Anational green-building program is being revised to put more emphasis on using energy wisely and fighting climate change. The changes are being made in the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program, or LEED.

BRISTOL Rather than get upset about his $350 electric bill, John Almany found a unique way pay it—in pennies. Almany said he and his brother Gary came up with the idea in January. After finding enough banks to supply the pennies, Almany delivered more than 29,000 to Bristol Virginia Utilities. “I thought I’d make light of the situation,“ Almany said. “Everybody gets mad, but there’s nothing anyone can do about it.“

Capital One Financial Corp., one of the largest employers in the Richmond area, is cutting costs by eliminating positions here and reducing the dividend it pays to shareholders by 87 percent. The credit-card and financial-services company is eliminating 35 full-time jobs in accounting and finance in the Richmond area, company spokeswoman Julie Rakes said yesterday. The jobs will be phased out by June and the work will be outsourced.

A patent-infringement lawsuit between tobacco companies Star Scientific Inc. and R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. could go to trial by May, but Reynolds is seeking to postpone the case. The U.S. Supreme Court yesterday declined to hear an appeal by Reynolds, which sought to overturn an appeals-court ruling in Star’s favor. Petersburg-based Star Scientific, a small manufacturer of smokeless tobacco products, filed the federal suit in 2001.

2) GlaxoSmithKline: $36.5 billion
  3) Novartis: $36.2 billion
  4) Sanofi-Aventis: $35.6 billion
  5) Roche: $30.3 billion
  6) Johnson & Johnson: $29.4 billion
  7) Merck & Co.: $26.2 billion
  8) Abbott: $19.5 billion
  9) Eli Lilly: $19.1 billion
  10) Amgen: $15.8 billion

McClatchy Co. is shedding an additional 1,600 jobs in a cost-cutting effort that has clipped nearly one-third of the newspaper publisher’s work force in less than a year. The latest reduction, announced yesterday, follows through on the company’s previously disclosed plans to lower its expenses by as much as $110 million over the next year as its revenue declines amid the recession.

A 45,700-square-foot XXI Forever store will open at Regency Square mall this year. Construction begins in June on the store, considered a mini-anchor tenant because it will take up almost an entire section of the mall’s interior space on two levels near the Sears store. XXI Forever is the larger flagship model of clothing retailer Forever 21 and For Love 21.

Drug giant Merck & Co. is buying Schering-Plough Corp. for $41.1 billion in a deal that gives Merck key new businesses, access to a promising pipeline of new products and the chance to further cut costs, including eliminating about 16,000 jobs. Merck hopes the cash-and-stock deal, which would vault it to the world’s No. 2 drugmaker, will help it better compete in an industry facing slumping sales, tough competition from generics and intense pricing pressures.

If a film was made about the owners of Movieland at Boulevard Square in Richmond, an apt title might be “Like Father, Like Son.“ Charles B. “Charley” Moss and his son, Ben, own and run a fourth-generation business that began in 1900 when Benjamin S. Moss emigrated from Austria and founded a chain of vaudeville houses in New York City.

Betty Johnson attends lots of regional and national trade shows for Bostwick Laboratories. When she needed folding table-top displays and other graphics for trade shows, she called Noreen Louthan, president of FrontLine Exhibits +.

A single check-box deep in the guts of the next version of Windows is giving Microsoft Corp. watchers a peek at how the software maker plans to keep European antitrust regulators from marring a crucial software launch. Windows 7, the successor to the much-maligned Vista, isn’t expected to reach consumers until next year, but more than a million people are testing early versions. Bloggers stumbled upon the ability to “turn off” Microsoft’s own Internet Explorer browser.

Microsoft Corp. has said marketing teams were hard at work fixing the company’s Web search image. As a brand, Live Search wasn’t working. But Kumo? What? Microsoft’s search team posted a screen shot of a redesigned search site, called Kumo, on its blog Tuesday. A leaked memo from the team’s technical leader, Satya Nadella, described Kumo.com as a test program that can be accessed only from computers on Microsoft’s network. The company confirmed the memo’s authenticity after it appeared on CNET News.

COVENTRY HEALTH CARE INC.

After three years of development, Boehringer Ingelheim Chemicals Inc. will start production soon at a $135 million expansion of its pharmaceutical plant in Petersburg. Most of the 100 jobs created with the opening of the new plant have been filled, company spokeswoman Amanda Tate said yesterday. The plant, which employs almost 500 people, typically has about five to 15 job openings per month, she said. A handful of jobs were listed on the company’s Web site yesterday for production and administrative positions.

After hibernating since last fall, shoppers may be carefully moving to restock their pantries and buy a few more necessities. Retailers released figures yesterday showing that sales kept falling in February, but not nearly as much as in January—possibly indicating that business could be stabilizing. But analysts say that’s hardly enough to call the beginning of a recovery.