ALASKA CLEARED TO BUY VIRGIN

Alaska Airlines has won government approval to buy rival Virgin America after agreeing to reduce its flight-selling partnership with American Airlines.

Parent company Alaska Air Group Inc. said Tuesday that it expects to close the $2.6 billion deal soon.

Seattle-based Alaska is the nation’s sixth-biggest airline, and California-based Virgin is eighth. Together, they will become the fifthbiggest. Both airlines provide service at Denver International Airport.

Wild Rose Marketing acquired. Chicagobased

C.A. Fortune has acquired Boulder’s Wild Rose Marketing, according to a statement from the company.

“Bringing Wild Rose Marketing into the C.A. Fortune family adds complete coverage of Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming and gets us closer to our goal of building the best-in-class national privately-held natural, specialty, and bakery/ deli agency in the country,” C.A. Fortune managing partner Tyler Lowell said.

Fortune said it plans to move the firm to Denver and that founder Rose Pierro will remain with the company in a leadership role

U.S. productivity up 3.1%. The productivity

of American workers rose in the July-September quarter at the fastest pace in two years while labor costs slowed after a big jump in the spring.

Productivity increased in the third quarter at a 3.1 percent rate, the Labor Department reported Tuesday. That followed three quarterly declines and was the best showing since the third quarter of 2014. Labor costs edged up at a 0.7 percent rate in the third quarter following a much faster 6.2 percent jump in the second quarter.

Google hits renewable energy goal. Google

says that beginning next year, it believes it will have amassed enough renewable energy to meet all of its electricity needs throughout the world.

That’s significant, given Google’s ravenous appetite for electricity to power its offices and the huge data centers that process requests for its services.

Google won’t be able to power its operations solely on wind and solar power. But it may be in a position to offset every megawatt hour of electricity supplied by a power plant running on fossil fuels with renewable energy.

Katrina-fraud verdict against State Farm upheld. A unanimous

Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld a jury verdict that State Farm Fire and Casualty Co. committed fraud against the federal government after 2005’s Hurricane Katrina.

The justices on Tuesday rejected claims by State Farm that the whistleblower case against the insurer should have been dismissed because its existence was leaked while it was supposed to be secret.

Sisters Cori and Kerry Rigsby filed the fraud lawsuit on behalf of the government after they said they witnessed State Farm shifting Mississippi claims to federal flood insurance that should have been paid by private wind insurance.

Lego names new CEO.

Lego announced Tuesday that its CEO, who has led the Danish company for 12 years, will be replaced by another company executive.

Lego said that 60year-old Bali Padda will take over Jan. 1 from Joergen Vig Knudstorp, who will head up a new entity within the group. Padda, the current chief operations officer, joined Lego in 2002.