Obama's choice of rival Hillary Clinton for secretary of state shows his political wisdom. And the vetting suggests the Clintons -- surprise! -- have little to hide.
In the space of a few hours, Donnie Walsh, the Knicks’ president, traded Jamal Crawford to the Golden State Warriors and struck a deal to send Zach Randolph to the Los Angeles Clippers.
Basement hackers and amateur mathematicians are competing to improve the program that Netflix uses to recommend DVDs — and to win $1 million in the process.
Is it really possible that G.M. has not yet begun drawing up contingency plans for a bankruptcy filing — as its chief executive told Congress this week?
by By PETER BAKER and HELENE COOPER at 18:59 PM, 11/21/2008
Hillary Rodham Clinton will give up her Senate seat and accept the nomination for secretary of state after talks with President-elect Barack Obama about her role, two confidants said.
Many college football rivalries are conducted with a religious fervor, but when Utah and B.Y.U. play, as they will on Saturday, the fervor has religion in its roots.
President-elect Barack Obama’s reported selection for two major cabinet positions suggest that he is surrounding himself with pragmatists rather than ideologues.
by By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS at 18:48 PM, 11/21/2008
The food products company said that strong sales of products like frozen meals bolstered second-quarter profit by 22 percent as consumers cooked more meals at home.
G.M. executives are using the Chevrolet Volt as the centerpiece of their case to a skeptical Congress that their business plan for a turnaround is strong.
President-elect Barack Obama spoke via video on Friday to European Olympic committees at a meeting in Istanbul in an effort to sell Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Summer Games.
Annika Sorenstam ended her career too soon, with just the 10th missed cut in 303 tournament starts ushering her final official round to a close on Friday.
As the N.F.L. players prepare to elect a new executive director for their union, they should seek the advice of Marvin Miller, the former Major League Baseball Players Association boss.
Geoffrey K. Pullum,
Professor of General Linguistics in the School of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences
University of Edinburgh has written a marvelous verse, in the style
of Dr. Suess, that explains the proof that the Halting Problem is
undecidable in a clear and humorous way. The verse is called Scooping the Loop
Snooper (PDF). If only all of Computational Theory were this
easy to understand!
Noah Van Niel, last year’s starting fullback, will be on the field again Saturday belting out the national anthem before the Crimson’s annual game against Yale.
: Photo courtesy San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
What are the social consequences when science allows us to see things that had previously been invisible?
Scientists have revealed microscopic life, nanoscale molecules and galaxies billions of light-years away. These images have revolutionized the disciplines in which they were made, but they also transformed the public's imagination, giving common people new things to think and dream about.
The intertwined social, scientific and artistic impacts of 19th century photography is the subject of a new exhibit, Brought to Light Photography and the Invisible, 1840-1900, at San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art.
This gallery looks at some of the more astounding images and stories from the exhibit.
Left:
Hermann Schnauss, Electrograph of a brass wire gauge, 1900 As the men of industry attempted to harness electricity for profit, the public — which knew electricity primarily as lightning — had to be persuaded that this powerful, invisible force was something to invite into their homes. Electrographs like this one, produced by exposing a photographic negative with electricity, helped the public visualize and understand the mysterious electromagnetic waves that scientists were discovered populating the air.
"This is a moment where [scientists] are trying to harness electricity for practical purposes, but the general public was kind of skeptical," said Corey Keller, curator of the Brought to Light exhibit. "Their experiences with electricity were generally through lighting, which they knew could burn things down and kill you, if you weren't careful. So a great deal of time and money was spent trying to make electricity understandable and approachable."
: Photo courtesy SFMOMA
In the early history of photography, capturing motion was out of the question. The photographic negatives of the time were not sensitive enough to light to be exposed over the short time periods required to capture fast action.
"If you look at 19th century cityscapes, you would think that Armageddon had taken place. You don't see any people," Keller said. "It's not that they aren't there, it's just that they don't show up because they walked through too quickly."
But by the end of the 1870s, more sensitive negatives brought motion within reach. Edward Muybridge was one of the first photographers to take advantage of the new abilities.
In this photo, we see one of Muybridge's motion studies: two men boxing in jock straps.
Historians note that despite the scientific trappings, Muybridge's work was just art; it did not produce good scientific evidence about bodies' movements.
: Photo courtesy SFMOMA
The ability to capture motion in photography opened up a previously invisible source of scientific data. Etienne-Jules Marey was a scientist trying to understand biomechanics, or the motion of the body, and he used photography to acquire information he couldn't get any other way, as in this photograph of a man on a stationary bicycle.
"What happens in this picture is that each split second exposure is layered on top of each other, so you get the sense of the full arc of the motion," Keller said. "And he's put a piece of tape down the arm and torso and the leg where the joints articulated, so as the leg went around and around the whole pedal stroke is outlined."
This wasn't just to create beautiful pictures; Marey was on a committee in France to improve the ergonomics of the newly popular bicycle.
"So by studying the motion of the leg, he would have been able to improve the engineering of the bicycle," Keller concluded.
: Photo courtesy SFMOMA
While forward-looking scientists like Marey were using photography to understand, for example, how animals moved, as in this photo, others were less enthused about this new technology.
In particular, photographers' ability to capture images beyond what the human eye could perceive called into question an important tenet of 19th century science.
"What's amazing is that this is a moment where empirical observation in science is the most important thing, that idea of objective observation. And this kind of photography proved how completely useless a human observer was," said Keller. "So you end up with this photographic data that cant' be corroborated in any other way. It exists independently of any kind of perceptual experience."
When William Roentgen announced his discovery of X-rays, a photo of his wife's hand accompanied his paper as it made its way into the scientific community.
Over the next few years, images like this one of a skeletal hand with the ring came to symbolize X-rays. Practically, the hand is relatively flat and therefore easy to X-ray, but it was the aesthetics and grim-reaper symbolism that Keller said hit a nerve with the upper classes.
"It became fashionable to have an X-ray portrait taken of your hand," she said, calling attention to x-ray hand portraits of the last tsar of Russia and his wife.
: Photo courtesy SFMOMA
The discovery of X-rays also touched off a lower-brow commercial craze. Within three months, DIY X-ray kits were available on the market. Photographers, who had access to most of the tools needed to make the images, began to train this new form of light on just about anything that might be beautiful.
"They were X-raying everything just to see what it looked like," Keller said.
One stunning example is this X-ray of a foot in a shoe from 1897. In fact, the connection between X-rays and extremities has remained strong. Even into the 1960s, shoe stores kept X-ray machines in their lobbies, both as marketing tools and to help their salesmen fit their patrons' feet correctly.
: Photo courtesy SFMOMA
Throughout the second-half of the 19th century, photographers strived to unite the camera with the telescope. The moon, in particular, held a lasting fascination for astronomers and artists alike.
Imaging the moon, after all, was an immensely difficult task. The Earth rotates and the moon is actually a relatively faint object. It wasn't until John Adams Whipple and George Phillips Bond figured out how to rotate their camera ever so slightly to cancel out Earth's movement that simple images of our only satellite became possible.
What's interesting is that despite the fascination with creating pictures of the moon, like this striking image created in Spain, the images didn't add much for science beyond what detailed drawings could already do.
: Photo courtesy SFMOMA
If you wanted close-up photos of the moon any time before the Apollo missions, you were pretty much out of luck. Unless, of course, you built incredibly detailed plaster models of lunar craters and then snapped carefully lit pictures of them. And that's exactly what an engineer and astronomer did in 1874 to tremendous acclaim.
James Nasmyth, the inventor of the steam hammer, and James Carpenter, then at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England, released a hugely successful book, The Moon: Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite, illustrated by their incredible moon mock-ups. The august journal Nature gave the book a rapturous review.
"No more truthful or striking representations of natural objects than those here presented have ever been laid before his readers by any student of Science," the reviewer wrote.
But what's really appealing about the images isn't their "truthfulness" but their "truthiness."
"Astronomers were perfectly aware of what they were looking at," Keller said. "But they felt that because they were photographed, it added a layer of authenticity to the undertaking that simple drawings didn't have."
: Photo courtesy SFMOMA
At the other end of the scale of size from the moon, other photographers were pushing their discipline into the microscopic realm. They had to devise new emulsion chemistries and types of equipment to capture clear images of tiny things.
Leading the charge was Auguste-Adolphe Bertsch, who worked to overcome any challenge that scientists threw at him. Unfortunately, he died during social unrest in France in 1871, and his images lay in a photographic archive until Keller brought them to the US for the exhibition.
: Photo courtesy SFMOMA
Even as they solved technical challenges, the photomicrographers faced social resistance. The idea of representing a specific living thing instead of a generalized abstraction of an organism forced scientists to let go of long-held notions about their discipline.
"Prior to the 19th century, the scientific illustrations tend to represent a type, an ideal. So if you were going to do a picture of a flower, for example, the illustrator would look at 20 flowers and then take the common features and make an ideal flower," said Keller. "So, if that particular one happens to have a defective petal or something peculiar to it, you never really know: Does that photograph substitute then for that type of flower in general, or does it only represent that one specimen?"
While it may have posed a challenge for scientists of the 19th century, it's the unique nature of each photograph taken during this early period that wows us, even now.
Michael Moore was a recent guest on Larry King talking about the auto bailout. Moore's terrific documentary, "Roger & Me," targeted the auto companies in 1989 while they closed plants and laid off workers. Moore tells Larry King that in the movie when the GM representative said that 30,000 people could be laid off in Flint, he thought it was a joke. Years later, it came true. Moore says he's conflicted, as many of us are, about what to do. He doesn't have any confidence in the leaders of this industry.
Moore doesn't want to see the loss of more jobs in the US auto industry. He also doesn't trust the current management teams that got them into this mess. Hard to argue against either position.
I don't know if I can go so far as Moore to believe that the government could do a better job running these companies. However, it's clear that this manufacturing capacity could be a great asset if applied to an overhaul of the US transportation system.
I liked Michael Moore as the bumbling everyman in Roger & Me and I've liked his movies less and less as they've become strident setups. I was happy to see Moore in this interview get back to something like his old self. It's somehow personal again.
Since this interview, the CEOs of the Big Three had a humbling day on Capitol Hill, unable to defend their use of separate corporate jets to bring them to the hearing and more importantly, unable to articulate what they would do with the money they're asking for. They've supposedly gone back to Detroit to work on a proposal and muster the courage to go back to Washington in December.
If you were considering running your MacBook or MacBook Pro without a battery, think again. Aside from the obvious problem of causing a power interruption by bumping the easily dislodged MagSafe connector, Gearlog reports that running without a battery significantly hurts performance.
VMware Fusion. The most seamless way to run Windows on your Mac.
Backed by nearly a decade of proven virtualization technology.
Try VMware Fusion today for free, or order online for only $79.
Visit: <http://www.tidbits.com/about/support/vmware-fusion.html>
If you've been reading my blog you know I'm a big fan of the Fresh Air podcast, have been for a long time, since before it was a podcast. I like the way the host Terry Gross interviews people, and because the show is so good, and she's basically a fair interviewer, and a lot of people listen to it, she gets very good, very interesting guests. All around, a lot of positive flow around the show, and I'm a fan. Or I should say I was a fan until three days ago, since then I've not been able to listen to the show, I'm so disillusioned with Ms Gross. Let me explain.
First, what happened three days ago was she interviewed William Ayers, the man made famous by the McCain-Palin campaign as the supposed terrorist who President-elect Obama "palled-around" with. Here's an MP3 of the interview. Before you judge my judgement, listen to the whole thing. It's necessary to get a full appreciation of what I'm going to say.
In this interview, she used the tough "gotcha" style interview, every question designed to evoke a confession. Ayers answered each question like a skilled politician, and walked a very fine line, and held back a lot of things I'm sure he would have liked to say.
In the end she asked Ayers if he wanted to apologize for what he did, if he would be willing to take the "unrepentent" part off the label "unrepentent terrorist," and he refused, and I'm glad he did.
These are complicated issues, and to deal with it in a balanced way would require probably a few books, written from different perspectives. We don't today have a balanced view of the struggle in the US over Vietnam. Not when one person is singled out this way, when so many others are responsible for so much more death and destruction.
The reason I like FreshAir is she doesn't normally do gotcha. Her style is to ask leading questions to get her subjects to tell their own stories. She may ask challenging questions, but only ones her subject wants to answer. Since the Ayers interview she's returned to her original style, interviewing a comedian and a book author. But I can't help but wonder if each of these people has something to answer for too, and she's not asking about any of that.
I definitely sympathize with Ayers, I probably wouldn't have minded if she probed John McCain this way about his involvement in Vietnam. I'm sure he killed a lot more people than Ayers did. And that led me to the other, larger reason I'm unhappy with the interview -- she might not want someday to have someone say she "palled around" with an unrepentent terrorist who attacked his own country. In other words, she may be using us to protect herself. If that's the reason she drove Ayers so hard, I would much rather she had skipped the interview altogether.
After all we've heard about him that's bad, didn't he deserve one chance to tell his story without being presumed guilty? And didn't we deserve a chance to hear that? FreshAir is the place I would have thought we would have gotten that story, and I think there's a good chance that cowardice prevented it. It certainly appears that way, and in journalism, it's hard to respect someone who allows such an appearance to persist.
It's going to be real hard for her to keep me as a fan. Either she adopts the gotcha style and goes after everyone, from clowns to reporters, and I'll tune out for the same reasons I don't listen to other reporters who use that style; or she stays with the softball style I like, but I'll never be able to stop thinking of her as a hypocrite for being so gutless with Ayers.
Online photo processors and drugstore kiosks are fine choices for printing your personal photos, but if you want to take photo printing matters into your own hands, there’s no beating owning your own inkjet printer. We’ll tell you what to look for if a photo printer is on your shopping list.
The Montclair High School football team has become good at coping, winning four of five games since the death of Ryne Dougherty, a 16-year-old linebacker who was hurt while making a tackle.
Reuters - U.S. mobile service provider Sprint Nextel Corp said on Friday that the president of its CDMA business unit, John Garcia, is leaving the company.
Analysis Judging from some of the comments responding to our story about security sloppiness on Barack Obama's website, it's clear a discussion about the risks of third-party javascript is in order. Contrary to what many commentators believe, widgets used by Google Analytics and similar services do represent a threat, especially if you're a high-profile target.…
The chancellor, Alistair Darling, is preparing to admit that tax will need to rise after the next election as borrowing projections emerged showing the public finances in a worse state than previous estimates had shown. Darling will use his pre-budget report on Monday to say that "adjustments" will have to be made, though it is unclear whether these will be slated for 2010 or 2011.
Yesterday the Treasury refused to deny reports that its officials were putting borrowing in the region of £120bn, with one aide saying the figure was "not far off the mark". The new figure is much more than the £90bn many thought Darling would announce in his report.
Treasury officials are reported to have described the effect the £120bn would have on the economy as a "mammoth shock" as tax revenues continue to plummet and the costs of increased unemployment are borne by the state.
On Monday, Darling will have to show that the government has a strategy for controlling annual borrowing to soothe international markets and remove conditions that might otherwise see the Bank of England feel the need to raise interest rates.
A Treasury aide told the Guardian: "What Alistair will do on Monday is announce a fiscal stimulus package and lay out how he's going to pay for it."
The chancellor's admission may also serve to claim for the government some of the intellectual territory the Conservative leader staked this week when he ended a year-old commitment to match Labour party's spending plans for the year 2010-2011. Explaining his position on Tuesday, David Cameron said he believed the British people would be suspicious of tax cuts and public spending programmes without obvious funding.
It was not clear what form the tax rises might take but a Treasury aide described as "rubbish" a suggestion that VAT might rise from 17.5% to 22.5%.
This week the prime minister's efforts in tackling the economic downturn were reflected in improved polling figures, leading to speculation that No 10 was gearing up to call an election.
Speaking on Jeremy Vine's Radio 2 programme yesterday, Gordon Brown refused to be drawn on his improved standing and batted away talk of a election. There has been talk of a poll in the spring when the weather improves or in June 2009 when local and European elections are scheduled. Yesterday Brown said all speculation could be "discounted".
Downing Street has been quick to nip the rumour in the bud, with ministerial special advisers briefed this week by senior No 10 aides that an election was not "remotely on our minds". They are keen to prevent a rerun of last summer which saw Brown's political standing damaged by his decision not to call an election after weeks of speculation.
In the same interview, Brown admitted that he had been wrong to promise an end to "boom and bust."
Asked if the pledge, had been a mistake, he said: "Yes. Of course politicians make mistakes and I've got to be honest that we've made mistakes."
But he insisted the current downturn was different to that experienced under the last Conservative government. "The boom and bust we were talking about then was 15% interest rates - and actually at one point interest rates went to 18%. We've got a quite different set of problems now.
"We've got low inflation, low interest rates and we've got a downturn and we need confidence to be rebuilt in the economy. That's why I'm trying to get the banks to start lending again."
Pressure was piled on the Treasury team drawing up Monday's plan by confirmation yesterday of poor October public sector net borrowing figures. Public sector net borrowing increased in the last month by £1.4bn. Borrowing was £3.1bn higher this year than in October 2007.
The figure for public sector net debt rose to £640.9bn or 42.9% of GDP largely down to the government's takeover of Bradford and Bingley at the end of September. Net borrowing has reached £37bn already - nearly as much as the £43bn forecast by the Treasury for the whole of the year. Government spending was higher than in the same month a year ago.
by Aidan Jones, Helen Pidd at 16:40 PM, 11/21/2008
He is one of the world's richest artists, who defied the credit crunch in September by auctioning a whole collection for £111m. But even Damien Hirst may not be immune to the economic climate - many of the workers who produce his works found themselves out of a job this week, the Guardian has learned.
On Thursday, up to 17 of the 22 people who make the pills for Hirst's drug cabinet series were told their contracts were not being renewed, according to two sources close to Science Ltd, Hirst's main art-producing company. Another three who make his butterfly paintings were also told they were surplus to requirements.
It is thought that amounts to approximately half of the London-based artists who work for Hirst. They are paid about £19,000 a year, sources said. In June 2007, Lullaby Spring, a cabinet filled with hand-painted pills, sold for £9.65m.
This year's Sunday Times Rich List valued the 43-year-old artist's wealth at £200m - but it was produced before September's sale at Sotheby's.
Yesterday Jude Tyrrell, a director of Science Ltd, confirmed jobs were going, but wouldn't be drawn on how many.
"As previously stated by Damien, he is finishing a number of bodies of works which is why temporary contracts (fixed term) have not been renewed. We have to be mindful of the current economic climate and how this may affect us in the future."
In July, Hirst said that he would stop making the spin and butterfly paintings, plus the medicine cabinets - a decision that was welcomed by many in the art world who worried about overproduction of these series.
But a source close to Science said that if the job losses were pre-planned, as indicated by Tyrrell's statement, the staff seemed unprepared for it on Thursday. "It was unexpected, especially after Hirst made a killing from the Sotheby's sale. The workers who will not have their contracts renewed can work their notice period into December, but I'm not sure how many will stay. They will need to find jobs quickly."
At Hirst's studio on Glengall Road in Peckham yesterday, where the pill cabinets and butterfly paintings are made, workers would not talk about the job losses. One woman, wearing the Hirst "uniform" of a red sweatshirt with a skull on the back of it (inspired by Hirst's £50m diamond sculpture For the Love of God), said she didn't know anything about it.
Another, at the Newport Street studio in Lambeth where the spot paintings are produced, said she had been told not to talk to the press.
Last week, Hirst admitted that art had probably become too expensive in recent years and said he welcomed the prospect of selling his work at cheaper rates in the present climate of recession.
Conrad Black, the disgraced British peer serving a 6½-year sentence in Florida for defrauding millions from his former media empire, has asked President Bush to grant him clemency before leaving the White House.
The US justice department has confirmed that it is considering the request. An agreement by the president could involve either pardoning the offence, which would erase the criminal record, or commuting it.
Black, 64, was chairman and chief executive officer of Hollinger International the third largest media empire of its day, for eight years. It included titles such as the Daily Telegraph, the Jerusalem Post and the New York Sun.
He quit the company in 2003 after he was found to have received millions of dollars in unauthorised payments. In 2007 he was convicted, with three other Hollinger executives, of four counts of fraud amounting to $6.1m (£4m) and of obstructing the course of justice. He began his sentence in March at a prison in Coleman, Florida.
The Sun-Times Media Group, the company that emerged from Hollinger International, has been taken aback by the clemency application, because Black always insisted he would not make any such request. The firm was even more surprised when lawyers acting on behalf of the jailed tycoon submitted legal bills to his former business asking for it to pay for costs incurred in the clemency plea.
One unnamed source at the company told the Toronto-based Globe and Mail newspaper: "We try to draw the line at outrageous things, and this is sort of one of them."
More than 5,000 applications for pardon and commutation are waiting to be processed by the justice department.
Black told the Globe and Mail this month that he was "horrifyingly busy with one thing and another" in jail. When the paper asked what was taking up all his time, he replied: "Writing and reviewing legal initiatives, as well as dealing with my students" - an apparent reference to the history seminars he is said to be running.
More than 30,000 retail jobs were at risk last night as Woolworths fought to avoid collapse and the fashion discount chain MK One crashed into administration for the second time in a year.
Woolworths' future was hanging in the balance after its bankers objected to a management rescue plan to sell the loss-making 800-store chain to Hilco, which specialises in restructuring distressed companies.
The 99-year old retailer, which is a mainstay of town and city centres across the country, is now in last-ditch talks with its lenders in an attempt to avoid bankruptcy. But a source close to the negotiations said the talks had reached "an impasse" and "are not looking good".
Some 25,000 staff work in Woolworths stores and another 5,000 for two other businesses in the Woolworths group: EUK and 2entertain. The group also has 10,000 pensioners and pension fund members.
EUK distributes DVDs, CDs and books to major supermarkets including Asda, Sainsbury's and Morrisons and if the distributor is forced into administration alongside the Woolworths stores it could threaten the supermarkets' supplies in the vital Christmas shopping weeks.
2entertain is a joint venture with the BBC which produces and distributes BBC programmes on DVD and has had big successes with shows such as Little Britain and Top Gear.
MK One, which operates 125 stores aimed at young women and teenagers, has 1,400 staff jobs at risk.
The latest potential job losses come amid vast cutbacks in the retail industry, which is slashing staff costs by reducing workers' hours. Argos, for instance, has cut workers' hours by 20%. The specialist magazine Retail Week yesterday reported that across the high street such cutbacks now equal 100,000 full time jobs vanishing in the last year. The retail sector employs 10% of the UK workforce.
The stock market fell sharply again yesterday as investors worried about the effects of a recession on the corporate sector. Leading UK shares suffered their third worst week on record with the FTSE 100 slipping to 3,780, its lowest level since April 2003.
Woolworths has been battered by other retailers for years, but in recent weeks it has also been squeezed by the economic downturn and the impact of credit insurers - who protect suppliers from non-payment of invoices in the event of a retailer going bust - withdrawing cover to Woolworths' suppliers. That has left the chain having to pay suppliers on delivery - or have empty shelves.
Woolworths bosses have tried to sell the chain for a year in order to protect the other two businesses, but without success. A possible offer from Iceland supermarket boss Malcolm Walker in the summer fell apart when Baugur, the Icelandic investor backing his approach, ran into its own, credit crunch-related, problems.
Earlier this week Woolworths confirmed it might sell the stores, which are all leasehold, to Hilco. The US-owned group would have also taken on £265m of Woolworths' £380m of debts. Woolworths wanted the other £115m of debt to be transferred to EUK and 2entertain, which last year made profits of more than £40m before interest and tax.
In normal banking circumstances, such an arrangement would be commonplace, but a source familiar with the situation said: "The banks just won't let it happen. They seem to want to put the whole lot into administration to get all their money back immediately. The banks have the whip hand here."
Woolworths has a range of lenders, and many have been hit hard by the credit crunch. Its lead lenders are GMAC, of the US which is applying to the American bank bail-out fund for support, and Burdale, part of the deeply troubled Bank of Ireland, which yesterday said it had received a takeover approach.
Woolworths' other lenders include Barclays, which is raising £7bn from Middle East investors, the American bank Wachovia, which has just been taken over, and GE, which has had two profits warnings this year.
A spokesman for Burdale, one of the lead lenders, refused to comment on the discussions with Woolworths.
The crisis at Woolworths and MK One will increase fears that other ailing retail chains could collapse in the coming weeks. Casualties - and a fresh round of job losses - had been expected in the new year, when the Christmas winners and losers emerge. But lenders and suppliers had been thought unlikely to force stores into bankruptcy in the run-up to Christmas, when they should be raking in cash. Woolworths, for instance, normally makes 90% of its profits in the six weeks before Christmas. However, in the first six months of this year it crashed £100m in the red.
Woolworths shares closed last night at just 1.43p, down 32%, valuing the entire business at just £25m - equal to about three days' sales.
by James Robinson, Kathryn Hopkins, Justin McCurry at 16:40 PM, 11/21/2008
The Japanese car manufacturer Honda is halting production at its flagship plant in Swindon for two months next year as it struggles to cope with a sales slump.
While the plant's 4,800 employees will be paid during the closure in February and March, union officials fear that shutting the production line is the prelude to a round of redundancies as the recession starts to bite across Europe.
The mothballing of Honda's only British plant comes as sales of new cars plummet across the world. American rivals General Motors, Ford and Chrysler are trying to persuade the US Congress to sign off a $25bn (£17bn) bail-out as they struggle to cope with the financial crisis, while other car manufacturers have been cutting production and laying off part-time staff.
BMW has announced plans to close its Oxford factory, which produces the Mini, for four weeks to reduce output, while Nissan, Toyota, GM and Ford have all announced temporary shutdowns at UK plants or have shed contract workers.
Temporarily closing the Swindon plant will reduce Honda's production by 21,000 vehicles, on top of plans to reduce production by 10,000, and the company now expects its total output in Europe for the year to the end of next March to be 175,000 vehicles, a fall of 29% from last year.
It is also cutting shifts at its plant in Saitama, immediately to the north of Tokyo, which will further reduce production by 40,000 vehicles, and reducing output at plants in Alabama and Ohio in the US by 18,000 vehicles.
The company, however, is faring better than some of its domestic rivals. This week Isuzu and Mazda announced they would cut a combined 2,700 temporary jobs while Toyota, the country's biggest carmaker, is halving its temporary workforce in Japan, from 6,000 to 3,000.
News of the Swindon closure alarmed union leaders who believe the company had originally been looking to make 1,300 people redundant.
Unite regional officer Jim D'Avila said: "This is unexpected bad news. The union, staff and the company need to work together to minimise any financial hardship and to find ways to protect pay and long-term job security.
"Unite has meetings scheduled with the company throughout December in order to seek a solution and end this uncertainty for staff."
A spokeswoman for Honda said the Swindon closure was due to a slowing of demand for cars "in western Europe and in Russia and eastern Europe, so we have to adjust our inventory to appropriate levels. That means reducing production".
Phil Brook, a 26-year-old worker on the main line at the Swindon plant, was shocked at the news, which was broken to workers when they arrived at the factory at 6 o'clock yesterday morning.
"I don't know what the pay is going to be in February and March," he said. "They just told us in a meeting this morning that they were going to close the plant for those two months but that we should come back in on Monday.
"There's a pretty gloomy atmosphere [inside the factory]. Everyone's a bit scared."
And he did not hold out much hope for the future. "There's not a lot they can do," he added.
Another worker on the main line, who did not want to be named, said: "This is going to have a big effect on my life. Emotionally, I should be happy at Christmas but now there is so much to worry about.
"I have to support my wife and my three-year-old son. I have bought some of his Christmas presents but I don't know if I'll be able to buy any more.
"I don't know how I'm going to pay my bills and my rent."
Other locals in the village of Wroughton, just outside Swindon, are worried about the number of lorries that will soon be blocking their roads as thousands of cars are transported to Wroughton airfield. Honda is having to stockpile a lot of cars there as it simply cannot sell them in a time of such economic crisis.
Rich governments and corporations are triggering alarm for the poor as they buy up the rights to millions of hectares of agricultural land in developing countries in an effort to secure their own long-term food supplies.
The head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, Jacques Diouf, has warned that the controversial rise in land deals could create a form of "neo-colonialism", with poor states producing food for the rich at the expense of their own hungry people.
Rising food prices have already set off a second "scramble for Africa". This week, the South Korean firm Daewoo Logistics announced plans to buy a 99-year lease on a million hectares in Madagascar. Its aim is to grow 5m tonnes of corn a year by 2023, and produce palm oil from a further lease of 120,000 hectares (296,000 acres), relying on a largely South African workforce. Production would be mainly earmarked for South Korea, which wants to lessen dependence on imports.
"These deals can be purely commercial ventures on one level, but sitting behind it is often a food security imperative backed by a government," said Carl Atkin, a consultant at Bidwells Agribusiness, a Cambridge firm helping to arrange some of the big international land deals.
Madagascar's government said that an environmental impact assessment would have to be carried out before the Daewoo deal could be approved, but it welcomed the investment. The massive lease is the largest so far in an accelerating number of land deals that have been arranged since the surge
: Photo courtesy San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
: Photo courtesy SFMOMA
: Photo courtesy SFMOMA
: Photo courtesy SFMOMA
: Photo courtesy SFMOMA
: Photo courtesy SFMOMA
: Photo courtesy SFMOMA
: Photo courtesy SFMOMA
: Photo courtesy SFMOMA
: Photo courtesy SFMOMA
£120bn debt shock a headache for Darling
by Allegra Stratton at 16:42 PM, 11/21/2008