The shooting was reported about 5:45 pm at a shopping center in the 2800 block of Greenmount Ave. in North Baltimores Harwood neighborhood. Police said the gunman shot through a door, striking the victim inside. He was later pronounced dead. Police did not immediately identify the victim and did not give a description of the shooter or motive.

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DES MOINES ? Iowa workers who make minimum wage would get a 38 percent pay raise under a proposal advanced Thursday by Senate Democrats.

The state would increase its minimum wage from $7.25 to $8.75 in July, and to $10 in January under Senate File 2040, approved 2-1 by an Iowa Senate Labor and Business Relations subcommittee. That?s an annual pay of $20,000 a year, up from $14,000 a year.

?I believe that we?re actually going to harm the economy by pushing the minimum wage past the threshold that the federal government recommends,? said state Sen. Mark Chelgren, R-Ottumwa, who is president and owner of two businesses.

Iowa?s minimum wage was last increased in July 2009 from $6.55 an hour to $7.25 an hour, to mirror an increase in the federal minimum wage.

?This isn?t going to lift anybody out of poverty, but it?s going to help keep the lights on, help keep the car running,? said Charlie Wishman, secretary and treasurer for the Iowa Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO, which represents more than 50,000 members of 520 unions.

?We raise the minimum wage and it?s economic development, because this money is spent ? it?s either saved for tuition or put back immediately into the economy, said Sen. Dick Dearden, D-Des Moines. It goes back on Main Street. It does good for local businesses.?

But following the 2009 increase, more than 500,000 jobs were lost, said John Gilliland, senior vice president for government relations for the Iowa Association of Business and Industry, the state?s largest business trade group representing 1,400 Iowa businesses that employ more than 300,000 Iowans.

The increase also led 58 percent of restaurants to increase their menu prices; 41 percent to reduce employee work hours; 26 percent to postpone plans for new hiring and 24 percent to reduce their number of employees, according to the National Restaurant Association, which represents more than 380,000 restaurants and others in the food service industry.

?There are ripple effects sometimes, beyond just raising the minimum wage, for the rest of the population,? said Craig Walter, a lobbyist for the Iowa Restaurant Association, which represents more than 6,000 restaurants and bars. ?It?s something we would like to avoid.?

Walter said businesses have just experienced one of the largest economic downturns in 80 years and are ?crawling out of that hole.? He said profit margins are running only 2 percent to 4 percent. An increase in the minimum wage would eat into that.

?If you start increasing the minimum wage, my small guys are basically scraping by … Any kind of adjustment, they won?t hire that high school kid. They?ll just do the work themselves,? said Kristin Kunert, state director for the National Federation of Independent Business, which represents more than 10,500 Iowa small businesses, each with an average of 15 employees. ?It is hurting the people they want to help.?

Kunert said only a very small percentage of small businesses pay the minimum wage. Most pay more. But she said small businesses would have a more difficulty than big ones in absorbing the increased costs. 

?Larger companies have an HR department,? she said. ?My guys have grandma doing the books.? 

Chelgren also said he pays more than minimum wage to all 14 employees at his two businesses: Frog Legs, which makes components for wheelchairs; and Fizzix Manufacturing, a urethane manufacturer that specializes in durable medical equipment.

As many as 85 percent of those who earn the minimum wage are teenagers, Gilliland said, citing data from the Employment Policies Institute, a Washington, DC-based nonprofit research organization that studies public policy issues surrounding employment growth. He said those teens lose job opportunities each time the minimum wage is increased.

But state Sen. Thomas Courtney, D-Burlington, said 76 percent of workers who earn at or near the minimum wage are adults 20 or older. His data came from the National Employment Law Project, a national advocacy organization for employment rights of lower-wage workers

?I don?t believe that there?s any proof that the minimum wage makes businesses go under,? Courtney said.

Gilberto Garcia, 23, is among those adults getting paid $7.25 an hour. He works at a Burger King in Des Moines and described the minimum wage as ?so-so.?

?It?s OK when you need the job. It?s OK,? Garcia said.

Despite Thursday?s passage of Senate File 2040 by a subcommittee of the Democratic-led Senate, the bill isn?t expected to go far. The Republican-controlled Iowa House does not support the bill.

?I?m not naive enough to think it?s going to go anywhere on the other side,? Courtney said, referring to the Iowa House.

Iowa House Speaker Kraig Paulsen, R-Hiawatha, said he favors a different approach to increasing jobs and improving the economy.

?If you?re interested in putting Iowans back to work, then you need to make it easier to be an employer in the state of Iowa, not harder,? Paulsen said. ?So that is where we?re focusing our attention.?

See Senate File 2040:
http://tinyurl.com/6pu6deu

The report found SMB cloud adoption is a global phenomenon not limited to North America, as the worldwide SMB cloud market is expected to expand at a 26 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) to $68 billion by 2014. In addition, SMBs with less than 20 employees are at least three times more likely to choose cloud services over on-premise services.

Small businesses are rapidly moving beyond basic Web presence, with 45 percent of SMBs in the US now managing a Facebook page to promote their business. In addition, the report indicated SMBs plan to double the amount of paid cloud applications they purchase in the next three years, with the size of the SMB determining which applications are critical (micro and small SMBs seek apps like backup, file-sharing and accounting and e-mail achieving; while midsize businesses are seeking phone conferencing services).

Parallels SMB Cloud Insights outlines which hosting, cloud services and applications have the most current and future appeal for SMBs across four key categories?hosted infrastructure (infrastructure as a service, or IaaS), Web presence, communications and collaboration, and hosted business applications. Parallels research also reveals the market-by-market demand for value-added hosted applications and services such as online backup, file sharing, accounting, e-mail archiving and Web conferencing.

?Parallels SMB Cloud Insights research continues to confirm that SMBs are at the forefront of cloud adoption,? said Birger Steen, CEO of Parallels.

?For me, the takeaway isn?t so much about the healing of the job market as it is about the beginning of an attitude adjustment for this country,? Paulsen said.

In a few weeks, entrepreneur Joe Wong will open a restaurant overseeing the Sacramento River in Redding, Calif. The eatery, View 202, will employ 100.

Farther south, the economy is only starting to improve in California?s Riverside and San Bernardino counties, an area that was clobbered when housing prices plunged.

?We still have large numbers of foreclosures on the books, and property values and sales taxes are also lagging behind projections,? says Tom Freeman, a Riverside County commissioner.

At least, Freeman says, businesses that sell goods overseas have been a bright spot.

In downtown Indianapolis, Windsor Jewelry hired a part-time worker for the holidays, then made him full time as demand held up. Owner Greg Bires says he might hire another person.

Business is a little steadier now. Still, rising gold prices have pinched the company.

?That?s been the biggest problem ? just not knowing what tomorrow was going to bring,? Bires says. ?So we?ve been kind of afraid to make any major changes.?

Job seekers still face tough odds. There are still more than four unemployed Americans, on average, for every job opening. In a healthy economy, by contrast, that ratio would be roughly 2-to-1.

In Buffalo, NY, Rosanne DiPizio, vice president of her family?s DiPizio Construction, says there isn?t enough work for her company to justify hiring. It relies mostly on government road-construction contracts. And governments have been cutting back.

?We will employ more if we have more work,? she says. ?It?s that simple.?

Jeff Searcy says fewer people are showing up at a support group for job hunters in Charlotte, NC Searcy isn?t sure why. The area is suffering from 9.9 percent unemployment, far above the national average.

?We know it?s not because everyone has found a job,? Searcy says.

?After you?ve been to 10 lectures on networking, how much more can you learn??

Aaron Cruz of Indianapolis says that while hiring has picked up, there?s a catch: Landing a job can mean accepting part-time work or a pay cut.

Cruz lost his job as a truck driver in December 2008. He didn?t find full-time work again until last June.

His old job paid $23 an hour; his new one, $14.

Associated Press business writers Christina Rexrode and Matthew Craft in New York, Tom Murphy in Indianapolis and Joshua Freed in Minneapolis contributed to this report.

TEN OUT of 30 different supplement pills tested last year in Nicosia and Limassol were found to contain dangerous and banned substances, and the state has still not acted on it, the House Health Committee heard yesterday.

The alarming news was revealed by the head of the Cyprus Anti-Doping Authority, Michael Petrou.

“Among our duties is to ensure the safety of supplements, so we carried out our own investigation,” Petrou told MPs. “We checked 30 supplements in the Limassol and Nicosia districts and found 10 containing substances that are very dangerous for human health.”

He said the message was immediately relayed to the Health Ministry, as well as the police. “However, over a year has passed and we have heard nothing back. We are seeking a law amendment to bring the situation under control.”

Petrou said there were many cases where athletes were forced to quit or even ended up in hospital, after consuming dodgy supplements.

The Health Ministry’s permanent secretary, Dionysis Mavronicolas, said the ministry was especially sensitised on the issue, which was why it added some stricter provisions in the harmonising law that was passed.

“But the EU regulations make our task for better control over the matter harder,” said Mavronicolas.

He said his ministry was in the process of preparing an information campaign, to help educate children and their parents on the hidden dangers in taking supplements.

It was explained that supplements approved by the state were only sold at chemists and by approved specialists, such as dieticians and doctors. Consumers are being warned to check the small-print and they are not even safe from advertised supplements bearing a so-called EU stamp of approval.

It was also revealed that a lab was uncovered in Nicosia suburb Latsia, which was producing supplements containing ephedrine – a harmful, addictive substance, used as a stimulant and to suppress the appetite.

“These banned substances have so many side effects; they can even lead to death,” a spokesman for the Cyprus Association of Sports and Medicine, said. “We found a 12-year-old schoolboy had been taking 14 different types of supplements, which his parents had provided by purchasing them online. So we are definitely in favour of an information campaign,” he said.

AKEL deputy Irini Charalambidou, whose party tabled the issue for discussion, slammed the state’s lacklustre checking system and even accused the Health Services of recently approving a container of supplements, which were later found to contain banned substances.

“When this same matter was discussed four years ago, the former Health Minister ordered an investigation into why the Health Services hadn’t found these dangerous supplements; instead. They were only found spotted by the Anti-doping Authority,” she said. “I want to know the outcome of this investigation.”

The Committee had to interrupt due to lack of time, committing to continue the discussion next week.

The ministry’s response to Charalambides’ query, as well as those of other MPs, will be submitted in the next meeting.