News in brief
September 19th, 2002
Coup attempt in Ivory Coast fails
ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast
Loyalist troops put down an uprising by security forces who attacked military and police bases across the Ivory Coast yesterday, trying to oust the president while he was visiting Italy.
The Cabinet minister in charge of police was killed along with the former junta leader accused of having a role in the uprising.
President Laurent Gbagbo declared the rebellion had been halted after hours of heavy gunfights and mortar exchanges left at least 10 rebel soldiers and seven loyal police dead.
Bloody bodies littered the streets of Abidjan, the commercial capital.
Gbagbo's government has been struggling to calm ethnic and political tension and a restive military since the once-tranquil country's first-ever coup in 1999.
Government troops killed Gen. Robert Guei, the ex-junta leader, when his car refused to stop for a roadblock in downtown Abidjan, paramilitary police Sgt. Ahossi Aime said.
Guei, the former army chief who took power in the 1999 uprising, was forced out during elections the next year amid allegations he was trying to steal the vote.
German denies link to Sept. 11 terrorists
RETHWISCH, Germany
A Syrian-born German businessman questioned last week by federal police said yesterday that he and his family knew suspected members of the Sept. 11 terror cell in Hamburg, but knew nothing about any terror plots.
In his first interview since the raid on his home and offices amid allegations he had helped bring terrorists into the country, Abdel-Mateen Tatari said that the 111 Arabs he helped with visas in 2000 and 2001 were business clients, or their relatives. He said agents were interested in the Arabs he sponsored to come to Germany on tourist visas who included Saudis, Egyptians and Syrians. "I don't issue the visas," he said. "I just hand the local police a letter of sponsorship and they take it from there."
Speaking in Arabic, Tatari said he and his youngest son told authorities about their relationship with Mohamed Atta, believed to be the leader of the suicide hijackers, and others linked to the Hamburg cell, including Mounir el Motassadeq, and Mohammed Haydar Zammar.
"I have nothing to hide and I am sure this whole thing will come to nothing," Tatari told The Associated Press in his office at Rethwisch.
Tumors shrink after blood cell treatment
WASHINGTON
Some seriously ill melanoma patients were left virtually free of disease after researchers injected them with billions of laboratory-grown white blood cells that attacked and shrank their skin cancer tumors, National Institutes of Health researchers say.
In a study appearing today in the journal Science, a team led by Dr. Steven Rosenberg of the National Cancer Institute reports using amplified lymphocytes - the body's white blood cells - to attack melanoma tumors in 13 patients. Ten of those patients are still alive, four are "virtually cancer free" and two others have experienced "substantial" shrinkage of their tumors, the researcher said.
Rosenberg, who has spent years developing ways to enlist the body's own immune cells to combat cancer, said his team has learned how to grow huge numbers of cancer-fighting cells within a patient, enough to overwhelm the tumors.
Stronger warnings needed for drug
SILVER SPRING, Md.
Federal scientists urged stronger warning labels yesterday on every bottle of acetaminophen, based on evidence that thousands of Americans may unwittingly take toxic doses that could harm their livers.
"You cannot allow more innocent men, women and children to suffer," Kate Trunk, whose 23-year-old son Marcus was one of about 100 people thought to die every year from unintentional overdoses, told a panel of Food and Drug Administration advisers. "Death is not an acceptable side effect."
The FDA panel voted 21-1 to back her call for more warnings about the risk.
Some 100 million people a year take acetaminophen, and serious liver damage is very rare, manufacturers insist. Although best known by the Tylenol brand, acetaminophen is in almost 200 different branded and generic products, from headache relievers to cold-and-cough remedies. While mostly sold without a prescription, it's also in a few prescription painkillers such as Percocet and Vicodin.
Article: Gays should not be ordained
NEW YORK
A staff member of an influential Vatican office has published an article arguing that gays should not be ordained as priests in the wake of the clerical sex abuse scandal.
If a man is gay, "then he should not be admitted to holy orders, and his presence in the seminary would not only give him false hope but it may, in fact, hinder" the therapy he needs, Monsignor Andrew Baker of the Congregation of Bishops wrote. Reached by phone in Rome, Baker would not immediately say whether his superiors reviewed or approved the article before it was printed in the Jesuit magazine America due out Monday.
However, church observers say Baker's arguments were evidence of the Holy See's views on homosexuality at a critical time for the Roman Catholic Church. "The Congregation for Bishops is one of the most important offices in the Vatican because it deals with bishops' conferences.
Confidence as spending indicator lower than satisfaction rates
By Shabina S. Khatri
Daily Staff Reporter
Consumer satisfaction has beaten out consumer confidence and income changes as the most influential factor on consumer spending in the last six years, according to a new University study.
Business School Prof. Claes Fornell, co-director of the Business School's National Quality Research Center, and colleague Jennifer Stephan of the Claes Fornell International group, collected and analyzed the preferences, income and spending habits of consumers from 1995 to 2001 using three different consumer indexes.
Much to the surprise of some experts, who have recently been hailing consumer confidence as the key determining factor in predicting future economic trends, the factor only accounted for 9 percent of the variation in spending growth, as opposed to customer satisfaction's 38 percent.
But Stephan, a research analyst at the CFI Group, said the empirical evidence makes sense.
"While consumer confidence and consumer sentiment are statistically significant predictors, they tend not to explain the variation in consumer spending," she said. "It goes back to the logic of the situation.
"Consumer spending depends not only on your ability to buy, (which involves) factors such as unemployment and income, but also your willingness to buy."
Fornell's co-director, David Van Amburg, said a customer's past and present purchasing experiences will always affect his future spending patterns.
"Satisfaction plays a bigger role in future spending because it's essentially about gratification. If you're happy with what you purchased you'll buy again," he said. That is why the American Customer Satisfaction Index, which is compiled by the Research Center, "better predicts future spending than any other single economic indicator," he said.
Stephan said one possible reason for the dispute between the significance of consumer satisfaction versus consumer confidence is the time period in which the study gathered its figures.
"Our data goes through 2001, before the most significant problems in our economy started," she said. "(This means) we know that when the economy is strong, consumer satisfaction is the biggest factor."
But as for drawing similar conclusions with the weakening economy, "that is definitely a question," Stephan said.
While Van Amburg admits the empirical evidence does not include data from the most recent economic crisis, he remains confident that consumer satisfaction will continue to predict future consumer spending.
"You can never account for how cataclysmic events like Sept. 11 or going to war will affect the stock markets. In the mid to late '90s the economic boom - which has now gone bust - this held to be true," he said.
"Time will tell whether this will hold true for all times, (but) it's our assumption that customer satisfaction will (continue to) remain a strong predictor."
Former Tyco chief still free
NEW YORK (AP) - A judge yesterday allowed former Tyco International Ltd. chief executive L. Dennis Kozlowski to remain free on bail while authorities determine if assets pledged for his bond are linked to his alleged multimillion dollar fraud.
State Supreme Court Justice Michael Obus set a Sept. 27 hearing to discuss the source of the money, which prosecutors contend was stolen from the company and should not be used for bail.
Kozlowski and former Tyco chief financial officer Mark Swartz were charged last week with enterprise corruption and grand larceny for allegedly stealing some $600 million from Tyco. They face up to 25 years in prison on each of those charges if convicted.
Lawyers for Kozlowski and Swartz had complained earlier this week that the men's personal assets had been frozen, and money offered by relatives and others for the bail had been rejected by prosecutors as possible proceeds of the crimes with which they are charged. Kozlowski's ex-wife, Angie, was expected to post $10 million in cash later yesterday on Kozlowski's $100 million bond, his lawyer, Stephen Kaufman.
Swartz's lawyer, James Mitchell, said his client would post $5 million security on $50 million with shares of Tyco stock, either yesterday or today.
Assistant District Attorney John Moscow told the judge, "When the bail is posted, we will check it out."
Prosecutors filed criminal charges against the men soon after the Securities and Exchange Commission accused them of hiding huge loans and other money allegedly taken from Tyco.
The SEC said Kozlowski used $242 million from an employee loan program, established to help workers buy Tyco stock, to pay for yachts, art, luxury apartments and vacations. Kozlowski already had pleaded innocent to charges of evading New York sales taxes on $13 million in art.
Case begins tenure as chief
NEW YORK - Stephen Case began AOL Time Warner's board meeting yesterday as chairman, and he was chairman when the all-day meeting ended.
In between, despite pressure from some major shareholders to oust Case and some anti-Case sentiment on the board itself, the 44-year-old chairman's job status was not on the agenda and was not even discussed, company spokesman Edward Adler said yesterday evening.
"As we've repeatedly said, Steve Case is chairman and is going to remain so. The board conducted regular business today," Adler said.
The company normally wouldn't say even that much about a regularly scheduled board meeting held at headquarters in midtown Manhattan, but "all the rumors and speculation forced us to act," Adler added.
Case declined to be interviewed, as did several of the other 13 board members.
AOL Time Warner shares sank 56 cents, or 4 percent, to $12.27 in trading yesterday on the New York Stock Exchange.
The stock has plummeted 74 percent since the January 2001 merger of America Online Inc., the company Case founded, and Time Warner Inc. Some shareholders blame Case for overselling the merger and the purported benefits that the popular Internet service would bring to the media and entertainment giant.
Two others held most responsible for the merger, former AOL Time Warner Chief Executive Gerald Levin and Co-Chief Operating Officer Robert Pittman, already have been squeezed out of the company.
Yet Case's status "is really not the key issue in front of the board," said Ajay Mehra, vice president of Columbia Management, a Portland, Ore., investment firm that considers AOL Time Warner shares undervalued and recently began buying.
Printed from www.michigandaily.com on Sat, 26 May 2012 19:18:53 -0400