Chrysler rushed to clinch deals with Fiat and a fractious group of lenders on Wednesday in a last-ditch effort to avoid bankruptcy ahead of a government-imposed April 30 restructuring deadline.

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal citing people familiar with the matter, those efforts hit a major roadblock late in the day as talks between the U.S. Treasury Department and lenders collapsed.

This meant bankruptcy for Chrysler was “all but certain”, the report said, citing those sources.

Earlier in the evening, U.S. President Barack Obama said concessions by Chrysler’s unions and its major bank lenders had made him more hopeful than a month ago that the struggling automaker could be made viable.

But he added it was still not clear if Chrysler would need to seek bankruptcy protection to cement concessions from its lenders and move ahead with a planned alliance with Italy’s Fiat.

“The details have not yet been finalized so I don’t want to jump the gun, but I’m feeling more optimistic than I was about the possibilities about that getting done,” Obama said at a news conference.

The White House has set a series of aggressive targets for Chrysler in order to justify another $6 billion (4 billion pounds) in investment on top of $4 billion in emergency loans the government has extended since the start of the year.

The No. 3 U.S. automaker has won cost-cutting concessions from its unions in the United States and Canada and is on the brink of closing its deal with Fiat, a person involved in those negotiations told.

The New Hampshire Senate have voted to allow same-sex couples to marry, setting the state in motion to become the fifth in the country to legalize same-sex marriage.

New Hampshire’s House of Representatives has already approved the bill, but the Senate amended the language slightly before passing it on a 13-to-11 vote, meaning the House must approve the changes, reject them, or confer with the Senate before sending the bill to the governor.

With House approval expected, supporters and opponents are closely watching Governor John Lynch, a Democrat who has opposed same-sex marriage in the past and has not indicated whether he would sign or veto the latest measure.

On a day when the Senate also approved the use of medicinal marijuana, supporters of same-sex marriage hailed yesterday’s vote as a landmark victory for individual liberty in the “Live Free or Die” state.

“It is such an important statement, especially to young people, to say if you are gay, if you are lesbian, you are no different,” said Claire Ebel, executive director of the state’s chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. “You have the same rights.” But opponents said the vote would undermine traditional definitions of marriage.

Swine flu emerged in Mexico months earlier than previously thought, the country’s health minister has said, giving possible clues about the origins of the killer virus. Officials had previously said that the first recorded case of the H1N1 virus in Mexico was from a woman who died in the southern state of Oaxaca on April 12. Jose Cordova confirmed that a four-year-old boy in the eastern state of Veracruz had suffered from the virus as early as February. He survived the influenza.

A sample from the boy was sent to a US laboratory for anaylsis after swine flu was discovered in America.The announcement came as the probable death toll from the virus rose to 152. However, Mr Cordova said there had been no evidence that a mutant human-to-human flu strain had emerged at that time.

“We never had this kind of epidemic in the world,” he said. “This is the first time we have this kind of virus.”Mexico’s Agriculture Department said that inspectors found no sign of swine flu among pigs in the region, adding that no infected pigs have been found yet anywhere in Mexico.

Swine flu has hospitalized almost 2,000 people in Mexico and spread to several countries including Britain, America, Spain and Israel. Cases are also feared in New Zealand, Australia and South Korea.

The WHO announcement in Geneva followed a decision by the top EU health official urging Europeans to postpone nonessential travel to parts of the US and Mexico because of the virus.

U.S. automaker Chrysler showed signs of progress with its unionized workers in its battle to stay alive on Sunday with just days left to complete deals to slash labour and debt costs or face bankruptcy.

No. 1 U.S. automaker General Motors is also restructuring in an effort to secure the government funding it needs to stay in business, and was expected to announce a fresh round of cost cutting on Monday.

Chrysler – 80 percent controlled by private-equity firm Cerberus Capital Management CBS.UL – has been given until April 30 by the Obama administration to agree on cost-cutting deals with its creditors and the unions, plus cement an alliance with Italian automaker Fiat SpA.

Failure to meet those goals could shut off access to U.S. government aid for Chrysler, leaving it facing potential liquidation.

In a first significant step towards meeting those goals, the Canadian Auto Workers union on Sunday ratified a new collective agreement with the automaker that will save Chrysler about C$240 million (135.1 million pounds) annually.

The union said its members voted 87 percent in favour of the new agreement. Chrysler has 8,000 unionized workers in Canada.

Scientists report today that artificial blood vessels made using a person’s own skin cells work well in patients receiving kidney dialysis. The new blood vessels mark the first vascular grafts to be derived entirely from a patient’s own tissues, which lowers the odds of a harmful immune reaction.

To speed the procedure of renal dialysis doctors typically implant a small blood vessel between a vein and an artery in the patient’s arm. Blood is then removed and reinserted through an intravenous line inserted into this bypass vessel. When possible, doctors typically harvest a piece of a vein from a patient to make this bypass, called a shunt. But over time, these shunts often fail, forcing doctors to use shunts made with plastics and other synthetic materials that can trigger immune reactions or blood-flow problems downstream.

They start by harvesting skin cells known as fibroblasts and growing these in a sheet. They then roll up the sheet and allow the cells to produce an interpenetrating mixture of structural support proteins, known as collagen and elastin. The trouble with fibroblasts is that they can transform into smooth muscle cells that can eventually clog the vessel. So McAllister’s team removed the fibroblasts, leaving behind just the protein scaffold. Then the researchers layered another sheet of fibroblasts on the outside of this scaffold, which is dense enough to prevent the cells from easily migrating to the inside of the engineered vessel. Finally, the team added a layer of the patient’s own endothelial cells, which promote smooth blood flow, on the inside of the vessel.

A University of Nottingham study is holding freedom from louse infestation responsible for increased allergic reactions. The finding means that the epidemic of allergic disorders in modern, urban people might be due to our having rid ourselves of lice and worms.

As per “hygiene hypothesis” humans’ immune systems evolved to compensate for continual infections with parasitic gut worms, which secrete chemicals that reduce our immune responses. People who are now worm-free have overreactive immune systems, which can lead to asthma and autoimmune disorders.

In the study conducted on wild wood mice, Janette Bradley and her colleagues have found that body louse reduced the readiness of the innate system to mount an immune response.

During the study, the authors conducted post-mortem on the captured mice, assessing their weight, parasite load, and the responsiveness of their spleen cells to substances such as heat-killed listeria and bacteria, which bind receptors of the innate immune system and provoke a measurable reaction.

They found that those mice uninfected with the louse Polyplax serrata showed markedly increased responses to these triggers of innate immune responses, compared to highly-infected animals. This suggests that the parasite is able to exert some kind of immunosuppressive effect, possibly directly by secreting some substance into the mice from its saliva, or indirectly by transmitting bacteria or other pathogens.

New research presented at the Experimental Biology 2009 meeting being held in New Orleans that a specific type of antioxidant phytochemical called ellagic acid holds the promise of enhancing our bodies on the outside. In fact, it may hold the key to successfully slowing down or even stopping skin aging.

Researchers in the laboratory of Dr. Young-Hee Kang at Hallym University in the Republic of Korea have found topical application of ellagic acid markedly prevents the two major causes of wrinkles and aged-looking skin — the destruction of collagen and inflammation. Their findings are based on studies in human skin cells as well as on experiments with mice exposed to UV-B light that mimics the sun’s skin-damaging ultraviolet radioactive rays.

Ellagic acid is found in many fruits, vegetables and nuts but it is especially abundant in raspberries, strawberries, cranberries and pomegranates. Previous studies have suggested it has a photoprotective effect on the skin so the Korean scientists decided to try to find out the exact mechanism. They discovered that in human skin cells, ellagic acid worked to protect against UV damage by blocking production of matrix metalloproteinase (MMP), enzymes that break down collagen in damaged skin cells. It also reduced the expression of a molecule known as ICAM that is involved in inflammatory reactions.

In animal study the mice exposed to UV radiation without the ellagic treatment developed wrinkles and thickening of the skin but the group that received a topical dose of ellagic acid showed reduced wrinkle formation. The ellagic acid tamed the inflammation response, kept collagen from degrading and prevented the skin from thickening. The researchers concluded these results show that ellagic acid works to prevent wrinkle formation and photo-aging caused by UV destruction of collagen and inflammation.

Chrysler LLC is preparing to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection as soon as next week, whether or not it reaches a deal with its lenders or forges an alliance with Fiat SpA, said several people familiar with the matter.

If an agreement with the car maker’s lenders can be reached, Chrysler would file for bankruptcy protection to rid itself of some liabilities. That would let Fiat pick and choose which operations it wants, these people said. The U.S. government would provide bankruptcy financing while the reorganization plays out.

The United Auto Workers union is on board with the plan and likely would end up owning a sizable stake in the restructured car maker, said these people.

A relatively orderly bankruptcy filing along these lines would represent a measure of success for the Obama administration. But if a deal with Chrysler’s banks and Fiat cannot be reached, the company would begin the process of liquidation, with assets potentially sold to many buyers or shut down, said these people. Chrysler has shrunk radically in recent years but still employs 66,000 people in the U.S.

Meantime, Fiat has begun talks with General Motors Corp. about joining forces in Europe and Latin America, people familiar with the matters said, a surprise move that could have profound implications for the restructuring of GM and Chrysler. GM and Fiat have begun discussions about the Italian company buying a majority stake in Opel, the heart of GM’s European unit, these people said.

But no GM deal would go forward until Fiat’s plans with Chrysler are settled. Fiat has said it wants to take an initial 20% stake in Chrysler.

St. Petersburg Fire & Rescue reported that a 26-year-old woman was told there was a pig in her back yard on Monday afternoon. When she went outside to investigate, the 200-pound animal charged her, cutting the back of her left leg. Officials said a wild hog attacked a woman in the back yard of her home.

Rescuers were able to treat the woman for her injury at the scene. An animal control officer lassoed the hog and transported it to the Pinellas County Animal Control Office for rabies testing.

As reported by PC Magazine, the latest revision to the Bluetooth Core Specification was officially unveiled earlier this week – and it brings some nice new features to the party.

Building on the existing Bluetooth technology, Bluetooth 3.0 increases the speed of data transfer dramatically by piggybacking on available 802.11 wireless network connections – borrowing a small chunk of their bandwidth in order to shuffle data faster. While this functionality requires a second radio – either 802.11g or 802.11n – it does boost throughput to a not unimpressive 24Mb/s.

With Broadcom, Atheros, Nordic Semiconductor, Texas Instruments, and Cambridge Silicon Radio all having finalised chip designs for the new standard it’s thought that consumer devices featuring Bluetooth 3.0 support could hit the market before the end of the year. Even better is the news from special interest group chairman Mike Foley who announced that “any phone or computer that has Bluetooth 2.1+EDR and a 802.11g card may be able to be updated to Bluetooth 3.0 via driver, firmware, or software update.” There’s a clear “may” in that statement, but it at least holds the promise that some existing devices will be able to enjoy the speed boost brought by Bluetooth 3.0.

Sadly for anyone who uses Bluetooth to stream audio, while data transfer speeds were a clear selling point of the 3.0 specification revision, audio quality wasn’t. With many existing Bluetooth audio implementations proving disappointing – including the newer A2DP technology – hopes that Bluetooth 3.0 would resolve the issues appear dashed.

In the search for Earth-like planets, astronomers zeroed in on two places that look awfully familiar to home. One is close to the right size. The other is in the right place. European researchers said they not only found the smallest exoplanet ever, called Gliese 581 e, but realized that a neighboring planet discovered earlier, Gliese 581 d, was in the prime habitable zone for potential life.

“The Holy Grail of current exoplanet research is the detection of a rocky, Earth-like planet in the ‘habitable zone,’” said Michel Mayor, an astrophysicist at Geneva University in Switzerland.

An American expert called the discovery of the tiny planet “extraordinary.”

Gliese 581 e is only 1.9 times the size of Earth — while previous planets found outside our solar system are closer to the size of massive Jupiter, which NASA says could swallow more than 1,000 Earths.

Gliese 581 e sits close to the nearest star, making it too hot to support life. Still, Mayor said its discovery in a solar system 20 1/2 light years away from Earth is a “good example that we are progressing in the detection of Earth-like planets.”

Scientists also discovered that the orbit of planet Gliese 581 d, which was found in 2007, was located within the “habitable zone” — a region around a sun-like star that would allow water to be liquid on the planet’s surface, Mayor said.

He spoke at a news conference Tuesday at the University of Hertfordshire during the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science.

Gliese 581 d is probably too large to be made only of rocky material, fellow astronomer and team member Stephane Udry said, adding it was possible the planet had a “large and deep” ocean.

The Pentagon and Lockheed Martin, the lead defense contractor for the new F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, suggested yesterday that cyber-attacks had not caused any serious security breaches in the Pentagon’s most expensive weapons program.

Still, defense and corporate officials said attacks on the Pentagon as well as the F-35 program are constant and former defense officials familiar with the program said some of the F-35’s less sensitive systems have been infiltrated by cyber-intruders.

“We know we are probed on this every day. We have very aggressive defensive systems. The more sensitive the information, the greater the safeguards are,” said Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman. He said he was not aware of any sensitive F-35 technology having been compromised by a cyber-attack.

The comments came in response to a Wall Street Journal story Monday reporting that cyber-attackers copied and siphoned off data related to design and electronics systems, “potentially making it easier to defend against the craft.”

The F-35 is the Pentagon’s most expensive, complex and ambitious aircraft program. According to program estimates, the total investment required in the F-35 exceeds $1 trillion — more than $300 billion to buy 2,456 aircraft and $760 billion to keep them flying beyond their expected life cycle.

British Treasury chief Alistair Darling presents the government’s budget on Wednesday, with his options constricted after pumping billions into stabilizing a foundering economy.

Some tax breaks intended to stimulate spending may be introduced or continued, but the government’s mounting debt has sown caution about any further big gestures — and some sort of tax increases appear inevitable.

Economists’ forecasts for the rise in borrowing for each of the next two years range from around £150 billion to £175 billion. That could push the budget deficit to as much as 12% of GDP, the highest since World War II.

During the last recession in the early 1990s, debt peaked at 8% of GDP, but that downturn was nothing like this one.

Since Mr. Darling presented his previous budget, the Treasury has had to rescue Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC, taking a more than two-thirds stake in the business, and take a majority stake in Lloyds Banking Group PLC, which got into trouble after a government-encouraged takeover of Halifax-Bank of Scotland.

The government spent £37 billion ($54.28 billion) to shore up those banks, and has insured £585 billion worth of their most risky assets.

The International Monetary Fund reported Tuesday that the cost of stabilizing the financial sector in Britain may reach 12% of GDP.

Mr. Darling also faces intense political pressure to please as many people as possible, with a national election just a year away. Home builders, the auto industry, savers and pub owners are among those clamoring for relief from the impact of a downturn that, the government insists, was born in the U.S.

Chrysler LLC’s future leadership will be determined by the U.S. government and Fiat SpA if Chrysler succeeds at merging with the Italian auto maker.

Chrysler Chief Executive Officer Bob Nardelli, in a note to employees obtained by Dow Jones Newswires, said a new board of directors will be appointed by the federal government and Fiat once a deal is completed. The majority of the directors will be independent.

“The board will have the responsibility to appoint a chairman,” Nardelli said in the letter distributed to employees via e-mail on Thursday. “The board also will select a CEO with Fiat’s concurrence.”

Nardelli’s comments clarify speculation on who will control Chrysler if a merger deal with Fiat is completed and what role Nardelli might play in that new company.

Chrysler is racing to secure new union cost-cutting deals, reduce its debt and ink a Fiat partnership before the federally mandated April 30 deadline.

The Obama administration said it would not provide Chrysler additional access to low-interest loans if the requirements are not met, which could result in the third-largest U.S. auto maker filing for bankruptcy protection.

For at least 3,000 years, a drumbeat of potent droughts, far longer and more severe than any experienced recently, have seared a belt of sub-Saharan Africa that is now home to tens of millions of the world’s poorest people, climate researchers report in a new study.

The last such drought, persisting more than three centuries, ended around 1750, the research team writes in the April 17 issue of the journal Science.

The scientists warned that more such mega-droughts are inevitable, although there is no way to predict when the next one could unfold.

That sobering prediction emerged from the first study of year-by-year climate conditions in the region over the millenniums, based on layered mud and dead trees in a crater lake in Ghana. Although the evidence was drawn from a single water body, Lake Bosumtwi, the researchers said there was evidence that the drought patterns etched in the lake bed extended across a broad swath of West Africa.

A report to be presented at the United Nations Forum on Forests (UNFF) on April 20 will canvas the possibility that the world’s forests may move from being important carbon “sinks” to a net source of CO2.

The study: ‘Adaptation of Forests and People to Climate Change – A Global Assessment’ was put together by the Vienna-based International Union of Forest Research Organizations (IUFRO) through the Collaborative Partnership on Forests (CPF).

The report was the result of work by 35 of the world’s top forestry scientists and is expected to play a key role at the UNFF discussions which run until May 01.

Risto Seppälä, a professor at the Finnish Forest Research Institute (Metla) and Immediate Past President of IUFRO, who chaired the expert panel that produced the report, described the very real risk of forests becoming sources for carbon.

“We normally think of forests as putting the brakes on global warming, but in fact over the next few decades, damage induced by climate change could cause forests to release huge quantities of carbon and create a situation in which they do more to accelerate warming than to slow it down,” he said.

The report said a rise in global temperatures has already slowed regenerative growth in the world’s tropical rainforests and the dryer conditions have made the forests more vulnerable to fire, disease and insect infestations.

“The current carbon-regulating functions of forests are at risk of being lost entirely unless carbon emissions are reduced drastically,” said Alexander Buck, IUFRO’s deputy director and a coordinator of the report, to news agency.

“With a global warming of 2.5 C (4.5 F) compared to pre-industrial times, the forest ecosystems would begin to turn into a net source of carbon, adding significantly to emissions from fossil fuels and deforestation,” he added.”Policymakers should focus greater attention on helping forests and the people who live around them adapt to anticipated problems,” said Professor Seppälä.

A microbial ecosystem has been trapped under an Antarctic glacier for over a million years. Researchers have now figured out what fuels these bacteria thanks to a shift that has brought bright red, iron-rich ice to the surface.

The McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica are considered one of the least hospitable places on Earth; NASA has used them to simulate conditions that might prevail on Mars. But scientists are now reporting the discovery of an ecosystem buried under the ice of one of these glaciers that stretches the definition of unusual well past the breaking point.

Nobody would be likely to suspect that there is any life underneath the ice, which is hundreds of meters thick in the area, if it weren’t for the striking red ice erupting from the glacier’s terminus, giving the formation the name Blood Falls. That red color comes from iron concentrated in the ice, which exists primarily in the Fe(II) state favored when oxygen is absent..

It seems that the red ice has travelled from a pocket that exists four kilometers from the glacier’s end, at a site where the ice is over 400m thick. Based on the chemical composition of the material trapped in the ice, scientists think that the pocket encases the remains of an arm of the ocean that extended into the area during the Pilocene, which ended over 1.8 million years ago. Once encased under the glacier, that pocket became hyper-saline and completely devoid of free oxygen. Consistent with its total isolation from the surface, the amount of 14C in the sample is extremely low.

The DNA sequences obtained from Blood Falls appear to come from relatives of marine organisms. Most of the clones come from within the Proteobacteria, and the closest cultured relatives of many of these metabolize sulfur and iron (there are also high levels of sulfur present in the brine).

Unlike the sulfur-powered communities present at undersea vents, there’s little indication of a hydrogen sulfide metabolism present in the ice at Blood Falls. Instead, it appears that energy is obtained when sulfur is cycled through different oxidation states by reacting it with iron, producing the Fe(II) seen in the brine. The oxidized sulfur is then used to react with carbon compounds, powering the metabolism. All of that is pretty low-energy—the authors suggest that the doubling time for a bacterium in this environment would be roughly 300 days—and requires an external source of Fe(III) to power the system. The authors posit that the glacier itself might provide the source by extracting new iron as it scrapes across the underlying rocks. The Blood Falls bacteria suggest that life could have eked out a metabolism under these extreme conditions, providing raw material for evolution once the planet warmed again.

GlaxoSmithKline P.L.C. and Pfizer Inc. announced a deal that would combine their HIV operations into a new company that would account for almost 20 percent of sales of drugs to fight the virus.

In recent years, competitors, most notably Gilead Sciences Inc. and Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., have seized the lead in sales of HIV drugs.

That pressure is especially intense in the competition for new drugs to treat HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Demand for new HIV drugs is constant because the disease changes quickly.

While demand for HIV drugs – especially new ones – is strong, companies often cannot charge high prices for them.

Most people who have HIV live in extremely poor countries, with little or no ability to pay for drugs. Even in wealthier countries, the drugs are so crucial to survival that high prices create political furor that keeps a lid on what companies can charge. More broadly, the Obama administration is seeking to lower prescription costs for all drugs.

London-based Glaxo, which employs about 4,500 people in the Philadelphia area, will own about 85 percent of the new firm. New York-based Pfizer will own the remainder.

Pfizer expects to complete the acquisition of Wyeth, which has its U.S. pharmaceutical headquarters in Collegeville, by the end of this year.

Glaxo’s HIV operations are based at its U.S. headquarters in Research Triangle Park, N.C. Yesterday’s announcement will have no effect on the company’s Philadelphia operations, a spokesman said.

Creating a new company is unusual in the pharmaceutical world, where firms more often merge or strike licensing deals.