Daily News Channel
A depressed aluminum market dragged down first-half earnings at Rio Tinto, the global mining company, which paid no interim dividend in order to husband cash and cope with $39 billion in net debt. Rio, fresh from a $15.2 billion rights issue, recorded a $206 million loss before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization at its Rio Tinto Alcan aluminum unit, compared with an ebitda gain of $2.38 billion in the first half of 2008
Four U.S.
Around six hundred workers at Total’s Lindsey oil refinery in Northern England have been told they no longer have jobs after staging what the company calls an "unofficial, illegal walk out." The steel workers started striking last Thursday after one contractor axed 51 jobs while another employer on the same site was recruiting. The dispute has prompted a number of wildcat strikes at power stations and oil refineries around the United Kingdom. The workers’ union GMB, which represents around half of the sacked workers, estimates that, as of late yesterday, up to 4,000 other workers at four power stations and three oil refineries had walked off the job in sympathy
The Israeli government is responsible for deaths and more than $10 million in damage to U.N. buildings during the recent military offensive in Gaza, a U.N
The Israeli Military said Thursday that the "vast majority" of Palestinians killed in the recent Gaza conflict were "terror operatives" and the number of people killed was less than Palestinian sources reported. In an e-mailed statement the Israel Defense Forces spokesman’s office claimed their figures contained the names of 1,166 Palestinians killed in the conflict, called “Operation Cast Lead.” The Israeli military said 709 of them were “identified as Hamas terror operatives, among them several from various other terror organizations.” The remaining, the statement claims, were comprised of 162 names who “have not yet been attributed to any organization.” “Furthermore, it has come to our understanding that 295 uninvolved Palestinians were killed during the operation, 89 of them under the age of 16, and 49 of them were women.” The Israeli military said it was releasing the findings to counter “false information originating from various Palestinian sources, and in order to remove any doubt regarding the number of Palestinians killed in Operation Cast Lead.” The numbers presented by the Israeli military differ sharply from those reported by Palestinian sources. At the conclusion of the fighting, the Hamas controlled Ministry of Health in Gaza had put the death toll at over 1,300, with the majority made up of non-combatants