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There have been many wonderful letters written through time on a number of topics including love (Napoleon, Beethoven and Lewis Caroll), fatherly advice (Reagan and Fitzgerald), and condolence; perhaps none better than Lincoln's letter to Mrs. Bixby, but my favorite letter of indignation, honesty, and dire warning came this week from the CEO of Titan (TWI) to the industry minister of France. On January 31 of this year, Goodyear Tire made the decison to close its sprawling commerical and farm tire plant in north France. The company in fact decided to bolt Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. It simply...

Goodyear's plant manager placed its bad-news call to City Hall at 7:58 a.m. Thursday: The Union City plant where 1,900 employees make radial tires will close by year's end. "We were just all surprised, I guess," City Clerk Carolyn Moran said, adding most everyone in this border town of 10,200 knows someone who works at the plant four miles north of City Hall. Union City sits at the Kentucky line, 115 miles northeast of Memphis. The area unemployment rate is 9.9 percent. Goodyear's fourth-quarter earnings report, released Thursday, disclosed the Akron, Ohio-based company will take a one-time $160 million charge...

China's giant sovereign wealth fund revealed it has accumulated stakes totalling $US9.6 billion ($A11.1 billion) in major US companies including Coca-Cola, Apple and Goodyear following a buying spree last year. Most of the stakes are small, reflecting China Investment Corp's strategy of avoiding politically sensitive acquisitions. But they highlight its growing presence in global markets as it invests a portion of Beijing's $US2.4 trillion ($A2.78 trillion) in foreign reserves. The holdings were disclosed Friday in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission that listed shares traded in the United States. CIC, one of the world's biggest investment funds,...

Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. on Friday said it will cut back on production at a Tennessee tire plant due to weak industry demand in a move that will cost 550 workers their jobs.

Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., the biggest U.S. tire maker, said Wednesday it plans to cut nearly 5,000 jobs this year after a sharp drop in sales led to a loss of $330 million in the fourth quarter. The job cuts equal almost 7 percent of the Akron, Ohio-based company’s work force and follow the elimination of about 4,000 jobs in the second half of last year.

Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. said Tuesday that it would close 92 money-losing retail stores with about 500 full-time workers by the end of the year. The move by the biggest U.S. tire maker affects about 11% of Goodyear outlets in North America and will result in charges of about $30 million, half of which will be recorded in the third quarter. The stores, all company owned, had combined annual losses of about $9 million, the Akron, Ohio-based company said. "Taking this action now will allow us to focus our attention on locations with the best long-term potential," said Scott...

INDIANAPOLIS -- Tire troubles that plagued Sunday's Allstate 400 at the Brickyard left thousands of NASCAR fans steaming Sunday. The caution flag waved 11 times at the race -- many of them planned because of safety concerns brought about by excessive tire wear. Many fans trickled into the speedway Monday morning to renew tickets for next year's race, but some of them said they considered not coming back for another year. Jerry and Diane Stoll, Jeff Gordon fans, said memories from Sunday's race are bad, but that didn't deter them from getting tickets for next year. "I wasn't happy with...

Al Goodyear and the Secrets of the Ancient AmericansUSC Professor Discovers 50,000 Year-Old Artifacts in S.C. BY RON AIKEN It was the summer of 1998, and University of South Carolina archaeologist Al Goodyear had a problem on his hands. Fourteen years of digging at an ancient chert quarry outside Allendale had begun to bear fruit: At a site called Big Pine Tree, Goodyear was well on his way to establishing that a substantial Clovis population lived here. If you’ll recall your history lessons from high school, the Clovis people — named such because the first evidence of them was found...

PR executive Doug Goodyear voluntarily steps down after past ties to Burma are revealed.

Posted on Thu, Oct. 27, 2005 Clovis speakers discuss man's origins in the United States MEG KINNARD Associated Press COLUMBIA, S.C. - A University of Texas archaeologist opened the highly anticipated "Clovis in the Southeast" conference at the Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center Thursday by rejecting the premise on which many experts once based their theories on man's North American origins. At the meeting, sponsored in part by the University of South Carolina, Michael Collins called the idea that the first inhabitants traveled by way of a land bridge from Asia "primal racism." Instead, Collins said, they arrived by water, because...

A contentious theory that the first Americans came here from Europe - not Asia - is challenging a century-old consensus among archaeologists, and a dig in Kenosha County is part of the evidence. The two leading proponents of the Europe theory admit that many scientists reject their contention, instead holding fast to the long-established belief that the first Americans arrived from Siberia via a now-submerged land bridge across the Bering Sea to Alaska. The first of the Europe-to-North America treks probably took place at the height of the last Ice Age more than 18,000 years ago, said Dennis Stanford, ...

University of South Carolina archeologist Al Goodyear said he has uncovered a layer of charcoal from a possible hearth or fire pit at a site near the Savannah River. Samples from the layer have been laboratory-dated to more than 50,000 years old. Yet Goodyear stopped short of declaring it proof of the continent's earliest human occupation. "It does look like a hearth," he said, "and the material that was dated has been burned." ...Goodyear, who has worked the Topper site since 1981, discovered the charcoal layer in May.

COLUMBIA, S.C. - A supernova could be the "quick and dirty" explanation for what may have happened to an early North American culture, a nuclear scientist here said Thursday. Richard Firestone said at the "Clovis in the Southeast" conference that he thinks "impact regions" on mammoth tusks found in Gainey, Mich., were caused by magnetic particles rich in elements like titanium and uranium. This composition, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientist said, resembles rocks that were discovered on the moon and have also been found in lunar meteorites that fell to Earth about 10,000 years ago. Firestone said that, based...

Kennewick Man, meet your distant cousins By Kate Riley Monday, November 7, 2005 - Page updated at 12:00 AM COLUMBIA, S.C. — Discerning the story of America's prehistoric past is a bit like groping through an unfamiliar room in the dark. One learned scientist's tattooing tool is another's piece of rock. Ask them to agree how long it has been there and you're bound to set off an argument that makes Seattle's whether-to-monorail conflict seem like a tea party. So it goes with evolving thought in archaeology. We all know the prevailing theory. Our children's high-school textbooks talk about the...

Rediscovering AmericaThe New World may be 20,000 years older than experts thought BY CHARLES W. PETIT Late in the afternoon last May 17, a tired archaeological team neared the end of a 14-hour day winching muck to the deck of a Canadian Coast Guard vessel. It was in water 170 feet deep in Juan Perez Sound, half a mile offshore among British Columbia's Queen Charlotte Islands. For four days, team members had fruitlessly sieved undersea mud and gravel. Then, in the slanting light of sunset, a deckhand drew from the goop a triangular blade of dark basalt. Its sharp edge...

BARNWELL, S.C., June 24 - On a hillside by the Savannah River, under tall oaks bearded with Spanish moss, an archaeologist and a graduate student crouched in the humid depths of a trench. They had reason to think they were in the presence of a breathtaking discovery. Or at the least, they were on to something more than 20,000 years old that would throw American archaeology into further turmoil over its most contentious issue: when did people first reach America, and who were they?

‘Scientific American’ shines spotlight on S.C. dig By DOUG NYETelevision Editor Posted on Tue, Jul. 20, 2004 About 12,000 years ago, the first people to journey to the American continents did so by crossing the Bering land bridge from Asia. At least, that’s what archaeologists have long believed. But tonight’s edition of “Scientific American Frontiers” examines five archaeological sites that could prove that humans walked this land much earlier. Among the digs spotlighted is USC’s Topper excavation site in Allendale County, supervised by archaeologist Albert C. Goodyear, director of the Allendale Paleo-Indian Expedition of the S.C. Institute of Archaeology and...

Archaeologist's find could shake up science By HEATHER URQUIDES Published January 7, 2007 Archaeologist Albert Goodyear is working on the find of his life. Based on radiocarbon tests and artifacts he's found along the Savannah River in South Carolina, Goodyear believes that humans existed in North America as many as 50,000 years ago, shattering the long-held notion that the earliest settlers arrived here about 13,000 years ago in Alaska via a lost land bridge. Not everyone is convinced, but Goodyear believes further excavation and testing at the South Carolina location, known as the Topper site, will confirm his findings. He's...

Excerpt - TOPEKA, Kan. The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee is calling for a deal to get striking workers at Goodyear's Topeka plant back on the job. The plant makes tires for Humvees, the military's workhorse vehicle in Iraq and Afghanistan. About 12-thousand Goodyear workers in the United States and Canada have been on strike since October, including those at the Topeka plant. Congressman Duncan Hunter of California says production is down about 35 percent, creating a shortage of tires for Humvees. ~ snip ~

Tired of reading about America's retirement woes? Then I have an alternative for you: Watch a TV show about them. Heck, you don't even have to move to your TV -- you can watch it on your computer, from the comfort of your own desk chair. The particular program I'm talking about is an episode of the PBS series Frontline titled "Can You Afford to Retire?" Of course, since you've clicked on this article, you can't be too tired of reading about all of the impending retirement woes out there, so let me sum up the program's main points and...