Citizens' Voice from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania • A4

WBVOICEPAGES A04 I 120115 19:14 DULSKYAPRI MAGENTA BLACK DOW 17,888.35168.43 NASDAQ 5,156.31 47.64 2,102.63 22.22 10-YR T-NOTE 2.15 30-YR T-BOND 2.90 CRUDE OIL $41.85 .20 GOLD $1,063.80 EURO $1.0631 .0059 Strong month for GM, Toyota Volkswagen sales plummet day" deals as early as Halloween. Jeep offered zero percent financing for up to 75 months. GM teased savings of up to 20 percent of for its Buick, Chevrolet and GMC brands. Hyundai offered an extra $500 on the Sonata sedan between Nov 20 and Nov 30. Ford's U.S.

sales chief Mark LaNeve said sales got progressively stronger as November progressed, and the last day of the month was one of the best days this year. Deals can be dangerous for the auto industry because they cut into profits and lower vehicles' resale value. Honda's sales fell 5 percent, hurt by lower CR-V sales. But the biggest sales declines were at Volkswagen. VW's U.S.

sales plummeted almost 25 percent, hurt by the company's admission that its diesel vehicles cheated on emissions tests. November was a notoriously slow sales month until about five years ago, when car dealers joined other retailers in promoting Black Friday, according to Edmunds analyst Jessica Caldwell. Now, like Amazon, Wal-Mart and others, dealers started promoting "Black Fri ASSOCIATED PRESS FILE Volkswagen Passat pared with almost 32,000 a year ago. Diesels normally make up around 20 percent of the brand's sales. ASSOCIATED PRESS while Nissan's were up 4 percent.

Ford's sales were flat. BY DEE-ANN DURBIN ASSOCIATED PRESS DETROIT November used to be a slow month for U.S. car sales. Not anymore. Black Friday promotions some of which began well before Thanksgiving were expected to push last month's sales to near-record levels.

Car buying site Edmunds.com predicted sales of new cars and trucks will hit 1.33 million, eclipsing the previous November record set in 2001. General Motors' sales rose 1.5 percent over last November, while Toyota and Fiat Chrysler's each saw 3 per- Dennis Ferrell, a coal jVjjj DETROIT Volkswagen's emissions-cheating scandal took a serious bite out of the company's U.S. sales last month. The German automaker reported that November U.S. sales fell almost 25 percent from a year ago.

The company blamed the decline on stop-sale orders for diesel-powered vehicles that cheated on pollution tests. The VW brand sold 23,882 vehicles last month corn-cent sales gains. Hyundai's sales jumped 12 percent, miner of 15 years, watches DAVID GOLDMAN ASSOCIATED PRESS over conveyer belts carrying coal out of the Sally Ann 1 mine in Welch, W.Va. BRIEFS McDonald's in Dickson City closes DICKSON CITY After nearly 40 years of operation, the Mueller family closed Tuesday the Dickson City McDonald's Restaurant at 449 Business Route 6. After much deliberation the family, longtime franchisees in the area, decided to close the store.

"Although it was a very difficult decision to close our doors after over 40 years at our Dickson City location, we are so fortunate to have all of our employees relocating to one of our other restaurant locations," said owneroperator Christina Mueller-Curran. The Muellers operate two other McDonald's within a half mile of the closed site, Bell Mountain Village in Dickson City and Keyser Avenue, Scranton. This follows the closure of a restaurant in Birney Avenue in Moosic earlier this year. DAVID FALCHEK Group that fights obesity disbands NEW YORK A nonprofit funded by the Coca-Cola Co. to combat obesity is disbanding following revelations about the beverage maker's involvement with the group.

The Global Energy Balance Network said on its website Monday night that it is "discontinuing operations due to resource limitations." The decision was effective immediately. The group had previously said that it received an "unrestricted gift" from Coke and that the Atlanta-based soft drink giant had "no input" into its activities. But last week, The Associated Press reported on emails showing that Coke helped with the selection of the group's leaders, edited its mission statement and suggested content for its website. RV industry on rebound LOUISVILLE, Ky. After a long, bumpy ride, production of RVs has just about returned to where it was before the Great Recession put sales in the slow lane.

Overall recreational vehicle shipments from manufacturers to dealers a key measure of consumer demand are expected to increase 3.5 percent to 369,100 units in 2015, the Recreation Vehicle Industry Association said Tuesday at the start of an industry trade show in Louisville. Shipments are up for all kinds of RVs, from lessexpen-sive towable ones to standalone motor homes, it said. And the industry expects to ride the momentum into 2016, when total wholesale shipments are projected to reach 375,100. That would be the highest total since the pre-recessionary boom times a decade ago. ASSOCIATED PRESS CEOs' economic expectations sink WASHINGTON The economic expectations of leading U.S.

chief executives have dropped to the lowest level in three years amid concerns about taxes and the global economy, according to survey results released Tuesday. Reduced expectations for sales and capital spending over the next six months pushed down the quarterly economic outlook index from the Business Round-table, a trade association of CEOs of the largest U.S. corporations. It was the third straight decline for the index, which fell to 67.5 in the fourth quarter from 74.1 in the previous quarter, the group said. TRIBUNE NEWS SERVICE Coal is barely surviving in A Familiar struggle Central Appalachia's struggle is familiar to many rural regions across the U.S., where middle-class jobs are disappearing or gone and young people have no other choice than to leave to find opportunity.

But the problems are amplified in coal country, where these difficult economic and social conditions have gripped the region for decades and where there is hardly any flat land to build anything. BY JONATHAN FAHEY ASSOCIATED PRESS WELCH, WVa. The seams of coal in some of Eddie Asbury's mines in McDowell County are so thin workers can barely squeeze down them. They enter on carts nearly flat on their backs, the roof of the mine coursing by just a few inches in front of their faces. They don't stand up all day To keep his business operating with such a paltry amount of coal, Mr Asbury has to do everything himself.

He has no use for the shiny multimillion-dollar DAVID GOLDMAN ASSOCIATED PRESS Foreman John Dillon, a coal miner of 39 years, walks past piles of coal at the Sewell 'R' coal mine in Yukon, W.Va. mining machines on display this fall at the biannual coal show nearby His equipment is secondhand stuff that he repairs and refurbishes. The coal he and his workers scrape out of the mountain is washed and coal country ASSOCIATED PRESS prepared for sale in a plant Mr Asbury and a colleague built themselves. "It's how we survive," says Mr. Asbury 66, a miner since 1971.

Even coal is barely surviving in coal country and coal is about the only thing Central Appalachia has West Virginia is the only state in the country where more than half of adults are not working, according to the Census Bureau. It is tied with Kentucky for the highest percentage of residents collecting disability payments from Social Security according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. And the death rate among working-age adults is highest in the nation, 55 ment for serious diseases and then hiked prices. The cost of some newer medications has raised questions as well, and drug prices consistently rank among the top public concerns, according to opinion polls. Express Scripts announced its decision the same day a bipartisan report from the Senate Finance Committee concluded that Gilead Sciences put profit ahead of patients in pricing its breakthrough hepatitis treatment Sovaldi DAVID GOLDMAN ASSOCIATED PRESS Superintendent Jackie Rati iff holds coal running through a processing plant, in Welch, W.Va.

Big federal and state programs and initiatives, some dating from the Lyndon Johnson administration, have failed to help the region diversify its economy much beyond digging or blasting coal out of mountains. If anything is going to help the people of Appalachia, poverty experts and residents of West Virginia now say it's themselves: local entrepreneurs who know their communities and customers well, and are committed to them. "We need to have some urgency and look at other Please see COAL, PageA5 pharmacy benefits for customers like insurers and employers. It makes recommendations on drug coverage, and those customers can then customize the guidelines. Leaders of the HIV Medicine Association and the Infectious Diseases Society of America said in an email that they are urging other pharmacy benefits managers and health insurers to make the Imprimis option available as well.

percent higher the national average, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Now, the one main source for decent-paying work, the brutal life of coal, seems to be drying up for good. The thick, easy cheap coal is gone, global competition is fierce, and clean air and water regulations are increasing costs and cutting into demand. "There's a reluctant realization that this is different," says Keith Burdette, West Virginia's commerce secretary and head of the state's economic development office, of the latest coal bust. at $1,000 per pill.

The Express Scripts decision means that a cheaper alternative to Daraprim created by Imprimis Pharmaceuticals will now be available to about 25 million cus-tomers through its formulary What those customers pay will depend on their insurance coverage. That could mean prescriptions that come with a co-payment as low as $10 or $20 for the whole bottle of pills. Express Scripts manages alternative to Turing drug offered Low-cost BY TOM MURPHY ASSOCIATED PRESS The nation's biggest pharmacy benefits manager is muscling back into the debate over soaring drug costs by promoting a less-expensive alternative to a life-saving medicine with a list price of $750 per pill. Express Scripts Holding Co. said Tuesday that it will make a treatment for the rare infection toxoplasmosis that costs $1 per pill available on its biggest formulary or list of covered drugs.

Daraprim, the drug that costs $750 per pill, comes from Turing Pharmaceuticals, which stirred outrage among doctors, patients and politicians when it bought rights to the pill earlier this year and then jacked up the price. The 62-year-old drug had been priced at $13.50 per pill before that. Other drugmakers have also recently purchased the rights to old, cheap medicines that are the only treat.