Ohio city awaiting decision on Jeep Wrangler production

Ohio city awaiting decision on Jeep Wrangler production

TOLEDO

City leaders in Toledo still are waiting to find out if Jeep Wrangler production will stay in its longtime home.

The CEO of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles had said last year that he expected a decision by the end of June.

The automaker is considering moving the Wrangler assembly line out of Toledo so it can be made with a partial aluminum body. CEO Sergio Marchionne has said the challenges of keeping the Wrangler in Toledo include the cost of reconfiguring their current plant.

City officials tell The Blade newspaper that they don’t know when an announcement will be made.

Some futures trading pits are set to close

NEW YORK

Pete Meegan had every intention of going back to college, but then he got a summer job in the Chicago trading pits and fell in love with the “roar” of the floor, the excitement of “4,000 people yelling, ‘Buy! Buy! Buy!”’ and decided no more classroom for him.

That roar will soon go silent. Today, most futures pits in Chicago and New York, where frenzied buying and selling once helped set prices on dozens of commodities, are expected to close for good. Now the computer – faster, cheaper and not nearly as noisy – has taken over.

Not all futures pits are going away. In its February announcement about the closings, the owner of the exchanges said the pits where Standard and Poor’s 500 stock futures and options on futures are traded will remain open. Floor trading of stocks on the New York Stock Exchange, which is owned by a different company, won’t end, either.

Man shoots firework off top of his head and dies instantly

CALAIS, MAINE

A 22-year-old man who was drinking and celebrating the Fourth of July tried to launch a firework off the top of his head, killing him instantly, authorities said Sunday.

Devon Staples and his friends had been drinking and setting off fireworks Saturday night in the backyard of a friend’s home in eastern Maine, said Stephen McCausland, a spokesman for the state Department of Public Safety.

Staples, 22, of Calais, a small city on the Canadian border, placed a reloadable fireworks mortar tube on his head and told his friends he was going to light it, McCausland said. But his friends urged him to stop.

Staples’s brother Cody told the Daily News of New York that he was a few feet away when his brother lit the firework and was the first to come to his side after it exploded.

“There was no rushing him to the hospital. There was no Devon left when I got there,” said 25-year-old Cody Staples, who called it an accident.

In Montana on Saturday, a 32-year-old man was killed at a Billings home in a fireworks accident involving a mortar tube.

And in New Jersey, a 52-year-old man blew off a large piece of his left leg below the knee when he set off a tennis-ball sized firework in Leonia.

Infant found by road

PASADENA, MD.

A woman claiming to be the mother of an infant discovered in a car seat carrier on the side of the road in Maryland has been arrested.

Officials with the Anne Arundel County Police Department say Sandra Clara McClary is charged with child neglect and reckless endangerment after her 3-month-old daughter was found just before midnight in a scuffed carrier in Pasadena after a resident called to report the abandoned child.

Authorities say McClary left the baby on the side of the road. The baby was taken to a local hospital and is in good condition.

Associated Press