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Sunday, January 11, 2009

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an outbreak of salmonella that has affected at least 399 people in 42 different U.S. states has been linked to King Nut, an American brand of peanut butter. In Minnesota, the state’s Health Department announced that bacteria tests for the disease on a tub of creamy King Nut peanut butter had tested positive for the disease, initiating a recall by its distributor in Solon, King Nut Companies.

Workers found evidence from these tests that the brand caused the outbreak. This has not been completely proven, however, as the Food and Drug Administration and King Nut itself are still conducting tests to discover if the case is isolated or related to the nationwide incident.

According to a statement made by the Health Department, the brand is used in many places including schools, hospitals, some restaurants and retirement homes, 20 alone being in Minnesota. A tub of peanut butter used inside of a retirement home where many of its citizens had become sick was tested positive by Minnesota’s health department.

Yesterday, King Nut Companies recalled all peanut butter distributed by their company. The president of King Nut Companies, Martin Kanan, said in a statement yesterday, “We are very sorry this happened. We are taking immediate and voluntary action because the health and safety of those who use our products is always our highest priority.”

In a web statement, King Nut told all of its customers to “put on hold all of their peanut butter in question. A recall of this product will be announced Monday morning. At this point it is unclear what Peanut Corporation of America will do with regard to this case or the national case of the salmonella outbreak.” The Peanut Corporation of America, located in Lynchburg but also operating in the states of Texas and Georgia, is the manufacturer for King Nut.

Salmonellosis is an infection of salmonella bacteria that usually results in diarrhea, fever, vomiting, and abdominal cramps. These symptoms are normally developed 12 to 72 hours after a person is infected, and can last anywhere from 3 to 7 days. Most of the time, the infected person will recover from the disease, but younger and older people have higher risks of it developing and becoming serious. Rarely, salmonella can cause hospitalization, and very rarely, it can lead to death.

Wednesday, October 12, 2005

While Aid starts to pour in to the worst hit areas of South Asia Earthquake that has killed more than 30,000 people, bad weather is hampering the relief efforts with snow falling on the peaks of the earthquake-devastated areas of Pakistan.

The measure of human suffering can’t just be measured in the death toll, which officially stands at 23,000, but also in the 4 million who have been made homeless, hungry, and cold with 1 million in acute need, facing certain death without outside assistance. In the Indian state of Jammu & Kashmir, authorities say at least 1,300 people are known to have died, but officials fear the number will rise.

ABC Australia reports of a man in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, who has been cut from aid, saying “I find that we are alone now. We have nothing. We are finished.”

Choppers are the main lifeline of support; trucks are unable to deliver relief supplies due to looting and general mayhem on the ground. The more snow, the less able aid agencies are to make their way to those in the direst need.

Jan Vandemoortele, U.N. Resident Coordinator for Pakistan, said key roads into the quake zone have been reopened, as 30 countries including Australia, France, Japan, Jordan, China, Russia, Iran, Syria and the US provide assistance in the form of money, doctors, tents, blankets, and disaster relief teams.

United Nations officials are warning of a growing threat of measles, cholera, and diarrhea outbreaks among the millions of survivors.

There have been no reports of epidemic outbreaks so far, but the area’s health infrastructure has completely collapsed, Vandemoortele said.

Monday, October 14, 2013

Half-a-million people have fled their homes in and around the Indian state of Orissa after Cyclone Phailin made landfall.

Wikinews interviewed specialists in meteorology about the devastation the cyclone has caused.

Thursday, January 21, 2010

After a long night of negotiations, United States television personality and seven-month host of The Tonight Show Conan O’Brien and his network, NBC, have reached a deal that would buy out the contracts of O’Brien and his staff for US$45 million and reinstate Jay Leno as the show’s host starting March 1, O’Brien’s manager told media on Thursday. In this agreement, O’Brien will walk away with more than $33 million. The rest will be distributed to his staff of over 200 people as severance payments.

His manager went on to say that Friday will be O’Brien’s last night serving as host. O’Brien reportedly plans to have an official farewell show with American actors Tom Hanks and Will Ferrell as guests, and with Canadian rock singer Neil Young as the closing musical performance.

As pertains to O’Brien’s next move, ABC has said that it is not interested in hiring him. Fox, on the other hand, which lacks a late-night talk show, expressed “appreciation” for O’Brien’s abilities—but for now nothing more. Comedy Central has also been mentioned as a possible new network home for O’Brien.

When asked about the issue by the Associated Press, a spokesman for O’Brien said he was currently “unavailable” to comment.

Friday, January 9, 2009

Global chemical manufacturer LyondellBasell — the third-largest private chemical company in the world — has collapsed. The firm filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the United States, as well as the Dutch equivalent. They had failed to meet a January 4 deadline on postponed debt payments, and talks with creditors failed.

Headquartered in The Netherlands, LyondellBasell is owned by private equity tycoon Len Blavatnik, who had already refused the company a loan to help deal with debt resulting from a $12.7 billion merger between Basell International Holdings and Lyondell Chemical to create LyondellBasell Industries.

The company had already appointed Kevin McShea from Alix Partners to restructure the firm. McShea was assigned speculatively prior to the bankruptcy filing. Access Industries, Blavatnik’s company, refused to extend credit as part of a loan deal brokered in March, a decision Lyondell Chemicals Company, a subsidiary of LyondellBasell, stated they were unhappy with.

LyondellBasell had postponed $280 million worth of interest payments, which Standard & Poor said placed it in “selective default” with a “rapidly weakening liquidity position”. S&P also said that LyondellBasell have debts of $26 billion in a report on the company prior to the firm’s collapse.

LyondellBasell responded with a press release, issuing the following statement: “Standard & Poor’s definition of ‘selected default’ related to our corporate credit rating should not be misinterpreted to suggest that LyondellBasell is currently in default of its bank agreements. As they stated in their press release, ‘This is a default in our opinion according to our definitions and criteria.’ LyondellBasell is not currently in default according to its agreements with its lenders.”

The company met with high oil prices shortly after the expensive merger. This was followed by a general tail-off in demand caused by the ongoing financial crisis. Investors were continuing to bet before the collapse that the firm would restructure under bankruptcy protection, leaving lenders with big losses, potentially over 90% of their investments. The cost of credit protection for LyondellBasell bonds had soared. The creditors include Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, ABN Amro and UBS.

On Thursday, an interim allowance was made by a judge for LyondellBasell to seek up to $2.167 billion of loans. There is also an emergency loan paid out of $100 million. As well as LyondellBasell, 79 affiliates have become insolvent. Citigroup has said the collapse will set them back $1.4 billion in unpaid debts.

Tuesday, March 15, 2005

Wikibooks, an Internet project which seeks to create free content textbooks using wiki technology, has published its February 2005 statistics. The Cookbook project leads the statistics, both by number of contributors (94) and by total edits (668). Newcomer of the month is “Wikibooks Pokédex“, with 337 edits by mainly one user, followed by “Programming:Ada” (320 edits). Seventy contributors edited on “Wikiversity“, followed by sixty-eight users on the “Jokebook“. Wikiversity is a project of its own which aims to build a collaborative learning environment online.

Wikibooks was originally meant as a place for textbooks and manuals but has increasingly become a community creating books on all kinds of subjects, with the cookbook being the most prominent example. Intended as a collection of recipes from around the world, it hosts recipes from Hamburger to Sushi, ethnic cuisines from the Caribbean to the Mediterranean, and gives background information on ingredients, nutrition, and many cooking techniques.

Wikis are openly editable websites that are often used to create knowledge bases. Wikibooks is a project operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization based in the United States which runs several free content wikis, including Wikipedia, a free encyclopedia, and Wikinews, a free news source. The statistics for Wikibooks are extracted using an SQL query on the latest Wikibooks database dump.