Byline: BRIAN NEARING - Staff writer
MECHANICVILLE - Engine problems forced an Army National Guard helicopter on a night training mission to make an emergency landing in a cornfield off Roe Road.
None of the four crew members aboard was injured after the UH-60 Blackhawk set down about 11 p.m. Wednesday, its pilot using night vision goggles to find a safe place, said Major Kathy Sweeney.
On Thursday, repair crews were working on the chopper's twin 1,560-horsepower engines. …
An acrimonious annual shareholder meeting has revived merger Michigan National Corp.
After attending the meeting in Detroit, analyst Micheal K. Diana ofheal Prudential Securities Inc. put a "buy" rating on the stock, saying he was convinced that dissident shareholders have the mometum to force a sale.
"I've been saying a proxy fight wasn't going to be a winnder, but based on what happened yesterday, I know think a proxy fight is a winner," the merger and acquisition expert said.
Predicting a sale within 15 months, Mr. Dana put a 12-month target price on the stock of $80 and an 18-month target of $90. It closed at $65.25 Wednesday, up $1.50. …
Patent Update
A change in U.S. patent law resulting from the 1994 GATT Uruguay Round Table Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property ("TRIPS") agreements added to the list of acts that constitute infringement of a patent. Previously, the only acts that constituted infringement were making, using, or selling the patented invention. Offering to sell was added as part of the effort to harmonize U.S. patent law with that of its trading partners. Like the other infringing acts, offering to sell constitutes infringement only when the offer is made in the U.S. When the offer is made in the U.S., infringement is present even if the actual sale, manufacture, and use are all performed …
Byline: JAIME ARON Associated Press
Clippers 122
Suns 97
PHOENIX - The Los Angeles Clippers rebounded with a capital "R" to win Game 2 of the Western Conference semifinals.
The bigger Clippers swamped the Phoenix Suns on the boards 57-26 in a 122-97 victory Wednesday night that evened the best-of-7 series. Game 3 is in Los Angeles on Friday night.
Elton Brand, coming off a 40- point performance in Game 1, had 27 points and 10 rebounds …
A New Jersey state grand jury has indicted three men, accusing them of defrauding five freight brokers out of $2.6 million in an elaborate Internet load board scam.
The indictment accused Fazal Din, Dayton, N.J.; Raiendra Patel, Jersey City, N.J.; and Kulwinder Dhaliwal Singh, Monroe, N.J., of first-degree conspiracy, theft by deception and money-laundering in a "bust out" shipping scam in which the three men allegedly built up a line of credit with the brokers and then used that credit to defraud the brokers.
"We allege that these defendants had their own companies on both sides of fraudulent shipping transactions, with unsuspecting freight brokers caught in the middle." Paula Dow, New Jersey's attorney general, said in a statement. "They allegedly ripped off the brokers, both coming and going, to the tune of $2.6 million."
The indictment also charges the men and two of their wives with failure to file state income tax returns.
As of last week, all three men were fugitives, according to the New Jersey Office of the Attorney General, which is prosecuting the case.
The five brokers who were victims of the fraud were not identified in the indictment, announced on June 30. "We're not ready yet to name the victims," said Peter Aseltine, a spokesman for the attorney general's office.
One of the brokers lost $1.1 million to the fraud, Aseltine said. Authorities were tipped to the scam by the brokers, he added.
Stephen Taylor, director of New Jersey's Division of Criminal Justice, said the fraud scheme was complex and involved more than 1,200 transactions.
"As con artists have become more sophisticated and have exploited opportunities for fraud on the Internet, we have stepped up our efforts to detect and prosecute such white-collar criminals through our Financial and Computer Crimes Bureau," Taylor said in a statement.
The three men allegedly operated their businesses using sham companies that operated as National Freight, National Freight Solutions, Diamond Freight Solutions, Golden Star Express Corp. doing business as Prime Time Freight and PRP Enterprises.
The Attorney General's Office said the scam was unusual because the three men initially gained the confidence of the brokers and built up a line of credit, at first legitimately moving freight using independent owner-operators and large motor carriers.
"The men made some payments in order to sustain the scam," Aseltine said.
The three men were engaged in transactions in which one of their companies - either Prime Time Freight or Diamond Freight Solutions - advertised that they had goods to move and contracted with the freight brokers to ship goods from California to New Jersey.
The brokers would then post the jobs on the Internet, and one of the sham companies, PRP Enterprises, would contact the broker and indicate they could move the freight, but never did - and still got paid.
"Basically, they had the companies on both ends of the transaction, so Prime Time and Diamond Freight never complained," Aseltine said.
Prime Time and Diamond Freight contracted with brokers for a total of 1,217 shipments in 2009 and 2010, authorities said.
However, the brokers were unaware of the connections between the companies involved in the transactions, and the line of credit allowed the victim brokers to pay PRP before the broker was paid hy Prime Time or Diamond Freight, authorities said.
In the end, Prime Time and Diamond Freight allegedly failed to pay $2.6 million owed to the five freight brokers who held contracts with the scam operators that totaled about $4.7 million.
Din, Patel and Singh allegedly laundered their illegal proceeds by moving money through their companies and making payments to relatives and other individual associates.
Din and Patel are U.S. citizens, Aseltine said.
The three men face a sentence up to 30 years in state prison and a $350,000 fine if convicted of the charges.
[Author Affiliation]
By Eric Miller
Staff Reporter
ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 2 -- The trademark TIERRA (Reg. No. 3923552) was issued on Feb. 22 by the USPTO.
Owner: Topcon Positioning Systems, Inc. CORPORATION CALIFORNIA 7400 National Drive Livermore CALIFORNIA 94551.
The trademark application serial number 77442964 was filed on April 8, 2008 and was registered on Feb. 22.
Goods and Services: Telematics apparatus, namely, wireless internet devices which provide telematic services and can include a cellular phone function. FIRST USE: 20091208. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 20091208
Telematics business services, namely, providing start-up support for businesses of others; compiling and analyzing telematic data for large fleet vehicle management; data processing services in the fields of large vehicle fleet management and communication, construction and agricultural management; database management of maps of the world; statistical reporting services for business purposes. FIRST USE: 20091208. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 20091208
Housing telematic data for large vehicle fleet management and communication, construction and agricultural management in the nature of storage of electronic media, namely, electronic data. FIRST USE: 20091208. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 20091208
For any query with respect to this article or any other content requirement, please contact Editor at htsyndication@hindustantimes.com
The younger students are much more hi-tech than we older ones. They move easily around PowerPoint and multicoloured computer presentations, and sit in lectures fiddling with their BlackB erries . My mobile phone doesn't do emails and photos and stuff. It cost �5 and has lasted nine months.
And they are all on Facebook. All the time. They tell each other when they are about to attend lectures, they post pictures of their weekends, they spy on former boyfriends (mostly it seems to be about that). They don't do Twitter. I've lost count of the number of times I've been told with an astonished look that I've got to be on Facebook.
We were in a statistics computer workshop and I was trying to explain to one of them why I didn't want a load of emails every day, telling me what my friends had been drinking the night before. But you don't get loads of emails, she insisted, and logged on to her university account. There were dozens of messages, all with alerts from Facebook, all from that day, all unread. "But I don't mind," she explained as she glanced through the list. "I don't really know most of these people." Exactly.
Jiggery-pokery
I suppose these things must look different from the perspective of someone who has never worked. Because anyone who has had a j ob knows what a bore emails are. I am still scarredby being on the Liberal Democrats' press release list for many years; there are only so many times you can be told that "Time for talking has passed", or "Willis should get off fence (maybe)", before you want to shut down your inbox and retire behind a nice, secure fence yourself.
I once asked Menzies Campbell when he last poked someone. The Lib Dems had been putting it about that he was the most popular party leader on Facebook. So, in the middle of an interview, my colleague and I asked "ming" (remember how the rebranding came with a lower case?) when he last poked somebody. He went red with fury before we reassured him that it was a technical term connoting the greeting of friends on Facebook. It was a mean trick, I suppose, but it proved our point.
And now I am on Facebook, too. It was quite easy to sign up, once I had also signed up to a fake email address so that all those posts can go somewhere else. Feeling a little like a spy, I checked the pages of a few of the students: one of them was religious, another had a link to a page called "When I'm drunk, I tend to ruin my life". It was full of late-night or hungover messages of self-loathing by other people. It also seemed to be very popular to post pictures of oneself leaping on a beach. They reminded me of those depressed people who dye their hair very bright colours, as if to jolly themselves up.
Sociologists argue whether Facebook, which overtook Google in March among US internet users, is a source of weak or strong "social capital", of making acquaintances or making friends. It seems to me to make people paranoid. The students count how many "friends" they and others have; they monitor the people they fancy. They check up on people they didn't like at school, and hope to find them in dead-end jobs. Two 12 -year -olds I know were recently found posting late into the night about how much they hated a girl at school, goading each other on to deeper meanness.
A report in the US that surveyed hundreds of university students (average number of "friends": 150-200), and then conducted regression analyses to search for links between Facebook use and social capital, found that Facebook was particularly useful in forming weak social capital for those with low selfesteem. It didn't show a lot else.
Fake smiles
If Facebook friends do not make people socially secure, nor does technical know-how make them competent. I thought the whole point of wiring up schoolkids from the age of five was to teach independent learning. But these students seem a lot less independent than I remember being- or, perhaps, that is my memory playing tricks. They have lectures with slides, and then handouts of the slides, and the other day we had a handout of the slides with ruled lines down the other side of the sheet - so you could write your notes on them. It is infantilising.
There was one postgraduate last week who did clever things with colour codes on his computer (at which I was staring in horror) - and then asked the lecturer what he should do now, because he had finished early. Like a child. It's as if they have been taught how to do but not how to think, just as Facebook teaches you how to look happy, not be happy. It seems like a con. Although, as I have forgotten my fake email address, I don't suppose I shall be finding out.
[Author Affiliation]
newstatesman.com/writers/alice_miles
