Brookdale Inn owners facing workers compensation and insurance ...

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Brookdale Inn and Spa owner Sanjiv Kakkar arrives at the County Courthouse on Friday morning.

SANTA CRUZ - The owners of the historic Brookdale Inn and Spa are facing trial on charges that they falsified wage information to obtain lower insurance premiums.

Judge Robert Moody ordered Sanjiv and Neelam Kakkar held on five felony counts of insurance fraud Wednesday after hearing testimony from detectives with the state Department of Insurance.

The Department of Insurance investigated discrepancies between wage information the Kakkars supplied to the state Employment Development Department and the information they reported to their insurance company. By providing a lower number to their insurance company, prosecutor Kelly Walker alleges that they were able to obtain lower premiums for their workers' compensation insurance.

According to records, the couple paid approximately $800,000 less in insurance premiums than they should have over a period of several years, Walker said.

The pair, who purchased the Brookdale Inn in 2007 for $5.3 million, are due back in court July 10 for arraignment on the charges.

The Kakkars also have other pending criminal matters against them involving alleged violations of state health and safety codes. Sanjiv Kakkar also faces charges for allegedly passing bad checks. Those matters are trailing the workers' compensation fraud case.

Additionally, the Kakkars have an ongoing matter with county officials in civil court.

In April, the couple admitted to several building code violations and were given about a month to obtain permits to fix them. According to court records, they have not done so and the county is now pursuing contempt of court proceedings. They're due back in court on that matter in July.

The violations, uncovered during a January 2011 inspection, including construction projects started without needed permits, remodels of the lobby entrance, bar and restaurant and a roof over an indoor pool, according to county code compliance officials.

The inn was shuttered in October by the Boulder Creek Fire Department after a number of alleged fire code violations were found. A notice of violation was sent to Kakkar and the management company on Aug. 31, informing them the violations needed to be corrected within 30 days. The business didn't comply and fire officials "red-tagged" the property, closing it until compliance has been met.

A fire at the inn in August 2009 destroyed 20 apartments and displaced 65 people.

Follow Sentinel reporter Jessica M. Pasko on Twitter: @jmpasko96

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SmackDown results: Cena risked it all for the joy of dropping Mr. Laurinaitis

All WWE programming, talent names, images, likenesses, slogans, wrestling moves, trademarks, logos and copyrights are the exclusive property of WWE, Inc. and its subsidiaries. All other trademarks, logos and copyrights are the property of their respective owners. ? 2012 WWE, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This website is based in the United States. By submitting personal information to this website you consent to your information being maintained in the U.S., subject to applicable U.S. laws. U.S. law may be different than the law of your home country. WrestleMania XXIX (NY/NJ) logo TM & ? 2012 WWE. All Rights Reserved. The Empire State Building design is a registered trademark and used with permission by ESBC.

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Romney back to economy after immigration detour

Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, and his wife Ann, serve ice cream to supporters during a campaign stop in Milford, N.H., Friday, June 15, 2012. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, and his wife Ann, serve ice cream to supporters during a campaign stop in Milford, N.H., Friday, June 15, 2012. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

A protestor in a car circles a campaign event site for Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney with a plastic dog strapped to the roof of their car, Friday, June 15, 2012, in Milford, N.H . (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Ann Romney, wife of Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney talks to supporters during a campaign stop in Milford, N.H., Friday, June 15, 2012. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

(AP) ? Mitt Romney is trying to steer his bus tour back to middle-class economic issues as he visits three communities in Pennsylvania following a detour caused by President Barack Obama's new policy on the deportation of young illegal immigrants.

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee plans to keep up his focus on jobs and the economy, arguing that he's the candidate who will give average Americans a "fair shot" at prosperity.

Romney is targeting smaller cities and towns through the state's conservative midsection. He planned stops Saturday at a casting and machine company in Weatherly, a convenience store in Quakertown and an old iron furnace in Cornwall that's now a national historic landmark.

The tour is intended to challenge Obama in states where he's strong ? the president won Pennsylvania in 2008, and no Republican has won the state since 1988. In 2008, Republican nominee John McCain won two of the counties Romney plans to visit.

The last time Romney was in the Keystone State, he was campaigning with Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and saying he was "studying" the Cuban-American's ideas for legislation that would allow some illegal immigrants to stay in the country to work.

The opening of Romney's six-state, five-day tour was overshadowed by Obama's announcement Friday that the U.S. would no longer deport some young illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children. In response, Romney softened the harsh rhetoric he used in addressing illegal immigration during the contentious GOP primary campaign.

"It's an important matter to be considered and should be solved on a long-term basis so they know what their future would be in this country," Romney told reporters after stepping off his bus in New Hampshire. Obama's executive order was problematic, he said, because "an executive order, of course, is a short-term matter. It can be reversed by subsequent presidents."

That measured response echoed Rubio's own reaction to Obama's announcement. Although pressed by reporters, Romney refused to take a firm position or say whether he would, if elected president, reverse the executive order.

The focus on immigration also threatened to raise questions about whether Romney would shift his positions based on changing political circumstances.

Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, adopted a tough line on immigration during the primary, calling the so-called DREAM Act a "handout" and saying he would veto it as president. The legislation would provide a pathway to citizenship for young illegal immigrants who attended college or served in the military.

Romney faces pressure to appeal to the Hispanic voters who will be critical in battleground states like Nevada and Colorado, but he also risks alienating his conservative base if he abandons his previously tough stances.

The bus tour ? Romney plans to fly each night to the next state and ride from town to town during the day ? is his first traditional campaign swing and is aimed at undecided voters in six battleground states: New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan and Iowa. Obama won them all in 2008.

"If there's ever been a president who has not given a fair shot to the middle-income Americans of this great nation, it is Barack Obama," Romney declared from a makeshift podium during an "ice cream social" in a New Hampshire town square on Friday. "I understand what it takes to get people to work again. I will do that to help the American people from the richest to the poorest and everybody in between."

The tour represents a new mode for Romney in the general election. During the primary, Romney sometimes ran into trouble in less-scripted environments and the bus tour is likely to test him again. He also has long faced questions about his ability to connect with average Americans.

Associated Press

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Scientists dispel myths, provide new insight into human impact on pre-Columbian Amazon River Basin

Scientists dispel myths, provide new insight into human impact on pre-Columbian Amazon River Basin

Friday, June 15, 2012

A paper published this week in Scienceprovides the most nuanced view to date of the small, shifting human populations in much of the Amazon before the arrival of Europeans. The research, which includes the first landscape-scale sampling of central and western Amazonia, finds that early inhabitants were concentrated near rivers and lakes but actually had little long-term impact on the outlying forests, as if they merely tiptoed around the land far from natural sources of water. In doing so, the new study overturns the currently popular idea that the Amazon was a cultural parkland in pre-Columbian times.

The Amazon Basin is one of Earth's areas of highest biodiversity. Therefore, understanding how Amazonia was modified by humans in the past is important for conservation and understanding the ecological processes of tropical rainforests.

Researchers, at Florida Institute of Technology, the Smithsonian Institution, Wake Forest University and the University of Florida looked at how widespread human impacts were in Amazonia before the Europeans arrived. If the Pre-Columbian Amazon was a highly altered landscape, then most of the Amazon's current biodiversity could have come from human effects.

The research team, led by Florida Tech's Crystal McMichael and Mark Bush, retrieved 247 soil cores from 55 locations throughout the central and western Amazon, sampling sites that were likely disturbed by humans, like river banks and areas known from archeological evidence to have been occupied by people. They also collected cores farther away from rivers, where human impacts were unknown and used markers in the cores to track the histories of fire, vegetation and human alterations of the soil. The eastern Amazon has already been studied in detail.

McMichael, Bush, and their colleagues conclude that people in the central and western Amazon generally lived in small groups, with larger populations on some rivers.

"There is strong evidence of large settlements in eastern Amazonia, but our data point to different cultural adaptations in the central and western Amazon, which left vast areas with very little human imprint," said Bush.

They did not live in large settlements throughout the basin as was previously thought. Even sites of supposedly large settlements did not show evidence of high population densities and large-scale agriculture. All the signs point to smaller, mobile populations before Europeans arrived. The impacts of these small populations were largely limited to river banks.

"The amazing biodiversity of the Amazon is not a byproduct of past human disturbance," said McMichael. "We also can't assume that these forests will be resilient to disturbance, because many have never been disturbed, or have only been lightly disturbed in the past."

Certainly there is no parallel in western Amazonia for the scale of modern disturbance that accompanies industrial agriculture, road construction, and the synergies of those disturbances with climate change."

###

Florida Institute of Technology: http://www.fit.edu

Thanks to Florida Institute of Technology for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

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Six new stem cell lines now publicly available

ScienceDaily (June 14, 2012) ? Six new human embryonic stem cell lines derived at the University of Michigan have just been placed on the U.S. National Institutes of Health's registry, making the cells available for federally-funded research.

U-M now has a total of eight cell lines on the registry, including five that carry genetic mutations for serious diseases such as the severe bleeding disorder hemophilia B, the fatal brain disorder Huntington's disease and the heart condition called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, which causes sudden death in athletes and others.

Researchers at U-M and around the country can now begin using the stem cell lines to study the origins of these diseases and potential treatments. Two of the cell lines are believed to be the first in the world bearing that particular disease gene.

The three U-M stem cell lines now in the registry that do not carry disease genes are also useful for general studies and as comparisons for stem cells with disease genes. In all, there are 163 stem cell lines in the federal registry, most of them without major disease genes.

Each of the lines was derived from a cluster of about 30 cells removed from a donated five-day-old embryo roughly the size of the period at the end of this sentence. The embryos carrying disease genes were created for reproductive purposes, tested and found to be affected with a genetic disorder, deemed not suitable for implantation and would have otherwise been discarded if not donated by the couples who donated them.

Some came from couples having fertility treatment at U-M's Center for Reproductive Medicine, others from as far away as Portland, OR. Some were never frozen, which may mean that the stem cells will have unique characteristics and utilities.

The full list of U-M-derived stem cell lines accepted to the NIH registry includes:

  • UM9-1PGD -- Hemophilia B UM17-1 PGD -- Huntington's disease
  • UM38-2 PGD -- Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy (MYBPC3)
  • UM15-4 PGD -- Hydroxysteroid Dehydrogenase 4 Deficiency, a rare hormone disorder
  • UM11-1PGD -- Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease Type 1A
  • UM4-6 -- no disease gene
  • UM14-1 -- no disease gene UM14-2 -- no disease gene

"Our last three years of work have really begun to pay off, paving the way for scientists worldwide to make novel discoveries that will benefit human health in the near future," says Gary Smith, Ph.D., who derived the lines and also is co-director of the U-M Consortium for Stem Cell Therapies, part of the A. Alfred Taubman Medical Research Institute.

"Each cell line accepted to the registry demonstrates our attention to details of proper oversight, consenting, and following of NIH guidelines," says Sue O'Shea, Ph.D., professor of Cell and Developmental Biology at the U-M Medical School, and co-director of the Consortium for Stem Cell Therapies.

U-M is one of only three academic institutions to have disease-specific stem cell lines listed in the national registry, says Smith, who is a professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Michigan Medical School. The first line, a genetically normal one, was accepted to the registry in February.

Each line is the culmination of years of preparation and cooperation between U-M and Genesis Genetics, a Michigan-based genetic diagnostic company. This work was made possible by Michigan voters' November 2008 approval of a state constitutional amendment permitting scientists to derive embryonic stem cell lines using surplus embryos from fertility clinics or embryos with genetic abnormalities and not suitable for implantation.

The amendment also made possible an unusual collaboration that has blossomed between the University of Michigan and molecular research scientists at Genesis Genetics, a company that has grown in only eight years to become the leading global provider of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) testing. PGD is a testing method used to identify embryos carrying the genetic mutations responsible for serious inherited diseases.

Genesis Genetics performs nearly 7,500 PGD tests annually. Under the arrangement between the company and U-M, patients with embryos that test positive for a genetic disease now have the option of donating those embryos to U-M if they have decided not to use them for reproductive purposes and the embryos would otherwise be discarded.

The agreement was worked out between U-M's Smith and Mark Hughes, M.D., Ph.D., founder and president of Genesis Genetics and a pioneer in the field of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. "These are very precious cells, and it would be unconscionable not to take advantage of such an opportunity for medical science and the cure of disease," Hughes says.

The hemophilia B line also resulted from a collaboration with the Oregon Health Science University, and is believed to be the first of its kind in the world. Through the partnership with the Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility division, headed by Philip Patton, M.D., and the work of David Battaglia, Ph.D., the single embryo was frozen at OHSU and shipped to Michigan.

Contributors to the A. Alfred Taubman Medical Research Institute's Consortium for Stem Cell Therapies include the Taubman Institute; the Office of the Executive Vice President for Medical Affairs; the Office of the Medical School Dean; the Comprehensive Cancer Center; the Department of Pediatrics and Communicable Diseases; the Office of the Vice President for Research; the School of Dentistry; the Department of Pathology; the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology; the College of Engineering; the Life Sciences Institute; the Department of Neurology; and U-M's Michigan Institute for Clinical and Health Research.

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The bonobo, the non-murderous version of the chimpanzee, gets its genome mapped ( video)

The bonobos, like the chimpanzee, is very closely related to our species. But unlike the chimpanzee, it probably doesn't want to kill you.?

By Seth Borenstein,?AP Science Writer / June 13, 2012

This undated handout photo provided by Friends of Bonobos shows mother and a baby bonobo in the Congo. Scientists have mapped the DNA of the famously peaceful ape, and some researchers say that may eventually reveal secrets about how the darker side of our nature evolved.

Vanessa Woods/Duke University/AP

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Behold the?bonobo, our ape cousin that's kinder and gentler than the chimp or, well, us. Now scientists have mapped the primate's DNA, and some researchers say that may eventually reveal secrets about how the darker side of our nature evolved.

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'; } else if (google_ads.length > 1) { ad_unit += ''; } } document.getElementById("ad_unit").innerHTML += ad_unit; google_adnum += google_ads.length; return; } var google_adnum = 0; google_ad_client = "pub-6743622525202572"; google_ad_output = 'js'; google_max_num_ads = '1'; google_feedback = "on"; google_ad_type = "text"; google_adtest = "off"; google_image_size = '230x105'; google_skip = '0'; // --> Gottfried Hohmann from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology is leading a Bonobo research project in the Congo. One of the things he and his colleagues want to discover is why bonobo males are less aggressive than male chimpanzees. Could it be because the females band together with other females?

Scientists have found that we are as close genetically to the peace-loving but little-known?bonobo?as we are to the more violent and better understood chimpanzee. It's as if they are siblings and we are cousins, related to them both equally, sharing some traits with just?bonobos?and other characteristics with just chimps.

Bonobos?and humans share 98.7 percent of the same genetic blueprint, the same percentage shared with chimps, according to a study released Wednesday by the journal Nature. The two apes are much more closely related to each other ? sharing 99.6 percent of their genomes ? said study lead author Kay Prufer, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute in Germany. "Humans are a little like a mosaic of?bonobo?and chimpanzee genomes."

Bonobos?and chimps have distinctly different behaviors that can be seen in humans, with?bonobos?displaying what might be thought of as our better angels, said Duke University researcher Brian Hare.?Bonobos?make love, not war. Chimps have been documented to kill and make war.?Bonobos?share food with total strangers, but chimps do not.?Bonobos?stay close to their mothers ? who even pick out their sons' mates ? long after infancy like humans. But chimps tend to use tools better and have bigger brains, like humans.

"Is the?bonobo?genome the secret to the biology of peace?" asked Hare, who was not involved in the new research. "They have done something in their evolution that even humans can't do. They don't have the dark side we do.

"If we only studied chimps, we'd get a skewed view of human evolution," he said.

Bonobos, chimps and humans shared a single common ancestor from about 6 million years ago, Prufer said. Chimps and bonobos?shared the same common ancestor until about a million years ago, when the Congo River formed. Then the?bonobos developed on one side of the river, the chimps the other. They became different species, even though scientists didn't realize that until about 90 years ago.

Bonobo?heads are slightly smaller and their teeth are arranged differently. In behavior,?bonobos?are far more tolerant, more social. They are inordinately sexual. Instead of releasing tension by fighting, they couple repeatedly, Hare said.?Bonobos?are ruled by alpha females, chimps by males.

In some ways ? especially when looking at the physiology of the brain ? it's as if a?bonobo?is a juvenile chimp that doesn't develop, Hare said. Chimps get more violent as they age;?bonobos?don't.

While the scientific name for?bonobos?is Pan paniscus, "they should be Peter Pan," Hare said. "They never grow up and we have lots of data to support this idea. Much of their psychology seems to be frozen."

Some researchers say Hare has romanticized the?bonobo?too much. Emory University researcher Bill Hopkins says he has more?bonobo?scars than chimp scars on his body. Sure,?bonobos?will bite, but they won't kill, Hare said.

Bonobos?are endangered and only live around the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo. "Ironically," Hare said, "bonobos are from the place where people are at their worst."

___

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