Apple CEO Tim Cook didn't specifically mention The New York Times' exposé on working conditions at Foxconn in his company-wide email yesterday, but it's clear that this was the first attempt at damage control. 9to5Mac posted Cook's company-wide e-mail yesterday, which for the most part, reads like a standard corporate response to unpleasant news. "Unfortunately some people are questioning Apple’s values today, and I’d like to address this with you directly," Cook wrote.  "We care about every worker in our worldwide supply chain... Any suggestion that we don’t care is patently false and offensive to us."

Obviously he's referring to yesterday's A1 story in The Times which documented the dangerous working conditions and deaths in Apple's supplier factories. And though Cook sounds earnest, caring doesn't change the fact that iPad manufacturing explosions killed people. Cook writes:

Every year we inspect more factories, raising the bar for our partners and going deeper into the supply chain. As we reported earlier this month, we’ve made a great deal of progress and improved conditions for hundreds of thousands of workers. We know of no one in our industry doing as much as we are, in as many places, touching as many people.

He concludes the email by thanking his employees but not before linking to Apple's Supplier Responsibility page, a savvy made-for-leaking-email move.

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Alexander Abad-Santos