billso.com

From Yahoo, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, and the Honolulu Advertiser: Del Monte announced yesterday that the company will shut down its Hawaii operations within the next 60 days, the minimum amount of time allowed by Federal law for a layoff announcement. The layoff affects 551 Del Monte employees.I’ve heard of giving pineapples as a Christmas present, but this seems cruel. Del Monte’s been a part of the Hawaiian economy for a century, and this announcement is another nail in the coffin for Hawaiian agriculture, as more farmland is converted to residential and commercial use.

It’s much less expensive for Del Monte to grow pineapples in Costa Rica, the Philippines and Thailand than Hawaii, mostly because of labor costs. Apparently Hawaii pineapple no longer commands a premium price from consumers.

The company had announced in February that it would shut down operations in 2008. The new date means that the current crop of pineapple, grown on a 5100 acre plot in Kunia, may be abandoned. Pineapple takes three years to cultivate and harvest. Maui Pineapple has asked to salvage the abandoned crop, but Dole may become the only company growing pineapple on Oahu.

From Yahoo: The International Tracing Service, which is part of the International Red Cross, maintains an archive of documents related to the Holocaust.

Much of the material is recorded on 16 miles paper, contained in six buildings in Bad Aronson, Germany. Only 2 percent of the material is available to the public. Many of the records were retrieved from German government and military offices after the Nazis surrendered in 1945. Some of the archives include transcripts from Allied interrogations of collaborators and prisoners.

How detailed is this information? An entry about Anne Frank’s deportation from the Netherlands was found in these archives, according to this article in Time.

The service plans to convert some of the documents to digital formats over the next decade.

If you’re interested in the military history of information systems, read IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black. While IBM’s management has continued to deny Black’s findings, the book presents a wide variety of evidence that IBM information systems and services were used by Nazi Germany to schedule and manage their war effort. The footnotes are compelling reading, and are quite authoritative.