Jun
30
NEW YORK - Even for an industry awash in bad news, the newspaper business went through one of its most severe retrenchments in recent memory last week.
Half a dozen newspapers said they would slash payrolls, one said it would outsource all its printing, and Tribune Co., one of the biggest publishers in the country, said it might sell its iconic headquarters tower in Chicago and the building that houses the Los Angeles Times.
The increasingly rapid and broad decline in the newspaper business in recent months has surprised even the most pessimistic financial analysts, many of whom say it’s too hard to tell how far the slump will go.
“They’re in survival mode now,” said Mike Simonton, a media analyst at Fitch Ratings, a credit analysis agency.
“We had very grim expectations for the sector,” Simonton said, and publishers have either met or surpassed his estimates for how bad the results would be.
Last week alone, deep staff cuts were announced at The Hartford Courant and The (Baltimore) Sun - two Tribune papers - as well as at the Daytona Beach-Journal, while The Detroit News and Detroit Free Press said they hoped to reduce the head count in their joint operations by 7 percent through buyouts. The Boston Herald said up to 160 employees would be laid off as it outsourced its printing operations, and in a memo explaining the terms of its job security pledge, the Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J., said it is operating in the red. The week before, McClatchy Co. said companywide staff cuts of 10 percent were coming.
Tribune, meanwhile, told its employees Wednesday that it hoped to wring more value out of its “underutilized” real estate in Chicago and Los Angeles, extending an asset-selling program Tribune is pursuing to service a $13 billion debt load, much of which it took on from going private.
Tribune has already reached a deal to sell one of its largest newspapers, Long Island-based Newsday, but ran into delays early this month in liquidating Wrigley Field, where the Chicago Cubs play, when negotiations for the field’s purchase by a state agency broke down over financing. Tribune is also moving to sell the Cubs.
Tribune has enough money to meet its debt requirements this year, bond analysts have said, but it must make headway on asset sales in order to meet its obligations in 2009.
Tribune’s troubles reflect broader problems in the industry, where a deepening economic downturn is worsening losses from a long-term shift away from print advertising toward online, especially in classified categories like help wanted, autos and real estate, where rivals such as Craigslist, Move.com and AutoTrader.com are thriving.
Advertising is by far the most important source of revenue for newspapers. And in the first quarter, their overall ad revenue slumped 12.9 percent, led by a 24.9 percent drop-off in classifieds, compared with the same period a year earlier.
In fact, the industry group that compiles and releases ad revenue figures, the Newspaper Association of America, this month stopped putting out quarterly press releases with the numbers, though it quietly updated them on its Web site.
NAA spokeswoman Sheila Owens said in an e-mailed statement that the organization will now put out press releases only with full-year data “to keep the market focused on the longer-term industry transition from print to a multiplatform medium.”
Some say complacency in the industry about the threat the Internet posed is to blame for the current quagmire.
Speaking on the CNBC business news cable channel Friday, Sam Zell, the real estate magnate who is now Tribune’s CEO, said newspapers have historically been “monopolies” in their local markets and “insulated from reality,” according to a transcript of his remarks provided by CNBC.
Going forward, if ad revenues continue to slide rapidly, companies including Journal Register Co., MediaNews Group Inc. and - in the absence of further asset sales - Tribune could then risk violating their loan terms, said Emile Courtney, a media industry credit analyst for Standard & Poor’s.
Already, just two major publishers have investment-grade debt under S&P’s ratings - Gannett Co. and The New York Times Co. The industry is divided between them and “everybody else,” Courtney said.
Given the current poor climate for the business, he said: “I have doubts banks will be as willing as they were in the past to waive or amend covenants.”
Jun
30
NEW YORK - Even for an industry awash in bad news, the newspaper business went through one of its most severe retrenchments in recent memory last week.
Half a dozen newspapers said they would slash payrolls, one said it would outsource all its printing, and Tribune Co., one of the biggest publishers in the country, said it might sell its iconic headquarters tower in Chicago and the building that houses the Los Angeles Times.
The increasingly rapid and broad decline in the newspaper business in recent months has surprised even the most pessimistic financial analysts, many of whom say it’s too hard to tell how far the slump will go.
“They’re in survival mode now,” said Mike Simonton, a media analyst at Fitch Ratings, a credit analysis agency.
“We had very grim expectations for the sector,” Simonton said, and publishers have either met or surpassed his estimates for how bad the results would be.
Last week alone, deep staff cuts were announced at The Hartford Courant and The (Baltimore) Sun - two Tribune papers - as well as at the Daytona Beach-Journal, while The Detroit News and Detroit Free Press said they hoped to reduce the head count in their joint operations by 7 percent through buyouts. The Boston Herald said up to 160 employees would be laid off as it outsourced its printing operations, and in a memo explaining the terms of its job security pledge, the Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J., said it is operating in the red. The week before, McClatchy Co. said companywide staff cuts of 10 percent were coming.
Tribune, meanwhile, told its employees Wednesday that it hoped to wring more value out of its “underutilized” real estate in Chicago and Los Angeles, extending an asset-selling program Tribune is pursuing to service a $13 billion debt load, much of which it took on from going private.
Tribune has already reached a deal to sell one of its largest newspapers, Long Island-based Newsday, but ran into delays early this month in liquidating Wrigley Field, where the Chicago Cubs play, when negotiations for the field’s purchase by a state agency broke down over financing. Tribune is also moving to sell the Cubs.
Tribune has enough money to meet its debt requirements this year, bond analysts have said, but it must make headway on asset sales in order to meet its obligations in 2009.
Tribune’s troubles reflect broader problems in the industry, where a deepening economic downturn is worsening losses from a long-term shift away from print advertising toward online, especially in classified categories like help wanted, autos and real estate, where rivals such as Craigslist, Move.com and AutoTrader.com are thriving.
Advertising is by far the most important source of revenue for newspapers. And in the first quarter, their overall ad revenue slumped 12.9 percent, led by a 24.9 percent drop-off in classifieds, compared with the same period a year earlier.
In fact, the industry group that compiles and releases ad revenue figures, the Newspaper Association of America, this month stopped putting out quarterly press releases with the numbers, though it quietly updated them on its Web site.
NAA spokeswoman Sheila Owens said in an e-mailed statement that the organization will now put out press releases only with full-year data “to keep the market focused on the longer-term industry transition from print to a multiplatform medium.”
Some say complacency in the industry about the threat the Internet posed is to blame for the current quagmire.
Speaking on the CNBC business news cable channel Friday, Sam Zell, the real estate magnate who is now Tribune’s CEO, said newspapers have historically been “monopolies” in their local markets and “insulated from reality,” according to a transcript of his remarks provided by CNBC.
Going forward, if ad revenues continue to slide rapidly, companies including Journal Register Co., MediaNews Group Inc. and - in the absence of further asset sales - Tribune could then risk violating their loan terms, said Emile Courtney, a media industry credit analyst for Standard & Poor’s.
Already, just two major publishers have investment-grade debt under S&P’s ratings - Gannett Co. and The New York Times Co. The industry is divided between them and “everybody else,” Courtney said.
Given the current poor climate for the business, he said: “I have doubts banks will be as willing as they were in the past to waive or amend covenants.”
Jun
30
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A drug developed using nanotechnology and a fungus that contaminated a lab experiment may be broadly effective against a range of cancers, U.S. researchers reported on Sunday.
The drug, called lodamin, was improved in one of the last experiments overseen by Dr. Judah Folkman, a cancer researcher who died in January. Folkman pioneered the idea of angiogenesis therapy — starving tumors by preventing them from growing blood supplies.
Lodamin is an angiogenesis inhibitor that Folkman’s team has been working to perfect for 20 years. Writing in the journal Nature Biotechnology, his colleagues say they developed a formulation that works as a pill, without side-effects.
They have licensed it to SynDevRx, Inc, a privately held Cambridge, Massachusetts biotechnology company that has recruited several prominent cancer experts to its board.
Tests in mice showed it worked against a range of tumors, including breast cancer, neuroblastoma, ovarian cancer, prostate cancer, brain tumors known as glioblastomas and uterine tumors.
It helped stop so-called primary tumors and also prevented their spread, Ofra Benny of Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School and colleagues reported.
“Using the oral route of administration, it first reaches the liver, making it especially efficient in preventing the development of liver metastasis in mice,” they wrote in their report. “Liver metastasis is very common in many tumor types and is often associated with a poor prognosis and survival rate,” they added.
‘ALMOST CLEAN’ LIVERS
“When I looked at the livers of the mice, the treated group was almost clean,” Benny said in a statement. “In the control group you couldn’t recognize the livers — they were a mass of tumors.”
The drug was known experimentally as TNP-470, and was originally isolated from a fungus called Aspergillus fumigatus fresenius.
Harvards’s Donald Ingber discovered the fungus by accident while trying to grow endothelial cells — the cells that line blood vessels. The mold affected the cells in a way known to prevent the growth of tiny blood vessels known as capillaries.
Ingber and Folkman developed TNP-470 with the help of Takeda Chemical Industries in Japan in 1990.
But the drug affected the brain, causing depression, dizziness and other side-effects. It also did not stay in the body long and required constant infusions. The lab dropped it.
Efforts to improve it did not work well. Then Benny and colleagues tried nanotechnology, attaching two “pom-pom”-shaped polymers to TNP-470, protecting it from stomach acid.
In mice, the altered drug, now named lodamin, went straight to tumor cells and helped suppress melanoma and lung cancer, with no apparent side effects, Benny said.
All untreated mice had fluid in the abdominal cavity, and enlarged livers covered with tumors. Mice treated with lodamin had normal-looking livers and spleens, the researchers said.
Twenty days after being injected with cancer cells, four out of seven untreated mice had died, while all treated mice were still alive, Benny’s team reported.
“I had never expected such a strong effect on these aggressive tumor models,” she said. The researchers believe lodamin may also be useful in other diseases marked by abnormal blood vessel growth, such as age-related macular degeneration.
(Editing by Todd Eastham)
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Jun
30
REDMOND, Wash. - Microsoft Corp. is scheduled to stop selling its Windows XP operating system to retailers and major computer makers Monday, despite protests from a slice of PC users who don’t want to be forced into using XP’s successor, Vista.
Once computers loaded with XP have been cleared from the inventory of PC makers such as Dell Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co., consumers who can’t live without the old operating system on their new machine will have to buy Vista Ultimate or Vista Business and then legally “downgrade” to XP.
Microsoft will still allow smaller mom-and-pop PC builder shops to buy XP for resale through the end of January. A version of XP will also remain available for ultra-low-cost PCs such as the Asus Eee PC.
A group of vocal computer users who rallied around a “Save XP” petition posted on the industry news site InfoWorld had been clamoring for Microsoft to keep selling XP until its next operating system, Windows 7, is available. The software maker has said it expects to release Windows 7 sometime in 2009.
Last week, Microsoft said it would provide full technical support for six-year-old Windows XP through 2009, and limited support through 2014.
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Jun
30
ANCHORAGE, Alaska - A 14-year-old girl riding in a mountain bike race was attacked in the dark of night by a bear Sunday and severely injured, but she was able to make a brief 911 call that eventually resulted in her rescue.
The girl suffered head, neck, torso and leg wounds. She underwent surgery and was in critical condition Sunday afternoon at Providence Alaska Medical Center, police said.
“The local bear expert said it’s probably a sow grizzly,” said Cleo Hill, a spokeswoman for the Anchorage Fire Department. “One has been sighted in the area recently.”
The attack occurred along a trail in a 24-hour race put on by the Arctic Bicycle Club in Bicentennial Park. Rescuers had to hike in more than two miles to reach the girl.
The park, on Anchorage’s east side, borders on Chugach State Park. Wild animals - from grizzly and black bears to moose, wolves and wolverines - frequent the area. The girl was attacked as she reached a trail.
About 60 riders were entered in the race - a circular route that followed groomed trails used by hikers, bikers and skiers. The race began at noon Saturday and was to conclude at noon Sunday but was canceled after the attack.
Rick Sinnott, a wildlife biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, told the Anchorage Daily News that the bear could have been a mother that charged two runners on a nearby trail two weeks ago.
Sinnott went to the scene and posted warning signs, and said the girl was fortunate to be wearing a bike helmet because the bear had bitten her head.
The animal attacked the girl around 1:30 a.m., during the darkest part of the morning.
“It’s not light enough to read, but it’s light enough to see your way,” Hill said of the conditions one week after the summer solstice. Riders could see rocks, trees and the trail but may have been using headlamps or a bike headlight, Hill said.
The girl called 911, and dispatchers heard someone struggling to breathe. She whispered one word - “bear” - and the line went dead, Hill said.
Following procedure for when an emergency call is cut off, dispatchers called the number back. Another rider heard the phone ringing, stopped to investigate and spotted the teen off the trail.
“That rider was able to pick up the phone and talk with the police department,” Hill said.
One more rider appeared and stayed until emergency workers arrived. That took courage in the darkened forest, knowing a bear had attacked and could again, Hill said.
“It had to be extremely unnerving, if not terrifying,” Hill said.
Police officers with shotguns accompanied medics to retrieve the girl.
Police Lt. Paul Honeman said the family requested that no more information be issued on the girl’s condition.
“Their daughter is in a battle for her life,” he said.
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Jun
29
Pakistani forces take control of area in Khyber
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PESHAWAR, Pakistan - Paramilitary troops returned Sunday to posts they had been forced to abandon and Pakistani forces widened their offensive against militants operating in a volatile tribal area along the Afghan border, an official said.
The government launched the operation Saturday because the militants in the Khyber region presented an “immediate problem,” Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said.
The militants began threatening Peshawar and ambushing supply convoys bound for U.S.-led coalition troops in Afghanistan.
The military operation appears to be a shift in strategy by Pakistan’s new government, backing its calls for peace deals in the tribal areas with the threat of forceful action against militants who get out of line.
The United States has criticized the move for peace deals, saying it gives militants the freedom to regroup for attacks on U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan.
Speaking to reporters in Lahore, Gilani defended the peace deals, but warned that authorities will resort to force “if (the groups) backtrack from their agreements and damage state property.”
Troops from the paramilitary Frontier Corps, backed by tanks and armored personnel carriers, quickly cleared militants out of the Bara region, said Muhammad Siddiq Khan, a local official.
A tribal paramilitary force that had been forced to abandon its posts in the region several months ago returned to the checkpoints Sunday, he said.
The Frontier Corps met no resistance as it moved into other areas outside Bara, destroying militant bases along the way, he said.
The forces also destroyed a radio station used by the militants to broadcast propaganda and uncovered a torture chamber, said Rehman Malik, head of the Interior Ministry.
He called the operation “very successful” and said the government’s authority had been re-established and Peshawar was “totally safe.” “Those who commit crimes and believe that they are safe, they will not be allowed to remain safe,” he said.
On Saturday, authorities shelled militant hideouts and blew up the headquarters of militant leader Menghal Bagh, who had apparently fled. Another possible target was Haji Namdar’s Vice and Virtue Movement, which is suspected of attacks against coalition soldiers in Afghanistan.
Officials in Kabul welcomed the operation in Khyber and reiterated their suspicion that a surge in violence in Afghanistan was partly due to the lack of pressure on militants in Pakistan’s tribal areas.
“We endorse this operation, we want this operation to be continued and we want this operation to be successful,” Afghanistan’s Defense Ministry spokesman Gen. Mohammad Zahir Azimi said.
NATO spokesman Brig. Gen. Carlos Branco said “everything that can minimize the threat in Afghanistan is good for us.”
“We know that as long as insurgents can operate safely on the Pakistan side of the border, then there cannot be security in Afghanistan,” said Mark Laity, another alliance spokesman.
Muslim Khan, a militant spokesman in Swat, suggested the government had launched the operation at the behest of the United States.
“On the one side they are holding peace talks and on the other side they are breaking peace agreements and then carrying out operations against tribesmen,” he told Dawn television.
Baitullah Mehsud, the top Taliban leader in Pakistan, said he was suspending talks between his allies and the government in the wake of the offensive and implied his forces could cause trouble in Pakistan’s main cities.
Maj. Gen. Alam Khattak, head of the Frontier Corps, hinted this would not be the only operation against militants and other officials said the volatile Swat region could be next.
On Sunday, a remote-controlled bomb blast killed two soldiers on a foot patrol in Swat’s Matta area, a former militant stronghold, army spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas said.
Pro-Taliban fighters have battled security forces in Swat in recent months, despite a peace deal between militants and the new provincial government.
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Jun
29
Official: Israel OKs Hezbollah prisoner deal
Filed Under CNN News, Most Pepular, News, Top Stories | Leave a Comment
JERUSALEM (CNN) — The Israeli government on Sunday approved a deal with Hezbollah to exchange prisoners for two kidnapped Israeli soldiers, a government official said.
An Israeli woman stands in front of posters of kidnapped soldiers Sunday in Jerusalem.
The Cabinet approved the exchange with 22 ministers voting for it and three voting against it, the official said.
Before the vote, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told his Cabinet the two soldiers are most likely dead.
“As far as we know, our two soldiers — Udi Goldwasser and Eldad Regev — are not alive,” Olmert said, according to his office’s Web site.
Hezbollah militants based in Lebanon kidnapped Goldwasser and Regev and killed three other Israeli soldiers in a July 2006 raid into northern Israel. The two soldiers were wounded in the raid, and Hezbollah never gave Israel any indication whether they survived the attack, leaving the families in limbo.
Israel’s chief military rabbi began a procedure last week to officially determine whether the two soldiers are dead or alive.
The Jewish state and Hezbollah fought a 34-day war in 2006 during which Israeli troops invaded Lebanon in an unsuccessful attempt to rescue the soldiers.
Hezbollah is most interested in the release of convicted killer Samir Kuntar, who is the longest-serving Lebanese prisoner in Israel. Hezbollah hails him as a hero.
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Kuntar led a group of four men who entered Israel from Lebanon by boat in 1979. They killed a police officer who came across them. They later took a 28-year-old man and his 4-year-old daughter hostage.
Kuntar shot the father dead at close range in front of his daughter and dumped his body in the sea. He also smashed the girl’s head, killing her. He was sentenced to life.
Earlier this month, Israel deported a Lebanese-born man who served six years in jail on charges of spying for Hezbollah.
In exchange, Hezbollah handed over a brown coffin containing the remains of Israeli soldiers killed during the 2006 war. The move was seen as a prelude to a possible prisoner swap between Israel and Hezbollah..
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Jun
29
Plane soars past destination as pilots doze: report
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NEW DELHI (AFP) - An Air India flight headed for Mumbai overshot its destination and was halfway to Goa before its dozing pilots were woken out of a deep slumber by air traffic control, a report said.
The high altitude nap took place approximately two weeks ago, the Times of India reported Thursday. The report, however, drew a furious denial from Air India.
Some 100 passengers were on board the state-run flight that originated from Dubai and flew to the western Indian city of Jaipur before heading south to Mumbai when both pilots fell asleep, a source told the paper.
“After operating an overnight flight, fatigue levels peak — and so the pilots dozed off after taking off from Jaipur,” the source, who was not identified in the report, said.
The plane flew to Mumbai on autopilot, but when air traffic there tried to help the aircraft land, the plane ignored their instructions and carried on at full speed towards Goa.
“It was only after the aircraft reached Mumbai airspace that air traffic control realised it was not responding to any instructions and was carrying on its own course,” the source said.
“The aircraft should have begun its descent about 100 miles (160 kilometres) from Mumbai, but here it was still at cruising altitude. We checked for hijack.”
Finally air traffic control buzzed the cockpit and woke up the pilots, who turned the plane around, the report said.
Air India on Thursday said a plane had overshot its Mumbai destination on June 4 but furiously denied it was because the pilots were sleeping, putting the glitch down to a brief communications breakdown.
“The report is absolutely incorrect, devoid of facts, misleading and irresponsible. It is a figment of imagination,” Air India spokesman Jitender Bhargava told AFP by telephone from Mumbai.
“We have gone through the flight reports of the last 30 days. A plane did cross Mumbai for 15 kilometres because it had lost contact for a few moments. At those speeds 15 kilometres is covered in a very short time.”
The plane quickly established contact with air traffic control and landed a short while later, he said.
Bhargava accused the Times of India, one of the country’s biggest papers, of “batting for somebody.” The daily has said in its report that authorities were trying to hush up the incident.
Indian papers also reported this week that a flight operated by private airline Jetlite to the central Indian city of Patna was grounded after the pilot was allegedly found to be drunk.
Jun
29
U.S. escalating covert operations against Iran: report
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NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. congressional leaders agreed late last year to President George W. Bush’s funding request for a major escalation of covert operations against Iran aimed at destabilizing its leadership, according to a report in The New Yorker magazine published online on Sunday.
The article by reporter Seymour Hersh, from the magazine’s July 7 and 14 issue, centers around a highly classified Presidential Finding signed by Bush which by U.S. law must be made known to Democratic and Republican House and Senate leaders and ranking members of the intelligence committees.
“The Finding was focused on undermining Iran’s nuclear ambitions and trying to undermine the government through regime change,” the article cited a person familiar with its contents as saying, and involved “working with opposition groups and passing money.”
Hersh has written previously about possible administration plans to go to war to stop Tehran from obtaining nuclear weapons, including an April 2006 article in the New Yorker that suggested regime change in Iran, whether by diplomatic or military means, was Bush’s ultimate goal.
Funding for the covert escalation, for which Bush requested up to $400 million, was approved by congressional leaders, according to the article, citing current and former military, intelligence and congressional sources.
Clandestine operations against Iran are not new. U.S. Special Operations Forces have been conducting crossborder operations from southern Iraq since last year, the article said.
These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of “high-value targets” in Bush’s war on terrorism, who may be captured or killed, according to the article.
But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which include the Central Intelligence Agency, have now been significantly expanded, the article said, citing current and former officials.
Many of these activities are not specified in the new finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature, it said.
Among groups inside Iran benefiting from U.S. support is the Jundallah, also known as the Iranian People’s Resistance Movement, according to former CIA officer Robert Baer. Council on Foreign Relations analyst Vali Nasr described it to Hersh as a vicious organization suspected of links to al Qaeda.
The article said U.S. support for the dissident groups could prompt a violent crackdown by Iran, which could give the Bush administration a reason to intervene.
None of the Democratic leaders in Congress would comment on the finding, the article said. The White House, which has repeatedly denied preparing for military action against Iran, and the CIA also declined comment.
The United States is leading international efforts to rein in Iran’s suspected effort to develop nuclear weapons, although Washington concedes Iran has the right to develop nuclear power for civilian uses.
Jun
29
NEW YORK - A European Vogue cover model fell to her death from her Manhattan apartment building Saturday in an apparent suicide, published reports said.
Ruslana Korshunova, 20, died around 2:30 p.m. in a fall from a building on Water Street, in Manhattan’s Financial District, The New York Post, the Daily News and Newsday reported. The newspapers cited unnamed officials and police.
Police said the fall was under investigation. Korushnova’s New York agency and a spokeswoman for medical examiners did not immediately return telephone messages.
Originally from the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan, the almond-eyed, flowing-haired Korshunova appeared in advertisements and on runways for such designers as Marc Jacobs, Nina Ricci and DKNY. British Vogue hailed her as “a face to be excited about” in 2005.
Her break came when modeling booker Debbie Jones noticed her while perusing an in-flight magazine article about Korushnova’s hometown of Almaty, according to the Vogue report.
“She looked like something out of a fairytale!” Jones told the magazine. “We had to find her and we searched high and low until we did!”
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