Charlottesville-based SNL Financial has an office in Islamabad, Pakistan, with about 120 employees, most of whom live in Rawalpindi, the city where Benazir Bhutto was shot and 20 of her followers killed when a suicide bomber blew himself up Thursday, December 27.

“There’s always some concern when there’s this kind of national trauma,” says SNL chairman and founder Reid Nagle of his company’s Pakistan operations.

“It’s like the lull before the storm,” says Saad Khatri, SNL’s mergers and acquisitions manager, who spoke to the Hook from Islamabad. Bonfires and clashes followed the assassination, but SNL employees got home safely, he says.

The majority of employees came to work today, but with gas stations closed and public transportation not running, he expected fewer to show up for the night shift. “It’s hard to push people to work in the evening when safety is affected,” he says.

The situation is worse in the southern part of Pakistan, where Bhutto drew more of her support and where Khatri’s family lives. “My family said more shops had been burned,” he says. Born and raised in Karachi, Khatri, 25, attended the same private school that Bhutto did.

“It’s a huge shock,” he says, particularly for Pakistanis who had a more liberal, western education, such as himself and the director of SNL Pakistan, UVA grad Muneeb Idrees. (more)

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Three months after the state supreme court tossed out a challenge by neighbors and five days before Christmas, Virginia’s first proposed wind farm cleared what may have been its final regulatory hurdle, as the State Corporation Commission granted a certificate of public convenience to the 20-turbine, 39-megawatt, wind farm proposed in an ecologically sensitive forest in the Allegheny Mountains.

The approval for the project by Highland New Wind LLC comes with strings attached in the form of a commitment by the developer to allow officials with the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries to monitor the site for dead birds and bats since the tips of the jumbo-jet-sized blades can whirl at speeds of 91 to 184 miles per hour.

Wind energy as a so-called “green” energy source has split the venerable Sierra Club which, according to wind opponents, has branded the concept of (more)

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December was a bad month for birthdays– at least if you wanted birthday greetings posted on the sign at All American Car Wash on Long Street. Since 1980, the Tiger Fuel-owned All American has wished locals happy birthday and given them their 15 seconds of fame.

And then one day, nothing. The sign disappeared, leading to speculation the car wash was being sold or torn down.

The answer, my friend, was blowing in the wind, or more precisely, “The wind blew that sucker down,” says George Shore, who took charge of changing the birthdays every day during the week. The wind “snapped” the old sign off at least three, if not four weeks ago, says Shore. “I’m glad I wasn’t up on the ladder when it happened.”

Shore has a new sign ordered, and it should be up around the beginning of the year. “As soon as I’ve got it up, I’ve got birthdays,” says Shore, who estimates he’s had between 60 and 70 calls since the sign went down.

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Despite strong objections from local preservationists as well as from City Council, who denied additional bond financing to the Jefferson Scholars Foundation because they were not satisfied with efforts to consider preserving the Compton House (a.ka. Beta House), the Eugene Bradbury-designed private residence and fraternity house was reduced to a pile of rubble today.

To see recent photos of Beta House before the demo, click here.

From the start, the Jefferson Scholars seemed to show little interest in preserving the building at 124 Maury Avenue, despite repeated efforts from preservation activists like architectural historian Daniel Bluestone, who says he tried a number of times to contact Foundation president James Wright to encourage him to preserve the house. Bluestone says Wright never responded.

“We are not, as a foundation, in the business of historic preservation,” Wright told City Council members at a September 17 meeting. Wright– who, according to several Council members, appeared physically agitated by Council’s decision to block the requested financing– said then that the Foundation had not decided what to do with the building.

“It’s definitely a significant historic structure,” Mayor David Brown later told the Hook, “and we want to know what they plan to do before we approve the bond issue.” (more)

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WINA radio reported an interview today with Charlottesville Commonwealth’s Attorney Dave Chapman in which Chapman announced, as Police Chief Timothy Longo suggested in a memo, that the police effort to snare an injured pedestrian cannot go forward because the technology doesn’t fit the alleged crime. In this case, the alleged crime was riding a wheelchair through a crosswalk against the universal red-hand don’t walk signal. The case has attracted outrage for a variety of reasons: that the man in question was hit by police cruiser from another jurisdiction, that the allegedly inattentive police officer wasn’t ticketed, and that, despite a passel of officers on the scene, police failed to interview witnesses, instead focusing their efforts on delivering a ticket in a hospital to AIDS-wracked, wheelchair-bound artist.

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A memo sent by the Charlottesville Police chief to reassure City leaders about an accident that injured a wheelchair-bound pedestrian reveals that his department, which controversially issued a jaywalking ticket to the victim, ignored two witnesses. And that leaves one of them “outraged.”

On November 5, Ben Gathright watched in horror as an Albemarle police officer drove his cruiser into artist Gerry Mitchell at the corner of West Main and Fourth streets. The wheelchair-bound Mitchell, a long-time AIDS victim, subsequently experienced renal failure and is suffering from arm injuries incurred in the incident.

Hours after the accident, a Charlottesville police officer arrived in the University of Virginia Hospital emergency room and served Mitchell with a jaywalking ticket, which some have branded a brother-in-blue defensive move to stave off litigation.

A little over a month later, on December 12, Charlottesville Police Chief Timothy Longo sent a memo to City Council defending his department’s decisions and alleging that there were “no witnesses” to the accident. Indeed, police never (more)

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Gene Meeks and his son, Steve, have been putting up lights at their Crozet-area house since 1994. The family nails a donation box to a tree for the thousands of people who come to Meeks’ Run to see the lights every year to show their appreciation and help local charities.

Late Saturday night, December 15, after they’d turned off their famed annual display, which was written up last week in the Hook, someone came by and cut the lock on the donation box.

“It looks to me like it was cut with a hack saw or a bolt cutter,” Gene Meeks says.

The robber may have thought he was just stealing from the Meeks family, but it’s (more)

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Former UVA basketball coach and athletic director Terry Holland finds himself embroiled in a minor controversy at his current job as AD at East Carolina University. The Greenville, North Carolina, Daily Reflector reports that a November university audit found that, while he didn’t violate ECU policy, Holland made “inappropriate” use of athletic department funds by employing and providing financial aid to “a relative,” reportedly his younger brother Jonathan Gregg Holland, a 51-year-old business major at the school.

On December 5, the elder Holland sent a check for $25,000– roughly the amount he had paid his brother– to ECU chancellor Steve Ballard, along with a letter stating, “It is not my desire to defend my decision, but I do believe our Pirate faithful has always depended on me to be open and frank with them in good times and bad times, even though there are many who disagree with me on specific issues.”

Holland reportedly employed his brother as part of the athletic department’s facilities staff. From the fall of 2006 until September 30, 2007, the younger Holland (more)

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Three weeks after Richard Silva and Blair Austin were acquitted of charges relating to their September 29 encounter with a Charlottesville police officer in a downtown crosswalk, a 911 call made by a witness has been released.

The call was initially withheld because it was part of both the ongoing case against Silva and Austin (pictured right with her attorney David Heilberg) and also the internal police investigation into Flaherty’s behavior that night. Silva and Austin were both cleared of public intoxication charges on November 29 in Charlottesville District Court. Austin was also cleared of a second charge for obstructing justice, though Judge Bob Downer suggested he believed Flaherty’s account.

Does the release of the tape mean the internal investigation has also concluded? Charlottesville Police Chief Tim Longo did not immediately return the Hook’s call.

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In the wake of two recent incidents in which wheelchair pedestrians were hit in city crosswalks and then ticketed, City officials are finally speaking out.

On Monday afternoon, Charlottesville Police Chief Timothy Longo spoke publicly about the cases, and apologized for the first time to victims Gerry Mitchell and Deborah Hamlin. A few hours later during the public comment segment at the city council meeting, several community members expressed their outrage about the incidents, while Mitchell, who was struck by an Albemarle police cruiser on November 5, announced Charlottesville “has a problem with the police not respecting the rights of the citizens.” He received a standing ovation from the near-capacity crowd.

Pedestrian activist Kevin Cox demanded (more)

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Drink up now, Charlottesville, so you can say you drank it when. Crozet-based Starr Hill Brewery announced today that the company has reached a distribution deal with megabrewer Anheuser-Busch to distribute Starr Hill’s microbrewed suds across the mid-Atlantic region starting in 2011, with plans to go national as early as 2013.

“We want to follow the model of breweries like Sierra Nevada, Widmer, and Red Hook to become the next great national beer,” says Starr Hill founder and president Mark Thompson. “Anheuser-Busch is the best distribution network anywhere, so the sky’s the limit.”

The deal means a definite increase in volume for the eight-year old brewery which got its start at the defunct Starr Hill Music Hall and counts music mogul Coran Capshaw among its backers. Yet, Thompson says the brewery has no plans to (more)

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Sixteen months after he was arrested in a Briarwood townhouse for the crime, yesterday Douglas Michael “Beefy” Brown Jr. was found not guilty of murder in Colonial Heights Circuit Court for his role in the death of a police officer, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports. On August 12, 2006, Chesterfield County police were in a 110mph pursuit of the Barboursville man when one police cruiser crashed into the car of off-duty Colonial Heights police Lt. James Sears. Judge Herbert C. Gill decided to convict Brown of involuntary manslaughter, saying that however tragic Sears’ death was, it was not a direct result of Brown’s reckless driving, and it was “merely a coincidence.” Gill also found Brown guilty of felony counts of eluding police, hit-and-run driving, and being a habitual traffic offender, all of which add up to a maximum of 30 years in prison.

Brown is familiar to local law enforcement. In 2003, while in Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail awaiting trial on charges of methadone possession and grand larceny, Brown attempted to stab a corrections officer through his cell bars with the axle he had broken off a restraining chair. According to the incident report, he subsequently threw urine, feces and other pieces of the chair at the officer.

On March 22, 2003, with the additional charge of assault of a law enforcement officer, visiting judge David Berry sentenced Brown to 16 years, with all but 3-1/2 years suspended, plus two years’ probation.

Brown walked on May 18, 2005, only to be back in court on April 5, 2006 for violating his probation and for possession of marijuana and cocaine. But instead of reinstating Brown’s suspended sentence, then-presiding judge Paul “Mac” Peatross revoked 12 years of the suspended sentence, suspended the remaining six months, and ordered Brown to the Boxwood Rehabilitation Center in Culpeper.

On June 13, 2006, two days after completing the two-week program at Boxwood, Brown reported to his probation officer. This was the last Albemarle authorities heard from Brown, as he missed his next three probation meetings, the last scheduled for August 9, three days before his chase with Chesterfield police.

Brown’s sentencing is scheduled for Tuesday, March 11.

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Heeeeee’s baaaaack! After a nearly three-year absence touring all over the U.S. and the U.K., Charlottesville-based performance artist Stevie Jay and his one-man show, Life, Love, Sex, Death and Other Works in Progress, returns to Gravity Lounge this week for a two-night stand.

“Walking around Charlottesville, people stop me everyday and ask, ‘When are you doing the show again?’” he says. “I’ve been doing this show nine years. I’ve seen people walk in with skateboards and walkers in the same audience, and people still walk up to me and quote lines they heard way back then.”

Using humor to tackle complex issues of everyday life, Stevie Jay says his “multi-chakra extravaganza” was born out of a disturbing trend he noticed almost a decade ago.

“People just stopped caring. Whether you’re talking about global warming or war, the first thing you have to do is make people care,” he says. “The catch-22 is how do you get people to care about not caring?”

To that end, Stevie Jay says (more)

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