IN THE PAPERS
In the papers 20 September
20-09-2007
by Sylvia Leatham
Intel to cut 200 Irish jobs | EU could bail out Galileo
The Irish Times reports that chipmaker Intel, one of Ireland's largest private-sector employers, intends to cut 200 jobs over the next three months. The company told workers on Wednesday that it was seeking 200 voluntary redundancies by the year's end. Intel Ireland chief Jim O'Hara said the company wanted to cut numbers at the Kildare plant to boost competitiveness, but he stressed that Intel still has a long-term commitment to the Republic. The company employs 5,500 workers at a facility in Leixlip.
Separately, the paper reports on new chips unveiled by Intel at a developer conference on Wednesday, as reported by ENN.
The paper also reports on the creation of new jobs in Ireland by medical technology group Kinetic Concepts (KCI) and by Blizzard, which develops and publishes entertainment software.
The same paper says that a Dublin-based worldwide internet monitoring service has said that its members are passing an average of 9,600 confirmed reports of child pornography on to police every month. The International Association of Internet Hotlines (Inhope) represents hotlines in 25 countries where members of the public can ring up to complain about the content of websites. Inhope, based in Sandyford, said that between September 2004 and December 2006, its network processed 1.9 million reports of illegal activity on the internet.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Europe's proposed multibillion-dollar Galileo satellite navigation project could be salvaged with the help of unspent EU funds and without additional taxpayer money, according to the European Commission. The EU executive said it could shift money within the bloc's 2007-2013 budget to come up with the EUR2.4 billion needed to bail out the project. Galileo was envisioned as a rival to the global positioning system in the US but ran into difficulties when eight companies clashed over the development of the system.
The paper also says that Hewlett-Packard plans to increase the number of employees at its product-development centre in Taiwan to 400 from the current 300 by the end of the year. "We have many product lines, so we need more research and development", as well as more engineering personnel, said HP Taiwan corporate marketing manager Emily Chang.
The Financial Times reports that Patricia Russo, chief executive of Alcatel-Lucent, has opened the way for more job cuts at the telecoms equipment supplier. Russo is under pressure from Alcatel-Lucent's French-based directors over the management of the struggling group. She admitted in an interview with Le Figaro, the French newspaper, that the company could cut more of its 79,000 workforce than the 12,500 planned under its merger cost-savings programme.
Caped Koala Studios has built a virtual world for kids, combining education and social networking 