R E O R G A N I Z A T I O N

OUT OF THE WOODS Court supervision of Dow Corning scheduled to end in June

BARRING LAST MINUTE COM-

plications, Dow Corning will end a nine-year stint un­

der court supervision when it emerges from bankruptcy reor­ganization on June 1.

Stephanie A. Burns, Dow Coming's CEO, says she credits the focus and resolve of employ­ees on servicing customers while the lawyers handled bankruptcy details for getting Dow Corning to this point.

However, trimming employ­ment to improve the firm's finan­cial performance will be among the first orders of business. A Dow Corning spokeswoman says about 250 positions—nearly 3%

of the workforce—are slated to go by year's end. A merger of sev­eral business units last year left redundancies, she adds.

Judge Denise Page Hood of U.S. District Court for the East­ern District of Michigan set the date to end Dow Coming's or­deal just two weeks after an at­torney representing 48 Nevada women dropped his appeal of the firm's $3.2 billion settlement with silicone gel breast implant recipients.

Some 170,000 breast implant claimants and another 75,000 claimants with other types of sil­icone implants—including joint and jaw implants—could begin

receiving claim packets the first week of June. Payments of be­tween $2 ,000 and $330,000 could start being distributed to claimants by June 15, accord­ing to the official website of the Dow Corning Trust Settlement Facility

A dispute over interest due on about $800 million owed to commercial creditors is the last remaining obstacle to bank­ruptcy resolution. But the com­pany spokeswoman is confident that a deal will be worked out to let the June 1 date stand.

The workforce reduction will go ahead regardless of the firm's bankruptcy status. "We're look­ing at ways to be more efficient to meet financial targets," the spokeswoman explains. Al­though the company can't con­trol high energy and raw mate­rial costs, "the size of the organization is one thing we can control."-MARC REISCH

S C I E N T I F I C P U B L I S H I N G

GOVERNMENT ENDS EDITING EMBARGO Treasury Department backs down from its earlier position on editing services

BOMBARDED BY PROTESTS

from publishers, researchers, and elected officials, the

Treasury Department has lifted its ban on the pub­lication of peer-re viewed and edited scientific journal articles written by authors in countries under U.S. trade sanction. The de­partment's Of­fice of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) conceded that its regulatory programs do not prohibit the routine * activities necessary to \ prepare such articles for publication.

The issue originally

arose in 2001 over a conference sponsored in Iran by the Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engi­neers. After learning that servic­

es associated with the meeting might violate government regulations, IEEE decided that it had to limit activit ies involving Iran, in­cluding the editing of papers written by au­thors in that nation. Subsequently, the American Chemical Society reluctantly imposed a morato­rium in November 2003 on publish­ing articles from

Iran and the other sanctioned coun­

tries — Cuba, Iraq, Libya, and Su­dan—fearing that the society could otherwise incur serious penalties from the government.

But publishers and their sup­porters refused to let the matter rest. For months, they have been trying to get OFAC to reverse its position on the grounds that the government ban violated trade-related legislation and the First Amendment. After judging that its customary publishing activi­ties were lawful, ACS took a cal­culated risk and resumed pub­lishing papers from the affected countries in mid-February (C&EN, Feb. 23, page 6). Then on April 2, IEEE received a letter from OFAC Director R. Richard Newcomb acknowledging that the institute's publishing activi­ties do not "entail the prohibited exportation of services to Iran or another sanctioned country"

Robert D. Bovenschulte, pres­ident of ACS's Publications Di­vision, says the society "has always believed that scholarly publish­ing should not be constrained by federal regulation. We are pleased to learn that the Treasury De­par tment concurs."—SOPHIE R0VNER

Burns

IN BRIEF: AMAZON

Destruction of Brazils Amazon rain forest in­creased by about 2 .1% last year, according to numbers released on

Apr i l 7 by the Brazilian government. Although the government has promised action, officials with the World Wildlife Fund say Brazil must do more to protect the Amazons unique array of plant and animal species.

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