Kim Richards is staying out of jail ... for now.

The ex-Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star, 51, was on the hot seat Wednesday linked to a probation violation after she was convicted of shoplifting more than $600 worth of merchandise at a Van Nuys Target store in August of 2015.

While officials said she had not made good on the 30 days of community service and 52 Alcoholics Anonymous meetings the court ordered her to fulfill, on deadline, as part of her sentence, TMZ reported that her legal team was able to prove that she had completed both tasks late.

Back on the red carpet: Kim Richards, 51, was allowed to remain a free woman Wednesday amid accusations the ex-RHOBH star had violated her probation in her 2015 shoplifting conviction

The presiding judge continued the matter until November, at which time the Southern California socialite - who remains on probation for the humiliating incident - must prove she's up-to-date on all of her court-ordered responsibilities.

The mother-of-four's shoplifting arrest came nearly a year ago, on August 2, 2015, when the former child actress was busted outside the retailer by a security guard with a swiped haul that consisted of children's-related items such as stickers, crayons and coloring books.

Kim, whose sister Kyle Richards remains a key cast member on Bravo's hit show set in the 90210, kept a low profile on Twitter Wednesday, with her last post having come Tuesday, in which she wished her youngest daughter, Kimberly Jackson, a happy 21st birthday.

Rock bottom: Kim's humiliating arrest came in August of 2015, when she was nabbed outside of a Van Nuys Target store with more than $600 in stolen merchandise

Reality bites: Kim's substance abuse issues were often the focal point of her storylines on RHOBH

Hard times: It's been a rough two years for the Los Angeles socialite, who was arrested twice in embarrassing circumstances, then lost her ex-husband and confidante Monty Brinson this past January to cancer

As reality TV viewers might remember, Jackson has been one of Kim's biggest supporters, as the dynamics of their nurturing - and sometimes-tragic - parent-child relationship were laid bare on Lifetime's The Mother/Daughter Experiment: Celebrity Edition.

Viewers of the program saw Jackson admit that she's often forced into a 'caretaker' role over her mother, who was also arrested in April of 2015 in connection with public intoxication and more after a drunken, belligerent run-in with a police officer after she was kicked out of the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

Sisterhood: Kim posed in 2014 with sister Kyle, 47, who remains one of the key players on RHOBH

On the Lifetime program, Jackson said she was overwhelmed at times dealing with her mother, who she called 'fragile, physically and emotionally.'

A teary-eyed Richards, after seeing her daughter's frustration, admitted, 'I need to remember how my decisions do affect Kimberly.'

On the show, Kim, who's also related to Kathy and Paris Hilton, seemed to believe that her time on Bravo's RHOBH 'really hurt me because I was struggling with certain things.'


Julia Flynn Siler | The House of Mondavi | 2007 | 14 minutes (3,328 words)

For our latest Longreads Member Pick, we’re excited to feature an excerpt from The House of Mondavi, Julia Flynn Siler’s book about a family that turned a Napa Valley winery into a billion-dollar fortune. Thanks to Siler and Gotham Books for sharing it with the Longreads community.

Download .mobi (Kindle) Download .epub (iBooks)

* * *

Crush: 1966–1972

The first few months at the Robert Mondavi Winery were chaotic. Carpenters, masons, plumbers, electricians, and the winemaker, Warren Winiarski, were all working on top of one another. By late summer, there were walls, but still no roof, catwalks, or ladders to reach the tops of the new stainless steel fermenters. Parts were missing and there was no place to do any lab work—let alone a lab technician to do it. Since there were no desks or offices or tables, Winiarski worked from a clipboard. Robert, who had a small office in a trailer, was seldom in one place for long. Winiarski would see him early in the morning and late in the day; the rest of the time, he was a whirlwind of energy, conferring with the builders, making deals for grapes, consulting, and purchasing equipment.

Robert’s energy was infectious and his aspirations heady. But he was strongly motivated to start making wine. Fired from Krug without any significant severance pay, Robert was under severe financial pressure. With construction costs mounting, he sought to produce cash flow as quickly as possible. So he set an ambitious timeline. He was determined to bring in the harvest that first year and crush grapes to make the Robert Mondavi Winery’s first vintage. From groundbreaking to crush, he had two, or perhaps three, months at most. Although Robert had probably not fully formed his intentions for the new winery in 1966, even by then the people who were helping him to make it happen recognized that his dreams were lofty.

“It was not meant to be a small winery and it was not meant to be a family winery.”

“From the beginning, the Robert Mondavi Winery was meant to reach out,” says Winiarski.

Once again, the friendships that Robert had built after twenty years in the valley came to his rescue. William Bonetti, by then the production chief at Charles Krug, helped Winiarski with some lab work, allowing him to come over and use the Krug lab to run simple analytical tests of the fermenting juice, as well as to borrow equipment and chemicals. Winiarski had assumed that Bonetti had gotten Peter’s implicit, if not explicit, permission to help out his brother, but it wasn’t exactly clear, since neither brother had spoken openly to Winiarski of the simmering feud.

Krug also crushed grapes for the Robert Mondavi winery’s first year, sold it yeast, bottles, and a labeling machine, and loaned the new winery a bottling machine free of charge. As a safety net, Peter and Rosa agreed to pay Robert a $9,000-a-year consulting fee after he was fired, although he never performed any consulting services for Krug. While they didn’t welcome Robert as a competitor, they also didn’t want him to fail. As Peter later explained, “We felt that he needed some support from the family inasmuch as he ventured, and we wanted to see him make a success of what he was doing.” Louis Martini and the winemakers at Beaulieu also pitched in to help out their old friend.

And when the time came to design the winery’s first label, Robert again turned to people he had worked with at Krug: a well-known local printer named James E. Beard and a graphic designer named Mallette Dean. Dean had done beautiful work over the years for Krug, including a delicate woodcut of a farmer tending grapevines that had graced the masthead of the Krug newsletter “Bottles & Bins.”

The label the pair created for the new Robert Mondavi Winery captured its spirit centered around Dean’s wood engraving of the Cliff May building, with its elegant arch and wings. But Dean struggled with a lack of vertical balance in the frame, which he eventually corrected by adding a flank of poplar trees to the scene. In the real setting, a series of trees planted on the walkway had failed to flourish in the 1970s, so eventually, to match the reality to the image on the label, the winery ended up planting poplar trees where Dean had imagined them.

Dean’s label for the Robert Mondavi Winery quickly became one of the iconic images of Napa Valley.

Photo: aphasiafilms, flickr

The cool weather that year also came to Robert’s aid, pushing harvest back by several weeks. Fieldworkers picked the last Cabernet grapes on Veterans Day, November 11, in a season marked by tule fog and cool evenings that often cloaked the valley until ten or eleven in the morning.

To the astonishment of some of the friends and rivals who’d called him crazy, Robert managed to make wine that first year. In 1966, the new Robert Mondavi Winery crushed about 490 tons of grapes—even though there was nothing even close to resembling a building on the site yet. By the time the crush rolled around, there were only concrete slabs on the ground, foundations for the fermenting tanks. In the open air, Robert pumped the juice from the fermenting tanks into other tanks. As summer became autumn, workers were plastering the walls of the newly erected building, even as Warren Winiarski made the wine.

Returning to the rituals and ceremonies of the Roman Catholic Church, Robert marked his winery’s first crush of the grapes surrounded by his immediate family and his most supportive friends on a sunny morning in mid-September. Robert halted the whirl of painting, plastering, and sanding for a few hours. On a concrete platform surrounded by dirt, a group of a few dozen people gathered on the north side of what would become the winery. Father Levinus of the nearby Carmelite monastery, wearing a long black robe that fell to his ankles and a white cassock over that, faced the gondola that held the grapes. Marcia Mondavi, with her short-cropped dark hair and a ladylike knee-length skirt and sleeveless blouse, bowed her head and clasped her hands together. The priest began his benediction in English sprinkled with Latin words.

Photo courtesy of Robert Mondavi Winery

In the background, Winiarski operated the lift that raised the gondola filled with grapes and tipped them into the hopper. From there, the fruit moved along a conveyer belt to the crusher. The mechanics of the moment only hinted at the deeper transformations that would take place as the grapes moved toward their transfiguration into wine. The atmosphere was solemn: There was no round of applause or cheering as Robert’s partners Fred Holmes, Bill Hart, and Ivan Shoch stood watching, their families beside them. Also present was Charles Daniels and two of his sons. Daniels had been distributing Krug’s wines since the 1940s and was close friends with Robert. He wanted to support him in his new venture and offered to distribute his wines when they were released in the spring of 1967, even though he knew that support would infuriate Peter.

For growers such as Holmes and Hart, crush is a moment of death as well as birth. The life that they have nurtured from bud break through harvest is coming to an end; another is about to begin. “There is a death taking place here,” reflects Warren Winiarski, who later became one of the valley’s most famous winemakers. “It’s the death of the grape. I never saw a grower sad, but solemn. They’re glad that it’s happening but it’s a mixed feeling. They’ve worked all that season to make these grapes what they are and now they are being crushed, being destroyed in order to be reborn into a different substance. They’re glad but also a little bit mindful of destruction.”

But that moment of solemnity passed. Robert said a few words about a new beginning. The group included workmen clad in overalls and hats to shield them from the sun. Marjorie began pouring the white wine that had waited for the group beneath a folding card table in a plastic tub filled with ice. Looking cool and elegant, with her blond hair pinned into a chignon, Marjorie, like her daughter, had dressed for the heat, in a conservative A-line skirt that stopped just below the knee and white flats, even though miniskirts and go-go boots were shocking the nation elsewhere.

After the ceremony, the Holmeses, Shochs, and Mondavis gathered for a group photo in front of the grape-filled gondola. The adults held long-stemmed wineglasses. Robert smiled at Marjorie. Timothy, fair-haired and with the gangly look of a teenager, wore black-and-white-laced Converse sneakers. Then just fifteen years old, he, too, held a wineglass in his hand. Marcia, looking contemplative, sat below the row of standing adults. Perhaps in a foreshadowing of the family drama to come, Robert’s elder son was absent on that momentous day.

* * *

The new Mondavi winery was the most significant to be built in the valley since Prohibition, and with barely three dozen bonded wineries operating in the valley at the time, the groundbreaking marked a key turning point. “The construction of the Robert Mondavi Winery marks the effective beginning of American wine’s rise in both quality and prestige,” wrote the wine historian Paul Lukacs.

“What happened there helped ignite the revolution in American tastes.”

“It also helped change broad public attitudes toward wine in general and American wine in particular.”

That fall, however, the significance of Robert’s bold new winery—a venture that some dismissed as “Robert’s Folly” and others as an example of his hubris—seemed to offer concrete proof of the fissure between the proud and talented Mondavi brothers. Fellow vintners watched the rising feud between Robert and Peter with a mixture of sympathy and dismay. After all, Robert was building his winery just five miles south of Krug on Highway 29. The brothers were barely on speaking terms. Other vintners in the valley didn’t talk about it much; mostly, they looked the other way.

But what also caught everyone’s attention and provoked some amused comments was that almost as soon as he started his own winery, Robert began pronouncing his surname differently than Peter, Rosa, and the rest of the family.

He restored it to “Mon-dah-vee,” which was how the name was pronounced before Cesare had Americanized it after immigrating to the U.S.

Meanwhile, Peter and the rest of the family continued to pronounce their last name as they always had done: “Mon-day-vee.”

However slight the change, the new pronunciation had the intended effect of distinguishing Robert from his younger brother. When his longtime friend Charles Daniels asked Robert why he’d changed it, Robert explained with a straight face: “That’s the proper Italian pronunciation.” Daniels also recalled that around that time, some people in the valley began asking, “What is it with this Mondavi business?” referring to the rift between the brothers and Robert’s startling decision to Europeanize his last name. Robert never formally announced the change in pronunciation; it just spread through usage. In later years, his sister Helen would even jokingly introduce herself as “Helen Mon-dah-vee Mon-day-vee.”

And soon enough many people—and especially newcomers to the valley—started referring to the entire family as “Mon-dah-vees”—a galling, frequent reminder to Peter of Robert’s linguistic coup over the rest of the family.

The Robert Mondavi Winery’s growing reputation was built on fine wines, meaning expensive wines made almost exclusively from Napa Valley grapes. It was also built on Robert’s gift for hiring talented winemakers. Keeping those winemakers was another matter, though. For Robert faced an ongoing problem: With one son in the business and another likely to join, the family would always get the credit for the elegant wines that were produced at Oakville, even though it was often the staffers doing much of the work. And although Robert would pay employees 10 to 15 percent above other wineries’ wages and offered such perks as weekly wine tastings, there was a ceiling to any career ambitions that a staffer without the last name Mondavi might entertain at the winery. The family openly acknowledged this.

Michael, upon his return, worked hard and earned just $650 a week. To try to drum up business, he would sometimes drive slowly down Highway 29 from Rutherford to Oakville, waiting for cars to stack up behind him. Driving a pickup truck borrowed from his father-in-law, he’d then slowly make the right-hand turn into the winery. When a car or two followed him, as they often did, he’d jump out of his truck and stick out his hand, saying, “Hi there, I’m Michael Mondavi. Would you like a tour?” Yet, Michael also clearly enjoyed an advantage because of his last name, even joking about it at times. On meeting Michael for the first time for a job interview, one applicant asked if he minded that the applicant’s wife also worked at the winery.

Robert’s elder son leaned back in his chair and grinned: “Nepotism can be a good thing.”

But this practice carried a sizable cost for the company: Ambitious employees often ended up quitting for better opportunities elsewhere. The first to go was Warren Winiarski, the academic refugee from the University of Chicago. Winiarski worked through the first two crushes at the Robert Mondavi Winery, amid the chaos of construction, and left shortly before the third in 1968.

This first year, Winiarski did much of the lab work himself as well as supervising crush, fermentation, and aging of the reds. Michael was doing his National Guard duty for much of the first year as the Vietnam War raged, so Winiarski took his guidance from Robert. In terms of the day-to-day production, Winiarski was in charge, without any sort of directions in terms of style from either Robert or Michael to produce, for example, Bordeaux-style wines. Because so much else was going at the winery—completing construction, negotiating grape contracts, and selling their first year’s wine—Winiarski was left mostly to his own devices. Yet by 1967, Michael had returned from the National Guard and become, in title at least, the winemaker at Mondavi.

That proved frustrating for Winiarski, who, despite his differences with Lee Stewart, had embraced his old boss’s style of paying close attention to even the seemingly most minor details of winemaking. Michael, in turn, had no formal training in enology or chemistry and while he had absorbed a general understanding of winemaking from his days as a cellar rat at Krug, he was not by nature highly detail-oriented. So when incidents occurred in Winiarski’s second and third years at Mondavi, such as Michael taking the valves off the tanks and not replacing them, thus inadvertently exposing the wine to air, Winiarski started to wish he had more control. “There were things he didn’t see because he didn’t care,” says Winiarski. “He liked wine but it wasn’t his passion.”

Winiarski had borrowed money in 1965 to buy fifteen acres of his own up on Howell Mountain, where he hoped to plant a vineyard. His first season in 1967 was a disappointment but he didn’t give up. The following year, his plans to start a vineyard of his own started to come together. So, hoping he could support his family as a freelance winemaker and consultant, he announced he was quitting the Robert Mondavi Winery, shortly before the crucial time of harvest. As Winiarski tells it, Michael was not happy about the timing of his departure. But “I didn’t come to California to be the number-two man in a two-man winery,” recalled Winiarski, referring to his relatively short stay at Souverain Cellars. “The same thing was true at Mondavi.” While Winiarski learned an extraordinary amount at both places, he bridled at working under someone else.“Everyone who is devoted to making something wants to have control of the material—finally and completely—and that couldn’t happen there because of Mike and Robert. It was their material,” meaning it was ultimately their grapes, yeast, barrels, and wine.

It didn’t take long for Robert to recruit Winiarski’s replacement: a talented Croatian immigrant named Miljenko “Mike” Grgich, who was then working at Beaulieu Vineyard for André Tchelistcheff, the quality-driven winemaker who demanded high standards of cleanliness and precision from his staff. Tchelistcheff was about to retire, but ironically his own son had applied for his job, which seemed to suggest that Grgich was unlikely to become the next winemaker at Beaulieu, the most revered producer of fine wines in the valley. Robert knew of Grgich’s situation and thought he might be looking for a new position. So the men arranged a chat in the fall of 1968, just a few weeks after Winiarski had left.

Grgich made the short, two-mile drive down Highway 29 and met with Robert on a wooden bench, near the Robert Mondavi Winery’s mission-style arch. It was a sunny fall day and Robert’s enthusiasm was infectious, as he explained to Grgich his dream of making French-style wines with the newest and most technologically advanced equipment available. Robert also explained that his son recently had returned from duty in the National Guard and was the vice president of winemaking. “I need someone to help my son Michael, who is very young,” Robert told Grgich. While his job title would be head of quality control, in fact he would run the winemaking operation for the family and be the actual winemaker, in a deus-ex-machina fashion. In return, Robert offered Grgich the opportunity to build his reputation as one of the finest winemakers of his generation.

“Mike, if you join my company, I’ll make out of you a little André Tchelistcheff!” he promised him.

It was an irresistible offer, made more so because of Robert’s evident passion to make the Robert Mondavi Winery America’s finest. Grgich accepted and got to work, introducing—among other methods he had learned at Beaulieu—malolactic fermentation, a technique that lends a soft, buttery quality to wines by converting hard malic acids into soft lactic acids. Every Monday, led by Robert, the staff would have their own blind tastings of Mondavi wines against the best from France. It entered into company legend that the winery was California’s largest importer of French grand crus because of these competitive tastings. Robert showed up at the winery nearly as early as Grgich, at six or seven each morning during crush, to taste the progress of the fermenting juice from the barrels or discuss a technical issue with his winemaker.

The very first Cabernet Grgich made for the winery, the 1969, was entered in a blind tasting—which meant that the wine labels would be hidden from the judges—against several other Cabernet Sauvignons from California. Organized by the Los Angeles Times’s wine writer, Robert Lawrence Balzer, the judges, who included Tchelistcheff and Robert, had made most of the wines being tasted that day. When the judges voted the 1969 Robert Mondavi Winery Cabernet as the very best, that decision led to a rush of favorable publicity for the young winery, catapulting it overnight into the ranks of such revered wines as those made at Beaulieu.

Though Grgich had made the wine, Robert took credit for it.

The Balzer tasting, as it came to be known, was the first big publicity breakthrough for the winery, sending its sales soaring. It helped attract the attention of the European wine trade, which, a few years later, in 1976, would organize a blind tasting that would have an even more significant impact on Napa Valley.

* * *

From The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty by Julia Flynn Siler (juliaflynnsiler.com). Published by arrangement with Gotham Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA), LLC. Copyright © 2007 by Julia Flynn Siler.

Photo: flydolce, flickr


A roundup of every time Jason Louv has appeared with Duncan Trussell on the Duncan Trussell Family Hour to talk about magick!

Hey there! Over the last couple years I’ve been very honored and grateful to team up with psychedelic avenger Duncan Trussell and become a regular guest on his show. About once a year I show up to do a “Magick Class With Jason Louv” spot, and Duncan and I travel across the multiverse to discuss the heavens and hells of psychedelic and magical consciousness.

Here’s the shows, in chronological order:

Duncan Trussell Family Hour #114

In my first appearance on Duncan’s show, we talk about the occult nature of the media; if there actually is a massive conspiracy to constrain human consciousness or if people are just that way all on their own; the nature of the Qliphothic Hell Realms and lots, lots more. This one starts off dark and just gets darker, but worry not, there’s LVX at the end of the tunnel!

Duncan says: Magician, author, and mystic Jason Louv (Monsanto Vs. The World, Queen Valentine, Generation Hex, The Psychick Bible) discusses the dangers and potential benefits that come from walking the magickal path!

Duncan Trussell Family Hour #160

I follow up my previous appearance with a good general talk on the nature of Magick and the critical importance of laser-pointed consciousness in our fragmented, mentally scattered world. How to jump across multiple dimensions by shifting your focus is also discussed, so there’s that, too.

Duncan says: Jason Louv, Ultraculture, magick.me, returns to the DTFH to teach Duncan about the secret arts!!

Duncan Trussell Family Hour #230

In my latest appearance, we talk about the great Renaissance magician Dr. John Dee, the deeper history of the Western occult tradition and the nature of the universe itself as the embodied mind of God. These are all fun subjects you can discuss with your family around the dinner table after listening intently!

Duncan says: A deluxe episode with an exclusive new song from award winning mega-band Win Streak Bonus Star along with a deep conversation with author and occultist Jason Louv. We explore John Dee, the Enochian angels and the magical arts.

(Check it out at Duncan’s site here, it’s not on YouTube currently.)

If you’re inspired to learn more about magick after listening to these shows, you check out my free course on chaos magick here!


All Montgomery County and City of Rockville facilities will be closed and no programs will operate on Dec. 25 and Jan. 1.

Holiday hours for city facilities are as follows:

Rockville City Hall will be closed Christmas Day and New Year's Day.

Rockville Senior Center will close at 5 p.m. on Monday and on Dec. 31 and will be closed Christmas Day and New Year's Day.

Lincoln Park Community Center, Thomas Farm Community Center and Twinbrook Community Recreation Center will be open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Monday, on Wednesday, on Dec. 31 and on Jan. 2. The centers will be closed Christmas Day and New Year's Day.

Croydon Creek Nature Center will be closed on Monday and on Dec. 31. The center will be open from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Dec. 26. The center will be closed Christmas Day and New Year's Day.

Glenview Mansion will be closed Christmas Day and New Year's Day.

F. Scott Fitzgerald Theatre be closed Christmas through New Year's Day.

Rockville Swim and Fitness Center will be open 6 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Dec. 24 and 31 and closed Christmas Day and New Year's Day.

Recycling and refuse collection for Monday and for Dec. 31 will not be affected. Collection for the remainder of each week will shift forward one day, with Friday collection made on Saturday.

The city also is recycling cut and artificial Christmas trees. Click here for details.

Parking will be free at city-owned meters and garages on Christmas Day and New Year's Day. For payment information on Rockville Town Square parking garages, go to rockvilletownsquare.com/parking.

For more information about city facilities or programs call 240-314-5000 or visitwww.rockvillemd.gov.

The following county and state facilities will be closed on Christmas Day and New Year's Day:

Montgomery County government offices. Offices also will be closed Monday.

State offices and courts.

Montgomery County Public School administrative offices will be closed Dec. 22-25 and Jan. 1.

County libraries. Branches also will be closed on Monday. Branches will close at 6 p.m. on Dec. 31. Olney Express Service will be closed Dec. 23 through Jan. 1. Gaithersburg Interim Library will be closed Dec. 24-25, Dec. 31 and Jan. 1.

All recreation facilities will be closed on Monday, on Christmas Day and on New Year's Day. All county community and neighborhood recreation centers will be closed Monday through Jan. 1. County senior centers will be closed Sunday through Jan. 1.

County liquor stores. Stores will be open 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Monday and on Dec. 31.

Shady Grove Processing Facility and Transfer Station. The station will close at 5 p.m. on Monday.

Recycling and refuse collection for Monday and for Dec. 31 will not be affected. Collection for the remainder of each week will shift forward one day, with Friday collection made on Saturday.

Parking will be free at county public garages, lots and curbside meters on Monday, on Christmas Day and on New Year's Day.

Transportation services are running on modified schedules on Christmas Day and New Year's Day:

Ride On: Sunday schedule. Service ends early Monday, Christmas Eve, with last buses departing terminals around 10 p.m.

Metrobus: Sunday schedule.

Metrorail: Sunday schedule.

TRiPS Commuter Stores near Silver Spring and Friendship Heights Metro stations will be closed Christmas Day and New Year's Day.


In this guest blog, Caroline Nielsen explores how war changed the lives of women on the home front not just in terms of their daily work, but in the clothes they wore to do it.

One day in early 1915 in the pit village of Horden, County Durham, 22 year-old Elizabeth “Lizzie” Holmes set off to post a letter for her father-in-law. She was on her way home from work, and the Post Office was on the way. This seemingly innocuous errand ended with her being mobbed by children.

Why did Lizzie inadvertently become the centre of attention that day? Lizzie was wearing men’s work clothes. Her heavy shirt, leather trousers and boots was the standard gear of all above-ground pit workers. Along with a number of her friends and neighbours, Lizzie had taken a labouring job at the local pit operating the coke ovens. For the first time, the children were confronted with a woman wearing an outfit that they had previously only associated with their fathers, grandfathers and older brothers. For one brief moment, Lizzie reminded all who saw her that the war had changed fundamentally changed British industry as they knew it. Women were taking men’s jobs in all industries, including in the male-dominated coal industry.

That the simple act of wearing men’s work clothes was evidently so shocking seems odd to modern audiences. But in 1915, trousers were an exclusively male garment. That doesn’t mean that women did not periodically wear trousers albeit in very limited contexts. Women’s fashion had toyed with the idea of trousers for at least three decades before Lizzie set off on her errand. A small number of Victorian and Edwardian ladies adopted baggy trousers and “bifurcated skirts” (long culottes) as part of their campaign against the restrictive fashions of the time. In spite of their efforts, trouser-wearing was not widely adopted until the late 1920s and 1930s when masculine tailoring became a staple of haute couture. Even the sportiest Edwardian lady pilots and racing-car drivers preferred to tie their long skirts modestly around their ankles.

Male impersonators were also a regular feature on British music hall circuits where performers like Vesta Tilley drew large audiences. These women performed risqué songs while dressed as young men. Part of the thrill was that audience could see their legs! Lower-class women had, of course, been wearing work trousers for centuries. During the Victorian era, leather trousers were associated with the “pit brow lasses” of Lancashire. Women who chose to wear “men’s clothes” outside of these contexts risked a more negative response from their communities. Cross-dressing was a moral issue. By the early twentieth century, dressing in masculine clothes was gradually being associated with lesbianism. Trousers were associated with clear contexts: politicised fashion and distinct regional trades. They were not associated with respectable miner’s wives, at least not in the Durham area. The fact that it was Lizzie, a woman who may have already attracted negative comments from her community, probably added to the children’s response. She was an extrovert and in her own words, “a bit rough and ready”. She had tattoos, liked a drink, and on at least one occasion ended up in a fight, an event which she enjoyed describing when she was interviewed in her mid-80s.

Lizzie revelled in the notoriety of being proclaimed “the first woman in Horden to wear trousers!”. We will never know if this title was truly deserved. However, her story demonstrates how the First World War expanded the employment opportunities available to women. Lizzie was offered the opportunity to work in a trade that had previously been barred to her as a married woman in a County Durham village. The Northern Coalfield was almost exclusively male. The 1911 census shows how shocking the arrival of female coke oven workers would have been in Horden: officially there were only 13 female coke workers recorded in the entire Durham area. While this figure was definitely an under-estimate, it explains why the children were so surprised!

Lizzie’s time in the coal industry was short-lived. Like most women who joined heavy industry during the First World War, Lizzie saw her wartime job as a temporary expedient. She expected to leave the job once her miner husband came home from the front. The majority of married women never entered the labour market during the war, believing that their place was at home with their families. The Government, trade unions and employers similarly saw women’s employment only as temporary. The end of the war saw the mass withdrawal of women from the labour market. Some went voluntarily like Lizzie. Many others were summarily dismissed. Some trade unions began lobbying for a ban on the employment of married women, concerned that the war had all too readily demonstrated that women were able to compete with their male counterparts. Women were encouraged to return to more “gender appropriate” trades like domestic service. Lizzie spent the rest of her working life as a charwoman, raising her family and caring for her wounded husband Jimmy.

Click here to view an image of Lizzie (front row, far right).

Lizzie was interviewed in 1976 as part of the Peterlee Development Project, a collaboration between the artist Stuart Brisley, Peterlee Council and the Artists Placement Group. Some of the materials from this are now available on through Durham County Records Office and their People Past and Present Archive.


In his book, "The Clintons' War on Women," high-profile Donald Trump campaign strategist and noted conspiracy theorist Roger Stone claims Chelsea Clinton — daughter of Democratic nominee Hillary and former-President Bill — had four plastic surgeries in order to look less like her biological father, Webb Hubbell.

Promoting the book in what looks like a hotel banquet hall over the weekend, Stone reasons, "Hillary admits in her own book that a large football player-sized man taught her the proper way to hold a baby. Who could that be?"

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Hubbell — who was associate attorney general during Clinton's presidency — played offensive tackle for the University of Arkansas Razorbacks and was drafted by the Chicago Bears before a knee injury ended his career.

"And if you look at her, she doesn’t look anything like Bill," Stone continued. "She looks just like her daddy, despite four plastic surgeries, the youngest one when she’s only 18. What 18-year-old gets plastic surgery unless you’re trying to, I don’t know, thin out the lips and make you look less like your daddy?"

Watch below, via MediaMatters:


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Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, one of the premier pediatric hospital systems in the southeastern U.S., announced Tuesday that they would be able to support a plan by State Representative Allen Peake (R-Macon) to introduce a medical marijuana bill. While not a rousing endorsement of medical marijuana, Children’s says they are in support of the bill because of the research opportunities that will come along with it.

In a statement to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Children’s said “there has not been enough evidence-based research around the use of (cannabis oil) studying its safety and tolerability in children with seizure disorders and thus should not be used generally.” However, they said they were “in support of legislation that would allow clinical research by academic institutions to further investigate this compound for the treatment of intractable seizures in children.”

Rep. Peake was expected to introduce his bill today but that got postponed when snow started falling and the House of Representatives adjourned until 1:00 PM Wednesday. It is expected that Rep. Peake’s bill will place a heavy emphasis on medical marijuana in the form of CBD drops and tinctures.


RIM CEO Thorsten Heins is sort of like the captain of the Titanic, except the Titanic was popular and people were sad when it sank. But unlike Captain Edward Smith, Heins is either crazy or a liar. Or both.

This week, while most of America was either preparing for or in the midst of a beer-and-meat-induced catatonic state, RIM's current and final chief executive took a frosty page from the old Iraqi Information Minister, telling the world that the sky was not falling, but if it were, it was a chocolate sky. Lift up your mouth and let the delicious death spiral sprinkles fall into your mouth! Everything is lovely, nothing harmed, the children of tomorrow smile, palms upward, waiting for a new BB10 device. They tie ribbons in their hair and wait.

He also spit out a salvo of statements diametrically opposed to the fabric of reality. Here's all the proof you need to decide that RIM isn't just fucked, but not even due for an enjoyable fucking. The man in charge is full of shit. To wit, from an op-ed in the Globe and Mail that will make you weep:

1. "Don't count BlackBerry out."

Sorry, everyone has. It's over. And a weak cliche of ra-ra-ism isn't going to change that.

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2. "We believe RIM is a company at the beginning of a transition that we expect will once again change the way people communicate."

There is nothing we've seen of BB10 that suggests it would've been anything more than a catchup grab at iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. There is zero about BB10 that's of the future.

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3. "As we prepare to launch our new mobile platform, BlackBerry 10, in the first quarter of next year, we expect to empower people as never before. BlackBerry 10 will connect users not just to each other, but to the embedded systems that run constantly in the background of everyday life - from parking meters and car computers to credit card machines and ticket counters."

This would be a grandiose statement even from Google or Apple.

4. "We are working diligently on BlackBerry 10 in order to provide a compelling experience for our loyal enterprise customers and consumers. While we are in a very competitive and constantly changing market, customers benefit from this competition and continued innovation."

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"Customers" do, but not RIM customers. Nobody who wants a BlackBerry will benefit by waiting for an operating system that will almost certainly not see the light of day.

5. "As has been reported, RIM has hired outside advisers to help me and the other members of the executive team think about the business in new ways and to explore a range of alternatives that leverage our core strengths and build on the BlackBerry brand."

Translation: we have brought in consultants to figure out how we can die gracefully. Okay, actually that's the sanest thing he's said in months. Minus the "build on the BlackBerry brand" part.

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6. "In response to our tough quarterly results last week, our employees received thousands of e-mails from around the world from retail customers, carrier partners, developers, family, friends and neighbours expressing their support and loyalty to BlackBerry. They are - like many of us - BlackBerry people by choice."

How many BlackBerry users have any brand loyalty beyond their job requirements? And how many of those "thousands" of cheery messages, if they are real, were matched by thousands of messages from the thousands of RIM employees you laid off because your company is dying?

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But it might be a recent interview that shows just how detached Thorsten Heins is from anything you could call the real world:

7. "There's nothing wrong with the company as it exists right now," Heins said on CBC's Metro Morning radio show. 8. "I'm not talking about the company as I, kind of, took it over six months ago. I'm talking about the company (in the) state it's in right now."

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But Thorsten, you yourself speak of "tough quarterly results," how yours is a "challenging job," and how the company needs to "start to surface." From one side of your mouth you downplay RIM's necrosis, and from the other side, deny it altogether. At least Nero had the decency to fiddle while Rome burned—Heins just plays the bullshit saxophone. We get that RIM needs to puff itself up if it wants to attract buyers for an inevitable corporate butchering—like a diseased peacock that still needs a mate—but this is just unseemly.

If, for whatever reason, you need more evidence that the man is unfit to see RIM droop and splinter in its last gloomy days, consider the fact that, at one point, Thorsten Heins said—without a shred of irony:

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9. "Let's rock and roll this!"

That is all.


Welcome To The Pittman Center Community Volunteer Fire Department

Serving and Protecting since 1983

BURN PERMITS ARE REQUIRED

OCTOBER 15TH THRU MAY 15TH.

Visit: burnsafetn.org to obtain a permit online or to see

regulations for outdoor burning.

Please call 865-429-7020 to obtain a permit by phone.

ORDER YOURS TODAY!

Now accepting donations on line.

Click on the "Donate" button.

Free Smoke Detector

If you need a Smoke Detector click on "Smoke Detector Request ", fill out the form and click submit. We will come to your home and install the Smoke Detectors FREE OF CHARGE. If you do not live in our response area, we will pass on your information to your responding fire department.

Station 2 is available for parties and meetings.

Click on "Station Rental" for details


We hear a lot about what could be done with the Blockchain, this decentralized ledger which record permanently and almost instantly information from all around the world. This is the first time in our history that we created such a ledger, it's not about chatting with someone else, it's about agreeing on facts with everyone else every couple of minutes.

However we don't hear much about the actual projects the big corporations are working on. Let's see the 7 most important:

1. IBM and Samsung - IoT

Would you like to see your fridge, your phone and your car transact with other things? IBM and Samsung are working on a project unveiled at CES 2015 called ADEPT which will serve as a ledger of existence for billions of devices that will autonomously broadcast transactions between each other’s.

2. NASDAQ, NYSE – Stock Exchange

Or how to bypass Automated Clearing House which take days to record wall street transactions. "As Blockchain technology continues to redefine not only how the exchange sector operates, but the global financial economy as a whole, Nasdaq aims to be at the center of this watershed development." said Bob Greifeld, CEO, Nasdaq

3. Deloitte - Audit & Consulting

Real time auditing, land registry and reconsolidation between trading partners, this is just the top of the iceberg Deloitte is building with its new platform called Rubix.

Deloitte is also working internally on a stealth solution to automate some of its auditing processing

4. BNP, Barclays, City, UBS, Société Générale, Goldman Sachs, Santander - Banks

Do you know that your banks depends heavily on some protocol to transfer money? Using the Blockchain will allow them to get rid of VISA, Mastercard and SWIFT.

5. Minecraft - Games and Virtual reality

Every game has it's own currency system and some become so important that you can find a stable exchange rate with fiat currencies. This is the case with World of Warcraft gold or Second Life Linden dollars. Blockchain bring to these world a currency that they can use inside the game and trade on Amazon at the same time. Some servers of Minecraft already implemented such systems.

6. Western Union - Money transfer solutions

The famous dinosaur of money transfer is facing a big threat with the new Fintech startup and want to face it with the same weapon. They already set up a lab with Ripple to study the Blockchain technology and improve their cross border payment. Will they adapt?

7. Honduras, Isles of man - Governments

We would expect the Blockchain to be used for a voting system, but it seems the first aspect interesting for government is registries. Registry of lands in one case, registry of companies in the other one, notaries might not be such an important job in the future.

If you want to know more and discuss details, let me some comments or send me a private message. I would also be pleased to hear some more examples !


Passengers were stuck in the train without lights for about five minutes, and were guided to the station as much as 40 minutes from the time the train broke down, an eyewitness says.

SINGAPORE: Some passengers found themselves walking on the Light Rail Transit (LRT) tracks in near-darkness in Sengkang on Tuesday evening (Mar 29), due to a train fault.

LRT passengers forced to walk on track after train fault in Se... Sengkang LRT breakdown: Up to 30 people had to walk on the LRT tracks in near-darkness after a train fault.Full story: http://bit.ly/1Rp0gEg(Video: Mohann) Posted by Channel NewsAsia on Tuesday, 29 March 2016

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Off-duty cameraman Rajamohann Alrum Murugaiah said he was on the train travelling from Sengkang station to Renjong station at about 7pm when it stopped suddenly about 150m to 200m from Renjong station. He said the lights and ventilation fans went out for about five minutes, before coming on again.

Facebook video: What it was like to walk on tracks in near-darkness

SBS Transit first announced the disruption on Twitter at 7.57pm, saying there was no service on the East Loop of the LRT, and that free bridging bus services were available. It later stated at 8.22pm that services on the West (outer loop) of the LRT were also unavailable.

At 8.31pm, SBS Transit said full LRT service resumed.

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Mr Rajamohann said while there were announcements on the train about the disruption, SBS staff only arrived about 20 minutes after the breakdown. They tried but failed to restart the LRT train, before two or three staff finally asked passengers to alight from the carriage and guided them towards Renjong station at around 7.30pm to 7.40pm.

There were about 30 people inside the train, but Mr Rajamohann said he did not observe any panic among his fellow passengers.

"It was after work ... I think they were just tired and frustrated," he said.


It’s Friday, making it much easier to get distracted by something more interesting than work on the Internet. If you’re looking for something great to watch today, then Google has put up a video of Garry Kasparov talking at Google this week.

Kasparov was the highest-rated chess champion for more than 22 years. In the chat that lasts just over an hour he discusses how he still feels IBM cheated in his match with Deep Blue. He also says the dismantling of Big Blue right after the match was equivalent to IBM removing the only partial witness to his claims. He hasn’t even got logs of the game from IBM to look at.

It’s a great watch with Kasparov giving some amusing responses to some of the questions asked. For example, when asked how to get better at chess without dedicating your life to it (18 minutes in), he responds by simply saying:

If you don’t have time to devote your life for chess, why do you want to improve at the game?

via YouTube


MSNBC HOST: The New York Times is reporting yesterday that Goldman Sachs has paid Hillary Clinton $675,000 for three speeches in recent years. She was paid millions more by other Wall Street firms. Along with her husband, they've been paid more than $125 million for paid speeches since 2001.

That is, of course, not the kind of money that most Americans can relate to. Were the speeches a mistake, senator?

SEN. JEANNE SHAHEEN, D-NH: Listen, voters are angry, and I don't blame them, because they've been watching a Washington that has been divisive, that hasn't worked together. And I believe we need a candidate who's not going to further divide this country but who's going to unite it.

But that's not my question, senator.

That's one of the reasons I'm supporting Hillary. Well, your first question was, are voters angry, and I would say yes.

MSNBC HOST: No, I never asked that question. I think that's well established. The question was, are the speeches, were the speeches a mistake? Did it make sense to accept close to --

SHAHEEN: Look, it doesn't matter whether you support that or not. The fact is, that's in the past, just as Bernie's socialism, he claims, is in the past.

So, the question is, what do voters want to see now from the candidates, and who can deliver? And that's what I believe the difference is between the candidates in this race. On both, on the Democratic side and on the Republican side.


While staying quite about the game for a while I was busy preparing things for bringing the game to E3, showing the game to journalists and the world in the Devolver parking lot. I'm happy to report it all went really, really well, and I'm so grateful for having gotten this opportunity, and I'm so so grateful people really seem to enjoy the game! If you haven't already, check a look at the trailer above!

And as if just the adventure of going to E3 wasn't enough, the game got nominated for "Best of E3" by PC Gamer and CGM! It also got nominated for "Best Action Game" by IGN! And it won "Best Indie Game" by Resetmx! Incredible. And don't forget all of these nominations happened next to big AAA titles. Feels really surreal.

Oh yeah, and there was actual Pedro swag! (As you might spot in the lower left corner of the above image)

IGN posted a gameplay video and it's already got over a million views. Check it out here:

There are also a bunch of video interviews floating around, some of which you can find here:

Thank you all for being part of the journey up to this point, and here's hoping you'll stick with the game until the actual release!

Oh, and if you haven't already, feel free to wishlist the game on Steam: Store.steampowered.com

Cheerio!

Victor


On Monday Mr Hollande said he had not yet decided whether to host Mr Putin, saying that pro-government forces in Syria troops had committed a "war crime" in the city of Aleppo with Russian support.

"I asked myself the question... Is it useful? Is it necessary? Can it be a way of exerting pressure? Can we get him to stop what he is doing with the Syrian regime?" Mr Hollande said in a television interview.

Jean-Marc Ayrault, the French foreign minister, said on Monday that France would ask prosecutors at the International Criminal Court in the Hague to consider an investigation into suspected Syrian and Russian war crimes.

Mr Ayrault visited Moscow last week for talks with Sergei Lavrov, his Russian counterpart, in an attempt to win support at the UN for a French draft resolution for a ceasefire in Aleppo.


A team of hackers that target governments, the military and journalists has turned its attention to the iPhone, according to Trend Micro.

The computer security company says it has discovered new spyware that infects iPhones, gathers large amounts of personal information and sends it to a remote server.

The spyware, called XAgent, is delivered via a phishing attack using a technique called island hopping. In that, the phones of friends and associates of the true target are first infected and then used to pass on the spyware link. It’s based on the assumption that the target is more likely to click on links from people they know than from strangers.

Once installed, XAgent will collect text messages, contact lists, pictures, geo-location data, a list of installed apps, a list of any software processes that are running and the WiFi status of the device. That information is packaged and sent to a server operated by the hackers. XAgent is also capable of switching on the phone’s microphone and recording everything it hears.

XAgent runs on both iOS 7 and iOS 8 phones, whether they’ve been jailbroken or not. It is most dangerous on iOS 7 since it hides its icon to evade detection.

On iOS 8 it isn’t hidden and needs to be manually launched each time the phone is rebooted—a process that would require the user to purposely reinfect their phone each time. For that reason, Trend Micro believes the spyware was written before iOS 8 was launched last year.

Serenity Caldwell The iPhone 6 running iOS 8.

While close to three quarters of Apple mobile devices are using iOS 8, a quarter are still running iOS7, according to data published by Apple this week.

“We’ve been monitoring the actors behind this for quite some time,” said Jon Clay, senior manager of Global Threat communication at Trend Micro, in a phone interview. “The criminals have introduced [the iOS app] as part of their campaign to move further into the [targeted] organization, using this rather than PC malware.”

While the identity of the hackers isn’t known, Trend Micro says it believes those behind what it calls “Operation Pawn Storm” to be a pro-Russian group. Past targets have included military organizations, defense contractors, embassies and media groups.

Clay says the group might have targeted iOS because it discovered or assumed that a lot of its targets use Apple devices, either as work phones or secondary personal devices.

Security software such as that offered by Trend Micro will detect XAgent, he said. Users can also look through phone logs, but manual detection of the spyware is quite difficult.

His best advice is the same that’s been offered for years: don’t click on links that appear to be suspicious, especially when they involve downloading software or entering passwords.

“The good thing for users is that this isn’t something that can be automatically done,” he said. “There are steps you have to do as a user to install this.”


GOALTENDER ZANE McINTYRE NAMED CCM/AHL AWARD WINNER FOR DECEMBER

Providence, RI - The American Hockey League announced today that Providence Bruins goaltender Zane McIntyre has been selected as the CCM/AHL Goaltender of the Month for the month of December. McIntyre was a perfect 9-0-0 in nine appearances during December, sporting a 1.65 goals-against average and a .947 save percentage while stopping 269 of 284 shots.

McIntyre allowed two goals or fewer in eight of his nine starts last month, despite facing at least 30 shots seven times. After returning to Providence on Dec. 1 from an extended stay in Boston, McIntyre opened the month with a 31-save performance in a 6-2 win vs. Binghamton on Dec. 2, and he matched a career high with 38 saves in a 2-1 overtime victory over Springfield on Dec. 4. McIntyre stopped 31 of 32 shots and all three shootout attempts to earn a 2-1 victory over Hartford on Dec. 11, and he made 35 saves as Providence defeated Utica, 3-1, on Dec. 21. McIntyre closed out the month with 29 saves as the Bruins went to Wilkes-Barre/Scranton and beat the league-leading Penguins, 5-2, on Dec. 30.

A 24-year-old native of Thief River Falls, Minn., McIntyre is 10-0-0 in 12 appearances for Providence this season and leads the AHL with a 1.41 goals-against average and a .951 save percentage. McIntyre, a sixth-round pick by Boston in the 2010 NHL Entry Draft, also made his NHL debut earlier this season and appeared in three games with the parent Bruins. The University of North Dakota product has played 43 AHL games over his first two pro seasons, going 24-8-7 with a 2.32 GAA and a .914 save percentage.

Also selected as AHL award winners for December are Chicago Wolves forward Kenny Agostino as the CCM/AHL Player of the Month and Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins forward Jake Guentzel as the CCM/AHL Rookie of the Month. Each monthly award winner will be presented with an etched crystal award prior to an upcoming home game in recognition of his achievement.


EXPLAIN IT WITH MOLECULES-- SOAP MOLECULE What is Soap?

Soaps are mixtures of sodium or potassium salts of fatty acids which can be derived from oils or fats by reacting them with an alkali (such as sodium or potassium hydroxide) at 80°–100 °C in a process known as saponification. fat + NaOH ---> glycerol + sodium salt of fatty acid CH 2 -OOC-R - CH-OOC-R - CH 2 -OOC-R (fat) + 3 NaOH ( or KOH) both heated ---> CH 2 -OH -CH-OH - CH 2 -OH (glycerol) + 3 R-CO 2 -Na (soap) R=(CH 2 ) 14 CH 3 Note about 3D molecules -- Our files on this page now use Jsmol instead of Jmol . These files make use of Javascript which permits viewing of molecules on tablets, phones and easier use on Macs. - Jsmol is best viewed with the Chrome browser. Try this!! Click the right mouse button with the cursor over the image--> Labels --> Element Symbols Click on the left mouse button and rotate the soap structure. Notice that one end of the molecules is made up of a hydrocarbon chain -- the other end is a very polar structure containing oxygen and sodium. Soap molecules have both properties of non-polar and polar at opposite ends of the molecule. How does Soap Work? Nearly all compounds fall into one of two categories: hydrophilic ('water-loving') and hydrophobic ('water-hating'). Water and anything that will mix with water are hydrophilic. Oil and anything that will mix with oil are hydrophobic. When water and oil are mixed they separate. Hydrophilic and hydrophobic compounds just don't mix. The cleansing action of soap is determined by its polar and non-polar structures in conjunction with an application of solubility principles. The long hydrocarbon chain is non-polar and hydrophobic (repelled by water). The "salt" end of the soap molecule is ionic and hydrophilic (water soluble). When grease or oil (non-polar hydrocarbons) are mixed with a soap- water solution, the soap molecules work as a bridge between polar water molecules and non-polar oil molecules. Since soap molecules have both properties of non-polar and polar molecules the soap can act as an emulsifier. An emulsifier is capable of dispersing one liquid into another immiscible liquid. This means that while oil (which attracts dirt) doesn't naturally mix with water, soap can suspend oil/dirt in such a way that it can be removed. The soap will form micelles (see below) and trap the fats within the micelle. Since the micelle is soluble in water, it can easily be washed away. [Micelle shown using the Jsmol

Molecular dynamics simulations of dodecylphosphocholine

D. P. Tieleman, D. van der Spoel, H.J.C. Berendsen] --File shown without water molecules When you mix soap into the water the soap molecules arrange themselves into tiny clusters (called 'micelles'). The water-loving (hydrophilic) part of the soap molecules points outwards, forming the outer surface of the micelle. The oil-loving (hydrophobic) parts group together on the inside, where they don't come into contact with the water at all. Micelles can trap fats in the center. Try this ---> click right mouse button over image --> spin --> on Micelle (above) shown with water molecules. Multiple Choice Questions 1. Water is considered a polar molecule because

a) the molecule has a net positive charge

b) the molecule has a net negative charge

c) the molecule has a net zero charge

d) the ends of the molecule have partial negative and positive charges 2. Soap is formed from:

a) two hydrophobic compounds

b) a physical change when fats are heated

c) two hydrophilic compounds

d) oils or fats by reacting them with an alkali 3. Which statement is correct about hydrophobic and hydrophilic compounds

a) hydrophilic are water-hating and hydrophobic water-loving

b) hydrophilic are water-loving and hydrophobic water-hating

c) both hydrophobic and hydrophilic compounds are polar molecules

d) both hydrophobic and hydrophilic compounds are non-polar molecules 4. Soap acts by

a) digesting the fat molecules

b) forming micelles and trapping the fat within the micelles

c) releasing sodium and potassium into water

d) a chemical change 5. Which of the following statements is not correct

a) the soap molecules work as a bridge between polar water molecules and non-polar oil molecules

b) soap forms micelles

c) soap is an emulsifier

d) soap is made of just carbon and hydrogen atoms


When asked if a conflict similar to the events inciting World War I could happen today, Indy Neidell responded, “There are an awful lot of similarities in the world today with the world of 1914.”

“Of course that kind of question is really impossible to answer,” he acknowledges, “but I wouldn’t at all rule it out.”

In an AMA (Ask Me Anything) discussion on Reddit, the historian host of The Great War YouTube series invited users to challenge his knowledge of the first World War, inquire about what he hasn’t covered in the show’s first 234 videos, and get his historical perspective on the United States’ current political climate.

While Neidell began his YouTube series in July 2014 on topics you’d expect to find in a standard WWI curriculum—the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, early trench warfare, propaganda, the Red Baron—the show has since branched out to give a much more comprehensive look at the “Great War,” detailing everything from soldiers’ diets and salaries to what’s wrong with EA’s Battlefield 1 trailer:

As the series nears its $10,000 Patreon goal to enable its crew to “start planing trips to the European theatres of World War 1 and tell their stories in a completely new way,” Neidell teased what history buffs can expect to see in upcoming episodes.

And for fans unable to help the crowdfunding effort, Neidell’s social media manager Flo joined him in his AMA to share this open invitation: “You can always help with research if you want.”

Lesser-Known WWI History

Teaching WWI

Historical Twist on a Classic Question

If He Could Watch Any Moment…

What’s Next?

To read all of Neidell’s answers to redditors questions, check out the original AMA discussion. And to catch up on your “Great War” history in time just in time for Trivia Night, head over to The Great War YouTube channel.


Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.

Aug. 22, 2016, 8:10 PM GMT / Updated Aug. 22, 2016, 8:10 PM GMT By Maggie Fox

Researchers have developed a way to make a mouse transparent — by removing the liquids and fats from its tissue.

They hope their method can be used to make a complete, unsliced model of a human brain, with all the delicate nerve connections untouched. And they say their see-through mouse might reduce the need for lab scientists around the world to kill living mice just to study their organs.

Researchers in Germany have made mice see-through with a special method of dissolving skin that makes "see through" mice for lab research. Ali Ert?rk Ludwig / Maximilians University of Munich

“Now, for the first time, we have a powerful tool that can make the human brain transparent and reduce it size to fit an imaging microscope for mapping,” Ali Ertürk, a brain researcher at Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich in Germany, said in written comments.

"I believe that now, using uDISCO, scientists can start to build whole body atlases for various biological systems such nerves, vasculature and immune cells."

The method, described in the journal Nature Methods, is called ultimate DISCO (short for 3-D imaging of solvent-cleared organs). It not only makes it possible to see entire structures in place, but shrinks the body so that it fits under a microscope.

“We expect that this method is easily applicable to small monkeys, even to a whole human brain in the near future,” Erturk wrote.

“We all know the big fuss (rightfully) around mapping the human brain. But so far there is not any approach that even comes close to mapping any part of human brain at individual neuron level.”

A mouse with its skin removed during various stages of examination, taken with a bright field camera. Cell, Yang et al / AP

The technique might also save the lives of at least some lab animals, Erturk said.

“In research, we usually sacrifice the animals to collect a small piece of their tissue,” he wrote.

“The rest of the animal actually is wasted. I believe that now, using uDISCO, scientists can start to build whole body atlases for various biological systems such nerves, vasculature and immune cells innervating whole body. This will at least provide the basic knowledge about how a healthy organ is organized in terms of these mapped systems (nerves, vessels etc.). This information will be available to everyone.”

The team first anesthetized living mice, and used various agents to make it possible to image the desired systems using fluorescent light or other processes — akin to getting, for instance, an infusion of a contrast agent before getting an MRI or heart catheter scan.

Once the contrast dye or agent was pumped though the tissue, the mice were killed and their tissues cleared of water and fat.

Water and lipids scatter light, making tissue opaque.

Scientists have come up with good images of organs and event whole bodies by slicing tissue very thinly, imaging it, and then recreating a 3-D version using a computer.

But even the thinnest slices can disrupt delicate neurons and their connections, Erturk noted.

“That means, while their cell body resides in one side of the brain, it can make connections to the other side of the brain (several centimeters away) or even to the spinal cord, which might be more than a meter long," he wrote. "Therefore, when we want to study brain diseases such as Alzheimers’s disease or schizophrenia, making thin sections of biological specimen would degrade important information on neuronal connectivity."


TREASURE ISLAND — A Florida man was charged with aggravated battery after whacking a visiting tourist with a shovel in a dispute over digging at the beach.

WTSP-TV reported Sunday that 53-year-old Christopher Carosella from Tampa argued with 18-year old Christian Geis over a large hole he had dug.

Carosella on Friday evening allegedly got upset when the Lexington, Ky., teenager refused to comply with his order to stop digging.

Drew Geis, Christian's father, told the station that 45 minutes later, Carosella took the shovel his son had left on the beach and then attacked him when he was walking back to his hotel room.

The station reported the Treasure Island Police Department said Carosella struck Christian Geis twice, causing bruising and abrasions.

The station said that Carosella was later released from the Pinellas County Jail on a $2,500 bond. Court records do not list an attorney.


1 people found this review helpful

Customer Review Rated Bad 8 - 8 out of 10

For a well-worn song title ‘Paparazzi’ is certainly a perfect vehicle for the Gee Gee girls; flashing cameras, intrusive attentions and story spins are inevitable when world domination is at stake, and a locale’s paparazzi must be spazzing out to high heaven when the GG girls are in town. Anyway, this new Japanese single for SNSD is an okay dance song, and the video stage setting is elaborately befitting (with some ‘Singing in the Rain’ on the MV version). But this ‘Paparazzi’ (Mi Youn Kan and Lady Gaga did one, too) is really only a moderate dance song with more of that allurement factor going on. Wink wink. The same repetitive 'seduction' merry go round, getting ‘bad publicity’, staging the double dark dance of camera and ‘star’ into a swirl of premeditated social and pop culture media. Yes, the paparazzi are in town, and it’s all vexingly watching the famous girls ‘luring’ the boys into their ‘come up and see me sometime’ world again (via TV camera) for the paparazzi to ‘scandalize’. Why are the girls so bad, the boys so bad? Its only theatre, smoke and mirrors, right? The Modern Tribal Cynical Sophistication Disco Dance, giving the masses their social tonic.

Okay, okay, this is the theatre I’m on about, not exactly SNSD themselves, more their personas and what’s in the lyrics. But ‘Paparazzi’ is another similar slant in modern pop perspectives to take sides on. The ‘bad’ paparazzi who scandal (run devil run? It’s a job isn’t it?), the good girls who might see their mirror image tarnished. But it could be the other way around, the ‘bad girl’ alluring the camera boy or the dance club DJ? That sort of thing; seducing and dividing. Template soft anger pop. But instead of the Jets and the Sharks that are verses, it’s the press and the famous, the VIP and the excluded, good/bad (or whatever). The concept’s okay, what the heck, it’s supposed to be fun. But a new song meaning to the words Girls’ Generation would be welcoming. For SNSD I really would love them to do…something spiritually unifying. “The Boys” album has strong songs and it’s a nice album, but SNSD should do something really different in their pop music now. This limited edition is a landscape packaging with CD/DVD but there’s no inner booklet with mucho photo here. I preferred this cover version, too, to the main edition; the girls look all pensive and moody, a bit 'edgy' maybe, and its alright. I like SNSD I really do, as I like Kara, T-ara and many others. No divisions.


Dear Reader, As you can imagine, more people are reading The Jerusalem Post than ever before. Nevertheless, traditional business models are no longer sustainable and high-quality publications, like ours, are being forced to look for new ways to keep going. Unlike many other news organizations, we have not put up a paywall. We want to keep our journalism open and accessible and be able to keep providing you with news and analysis from the frontlines of Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish World.

A Palestinian gunman shot dead two Israeli parents in a shooting attack on their vehicle in Samaria, between Elon Moreh and Itamar on Thursday night; Four of their young children survived the attack without injury and were rescued by emergency responders from the bullet-ridden vehicle.

Magen David Adom paramedics and IDF units pulled the children out of the car near the Palestinian village of Beit Furik, and paramedics declared the parents dead on the scene after failing to detect vital signs.

A 4-month-old baby, a 4-year-old boy, a seven-year-old boy and a nine-year old boy survived the attack without physical injury, after witnessing their parents being shot dead before their eyes.Boaz Malka, a MADA paramedic who arrive on the scene, said, "It was a very difficult scene. We saw a car in the middle of the road, and next to it, a man in his 30s lay on the ground with upper body gunshot wounds. Inside the car a woman sat, with severe upper body wounds. They had no vital signs and to our sorrow we had to declare them dead on the scene."The IDF was sweeping the area for suspects.Reacting to the shooting, Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon said "this murderous terror attack this evening is a clear continuation of the incitement against the State of Israel and its civilians, and repeated attempts to carry out terror attacks.""The war against terrorism requires determination from us, a steel hand, and patience. We are fighting against a blood-thirsty relentless enemy, and with great sorrow we sometimes absorb losses on the way. At this time, the IDF and the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) are pursuing the murderers. We will pursue them and we will not be silent until we place our hands on the murderers, and those who sent them."In light of the shooting, right-wing politicians accused Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas 's incitement for the attack, which came a day after he threatened to stop abiding by all agreements with Israel in a fiery speech to the United Nations General Assembly.Likud Minister Miri Regev said, "24 hours after the violent speech of the arch-murderer Abu Mazen [Abbas], a husband and wife were killed in Israel."She called on Israel to take harsher steps against Palestinian terror.Education Minister Naftali Bennett (Bayit Yehudi) said that Abbas's "call to arms was taken up tonight in Israel, and it is red with blood."Bennett added that "A people whose leaders encourage murder will never have a state, and this must be made clear. Now the time of talking is done and the time for action has come."Meanwhile, Hamas praised the "heroic terror attack" and called for more "quality attacks."The group said that "Zionists will pay the price for [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu's criminal policies everywhere."

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Rep. Nancy Pelosi was emphatic. Mitt Romney’s refusal to release more than two years of his personal tax returns, she said, makes him unfit to win confirmation as a member of the president’s Cabinet, let alone to hold the high office himself.

Sen. Harry Reid went farther: Romney’s refusal to make public more of his tax records makes him unfit to be a dogcatcher.

They do not, however, think that standard of transparency should apply to them. The two Democratic leaders of the Senate and the House of Representatives are among hundreds of senators and representatives from both parties who refused to release their tax records. Just 17 out of the 535 members of Congress released their most recent tax forms or provided some similar documentation of their tax liabilities in response to requests from McClatchy over the last three months. Another 19 replied that they wouldn’t release the information, and the remainder never responded to the query.

The widespread secrecy in one branch of the government suggests a self-imposed double standard. Yet while American politics has come to expect candidates for the presidency to release their tax returns, the president isn’t alone in having a say over the nation’s tax laws. Congress also stands to gain or lose by the very tax policies it enacts, and tax records – more than any broad financial disclosure rules now in place – offer the chance to see whether the leaders of the government stand to benefit from their own actions.

“Senior public officials, especially members of Congress and presidential candidates, should be required to disclose their tax returns so that the public can monitor potential conflicts of interest,” said Craig Holman, government affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen, a nonpartisan watchdog group.

The question of taxes is particularly pressing this year, as Congress debates whether to extend all or some of the Bush-era tax cuts that are set to expire Dec. 31. At the same time, tax returns reveal assets and investments.

Absent tax information, members of Congress aren’t fully transparent, said Daniel Auble, who heads the personal finance project for the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks financial disclosures by members of Congress and appointees confirmed by Congress.

“Having a clearer picture of lawmakers’ interests . . . is definitely important in making available to the public what possible influence there could be,” he said. “In terms of transparency, it would be helpful to have more information.”

Among those who did disclose their tax returns: Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., and Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the senior Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee and a co-author of the Dodd-Frank law tightening regulations on Wall Street.

To Pelosi and some other top Democrats, the focus is on Romney, the Republican presidential candidate, who’s released his 2010 return and 2011 estimates and plans to release his 2011 return when it’s completed, but refuses to release any more. They say the very refusal to release more suggests that he’s hiding something.

"He could not even become a Cabinet member for that lack of disclosure, and now with that lack of disclosure he wants to be president of the United States,” said Pelosi, the House minority leader, who’s from California.

“We’d like to know what’s in those tax returns that he refuses to show to the American public. Did he pay any taxes?” Reid asked in an impassioned speech to the Senate on July 11. Days later, Reid, who’s from Nevada, suggested that Romney’s refusal to release more than two years of tax returns would make him ineligible to serve even as dogcatcher.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, also has harangued Romney for refusing to release more tax returns, calling it a “penchant for secrecy.”

All three refused repeated requests from McClatchy to release their own returns, requests that started before the flap over Romney’s records.

Pelosi aides refused, saying she’s disclosed all that Congress requires.

“The leader has filed a complete financial disclosure report as required by law that includes financial holdings, transactions and other personal information,” Pelosi spokesman Nadeam Elshami said. “There has been no question about where Leader Pelosi and Democrats stand on tax policy: We must extend the middle-class tax cuts and end tax breaks for millionaires and use the revenues to pay down the deficit.”

Challenged at a recent news conference to release hers, Wasserman Schultz said she wouldn’t because she wasn’t running for president. “I file full financial disclosure required under the law,” she said.

What’s required by law is written by Congress itself, a broad financial-disclosure statement that offers no direct information on tax liabilities and no requirement for reporting spousal income other than the source – but not the amount – of any income above $1,000. There’s little way of knowing whether that spousal income is $1,001 or $1 million.

Several members of Congress married into money or have wealthy spouses. Topping that list are Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, whose wife, Linda, is an heiress to the Clear Channel Communications fortune, and Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., whose wife, Teresa, is the heiress to the Heinz ketchup fortune. Pelosi’s husband, Paul, heads Financial Leasing Services Inc., a San Francisco-based venture capital and real estate firm.

When it comes to the valuation of investments or reporting of income on the annual disclosure forms, what’s required are broad numbers such as between $250,000 and $500,000 or $1 million and $5 million. That makes it hard to determine how much benefit a lawmaker might get from competing tax plans.

“They just don’t provide the same level of detail as a tax return,” said Darrell West, a specialist on governing and a vice president of the Brookings Institution, a center-left research center in Washington.

Most members won’t release that kind of detail.

Only 17 members shared their detailed tax information with McClatchy. Another 19 refused, but the majority of them stressed that they comply with congressional disclosure requirements.

Of the lawmakers who shared their tax returns, most got large deductions for interest on personal and investment real estate. That’s useful information for taxpayers, since a revamp of the tax code is expected in the next few years.

McClatchy isn’t releasing the tax returns under the terms of the agreement with the lawmakers. Reporters requested the returns to examine in detail how members would be personally affected by changes in tax laws being debated in Congress including income tax rates, as well as taxes on capital gains and dividends and deductions for such expenses as home mortgage interest. In exchange for sharing their returns, members were told their actual returns would not be made public.

Most lawmakers, however, chose to keep their tax liabilities a secret.

“First your publishers and editors and execs should publish their tax returns. They have great influence over public policy,” Rep. Gary Ackerman, D-N.Y., said in an emailed response. Ackerman, who was dogged in 2010 by allegations of a sweetheart stock purchase, isn’t seeking re-election, so his term ends in January.

“Are you guys asking the president to turn over his college records? Or asking him to turn anything over of any kind?” responded Allen Klump, the communications director for Rep. Jeff Duncan, R-S.C.

“Thanks, but we will not give you Sen. Rockefeller’s tax return. Good luck on the project,” said Vincent Morris, a spokesman for Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., whose family surname is synonymous with wealth.

Several lawmakers said they’d disclose what’s required and no more.

Rep. Renee Ellmers “files a financial disclosure form each year in accordance with House ethics rules and this is publicly available,” said Tom Doheny, a spokesman for the North Carolina Republican.

Rep. Joe Wilson “has submitted a financial disclosure form, which is required by law and available to constituents as a matter of public record,” said Caroline Delleney, a spokeswoman for the South Carolina Republican.

Constituents generally know where their particular lawmakers stand on the issue of the expiring tax cuts because the two major political parties have well-defined views. But there’s more at stake than just tax brackets, and voters often have little feel for whether their members of Congress would benefit or be harmed by changes that are under consideration.

From the financial disclosure forms, constituents can, with some work, surmise how lawmakers’ investment income might be taxed under competing plans. Given their salaries, lawmakers would fall into the higher tax bracket for dividends, but it’s unclear where they’d fall individually on the income scale.

“There are clearly some people above (the $250,000 threshold). There’s a bunch of people who might or might not be affected, and you can’t tell,” said Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, which is run by the Brookings Institution and the centrist Urban Institute.

Tax data isn’t always a panacea, however.

Missouri Democrat McCaskill was one of the few senators who provided McClatchy with a tax return. Her 1040 form lists her as married filing separately, showing an adjusted gross income of $193,384.

But her husband, Joe Shepard, is a wealthy businessman whose investments sometimes have put her in an unpleasant spotlight. His investment in a reinsurance company in Bermuda – the same country in which a Romney investment has been criticized by Democrats – brought allegations from Republicans in 2009 of tax dodging. Shepard no longer hold the investment.

McCaskill does report dozens of her husband's investments in her annual financial disclosure statement, with more detail than required. But each still is listed only under ranges of values, not precise amounts.

That’s another reason advocacy groups think that financial-disclosure reporting should be expanded to capture spousal income more fully, and argue that tax data would be a useful, albeit imperfect, tool.

“As public officials, potential conflicts of interest caused by their wealth and assets are a public concern,” said Holman, the Public Citizen lobbyist.

Kaz Komolafe and Farah Mohamed contributed to this article.


Pirelli has overhauled its tyre concept to reduce degradation for 2017, as requested by the new rules, allowing drivers to push harder in a philosophy that is a departure from the policy it has followed since it became F1's tyre supplier in 2011.

Pirelli motorsport chief Hembery has previously said F1 could end up with processional racing this year because the rules shake-up, which includes significant tweaks to aerodynamics, will spread the field out.

Speaking at an event in Turin to mark Pirelli's 110th motorsport anniversary, Hembery told Motorsport.com that if the new tyre concept does not deliver a good show, the blame should not lie with the Italian company.

"You can't please everyone and you can only go in one of two directions," Hembery said. "We did something from the outset which was desired, then there was a decision to go in another direction.

"We're just following what the sport asks us. All we ask is that they tell us what they want. There's no point in complaining that we deliver what we have been asked to deliver.

"As a sport we're moving in a different direction, and if it works as people say then we should get good racing."

While the modified 2015 mule cars Pirelli used for testing failed to deliver the required amount of downforce expected in 2017, the tyre supplier was able to fall back on simulation data.

"The biggest challenge is if you don't have downforce, you might not be able to get the tyres working as intended, because we worked to a level of downforce given by the simulation," he said.

"It's true the mule cars were some way off in terms of performance levels, but we do have the simulation data.

"That's the question, how close will the cars be to that data – maybe they will have more and go much quicker."

Hembery feels while there may be fewer pitstops, the change in the rules should create a situation where overtaking possibilities are increased.

"We'll see fewer stops," he said. "That comes with less degradation. You come into the pits either because of performance loss [due to degradation] or wear, and in this case we are reducing both.

"We'll see a lot more one-stop races but if we deliver with the aerodynamic package cars that are closer together, and the tyre's not overheating on the surface, drivers will be able to push and lead to a scenario where overtaking is improved."


In March 1987 Daniel Morgan, a private detective, was murdered in Sydenham in south east London, just as he was reportedly close to revealing police corruption with links to the News of the World.

You might ask why we would want to look at a murder that took place 25 years ago, but it’s important to understand that the collusion between the police and press that’s being uncovered now isn’t just about events that took place in the past few years, but a pattern of corruption that goes back many decades, and that many of the people involved with past corruption are still involved with the Hackgate scandal even now.

After repeated failed police inquiries into the murder which themselves have been mired in corruption the family of Daniel Morgan are still seeking justice, and have spent the past two decades running the Justice 4 Daniel campaign.

Southern Investigations

In 1984 Daniel Morgan and Jonathan Rees Jonathan Rees set up the detective agency Southern Investigations Jonathan Rees is alleged to have had a “network of corrupt police who were involved in widespread criminality and used Southern Investigations as a conduit for drugs and money”, and that Rees “counted many officers as friends. One of his specialities was to use his "friends" in the force to provide information which he sold to tabloid newspapers.”

On the other hand Daniel Morgan’s role “involved him acting as a bailiff or utilising his particular talent for remembering car registration plates and telephone numbers”.

It is believed that at the time of his murder Daniel Morgan was planning to expose police corruption, described by his brother as “police involvement with criminals, involvement with drugs and weapons importation."

More recently, Tom Watson MP alleged in a Commons adjournment debate that Daniel Morgan has approached Alex Muranchak of the News of the World with a story making allegations about police corruption a week before he died, and was offered £40,000 for the story. He described the relationship between Jonathan Rees and Alex Marunchak as "a close association between Rees and Marunchak ... a relationship that was so close they both had companies registered at the same address". Watson also stated that "thanks to a Guardian investigation we also know that Southern Investigations paid the debts of Marunchak ".

Alex Marunchak would go on to deny those allegations , as well as other allegations made by Tom Watson.

The death of Daniel Morgan

At 9.30pm on Tuesday March 10th 1987 Daniel Morgan’s body was discovered next to his BMW in the parking lot of the Golden Lion pub. An axe, wrapped in Elastoplasts to obscure fingerprints, was protruding at a right angle from his face, his pockets torn open, with notes he had been seen writing missing, but with his wallet and watch still on his body, and he was still holding the two packets of crisps purchased inside the pub.

He had let the Golden Lion pub at 8:55pm after meeting with Jonathan Rees to discuss an issue that was putting pressure on their already fraught relationship. Rees had claimed he had been robbed while transporting £18,000 for a client of Southern Investigations, Belmont Car Auctions, with at least one moonlighting police officer. Both Morgan and Belmont Car Auctions believed this was a lie, and Rees and his associates had taken the money for themselves.

At the 1988 inquest into the murder the Southern Investigations accountant Kevin Lennon said that Jonathan Rees had told him “I've got the perfect solution for Daniel's murder. My mates at Catford nick are going to arrange it” and went on to say "He went on to explain to me that if they didn't do it themselves the police would arrange for some person over whom they had some criminal charge pending to carry out Daniel's murder."

The initial police investigation into the murder

Detective Sergeant Sid Fillery at Catford police station was assigned to the case, failing to reveal to his superiors that he had been working for Southern Investigations

At the 1988 inquest Kevin Lennon said Rees wanted Morgan dead after a row: "John Rees explained that, when or after Daniel Morgan had been killed, he would be replaced by a friend of his who was a serving policeman, Detective Sergeant Sid Fillery", and eventually would end up in business with Jonathan Rees at Southern Investigations, recruiting corrupt police officers, and was later convicted for the possession of child pornography.

Sid Fillery and Jonathan Rees would later be arrested in 1987 on suspicion of murder , along with the brothers Glenn and Garry Vian and two Metropolitan police officers, but eventually all of them were released without charge.

Inquiries into the murder

Over the next 20 years five investigations would look into the murder of Daniel Morgan . The initial investigation into the murder by the Metropolitan Police focused on Sid Fillery and Jonathan Rees, both who denied involvement in the murder. This was followed by an inquiry by Hampshire Police in 1988 focusing on Jonathan Rees and another man, but the charges were dropped because of a lack of evidence, with the Hampshire inquiry's 1989 report to the Police Complaints Authority stated that "no evidence whatsoever" had been found of police involvement in the murder. During this period Sid Fillery left the police to join Southern Investigations as Jonathan Rees’ business partner.

In 1999 Operation Nigeria began to investigate Southern Investigations, with bugs being placed inside the Southern Investigations offices by the police. The operation ceased when Jonathan Rees was recorded conspiring with a corrupt police officer to plant cocaine on an innocent woman in order to discredit her during a custody battle, and in December 2000 he was jailed for seven years.

In 2002-2003 a fourth inquiry began, involving the bugging of a suspect’s car and the home of Glenn Vian. The investigation obtained evidence that linked a number of individuals to the murder, but the Crown Prosecution Service decided there was insufficient evidence to proceed with a prosecution.

The fifth inquiry took place in 2006, headed by Detective Superintendent David Cook was set up in secret after Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair declared that the first investigation had been compromised by the involvement of Sid Fillery.

Concerns over connections between Masonic Lodge members and the murder required the 36 police officers involved with the case to state they had never been Freemasons, with Cook describing the murder as being one of the worst kept secrets in south-east London, claiming “a whole cabal of people” knew the identity of at least some of those involved. He also claimed attempts had been made to smear Daniel Morgan’s character and there had been attempts to link him with Colombian drug dealers. He identified the main suspects as "white Anglo-Saxons".

Yet again bugs were placed, Jonathan Rees, Sid Fillery, and Glenn and Gary Vian were arrested, along with a builder, James Cook, all on suspicion of murder, plus other related charges. This time however, the suspects made it to court.

The 2011 Old Bailey trial

The trial was badly handled by the prosecution , with 3 supergrass informers being dismissed as key witnesses, resulting in a stay of prosecution for Sid Fillery and James Cook being discharged.

In March 2011 the Director of Public Prosecutions abandoned the case and all remaining charges were dropped. The case had yet to reach the stage where it would look at the murder as it was still dealing with preliminary issues when the prosecution collapsed. The judge noted the case’s vastness and complexity, and considered that the prosecution had been principled and right to drop the case, but the police had “ample grounds to justify the arrest and prosecution of the defendants”.

A massive amount of evidence had been gathered, over 750,000 documents, with four more crates of evidence being discovered after the trial collapsed.

Links to the News of the World

After the trial collapsed it was revealed that Jonathan Rees had been working for the News of the World, earning £150,000 supplying illegally obtained information about figures in the public eye. After serving the prison sentence for perverting the course of justice after the Operation Nigeria inquiry Andy Coulson , then editor of the News of the World, hired Jonathan Rees, and worked regularly with the Sunday and Daily Mirror as well. Andy Coulson was later hired by David Cameron as director of communications despite warnings about Andy Coulson’s hiring of the convicted criminal Jonathan Rees.

Using a network of corrupt police officers he illegally obtained information on a variety of public figures, including the Royal family, and was also alleged to have commissioned burglaries on behalf of journalists. However, despite detailed evidence the Metropolitan Police failed to pursue any action against Rees, even to the point of taking the News of the World at their word that Clive Goodman had worked alone when he was convicted for intercepting phone calls from Clarence House.

[Forward to The Leveson Inquiry]

[Index]


The government’s move to link one billion of these numbers to bank accounts and mobiles is fraught with security risks. Studies say that digital security must be beefed up before this happens

Alarm bells have been ringing in the ministry of electronics and information technology (MeitY). This was ever since Union finance minister Arun Jaitley announced on August 28 that the linking of one billion Aadhaar IDs with bank accounts and mobiles is very much on the cards. The minister, speaking at a function to mark the completion of three years of the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojna, said that the linkage would ensure “financial inclusion” which will be “nothing short of a social revolution”.

Officials in MeitY, are a worried lot. The ministry has been entrusted with the onerous task of ensuring cyberspace security in the country and managing the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) which deals with hacking and related crimes. More importantly, it is also directly responsible for the functioning of the Unique Identity Authority of India (UIDAI) which operates the Aadhaar database. It will have an important role to play once the linkage referred to by Jaitley covers all Aadhaar cards—virtually the entire adult population in the country.

STOLEN DATA

A MeitY official told India Legal: “The finance minister has talked about a social revolution but we will need a cyber security revolution if the grand plan has to take off without floundering and losing its way. As things stand now, there are too many holes in the security set up which are being exploited by hackers. We have to prepare ourselves for a flood of cyber-related crime once the linkage happens. To make matters worse, no one is clear about the volume of Aadhaar data that has already been stolen or accessed by the wrong people.”

According to him, there are several reports with the ministry which point to the urgent need for a complete overhaul of the cyber security apparatus in the country. This will be a time-consuming process, but he feels it nevertheless needs to be done before any major three-way linkage is even attempted. “A new financial division of CERT-In has been promised. It has to be set up and tested. No system is fool-proof. The basic problem with Aadhaar is that the safety of data was not thought through when it was launched. Much of what is being done is a post facto response,” he added.

MeitY sources also point out that according to official data, 164 government websites were hacked during 2015. There have also been instances where government departments have placed Aadhaar numbers in the public domain. The problem, they say, has several dimensions. And laws alone cannot deter the criminals. Prevention and detection are key aspects in any fight because the cyber-criminal floats in cyberspace and may operate from a foreign land outside India’s jurisdiction.