NightBlogger

The agency that protects pension plans raised new concerns about Detroit’s three auto makers, saying their use of pension funds to pay for restructuring threatens to drain the funds and leave the agency footing the bill. The U.S. Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. this week sent letters to General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler LLC asking for projections on how the companies plan to use their pension plans to cover early retirements or other buyout deals. The agency is “concerned” that using pension funds for such attrition programs could “undermine the state of the plans,” agency Director Charles E. F. Millard said in letters to the auto makers. Copies of the letters were reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. More

(Reuters) - Threatening letters containing a suspicious white powder mailed to three U.S. financial institutions warn “it’s payback time,” according to a text released by the FBI on Thursday. More than 50 letters, with identical or similar threatening language, were sent to Chase Bank offices, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and the U.S. Office of Thrift Supervision, the FBI said. “Steal tens of thousands of people’s money and not expect repercussions (sic). It’s payback time. What you just breathed in will kill you within 10 days. Thank (redacted) and the FDIC for your demise,” said the text posted on the FBI Web site. The agency also released a photograph of the envelope in which the letter was mailed. It was addressed to a Chase Bank branch in Lakewood, Colorado, and bears an Amarillo, Texas, postmark. All the letters were mailed from the city in the Texas panhandle, the FBI said. More

Scripts, letters, designs, props, photographs – as many as 900 boxes of material belonging to one of the greats of cinema have been made available to a wider audience. Stanley Kubrick’s widow, Christiane, has donated the auteur’s paperwork to the University of the Arts, and the collection, carefully sifted for this Kubrick retrospective by Chris Hastings, gives us a fascinating insight into the public and private worlds of an inspirational film-maker. More