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The automaker said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that the deal would be part of an agreement with the Treasury Department in which the government would assume at least half of GM’s debt in exchange for company shares. GM will send the information to shareholders currently holding a total of 610.5 million outstanding shares.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters Wednesday that an internal report will probably be completed this week.

“We have no plans to release them,” an aide to President Obama told The Post, refusing to comment further.

The sole purpose of the secret photo-op, which sent thousands of New Yorkers running for cover, was to take new publicity shots of the presidential jet over the city.

“The photos . . . are classified — that’s ridiculous,” Councilman Peter Vallone Jr., said.

Russia, which fought a war with Georgia last year, denied any involvement and said President Mikheil Saakashvili was trying to shift the blame for his domestic problems.

Georgia’s opposition said the incident was “a show” to deflect attention from protests against the president.

Saakashvili called the rebellion at the Mukhrovani tank base a “serious threat.” Police kept reporters at a distance and it was not clear how many of the 500 soldiers there were involved.

About three hours after news broke of a military uprising, around 30 tanks and armoured personnel carriers entered the base, followed later by Saakashvili and the ministers of defence and interior, a Reuters reporter said.

The Alex Jones Channel, started by a fan but since embraced as the “official” Alex Jones micro-site on You Tube, has routinely featured in the website’s most popular ranking charts and has collectively attracted millions of views for videos painstakingly catalogued and uploaded over the past two years.

Those videos are now completely gone after You Tube bosses deleted the channel, primarily because the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette complained that Alex Jones had shown a computer print out of one of their articles about the Poplawski cop killer incident last month.

The truth is that agriculture is a relentless assault against the planet, and more of the same won’t save us. In service to annual grains, humans have devastated prairies and forests, driven countless species extinct, altered the climate, and destroyed the topsoil–the basis of life itself. Keith argues that if we are to save this planet, our food must be an act of profound and abiding repair: it must come from inside living communities, not be imposed across them.

A prototype floating nuclear power station being constructed at the SevMash shipyard in Severodvinsk is due to be completed next year. Agreement to build a further four was reached between the Russian state nuclear corporation, Rosatom, and the northern Siberian republic of Yakutiya in February.

The 70-megawatt plants, each of which would consist of two reactors on board giant steel platforms, would provide power to Gazprom, the oil firm which is also Russia’s biggest company. It would allow Gazprom to power drills needed to exploit some of the remotest oil and gas fields in the world in the Barents and Kara seas. The self-propelled vessels would store their own waste and fuel and would need to be serviced only once every 12 to 14 years.

In addition, designers are known to have developed submarine nuclear-powered drilling rigs that could allow eight wells to be drilled at a time.

Bellona, a leading Scandinavian environmental watchdog group, yesterday condemned the idea of using nuclear power to open the Arctic to oil, gas and mineral production.

“It is highly risky. The risk of a nuclear accident on a floating power plant is increased. The plants’ potential impact on the fragile Arctic environment through emissions of radioactivity and heat remains a major concern. If there is an accident, it would be impossible to handle,” said Igor Kudrik, a spokesman.

Environmentalists also fear that if additional radioactive waste is produced, it will be dumped into the sea. Russia has a long record of polluting the Arctic with radioactive waste. Countries including Britain have had to offer Russia billions of dollars to decommission more than 160 nuclear submarines, but at least 12 nuclear reactors are known to have been dumped, along with more than 5,000 containers of solid and liquid nuclear waste, on the northern coast and on the island of Novaya Zemlya.

After down-to-the-wire negotiations did not produce millions of dollars in union concessions, the Times Co. said that it will file today a required 60-day notice of the planned shutdown under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification law.

The company and union had set a deadline of midnight last night to forge an agreement. But negotiations continued until 8 a.m. and the company fashioned agreements with the unions representing mailers and drivers during the extended talks, the Associated Press reported. However, talks with other unions, including the Boston Newspaper Guild, are expected to continue later this week.

The threatened shutdown could amount to a negotiating ploy to extract further union concessions, since the notice does not require the Times Co. to close the paper after 60 days.
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But it puts the unions under fierce pressure to produce additional savings; the Boston Newspaper Guild promptly called the step a “bullying” tactic by the company.

Some industry observers have expressed skepticism that Times Co. Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. would want his legacy to include the shuttering of the Globe, which his company bought in 1993.

But the Times Co. itself is under strong financial pressure. It recently mortgaged its new Manhattan headquarters, borrowed $250 million from a Mexican billionaire at 14 percent interest, laid off 100 newsroom staffers and cut salaries by 5 percent.

Globe management said in a toughly worded statement: “Filing the WARN notice is a difficult step that we would like to avoid. But, unfortunately, given the state of the negotiations, it is one we must be prepared to take.”

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UK financial regulators have rehearsed how a pandemic like the swine flu, now spreading from Mexico, will affect Britain. In the most detailed disaster planning exercise held anywhere in the world, more than 70 City firms, including HSBC and Norwich Union, secretly tested how the crisis would unfold over five months.

“In one sense, it’s one of the mildest shifts because most people on the planet have got some memory, have come across H1N1 viruses since 1978,” Oxford says.

Even though health officials are calling this new virus H1N1, that’s also the type of virus that’s in wide circulation today. And it has an interesting history. It was the dominant flu virus through the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s. Oxford says it disappeared in 1957, when it was displaced by another flu virus. But then a strain of H1N1 suddenly reappeared in 1977.

“Now where could it have come from?” he asks. “We reckon now, in retrospect, it was probably released accidentally from a laboratory, probably in northern China or just across the border in Russia, because everyone was experimenting with those viruses at the time in the lab.”

It was nothing malicious, Oxford believes, just some flu vaccine research that broke out of containment. The descendents of this virus are still circulating. He notes that most people who have encountered the newly emerged H1N1 virus seem to have developed only mild disease, and he speculates that’s because we have all been exposed to a distant cousin, the H1N1 virus that emerged in the 1970s.

Over seven tumultuous weeks of nationwide demonstrations and protests, beginning with the death of the sacked reformer, Hu Yaobang, on 15 April 1989 and ending with the movement’s violent suppression on 4 June, an estimated 100 million people across China demonstrated in support of political reform. The movement was inchoate, contradictory and politically confused but it remains the biggest peaceful pro-democracy movement in human history. For the millions who took part, life would never be the same again.

Last week I listened to a man in his 40s unburden himself of a secret he had carried for two decades. He was a student leader in a major provincial city, and although he was arrested in mid-June 1989, he was released after a month of enforced confessions. He moved to another city and eventually made a successful career. But for 20 years the burden of the hopes that were shattered on 4 June, and the apprehension that he could be targeted at any time by a regime that never forgets and rarely forgives, has weighed on his spirit. It is part fear, part depression, part rage.

Some are still in prison. Others, in mourning, are still harassed. A few campaign openly for a reversal of the Communist Party’s verdict that the movement was the work of “a small clique of counter-revolutionaries” who wanted to overthrow the party and the socialist system. Behind the few high-profile campaigners and dissidents is the much larger throng of those who still nurse memories too painful to discuss.