Waikele Golf Club changes owners

The parent of Waikele Golf Club is transferring ownership of the leeward Oahu links to a sister company.

The Waikele Golf LLC will take over the 18-hole club from Waikele Golf Club Inc. on Nov. 26, according to a filing with the state Department of Labor and Industrial Relations.

Both companies are wholly owned by Illinois-based Northbrook Corp. Northbrook is an affiliate of Amfac JMB/Hawaii Inc.

Waikele Golf LLC said it expects rehire all of the golf course's 29 full-time and 34 part-time workers.

ML Macadamia touts favorable court ruling

ML Macadamia Orchards LP, the partnership that grows nuts on more than 4,000 acres of Big Island land, has won a large part of its court argument with a San Francisco investment partnership that bought its macadamia marketing and distribution business, Mauna Loa Macadamia Nut Corp., in late 2000.

The publicly traded Orchards partnership said that it reached a settlement in which Mauna Loa last month paid Orchards $908,000, money that had been withheld last year in an argument over the quality of nuts. Mauna Loa, owned by the Shansby Group, also paid ML Macadamia Orchards $200,000 to defray legal expenses incurred by the partnership in the court fight to get money it believed it was owed.

The dispute had to do with interpretation of a purchase contract that ML Macadamia said had always required Mauna Loa to buy all the nuts the partnership produced, regardless of quality. Shansby-owned Mauna Loa argued it shouldn't have to pay for inferior nuts.

New safety regulations to take effect Jan. 1

The state will adopt the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration's revised injury and illness recording and reporting requirements effective Jan. 1.

The state Department of Labor and Industrial Relations' Hawaii Occupational Safety and Health Division will implement the requirements to "improve the tracking of occupational injuries and illnesses, which can be used by employers and employees to reduce accidents in the workplace," according to a statement. The division, also known as HIOSH, will use the recordkeeping data to focus resources on areas with the highest incidences of problems.

The revised requirements include simpler forms, provide employers more flexibility in compliance and increase employee privacy and involvement, according to the statement.

Exempt from the requirements are businesses with fewer than 10 employees and certain areas of retail, service finance, insurance and real estate which are classified as low-hazard.

A schedule of HIOSH training sessions in November and December is available at www.state.hi.us/dlir/hiosh, or by phone at 586-9131. Additional information is available on the federal OSHA site at www.osha.gov.

Japan trade surplus falls 33% during October

TOKYO >> Japan's customs-cleared trade surplus fell 32.9 percent in October from a year earlier, the Ministry of Finance said on Thursday, boding ill for an economy that looks like it is heading into a prolonged recession.

The ministry said the October trade surplus shrank to &YEN462.5 billion ($3.75 billion), in unadjusted terms.