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Start-up company creates true 3D hologram of proteins

A start-up company has created a true 3D hologram of a protein structure that biomedical researchers can view from multiple angles to peel away certain domains.

The product is essentially a micro-engineered plastic sheet — but Holoxica is ultimately aiming to build a dynamic display system that can store a number of different holograms graphics and short animations.

Holoxica is a company with connections to several Scottish universities, including St Andrews, Heriot-Watt and Edinburgh, and is headed by optical engineer Javid Kahn. The company produces custom-made holographic prints using a half-a-million pound holographic printer supplied by Lithuanian company Golea.

‘I decided in 2007 that 3D was going to be really big and I was dissatisfied with the state of the art in the field — I decided that I could do it better by going back to basics and trying a different approach,’ said Javid Kahn of Holoxica.

The latest commission is a holographic display of the crystal structure of green fluorescent protein (GFP) — a molecule of special interest to geneticists. Holoxica was able to design the display using information from the online, open-access protein database.

The resulting product is an A3-sized sheet of plastic that is displayed horizontally like a painting. When a halogen spotlight is shone on the display, a 3D image is projected out of the screen, which has a 120° field of view.

The display can be designed with a basic level of interaction so that when the researchers move around the 3D projection, part of the protein structure is ‘peeled away’ to reveal deeper internal domains of the protein.

‘The hologram itself is a dot-matrix structure and each dot has holographic information encoded about the subject from a unique viewpoint in red, green and blue for colour,’ Kahn said.

Concept car

Holoxica has also created a display for a concept car that can be laid flat on a table with the resulting holographic image projected up and viewed from all angles at 360°.

Currently, however, the commercial displays the company makes can only handle one protein (or other graphic) at a time and can only incorporate very basic levels of interaction. A grant from the Technology Strategy Board will now allow it to develop a more dynamic display.

‘We will embed a number of holographic images into what we call a holographic screen and switch between them and do simple animations. It’s true, proper 3D, no messing around with glasses or optical tricks — nobody has been able to do that yet,’ Kahn said.

So far, the company has managed to embed nine images on the same display and is now aiming for 25 — which will allow one second of true holographic video.


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Ten of the worst ... savings accounts

With many savings accounts offering shockingly low interest rates, let Sandra Haurant steer you away from the worst ones
Don't assume your savings account is still a best buy. Photograph: Ann Pickford/Rex Features

Ten of the worst ... savings accounts

With many savings accounts offering shockingly low interest rates, let Sandra Haurant steer you away from the worst ones

These are tough times for people hoping to get a good interest rate on their savings accounts. Some of today's top rates would have been found at the bottom of the best buy tables two years ago, when the Bank of England base rate was 5.5%. Savings rates have tumbled since it was cut to 0.5% last March, and some lenders have focussed on bringing in new customers with their best rates while eroding what they pay on long-standing accounts.

To help you steer clear of the shockers out there, we have trawled the depths to find you the ten savings accounts we like least.

1. Halifax Liquid Gold Saver

A fistful of cash
Photograph: Dougal Waters/Getty Images

This is always worth a mention, says Andrew Hagger of Moneynet.co.uk: "Once a best buy and heavily advertised on TV many moons ago, this account is now paying just 0.05%." Hagger says there is no excuse for staying in a low-paying savings account. "There are an awful lot of poor rates out there," he says. "You can still get an instant savings account that will pay you 3%, but there are many that pay at least 30 times less."

2. Post Office Instant Saver

Although the base rate hasn't budged since last March, introductory rates on savings have crept up slightly, from an average of 0.9% in January last year to 1.18% in January 2010. But finding an account that pays a decent rate is an uphill struggle. Take the Post Office Instant Saver. It looks relatively attractive at first glance, or at least not too bad, with its 2.1% rate. However, strip away the 2% bonus at the end of 12 months and suddenly you are earning just 0.1% on your cash.

3. Lloyds TSB's Easy Saver and eSavings

These accounts are not much cop either. An already not-very-impressive introductory rate of 1.6% also includes a bonus – this time 1.5%, so your interest rate reverts to 0.1% after 12 months. If you have more than £10,000 you are made to feel a bit more welcome, with a rate of 2.5%, although that again includes a bonus of 1.5%.

4. Earl Shilton Building Society's capital 90 account

Loads of money.
Photograph: Alamy

This account was paying a not great 2.5% two years ago, and now pays just 0.1%. If you want to move your cash to an account that will pay you more you will have to give 90 days' notice. Unless, that is, you are happy to leave £20,000 in your account, in which case you won't be charged a penalty. Though at that rate, it would seem a peculiar choice.

5. Chesham Building Society's Bonus Saver

Thought 0.1% was a poor interest rate? This branch-based account pays a shockingly low 0.01%, down from 1.37% two years ago. You do get a bonus of 0.1% if you don't make more than six withdrawals a year. It may be sensible, though, to make one big withdrawal and plonk the money somewhere more profitable.

6. The 50+ Saver Issue 4 from Santander

Pile of money
Photograph: Jason Hetherington/Getty Images

The 0.95% savings rate includes a bonus of 0.85% if your savings stay put for 12 months. It does pay more if you have more to stash away: balances of £750,000 attract interest at 2%, on amounts over £500,000 you get 1.55%, and on balances of £100,000 interest is paid at just 1%.

7. Marsden Building Society Rainbow 40 account

Two years ago this account was paying 4% interest, and savers who chose it were probably pretty pleased with themselves. If you have been sitting back on laurels ever since it's time to wake up and smell the rubbish interest rate, now languishing at 0.1% for balances of between £1,000 and £10,000. To add insult to injury you need to give 40 days' notice before taking your business elsewhere.

8. Lloyds TSB's Advantage Saver Silver and Select Bonus accounts

Pensioner holding cash
Photograph: Daniel Berehulak/Getty

Even the higher paying accounts come with caveats these days, with the majority of headline interest rates including a bonus for a limit period. Darren Cook, spokesman for Moneyfacts.co.uk, says: "Unfortunately, the onus solely lies on the customer to make sure that they make a note or diarise an expiry date. They then need to shop around for a better deal as soon as possible." Now, having to review your savings accounts every 12 months may just mean a bit of extra effort, but switching in search of a better rate every six months is a bit much, especially when the rates are as low as this from Lloyds TSB. These accounts pay 1%,including a 0.25% bonus for six months.

9. HSBC's Flexible Saver

If you opened an account back in January 2008, you would have enjoyed a reasonable rate of 3.15%. But that was then, this is now, and if your cash is still sat in the account it's time you thought about jumping ship. On its website the bank suggests you could use the account to save for a wedding, but with a pilfering 0.05% interest rate you might as well stash your cash under the prenuptial mattress.

10. Cheltenham & Gloucester's Reward Saver

The best savings rates are oversubscribed very quickly
Photograph: Getty Images/Image Source

Despite its name it may not feel all that rewarding these days. Two years ago it was paying a competitive 5.75%, but now it pays just 1.23% on balances between £1,000 and £24,999 (or 0.5% on balances up to £999), and that includes a bonus of 0.7% for six months. The already minimalist rate reduces still further if you make more than two withdrawals a year.

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Still searching for the web's holy grail

Stand-up comedians have a saying that 'you're only as good as your last gig'. The same goes for computer technology. What you have to assume is that someone somewhere has a business plan which involves, er, attracting all your customers.

To date, there are only two known defensive strategies. One consists of 'locking in' said customers so that they have to be very determined to go elsewhere. This is the Microsoft Way. The other is to make your next product even more sensational than its predecessor. To date, few companies have managed this trick.

The $64 billion question at the moment is whether Google, the world's favourite search engine, will manage to pull it off. Its spectacular success has revealed that internet searching is a very big business. Something like 550 million search requests are entered every day worldwide (245 million of them in the United States and 77 per cent through Google).

Google has shown that selling advertising based on searches can be very lucrative. And it is estimated by industry watchers that the annual paid-placement advertising revenue generated by web searches will reach about $7bn by 2007 (as compared with $3bn in 2003). If Google's current share of searching continues, that means the company could look forward to annual revenues of nearly $5.5bn in three years' time.

Ah, that magic word, 'if'... The great thing about capitalism is that the prospect of annual revenues of $5.5bn tends to concentrate minds. So far, in relation to Google, those minds have been focused in two directions.

The first involves trying to get a slice of Google's action. The company is heading for a stock-market flotation this year and - if industry rumours are to be believed - this could be the biggest thing since Netscape went public on 9 August 1995. Netscape shares were conservatively priced at $28, opened at $71 and went as high as $74 in the most frantic day's trading since the Wall Street crash.

Something similar could happen with Google. And this, in turn, might have wider implications, because it was the Netscape launch that triggered the technology boom/bubble. It was what awakened non-techies to the notion that there might be money in that internet thingummy.

Given that the stock market is slowly shaking off the rueful technophobia that has afflicted it since 2001, could it happen that Google's flot ation triggers another avalanche?

The second direction in which search-related revenue concentrates minds leads to the quest for technology that is better than Google's. A lot of IQ is being focused on this question. Some of us are old enough to remember when AltaVista was the best search engine there ever had been. Then one day Google launched and we never used AltaVista again. But all that means is that Google is the new AltaVista, and the question is: what lies around the corner?

There's no doubt that Google represented a great advance. But there is no such thing as perfection in this business. Surveys indicate that almost a quarter of users don't find what they're looking for in the first set of links returned by a search engine. That's partly because, in the words of MIT's 'Technology Review' newsletter, 'the precious needles of information we seek are buried under a haystack that grows by some 60 terabytes every day. [A tera-byte is 1024 gigabytes.] And it's why fierce competition in the search industry is certain to continue, especially as companies implement a host of new technologies, such as natural-language processing and machine learning.'

Already, there is interesting potential competition for Google. There's Teoma (, for example, which uses the existence of subject-based communities to home in on an answer to a search query. Then there's Mooter (, which uses ideas from psychology, software and neural networks to create a ranking algorithm that learns from the user as a search progresses.

And there are several research efforts aimed at finding ways of searching the 'deep web' - that is the huge reserve of documents buried in corporate and official databases which only become published web pages if a particular search query asks for them.

Furthermore, of course, there is Microsoft. There is always Microsoft. Bill Gates has made it clear that he sees searching as Microsoft's business. The company has a huge research and development effort devoted to it. And it plans to use its, er, "infrastructural advantage' (monopoly) to build natural language searching into 'Longhorn' - the next release of its operating system, due in 2005 or 2006.

The European Commission has recently concluded an investigation into Microsoft's abuse of its Windows monopoly in the area of media player software. In a couple of years it may have to start all over again on the question of internet searching. It all makes work for the lawyering classes to do. But at least they will have better search engines to help them do it.


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Kevin Federline Getting Freak on With Nicole Narain?

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The great Kevin Federline partied like a man with something to celebrate as he went out like a rock star at two Los Angeles hotspots Thursday night.

A day after meeting face-to-face with ex-wife Britney Spears over custody issues, Federline was spotted at L.A. club Vice hanging out with Colin Farrell's ex (and sex tape partner) Nicole Narain.

"They were dancing, she had her arms on his shoulder, she was clearly making advances," an onlooker tells People about model Narain, who made a beeline for Federline, wearing his trademark fedora, when he arrived just after 9 p.m.

Federline, who's set to guest on One Tree Hill, recently said how he's focusing on his acting career, and thanked Narain for the dance with a kiss on the cheek.

Then they posed for pictures with Hugh Hefner, obviously.

Although they left separately, Kevin Federline and Nicole Narain hooked up at Opera shortly after 1 a.m. And they weren't the only ones having a good time.

Next to Federline, Leonardo DiCaprio shared a table with Entourage stars Kevin Connolly and Kevin Dillon. This real-life crew didn't stay too long, however, much to the dismay of the ladies lingering around their booth.

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Kevin Federline Biography

Family Love!
Yo, it's Kevin Federline, yo. Werrrrrd. He's a deadbeat with no redeeming worth whatsoever, but yo, Federleezy is extremely fertile,... More »
Fresno, California
Full Name
Kevin Earl Federline


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Kobe and Vanessa Bryant: Getting Back Together?!

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Kobe Bryant and wife Vanessa Bryant just split, but are already working on a reconciliation, according to reports... and photos of them kissing (on TMZ).

Vanessa showed up for the Lakers' win over the Atlanta Hawks last night, and the couple shared a kiss in the tunnel on the way into the locker room.

Love was apparently in the air for the ex-spouses on Valentine's Day!

Kobe Bryant, Family

Vanessa filed for divorce in December, and they already sealed a property settlement deal in which she got all three of their homes and $75 million.

The pair married over a decade ago and have two little girls (above).

However, Kobe has been trying to win her back ever since the split, and the divorce is not final, so there's more than a glimmer of hope for the pair.

While Kobe and Vanessa Bryant submitted all the necessary papers to divorce, it doesn't become finalized until mid-June - six months under California law.

There's plenty of time to withdraw the papers, and it looks like things are trending that way, though Kobe and Vanessa are NOT living together ... yet.

[Photo: WENN.com]

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Kobe Bryant Biography

Kobe Bryant Mug Shot
Kobe Bryant sure can ball. Teenage girls other than his wife (pictured). He's also pretty good at hoops, you may say. He scored 81 points... More »
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Kobe Bryant


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Kendra Wilkinson: Baby #2 on the Way in 2013!

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Unlike many others, Kendra Wilkinson isn't hoping to shed any weight in the new year.

Quite the opposite, in fact, as this reality star's resolution involves packing on the pounds... baby style!

Kendra Wilkinson, Cleavage Pic

"Our resolution is to definitely have baby number two," Kendra told Us Weekly last Thursday "Maybe another boy. We're used to those already."

Wilkinson and Hank Baskett were married in 2009 and welcomed a son into the world in August of 2010.

And how is Hank Jr. doing these days?

"He's like the biggest tattle-teller ever at school. If anyone does anything bad, he goes up and tells the teacher," Wilkinson said. "And he's learning how to treat a woman. Like tonight, he was like, 'Mommy, you look so pretty.'"

AWWWWW. That's sort of the same thing men everywhere say when they look at photos of Kendra Wilkinson nude.

Kendra Wilkinson Biography

The Girls Next Door
Kendra Wilkinson was a star on The Girls Next Door. But she left that show, along with Hugh Hefner, in 2008. From there, Kendra met and... More »
San Diego, California
Full Name
Kendra Leigh Wilkinson


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We are one of the UK’s leading environmental law firms. Unlike many firms, we have a standalone environment group — not a team that is an add-on to a real-estate, planning or energy practice.

Our approach is practical and commercial. We help our clients assess risk and avoid problems. Where they do have problems, we help solve them. Where damage is inevitable, we strive to limit it, with particular emphasis on protecting reputation and, when necessary, individuals.

We usually work with our clients to avoid litigation. But when we can’t avoid it, our combination of in-depth commercial understanding and criminal advocacy know-how makes us a formidable force. We also have an experience of the appeals system and judicial review.

In non-contentious areas, our environment lawyers do a wide variety of ‘pure’ environmental work, as well as advising on risk assessment and apportionment in corporate, property and financing transactions. They also work closely with our specialists in the areas of planning, energy and EU law.

Our clients include European and US investors in the UK, government departments and agencies, local authorities, banks, investment funds, landowners, utility operators, property companies, landfill operators, professional bodies and companies from many other sectors, including manufacturing, waste, chemicals, construction, house building, rail, mining, quarrying, oil and energy.

The most recent Chambers directory praised our ‘genuinely excellent’ specialists for their ‘commercial understanding of environmental issues’ and their ‘incredibly strong sense of strategy and tactics’.

For more information on environment click here.


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Every day, new revelations emerge in the mounting scandal rocking the Bush Administration and the mercenary company Blackwater Worldwide. Much of the attention focuses on the now infamous shooting spree in Baghdad’s Nisour Square on September 16, in which seventeen Iraqi civilians were killed and twenty-four wounded. FBI investigators are now alleging that fourteen were victims of unjustified and unprovoked shooting–some were shot while they were fleeing. Investigators also say they found nothing to substantiate Blackwater’s claims of being fired on by Iraqis. This comes a month after a US Army investigation determined there was “no enemy activity involved” and labeled the shootings a “criminal event.” But while Blackwater gets hammered in the press, the behind-the-scenes actions of the company’s paymaster, the State Department, grow more scandalous by the minute.

Almost from the moment the Nisour Square shootings happened, the State Department has taken actions that give the impression of trying to cover up the incident. The department’s initial report on the shooting was drafted by a Blackwater contractor on official US government stationery. The FBI was not dispatched to investigate the case until two weeks after the shootings, meaning that the initial investigation was in the hands of a non-law enforcement agency, the State Department, that just happens to be Blackwater’s employer. In late October it emerged that the department had actually granted some Blackwater operatives “limited use immunity” in return for their statements on the shooting. Some Blackwater agents have reportedly refused to answer FBI questions, citing their State Department-granted “immunity.” This means that their statements, and information gleaned from them, cannot be used to bring criminal charges against them. The State Department also offered to facilitate the payment of what amounted to hush money to victims of the shooting, which it has done on numerous occasions for Blackwater and other companies when they kill Iraqis.

Now this story has taken yet another dramatic twist. On Wednesday the State Department Inspector General, Howard “Cookie” Krongard, was in the hot seat on Capitol Hill, where he found himself being grilled by Representative Henry Waxman’s Oversight and Government Affairs Committee. Krongard is the top State Department official charged with investigating allegations of waste, fraud and abuse. In addition to all of the questionable actions by the State Department in the Blackwater investigation, Krongard has faced charges that he impeded a Justice Department investigation into Blackwater over allegations the company was illegally smuggling weapons into Iraq. But the bombshell at the hearing was the revelation that Krongard’s brother, Alvin “Buzzy” Krongard, recently accepted a position as a paid consultant for Blackwater, where he serves on the company’s advisory board. Until his resignation in 2004, Buzzy was the number-three man at the Central Intelligence Agency (more on that later). Waxman’s committee broke the news of Buzzy’s Blackwater position as part of what can only be described as a masterful ambush of the Inspector General.

When Waxman revealed the conflict of interest with the brothers Krongard and Blackwater, alleging that Cookie Krongard had “concealed” his brother’s relationship with Blackwater, the Inspector General told Waxman:

“I can tell you very frankly, I am not aware of any financial interest or position [my brother] has with respect to Blackwater. It couldn’t possibly have affected anything I’ve done, because I don’t believe it. And when these ugly rumors started recently, I specifically asked him. I do not believe it is true that he is a member of the advisory board, as you stated, and that is something I think I need to say.”

This statement would quickly thrust Cookie Krongard, who was testifying under oath, in front of a firing line that would ultimately produce his recusal from the Blackwater investigation. Moments after Cookie Krongard denied that his brother had any involvement with Blackwater, the committee produced a letter from Blackwater CEO Erik Prince to Buzzy Krongard, dated July 26, inviting him to join the board and offering him a $3,500 honorarium per meeting attended plus all expenses paid. “Your experience and insight would be ideal to help our team determine where we are and where we are going,” Prince wrote.

Cookie Krongard said his brother “has been involved in a lot of activities involving security. So it’s no surprise that someone like Erik Prince would invite him to continue to support ‘security, peace, and freedom.'” But Cookie Krongard insisted his brother had not accepted the position, saying, “I dispute that.” Representative Elijah Cummings then produced a September 5 e-mail from Prince to Buzzy saying, “Welcome and thank you for accepting the invitation to be a member of the board.” Cummings told Cookie, “Prince invited your brother to be at a board meeting to discuss strategic planning. And this meeting is taking place right now, in Williamsburg, Virginia, this week as we speak. Staff contacted the hotel to speak to your brother and the hotel confirmed that he was scheduled to be there.”

Cookie replied that he was not aware of this, adding, “By the nature of my brother’s work, you should understand that we have never discussed his work or my work, so I had no reason to even think that he had any involvement with Blackwater. But when these things surfaced, I called him and I asked him directly, he has told me he does not have any involvement, he does not have any financial interest. If you’re telling me he does absolutely I would recuse myself” from the Blackwater investigation.

During a recess of the hearing, Cookie later said, he called his brother, who confirmed for him that he had indeed accepted a position on the Blackwater advisory board. Cookie abruptly announced he was recusing himself from all matters relating to Blackwater. But this is unlikely to be the end of Cookie’s problems stemming from this scandal. He may actually have perjured himself. After the hearing, Buzzy Krongard told reporter Spencer Ackerman of TPM Muckraker that he had informed Cookie weeks ago of his position with Blackwater. “I had told my brother I was going on the advisory board,” Buzzy said. “My brother says that is not the case. I stand by what I told my brother.” When Ackerman asked Buzzy if Blackwater knew who his brother was when Prince offered him the advisory board position, Buzzy said, “You think I had to tell them? That they didn’t know?” He added, “If [Cookie’s] got integrity it’s not gonna matter one way or other…. If he doesn’t have integrity it’s not gonna matter.”

While Buzzy’s new position on Blackwater’s advisory board is indeed a salacious development, it is just the tip of the iceberg. In my book Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, I explore in depth the relationship between Buzzy Krongard and Blackwater founder Erik Prince. The two men go back at least to 2002, when Buzzy helped jump-start Blackwater’s ultra-profitable role as a provider of soldiers-for-hire in the “war on terror.”

Though Blackwater was founded in 1997, Blackwater Security Consulting–its mercenary division–was incorporated in Delaware on January 22, 2002. Within months, as the United States occupied Afghanistan and began planning the Iraq invasion, Blackwater Security was already turning a profit, pulling in hundreds of thousands a month from a valuable CIA contract.

One of the players in forging that first Blackwater Security contract was Buzzy Krongard, at the time executive director of the CIA, the agency’s number-three position. Krongard, who was named to that post in March 2001, had an unusual background for a spook, having spent most of his adult life as an investment banker. He had built up Alex.Brown, the country’s oldest investment banking firm, into one of the most successful, and eventually sold it to Bankers Trust, from which he resigned in 1998. There have been some insinuations that Krongard was working undercover for the CIA years before he officially joined the agency in 1998 as a special adviser to George Tenet. But he won’t reveal how he met the CIA director, except to say that it was through “mutual friends.” The Princeton alum, Hall of Fame lacrosse player and former Marine boasts of having once punched a great white shark in the jaw; and he keeps one of its teeth on a chain and pictures of the animal in his office. Despite his bravado, some at the agency thought of Krongard as a wanna-be, according to a 2001 Newsweek story published shortly after his ascension to the number-three spot. “A wanna-be? Maybe I am. Maybe I’m not. That’s as much as you’re going to get,” Krongard responded.

While working under Tenet at the CIA, Krongard acted internally, reorganizing divisions and pushing for projects like an intelligence venture capital firm, but he did on occasion speak publicly. In October 2001, he declared, “The war will be won in large measure by forces you do not know about, in actions you will not see and in ways you may not want to know about, but we will prevail.”

Some three years later, in January 2005, Krongard made news when he became the most senior Administration figure to articulate the benefits of having not killed or captured Osama bin Laden. “You can make the argument that we’re better off with him [at large],” he said. “Because if something happens to bin Laden, you might find a lot of people vying for his position and demonstrating how macho they are by unleashing a stream of terror…. He’s turning into more of a charismatic leader than a terrorist mastermind.” Krongard also characterized bin Laden “not as a chief executive but more like a venture capitalist,” saying, “Let’s say you and I want to blow up Trafalgar Square. So we go to bin Laden. And he’ll say, ‘Well, here’s some money and some passports and if you need weapons, see this guy.'”

It’s not clear exactly what the original connection was between Prince and Krongard. Some have alleged that Krongard knew Prince’s father. In a brief telephone interview conducted for my book, Krongard would only say he was “familiar” with Prince and Blackwater. A former Blackwater executive, however, asserted, “I know that Erik and Krongard were good buddies.” Whatever Krongard’s involvement, it was during his tenure at the CIA that Blackwater landed its first security contract, in April 2002. Krongard visited Kabul and said he realized the agency’s new station there was sorely lacking security. Blackwater received a $5.4 million six-month no-bid contract to provide twenty security guards for the Kabul CIA station. Krongard said it was Blackwater’s offering and not his connection to Prince that led to the company landing the contract, and that he talked to Prince about the contract but wasn’t certain who called whom, that he was “not sure which came first, the chicken or the egg.” He said that someone else was responsible for actually signing off on the CIA contract. “Blackwater got a contract because they were the first people that could get people on the ground,” Krongard said in the interview. “We were under the gun, we did whatever it took when I came back from Kabul…. The only concern we had was getting the best security for our people. If we thought Martians could provide it, I guess we would have gone after them.”

The relationship between Krongard and Prince apparently got chummier after the contract was signed. “Krongard came down and visited Blackwater, and I had to take his kids around and let them shoot on the firing range a number of times,” said a former Blackwater executive in an interview for my book. “That was after the contract was signed, and he may have come down just to see the company that he had just hired.” Prince apparently became consumed with the prospect of being involved with secretive operations in the “war on terror”–so much so that he personally deployed on the front lines. Prince joined Jamie Smith, a former CIA operative who originally headed up Blackwater Security Consulting, as part of the original twenty-man contingent Blackwater sent to fulfill its first CIA contract, which began in May 2002, according to Robert Young Pelton’s book Licensed to Kill.

Since CIA and other intelligence and security contracts are “black” contracts, it’s difficult to pin down exactly how much Blackwater began pulling in after that first Afghanistan contract, but Smith described it as a rapid period of growth for Blackwater. The company’s work for the CIA and the military and Prince’s political and military connections would provide Blackwater with important leverage in wooing what would become its largest confirmed client, the US State Department. “After that first contract went off, there was a lot of romancing with the State Department where they were just up the road, so we traveled up there a lot in Kabul and tried to sweet-talk them into letting us on board with them,” Smith said in an interview. “Once the State Department came on and there was a contract there, that opened up some different doors. Once you get your foot in the door with a government outfit that has offices in countries all over the world, it’s like–and this is probably a horrible analogy–but it’s something maybe like the metastasis of a cancer. You know, once you get into the bloodstream you’re going to be all over the body in just a couple of days, you know what I mean? So if you get in that pipeline, then everywhere that they’ve got a problem and an office, there’s an opportunity.”

A year later, Prince’s mercenary operations would get the boost of a lifetime when Blackwater was handed a $27 million no-bid contract to serve as the elite bodyguards of the US occupation of Iraq. To date that arrangement has brought Blackwater about $1 billion in federal “security” contracts. Is it just a coincidence that one of the key players in securing Blackwater’s role as the leading mercenary company of the Bush Administration has a brother whose job it was to oversee Blackwater? Or that the Inspector General stands accused of failing to do his duty and actually impeding federal investigations into the company’s potentially criminal activities? Is there a connection between the Krongards and the State Department’s systematic cover-up campaign for Blackwater? Unsurprisingly, Blackwater’s spokesperson, Anne Tyrrell, said, “We do not see a conflict of interest.” But these aren’t questions for the company’s PR people. These are questions that must be answered by the brothers Krongard under oath.


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This piece originally appeared at TomDispatch.

There is a distinct creepiness to the controversy now raging around a proposed Islamic cultural center in Lower Manhattan. The angry “debate" over whether the building should exist has a kind of glitch-in-the-Matrix feel to it, leaving in its wake an aura of something-very-bad-about-to-happen.

It’s not just that opposition to the building has coalesced around a phony “Mosque at Ground Zero" shorthand (with its echoes of dust, death and evildoers). Many have pointed out—futilely—that the complex will be more than two blocks from the former World Trade Center, around a corner on Park Place, and will feature an auditorium, spa, basketball court, swimming pool, classrooms, exhibition space, community meeting space, 9/11 memorial and, yes, a prayer space for Muslims. The shorthand still sticks.

Nor is it just that this is only the most visible of a growing number of nasty controversies over proposed mosques in Tennessee, California, Georgia, Kentucky, Wisconsin and Illinois as well as Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn and Midland Beach, Staten Island, in New York City. Such protests are emerging with alarming frequency. Nor is it simply that political leaders—from Republican presidential wannabes to New York gubernatorial hopefuls—have sought to exploit the Lower Manhattan controversy. (Sarah Palin demanded that “peaceful Muslims" step up and “refudiate" the plan; Newt Gingrich denounced the building of such a “mosque" as long as Saudi Arabia bars construction of churches and synagogues; Rick Lazio, a Republican campaigning for the governorship of New York state, asserted that the plan somehow subverted the right of New Yorkers “to feel safe and be safe.")

No, it’s the déjà-vu-ness of the controversy that kindles special unease, the sense that we’ve been here before as a country, and the realization that, for a decade, a significant number of our nation’s political leaders have been honing an anti-Muslim narrative which fertilizes anti-Muslim sentiment to the point where it is now spreading like a toxic plume, uncapped and uncontrollable.

The mosque controversy is not really about a mosque at all; it’s about the presence of Muslims in America, and the free-floating anxiety and fear that now dominate the nation’s psyche. The mere presence of Muslims at prayer is now enough to trigger angry protests, as Bridgeport, Connecticut, police discovered last week. Those opposing the construction of the center in New York City are drawing on what amounts to a decade of government-stoked xenophobia about Muslims, now gathering strength and visibility in a nation full of deep economic anxieties and increasingly aggressive far-right grassroots groups. Lower Manhattan and Murfreesboro, Tennessee and Temecula, California, are all in this together. And it is not going to go away simply because the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission gave its unanimous blessing to the Islamic center plan. Since that is the case, it’s worth pausing to consider what has happened here over the past ten years.

Panic in the Streets

In the panicked wake of 9/11, revenge attacks on Muslims (and dark-skinned people mistaken for Muslims) swept the country. Hundreds of beatings and even some random reprisal killings were reported coast to coast.

On September 17, 2001, the day after he told the nation that a “crusade" against terror was in order, President Bush stood in the Islamic Center of Washington and piously proclaimed that “Islam is peace." At virtually the same moment across town, Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller III were at a press conference, announcing that 55,000 tips had flooded into their ballooning 9/11 investigation, an undisclosed number of immigration violators and uncharged material witnesses were being hauled into custody, Arabic and Farsi speakers were suddenly in demand at the FBI and major legislation was already in the works to beef up government surveillance, immigration and anti-terror capabilities. But no, Mueller said, there was nothing at all to complaints of ethnic targeting from Arab-American communities.

After the Patriot Act became law that October, Ashcroft launched a nationwide program of 5,000 “voluntary" interviews with Muslims from the Middle East. Internal Justice Department memos instructed interviewers to detain anyone suspected of immigration violations. “Let the terrorists among us be warned: If you overstay your visa—even by one day—we will arrest you," Ashcroft proclaimed.

When that initial set of 5,000 interviews was deemed complete (leading to no terrorism arrests of any kind), Ashcroft announced that another 3,000 would be conducted. He vowed to find anyone who had skipped out on the previous “voluntary" round.

By the end of 2001, a minimum of 2,000 Middle Easterners and South Asians had been taken into custody, the vast majority without criminal charges of any kind being lodged. Arrests were often highly publicized; the aftermaths of those arrests were shrouded in secrecy as court and immigration hearings were closed to family, public and press. Vague color-coded attack alerts were announced by federal officials, and citizens were instructed to be prepared for a second 9/11 at any time. In 2004, another round of 5,000 voluntary interviews with Arabs and Muslims was announced.

The FBI began toting up the number and location of mosques around the country. The Census Bureau was drawn into a scheme to identify and enumerate areas with large Middle Eastern populations. The Energy Department was engaged to monitor mosques for suspicious levels of radiation.

A year after the 9/11 attacks, a special immigration program was instituted that required men from two dozen predominantly Muslim nations (and North Korea) to register with immigration authorities. Nearly 84,000 did so, with about 3,000 abruptly detained and over 13,000 promptly subjected to deportation proceedings. Muslims began to “disappear" from the streets of America. Lawyers wearing yellow shirts with “Human Rights Monitor" written on the back sought to keep track of individuals heading into registration centers in New York and Los Angeles—and never leaving again.

Not surprisingly, this frenzy of law enforcement activity led many Americans to believe that there must be a dark reason so much attention was being paid to so many Muslims. By 2003, announcements of elaborate terror “plots" and investigations had already taken over the news. These would regularly serve, like booster shots, to revitalize public suspicions that foul things were afoot. Muslims in Lodi, California, were plotting to blow up supermarkets. In Columbus, Ohio, they were targeting malls. In New York City, it was the Herald Square subway station.

Dozens and dozens of such cases have been reported over the past decade. Virtually all of them involved Middle Eastern and South Asian Muslims. Virtually none of the supposed plots had any chance of happening, and many were, in fact, fueled by zealous government informers and covert agents. As with the numerous immigration detentions and deportations in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, much publicity surrounded announcements that violent and deadly “jihadist" plots had been thwarted. Often, when the suspects finally came to trial, charges and evidence amounted to something far less ominous (and so, far less publicized).

Nevertheless, the threat, said authorities, was everywhere—even if it couldn’t be seen.

New Administration, Old Story

Throughout this period, the number of vigilante attacks on mosques, as well as individual Muslims, continued to rise, though these received little press attention. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) received 602 credible Muslim civil rights complaints in 2002, 1,019 in 2003 and 1,522 in 2004. Such complaints included forty-two hate crimes reported in 2002, 93 in 2003 and 141 in 2004. CAIR also cited and described several significant acts of violence against mosques, including bombings and arson, but did not specify the figures.

In its 2009 civil rights report, CAIR said it had processed 2,728 civil rights violations, including 721 that involved mosques or Muslim organizations, up from 221 mosque incidents in 2006. The organization expressed some optimism in its report, however, because there had been a decline in the number of reported hate crimes to 116 in 2008 from 135 the previous year. Again, CAIR reported serious mosque attacks and vandalism without separating out the figures.

It seems hardly coincidental, at this point, that when authorities announce another incident or terror plot—the failed effort to blow up an SUV in Times Square in May, for instance—random attacks on Muslims and Muslim institutions as well quickly follow. For example, a bomb was detonated at a mosque in Jacksonville, Florida, shortly after the Times Square incident. As the Lower Manhattan controversy spread in the news, arsonists attacked a mosque in Texas, and a church in Gainesville, Florida, announced that it would hold a bonfire of Korans on the anniversary of 9/11.

The change in presidential administrations has had no discernable moderating effect on such passions. In fact, as if to assert its own toughness, the Obama administration has now given its tacit blessing to legislation introduced in Congress late in July by Adam Schiff, a Congressman from California, that would carve out “terrorism exceptions" to constitutionally mandated Miranda warnings. The legislation would extend to up four days the period when law enforcement agents can question terrorism suspects without informing them of their right to remain silent and to receive the assistance of an attorney. If past is prelude, such exceptions will initially have a disproportionate impact on Middle Eastern and South Asian Muslims in America, only later spreading to wider groups of Americans taken into custody.

Parallel to the federal law-enforcement focus on Muslims, the past decade has witnessed a proliferation of anti-Muslim “analysts," “terror experts," political commentators and websites. This burgeoning industry, focused on Muslims as virtually a fifth column seeking to take over the country, has attracted ever more media attention, particularly as FOX News has chronicled and promoted the rise of the Tea Party movement.

It is in this alternate universe, after so many years of heightened anti-Muslim sentiments, that a Lower Manhattan prayer space designed to promote reconciliation has become the dreaded Mosque at Ground Zero, a “monument that would consist of a mosque for the worship of the terrorists’ monkey-god," as Mark Williams, then-chairman of a group known as the Tea Party Express, put it.

Waiting for the Demagogue

Here we come to the real source of unease over what’s now going on—the realization that we’ve seen something like this developing before, only it wasn’t diaperheads and terrorism inflaming the country. It was dirty commies and Jews then.

Sixty years ago, on February 9, 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy rose before a Republican women’s club in Wheeling, West Virginia, and delivered the famous speech in which he waved a sheet of paper and claimed that on it were the names of—there is dispute—fifty-seven or 205 known communists “working and shaping policy in the State Department." In doing so, he put his incendiary, eponymous stamp on the most oppressive period of the cold war, and as it turned out, the nation was ready for the message.

McCarthyism did not emerge on that cold day solely from the fevered imagination of the Wisconsin senator. There had been a drumbeat of anti-Communist red-baiting, hearings, speeches, treason charges and grandstanding coming from Washington for years. The House Committee on Un-American Activities, anti-communist informer Whittaker Chambers, ambitious Congressman Richard Nixon, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, President Harry Truman—all did yeoman’s work in preparing the soil for McCarthy and his reckless accusations of “twenty years of treason!"

There are some substantial differences between then and now. Most importantly, McCarthy operated from within the political system, using his subcommittee chairmanship as a vehicle for pseudo-investigations and attacks. When his Senate colleagues turned on him following a particularly reckless campaign against the US Army, McCarthy was stripped of his chairmanship and his power. A true demagogue, he had no organization to speak of, only those who feared him and those who followed him.

By contrast, while some extreme anti-Muslim sentiment is in evidence in Washington, the real juice for an anti-Muslim movement is now bubbling up outside the Beltway, much as virulent racist hysteria has, in the past, bubbled up from the grassroots. In that regard, it’s worth noting that about a third of America’s 5 to 8 million Muslims are African American.

Some mainstream politicians have actually tried to tamp down the Lower Manhattan controversy. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has, for instance, made numerous comments in support of the project and the principle of freedom of religion that goes with it. Such statements have, however, had little effect in quieting the dispute, countered as they are by opposition not only from the fringes, but from some mainstream Republican politicians and establishment non-governmental organizations. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), for example, recently came out with a statement opposing the construction plan, despite the fact that the rest of the opposition, the group said, exhibited elements of bigotry. It is better to side with bigots, the ADL essentially argued, than ignore the post-9/11 “healing process."

Because of the decentralized, grassroots nature of this anti-Muslim movement and the accompanying hysteria, it will be no easy task to put the mosque-at-Ground-Zero genie back in its bottle. Those who think that the decision by the New York City Landmarks Commission to clear the way for construction is likely to end the antagonism are undoubtedly engaged in wishful thinking. There are virtually endless potential flashpoints embedded along the road ahead, nor are the issue and its passions purely dependant on what happens in Manhattan, where a recent poll showed a majority of residents favor construction (although a majority of all New York City residents do not).

In California, those opposed to mosque construction in Temecula were urged to protest by rallying at the mosque with their dogs. Muslims "hate dogs," an unsigned email alert erroneously claimed. Counter-demonstrators turned out. There, too, the dispute continues. “The Islamic foothold is not strong here, and we really don’t want to see their influence spread," Pastor Bill Rench of Temecula’s Calvary Baptist Church told the Los Angeles Times. “There is a concern with all the rumors you hear about sleeper cells and all that. Are we supposed to be complacent just because these people say it’s a religion of peace? Many others have said the same thing."

In Kentucky, a fledgling controversy over a proposed mosque in Florence, south of Cincinnati, is also spreading thanks to anonymous communications. One unsigned protest flyer stated that “Americans need to stop the takeover of our country, our government is not protecting us."

Such sentiments are common to virtually all anti-Muslim protests: somehow, Muslims are taking over. Oklahoma legislators, fearing the imposition of Islamic law in Oklahoma courts, have even asked voters to amend the state constitution to forbid it. The government, increasing numbers of Americans evidently believe, is passively allowing Muslim subversion, and citizens need to defend themselves.

In Tennessee, a rancorous fight over a planned mosque in Murfreesboro has been rife with such sentiments. Lou Ann Zelenik, a Tennessee Republican Congressional candidate locked in a tough primary race, denounced the mosque plan, characterized its leaders as foreign agents with a “radical agenda," and received strong support from the Wilson County Tea Party, a local group.

On its website, the Tea Party curtsies to the US Constitution and then quickly cuts to the chase: “But this question must be asked based on repeated violence committed by Islamists in the name of religion: Is Islam nothing more than a front for terrorism?" Tennessee’s lieutenant governor, Ron Ramsey, a Republican candidate for governor, went out of his way last month to characterize Islam as a “cult" which may not warrant First Amendment protection: “You can even argue whether being a Muslim is actually a religion, or is it a nationality, a way of life, or a cult—whatever you want to call it…"

The proliferation of, and acceptance of, such talk, particularly from major political candidates, may be preparing the American ground for the emergence of a leader who can synthesize the demonizing and scapegoating of Muslims, fears augmented by severe economic anxiety, the maturing of extreme right-wing activism, and a widespread and growing contempt for official Washington. If that happens, the nation—and American Muslims—could face something far worse than McCarthy, who held sway in a golden era of rising expectations and general economic growth.

Mosque controversies will be the least of it then.


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The VA discriminates against thousands of military sexual trauma (MST) survivors like Moore each year, alleges a new report by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Service Women’s Action Network and the Veterans Legal Service Clinic at Yale Law School. In trying to obtain compensation for the impact of sexual trauma on their mental health, survivors face bureaucratic hurdles and long delays. Ultimately, a disproportionate number of their claims are rejected.

The report is based on previously withheld data that the VA released to settle Freedom of Information Act lawsuits brought by the Yale clinic. The numbers reveal that the VA grants disability claims for PTSD related to sexual assault at significantly lower rates than for PTSD caused by other types of trauma. In 2011, for example, the VA granted benefits to 74.2 percent of veterans who submitted non-MST-related trauma claims, but only to 44.6 percent of those with MST-related PTSD, a gap of nearly 30 percent.

“Under the current regulations, survivors of military sexual trauma have to provide a decent amount of documentation in order to get a compensation pension exam, as part of the benefits process,” explained Rose Carmen Goldberg, one of the authors of the report. Because of widespread retaliation, only a fraction of those who are sexually assaulted while in service report the crimes against them. Without a paper trail it is difficult for them to meet the VA’s evidentiary standards. Even with it, the report found, “claims adjudicators often fail to give adequate weight to the evidence that MST survivors do produce.”

Veterans with PTSD linked to combat or other sources of trauma, on the other hand, don’t bear the same burden of proof: their own testimony is sufficient to prove that their trauma is connected to their military service. “We think that very obvious and overt discrimination in the regulations is definitely an underlying factor, but there are probably many factors at work,” Golberg said. For example, until 2011 the Defense Department destroyed all restricted reports of sexual assault that were more than five years old.

As incidences of sexual assault in the military have risen, so have associated claims of PTSD, which increased by more than half between 2010 and 2011. Women who suffered a sexual assault in the military are nine times more likely to develop PTSD than other female veterans. More than 15,800 veterans filed claims for PTSD related to sexual trauma in the five years spanning 2008 and 2012. About two-thirds of the applicants were women.

The VA’s ruling determines whether they have access to an essential lifeline. Female veterans are the fastest growing sector of the homeless population, according to The New York Times, and more than half of female veterans living on the street were sexually assaulted in the service. “The mental health effects of PTSD related to sexual trauma can make it very difficult if not impossible to work, so in many cases [disability benefits] will be their only source of income,” said Goldberg.

Overall, men are 10 percent more likely to be granted benefits for PTSD than women. That’s because so many women with PTSD link it to sexual trauma, while men are more likely to suffer PTSD related to combat and other traumas, which the VA grants benefits for at much higher rates. However, male survivors of sexual assault are even less likely to receive PTSD benefits than female MST survivors.

A veteran’s chance of receiving benefits for MST-related PTSD also varies by location. For example, the VA regional office in St. Paul, Minnesota, granted only a quarter of PTSD benefit claims related to sexual trauma. Compared with non-MST claims, the discrepancy was 35 percent.

Congress is considering several bills aimed at ending the discrimination detailed in the report. One, named for Ruth Moore, who was eventually granted full benefits after twenty-three years, would allow an assessment from a mental health professional to serve as corroborating evidence, and shift the burden of proof to put “every reasonable doubt in favor of the veteran.” That bill passed the House in June, but has languished in the Senate. Two other bills to reform the claims process are pending in the House.

“The reforms that are needed are very urgent,” said Golberg. “We’re hoping the data will speak strongly for the changes that are needed.”

Anu Bhagwati, the executive director of the Service Women’s Action Network and a former Marine Corps captain whose disability claim related to sexual harassment was initially denied, pointed out that a rejection from the VA is a veteran’s second betrayal. “VA’s claims process often serves as a brutal and extended retriggering of veterans’ most horrific experiences, when no one believed them, when no one supported them and they were made to feel as though they did something to deserve being raped, assaulted or harassed in uniform,” she said.

The Senate is now debating reforms to the military justice system responsible for that first betrayal. The Defense Authorization Act, expected to pass before Thanksgiving, includes measures preventing commanders from overturning jury convictions and criminalizes retaliation against victims who report crimes. Several senators are expected to offer amendments that would institute even greater reform. The most contentious is a proposal from Senator Kirsten Gillibrand that would give military lawyers, rather than commanding officers, the authority to decide whether an alleged crime warrants prosecution.

Since many perpetrators are within the victim’s chain of command, the measure is intended to limit retaliation and improve reporting, which would make it easier for survivors who develop PTSD to obtain benefits as veterans. The Pentagon and top Democrats on the Armed Services Committee, however, are fighting to maintain commanders’ authority. The authorization bill could hit the Senate floor as early as this week, and opponents are likely to use procedural rules to make sure Gillibrand’s amendment cannot pass with less than sixty votes. So far, forty-seven senators have pledged their support.

Take Action: Tell Your Senators to Act Now to Address Sexual Assault in the Military

Mychal Denzel Smith: misogyny has no place in progressive politics.


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World+dog awaits 'definitive' report on climate change

IPCC unveils climate crystal ball tomorrow

The definitive report of the state of our climate is due to be published tomorrow. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (the IPCC) fourth Assesment Report, some six years in the making, will be released in Paris.

Its likely findings are by now so well known - we're in for higher sea levels and temperatures, increasing deserts, etc - that there are unlikely to be very many shocked faces when the report comes out, although there are those who will dispute its conclusions.

The findings are supposed to inform global policy making, with a view to altering behaviour to minimise the impact we humans have on the climate.

Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society, commented: "[The report] is expected to stress, more convincingly than ever before, that our planet is already warming due to human actions, and that 'business as usual' would lead to unacceptable risks underscoring the urgent need for concerted international action to reduce the worst impacts of climate change."

He described the likely dissenters as "a vocal minority with their own agendas".

The report has been put together by a panel of 2,500 reviewers from 130 countries who will make their predictions based on data from 19 computer models.

Data from satellite observation of Earth, such as the European Space Agency's Earth Observation programme, has been hugely important in developing and refining those models, especially with data from the poles.

For example: ESA's satellites have shown that sea levels have been rising at 3mm per year since the early 1990s, and that Greenland's glaciers are melting twice as fast as anyone had thought. This kind of data gets fed back into the models, allowing researchers to fine tune their simulations. ®


text:
PBS, pH 7.2 This product, and/or its packaging, incorporates one or more environmental/green features. Click on this icon to learn more.

Catalog number: 20012027

Gibco™  Related applications: Mammalian Cell Culture

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Phosphate-buffered saline (PBS) is a balanced salt solution that is used for a variety of cell culture applications, such as washing cells before dissociation, transporting cells or tissue samples, diluting cells for counting, and preparing reagents. PBS is formulated without calcium and magnesium for rinsing chelators from the culture before cell dissociation.

We offer a variety of Gibco® PBS formulations for a range of cell culture applications.

This PBS is manufactured as follows:

• Calcium
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• Phenol Red

The complete formulation is available.

cGMP Manufacturing and Quality System
Gibco® PBS is manufactured at a cGMP compliant facility located in Grand Island, New York. The facility is registered with the FDA as a medical device manufacturer and is certified to ISO 13485 standards. For supply chain continuity, we offer an identical Gibco® PBS product made in our Scotland facility (70011-036). This facility is also registered with the FDA as a medical device manufacturer and is certified to the ISO 13485 standard.

Concentrated: 1 X
Inorganic Salts: No Calcium, No Magnesium
pH: pH 7.2
Form: Liquid
Classification: Animal Origin-Free
Osmolality: 280 - 320 mOsm/kg
Phenol Red Indicator: No Phenol Red
Product Line: Gibco®
Product Size: 500 mL
Sodium Pyruvate Additive: No Sodium Pyruvate
pH Range: 7.1 - 7.3
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Shipping Condition: Room Temperature

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Storage conditions: 15-30° C
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text:
Toronto-area Benisasia funeral home accused of cutting corners on embalmings

Benisasia Funeral Home is fighting to keep its licence as the funeral watchdog alleges bodies were improperly embalmed, among other accusations.

Prabhjot Kaur Johal, right, owner of Benisasia Funeral Home, poses with her husband and the home's founder, Rick Benisasia, outside the Mississauga location in 2011.
Prabhjot Kaur Johal, right, owner of Benisasia Funeral Home, poses with her husband and the home's founder, Rick Benisasia, outside the Mississauga location in 2011.  (ANDREW FRANCIS WALLACE / TORONTO STAR) | Order this photo

A prominent GTA funeral parlour skimped on chemicals while embalming hundreds of corpses, causing bodily fluids to seep from the deceased as loved ones looked on during visitations, Ontario’s funeral home watchdog alleges.

Benisasia Funeral Home, which will remain open pending a tribunal ruling on pulling its licence, is the subject of a slew of allegations, including accusations that the business cut corners while embalming nearly 400 bodies; owes money to coroners; and misled investigators about where it kept cremated remains.

Benisasia’s owner denies these allegations.

Meanwhile, Ontario’s Board of Funeral Services agreed to lift its Jan. 6 suspension of Benisasia’s Mississauga and Toronto funeral homes.

The two funeral homes will be allowed to reopen under the strict condition that daily operations are handled by a manager selected by the board. Doug Simpson, the board’s registrar, said it is still pushing to permanently revoke Benisasia’s licences, saying consumers are at risk.

Article Continued Below

“One of the terms will be that the individuals who own this organization will not be involved in the day-to-day operation of it,” Simpson said. “We are satisfied that the public will be dealing with an organization that is overseen by someone we can feel confidence in.”

The funeral home’s owner, Prabhjot Kaur Johal, is appealing the board’s plan to revoke the licences before the provincial Licence Appeal Tribunal. The allegations have not been proven.

Johal’s lawyer, Harris Rosen, spoke to the Star on her behalf. He said her appeal documents address the board’s accusations, and the temporary agreement to keep Benisasia operating is not an admission of wrongdoing.

Johal’s documents call the regulator’s bid to revoke Benisasia’s licences apparent retribution for an earlier protracted legal battle in which Johal was stripped of her funeral director licence for falsifying embalming records.

The investigators’ new allegations of scrimping on chemicals while embalming bodies rely largely on the testimony of a former Benisasia manager. Johal’s appeal states that the former employee lacks credibility because she was once convicted of drug trafficking.

The former Benisasia employee told the board the funeral home used far less than the required amount of embalming chemicals, according to the board’s suspension letter. Other staff told the board bodies “regularly” leaked fluids during funeral services and visitations.

This leaking, known as “purging,” occurs when tissue and organs have been insufficiently embalmed and begin to decompose, producing gas that pushes odious bodily fluids out of a corpse’s orifices.

“When a body is purging, we teach that it is embalming failure,” said Jeff Caldwell, who teaches embalming at Humber College’s funeral services program.

“The embalming process is to stop that from happening.”

Family members would have to ask staff to wipe the fluids from their loved one’s face in the middle of funeral services, former staff told the board. They told investigators they were instructed to put towels around the neck of corpses to protect “against the body purging overnight,” Simpson said in the suspension letter. Johal’s appeal cites a current staff member who said he never had to do either of these things.

The former manager, who oversaw daily operations at Benisasia’s Mississauga home, told the board Johal disregarded her request for “proper chemicals to guard against a body purging or having an odour.” Johal denies this happened.

The board’s letter says Benisasia funeral home scrimped on the amount of chemicals it should have bought to properly embalm the 378 bodies it treated in 2012.

Following embalming practices provided by the former employee, the board calculated it would take more than 1,500 bottles of chemicals to adequately preserve those 378 bodies. Records show the funeral home bought just 396 bottles that year — a discrepancy of more than 1,100 bottles.

“The (board of funeral services) is concerned about this shortfall and that bodies being embalmed at Benisasia may not be properly embalmed and that consumers are being charged for inferior or substandard services,” Simpson said in the letter suspending Benisasia’s licence.

Lacking these necessary supplies, the former manager said she would “short change” water in the chemical tank to make the chemicals last longer.

In her appeal documents, Johal called the former employee’s calculation of the amount of chemicals needed grossly inflated and “totally wrong.” The funeral home said roughly half that amount is needed for a normal embalming.

The board “is relying upon the evidence of a convicted narcotics trafficker,” Johal’s documents say, referring to the former manager. The Star was unable to confirm this conviction.

Johal was never directly involved in the embalmings and never gave instructions to use fewer chemicals than needed, her appeal documents say.

The documents said Benisasia has never received any complaints from bereaved families about bodies purging.

“Consumers are not being charged for inferior or substandard services,” the documents say.

Humber’s Caldwell said the chemical calculations of both Benisasia and the former employee are inconsistent with what he teaches students.

While the former employee’s calculation calls for more than the necessary amount of chemicals to arterially preserve tissue, he said the funeral home’s numbers underestimate the amount needed to harden cavities and preserve organs — a crucial step “to prevent a purge from occurring in the first place.”

This is not the first time Benisasia’s owner, Johal, has been caught up in controversy over embalmings.

In 2011, the Licence Appeal Tribunal ordered the board to strip Johal of her funeral director licence, after ruling she falsified embalming records to take credit for work actually done by an intern.

The board’s current case before the tribunal accuses Johal of a glaring “lack of honesty and integrity” in her role as funeral home owner, accusing, among other things, she failed to pay suppliers and coroners.

Part of the fee a bereaved family pays to a funeral home covers the services provided by the coroner, such as preparing a death certificate.

Simpson said Benisasia owes money to several coroners for work already done, which suggests that in some cases, Benisasia may have pocketed the cash paid by grieving families.

“Presumably, in some cases, those fees would be charged already, and may have been collected,” Simpson said in an interview.

In her appeal documents, Johal says coroners are still signing cremation certificates for Benisasia and all accounts are in good standing.

In another instance, former staff members told the board cremated remains were being kept in a closet, though board inspectors were repeatedly told there were no cremated remains in the building. On one occasion, the board alleges, Johal told employees to move car parts from the Kia dealership next door into the closet to give the appearance it was used as storage for the dealer.

Only after an inspector found ashes in an office in February 2013 did Benisasia produce a list of 44 cremated remains in the building.

Johal’s appeal says Benisasia’s record-keeping was affected by flooding last summer.

“There was never any attempt to mislead anyone about cremated remains,” the appeal says.

The next hearing on Benisasia’s licence revocation will take place Jan. 24.

Contact Jesse McLean at 647-215-4370 or Joel Eastwood at 647-232-6808


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Best U2 Songs

The Contenders: Page 5

81 October

How can this be 79? It's easily one of their top 3, and one of the top 20 songs of all time, by anyone

82 Original of the Species Original of the Species

My favourite Amazing battery rythm and such a great musical experiment indeed.

Moving, gripping, and filled with the emotion of a lasting group

This is in my top 10 favourites. Just a gorgeous song through and through.

83 This Is Where You Can Reach Me Now This Is Where You Can Reach Me Now
84 Fast Cars
85 When I Look at the World When I Look at the World
86 The Electric Co.

The highlight of Boy!

87 Cedarwood Road Cedarwood Road

From cedarwood cedarwood road don Na na Na na don Na na Na love the guitar solo

V 1 Comment
88 Cedars of Lebanon Cedars of Lebanon

This song is so great with the broken chords and the fantastic bass. It is my favorite song on No Line on the Horizon and I can't believe it's so low on this list! It's excellent!

89 Staring at the Sun Staring at the Sun

Wait, are you all serious? Staring at the sun, 82? ! This song deserves to be on the top 20's... But it's U2, so many songs and all are awesome!

Definitely a top 10 song, best song on POP.

90 Xanax and Wine (Demo of Fast Cars)
91 Smile Smile
92 A Man and a Woman A Man and a Woman
93 Gone Gone

One of the band's greatest songs in my opinion. Lost on an album the band didn't ultimately believe in, unfortunately. The album was too rushed at the end for their liking, but this song is so other-worldly, ethereal, and just damned good. I've listened to it before so many major life events to psych me up and it never fails. If you haven't listened and consider yourself a U2 fan, take 5 minutes - you won't regret it. I especially prefer the live version on their greatest hits album.

Surely this is one of their best songs from the 90's.

94 Trip Through Your Wires Trip Through Your Wires

This song isn't even mentioned...such a great song...!

This song deserves to be higher than 93.

V 1 Comment
95 Volcano Volcano V 1 Comment
96 Twilight Twilight

This song should be considered if ONLY for the coolest-sounding guitar solo in the world!

97 Rejoice Rejoice
98 Zoo Station Zoo Station

How can this be so low on this list

This song kicks ass. Should be WAY higher.

V 1 Comment
99 Zooropa Zooropa

What an intro to this track superb. Brings me back to summer 93 in Paris

One of their less conventional ones, but one of my favorites

V 3 Comments
100 The Hands That Built America

People! You're undervaluing this excellent work. Gangs of New York (the movie it was written for) only received a 75% rating on the famous vegetable movie review site, which may be part of why the song didn't get more air time. Bono's soaring solo toward the end reaches the skies and the interwoven melodies and harmonies make you want to play this on repeat.

"Best song ever... I just can't get enough of it... It makes me feel different, it reminds me the history of mankind and how we've evolved!

The most beautiful song, I'd say!

"From the stony fields to hanging steel from sky" --- what an evocative line

The Orchestral Version should be the first of U2

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Flag for South Sudan Clock Changes in Juba, South Sudan in 2012

Last change: 1985
1 hour Back

Oct 15, 1985, 12:00 midnight

No further time changes in 2012
in Juba

Location of JubaLocation

Daylight Saving Time (DST) Not Observed in Year 2012

Juba observed Eastern Africa Time (EAT) all year.

DST is no longer in use.

Clocks do not change in Juba, South Sudan.

The previous DST change in Juba was on October 14, 1985.

Try selecting a different year below.

Which countries & states use DST and which do not?

Other years: 1979 | 1980 | 1981 | 1982 | 1983 | 1984 | 1985

Daylight Saving Time in Other Years

DST changes do not necessarily occur on the same date every year.

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2010 — 2019DST not observed
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• 3 out of 5 stars
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The capacious, messy 333 was one of the first clubs to colonise this corner of town, and did as much as any venue to put the neighbourhood on London’s nightlife map.

It’s no longer the be-all and end-all of East End clubbing, and the programme in the main room is a little thinner than in previous years. Even so, this two-floored clubbing institution still draws queues for indie-rave and R&B mash-ups at weekends.

The basement’s dark and intense, which works well for the dubstep talent on show. Upstairs is the tatty Mother Bar, responsible for countless lost evenings. There’s no food up there besides the iconic nut machines, but really, if you’d eaten earlier, you probably wouldn’t have wound up there in the first place.

Venue name: 333
Address: 333 Old St
Opening hours: Open 8pm-2am Mon; 8pm-3am Tue-Thur; 10pm-3am Fri-Sun
Transport: Tube: Old St; Rail: Shoreditch High St Overground
Price: Admission free-£5
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Average User Rating

5 / 5

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So much fun!!!! Never been anywhere open so late so easy going and so well priced in London.

I went to 333 last weekend for the first time in ages. Whenever I go back I always have an incredible time. There's something about it which I can't put my finger on - it's just inescapably fun. Even my friends who don't like clubbing had an amazing time. It seems to appeal to all groups and different scenes without watering down on quality DJs and cool live bands.


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More Demand for Velayutham

The theatre owners and exhibitors are demanding for more prints as the film has taken a grand opening.

News 28-Oct-2011 11:11 AM IST Top 10 Cinema Comments

In spite of other big releases, producer Aascar Ravichandran managed to get bigger and more screens across Tamil Nadu and other areas for his Diwali release ‘Velayutham’. Released on October 25, the film has lived up to the expectations of not just Vijay fans, but has attracted the family audiences.

With a longer weekend still going on, the theatre owners and exhibitors have demanded for additional prints of the film. Across the states of Kerala and Karnataka, the fans circle for Vijay has increased than the usual limits. The repeat audiences in Kerala are rushing into the theatres to watch it again and again.

Well, it’s worth mentioning that Kerala audiences have welcomed even his films like ‘Sura’ and ‘Velayutham’ has become a huge hit over there.

Ilayathalapathy Vijay has thanked his fans for extending their support and making the film successful.

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Lands' End Boot Cut Jeans-Medium Wash

Lands' End Boot Cut Jeans

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Women's Stretch No-waist Premium Denim Boot-cut Jeans
The benefit of a "no waist" waistband? It lies flat and smooth around your middle, without adding bulk. Land's End called this a "boot-cut silhouette". I feel it has a wider-style leg than traditional boot-cut, but still ooks great with heels or boots. Only worn a few times. Premium denim has just a hint of stretch. 99% cotton/1% spandex.

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Book Hotels in Alleppey

1 Person in 1 Room
Room 1:
AdultsAbove 12 years
Children Below 12 years
  • Age(s) of Children
Room 1:
AdultsAbove 12 years
Children Below 12 years
  • Age of Children

Wed, 01 Feb – Thu, 02 Feb (1 Night)  |  1 Room  |  1 Guest

Alleppey Holiday beach Resort

North of Vijaya Park,Alleppey Beach, Alleppey, Alleppey , 688012  |  Show on map

Wed, 01 Mar - Thu, 02 Mar | 1 Room
Change Dates
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  • 1 Person in 1 Room
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No Reviews Found.
  • Overall Rating

    • 3.5
    • Alleppey Holiday beach Resort

      (based on 19 reviews)

    • Terrible 1
    • Poor 0
    • Average 6
    • Very Good 9
    • Excellent 3

    • Location
    • Sleep Quality
    • Rooms
    • Service
    • Value
    • Cleanliness

People Friendly. Cleanliness friendly. People Friendly. Cleanliness friendly.

by Kiran N on October 22, 2016

There are a couple of hotels right on the beach if you start from the public beach - this one is the last hotel before the fishermen colony. Right on the beach - so you sleep with the waves and wake up in the waves! Neat and tidy rooms with all basic facilities. Micheal - the one man show - is always up and ready with his enfield for any requests or help. Great hospitality - got us food as we reached at 11:30 pm starving and when everything is sort of closed. So all in all a clean hotel with a good location and a great staff!

Average hotel with very good staff on a very bad location Average hotel with very good staff on a very bad location

by anupdkurup on October 14, 2016

We stayed in AC rooms. We booked it since we want to stay near the beach. View from AC rooms are limited as the rooms are in the ground floor. You can only see a wall and sand even from the balcony. Rooms are old and small but are kept clean. Bed is not wide enough accommodate a family with 4 kids. The rooms are overpriced. No restaurant but the staff will help you to get food from outside. We had to sit in the room because of a dirty smell coming from the beach area. Beach was so dirty that we didn't feel like swimming there. There are lot of local fishermen hanging around the area and they don't care about cleanliness. I went for a morning walk and immediately came back after seeing a couple of locals excreting on the beach. On the good side, the staff and manager are very helpful and supportive. They are ready to go to any extend to help you.

Great. Great.

by Trogs2 on October 10, 2016

Having left where we had booked we happened on Alleppey Beach Resort. We are very glad we did. We only planned to stay in Alleppey for 3 nights but stayed a week because we enjoyed our room so much. We were in a non a/c room upstairs with a balcony. The property is built on a fishermen's beach. It was great watching the fishermen. The room was a very good size so was the bathroom. Both were very clean and tidy as was the whole property. All the staff were excellent. Helpful, cheerful and ready to help. The manager, Michael was extremely helpful and friendly. Giving excellent advice. Helping to arrange trips and transport. He put us in touch with an extremely good tuk tuk driver called Arpu. We would highly recommend this place to stay if in Alleppey. We will stasstasy there agazagazin if we pass through in the future.

Charming Location and Excellence Hospitality at a reasonable price!!! Charming Location and Excellence Hospitality at a reasonable price!!!

by Daniel G on August 7, 2016

The location is superb for hard swimming fans like myself, directly in front of the ocean!! You can sleep placidly while listening to the relaxing sea murmurs and have an early morning swim just directly after waking up. The facilities are simple but server for the purpose, good wifi connectivity in the reception and a wonderful balcony right facing the sea. But the main asset of this property is really the staff. Particularly the manager, a dynamic and charming young fellow called Michael, who will do his very best to make sure that your stay is wonderful and all your wishes are satisfied. Specially if you are a foreigner, Michael's help will be everything you need to make your Allapuzha stay a truly paradise on earth.

Clean and safe with great staff Clean and safe with great staff

by toubabing on July 26, 2016

After ditching our first attempt at a guesthouse in Alleppey due to security and cleanliness, this was an oasis. We arrived without a reservation and were immediately shown a clean triple bedroom on the ground floor with a deck that led to the beach. While the rooms are basic and there were a few ants, the staff is what really makes this place awesome. We came during off season, (three women) and arrived a night and there is construction on the main roan to Alleppey beach, making it difficult to walk to the restaurants. But Michael and his friend offered to take us there on their motos for free. He also gave us his card to call him when we heading back. When we were trying to find our way back, a local bar had just closed and there were a lot of drunken patrons on the street. We had someone call Michael. He said to walk back to the hotel and asked the person whose phone we were using to walk with us. Overall, we felt very taken care of and safe while staying here. The staff did not hassle us to book a houseboat or try to pawn us off to their friends. Highly recommend!

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Demo Trip Do not go with this guy called Shaji who works with Hotel or any guys recommended by hotel. Didn't work for us. Turned out to be a cheat.

by Kiran N on October 22, 2016

Demo Trip AC rooms are in the ground floor and view is pathetic. No-AC rooms should have good view as the rooms are in top floor and have balacony.

by anupdkurup on October 13, 2016

Demo Trip I'm assuming all views are sea-view, but do check about that first

by Florian M on March 25, 2016

Demo Trip quiet place and easy access

by jagadambea on March 8, 2016

Demo Trip no options .only stay in ground floor as AC is there

by pradhan746 on January 4, 2016

  • Services

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    Cancellation and prepayment policies vary according to room type. Please check what room conditions may apply when selecting your room above.

  • The primary guest must be at least 18 years of age to check into this hotel.
  • As per Government regulations, It is mandatory for all guests above 18 years of age to carry a valid photo identity card & address proof at the time of check-in. In case, check-in is denied by the hotel due to lack of required documents, you cannot claim for the refund & the booking will be considered as NO SHOW.
  • Unless mentioned, the tariff does not include charges for optional room services (such as telephone calls, room service, mini bar, snacks, laundry etc). In case, such additional charges are levied by the hotel, we shall not be held responsible for it.
  • In case suitable proof of identification is not presented at check in, the accommodation can be declined to guests posing as a couple. Travelguru.com will not be responsible for any check in declined by the hotel due to the aforesaid reason. ( and shall not be able to process any refund )
  • All hotels charge a compulsory Gala Dinner Supplement on Christmas and New Year's eve. Other special supplements may also be applicable during festival periods such as Dusshera, Diwali etc. Any such charge would have to be cleared directly at the hotel.
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text:
Three Ways Morgan Stanley Can Grow Its Wealth Management Business

by Trefis Team
Morgan Stanley
Rate   |   votes   |   Share

At a recent investor event, the head of Morgan Stanley’s (NYSE:MS) wealth and asset management business Greg Fleming, detailed a three-point strategy aimed at increasing the profitability of the investment bank’s wealth management operations. [1] Targeting a pre-tax margin of 17% for Morgan Stanley Wealth Management (MSWM) by mid-2013, Fleming reached the figure two quarters in advance and is now setting his sights on pushing the margin figure towards 20%. He intends to achieve this by getting advisers to cross-sell more bank products, by providing more “managed account” products and by offering capital market services to wealthy clients looking to raise money. To facilitate faster growth, MSWM will also spend half a billion dollars to improve its technology over the rest of the year so that clients have better access to its banking services.

We have pointed out on numerous occasions in the past, Morgan Stanley’s performance over recent quarters demonstrates a fundamental shift in its business model – from one relying almost completely on sales & trading to the balanced one it is now, thanks to the emphasis on generating steady revenues by focusing on its wealth management business. The continuing focus on the profitability of its wealth management business is no doubt good news as it holds the promise of considerable upside to the investment bank’s value.

We have a $24 price estimate for Morgan Stanley’s stock, which is about 5% below its current market prices.

See our full analysis of Morgan Stanley

Focus #1: Pushing Advisers To Cross-Sell More Bank Products

Fleming’s top priority is to get Morgan Stanley’s wealth management advisers to sell more bank products to clients, something that MSWM lags behind peers Bank of America-Merrill Lynch (NYSE:BAC) and Wells Fargo (NYSE:WFC). This includes the sale of mortgages and loans to wealthy clients, which in most cases is made favorable for clients by accepting securities and other investment products as collateral. Such a push should help the size of client assets managed by MSWM grow faster over the coming years – the impact of which on the bank’s value can be understood by making changes to the chart above.

Focus #2: Offering Clients More “Managed Account” Products

One of MSWM’s strengths in the industry is its proven track record in helping investors pick better performing hedge funds, mutual funds and other investment options based on the clients’ investment goals. The investment bank seeks to improve its leadership in this area and extend these customized services offered to more clients opting for managed accounts to be able to rope in additional fees. The proposition comes as a win-win situation for everyone involved as clients gain access to a wider range of investment options, the external fund manager see more cash inflows from the newly added customers and Morgan Stanley pockets a tidy fee in the match-making process.

Focus #3: Provide Wealthy Clients Better Access To Capital Market Services

This part of Fleming’s plan hinges on better collaboration between Morgan Stanley’s investment banking and wealth management arms. Wealthy clients looking to raise cash for their businesses would be provided access to debt and equity capital markets by Morgan Stanley’s capital markets team. The bank’s strong presence in global capital markets would definitely help in this regard and will bring in more business (and hence more fee revenues) to the investment banking operations.

While this three-pronged plan definitely holds promise when it comes to generating value for the bank, it must be remembered that the role of Morgan Stanley’s brokers is pivotal to the success of the plan. What remains to be seen is how well Fleming translates this plan into action by buying in the support of his 16,000 strong workforce of brokers.

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  1. Fleming opens Morgan Stanley’s wallet, Reuters, Jun 4 2013 []
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Disney Infinity

Discussion in 'Gaming' started by acappellasaurus, Aug 19, 2013.

  1. acappellasaurus

    acappellasaurus Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

    May 11, 2001
    Anchorage, Alaska
    I drank the Kool Aid and went for Disney Infinity, the new release that puts the Mouse House spin on the Skylanders motif. Is anyone else here playing this game? I bought it for my son's birthday, but I'd be lying if I didn't admit to wanting in on the fun too. We ended up with the basic setup, and the figures Sully, Mike W., Mr. Incredible, Mrs. Incredible, Jack Sparrow, Capt. Barbosa, and Mater. We have the basic Playset that includes Pirates/Metro City/Monsters University, and the power discs for Carl Fredreickson's cane, Tangled environment change, and Alice In Wonderland environment change.

    Any discussion pertaining to this game? I'd love to trade in-game secrets and the like in this thread!
  2. ThunderAeroI

    ThunderAeroI Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

    Feb 28, 2002
    Perpetually being chased by airplanes
    How like skylanders is it?
  3. Rincewiend

    Rincewiend Vice Admiral Admiral

    Mar 7, 2001
    .eu / .nl
    I picked it up as well...
    One game engine running atleast multiple different games/gameworlds is impressive...
    Especially when each of them is around 5 hours of playtime...
    Might pick up the Sidekicks and Villains sets and the Lone Ranger set as well...
    Looking forward to the Nightmare Before Christmas set...