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Friday, October 2, 2009

Companies in the United States are shedding more jobs, pushing the country’s unemployment rate to a 26-year high of 9.8%.

The US Labor Department said on Friday that employers cut 263,000 jobs in September, with companies in the service industries — including banks, restaurants and retailers — hit especially hard. This is the 21st consecutive month of job losses in the country.

The United States has now lost 7.2 million jobs since the recession officially began in December 2007. The new data has sparked fears that unemployment could threaten an economic recovery. Top US officials have warned that any recovery would be slow and uneven, and some have predicted the unemployment rate will top 10% before the situation improves.

“Continued household deleveraging and rising unemployment may weigh more on consumption than forecast, and accelerating corporate and commercial property defaults could slow the improvement in financial conditions,” read a report by the International Monetary Fund’s World Economic Outlook, predicting that unemployment will average 10.1% by next year and not go back down to five percent until 2014.

Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com, said that “it’s a very fragile and tentative recovery. Policy makers need to do more.”

“The number came in weaker than expected. We saw a lot of artificial involvement by the government to prop up the markets, and now that that is starting to end, the private sector isn’t yet showing signs of life,” said Kevin Caron, a market strategist for Stifel, Nicolaus & Co.

Also on Thursday, the US Commerce Department said factory orders fell for the first time in five months, dropping eight-tenths of a percent in August. Orders for durable goods — items intended to last several years (including everything from appliances to airliners) — fell 2.6%, the largest drop since January of this year.

The US government has been spending billions of dollars — part of a $787 billion stimulus package — to help spark economic growth. There have been some signs the economy is improving.

The Commerce Department said on Thursday that spending on home construction jumped in August for its biggest increase in 16 years. A real estate trade group, the National Association of Realtors, said pending sales of previously owned homes rose more than 12 percent in August, compared to August 2008.

A separate Commerce Department report said that consumer spending, which accounts for more than two-thirds of US economic activity, rose at its fastest pace in nearly eight years, jumping 1.3 percent in August.

Other reports have provided cause for concern. A banking industry trade group said Thursday the number of US consumers making late payments, or failing to make payments, on loans and credit cards is on the rise. A survey by a business group, the Institute for Supply Management, Thursday showed US manufacturing grew in September, but at a slower pace than in August when manufacturing increased for the first time in a year and a half.

Stock markets reacted negatively to the reports. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 41 points in early trading, reaching a level of 9467. This follows a drop of 203 points on Thursday, its largest loss in a single day since July. The London FTSE index fell 55 points, or 1.1%, to reach 4993 points by 15.00 local time.

Wednesday, January 17, 2018

On Sunday, a boat ferrying people to a floating casino in the Gulf of Mexico caught fire and burned near New Port Richey, Florida, US. All 50 passengers aboard abandoned ship and jumped into the sea, but one died in hospital that evening.

Beth Fifer, assistant chief executive of the Tropical Breeze Casino Cruise, said that the fire started at about 3:30 PM, local time, as the boat was outbound to the casino. According to Gerard DeCanio, the police chief of Port Richey, the captain saw smoke coming from the engine and turned back, then grounded the boat in shallow water.

The boat was rapidly engulfed in flames. Those aboard had to jump about ten feet into waist-high water and swim or wade ashore to safety. The police said that about fifteen were treated at local hospitals, including for possible hypothermia from exposure to the cold sea water. The one fatality, a 42-year-old woman, went to the emergency room at Regional Medical Center Bayonet Point hours later and died at 10:42 p.m., according to Kurt Conover, a spokesman for the medical center and Kevin Doll, a spokesman for the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office.

Passenger Qaadia Culbreath told WFLA-TV that he couldn’t swim and didn’t see any life jackets, so he found himself “dangling off the metal hanger in the front of the boat because I didn’t want to let go”. Andrew Fossa, deputy fire chief of Pasco County, described locals who assisted the passengers as they scrambled to shore as “phenomenal”.

According to police chief DeCanio, the boat captain had reported engine trouble on earlier trips. Fifer said, “It would’ve never left the dock if we knew something was wrong with it.” The Coast Guard has announced that they will review maintenance records. The casino operates offshore, requiring a boat to ferry gamblers to and fro, because casino gambling is not legal in the state of Florida.

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Libya has freed six foreign medical personnel who were convicted of infecting hundreds of Libyan children with HIV and sentenced to death. In jail since 1999, the five Bulgarian nurses and one Palestinian doctor arrived in Sofia, Bulgaria, today. The president of Bulgaria, Georgi Parvanov, promptly pardoned them.

All six have maintained their innocence throughout. They have also claimed that they suffered torture to extract confessions. International HIV experts testified at the trials that the infections began before the six arrived at the Benghazi hospital. They said the infections were more likely the result of poor hygiene.

Last week, Libya lifted the death sentences following a US$460 million financial settlement, which works out to US$1 million to each HIV victim’s family. However, Libya insisted on further concessions on relations with the European Union and aid.

A deal between the E.U. and Libya, mediated by Qatar, ended the diplomatic standoff. The foreign minister of Libya, Abdel Rahman Shalgham, said the E.U. promised to provide “life-long treatment” to the infected children, as well as aid to “improve the Benghazi hospital” where the children were infected. Further, he claimed that deal will allow for “full cooperation and partnership between Libya and the European Union.”

“We hope to go on further [in] normalising our relations with Libya. Our relations with Libya were to a large extent blocked by the non-settlement of this medics issue,” said José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission.

The president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, said that neither the E.U. nor France paid money to Libya. He also said he would visit Libya on Wednesday to help Tripoli’s reintegration. “I can quite simply confirm to you that neither Europe nor France have made the slightest financial contribution to Libya,” said Sarkozy to reporters in Paris. “I have had the opportunity to thank the Qatari authorities very warmly for their mediation and their humanitarian intervention.”

Benita Ferrero-Waldner, the European Commissioner for External Relations, said: “I share the joy of their families and friends and of the government and people of Bulgaria. For over eight years, we have never forgotten the suffering of the medical staff who have shown such dignity and fortitude during their long ordeal.”

“Now I still can’t believe that I am standing on Bulgarian soil. We were told the news at four o’clock in the morning and we left the jail at quarter to six to board the plane. Now I will try to get my previous life back,” said Kristiyana Vulcheva, 48, upon her release at the airport.

Friday, April 11, 2008

Wikinews held an exclusive interview with Jeremy Hanke, editor of MicroFilmmaker Magazine. The magazine, which is free to read online, was started as a resource for the low budget moviemaker and features book, independent film, equipment and software reviews as well as articles on film distribution, special effects and lighting.

He says that one of the goals of the magazine is to “connect low-budget filmmakers via a feeling of community, as many…..often compete so viciously against one another in film festivals for coveted “shots” with Hollywood, that they can quickly forget their similarities.”

When asked if films made on a shoestring budget can really compete with those made for millions of dollars, he replied, “no…yes…and absolutely. Allow me to explain.” And so he does in the interview below.

Thursday, September 25, 2008

Medical doctors have not been getting the full picture about newly FDA-approved drugs, concludes a research team from the University of California, San Francisco. This is because not all the studies required for FDA approval get published. New drug studies that do see publication tend to be ones where the medicine appears to perform well while poor and middling results are less likely to appear in medical journals. The result appears to be that doctors who read the available literature may get an inflated impression of new medications and may prescribe expensive new drugs in place of older medicines that perform as well or better. As Jordan Lite of Scientific American wonders, are drug companies cherry-picking the studies they publish to make their drugs look better than they actually are?

The University of California team reviewed trials that had supported new drugs approved from 1998 to 2000 and examined 909 trials of 90 medications. The search was conducted upon PubMed and other search tools that a typical medical doctor or patient could access. They concluded that less than half of the studies had been published five years after drug approval and a publication bias existed.

Erick Turner, who coauthored a similar study earlier this year, expressed concerns to Scientific American that the problem was not merely the raw percentage of studies published, but that a disproportionate share of the research that appeared in journals are examples where new medications appear to perform well:

When trials are selectively published … it will skew the efficacy of the drug and make it look like it works better than it does. It’s going to create a lot more enthusiasm among consumers of that information or in the words of Alan Greenspan, ‘irrational exuberance.’

Ken Johnson, senior vice president of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), defended the pharmaceutical industry by saying FDA review of new drug applications is more important than publishing the results of medication trials in medical journals. Approved medications come with labels that give patients and doctors enough information, assures Mr. Johnson.

Yet concerns about full and appropriate disclosure have been serious enough that a new law was enacted last year. FDA Amendments Act of 2007 (FDAAA) requires that all trials which support FDA-approved drugs be registered at the National Institutes of Health website. The requirement goes into effect this coming Saturday. Congress enacted the legislation in response to hearings that determined pharmaceutical companies were less likely to publish studies that indicated significant side effects. One shortcoming in the legislation, according to UCSF associate professor Ida Sim, is that the FDA is still not required to specify which trials it weighs when considering applications for drug approvals. Yet she praises the new law as a major improvement. It’s critically important that we know trials exist and that we get the summary results, positive and negative, into the public domain—that’s a huge step and more than any [other] country is doing now.

Sunday, March 27, 2005

A discussion group about weblogs, or blogs for short, that meets at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society last week began releasing video tutorials about how to blog using various web and software tools.

Harvard University‘s Berkman Center hosts the blogging discussion group, which has met weekly for the past two years.

After months of discussion and collaboration on the new tutorials, at Friday’s evening meeting presenters showed off some of their early video tutorials, which stream recorded audio, and previously-captured video of a computer screen, along with simultaneous live audio from a microphone.

Participants learned how similar tutorials can be constructed using free software tools such as CamStudio. Audio of the session was made available on the World Wide Web.

Shimon Rura, a local software developer, presented a recent screen-capture + voiceover flash file he had made, demonstrating how to use a bookmarklet in the Frassle blogging package. Other participants discussed video demonstrations of how to podcast, and how to use specific blogging tools such as WordPress.

There was also disussion of a recent initiative to set up a Blogging101 site for distributing and translating these instructional materials. Rebecca MacKinnon, a noted blogger and Berkman Fellow, spoke about the BloggerCorps initiative to connect non-profits who want broader exposure with local blogging enthusiasts.

The meeting was held inside the main conference room in the Berkman Center’s Cambridge offices on Massachusetts Avenue.