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GM, facing a U.S. government-imposed deadline of June 1 to restructure or file for bankruptcy, is expected to send termination notices to up to 2,000 dealers — a third of its roughly 6,000 U.S. dealers, the sources told Reuters.

Chrysler, which filed for bankruptcy on April 30, will also tell up to 1,000 of its 3,189 U.S. dealers it is terminating their franchise agreements, according to the sources who asked not to be identified because the controversial closure plans have not been yet announced.

The moves to shut down auto dealerships underscores how the economic pain caused by the downward spiral of both automakers — now operating under U.S. government oversight — is spreading beyond their home base in Detroit.

It dwarfs the 497m euro fine levied on Microsoft in 2004 for abusing its dominant market position.

The Commission found that between 2002 and 2007, Intel had paid manufacturers and a retailer to favour its chips over those of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).

Intel has announced that it will appeal against the verdict.

“Intel takes exception to this decision. We believe the decision is wrong and ignores the reality of a highly competitive microprocessor market,” Intel chief executive Paul Otellini said.

“There has been absolutely zero harm to consumers. Intel will appeal,” he added.

The fine was welcomed by AMD, which had lodged complaints in 2000, 2003 and 2006.

“The EU decision will shift the power from an abusive monopolist to computer makers, retailers and above all PC consumers,” said Giuliano Meroni, AMD’s European president.

‘Sustained violation’

The Commission said that personal computer makers Acer, Dell, HP, Lenovo and NEC had all been given hidden rebates if they only used Intel chips.

It also found that Media Saturn, which owns Europe’s biggest consumer electronics retailer Media Markt, had been given money so that it would only sell computers containing Intel chips.

“Intel has harmed millions of European consumers by deliberately acting to keep competitors out of the market for computer chips for many years,” said Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes.

A total of 342,038 properties received a default or auction notice or were seized last month, RealtyTrac Inc. of Irvine, California, said today in a statement. One in 374 households got a filing, the highest monthly rate since the property data service began issuing such reports in 2005.

“What you’re seeing is the inevitable result of severe job losses,” Nicolas Retsinas, director of housing studies at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said in an interview. “Until we stem the job losses, we can expect to see continuing foreclosures.”

Unemployment is hampering the housing market as property prices fall. The U.S. jobless rate rose to 8.9 percent, the highest in more than a quarter century, the Labor Department said May 9. Home prices fell the most on record in the first quarter to a median $169,000 amid sales of foreclosure properties, the National Association of Realtors said yesterday.

“I think it was part of your past and our past, and the ISI and CIA created them together,” Zardari told the NBC news channel in an interview.

In the interview, which was given to the NBC on May 7, Zardari also accused the US of supporting the military rule of Pervez Musharraf who was alleged to be taking sides of the Taliban.

He disagreed with the popular belief in the US that the Pakistan military and intelligent services still have sympathies for the Taliban.

“I think General Musharraf may have had a mindset to run head and hand with the hound but certainly not on our watch. We don’t have a tough process at all,” Zardari said.

Asked about the influential role of the Pakistan army, Zardari said he is in control of everything in the country, including the military.

“The Parliament has final say. It’s the Parliament form of government, and I am a product of the Parliament,” he said.

The document, obtained by Cadena SER radio, says the team and the pirates remain in contact by satellite telephone.

It says that pirate groups have “well-placed informers” in London who are in regular contact with control centres in Somalia where decisions on which vessels to attack are made. These London-based “consultants” help the pirates select targets, providing information on the ships’ cargoes and courses.

In at least one case the pirates have remained in contact with their London informants from the hijacked ship, according to one targeted shipping company.

The pirates’ information network extends to Yemen, Dubai and the Suez canal.

The intelligence report is understood to have been issued to European navies.

“The information that merchant ships sailing through the area volunteer to various international organisations is ending up in the pirates’ hands,” Cadena SER reported the report as saying.

This enables the more organised pirate groups to study their targets in advance, even spending several days training teams for specific hijacks. Senior pirates then join the vessel once it has been sailed close to Somalia.

Captains of attacked ships have found that pirates know everything from the layout of the vessel to its ports of call. Vessels targeted as a result of this kind of intelligence included the Greek cargo ship Titan, the Turkish merchant ship Karagol and the Spanish trawler Felipe Ruano.

In each case, says the document, the pirates had full knowledge of the cargo, nationality and course of the vessel.

The national flag of a ship is also taken into account when choosing a target, with British vessels being increasingly avoided, according to the report. It was not clear whether this was because pirates did not want to draw the attention of British police to their information sources in London.

The Geneva-based agency was informed of the pending publication over the weekend by the author, a retired Australian virologist named Adrian Gibbs.

It scrambled to draw in researchers from leading human and animal influenza laboratories around the world in a bid to determine if the claim has merit and if it does, whether that changes the advice WHO gives member countries on the threat posed by the new H1N1 swine flu virus.

The WHO’s leading flu scientist said the consultation is still ongoing and a conclusion hasn’t been reached, but the weight of evidence so far suggests the theory isn’t correct.

“I think the preliminary analyses certainly suggest there are other explanations and that the explanation suggested by the author is not the best one,” Dr. Keiji Fukuda, acting assistant director general for health security and environment, said in an interview from Geneva.

Fukuda said at least one WHO collaborating centre for influenza, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, has done an extensive analysis of available genetic sequence data for swine influenza viruses. That work does not support the claim made by Gibbs, he said.

Researchers at Cambridge University who specialize in the evolution of influenza viruses also challenge the hypothesis, Fukuda said. “They also feel that there are alternate explanations for this.”

Bloomberg News reported Tuesday that Gibbs plans to publish online a scientific report saying the never-before-seen virus may have evolved in eggs.

Gibbs apparently claims that the virus bears the hallmarks of having undergone “accelerated evolution” such as what happens when flu viruses try to adapt to growth in eggs.

But the head of the CDC’s influenza division, Dr. Nancy Cox, said her labs and others cannot find evidence to support the claim that the virus has undergone accelerated evolution.

Italian influenza researcher Dr. Ilaria Capua said there is too little known about swine influenza virus evolution to make the claim in the first place.

Capua, who runs an international reference laboratory for avian influenza in Padua, said Gibbs argues that the virus had accumulated mutations known to be seen in laboratory manipulation of viruses, specifically growth in eggs.

But she said the same mutations have been noted in a swine flu virus isolated from a pig in Italy. “So it can occur spontaneously in nature.”

“There is not enough scientific evidence to build this reasoning,” Capua said. “This virus could have generated itself by many ways: In swine or in another host or God or laboratory manipulation or whatever. But we just cannot say.”

The experiments, which also examined the potential of heart rhythms to authenticate individuals, were conducted under an EU-funded inquiry into biometric systems that could be deployed at airports, borders and in sensitive locations to screen out terrorist suspects.

Another series of tests fitted a “sensing seat” to a truck to record each driver’s characteristic seated posture in an attempt to spot whether commercial vehicles had been hijacked.

Details of the Humabio (Human Monitoring and Authentication using Biodynamic Indicators and Behaviourial Analysis) pilot projects have been published amid further evidence of biometric technologies penetrating everyday lives.

The Foreign Office plans to spend up to £15m on fixed and mobile security devices that use methods including “Facial recognition (two and/or three dimensional), fingerprint recognition, iris recognition and vein imaging palm recognition”.

Around the country, hospitals are now affiliated with more than 25 Wal-Mart clinics. The Cleveland Clinic has lent its name and backup services to a string of CVS drugstore clinics in northeastern Ohio. And the Mayo Clinic is in the game, operating one Express Care clinic at a supermarket in Rochester, Minn., and a second one across town at a shopping mall.

Many primary-care doctors still denigrate the retail clinics as cheap, unworthy competitors. But hospitals see the clinics as a way to reach more patients and expand their business. And they argue that as President Obama and Congress warn of a shortage of primary-care physicians, the hospital-linked retail clinics are filling a vital public need.

The walk-in centers help clear hospital emergency rooms of people seeking only basic medical care, like antibiotics for strep throat. But in contrast to E.R.’s, which in many states cannot legally turn away those unable to pay, the retail clinics typically serve only patients with insurance or money.

And even if $77 throat cultures or $30 physicals do not represent a vast new source of profit for hospitals, retail clinics can play a marketing role, helping establish relationships with customers who may eventually need more lucrative in-hospital care.

Consumers who use the clinics are often “exactly the customers that hospitals want — women of child-bearing age,” said Margaret Laws, a policy expert at the California Health Care Foundation. “The hospitals want to deliver babies,” she said.

Each day, the contents of the bags spill into the stainless steel hoppers of the receiving room. The diamonds are washed and sorted by size, clarity, shape and quality; then, rather than being sent to be sold around the world, they are wrapped in paper and whisked away to a vault — about three million carats worth of gems every month.

…

Russia quietly passed a milestone this year: surpassing De Beers as the world’s largest diamond producer. But the global market for diamonds is so dismal that the Alrosa diamond company, 90 percent owned by the Russian government, has not sold a rough stone on the open market since December, and has stockpiled them instead.

As a result, Russia has become the arbiter of global diamond prices. Its decisions on production and sales will determine the value of diamonds on rings and in jewelry stores for years to come, in one of the most surprising consequences of this recession.