| Puzzling actions surround Hardie asbestos debacle
WINSTON Churchill described Russia as a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, which can also be applied to the developing debacle around the latest attempt to coax money from James Hardie for the victims of asbestos poisoning. The riddle is the Australian Tax Office's ruling that the new entity set up by James Hardie working title: Special Purpose Fund is not a charity, thereby threatening the December deal to keep money flowing to asbestos victims. The mystery is why this fund had to be set up. Why not use the existing charity, the Medical Research and Compensation Foundation, which has been channelling compensation to James Hardie's victims? And the enigma is: why do investors think James Hardie's liability to its victims has been capped and are optimistically bidding up its share price? It has not been capped; the liability each year is limited to 35 per cent of cash flow, but the time for paying it is open-ended, and on one assessment the potential future claims are equal to the company's entire intrinsic value.
APIL: Compensation bill gets royal assent
We applaud the Government for introducing long overdue regulation of claims management companies but we must ensure the new rules provide robust protection for injured people. A great injustice has also been rectified following a Herculean effort by the Government to reverse the ruling in the Barker case, which would have been disastrous for mesothelioma sufferers. This swift action is to be commended. We fought vehemently alongside others for clause 1 of the bill, the so-called ‘negligence' clause, to be removed. We believe it will provide a bigger safety net for negligent defendants and erode standards of safety, but we must now wait and see how the courts interpret “desirable activities," and the impact this will have on compensation for injured people." -ends- For more information, contact: Lisa Wardle, t: 01159388715 or Lorraine Gwinnutt, t: 0115 9388707 .
(AFX UK Focus) 2006-07-30 16:49 GMT: Economist Louis Winnick dies at 85
MANHASSET, N.Y. (AFX) - Louis Winnick, an economist who helped guide the investments of the Ford Foundation and promoted low-income home ownership, has died. He was 85. Winnick died Saturday at a hospice in Manhasset, on Long Island. The cause of death was mesothelioma, a type of lung cancer that his daughter Pamela Winnick attributed to exposure to asbestos when he worked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II. Winnick was born in Romania and came to Brooklyn when he was 1. He graduated from Brooklyn College and earned a graduate degree in economics at Columbia University. He worked for the New York City Planning Commission and the Housing and Redevelopment Board before joining the Ford Foundation in 1962. He served as deputy vice president in the national affairs division from 1968 to 1986.
Asbestos laces many residential soils
It was the mid-1980s, and Terry Trent and his wife, Carol Adams, had broken ground for their dream home. Atop a hill east of Sacramento, Calif., the remote, 10-acre site in the Sierra foothills offered plenty of privacy. As the couple eventually learned, it offered plenty of something else as well: a nasty type of asbestos known as tremolite. Respiratory exposure to this mineral has been linked with mesothelioma, a lung cancer that quickly turns fatal. .
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