Poor Mojo Newswire

The moves signaled just how bad sales have become in bookstores and followed the news this week that the publisher of the adult division of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the house that represents authors including Philip Roth and Jose Saramago, had resigned, presumably in protest of a temporary freeze on the acquisition of new books.

Industry insiders were already calling it “Black Wednesday” as news trickled out about further layoffs at Houghton Mifflin, a cut of 10 percent of the staff at Thomas Nelson, the world’s largest publisher of English-language Bibles, a freeze on raises at the Penguin Group unit of Pearson and a delay of pay increases at HarperCollins, the books division of the News Corporation.

"Fitch believes more newspapers and newspaper groups will default, be shut down and be liquidated in 2009 and several cities could go without a daily print newspaper by 2010," the Chicago-based credit ratings firm said in a report on the outlook for U.S. media and entertainment.

Fitch is generally pessimistic across the board, assigning negative outlets to nearly all sectors from Yellow Pages to radio and TV and theme parks. But the newspaper industry is the most at risk of defaulting, it says.

"Much of the business risk for the media sector is likely to continue to be concentrated within the newspaper sub-sector," the report says. "Fitch expects newspaper industry revenue growth will be negative for the foreseeable future as both ad pricing and linage will be under pressure within each of the four main components of newspaper companies' revenue streams: circulation and local, classified and national advertising. Newsprint costs could rise, and it could be difficult to offset revenue declines with cost cuts."

. . .

The chemical, used to remove pipe corrosion, is especially dangerous because it contains hexavalent chromium, which is known to cause birth defects and cancer, particularly lung cancer, the lawsuit said. The cancer can take years to develop.

Some of the soldiers who served at the site now have respiratory system tumors associated with hexavalent chromium exposure, the lawsuit states.

Eller also accuses KBR of failing to maintain a medical incinerator at Joint Base Balad, which has been confirmed by two surgeons in interviews with Military Times about the Balad burn pit. Instead, according to the lawsuit and the physicians, medical waste, such as needles, amputated body parts and bloody bandages were burned in the open-air pit.

“Wild dogs in the area raided the burn pit and carried off human remains,” the lawsuit states. “The wild dogs could be seen roaming the base with body parts in their mouths, to the great distress of the U.S. forces.”

Joining a raft of companies slashing costs to survive a slump in spending, AT&T said on Thursday it will cut the jobs over the remainder of 2008 and 2009, and take a charge of about $600 million in this year's fourth quarter for severance.

So now Harper has gone to Governor General Michaelle Jean (technically an appointee of Queen Elizabeth II, Canada's head of state) and received permission to suspend Parliament until January. In other words, he's just shut the legislature down so it can't do anything.

Phelps' basic point is that Sendak is better than Seuss because Sendak is more of a formalist. ...

The difference between Seuss and Sendak, in other words, isn't only, or primarily, that Sendak is more interested in form. Phelps can natter on all he wants about the link between homilies and formlessness,capitalizing "Marketable Commodity" just to make it look more official, but that doesn't change the fact that the central claim is complete bullshit....

In other words, I think that, in choosing Sendak over Seuss, Phelps is just proving that which should come as a shock to no one who has read his prose; namely, that he prefers the pose of an aesthete to the pose of an entertainer. That's certainly not always the wrong choice, but I think it is in this instance.

It’s the story of Sophie, a college student in the near future. She’s been studying the various mythical appearances of Promethea, a warrior woman who’s been the subject of epic poems and pulp illustrations and comic books. When an evil spirit attacks, Sophie uses the power of story and imagination to become the latest version of Promethea, guided by previous incarnations. In other words, the stories we immerse ourselves in affect who we are, and we can become whatever we imagine ourselves to be.

You freely document tantrums, illness, mood swings and cat puke on the carpet. Is there a limit to your honesty? Do you sometimes regret what you reveal?

There have been moments in my life that the diary strip has made more difficult. For instance, between the birth of Eli and the birth of Oliver, my wife had a pregnancy that ended in miscarriage. It's not fun to mourn in public. But still, there was a part of me that was excited to make art from the experience. My life has still not yet really experienced any great tragedy, this was a minor one. But I know that every life will experience some tragedy, and when mine does, I want to be ready to fully experience it and write about it. I'm not going to let my embarrassment get in the way of my art.

The plan offered by America's Health Insurance Plans, a trade group representing companies that together insure more than 200 million people, comes a decade and half after the industry helped kill the last major healthcare reform campaign -- pushed early in the Clinton administration....

But swift criticism of the proposal from several consumer groups Wednesday also highlighted how contentious the debate over systemic changes to the healthcare system could become.

AHIP would require all Americans to get coverage, a new mandate that Obama rejected during the presidential campaign....

Potentially most controversial, however, is the insurance industry's call for a new "portable health plan" that would not be subject to the minimum coverage standards set by individual states....

"The health insurance industry's vision of healthcare reform lets them keep charging whatever they want and increase their profits while sticking families and taxpayers with high costs," said Richard Kirsch, national campaign manager for Health Care for America Now.

The Who - Boris the Spider

General Motors, Chrysler and Ford have pledged to cut costs dramatically to get a rescue deal, but need union support to deliver the cuts.

The union agreed to modify the jobs bank, where workers who lose their jobs continue to get paid.

The announcement represents a new challenge to the already splintering, 77-million-member world Anglican fellowship and the authority of its spiritual leader, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams.

The new Anglican Church in North America includes four breakaway Episcopal dioceses, dozens of individual parishes in the U.S. and Canada, and splinter groups that left the Anglican family years, or in one case, more than a century ago.

Its future status in the Anglican Communion is unclear.

To be listed on the Preliminary Ballot, a story needs to be "recommended" by 10 members of the SFWA before December 31, 2008.

If you are, or someone you love is, a member of the SFWA, then please, please, talk to an adult you trust, then go to the SFWA website and download a free copy of my novelette, "Tucker Teaches the Clockies to Copulate" (or contact Chris Cevasco at Paradox magazine to get a free copy of the issue featuring the piece). The story is about a crippled Confederate drunkard teaching robots to have sex. Lots of folks have enjoyed it so far. Maybe you will, too.

Mengele's research at Auschwitz, in particular, shows how the system worked. His experiments there were intended to be a contribution to his second doctorate, the Habilitation, which all German academics needed to qualify for a university professorship. Under Verschuer's guidance, he selected twins from the trainloads of Jews who arrived and injected them with chemicals to see if they reacted differently from one another. He collected prisoners with physical abnormalities, such as heterochromia – having a different colour in each eye – to investigate if their condition was hereditary. He treated gipsy and other children for starvation-related diseases, using vitamins and sulphonamides, to see if there were hereditary differences in their response to the therapy.

Mengele's work was pure research, without any obvious practical application. He gained his notoriety from his willingness to kill his subjects under certain circumstances – such as settling an argument about a diagnosis by executing patients and performing an autopsy. However, most survivors remembered him not for his experiments but for his ruthless and brutal behaviour on the selection ramp, or in the camp hospital, where he frequently consigned sick inmates to the gas chamber on the slightest of whims.

Kelly Lau Schumacher, 30, and Michael Schumacher, 34, were arrested late Monday, said Matt Robinson, a spokesman for police in Tracy.

They had been taken into custody for questioning earlier in the day at their home in Tracy, where the emaciated boy was allegedly held against his will. A search of the home turned up evidence implicating the couple, Robinson said. Tracy is about 60 miles east of San Francisco.