The new company, to be called Pilot Flying J, operates in 43 states and six Canadian provinces and employs more than 20,000 people. It is one of the top 10 privately held companies in the United States.

“We are now one great company, two great brands,” said Pilot Flying J President and CEO Jimmy Haslam. “Our new organization is a combination of two of the best-known brands in the travel center industry, both with strong family histories and shared values.

In July 2009, Pilot and Flying J announced a preliminary agreement to merge their travel center operations.

Customers will see the Pilot and Flying J brands on signage at the interstate facilities. Pilot has begun to accept the TCH card, and Flying J has begun to accept Comdata cards.  This change gives the trucking community many more options of where to fuel that are not dependent on the card they carry.

Other plans call for enhanced restaurant offerings with national brands in all locations. Brand additions to Flying J locations in the new network include Denny’s, Subway and Pizza Hut. In addition, there will be upgrades to drivers’ lounges, new gasoline and diesel pumps, enhanced showers and remodeled restrooms at many locations.

Pilot Flying J is selling 26 locations to Love’s Travel Stops & Country Stores as required by the Federal Trade Commission as a condition for the merger. For a list of the affected locations and additional information about the merger, visit www.pilotflyingj.com.

Also, ConocoPhillips completed selling its 50 percent partnership interest in the CFJ Properties-Flying J truck stops to Pilot for $626 million.

The government has said that the makers of BlackBerry – Research in Motion (RIM) – have to address its security concerns by offering the monitoring facility.

“If they don’t follow our guidelines, we will have no option but to ask them to stop their operations in India,” a senior official said.

The smartphone is used by over a million customers in India.

The Ministry of Home Affairs has asked the Department of Telecommunication to tell the popular smartphone company in no uncertain terms that its emails and other data services must comply with formats that can be monitored by security and intelligence agencies.

The MHA made it clear that RIM has been addressing security concerns of several other countries, including the United States, where it operates and therefore, there is no justification to not comply the same in India.

Government also wants a blackberry server in India but the company has been resisting the move. Once the server is in India, it will be easy to track the messages.

BlackBerry says the messages are encrypted. The smartphone’s server is based in Canada where the encryption level is very high and extremely difficult to crack. And any message going through a Canada server is encrypted and therefore cannot be accessed by intelligence agencies in India.

There are reports that China has got a similar server in the country.

Senior officials of key security agencies at a recent meeting argued that the continuation of BlackBerry services in the present format poses danger to the country. The meeting was attended by representatives of the MHA, DoT, intelligence agencies and the National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO).

The latest development indicates that security agencies are again finding it difficult to intercept or decipher messages sent through these phones, which use codes with an encryption of 256 bits.

This encryption code first scrambles the emails sent from a BlackBerry device and unscrambles it when the message reaches its target.

Leading telecom companies in India such as Bharti Airtel, Vodafone Essar, Reliance Communications, Tata Teleservices, BSNL and MTNL offer BlackBerry services.

This is the third time this year that the air traffic management system at the airport has collapsed. The system had crashed twice in January when US company Raytheon’s Autotrac-III system was being tested for installation.  The sources said no incoming flight was diverted to any other airport but they were made to hover over the Delhi airspace till the Autotrac-II system was made operational.  An Airports Authority of India spokesperson said the two Autotrac systems were working simultaneously. “There were some problems in Autotrac-III for a few minutes. There was no disruption to any flight in any way”. 

The ATC system crash occured on a day when the airport’s plush new Terminal-3 was made operational with some flights operating out of there.  A software glitch was suspected to be the prime cause for the crash, the sources said, adding that the Autotrac-III system had stopped transmitting inputs to the radar consoles, which show the traffic in the airspace controlled by ATC tower and give vital information like aircraft speed, height and call-signs.  In the past two such instances on January 14 and 26 this year, the ATC had to switch over to the ‘manual procedure’ to maintain vertical and horizontal separation between aircraft and to enable them to land or take-off.  At that time, the incident had happened during peak hour traffic and the system had taken almost one hour to be rectified, leading to severe congestion over Delhi airspace.  Aviation sources said that systems like Autotrac-II or III were not the only ones maintaining separation between two aircraft.

Most commercial airliners now fly with their own on board traffic collision avoidance systems (TCAS), which provide warnings about presence of another plane in the vicinity, they said, adding that it had been made mandatory to install TCAS on all aircraft operating in India.

In December 2004, Gujarat police had stage managed a shoot-out at the office of Popular Builders owned by Raman Patel and Dashrat Patel, using close aides of Sohrabuddin with the purpose of lodging FIR against Sohrabuddin in Gujarat, the chargesheet said.

The firing was done under the pretext of a dispute between one Manilal Goshar and the Patel brothers, it added.

The chargesheet says that after Sohrabuddin was killed on November 26, 2005, the Patel brothers were arrested by another accused in the case D G Vanzara, then DIG ATS, at the instance of Shah.

“Rs 60 lakh was extorted from them (Patel brothers) by Vanzara by threatening them and their family with dire consequences,” the chargesheet said.

‘Further, Amit Shah caused threats of preventive detention under the Prevention of Anti Social Activities Act (PASA) and demanded Rs 90 lakh from the two brothers through his close associate Ajay Patel (an absconding accused) who is the Chairman of ADC bank,” it said.

“In the bargain, the Patel brothers paid Rs 70 lakh in three instalments to Shah through Patel in May 2006,” it added.

After receipt of money, the said proposal under PASA was not pursued,” the chargesheet said.

The Gujarat police had made owners of the Popular Builders as the accused in the case of firing apart from Tulsi Prajapati and Sylvestor, associates of Sohrabuddin, who had actually opened fire in the builder’s office, it said.

“The motive of implicating them was merely to extort money from both the Patel brothers at the behest of Shah, Vanzara and Chudasama and to create criminal background of Sohrabuddin in Gujarat for likely future action against him,” the chargesheet said.

“Investigation disclosed that such type of modus operandi was used by the political functionaries in connivance with the police officers in Gujarat state against criminals and their gang,” it added.

The case against the Patel brothers was initially registered at Navrangpura police station but was then transferred to the Ahmedabad crime branch because Vanzara was the SP there. Later, when Vanzara was transferred to ATS, he got the case transferred to ATS.

“In a nutshell, the case file travelled along with Vanzara wherever he was posted for reasons best known to him,” the chargesheet said.

Private airliner Air Blue-operated Airbus A-321, flying from Turkey to Islamabad via Karachi, crashed into the heavily forested Margalla Hills overlooking Islamabad in rain. Police and officials fear a large casualty figure. PTI

‘Its engines stopped working, then it crashed and split into two halves. ‘Europe’s biggest cargo carrier said it was sending a team of experts to Riyadh to help investigate the cause of the crash.

An unnamed airport official said the plane veered off a runway on landing: ‘It did not stop until the Royal Terminal runway. Soon after smoke started to emerge, followed by a fire. ‘It took civil defence workers about three hours to contain the fire, he added.

Michael Goentgens, a spokesman for Lufthansa’s cargo division in Germany, said the cargo plane had started out in Frankfurt. Mr Goentgens confirmed it had an accident while trying to land at the airport in Riyadh, but he declined to comment on the cause. 

He also confirmed the two pilots aboard Flight 8460, which was carrying about 90 tons of unspecified cargo, were injured.

There is no word as yet on the exact cause of the  crash, but the MD-11 is regarded as having a poor safety record. 

Several MD-11s have crashed since the model was first introduced in 1990, resulting in over 200 fatalities.

The test event, National Federation Cup, was held to demonstrate that the swimming complex was games-ready. Instead, it looked far from ready. Loose tiles, loose grills, protruding iron rods, unfinished staircases and tonnes of rubbish outside told a sad story of unpreparedness, and worse, a slapdash attitude towards an event that’s billed to raise India’s international prestige, but could easily end up as an embarrassment.  

Worried experts lamented the lack of seriousness about the ongoing work with many of them saying that things could still be salvaged if the finishing work is taken up on a war-footing. They were looking for political intervention from the highest level. “We just can’t allow the Games to fail,” said one of them. As if the slippages in the Games stadia weren’t bad enough, the ongoing civil Games-related works have also come under critical scrutiny. The central vigilance commissioner Pratyush Sinha was quoted by an agency as saying that the CVC was examining all construction work following complaints of large-scale corruption.  

“Apart from expeditiously attending to complaints relating to the Games, the CVC, through its chief technical examiner’s wing, is keeping a close watch on all the contracts and works undertaken for the Games,” Sinha was quoted as saying. Coming back to the accident at the swimming complex, a young swimmer from West Bengal narrowly escaped serious injury after tripping over a loose plastic grill at the side of the diving pool on the opening day of a test event for the Commonwealth Games at the swimming complex.  

The swimmer was caught unawares by the loose grill, meant for draining water at the poolside, as she stepped out of the pool after practice and fell near one of the diving boards. Sheepish officials immediately rushed in to refit the grills. Officials of Sports Authority of India, sought to dismiss the incident as “non-serious”. “Such things can happen in any pool in the world. Grills are usually loosely-fitted. She put her foot in such a manner that it slipped. Anyway, we will check these grills again,” said a senior SAI official.  

The official’s casual attitude towards the accident is hardly likely to increase the confidence level among athletes world-wide who have already been fed by the global media on India’s poor organizing abilities in sports. It’s not even a fortnight since the sports ministry threw open the state-of-the-art swimming complex for the Games but the big claims of the pool being ready and up-to-date in time seem hollow. Meanwhile, a Swimming Federation of India (SFI) official agreed that the complex was far from ready. “The pool is ready but the finishing work is still on. All this is likely to take a long time,” the official said speaking on condition of anonymity.  

Due to the lack of facilities a diving event had to be rescheduled to the last day. “The high board diving event might be even called off if the requirements are not met,” the official added. Some swimmers complained that the changing rooms are still under construction as all swimmers were made to use the changing room meant for divers.  

The scoreboard was also not put up as the touch pad and lines were not in place. To this the SFI official replied, “The Omega (scoreboard) people are here and everything is ready from our side.” When asked for an opinion on the pool, another swimmer drew attention to sharp-edged material lying near the warm-up pool. This, he said, could hurt the swimmers. Sarah, a South African national, also the physiotherapist with the Indian swimming team said that the pool was good but a “lot of work needs to be done outside the pool area.” 

Meanwhile, the swanky 60,000-capacity JNS, venue for opening and closing ceremonies, and athletics events, was inaugurated by the sports minister M S Gill in the presence of Delhi CM Sheila Dikshit and CWG organising committee (OC) president Suresh Kalmadi on Tuesday afternoon.