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Byline: - Staff and Wire Services

Delphi work force to be down 70%

DETROIT -- An additional 1,400 hourly workers have decided to accept auto supplier Delphi Corp.'s buyout offers, meaning that the struggling company will lose more than 70 percent of its work force by the end of the year.

Delphi released the buyout numbers Tuesday, bringing to 20,100 the number of its production workers who have decided to leave this year either through buyout offers or early retirement packages.

Delphi had 27,500 unionized workers as of June 30, and 12,400 United Auto Workers union members previously accepted early retirement and buyout offers. An additional 6,300 members of the International Union of Electronic Workers-Communications Workers of America also will take buyouts or early retirements, Delphi said.

All workers who accepted the offers will be off the payroll by Jan. 1, with several thousand replaced by lower-paid temporary workers as the company closes or sells 21 of its 29 U.S. plants, Delphi spokesman Lindsey Williams said.

Glitch in Google service to ISP

NEW YORK -- Google services were slow or inaccessible to some users of a single Internet service provider Tuesday, the company said.

In a statement, Google Inc. said its engineers ``helped troubleshoot the problem and provided diagnostic information to the ISP. We believe the issue has since been resolved by the ISP,'' which the company did not name.

The cause of the glitch was not immediately known, nor were any details available on how widespread it was.

Brief outages of leading Internet sites are not uncommon.

Owens Corning's plan is approved

PITTSBURGH -- A federal bankruptcy judge on Tuesday approved Owens Corning's plan for emerging from bankruptcy, the company said.

The ruling by Judge Judith Fitzgerald at the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware comes more than five years after the building materials maker sought protection from creditors over health claims related to its asbestos products.

The plan shifts Owens Corning's $7 billion in asbestos liabilities off company books and into a trust that will be established for the plaintiffs. As part of the plan, the Toledo, Ohio-based building-products company will pay more than $5 billion to asbestos claimants and as much as $2.27 billion to holders of bank debt.

Satellite signal for Sirius device

NEW YORK -- Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. said Tuesday that it would begin selling its first handheld device that can receive live signals from Sirius' satellites.

Sirius' competitor XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc. already offers a portable unit with live reception, but XM is being sued by music companies that say they should be paid extra because those units can store music for playback later.

Sirius' new unit, the Stiletto 100, can also store music and play it later, but Sirius spokesman Patrick Reilly said the company had reached agreements with ``most'' of the major music companies that resolved their concerns over the Stiletto.