GM to Cut 21,000 U.S. Factory Jobs, Kill Pontiac, Try to Pay Government Debt with Stock… To Get More Bailouts
April 27th, 2009Via: AP:
General Motors Corp. said it will cut 21,000 U.S. factory jobs by next year, phase out its storied Pontiac brand and ask the government to take company stock in exchange for half GM’s government debt as part of a major restructuring effort needed to get more government aid.
The struggling automaker also said it will offer 225 shares of common stock for every $1,000 in notes held by bondholders as part of a debt-for-equity swap.
The annoucements came in a filing Monday with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
GM is living on $15.4 billion in government loans and faces a June 1 deadline to restructure and get more government money. If the restructuring doesn’t satisfy the government, the company could go into bankruptcy protection.
Dozens of CIA “Ghost Prisoners” Missing
April 27th, 2009Via: IPS:
At least three dozen detainees who were held in the CIA’s secret prisons overseas appear to be missing – and efforts by human rights organisations to track their whereabouts have been unsuccessful.
The story of these “ghost prisoners” was comprehensively documented last week by Pro Publica, an online investigative journalism group.
In September 2007, Michael V. Hayden, then director of the CIA, said, “fewer than 100 people had been detained at CIA’s facilities.” One memo released last week confirmed that the CIA had custody of at least 94 people as of May 2005 and “employed enhanced techniques to varying degrees in the interrogations of 28 of these.”
Former President George W. Bush publicly acknowledged the CIA programme in September 2006, and transferred 14 prisoners from the secret jails to Guantanamo. Many other prisoners, who had “little or no additional intelligence value,” Bush said, “have been returned to their home countries for prosecution or detention by their governments.”
But Bush did not reveal their identities or whereabouts – information that would have allowed the International Committee for the Red Cross to find them – or the terms under which the prisoners were handed over to foreign jailers.
The U.S. government has never released information describing the threat any of them posed. Some of the prisoners have since been released by third countries holding them, but it is still unclear what has happened to dozens of others, and no foreign governments have acknowledged holding them.
March 24, 1976: President Ford Orders Swine-Flu Shots for All
April 27th, 2009Via: Wired:
Ford was acting on the advice of medical experts, who believed they were dealing with a virus potentially as deadly as the one that caused the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic.
The virus surfaced in February at Fort Dix, New Jersey, where 19-year-old Pvt. David Lewis told his drill instructor that he felt tired and weak, although not sick enough to skip a training hike. Lewis was dead with 24 hours.
The autopsy revealed that Lewis had been killed by “swine flu,” an influenza virus originating in pigs. By then several other soldiers had been hospitalized with symptoms. Government doctors became alarmed when they discovered that at least 500 soldiers on the base were infected without becoming ill.
It recalled 1918, when infected soldiers returning from the trenches of World War I triggered a contagion that spread quickly around the world, killing at least 20 million people. Fearing another plague, the nation’s health officials urged Ford to authorize a mass inoculation program aimed at reaching every man, woman and child. He did, to the tune of $135 million ($500 million in today’s money).
Mass vaccinations started in October, but within weeks reports started coming in of people developing Guillain-Barré syndrome, a paralyzing nerve disease, right after taking the shot. Within two months, 500 people were affected, and more than 30 died. Amid a rising uproar and growing public reluctance to risk the shot, federal officials abruptly canceled the program Dec. 16.
In the end, 40 million Americans were inoculated, and there was no epidemic. A later, more technically advanced examination of the virus revealed that it was nowhere near as deadly as the 1918 influenza virus. The only recorded fatality from swine flu itself was the unfortunate Pvt. Lewis.
What Do You Call it When a Four-Week Civil Contingency Exercise, to Prepare for a Flu Pandemic, Has to Be Cancelled Due to the Outbreak of a Flu Pandemic? A “Sheer Coincidence”
April 27th, 2009This was in the Scotsman last week: Rehearsal of Flu Pandemic Set to Begin:
A FOUR-WEEK exercise to prepare Scotland for a flu pandemic is to start next week, it was announced yesterday.
The Scottish Government will be running the emergency exercise, called Cauld Craw, involving health boards, the ambulance services and other organisations who will be key to managing a severe outbreak of flu.
For several years experts have warned it is only a matter of time before a flu pandemic arrives.
Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill said: “Although there has been no change to the level of risk of a flu pandemic, an outbreak has been identified as one of the main risks Scotland could face.
Exercise Cauld Craw will test how ready we are and help us strengthen our plans for the future.”
And now…
Via: Times Online:
Ms Sturgeon also disclosed today that Cauld Craw – a four-week civil contingency exercise involving hospitals, ambulance services and other agencies to prepare the country for an eventual flu pandemic had been delayed because of the swine flu outbreak.
She told the Good Morning Scotland programme that Cauld Craw – Scots for Cold Throat – had been due “by sheer coincidence” to start this morning. “Obviously that has now been suspended,” she said.
Research Credit: CS
Baxter International Wants to Make Swine Flu Vaccine
April 27th, 2009Most people have already forgotten about this, or never knew about it in the first place: Baxter International “Unintentionally” Sent Flu Samples to Companies that Contained H5N1 Avian Flu.
And now back to our regularly scheduled programming.
Via: Chicago Sun Times:
Deerfield-based Baxter International Inc. has requested a sample of the swine flu virus so it can try to develop a vaccine.
Baxter spokesman Christopher Bona said the company has expertise in pandemic planning, research and development and manufacturing to rapidly develop potential flu vaccines.
“So when Baxter learned about the swine flu outbreak, the company requested a virus sample from the World Health Organization,” he said.
Baxter isn’t the only vaccine maker taking initial steps toward making shots against swine flu. GlaxoSmithKline Plc, based in London, has had conversations with WHO as well.
Bona said it’s premature to give any kind of time frame on how long it might take Baxter to develop a potential swine flu vaccine. But the company’s cell-based vaccine technology enables it to produce or manufacture vaccines in about half the time as conventional methods that use eggs. That effectively cuts production time to roughly 13 weeks from 26 weeks, once a vaccine is developed, he said.
Baxter has been developing a vaccine to protect against a potential bird flu pandemic. The vaccine, called Celvapan has received approval in Europe and is in clinical trials in the United States. Governments around the world have pandemic planning programs with Baxter. Some have stockpiled Celvapan or contracted to receive the vaccine if a bird flu pandemic breaks out.
Other companies that make flu vaccines include Novartis AG, of Basel, Switzerland, and Sanofi-Aventis SA, of Paris.
Revolutionary Espresso Book Machine Launches in London
April 27th, 2009Reading about something like this is fine, but I had to see it go:
Via: Guardian:
It’s not elegant and it’s not sexy – it looks like a large photocopier – but the Espresso Book Machine is being billed as the biggest change for the literary world since Gutenberg invented the printing press more than 500 years ago and made the mass production of books possible. Launching today at Blackwell’s Charing Cross Road branch in London, the machine prints and binds books on demand in five minutes, while customers wait.
Signalling the end, says Blackwell, to the frustration of being told by a bookseller that a title is out of print, or not in stock, the Espresso offers access to almost half a million books, from a facsimile of Lewis Carroll’s original manuscript for Alice in Wonderland to Mrs Beeton’s Book of Needlework. Blackwell hopes to increase this to over a million titles by the end of the summer – the equivalent of 23.6 miles of shelf space, or over 50 bookshops rolled into one. The majority of these books are currently out-of-copyright works, but Blackwell is working with publishers throughout the UK to increase access to in-copyright writings, and says the response has been overwhelmingly positive.
“This could change bookselling fundamentally,” said Blackwell chief executive Andrew Hutchings. “It’s giving the chance for smaller locations, independent booksellers, to have the opportunity to truly compete with big stock-holding shops and Amazon … I like to think of it as the revitalisation of the local bookshop industry. If you could walk into a local bookshop and have access to one million titles, that’s pretty compelling.”
From academics keen to purchase reproductions of rare manuscripts to wannabe novelists after a copy of their self-published novels, Blackwell believes the Espresso – a Time magazine “invention of the year” – can cater to a wide range of needs, and will be monitoring customer usage closely over the next few months as it looks to pin down pricing (likely to be around the level of traditional books) and demand. It then hopes to roll it out across its 60-store network, with its flagship Oxford branch likely to be an early recipient as well as a host of smaller, campus-based shops.
Monsanto Sues Germany Over GM Ban
April 26th, 2009Via: Food Production Daily:
Monsanto has filed a lawsuit against the German government after the EU member state banned planting of its genetically modified MON810 maize last week.
MON810 maize is genetically engineered to produce Bacillus thuringiensis, which is toxic to the corn borer pest. Permitted in Europe since 1998 for animal feed, it is marketed as a way to save farmers money on insecticides and other pest controls.
However German agriculture minister Ilse Aigner claimed last week that she had “legitimate reasons” to believe the maize to be a danger to the environment – and believes the Environment Ministry to agree with the view. Although MON810 has been permitted in Germany since 2005, she scrapped plans for 3,600 hectares (8,892 acres) to be planted in the eastern states for this summer’s harvest.
Now the biotech giant has hit back, according to a Reuters article, filing a lawsuit against the Germany government in the administrative court in Braunschweig, northern Germany.
The wire quotes a spokesperson for Monsanto as saying the ban is “arbitrary”. A clause in EU law does allow member states to impose such a ban, but Monsanto claims they can only do so once a plant has already been approved if new scientific evidence has come to light.
If the outcome of the lawsuit is in Monsanto’s favour, the cost to the German government has been estimated at between €6m and €7m.
Aigner, a member of the Christian Social Union, has denied that the decision to ban the MON810 plantings is politically motivated. She said the ban is an individual case, and should not be taken as an indication of future policy on genetically modified crops.
Other bans
Germany is not the only country to have banned MON810. France also invoked the clause on new scientific evidence that cast doubt over its safety last year.
However a review conducted by the European Food Safety Authority, requested by the European Commission, concluded that “in terms of risk to human and animal health and the environment, the provided information package does not present new scientific evidence that would invalidate the previous risk assessments of maize MON810”.
Other countries to implement bans are Hungary and Austria. Last month European ministers voted – for the fourth time – against forcing these countries to lift their bans, despite EFSA’s view.
U.S. Army Interpreter Who Witnessed Torture in Iraq Shot Herself with Service Rifle
April 26th, 2009Via: Independent:
It is possible that one of the victims of the United States’ torture policy is a young, devout Mormon woman from Arizona called Alyssa Peterson. She was a soldier who not only saw the rough interrogation methods that the US military used on Iraqi prisoners, but was deeply troubled by them. Some weeks after formally protesting about them to her superiors, and asking to be reassigned, she took her gun and killed herself. The cause of her death was kept secret for two years, and the mystery of what Peterson witnessed, and the content of the notes she made, still goes on.
It was in September 2003 at Tal-Afar air base, northern Iraq, that Specialist Peterson, serving with a military intelligence section of the 101st Airborne, came across interrogation methods very different from the ones she had known in training. An Arab-speaker, Peterson was assigned to work as an interpreter at interrogation sessions in a unit known as “The Cage”. After only two nights, she refused to take further part in the sessions and was reassigned. Then, on 15 September, she shot herself with her service rifle. A notebook recording her thoughts was found by her body. Its contents were blanked out in the subsequent official report.
Her family, in Flagstaff, Arizona, were told she had died from a “non-hostile weapons discharge”. It was only after an Arizona reporter, Kevin Elston, investigated, that the army revealed Peterson had killed herself. They refused to say what interrogation she objected to, and maintain that all documents relating to methods used at Tal-Afar have been destroyed.
GM Employee Stock Fund Dumps All Company Shares
April 26th, 2009Via: AP:
The manager of General Motors’ employee stock fund has sold off all remaining shares of the troubled auto maker, which is closing plants and slashing costs in a bid to avoid bankruptcy.
General Motors revealed in a regulatory filing late Friday that its employee stock-purchase plan has unloaded all shares of the company in favor of short-term and money market investments. The plan’s financial manager, State Street Bank and Trust Co., said it began selling off shares of the Detroit automaker in late March “due to the economic climate and the circumstances surrounding GM’s business.” GM disclosed the development in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
State Street said the General Motors Savings Plan now consists entirely of short-term, cash-based investments. By the end of May, the GM Common Stock Fund will be eliminated as an option for company employees, the investment manager said.
Flashback: Panasonic to Fly Home Workers’ Families “Well Ahead of Possible Confusion at the Outbreak of a Global Pandemic”
April 26th, 2009Remember this one from February?
Via: AFP:
Panasonic Corp. has ordered Japanese employees in some foreign countries to send their families home to Japan in preparation for a possible bird flu pandemic, a spokesman said Tuesday.
Family members of Japanese employees in parts of Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Russia, former Soviet states and Latin America will fly back to Japan by the end of September, Panasonic spokesman Akira Kadota said.
The firm decided to take the rare measure “well ahead of possible confusion at the outbreak of a global pandemic,” he said.
Eight people have contracted the H5N1 bird flu virus in China alone this year — five of whom died.
“The bird flu cases reported so far are infections from bird to human, but once an infection between human beings is reported, things can get chaotic with many other companies trying to bring back their employees,” Kadota said.
“We wanted to take action early before it gets difficult to book flight tickets,” he said.
The company did not say how many family members would return to Japan. Employees and their families in North America, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore will not be affected.
The H5N1 strain of the virus that is most dangerous to humans first emerged in Asia in 2003 and has since caused nearly 250 deaths, according to World Health Organisation figures.
Bird flu, or avian influenza, kills mainly birds but scientists fear it could mutate to jump from human to human, sparking a global pandemic.
Panasonic said last week it was cutting 15,000 jobs and closing dozens of plants worldwide as it braces to fall deep in the red due to the global economic crisis.
