

Ariely’s course is sponsored by Coursera, a company founded by two Stanford University professors in 2012, which has partnerships with more than 50 universities in the United States, Canada and overseas.

“We envision a future where the top universities are educating not only thousands of students, but millions,” the company says about its vision.

“Through this, we hope to give everyone access to the world-class education that has so far been available only to a select few. We want to empower people with education that will improve their lives, the lives of their families and the communities they live in.”

Mastering your money is a vital skill. Maybe it will become easier with the help of books and courses that allow you to understand the behavioural gaps that hold you back.

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