in which the company promised to "
Process all timely requests to deliver rebates within eight weeks of receiving a properly completed rebate request." (At this point, company president John Levy would break down and confess to several unrelated crimes ... if this were Perry Mason).
The feds request "restitution and disgorgement of ill-gotten gains."
You can read the suit here.
Yikes.
That was the collective reaction in the newsroom here at SF Weekly when we heard that David Weir, one of the deans of Bay Area journalism, had been laid off from the Web site Predictify. Weir's news-business credentials are sterling: His past gigs include investigative reporter at Rolling Stone, Editor in Chief at 7x7 magazine, managing editor for Salon.com, executive vice president at KQED, and managing editor of Mother Jones. He was also executive director and co-founder of the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR).
Most recently, Weir (pictured with former student Michelle Won) was working at Predictify, a quirky site that invites readers to predict trends in current events. On Thursday he was laid off, according to a somber set of entries on his personal blog. Weir says he loved the job and wishes the company well, with or without him.
It's no secret that print news is in dire straits. The stock price of the New York Times Co., owner of the world's most estimable daily newspaper, fell by 50 percent in 2008. But Weir's predicament brings the doom and gloom down to a personal, and more poignant, scale. If a guy like this can't keep his job in the media landscape of 2009, then who, exactly, does the evolving news business have room for? And what kind of stories will they produce?
Blinky, the three-eyed fish from the animated television sitcom The Simpsons, may be headed for the San Francisco Bay and its estuaries, according SF Weekly's reading of new research from the University of California at Davis. Wholesale dumping of toxic chemicals into waterways -- such as the gunk disgorged in Springfield ponds by nuclear power plant owner Monty Burns -- has led to a new type of San Francisco Bay zombie fish, with a shrunken brain and misshapen body, according to a study in the Nov. 24 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The toxic mix of pesticides, industrial chemicals and flame retardants Bay Area residents have long wantonly dumped into the bay and delta is passed from mother bass to fingerlings during gestation, scientists reported. As a result, the weeuns have undeveloped brains, are sluggish, runtish, and have livers that don't work right, the report said.
In the Nov., 1990 Simpsons episode "Two Cars in Every Garage and Three Eyes on Every Fish," Bart and Lisa Simpson catch a three-eyed fish downstream from Mr. Burns' plant. The press nicknames the fish "Blinky," and a state investigation reveals numerous violations by Burns. Given the scant time the episode devotes to explaining the science behind this multiple-eye deformation, it's unclear whether it could be caused by contaminants found in the San Francisco Bay.
Notwithstanding, SF Bay-borne chemicals such as polybrominated diphenyl ethers, polychlorinated biphenyls, and the pesticides chlorpyrifos and dieldren, are known to cause skeletal, hormonal, and organ deformities in young and adult organisms. When the effects are combined, these effects can increase by several orders of magnitude, according to U.C. Davis researcher David Ostrach.
