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Hostess Brands Inc., the maker of the iconic snack, announced today that it will liquidate the entire company because not enough striking employees returned to work by a Thursday evening deadline set by the company. "We deeply regret the necessity of today's decision, but we do not have the financial resources to weather an extended nationwide strike," said Gregory F. Rayburn, chief executive officer. "Hostess Brands will move promptly to lay off most of its 18,500-member workforce and focus on selling its assets to the highest bidders." Hostess said it will seek bankruptcy court permission to close its business and...

Hostess Brands Inc. said it likely won't make an announcement until Friday morning on whether it will move to liquidate its business, after the company had set a Thursday deadline for striking employees to return to work. The maker of Twinkies, Ding Dongs and Wonder Bread had warned employees that would file a motion in U.S. Bankruptcy Court to unwind its business and sell off assets if plant operations didn't return to normal levels by 5 p.m. EST Thursday. That would result in the loss of about 18,000 jobs.Snip The Teamsters meanwhile are urging the smaller union to hold a...

Hostess Brands Inc. on Friday sent out letters notifying its more-than 18,000 workers that they could be laid off in the next two months. The maker of Twinkies and Wonder Bread on Friday mailed out WARN Act notices to all of its employees, a Hostess spokeswoman confirmed to Bankruptcy Beat Monday. The federal WARN Act requires companies to give employees 60 days notice before closing a facility or ordering mass layoffs. However, sending the notices doesn’t mean a company is definitely going to lay off the recipients.

The company that makes Twinkies, Wonder bread and Ding Dongs says it's making a final offer to workers to accept cost-cutting before it asks a bankruptcy court to impose the cuts. Hostess Brands Inc. wants the Teamsters and bakers' unions to accept reduced pension benefits and changes in work rules to lower costs. It wants to outsource some delivery work. The company said Saturday that if the unions reject the offer, it will push ahead with efforts in bankruptcy court to throw out the unions' collective bargaining agreements. A union official warned that could lead to a strike. Hostess Brands...

Do these stomach crusaders, these modern day abolitionists, take no lesson from history? Top down societal engineering does not work. Especially not in this country. We the people won’t sit idly by and be rationed bread and water just because a bunch of rich politicians think we’re too fat and talk funny and believe grits are a real thing. The phrase “cold, dead fingers” comes to mind.

Hostess Brands Inc. is preparing to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection as soon as this week, said people familiar with the matter, a move that would mark the second significant court restructuring for the Twinkies and Wonder Bread baker in the past several years. The privately held Irving, Texas, company, which employs roughly 19,000 people and carries more than $860 million in debt, has been facing a cash squeeze amid high labor costs and rising prices for sugar, flour and other ingredients, according to people familiar with the matter. Those costs together have proved higher than the company's roughly...

(CNN) -- Twinkies. Nutty bars. Powdered donuts. For 10 weeks, Mark Haub, a professor of human nutrition at Kansas State University, ate one of these sugary cakelets every three hours, instead of meals. To add variety in his steady stream of Hostess and Little Debbie snacks, Haub munched on Doritos chips, sugary cereals and Oreos, too. His premise: That in weight loss, pure calorie counting is what matters most -- not the nutritional value of the food. The premise held up: On his "convenience store diet," he shed 27 pounds in two months. For a class project, Haub limited himself...

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Meghan McCain watches the controversial new series Huge, about a fat camp for teenagers, and finds it to be provocative, funny, and important. There has been a lot of buzz recently about the new ABC Family show Huge, garnering it some mixed reviews and feedback. For those of you unfamiliar with Huge, the second episode of which aired Monday night, it is about characters at weight-loss camp, and stars Hairspray’s Nikki Blonsky and Hayley Hasselhoff (daughter of David). The show was created by Savannah Dooley and her mother, Winnie Holzman, of My So-Called Life fame. I should start by saying...

A new report, F as in Fat, says Texas ranks 14th in the nation — in how fat its adults are. The ranking means 27.9 percent of Texas adults are overweight or obese, according to the Trust for America’s Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, two non profits dedicated to health issues. In the same report, the state had the 20th highest rate of overweight youths, ages 10 to 17, at 32.2 percent. In no state did adults lose weight, the report says. Texas’ ranking didn’t budge from last year. (The new data are based on combined rates for...

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has vetoed a proposed Harvey Milk Day. The measure would have set aside the birthday of the slain gay activist/politician in his memory and encourage public schools to commemorate and educate about the history of California's first openly gay politician. Schwarzenegger's veto came on the last day possible to kill the legislation introduced by openly gay Assemblyman Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) and passed by lawmakers. In his veto message issued Tuesday, the governor explained his reasons for vetoing the measure. “I respect the author's intent to designate May 22nd as 'Harvey Milk Day' and a day...

"Harvey will be coming out soon," an extra assured the crowd in front of City Hall on a recent Sunday. They had gathered to be in a scene in "Milk"- the movie about the life and death of Harvey Milk - in which the San Francisco supervisor delivers an impassioned speech. It was really Sean Penn, of course, who plays the martyred supervisor, who would be appearing. But, this extra explained, because he's a "method actor," he wants to be called Harvey. *snip* Appearing on the City Hall steps to deafening applause, Penn looked shockingly like Milk. He had his...

Interstate Bakeries threatens to liquidate unless unions grant concessions By JENNIFER MANN The Kansas City Star Bankrupt Interstate Bakeries Corp. said Thursday it could be forced to liquidate if it is unable to extract major concessions from its 20,000 union workers soon. The assertion, the latest in an escalating labor confrontation, came in the struggling company’s request to the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for still more time to exclusively formulate a plan of reorganization. The current deadline is Oct. 5. The Kansas City-based company, once the nation’s largest wholesale baker, sought protection from creditors and time to reorganize the business in...

Troubled Interstate Bakeries Corp., in bankruptcy since September 2004, early today said it is closing four bread bakeries in Southern California. The closings will eliminate 1,300 jobs, which besides those in the bakeries, include jobs impacted by route consolidations. Interstate, the maker of iconic Hostess Twinkies, will continue to make and sell snack cakes in Southern California. In midday over-the-counter trading, Interstate Bakeries shares were up 10 cents, or 9.09 percent, at $1.20. The company said the pullout was due to lower-cost, non-union competitors, and irrational pricing, Those factors, combined with high fixed costs, have continued to make the market...

Michael Van Winkle, writing at the American Thinker, takes a look at some numbers and concludes that while Michael Moore’s SiCKO is an effective bit of propaganda, the people depicted in the film just aren’t representative of Americans as a whole If we take the film’s subjects as representative of the whole, Americans are routinely forced to make nightmarish health decisions, choosing, for instance, between a middle finger that costs $60K to reattach and a ring finger that costs only $12K

Thursday, May 31, 2007 By Steve Ettlinger Los Angeles Times When I began researching the ingredients for Twinkies, I naively thought that their raw materials were extracted from nuts, beans, fruit, seeds or leaves, and that they came from the United States. I was looking to link places with foods -- along the lines of California wine or Maine lobster, but for thiamine mononitrate. It turned out that I was way off. Although eight of the ingredients in the beloved little snack cake come from domestic corn and three from soybeans, there are others -- including thiamine mononitrate -- that...

The San Francisco Arts Commission is seeking proposals from artists to create a sculpture at City Hall of Harvey Milk, the city's first openly gay elected official. Artists should submit their proposals by Aug. 1. Three finalists will be selected and paid $2,500 each to produce a model for a bronze statue. The models will be put on public display to let city residents offer their opinions on the designs.

CHICAGO (AFP) - Every six seconds, someone in the United States eats a Twinkie, the creme-filled sponge cake that has climbed to iconic status since its inception 75 years ago. To fuel this passion, Hostess factories pump out 500 million of the sweet, yellow cakes at speeds of up to 1,000 Twinkies a minute. "It's such a simple treat. It's comfort food," explained Hostess brand manager Anne Drozda. The Twinkie was invented in a Chicago bakery in April 1930 by a baker who wanted to make better use of shortcake pans when strawberries were out of season. "It was the...

CHICAGO (AFP) - Every six seconds, someone in the United States eats a Twinkie, the creme-filled sponge cake that has climbed to iconic status since its inception 75 years ago. To fuel this passion, Hostess factories pump out 500 million of the sweet, yellow cakes at speeds of up to 1,000 Twinkies a minute. "It's such a simple treat. It's comfort food," explained Hostess brand manager Anne Drozda. The Twinkie was invented in a Chicago bakery in April 1930 by a baker who wanted to make better use of shortcake pans when strawberries were out of season. "It was the...

Love it or hate it, you have to admit: A mullet hairstyle is distinctive There are two kinds of people in this country, and forget that blue-state, red-state thing. You're either for a mullet or against a mullet. What's a mullet? Do not mock us. Yes, a mullet is a spiny-finned, feeble-toothed fish, but we all know it's so much more. A mullet is a hairstyle characterized by the hair cut short in front and on the sides but kept long down the back. It's not a cutting-edge style. But recently, the mullet has re-emerged as a pop culture object...