anahataenergy.com

Thursday, January 21, 2016

A majority of Detroit public schools were closed yesterday due to a coordinated “sickout” of teachers. This work stoppage was the latest in a series of showdowns with state government and was timed with an arrival by the President to attend an auto show. Activists used the opportunity to hold rallies to air their grievances publicly.

Educators have staged several work stoppages to protest the dilapidated state of public schools as well as Governor Rick Snyder’s plan for the schools, which involves spliting the school district in two. Yesterday’s protest closed over 85 schools and followed last week’s efforts which shut down more than 60 and prompted visits to school sites by Mayor Mike Duggan and inspectors. Detroit Public Schools is several hundred million dollars in debt and has been under the administration of emergency manager Darnell Earley for a year.

The “sickout” strategy attempts to sidestep Michigan law which prohibits teacher strikes. Schools have been found with mold in walls, crumbling infrastructure, and infestations.

In response to the sickout, the school district has filed a lawsuit and sought an injunction against the union as well as individual activists and teachers.

Sunday, April 22, 2007

Rick Kelly has won round three of the 2007 V8 Supercar Championship, maintaining his points lead in the series. Kelly won race three after his Toll HSV Dealer Team team-mate, Garth Tander experienced a slow pitstop in lap 15.

Tander won races one and two, and fought back to finish the final race in eighth position. Both Kelly and Tander earned 58 points during the round, with the win awarded to Kelly for finishing higher in the final race.

At the end of round three, Kelly leads the championship on 173 points, team-mate Tander is in second place on 160 points ahead of Rick Kelly’s brother, Todd on 132 points.

This round marked the last V8 Supercar race at the Pukekohe Park Raceway in New Zealand. The 2008 New Zealand round of the series will compete on a temporary street circuit in Hamilton.

Friday, July 22, 2005

Administrators PriceWaterHouseCoopers (PWC) have announced that the British car company MG Rover and its engine manufacturer Powertrain Ltd has been sold to Chinese company Nanjing Automobile for an unknown sum of money. The company beat bids from Shanghai Automotive (SAIC), despite being the smaller of the two.

MG Rover collapsed this Spring, after struggling to make a profit for several years.

SAIC had tried to buy only the engine plant and then transfer it to China, but in June Nanjing Automobile approached PWC with a combined bid for both the car manufacturing company and Powertrain. This Monday SAIC bid for both but the offer was inferior to Nanjing’s.

Nanjing has indicated that it too will move the engine production plant to China, along with some car manufacturing. However it also intends to continue building cars in Britain, and establish an engineering research and design centre there in an effort to expand its sales globally. Nanjing intends to start hiring at once.

Monday, July 7, 2008

The Philippine shipping company Sulpicio Lines has asked a court to issue a temporary restraining order (TRO) stopping the Board of Marine Inquiry (BMI) from proceeding with its investigation into the loss of MV Princess of the Stars. The passenger ferry capsised and sank off Sibuyan island on June 21 during Typhoon Fengshen (known locally as Typhhon Frank) with hundreds of casualties.

Sulpicio told the Manila Regional Trial Court that both Republic Act 9295 and the Domestic Shipping Development Act of 2004 removed the BMI’s power to investigate maritime incidents and that the investigation the board launched on June 25 is “irregular, illegal, and null and void”. They say only the Maritime Industry Authority is allowed to investigate accidents at sea.

Sulpicio also described the investigation as an ‘inquisition’ that was biased against Sulpicio from the start. They say “prejudgment” has increased the “pervasive negative publicity” surrounding the line, since negative accusations are most often published in newspapers. The company says one comment the board made was “Your vessel is not stable!” “You have no business being a safety officer!”

As a result Sulpicio is seeking ?650,000 from the BMI. This is split down as ?500,000 in moral damages, ?100,000 lawyer’s fees and ?50,000 further costs.

The House Committee on Transportation also launched its own inquiry into the disaster today. The case for the TRO will be heard tomorrow.

A compilation of brief news reports for Tuesday, January 13, 2009.

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

The United States Supreme Court on Monday ruled that “tobacco companies that marketed ‘light’ and ‘low tar’ cigarettes may be sued for fraud.” The 5-to-4 judgment is expected to open the way for dozens of lawsuits claiming billions of dollars in damages.

In the certiorari ruling penned by Justice Stevens, the Court held that a class action brought under state law prohibiting deceptive advertising generally was not preempted by federal law regulating cigarette advertising. The lawsuit claims that tobacco makers who manufacture “light” and “low tar” cigarettes had deceived smokers into thinking the products are safer than regular cigarettes. Former United States Solicitor General Theodore Olson, now working with Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, argued the case for the petitioners, Altria Group and Philip Morris USA.

Several smokers in recent decades switched to light cigarettes, with fervent faith they posed less of a danger to their health. But scientific or medical researches have shown this common-sense view is wrong. Although mechanical tests showed “light” cigarettes emitted less tar when burned, actual smokers inhale about the same amount of tar when they puff on a light cigarette, the studies found. The cigarette business faces more than 30 class-action lawsuits from smokers and ex-smokers who seek billions of dollars in damages and claim they were deceived by the marketing of light and low-tar cigarettes.

Respondents Stephanie Good and 2 others are Maine residents and for over 15 years smoked Marlboro Lights and Cambridge Lights cigarettes, which are manufactured by petitioners Altria Group and Philip Morris USA. They sought damages compensation for economic rather than medical harm, claiming they had overpaid for cigarettes based on fraudulent advertisements suggesting that light cigarettes were safer than regular ones. The Labeling Act requires tobacco companies to indicate rotating warnings on their packaging and advertising. “No requirement or prohibition ‘based on smoking and health’ shall be imposed under state law with respect to the advertising or promotion,” the law provides, and only if the labeling requirements on cigarettes are obeyed.

In the case, the Court applied the pertinent Federal laws, in question, Title 15 U.S.C. § 1334(b), the “Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act” and Me. Rev. Stat. Ann., Tit. 5, § 207 (Supp. 2008), the “Maine Unfair Trade Practices Act” (MUTPA). It held that “the Labeling Act neither expressly nor impliedly pre-empts respondents’ fraud claim.” The landmark decision allows the lawsuit to proceed on the merits upon remand to the trial court below. The ruling strikes a blow against a broad effort by U.S. corporations to limit their exposure to lawsuits filed under federal law.

The court also dismissed Philip Morris’s argument that the Federal Trade Commission‘s mid-1960s endorsement of machine testing of cigarette tar and nicotine levels “should relieve the company of liability for alleged fraud.” In November, the FTC officially dropped its endorsement of the Cambridge Filter Method, saying it is flawed because “the machine doesn’t take into account the way smokers adjust their behavior.”

The Supreme Court in a June ruling, said 8 to 1 that “a case filed in a state court alleging a defective catheter was pre-empted by a federal statue providing regulation of medical devices to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.” The court also ruled in 1992 in ‘Cipollone v. Liggett Group, Inc.’ that “the phrase ‘based on smoking and health’ in the Labeling Act did not apply to pre-empt suits under state laws based on the ‘general duty’ not to make fraudulent statements.”

Justice Clarence Thomas said that “some kinds of fraud claims against cigarette makers may go forward, just not those concerning smoking and health. Thus, if cigarette manufacturers were to falsely advertise their products as ‘American-made’ or ‘the official cigarette of Major League Baseball,’ state-law claims arising from that wrongful behavior would not be pre-empted. Forbidding lawsuits based on health claims, would not mean consumers lack protection, as tobacco marketing is subject to regulatory oversight.”

Altria’s associate general counsel, Murray Garnick, in a statement, said “we continue to view these cases as manageable, and the company will assert many of the strong defenses used successfully in the past to defend against this very type of case.”

Thursday, December 8, 2016

In findings announced yesterday, scientists from Johns Hopkins University took ordinary commercial drones, swapped out their cameras for coolers and packed them with human plasma, platelets and blood cells. The drones were found to deliver their cargo in usable condition after flights lasting almost half an hour, at distances of up to 12 miles.

“For rural areas that lack access to nearby clinics, or that may lack the infrastructure for collecting blood products or transporting them on their own, drones can provide that access,” says pathologist and lead author of the paper Dr. Timothy Amukele.

Although earlier studies have confirmed that drone flights do not affect the useful properties or microbe populations of human blood products, those experiments were performed on small, vial-sized samples. Here, the drones carried much larger quantities of blood, in the proportions and packaging that doctors and medical technicians would actually use on patients, with units purchased directly from the American Red Cross. Unlike Rwanda’s medical delivery drones, which were custom-made for blood product delivery by Zipline, these experiments were completed with regular, commercially available S900-model machines with minimal modification.

Post-flight, the samples were tested for cell rupture, changes in pH, air bubbles and other damage that might indicate that the packages had thawed out or otherwise become unsuitable for use in transfusions. The samples were found to have arrived intact.

Although the test was performed in an unpopulated area, it is speculated that drones might be useful not only for delivery of blood products to rural medical facilities but also for distributing blood resources through urban areas. John’s Hopkins pathologist and research team leader Dr. Timothy Armukele speculates that emergency medical teams may one day be able to transfuse patients on the spot by calling for a drone to bring blood of the appropriate type.

The details of the experiment have been published in the latest issue of Transfusion.