TWIN FALLS, Idaho • Chobani employees chanted “USA! USA! USA!” Tuesday as they waited for several members of the U.S. Olympic Ski and Snowboard Team to appear. Halfpipe ski competitors Aaron Blunck, 17, from Crested Butte, Colo., and Brita Sigourney, 24, of Carmel, Calif., were at Twin Falls’ Chobani yogurt plant to launch the company’s sponsorship of the ski team. The two athletes are heading to Sochi, Russia, to compete in the 2014 Winter Olympics, and a shipment of Chobani Greek yogurt will go with them.
Caught in a trade dispute with Russia, Chobani is donating the 5,000 cups of Greek yogurt originally intended for American Olympic athletes competing in Sochi, Russia, to food banks in New York and New Jersey. See our earlier story. "As a proud supporter of the Olympics and Team USA over the past four years, we're disappointed our athletes won't be able to enjoy Chobani while they compete in the games as we all hoped, and are deeply appreciative to everyone who tried to help get it there, especially Sens. [Charles] Schumer and [Kirsten] Gillibrand and various officials here at home," said Hamdi Ulukaya, founder and CEO of Chobani.
Soccer team owner Ersal Ozdemir made his pitch for an $87 million, state-financed stadium to a friendly audience of lawmakers Thursday. Several members of the House Ways and Means Committee thanked Ozdemir for investing in the North American Soccer League franchise Indy Eleven, which begins its inaugural season in April. While members had questions about the proposed financing of the 18,500-seat venue, they did not question its impact on other taxpayer-supported venues downtown.
Organizers of the Yacht & Brokerage Show have signed a contract to expand the 26-year-old show into an as-yet-unbuilt megayacht marina on Watson Island. Despite a decade of false starts, the Island Gardens project is slated to confirm financing this spring and begin dredging the marina by June, said Mehmet Bayraktar, the Turkish founder of the development company, Flagstone Property Group. If it can do that, next year’s show would have a 25-foot deep basin in which to erect floating docks for any number of yachts. The marina’s real docks would be built in time for the 2016 show, both sides said. 
To launch Chobani's new ad campaign focused on their all natural ingredients, they created a Super Bowl commercial featuring a discerning bear on the hunt for real, natural food. Then, their in-house agency went a step further by bringing that bear to life on the streets of NYC to see how people would react. 
Sierra Nevada Corp. announced recently it will launch its first unmanned orbital test fight in 2016, an effort meant to prove its Dream Chaser is capable of shuttling astronauts to and from space. The flight is currently scheduled to launch on Nov. 1, 2016 from Cape Canaveral, Fla., and will sit piggyback on a United Atlas 5 rocket. While the Dream Chaser’s first flight will be unmanned, the plan is to eventually shuttle astronauts into low-Earth orbit by 2017 using the private space plane.
Turkey's state-owned Halkbank is expected to continue processing payments for Iranian oil imports to Turkey, U.S. Treasury Undersecretary David Cohen said on Monday. "Halkbank has for some time been involved in handling oil payments for importing oil from Iran into Turkey and we expect that to continue," David Cohen, Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence told reporters. 
The boss of Coca-Cola has warned that if the world's youth unemployment problem is not solved, it could create severe social problems. Muhtar Kent, chief executive officer of Coca-Cola, told Bloomberg TV that if the issue is not resolved, the "social peace and mosaic" of the world could crack and everyone could be made "much worse off". Kent, speaking at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, also claimed there is a "huge mismatch" between what businesses need from employees and what universities are teaching students. 
SAN JOSE, Calif., Jan. 23, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Maxim Integrated Products, Inc. MXIM -1.64% reported net revenue of $620 million for its second quarter of fiscal 2014 ended December 28, 2013, a 6% increase from the $585 million revenue recorded in the prior quarter. Reported revenue included $35 million from Volterra. Excluding Volterra, revenue was flat compared to the prior quarter. 
