Corporate Watch. Charter acquires Time Warner Cable in $78.7 billion deal. UPDATE 12.49 GMT: Investor presentation details added.
Charter Communications has agreed to purchase Time Warner Cable in a cash and stock deal valuing the company at $78.7 billion. The buyout was announced on Tuesday. Under the terms of the deal, Charter will pay $100 in cash and shares of a new parent company -- dubbed New Charter -- equivalent to 0.5409 shares of Charter for each Time Warner Cable share outstanding; raising Time Warner individual share value to $195.71. In addition, Charter will give Time Warner Cable stockholders an election option to receive $115 in cash and New Charter shares equivalent to 0.4562 shares of Charter for each Time Warner Cable share they own. The deal gives Charter a subscriber pool strong enough to compete with the US' largest cable provider, Comcast.
Here's Big Cable's plan to stop the FCC's net neutrality rules. It was a moment big broadband providers have been anticipating for weeks.
The official publication of the Federal Communications Commission's network neutrality rules on Monday gave a green light for challenging those rules in court. This week, industry groups representing almost every type of internet service provider have filed lawsuits arguing that the FCC's new regulations are illegal. If these lawsuits succeed, they could strip the FCC of legal authority to establish strong net neutrality protections. The groups won't be required to spell out their legal arguments until later in the legal process. But this week I talked to two industry insiders — including Michael Powell, who represents the cable industry as the head of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association — to get a preview of the industry's arguments.
Google Fiber plans expansion, then TWC makes speeds six times faster. With Google Fiber preparing an expansion into Charlotte, North Carolina, incumbent cable operator Time Warner Cable is trying to hold onto customers by dramatically increasing Internet speeds at no extra charge.
"The Internet transformation will begin this summer and will include speed increases on TWC residential Internet plans at no additional cost, with customers experiencing increases up to six times faster, depending on their current level of Internet service," Time Warner Cable announced last week. "For example, customers who subscribe to Standard, formerly up to 15Mbps, will now receive up to 50Mbps, customers who subscribe to Extreme, formerly up to 30Mbps, will now receive up to 200Mbps; and customers who subscribe to Ultimate, formerly up to 50Mbps, will receive up to 300Mbps, at no extra charge. " Google announced plans to enter Charlotte and a few other metro areas in January and is working with local officials to finalize the network design so that construction can begin. Thomas Pyle: The Iowa Caucuses Have a Winner: Ethanol.
Employers Can Legally Lie to Workers, Court Rules. Why is Comcast so bad: Won’t let you cancel their service. Comcast didn’t earn its reputation as America’s Worst Company overnight — it took years and years of hard work.
From offering customers ridiculously overpriced bundle packages, to having the highest fees among any of its competitors, to offering some of the absolute worst customer service of any company in the United States, Comcast has toiled away tirelessly to perfect its craft of angering its own customers, who have little choice but to stick with the cable giant due to the sorry state of America’s home broadband market. However, just because it’s already one of the two most hated companies in America doesn’t mean Comcast is going to stop innovating new ways to enrage its subscribers.
TechCrunch brings us word of an amazing customer service call between a Comcast rep and former Engadget editor-in-chief Ryan Block, whose wife had been trying in vain to get Comcast to cancel their home service before Block took over the phone and decided to start recording the call. Dale Russakoff: A Test for School Reform in Newark. Late one night in December, 2009, a black Chevy Tahoe in a caravan of cops and residents moved slowly through some of the most dangerous neighborhoods of Newark.
In the back sat the Democratic mayor, Cory Booker, and the Republican governor-elect of New Jersey, Chris Christie. They had become friendly almost a decade earlier, during Christie’s years as United States Attorney in Newark, and Booker had invited him to join one of his periodic patrols of the city’s busiest drug corridors. News - 30,000-year-old giant virus 'comes back to life' An ancient virus has "come back to life" after lying dormant for at least 30,000 years, scientists say.
It was found frozen in a deep layer of the Siberian permafrost, but after it thawed it became infectious once again. The French scientists say the contagion poses no danger to humans or animals, but other viruses could be unleashed as the ground becomes exposed. The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). NC regulators shielded Duke's coal ash pollution. RALEIGH, N.C.
(AP) -- Over the last year, environmental groups have tried three times to use the federal Clean Water Act to force Duke Energy to clear out leaky coal ash dumps like the one that ruptured last week, spewing enough toxic sludge into a North Carolina river to fill 73 Olympic-sized pools. Each time, they say, their efforts have been stymied — by the N.C. Department of Environment and Natural Resources.
Here's How AT&T Is Planning to Rob Americans of an Open Public Telco Network. AT&T has a sneaky plan.
It wants to exploit a loophole in the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)’s rules to kill what remains of the public telecommunications network — and all of the consumer protections that go with it. It’s the final step in AT&T’s decade-long effort to end all telecommunications regulation, and the simplicity of the plan highlights a dysfunction unique to the American regulatory system. AT&T and other big telecom carriers want to replace the portions of their networks that still use circuit-switching technology with equipment that uses Internet Protocol (IP) to route voice and data traffic.
Report: data caps just a “cash cow” for Internet providers. Yovany Gonzalez's Wells Fargo Lawsuit Alleges Bank Fired Him, Cut Dying Daughter's Health Insurance. Wells Fargo allegedly fired an employee because his dying daughter needed expensive cancer treatment, according to a lawsuit filed in Palm Beach County Court on Thursday.
Wells Fargo fired mortgage consultant Yovany Gonzalez three days before his daughter Mackenzie was scheduled to get cancer surgery in August of 2010, the lawsuit states. According to the suit, the hospital canceled the surgery because Mackenzie no longer was covered by health insurance. She died of cancer in March of 2011. Before Gonzalez was fired, Wells Fargo and United Health Care, the health insurer, asked Gonzalez's wife "numerous questions" about Mackenzie's treatment and made "several references ... to the costs of her treatment," the lawsuit states. Killing Libby Andrew Lichtenstein / Corbis At U.S.
Highway 2 crosses Montana, it is dotted along its 600-mile length with signposts bearing white crosses. Nick Hanauer TED Presentation About Why Rich People Aren't Job Creators. Liberating America's secret, for-pay laws. [Editor's note: This morning, I found a an enormous, 30Lb box waiting for me at my post-office box. Affixed to it was a sticker warning me that by accepting this box into my possession, I was making myself liable for nearly $11 million in damages. The box was full of paper, and printed on the paper were US laws -- laws that no one is allowed to publish or distribute without permission.
Carl Malamud, Boing Boing's favorite rogue archivist, is the guy who sent me this glorious box of weird (here are the unboxing pics for your pleasure). The Myth of the Free-Market American Health Care System - Megan McArdle - Business. What the rest of the world can teach conservatives -- and all Americans -- about socialism, health care, and the path toward more affordable insurance Reuters Yesterday, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry posted a stimulating comparison between the American and French health-care systems. "From my outlook," he writes, "there's something that I haven't seen discussed and yet seems striking to me: how similar the French and U.S. healthcare systems are. On its face, this seems like a preposterous notion: whenever the two are mentioned together, it's to say that they're polar opposites.
" Indeed, there are a lot of misconceptions about how America's health-care system compares to those of the other developed countries, including France. Americans Elect: The Truth Behind the Corporate Scheme to Swipe the 2012 Election : Jane Jacobs and the Problem of Monstrous Hybrids. Timothy Karr: The Fate of the Internet. The Wall Street Journal just reported that the Federal Communications Commission is holding "closed-door meetings" with industry to broker a deal on Net Neutrality -- the rule that lets users determine their own Internet experience.
Given that the corporations at the table all profit from gaining control over information, the outcome won't be pretty. The meetings include a small group of industry lobbyists representing the likes of AT&T, Verizon, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, and Google. They reportedly met for two-and-a-half hours on Monday morning and will convene another meeting today. Group Says Botswana Bushmen Evicted over Diamonds. WASHINGTON, Nov 4, 2010 (IPS) - An international boycott of Botswana diamonds aims to draw greater attention to the government's mistreatment of native Kalahari Bushmen. The rights group Survival International launched the boycott in San Francisco and London Tuesday with a protest outside the diamond retailer De Beers, which is partly owned by the Botswana government.
With the support of several celebrity endorsements, the group is also urging a boycott of tourism to Botswana "until the Bushmen are allowed to live on their ancestral land in peace". "No government is immune to bad publicity, and the Botswana government is no exception," says Miriam Ross, Survival International's Campaigner.
"The more people know about the government's treatment of the Bushmen, the less customers Botswana will have for its diamonds and its tourism. " In past years, the Bushmen have relied on water from a borehole in one of the Kalahari communities. 19 iconic products that america doesn't make anymore: Tech Ticker, Yahoo! Finance. Our culture of avarice - War Room. House Republicans Propose $1.9 Billion Cut To EPA. Most-Pesticide-Laden Fruits and Veggies List Under Attack. American Corporations in a Nutshell. Milking it. Local organic insiders watching closely as Monsanto. Guelph Mercury GUELPH — Monsanto, the world’s largest seed and biotechnology company, is being jointly sued by American and Canadian organic farmers, seed businesses and agricultural organizations.
The lawsuit, filed by the Public Patent Foundation in the federal district court of Manhattan, is an effort to protect organic and conventional farmers from being accused by Monsanto of patent infringement when crops come to be influenced by the company’s genetically modified seed. The legal action is expected to take years to reach a conclusion. Bc video: Corporate interests take long view in attack on Democrats. Supreme Court Considers Corporate Right to Mandatory Arbitration. In South Africa, Wal-Mart Refuses to Buy Local, Threatens WTO Action, and Wins. Two things seem particularly noteworthy about the approval Wal-Mart won yesterday to acquire Massmart, a Johannesburg-based chain that operates across 13 African countries. One is that, despite the ample publicity Wal-Mart has engineered for its "buy local" efforts, the company in fact has zero interest in cultivating local suppliers beyond stocking a few token local veggies suitable for a nice photo-op.
Children of the Corn: GMOs Don't Qualify As Food. Don Blankenship: The Dark Lord of Coal Country. John Boehner Backed Deregulation Of Online Learning, Leading To Explosive Growth At For-Profit Colleges. Smoking is cost-effective, says report. GE’s Immelt Advises President on Jobs and Competiveness, Exports Jobs and Technology to China. U.S. Files Complaint to Block AT&T, T-Mobile Merger. Documentary General- Motors- History = Taken- for- a -Ride.