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GENEVA — Nicolas Hayek, chairman and former chief executive of the giant Swiss watch-manufacturing firm Swatch, has died. He was 82.

Swatch Group said Hayek died unexpectedly of heart failure Monday at his office in Biel, Switzerland.

“Nicolas G. Hayek’s greatest merit was his enormous contribution to the saving of the Swiss watch industry and the foundation and the commercial development of the Swatch Group,” the company said in a statement.

The self-styled Mr. Swatch is credited with reinventing Swiss watch-making in the 1980s by introducing radical cost-saving moves after he was asked to help close it down.

When Swiss banks asked Hayek’s consultancy firm for a report on the Alpine country’s watch-making industry, the two main manufacturers were on the verge of bankruptcy. The banks thought Swiss watches could not compete with digital watches made in the Far East, as the makers did not want to abandon their high prices and were rapidly losing market share.

Hayek maintained they could survive, by making less expensive products and charging a premium for top-of-the-range timepieces ‘Made in Switzerland’ — the traditional home of precision timekeeping.

Guided by Hayek’s consultancy, the watch-making companies merged to form SMH, in which Hayek bought a 51 percent share in 1984. Hayek reasoned that a cheap watch could tell the time just as well as an expensive one and SMH started to produce a plastic wristwatch — the Swatch — which revolutionized the industry. SMH was renamed the Swatch Group in 1998.

He introduced the use of plastic cases, quartz movements and mass-production to hold down prices of cheaper watches.

Although the Swatch brand became a global fashion success, Hayek also made money from the company’s more upmarket brands, such as Breguet, Calvin Klein, Longines and Omega. “People buy these watches like others buy Picassos,” he told the International Herald Tribune in 2004.

Hayek became a national figure, respected as one of the economic leaders of Switzerland, despite his very un-Swiss flamboyance. In 1998 he came up with the idea for the ultra-compact Smart car, now made by a subsidiary of DaimlerChrysler AG, saying a city car only needed “room for two big adults and a crate of beer.”

Man Wrecks Three Cars In Five Seconds On Dealer Test Drive

A man test driving an F-150 at a Missouri dealership accidentally put the truck in reverse, hit the gas and destroyed two Milans. Though, as Mike Levine points out, it’s one way to “Get rid of excess Mercury inventory.” [KMBC]

Send an email to Matt Hardigree, the author of this post, at matt@jalopnik.com.

Man Wrecks Three Cars In Five Seconds On Dealer Test Drive

A man test driving an F-150 at a Missouri dealership accidentally put the truck in reverse, hit the gas and destroyed two Milans. Though, as Mike Levine points out, it’s one way to “Get rid of excess Mercury inventory.” [KMBC]

Send an email to Matt Hardigree, the author of this post, at matt@jalopnik.com.

Gun rights extended by Supreme Court

By MARK SHERMAN
The Associated Press
Monday, June 28, 2010; 11:54 AM

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court held Monday that Americans have the right to own a gun for self-defense anywhere they live, advancing a recent trend by the John Roberts-led bench to embrace gun rights.

By a 5-4 vote, the justices cast doubt on handgun bans in the Chicago area, but signaled that some limitations on the Constitution’s “right to keep and bear arms” could survive legal challenges.

Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the court, said that the Second Amendment right “applies equally to the federal government and the states.”

(Photos from a Patriot’s Day gun rights rally)

The court was split along familiar ideological lines, with five conservative-moderate justices in favor of gun rights and four liberals opposed. Chief Justice Roberts voted with the majority.

Two years ago, the court declared that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to possess guns, at least for purposes of self-defense in the home.

That ruling applied only to federal laws. It struck down a ban on handguns and a trigger lock requirement for other guns in the District of Columbia, a federal city with unique legal standing. At the same time, the court was careful not to cast doubt on other regulations of firearms here.

Gun rights proponents almost immediately filed a federal lawsuit challenging gun control laws in Chicago and its suburb of Oak Park, Ill, where handguns have been banned for nearly 30 years. The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence says those laws appear to be the last two remaining outright bans.

Lower federal courts upheld the two laws, noting that judges on those benches were bound by Supreme Court precedent and that it would be up to the high court justices to ultimately rule on the true reach of the Second Amendment.

The Supreme Court already has said that most of the guarantees in the Bill of Rights serve as a check on state and local, as well as federal, laws.

Monday’s decision did not explicitly strike down the Chicago area laws. Instead, it ordered a federal appeals court to reconsider its ruling. But it left little doubt that the statutes eventually would fall.

Still, Alito noted that the declaration that the Second Amendment is fully binding on states and cities “limits (but by no means eliminates) their ability to devise solutions to social problems that suit local needs and values.”

Justices John Paul Stevens and Stephen Breyer, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor, each wrote a dissent. Stevens, in his final day on the bench after more than 34 years, said that unlike the Washington case, Monday’s decision “could prove far more destructive – quite literally – to our nation’s communities and to our constitutional structure.”

The ruling seemed unlikely to resolve questions and ongoing legal challenges about precisely what sort of gun control laws are permissible.

The response of the District to the court’s ruling in 2008 is illustrative of the uncertainty.

Local lawmakers in Washington, D.C. imposed a series of regulations on handgun ownership, including requirements to register weapons and to submit to a multiple-choice test, fingerprinting and a ballistics test. Owners must also show they have gotten classroom instruction on handling a gun and have spent at least an hour on the firing range. Some 800 people have now registered handguns in the city.

Anticipating a similar result in their case, Chicago lawmakers are looking at even more stringent regulations.

But the new regulations themselves are likely to themselves be the subject of lawsuits, a fact noted by the dissenting justices Monday. Already in Washington, Dick Heller, the plaintiff in the original case before the Supreme Court, has sued the city over its new laws.

Heller argues that the stringent restrictions violate the intent of the high court’s decision. So far a federal judge has upheld the limitations, but the case has been appealed.

Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, said his politically powerful group “will continue to work at every level to insure that defiant city councils and cynical politicians do not transform this constitutional victory into a practical defeat through Byzantine regulations and restrictions.”

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, an ardent proponent of gun control, said the ruling allows cities “to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and terrorists while at the same time respecting the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens.”

More from PostPolitics:

A look at the NRA’s role in arguing for the gun rights side.

The NRA had another victory in Congress earlier this month.

An NRA gun-safety program in grade schools has received criticism.

Majority of people don’t know about Elena Kagan.

The Elena Kagan hearings are set to begin.

—

Associated Press reporter Jessica Gresko contributed to this report.

BREAKING: Toyota’s chief test driver dies behind wheel of LFA in Germany

by Damon Lavrinc (RSS feed) on Jun 23rd 2010 at 1:55PM

Click above to view the video after the jump

We don’t have much in the way of details yet, but according to a report out of Germany, Toyota‘s chief test driver has died in a crash on highway 410 near the Nurburgring after veering into the oncoming lane and colliding with two others test drivers driving a BMW.

While the two BMW test drivers survived the crash, the yet-unnamed Toyota driver died behind the wheel of the recently spied LFA Nurburgring Edition he was driving.

The report says that the driver of the LF-A was 67 years old and Toyota’s chief test driver, which leads us to believe that he is Hiromu Naruse, In addition to being the company’s chief test driver, Naruse is also Akio Toyoda’s personal driver and the Godfather of the LFA.

More information should be forthcoming.

UPDATE: The two drivers in the BMW sustained lift-threatening injuries and one is in critical condition.
UPDATE 2: Video of the scene added after the jump.
UPDATE 3: Spiegel is confirming that Naruse was the driver.

Gallery: Lexus LFA Nurburgring Edition Spy Shots

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[Source: Rhein-Wied]

Myths about the teacher layoff crisis

By now, you’ve probably heard about the urgent teacher layoff crisis that threatens public education across America. Due to shrinking state and local budgets, up to 300,000 teachers could be laid off, with devastating educational consequences for our children, such as burgeoning class sizes. The only cure is $23 billion in fresh federal deficit spending, rushed through Congress as part of a bill to fund U.S. overseas military operations. “The urgency is high,” President Obama warned congressional leaders in a June 12 letter.

Don’t believe the hype.

Start with that scary number of 300,000 teacher layoffs, which has been bandied about in numerous newspaper articles. The sources for it are interested parties: teachers unions and school administrators, whose national organizations counted layoff warning notices that have already been sent out this spring and extrapolated from there. Notably, however, even these sources usually describe the threatened positions as “education jobs” – not teachers. That’s because the figures actually include not only kindergarten through 12th grade classroom instructors, but also support staff (bus drivers, custodians, et al.) and even community college faculty. And 300,000 is the upper end of a range that could be as low as 100,000. Nationwide, there are about 3.2 million K-12 public school teachers.

Moreover, springtime layoff notices are a notoriously unreliable guide to actual job cuts in the fall, because rules and regulations in many public school systems require administrators to notify every person who might conceivably be laid off — whether they actually expect to fire them or not. As the New York Times recently reported: “Everywhere, school officials tend to overestimate the potential for layoffs at this time of year, to ensure that every employee they might have to dismiss receives the required notifications.”

Given these facts, it’s unclear how the bill’s supporters came up with its $23 billion price tag. It works out to about $77,000 per job saved in the 300,000-layoff scenario, but $230,000 per job if only 100,000 jobs are at risk. Maybe that’s why the bill’s fine print allows states to spend any excess funds left over from education hiring on other state employees. By the way, the bill distributes funds to states according to how many residents they have, not how many threatened layoffs.

But what about class size? Well, 300,000 teacher layoffs would increase the national student-teacher ratio in public schools from 15.3 to 1, to 16.6 to 1 – roughly where it was in 1997. And 100,000 teacher layoffs would increase it to 15.6 to 1 – the 2005 level. Neither number portends educational apocalypse, especially when you consider how uncertain the links are between class size and student achievement. Student-teacher ratios shrank by roughly 10 percent nationally between 1996 and 2008, but reading scores on the National Assessment of Education Progress stayed essentially flat. Newark, for example, has a student-teacher ratio of only 10.7 to 1 – and the poorest test-score results of any public school system in New Jersey.

To be sure, the president and his advisers argue that the bill would pay for itself in part, because teachers and other school employees who are retained would continue to pay taxes and not collect unemployment benefits. But the same could be said for spending on any other category of employment. Beyond its totally unquantified and probably exaggerated claims of long-term educational benefits, the White House has no evidence that there’s something especially economically stimulative about keeping schools fully staffed. Moreover, by enabling inefficient school systems to continue living beyond their means this year, the bill would merely ensure that today’s smidgen of increased growth gets eaten up by tax increases and spending cuts when the federal fillip ends next year or the year after.

Indeed, given that the unemployment rate among health and education workers is only half that of the work force as a whole, you could argue that it’s the teachers’ turn to absorb some of the pain that they have been spared to date.

There are alternatives. If the administration wants to promote jobs, it could spend the $23 billion on extending unemployment benefits or building infrastructure or small-business loans. If it wants to keep teachers on the job, it could support mayors — such as Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles, a Democrat — and governors such as Chris Christie of New Jersey, a Republican — who are calling on teachers and other unionized public employees to make reasonable sacrifices to avoid layoffs.

Let’s be serious. This $23 billion bill — 15 hundredths of one percent of the United States’ $14.6 trillion economy — is not enough, all by itself, to bankrupt the nation. But it is also too paltry to jump-start the giant economy. The real point is that both the costs of the bill in increased federal borrowing and its benefits in purported economic stimulus are probably outweighed by the social costs of squandering an opportunity to wring concessions and reforms from the special interest groups that dominate public education, to the detriment of parents and children everywhere.

But, given the power of the teacher unions within the Democratic Party, something tells me that this bill isn’t really about stimulating the economy or educating our kids.

By Charles Lane  |  June 14, 2010; 4:21 PM ET
Categories:  Lane  | Tags: Charles Lane  

Last year marked one of the toughest budget years in history for the University of California, prompting furloughs for many employees and steep fee increases for students. Nevertheless, the state’s premier university system spent more on its payroll in 2009 than it did in 2008, according to a Bee analysis of UC salary data.

The increase was relatively small but points to a larger trend: As state funding declines, UC is relying more heavily on private sources of funding such as research grants and hospital fees. Those income sources fuel the university system’s medical and research enterprises, and aren’t used to pay for basic undergraduate education, which relies on student fees and the state’s general fund.

Overall compensation for UC’s 250,000 employees rose 2.5 percent in 2009. By comparison, compensation in 2008 was 7.4 percent higher than 2007. The number of UC employees earning more than $100,000 in 2009 increased by 5 percent – to about 22,600 workers – and the number earning more than $1 million went from eight to 10, the data analysis shows.

All of UC’s million-dollar earners are athletic coaches or medical specialists, such as brain surgeons. Their salaries are paid largely by users – ticket buyers and TV networks in the case of coaches, and hospital patients and health insurers in the case of doctors – not by the taxpayers who support the state’s general fund.

It’s the money UC gets from the general fund that took a big hit last year. Facing a massive budget deficit for the 2009-10 fiscal year, California lawmakers cut UC’s general fund allocation by about 20 percent last summer.

The university turned to grants and hospital fees to fund some pay increases, the salary data show. In 2009, UC spent $2.25 billion of its hospital revenue on salaries, up from $2.09 billion the year before. The amount of grant money spent on salaries grew by $87 million to $1.59 billion, driven largely by federal stimulus money for scientific research.

The increases reflect more work being done in UC’s hospitals and research labs, said UC spokesman Steve Montiel. In 2009, UC hospitals provided more medical care than the prior year, he said, and so took in more revenue.

“We don’t increase hospital and research revenues to pay for salary increases,” Montiel wrote in an e-mail to The Bee. “Those fund sources rise with an increased workload, and are only used to fund salaries for those employees supported from those fund sources.”

Market pressure also has contributed to rising salaries for doctors, particularly for those with medical specialties, Montiel said.

UC’s highest paid doctor is Timothy McCalmont, a specialist in diseases of the skin, who earned $1.9 million last year for his work at UC San Francisco. The highest-paid UC Davis doctor is Jan Paul Muizelaar, a brain surgeon who earned more than $747,000 last year.

“This is what doctors make,” Montiel said. “It’s not unique to the UC health system.”

UC implemented a furlough program last year but because it started in September, only four months of the associated pay cuts are reflected in the 2009 salary data.

The furloughs were not applied consistently across the university, with about 25 percent of UC’s 250,000 employees participating. UC imposed furloughs on many categories of nonunion employees, but most hospital employees were exempt, as were lab and campus employees whose salaries are paid by external research grants. In addition, not all labor unions agreed to take the furloughs, and workers in some unions got raises called for in their contracts.

While compensation was up overall in 2009, the impact on salaries was uneven. Not counting student workers, 60 percent of UC workers earned more than they did the prior year, while 40 percent earned less.

Some people saw their salaries rise or fall because of promotions, raises or furloughs. Others earned more or less because of overtime pay, extra pay for teaching in the summer or fluctuating grants.

Lynn Perani, a researcher in the dairy lab at UC Davis, saw her salary drop to $30,000 last year – from $41,000 the year before – because grant funding for her program fell. With less funding, Perani said she was offered only part-time work for much of 2009.

She and her husband cut back on meals out, choosing Denny’s instead of white linen. And Perani, 55, postponed her retirement. “We haven’t starved. We haven’t been homeless. But it has impacted my life,” she said.

Perani said it’s frustrating to see other UC employees making more while her salary gets cut.

“If one person gets a raise, then everybody should be getting raises,” she said. “Or if we have to cut back, then everybody should cut back. It’s just unfair.”

© Copyright The Sacramento Bee. All rights reserved.

Call The Bee’s Laurel Rosenhall, (916) 321-1083.

California lawmakers’ constitutional deadline to pass a state budget by June 15 will be ignored today – again.

Only once in the past two decades has the deadline been met, last year, but that spending plan was quickly unraveled by the economy and needed more than $20 billion in fixes.

California finds itself sinking again in red ink, a projected $19.1 billion, and no compromise is in sight between Democrats intent on raising billions in revenue and Republicans adamantly opposed.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, through a spokesman, expressed a sense of urgency about today’s missed deadline.

“Our deficit grows every day we don’t act, and the governor has been clear that the Legislature’s inaction will not be solved with more taxes or risky borrowing schemes,” Aaron McLear said.

“We must live within our means and use this crisis as an opportunity to reform our budget and fix our pension system that is spiraling out of control,” he said.

Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, said he does not take deadlines lightly but that it is more important to pass a budget that preserves key programs and reflects state values than to enact something quickly.

“I’m really focused on making sure that we do our best to get it right, not just for this year but that we take advantage of the moment and begin restructuring this failed structure,” Steinberg said of year-after-year of budget crises.

A 10-person Assembly and Senate conference committee has been meeting nearly every day for more than a week, and is scheduled to continue doing so, in attempting to craft a deal that could be fine-tuned for floor votes.

The conference committee has not yet grappled with the key issue of whether to bridge the $19.1 billion gap almost entirely with program cuts or whether – and how – to raise billions in revenue at a time when unemployment is high and the economy shaky.

Schwarzenegger has proposed wiping out California’s welfare program and slashing in-home health care for elderly and disabled residents, among other things, to maintain state government without a tax hike or extensive borrowing.

Democrats vow not to decimate the safety net for the neediest Californians, but the Assembly and Senate disagree on approach.

Senate Democrats are proposing $4.9 billion in additional taxes on corporations, income, vehicles and alcohol.

Assembly Democrats are pushing to borrow $9 billion by committing future revenue from the state’s container recycling program. The plan also would impose a tax on oil production and suspend about $2 billion in corporate tax breaks.

If agreement could be reached among Democrats, the conference committee conceivably could craft a budget by a simple majority, essentially ignoring Republicans. But passage in the Assembly and Senate would require a two-thirds majority of each house.

Sen. Denise Ducheny, D-San Diego, said today’s deadline is unrealistic because the state does not get solid revenue figures until after May 15. She said she is hopeful the conference committee can craft a proposal by July 1.

“You have three very different approaches for how to solve it,” Ducheny said of the multibillion-dollar deficit. “And reconciling these is going to take a little while.”

Assemblyman Jim Nielsen, R-Gerber, said he fears that any budget approved by the conference committee would be unraveled by political pressure.

“What I fear is that we’ll get the product of a Democratic budget that’s thrown down on our desks to take it or leave it – and we’ll be leaving it,” Nielsen said.

Hallye Jordan, spokeswoman for state Controller John Chiang, said that if no budget is adopted before the start of the new fiscal year July 1, the state would have to delay payments to vendors, local governments, for Cal Grant student aid, and to legislators and their aides.

Kris Vosburgh, executive director of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, said he suspects that most voters would not be surprised that lawmakers missed today’s budget deadline.

“They’ve become accustomed to it,” Vosburgh said.

“I think that generally most people have washed their hands of state government. Unless it’s a check they’re personally relying on, they don’t care much what Sacramento does.”

But Jean Ross, executive director of the California Budget Project, a nonprofit that advocates for low-income residents, said she does not “fault the Legislature” for missing today’s deadline because budgeting relies heavily on revenue from April’s income tax deadline.

“If you want the Legislature to be further ahead in the budget process than they are, you’d have to have taxpayers pay their taxes in March,” Ross said. “And I don’t think that would go over very well.”

© Copyright The Sacramento Bee. All rights reserved.

Call Jim Sanders, Bee Capitol Bureau, (916) 326-5538.

Cutting $24.4 million from the Sacramento County Probation Department would leave adult probationers virtually unsupervised and force the closure of Boys’ Ranch, a detention facility where judges place many juvenile offenders, Probation Chief Don Meyer warned the Board of Supervisors.

The board opened hearings today on the 2010-11 budget. Officials are recommending the board make widespread cuts to close a $122 million shortfall in the proposed $1.94 billion general fund budget for the fiscal year starting July 1.

Meyer was just one of the department heads who presented a doomsday scenario to the supervisors and pleaded for more funds. If the cuts stand, Meyer said he would need to lay off 155 workers – the third straight year of cuts to the department. If approved the department would have lost 40 percent of its staff since 2008-09.

“Sac County will be the only county in California without a functioning adult probation system,” Meyer told the board.

Steve White, presiding judge of the Sacramento Superior Court, spoke on behalf of the department, which he said is “every bit as critical to law enforcement and safety” in the county as the Sheriff’s Department, District Attorney and local police departments. People will go to prison who don’t belong there and there will be people released to the streets who don’t belong on the streets, White warned the board.

Supervisor Roberta MacGlashan said she has heard concerns the supervisors don’t care about the Probation Department but she pointed out that even with the cuts, the general fund allocation to the department – the amount of discretionary revenue the county budgets for probation – has gone up 50 percent since 2005-06.

“This board has been supportive and continues to be supportive,” MacGlashan said.

Budget documents show the probation department received $30.3 million in discretionary revenue in 2005-06 while officials are proposing a budget that would give them $58.2 million in 2010-11.

Meyer said the department has lost some grants and other outside funding, which means the department needs more local support to maintain staffing and programs. Budget documents show the entire department budget was $92.2 million in 2005-06 as compared to a proposed $103.6 million in 2010-11.

Supervisor Roger Dickinson asked Meyer to come back Wednesday with a plan how he’d use $10 million if the board were to be able to restore that much funding – a possible indicator the board is considering softening the blow to the department.

Earlier today, Dickinson and District Attorney Jan Scully had the first pointed exchange of this year’s county budget hearings.

Scully was presenting the impacts of $7.6 million in cuts to her department, including laying off 50 workers including 11 attorneys and five victims’ advocates. In making her case for more funding, Scully’s presentation said local funds spent prosecuting alleged criminals – not including the amount for the crime lab – is about $33.6 million. That’s less than the $40.1 million in funds spent defending those alleged criminals.

Dickinson cut in saying the District Attorney has grants and other funds bringing Scully’s total budget over $70 million. He suggested a total budget comparison would be more accurate.

Scully disagreed and said the outside funding often helps with cases that don’t require public defenders. The two went back and forth for several minutes.

Scully later pointed out that public defenders can ask for continuances and often receive such consideration from judges. If prosecutors aren’t ready on a certain date, however, the cases are simply dismissed, she added.

“These budget cuts that we’re facing are definitely tipping the scales of justice out of whack from the people’s standpoint,” Scully said.

Before Scully testified, Sheriff John McGinness said he would have to close the Rio Cosumnes Correctional Center, releasing thousands of prisoners into the community, or eliminate patrols in the county’s unincorporated areas, if the supervisors don’t find more money for his agency.

Undersheriff Mark Iwasa told the board such a funding reduction would mean cutting another 250-255 deputies. There are currently only 226 patrol deputies, Iwasa said.

McGinness used the recent standoff on Arden Way where an armed man held a baby hostage in an apartment for several days as an example of why his department should be spared cuts. During an impassioned speech that drew several loud ovations from the public safety supporters packing the chambers, McGinness said there are areas where prostitutes roam the streets, likening parts of the county to Amsterdam’s Red Light District.

Iwasa told supervisors the department would need $192.3 million in local funds to avoid cuts. The proposed budget calls for the department to get $154.7 million, a slight increase over the $153.5 million the department received this year.

Budget hearings have drawn supporters for the agencies’ programs and staff on the chopping block. This morning, public safety advocates wore black shirts. Animal care advocates have been marching outside the County Administration building at 700 H St. wearing red and blue T-shirts chanting “Save Our shelter, no more cuts.” Regional Parks supporters were recognizable in their green shirts.

Hearings continue Tuesday and Wednesday, and the board could vote on a budget by the end of the week.

© Copyright The Sacramento Bee. All rights reserved.

Call The Bee’s Robert Lewis, (916) 321-1061.

They mostly go unsupervised now as it is so they are saying its no change. No matter the amount of money we throw at them its wasted. They are trying to scare us. The budgets have gone up vastly up the service provided has not improved anywhere. How many areas have incorporated and have their own police now that the Sheriff’s are no longer responsible for?

How many stories of Probation officers not doing any work have their been? You should be able to see 2-3 parolees a day 5 days a week. Make the reports simpler and ensure you actually see them. Its a joke that they claim they can’t do their work.