The bovine brew is in the final stages of development by the Cow Protection Department of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), India’s biggest and oldest Hindu nationalist group, according to the man who makes it.

Om Prakash, the head of the department, said the drink – called “gau jal”, or “cow water” – in Sanskrit was undergoing laboratory tests and would be launched “very soon, maybe by the end of this year”.

“Don’t worry, it won’t smell like urine and will be tasty too,” he told The Times from his headquarters in Hardwar, one of four holy cities on the River Ganges. “Its USP will be that it’s going to be very healthy. It won’t be like carbonated drinks and would be devoid of any toxins.”

Hindus revere cows and slaughtering them is illegal in most of India. Cow dung is traditionally used as a fuel and disinfectant in villages, while cow urine and dung are often consumed in rituals to “purify” those on the bottom rungs of the Hindu caste system.

In 2001, the RSS and its offshoots – which include the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party – began promoting cow urine as a cure for ailments ranging from liver disease to obesity and even cancer.

Mr Prakash said his drink, by contrast, was made mainly of cow urine, mixed with a few medicinal and ayurvedic herbs. He said it would be “cheap”, but declined to give further details about its price or ingredients until it was officially launched.

He insisted, however, that it would be able to compete with the American cola brands, even with their enormous advertising budgets. “We’re going to give them good competition as our drink is good for mankind,” he said. “We may also think of exporting it.”

Charleston Fire Department Station 12 had to remove a Nativity display from the lawn, after a local man filed a complaint with the Wisconsin based Freedom From Religion Foundation. The group sent a letter to the fire department Friday, December 18th. The complaint states the display shows Charleston’s endorsement of Christianity, which is prohibited under the Constitution, and asked that it be removed
The firefighters removed the manger scene after the matter was referred to the fire department’s legal department. The fire department was not allowed to speak on camera, but released a statement. “The Supreme Court has said that the United States Constitution prohibits government from taking any action that appears to promote one religion over another. The Crech is the universal symbol of Christianity, and therefore based on the law, it was removed from the fire station. The city and the fire department fully support everyone’s right to practice his or her religion in our city.“
The fire department has received dozens of complaints about removing the nativity.

Sister Jane Livingston and her sisters from the Community of Catholic Sister Daughters of St. Paul wanted to do something nice for firefighters in Station 12. So they baked them a special cake. Sister Livingston says, “I’m delivering a Christmas cake to the people at Fire Station number 12. I figured if they can’t have a nativity on the outside, we would bring them a nativity they can have on the inside from us. There’s a clear prejudice it seems against Christianity. I was really kind of in sorrow in one sense, because Christmas is a joyful time, and it’s meant to be a time that brings people together, rather than divides them.“

Joanne Roberts lives in the area. She says, “I think it’s crazy. This is America. I’m a citizen of the United States of America and if you cannot have a manger scene in a front yard of a fire department what are we going to do. I think it’s crazy. It does upset me that they are not there. I just think we should fuss and fight and put it back up.“

Last month, a Daily Journal investigation found that disability insurers frequently deny or terminate benefits to people who have limited recourse to appeal the insurers’ decisions.

The investigation also found that the California Department of Insurance does little to regulate the practices of disability insurers.

The state Department of Insurance says it does not always have the power to intervene in claims denial cases because the federal Employee Retirement Income Security Act governs employer-sponsored worker benefits.

Assembly Health Committee Chair Dave Jones (D-Sacramento) said the Department of Insurance could wield more power to investigate claims denials and protect disabled consumers. Jones is running to replace current Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner (R) next year.

Poizner is seeking the Republican gubernatorial nomination.
In related news, some advocacy groups plan to pressure lawmakers to change ERISA regulations if national health care reform legislation requires all residents to have insurance coverage.

ERISA currently prohibits individuals covered under group policies from appealing a claims rejection in state courts or from seeking punitive damages.

Department brass have said Gillette was the latter, even after he had accumulated dozens of internal-affairs complaints. But 42 people — including accused criminals, people with no criminal records and law-enforcement officers — say in those complaints that, during more than 13 years as a sheriff’s deputy, Gillette acted as a law unto himself. His detractors say Gillette was a man with a penchant for profanity and roughness who crossed the line into criminal behavior
‘One of the worst cases’

By himself, Gillette racked up more complaints during his 13 years on patrol than the entire department generated in 2005, 2006 and 2007 combined. More than 70 deputies work for the Sangamon County sheriff’s department.

Based on the volume, seriousness and number of sustained complaints, Gillette should have been fired long ago, according to Samuel Walker, a University of Nebraska criminologist who is considered an expert on police misconduct.
Complaints can be a tool

Meyer and Walker said departments should use internal affairs complaints to help identify officers who need help.

Walker said the volume of complaints can be a tool to help figure out which officers need coaching, additional training or re-assignment. Meyer said departments can’t always go by complaint volumes — an officer assigned to DUI patrol, for example, is bound to get a fairly high number of complaints — but he blames himself for not doing more to help Gillette.
Williamson said he believes the department provides adequate help to employees with marital problems, psychological issues, alcohol-abuse problems or other issues that affect their work. The lack of psychological screening for new employees is due in part to the expense, Williamson said.

Williamson, who started the department’s internal-affairs division in 1997, has the final say on who gets hired. He said he requires prospective deputies to have a college diploma, and he interviews extensively before making a decision.

“This is one of the worst cases I’ve heard, just hearing his record,” Walker said. “This sounds, really, pretty shocking. This officer should have been long gone. There’s a really serious failure here.”

That view is shared by Stephen Meyer, former head of internal affairs for the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office, who said he would have fired Gillette if he’d had the authority.

“Given the frequency and severity (of complaints), there comes a time when the agency has to say ‘enough,’” said Meyer, who retired in 2001 but remains a sheriff’s chaplain. “I deemed law enforcement a profession. And you need to remove those who are not professional.”
Gillette, who is now working for a private entity (he declined to be more specific) in Afghanistan, called Meyer a “religious fanatic” who was out to get him and generated complaints by contacting people who had been arrested. While he admitted violating some rules, Gillette denied doing anything seriously wrong.

“The only thing I’ve been found guilty of is minor department infractions,” Gillette said in a telephone interview. “I’m not saying I’m an angel. It’s obvious that I’m not. I did a good job for the sheriff’s department, and we took a lot of bad guys off the street.”

Meyer said he never solicited complaints — when Williamson made him the department’s first head of internal affairs in 1997, the sheriff made it clear that he was to let complaints come to him, not go looking for them, Meyer said.

“My job would have been in jeopardy,” Meyer said. “The sheriff had said, ‘You will not solicit.’”
42 complaints

By October 2001, the number of complaints against Gillette stood at 28, with six of them sustained. He’d been a deputy for six years. Then the pace slowed. He was the target of 14 more complaints for the last eight years of his career with the county, with two of those — the complaint filed by Barr and the allegation of profanity by Anderson — sustained by the department.

A few things changed. Gillette was deployed to Iraq for a year in 2003 and won the Bronze Star, so he was off local streets. Meyer, who Gillette says was out to get him, retired in October 2001. And in September 2001, Lt. Patrick Davlin moved from the bureau of professional standards, which includes the department’s internal affairs division, and became supervisor of the midnight shift that included Gillette.

The paper reports that the oil and gas liaison’s department did add an employee in 2009 (from two to three) and will see a tripling in its budget from 2008 to 2010, if its proposed budget for next year is approved. But a key hydrologic study to check for contaminants from gas drilling in the Mamm Creek area was slashed from $180,000 to $20,000 in 2009.

That study is part of an ongoing effort to investigate findings from a private consultant that show elevated levels of methane in groundwater supplies since the most recent gas boom began in the late 1990s. There also is a push for more federal regulation of certain drilling practices in the wake of complaints from residents that their groundwater wells are being contaminated and they’re being sickened by gas drilling.
Oil and gas liaison officer Judy Jordan told the paper she was perplexed by the rising number of complaints given the drop-off in drilling in the county (from 70 active rigs a year ago to 16 currently operating). That slowdown is widely attributed to the global recession and drop in the commodity price, but some Republicans say it’s directly linked to more stringent state environmental regulations for gas drilling that went into effect in the spring.
“America is facing a painful recession, and this Governor’s policies have made a bad economic situation worse,” Penry writes in his most recent campaign fund-raising newsletter, blasting the “stifling oil and gas regulations [that] have done nothing to help get our economy turned around.”

Whatever the causes the latest natural gas downturn (or some would say bust), Garfield County’s Jordan said the number of drilling permits her department is seeing forwarded from the state for county review continues to go up.

The most common reasons for complaints to the department included denial of claims, claims delays, and unsatisfactory offers. The department recorded the most complaints in the following types of insurance: auto, group health, individual health and homeowners.

Some of the highest amount claims recovered were:

•Earlier this year a family of nine from southwest Missouri filed a complaint against their homeowners insurance company regarding a tornado loss that left them in a hotel room for over a month. After the department’s involvement, the family received a final recovery from the insurer of nearly $278,000.

•After being denied coverage for treatment of lymphoma, a consumer filed a complaint with the department. After mediation by the department, the insurance company overturned the denial and approved the procedure, which cost more than $250,000.

•After purchasing life insurance with the proceeds of her late husband’s life policy, a consumer complained that her new policy did not include the benefits she had been promised. After the department’s involvement, the consumer’s policy was re-written and her insurance company returned $109,846 to her.
In the first nine months of 2009, the department fielded almost 4,200 formal complaints and assisted nearly 3,000 consumers in writing and another 21,000 over the telephone.

The top categories of complaints were as follows:
By reason

•Denial of claim
•Delay of claim processing
•Unsatisfactory settlement offer
•Claim handling

By line of insurance

•Private passenger auto
•Group health
•Individual accident and health
•Homeowners

Police say within minutes of starting the operation, Street Crimes found numerous people engaged in prostitution activity. Interestingly police say that the bulk of those arrested are from Sacramento and Bay area.

Officers say they were told by some of the arrested that many of them travel to Santa Cruz because it is perceived as a place where you can make good money with relatively little concern about being put in jail.

Hamilton’s public health department discovered two months ago during a routine inspection that vaccines were being stored at wrong temperatures or exposed to light, which can make the shots less effective or even render them useless
Hamilton’s medical officer of health apologized publicly during a press conference yesterday to disclose the problems.

“We certainly are very sorry for what has happened here,” said Dr. Elizabeth Richardson, medical officer of health. “We regret any anxiety that it may have caused to any of the patients or the community.”

Improperly stored vaccine doesn’t go bad or pose any danger. But patients could be vulnerable to illness they thought they’d been protected against.

“The worst-case scenario with this would be that the vaccine someone was given was less effective than it should be,” said Dr. Michael Gardam, one of Ontario’s leading infectious disease experts. “Depending on the vaccine and depending on the circumstances, it could be a relatively big deal.”

Of particular concern is rabies, which can take up to seven years to cause illness.

That’s why public health is contacting all 62 patients who had a rabies vaccination at a Hamilton hospital from January 2002 to August 2009.

It’s also looking for 328 patients who had a tetanus diphtheria vaccination at a Hamilton hospital from August 2007 to August 2009.

Both of these vaccines were stored at temperatures above or below the required two to eight degrees Celsius. The problem happened when the vaccines were taken out of the central storage used for all hospitals and put in emergency department fridges.

“Those fridges and that process was less rigorous than the central process,” said Dr. David Higgins, chief of staff at St. Joseph’s.

The hospitals have now ensured the emergency department fridges are always at the right temperature.

Richardson says all of the storage issues have been fixed.

“The vaccine supply overall in Hamilton is very safe,” she said. “The situation we’ve encountered, we’re being very cautious about. We’re just being as proactive and as careful about it as we can.”

Both the hospitals and public health said they waited two months to reveal the errors because it took them that long to determine the size of the problem, how it would affect the vaccines and identify the hundreds of patients involved.

Higgins said it would have been “very anxiety-provoking and difficult to manage” to tell the community any sooner.

Gardam says it’s hard for public health to monitor vaccine storage as well as it should because so many places, from doctors’ offices to pharmacies to hospitals, carry vaccine. Hamilton’s public health nurses inspect about 325 places where vaccine is stored.

“It’s one of the areas where I think public health quite commonly has a challenge, making sure things are stored the way they’re supposed to be stored, so this kind of thing is not that unusual, unfortunately,” Gardam said. “It speaks to the fact that we need to focus on simple things like that so we don’t get into situations like this.”

Department Director Laura Thielen said it appeared the complaints were generated by people caught violating the law or who disagreed with state laws.

The investigations found the complaints unsubstantiated or that the accusations were contradicted by records or people at the scene.

According to the Department of Land and Natural Resources, nine complaints about the officer were received in November. The department opened an investigation and asked the attorney general to open a separate criminal investigation. During the investigations, the officer was placed on administrative leave.
In another complaint a mother accused the officer of pointing his gun at her child, who was hunting. Investigators found the officer took out his weapon after he was confronted by a pack of hunting dogs and holstered his weapon after the hunting dogs were secured.

Regulators say the money recovered for the first half of the year now totals $22 million.

Gov. David A. Paterson said given the current economic downturn and its impact on state residents, “we will continue to work to make sure New Yorkers get full value for their insurance dollars.”

“Insurance is a promise to protect us at our most vulnerable, and New Yorkers can rely on us to protect them if insurance companies do not keep their promises,” the governor said in a statement.
Among the cases highlighted in the latest round of recoveries by the New York State Insurance Department was a man denied long-term disability benefits due to chronic fatigue syndrome. After contacting the insurance department, an independent medical exam was conducted supporting his claim and a check for more than $75,000 was issued to the policyholder.

In another case, a hospitalized consumer who changed coverage from one insurer to another was refused by both companies for payment of her medical stay. The hospital placed a judgment against the patient for the charged and after the department intervened, the patient’s first carrier paid more than $96,000.t