Amazon's New Kindle

There'll be plenty of time for somber news in the next item, but first let's dwell on some breaking, and much anticipated, tech news: Amazon will announce a new version of its Kindle e-book reader later today, the Wall Street Journal reports. What's more, Amazon has acquired a new work by novelist and early e-book advocate Stephen King that will be available "exclusively, at least for a time, on Kindle," it writes.

Returning to normal business fare and news from the WSJ: General Motors is in talks to buy back a large chunk of Delphi Corp., the parts supplier GM spun off a decade ago. The discussions over Delphi (itself already under bankruptcy protection for the last 40 months) are "part of GM's strategy to line up additional bailout funds from the U.S. government, which has already committed $13.4 billion to the car company," writes the WSJ. GM has subsidized Delphi's operations for many years, and the supplier is a huge drain on GM's cash reserves. Continuing the trend of dire automaker results, Nissan announced this morning it will forecast a loss for the current financial year and is shedding 20,000 jobs in what the New York Times calls "one of the most aggressive cutbacks so far by a Japanese company since the start of the global downturn." Even as the petroleum-reliant car industry crumbles, one entrepreneur, Shai Agassi, continues to push his vision of electric battery "filling stations" and is getting major NYT play in the process. "Mr. Agassi’s theory is that the key to persuading more consumers to buy all-electric cars—rather than gas-electric hybrids like a Prius that still create tailpipe emissions—is to build a network of stations that can replace drained batteries with fresh ones," the NYT writes.

On the subject of optimism: Friday's stock surge shows that Wall Street eagerly awaits passage of President Obama's economic stimulus package, writes Business Week, even as it warns that the Senate package may disappoint. We'll see later this week when a compromise version of the Senate bill seems set to pass, thanks to the support of handful of Republican votes, writes CNN Money. Even then, more haggling will take place as lawmakers try to marry differing Senate and House plans into one acceptable bill. The push to pass the $800 billion-plus package has forced Obama back onto the campaign trail as he works to "counter Republican criticism of his $800 billion recovery package and take greater control of the debate," writes the NYT. He might want to start back in D.C. with the Washington Post, which writes that a hastily enacted stimulus bill could ride roughshod over oversight and waste billions of taxpayer dollars in the process. For the moment, the drive to pass the economic recovery bill has pushed the latest bank bailout onto the back burner—well until Tuesday at least, according to CNN Money. When he does announce his plans, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is expected to tell the nation that "the government will become a partner with the private sector to purchase banks' troubled assets," writes the WSJ.  Geithner's new TARP plans also include fresh cash injections into banks, programs to help up to 2.5 million struggling homeowners, and a significant expansion of a Federal Reserve program designed to jump-start consumer lending, according the WSJ. Yet it's the formation of the so-called aggregator bank (or bad bank) that is prompting the most discussion both inside and outside the Obama administration. With private-sector financing seen as crucial, "how the government would entice investors to participate in the private bank, given that they can already buy soured assets on the open market," is a central question that remains to be answered, notes the WSJ.

Leaving a new job just one month after being hired is not exactly unheard of, but it's not the sort of thing that normally happens to company chairmen. Yet that's the situation facing Rio Tinto Chairman-elect Jim Leng today after he abruptly quit (without giving a reason) just one month after being anointed to take over the top job at one of the world's largest mining concerns. With Rio about to announce its latest earnings and struggling to manage a $37 billion debt burden, Leng had fallen out with CEO Tom Albanese "over how to tackle the mining group’s financial problems," the Financial Times reports.

Finally, if you thought that Starbucks was a place to go for fancy coffee, think again. In these credit-crunch times, the coffee chain is retraining its baristas to emphasize that "the average price of a Starbucks beverage is less than $3, and that 90% of Starbucks drinks cost under $4," writes the WSJ.