Canada Pledges $3.3B Aid for Automakers

(NEWSER) - The collapse of Detroit has turned its Canadian counterpart into a veritable ghost town, the Economist reports. Located just across the Detroit River in Ontario, Windsor depends heavily on the Big Three, and now claims Canada’s highest unemployment rate at 14.4%. But Ontario’s problems go beyond “Detroit North”—tight post-9/11 border security and a high Canadian dollar have strangled cross-border trade, and the recession has killed demand for raw materials. More»

'Windsor-hum' causing cross-border ruckus

(NEWSER) - Something strange and noisy is happening on Michigan's Zug Island, complain Canadians in Windsor, on the other side of the Detroit River. The "Windsor hum"—described as a low-pitched rumble—has been annoying residents of the border city for two years. Canadian scientists say they have pinpointed the noise as emanating from the heavily industrialized island at the southern edge of Detroit. Canadian diplomats have repeatedly raised the issue with their US counterparts without success, the Wall Street Journal finds. More»

Derailment claims lives of 3 railway workers

(NEWSER) - Two locomotive engineers and a trainee were killed when a train derailed in Burlington, Ontario. Another railway worker and 45 passengers were injured when the train, headed to Toronto from Niagara Falls, came off the rails in an industrial district, the Toronto Star reports. The accident happened in good weather on a straight stretch of track and investigators say it could take a long time to establish the cause. More»

Chrysler, General Motors should never have been rescued, Mitt argued

(NEWSER) - Mitt Romney's opposition to the Detroit bailout plan may come back to haunt him in the Michigan primary , the New York Times reports. Not only did Bain Capital, the equity firm he founded, refuse to pump money into a flailing General Motors—Romney himself wrote an op-ed for the Times arguing that automakers should go bankrupt rather than get bailed out. Feelings are still sore in the nation's auto capitol: "All of us in the auto industry ... were profoundly disappointed and, I would say, angry," says a former GM executive. More»

Ex-Prez Bush says bailout his idea, and a good one

(NEWSER) - Three years ago, Mitt Romney wrote that President Obama should " Let Detroit Go Bankrupt ," instead of bailing out the struggling auto industry, in a famous New York Times column. And today? Even with the American auto industry on the rebound, Michigan's GOP primary looming on Feb. 28, and Rick Santorum breathing down his neck in the polls , Romney still thinks bankruptcy would have been better than the president's "crony capitalism," he writes in the Detroit News . "I believe that without his intervention things there would be better," he writes. More»