New Years Eve: Sunday 31st December 2006: -

• After a sinister year, it's down to us to protect our freedoms: In 2007, we should demand that MPs of all parties fight to restore the liberties which have been stolen by this government - An article in the New Scientist has reported that a rhesus monkey named Murph and a bottlenose dolphin called Natua, which lives in a harbour in Florida, have both exhibited a fascinating ability when doing reward-based tests. As well as being able to understand when they answered right or wrong, they learned to signal when they didn't know something and so avoid the disappointment of being wrong. Like Mastermind contestants, they elected to 'pass'. Knowing what you don't know is a type of abstract thought process called metacognition. A pigeon doesn't know what it doesn't know, but Murph and Natua do and that means they are both very intelligent and have a basic requirement for consciousness. It occurred to me that during 2006, most of us have been exhibiting precisely the opposite to Murph and Natua's talent. We don't know what we know. Or, rather, we chose not to know the incontestable and unequivocal truth about the character of this government. Certainly, we know about the sale of peerages, the scandal over the manipulation of legal advice and intelligence before the Iraq war, the constant move to centralise power and authority at the expense of ordinary people and the associated contempt for parliamentary scrutiny.

• Restore habeas rights - Earlier this month, a federal judge tossed out the case of Guantanamo Bay detainee Salim Ahmed Hamdan, citing the Military Commissions Act that Congress approved last September. This ghastly law gives the president unlimited authority to interrogate and detain captured enemy combatants and strips detainees of habeas corpus rights. Senate Democrats should use their newfound power to repeal this tyrannical law. It has done such grave damage to the Constitution and to this nation's credibility on human rights issues that it rivals the Alien and Sedition Acts as a low point of American democracy. In the wake of the Nov. 7 elections which shifted control of Congress to the Democrats, lawmakers should waste no time in revisiting this retrograde law, which violates the most sacred American values and runs the Constitution through a paper shredder.

• AUSTRALIA: Big Brother to keep eye on New Year's Eve trouble spots - A SOPHISTICATED closed-circuit television TV surveillance centre will be operating over New Year's Eve to monitor revellers in The Rocks for the first time - 10 years after a study identified it as a notorious December 31 crime hot spot. Planning Minister Frank Sartor predicts more than 100,000 people will crowd into the historic district tonight and said the remote security camera system will have 14 cameras set up at key points. "Rangers and police can also be quickly dispatched to specific locations to deal with any incidents caught on camera," Mr Sartor said. A 1997 study by the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research identified George Street in The Rocks as one of Sydney's top five "hot spots" for robberies and assaults. An assault occurred almost every day in the area. At least 23 per cent of the attacks occurred near a pub.

• Pesticide effects database released - The Eureka-based Californians for Alternatives to Toxics has unveiled on its Web site an assembled database of hundreds of scientific studies and research documents related to the harmful effects of pesticides and herbicides on amphibians and reptiles. CAT Executive Director Patty Clary said the database project began about six years ago when a CAT member in the Southern Humboldt County area alerted the group that swimming holes in several local rivers and creeks were no longer populated by frogs where frogs had always been observed. “This was a very frightening situation,” Clary said.

• Reopen 9/11 investigation, local group says - A Burlington group has gathered nearly enough signatures on a petition to put a ballot question before voters on Town Meeting Day urging a new investigation of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. Spokesman Marc Estrin, a Burlington writer and musician, said the group has been meeting for several months and has more than 1,200 of the roughly 1,350 signatures needed to place the matter on the ballot. The question would advise the Vermont congressional delegation to demand a new 9/11 investigation.   (RELATED: See our 9/11 archive and our affiliated site 911truthskipton.com) 

  

• Radio tagging of ads raises privacy issues - Stores in central Tokyo are set to beam news of special offers, menus and coupons to passers-by in a trial run of a radio-tagging system. The Tokyo Ubiquitous Network Project, which launches in the glitzy Ginza district n ext month, sends shoppers information from nearby shops via a network of radio-frequency identification tags, infrared and wireless transmitters, according to the project's Web site. Shoppers can either rent a prototype reader or get messages on their cell phones. The tags and transmitters identify a reader or phone's location and match it to information provided by shops. RFID uses a tiny computer chip to store data, which are transmitted wirelessly by a tiny antenna to a receiver - in this case, the reader or the phone. The technology has raised concerns about the erosion of privacy in society.

• Madrid bomb ends plan for talks - A car bomb exploded at Madrid's international airport yesterday and Spain's government, blaming the Basque group ETA, ended plans for peace talks with the separatists. The blast left two people missing - Ecuadorans who were believed to have been sleeping in their parked car - and 26 injured, most with damage to their ears from the shock wave. Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said the government would halt talks with ETA, a Basque acronym "Basque Homeland and Liberty", which had agreed to stop attacks in a cease-fire declaration in March that was seen as the greatest hope of a peaceful end to a conflict that has raged for a decade.

Saturday 30th December 2006: -

• Scarlett, author of the Iraq war dossier, is knighted - John Scarlett, who took responsibility for the error-ridden dossier that justified the war in Iraq, is knighted in today's New Year's Honours list. The award will enrage peace campaigners, who have accused the veteran spymaster of saving Tony Blair's skin over the flawed case for the invasion. The news came as a British soldier was killed by a roadside bomb in Basra yesterday, the 127th to die since the invasion in 2003. Sir John, the head of MI6, played a key role in the Hutton Inquiry hearings into the death of the weapons expert David Kelly, three years ago. He steadfastly defended the dossier, which contained the notorious claim that Iraq could launch weapons of mass destruction in 45 minutes. And he dismissed accusations he had bowed to pressure to "sex up" the document's conclusions.

• Bomb blast at Madrid airport terminal used by Gibraltar flights - There was a bomb blast early this morning in Madrid airport, in the parking area in the terminal used by Iberia for its Gibraltar flights. There was a previous call warning of the car bomb, with another called later saying that ETA was behind the blast. Spanish police had cordoned off the area before the blast which was said to have prevented serious consequences for passengers and others using Terminal 4. Spanish official sources said that a van had exploded. Madrid was put on alert. Police, ambulances and fire brigade raced to the airport from shortly after 9am. Some injured persons were reported. There was traffic chaos, with access to the airport halted. Passengers were being kept in arriving aircraft, said early reports. Departing flights were also affected. There is a daily flight from Madrid to Gibraltar at noon.

• X-Ray Tests Both Security and Privacy - The modifications made for the TSA "trade off detection for a level of privacy," Richard Mastronardi, a company vice president, told an aviation security conference in November. When the machine is programmed to maximize privacy protection, "you start to lose the ability to see" plastic explosives. Scientists have struggled for four years to build what seemed impossible: an airport X-ray machine that can look through clothing to spot hidden weapons without producing explicit photos of a passenger's body. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) will start testing such a device next month in Phoenix. It is the first new passenger-screening machine deployed since mid-2004.

• identiMetrics’ Finger Scanning ID Platform Selected By Focal Tech’s School Lunch Software System, LunchTime® – identiMetrics, a recognized leader in the development and marketing of biometric finger scanning identification solutions, has been selected by Focal Tech to incorporate their proprietary software, identiFi™, into Focal Tech’s School Lunch Software System, LunchTime® Focal Tech, Inc., School Lunch Software experts, headquartered in State College, PA, has been a leading provider of IT and e-Business software solutions since 2001. Their LunchTime® School Lunch Software System is marketed successfully in schools nationwide. LunchTime® allows for an automatic import of existing student information, is used for Federal and State Reimbursement Tracking reports, allows parents to view all purchases and fund accounts online in real time, and improves lunch line efficiency.

• Execution of a subdued Saddam was quick-witnesses - A subdued Saddam Hussein was led shackled into a hall early on Saturday in Baghdad, a noose was placed around his neck and a guard pulled a lever that swiftly ended his life and a chapter of Iraq's history. Sami al-Askari, a prominent Shi'ite politician close to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, witnessed the event and told Reuters the process of Saddam's execution lasted about 25 minutes but once he was dropped through a trap door his death was very quick. "One of the guards pulled a lever and he dropped half a meter into a trap door. We heard his neck snap instantly and we even saw a small amount of blood around the rope," Askari told Reuters.

• CNN: Is GOP Rep. 'fueling' Oklahoma City bombing conspiracy theories? - Earlier today, during an interview on CNN, the Republican chairman of the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of the House International Relations Committee -- which just released a report rebuking the FBI on its investigation of the 1999 Oklahoma City bombing -- was asked if he was helping to "fuel conspiracy theories." American Morning's Miles O'Brien told outgoing Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, (R-CA) that he had "raised a lot of questions that are just kind of 'out there' in the conspiracy theorist world." O'Brien mentioned different theories relating to Middle East terrorists, Iraqi officials, neo-Nazi bankrobbers, and the alleged John Doe #2. "Doesn't this just add more fuel to those conspiracy theories?" O'Brien wondered. "Well there's nothing wrong to adding to a conspiracy theory when there might be a conspiracy, in fact," Rohrabacher responded.

Friday 29th December 2006: -

• National eye scan database grows - Twenty-six states are participating in an eye-scanning project that helps identify missing children or adults afflicted with memory loss. Nationwide, an effort is under way to image irises of 5 million children into a database over the next few years, the Houston Chronicle said Friday. Sheriff's departments, including the Galveston County (Texas) Sheriff's Department in Texas, in 46 states have committed to the project. The system can scan an eye and match an iris in about five seconds after comparing it with stored images, Biometric Intelligence & Identification President Sean Mullin said. Children with an iris scan in the system cannot be identified unless they are in a county that has the Children's Identification Database Project equipment.   (QUESTION: Ask yourself this... this program is for children, not a database to catalogue everybody.  So what happens when these children become adults?  We are being told that the data will be 'removed' (deleted or moved somewhere else?) but as the noose of the police state tightens and the control grid expands can we honestly say at this stage that the information will not be used ad a building block for the New World Order)

• Child abuse in the information age: In today’s climate, the nature of sex crimes involving children is changing because the nature of childhood itself is changing. Information technology may be the single largest factor to account for this change - In September 2002 the parents of an 11-year-old British girl had a microchip implanted into her arm, as the result of widespread panic following the tragic abduction and murder of two girls in Cambridgeshire. The chip would send a signal via a mobile phone network that could be located at any time. Some object that this surveillance is too extreme, but several years down the line companies have learned to exploit this fear among parents by marketing child-friendly mobile phones outfitted with Global Positioning System (GPS) technology to let parents monitor their children's whereabouts and censor obscene content.

• ID card project branded rudderless - LOCAL campaigners against the government's controversial ID cards scheme say radical changes to identity database plans show that the Home Office has no idea how to implement the multi-billion pound scheme. The government has abandoned plans to build a new computer system for the national identity cards scheme, despite three previous years of announcements that a new "clean" database is essential for ID cards. Instead, sensitive personal identity details will be held on three separate existing databases, adding to fears about security.

• Bradford council leader calls on Government to abort ID card plans - Hopkins The leader of Bradford Council has urged the Government to abort plans to introduce national identity cards and instead divert a significant share of the funding towards improving Yorkshire's transport network. Kris Hopkins said he believed ID cards would prove to be "an enormous waste of money, particularly given the lack of evidence to suggest they will assist in the fight against terrorism or illegal working". He said: "The Home Office has already admitted the scheme will cost at least £5.4bn to set up and administer over the next ten years.

• Sheehan, protesters arrested at Bush ranch - Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan and four other protesters have been arrested in Texas for blocking a road near President Bush's ranch. A state police spokesman said Sheehan and the others lay or sat in the road for about 20 minutes and refused requests to move. A spokesman for the Texas Department of Public of Safety said the demonstration briefly delayed state troopers who were to serve in escort motorcades for government officials meeting with Bush. A White House spokesman said no top advisors were held up.

• Paroxetine (Paxil or Paxil CR) can more than triple major cardiac birth defects: Roman Bystrianyk, "Paroxetine (Paxil or Paxil CR) can more than triple major cardiac birth defects", Health Sentinel, December 29, 2006 - Paroxetine, known by the brand names Paxil or Paxil CR in the United States, is a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, or SSRI, antidepressant. Paroxetine was introduced in 1992 by GlaxoSmithKline and has become one of the most prescribed antidepressants on the market. In fact, paroxetine is the third most prescribed antidepressant in the United States and the most prescribed antidepressant in Canada.

• Diocese sued for alleged abuse by priest - A former Marine and Vietnam veteran filed a lawsuit Thursday against the Roman Catholic Diocese of Wilmington and a church in the city, accusing them of doing nothing to stop a priest from sexually abusing him and other boys in the 1950s and 60s. The diocese has acknowledged that the Rev. Edward B. Carley, who died in 1998 at age 82, abused a young male parishioner during his time as the assistant pastor at St. Ann's Catholic Church, from 1954 to 1962.

Thursday 28th December 2006: -

• READING ARTICLES LIKE THIS MAKES ME NAUSEOUS... BUT HERE IT IS, PASS THE SICKBAG!: How parents can help find missing kids - When a child goes missing, nothing is more important to authorities than time. Responding to that need, an industry has grown around helping police identify youngsters more quickly if they are abducted, run away or are involved in an accident. Yet police say such newfangled products, some of which sell for up to $60, can be easily replicated by parents with relatively little trouble. "The technology employed by many of these companies is readily accessible to the general public," said Sgt. Stephen Jones of the New Jersey State Police. Those in the child-identification industry say their software can do what traditional wallet-sized ID cards cannot: Send vital information about a missing child -- including a description, photographs, online chat names and favorite Web sites – to authorities. Police can then issue alerts to fellow law enforcement agencies.

• LUCIFER WORSHIPPING FREEMASONS MONITORING CHILDREN FOR THEIR 'SAFETY', ALARM BELLS ARE RINGING!: Masonic lodges refreshing ranks - Only if you looked closely could you recognize that the small, innumerable symbols on Ray Dietz's tie were the Masonic logo. The same symbol -- a G enclosed by a compass and right angle, or square -- adorned his ring. That's about the extent that Dietz, 55, of Ross, boasts that he's a member of the Freemasons, a fraternal organization that long operated behind a veil of secrecy, or so was the perception. THE ARTICLE CONTINUES...Besides the Masonic Village at Sewickley, local Masons have spearheaded a child identification program in which they fingerprint, photograph and videotape children and give parents the identifying information on CDs at no cost. The information can be given to police if the child goes missing. More than 150,000 children have participated, Dietz said.   (RELATED: See our Freemasonry archive)

• Homeland Security apologizes to Muslim woman who was strip searched - The Homeland Security Department has apologized to a Muslim woman who was detained at the Tampa airport and strip searched at a county jail, the Associated Press writes. Safana Jawad, 45, a Spanish citizen who was born in Iraq, was detained on April 11 because authorities thought she might be connected to a suspicious person -- who those authorities have not identified. Jawad was held for two days before being deported to England. The Times says Jawad "had flown to the United States to visit her son, Hany Kubba, 16, who then lived in Clearwater with her ex-husband, Ahmad Maki Kubba." Jawad told the Times that once she was in the local jail, she was subjected not only to a strip search but to a full body cavity search.   (RELATED: See our Police State archive)

• F.D.A. Says Food From Cloned Animals Is Safe: But would you buy a used car from them? - After years of delay, the Food and Drug Administration tentatively concluded today that milk and meat from some cloned farm animals are safe to eat. That finding, hailed by cloning companies and some livestock producers but criticized by consumer groups, could make the United States the first country to allow products from cloned livestock to be sold in grocery stores. Even if the F.D.A.’s assessment is formally approved in a few months, though, it is unlikely that consumers will see steaks or pork chops from cloned animals at the local supermarket with any regularity. Industry officials estimate there are now only about 500 or 600 cloned cows in the United States, out of roughly 44 million beef and dairy cows. There are roughly 200 cloned pigs.

• Big Brother's watching you - BIG brother really is watching you - as I discovered on a short trip to the town centre. It has become a popular phrase following the introduction of reality TV shows such as Big Brother, but on a shopping trip in Ilford, I was constantly watched on no less than eight cameras. As British people are among the most monitored in the world, with a high number of CCTV cameras watching our every move, I put Redbridge CCTV to the test to find out how well they could keep tabs on me in a busy shopping area.

• Biometric security device: Panasonic offers a range of new office products, including the biometric access control and security device - Panasonic Asia Pacific Pte Ltd., (India Branch Office) brings its five-city exhibition WORKSPECTRUM 2006 to Delhi this week. Panasonic WORKSPECTRUM 2006 aims at displaying not just the technological innovation and prowess but also the product diversity that the brand has on offer when it comes to redefining workspaces through the best in office automation, communications, security and audio-visual solutions. Leveraging on this unique customer and channel interaction platform, Panasonic also announced the launch and availability of new products in India including the biometric access control and security device—the Iris Recognition Camera System (BM-ET330)—and a revolutionary electronic whiteboard called the Interactive Panaboard (UB-8325).

Wednesday 27th December 2006: -

• BRAINWASHING OF THE YOUTH: Pupils’ photo ID card idea sparks anger - CALLS to introduce photo identity cards to Scotland's secondary schools have sparked a row over civil liberties. The Scottish Secondary Teachers' Association insists a voluntary card scheme would help defeat bullies who steal and use pupils' free-meal cards. But Glasgow MSP Patrick Harvie has criticised the SSTA's proposals claiming the cards would do nothing to address the causes of bullying but teach young people an ID card-culture is "normal".

• High School To Start Random Breathalyzer Tests - Los Gatos High School plans to join a growing number of high schools that perform random breath alcohol tests on students at dances and other events. Principal Doug Ramezane said he would institute the new policy after winter break because several students were found to be under the influence of alcohol at football games, the school's Coronation Ball and even during class this year. "It isn't OK that any of these kids are doing it," Ramezane said. "It probably isn't going to eliminate the problem completely, but we want to minimize alcohol and drug use."   (RELATED: See our Police State archive)

• Kansas Students Speak Out Against Tasers in Schools: Where grade-school hallways are patrolled by cops, some officers tote controversial electro-shock weapons that have left kids terrified and, in one town, saying enough is enough - Even before a police officer shocked a 15-year-old special-education student with a Taser in the assistant principal’s office last month, youth at Witchita high schools were organizing against the controversial weapons. The police officers who act as security guards in Wichita’s middle and high schools began carrying Tasers – gun-shaped electro-shock weapons – at the beginning of this school year. Student activists from across the district say they are angry the weapons were introduced without their input and scared because of news reports about people dying after police shocked them with Tasers.

• Justice rolls out OneDOJ, a massive law enforcement database - The Justice Department is building a massive database that allows state and local police officers around the country to search millions of case files from the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and other federal law enforcement agencies, The Washington Post reports. "OneDOJ," as the system is known, holds approximately 1 million case records and will triple in size over the next three years, Justice officials said. The files include investigative reports, criminal-history information, details of offenses, and the names, addresses and other information of criminal suspects or targets, officials said.

• Plan to retain all DNA samples - Labour leaders have announced controversial proposals to allow the police to keep the DNA of all crime suspects - even if they are later proved innocent. The party wants to make fighting crime a key part of its manifesto for next year's Holyrood elections. And Justice Minister Cathy Jamieson argued that giving police the power to retain DNA samples and fingerprints of all suspects would help catch more criminals and protect the public.

• US ex-President Gerald Ford dies - Last month he became the longest-living US president when he reached 93 years and 122 days, passing the record held by Ronald Reagan. Mr Ford was never elected president. He took office after Richard Nixon resigned over the Watergate scandal in 1974 but lost to Jimmy Carter in 1976.

• Military Commissions Act rooted in Nazi torture - On June 12, 1942 the chief of the Nazi Security Police (the branch of the Waffen SS that included the Gestapo) ordered the use of “third degree” interrogation methods against “Communists, Marxists, Jehovah's Witnesses, saboteurs, terrorists, members of resistance movements ... [and] anti-social elements.” The order permitted the use of those methods where preliminary investigation revealed that the prisoner could give information on important facts such as subversive activities but not to extort confessions of the prisoner's own crimes.

• Pentagon to build military courts at camp - Although the Pentagon estimates that no more than 80 of the 400 or so terrorism detainees currently held at Guantanamo Bay will ever be brought to trial, it is moving forward with a proposal to build a $125 million legal complex. Air Force Col. Morris Davis, chief prosecutor of the suspected al-Qaida and Taliban supporters, says he expects to file charges against 10 to 20 prisoners soon after new rules for trying detainees are presented to Defense Secretary Robert Gates in mid-January. The Supreme Court in June found the Bush administration's military tribunal system unconstitutional, and Congress passed the Military Commission Act in September to replace it. But less than 20 percent of the prisoners held at the U.S. naval facility are expected to faces charges under the new commissions. "At the end of the day, I think the total will be about 75, give or take a few," Davis said.

• 1995 Oklahoma bombing probe flayed: Congressional report criticizes FBI on lingering questions - The FBI failed to fully investigate information suggesting other suspects may have helped Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols with the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, allowing questions to linger more than a decade after the deadly attack, a congressional inquiry concludes. The House International Relations investigative subcommittee will release the findings of its two-year-review as early as Wednesday, declaring there is no conclusive evidence of a foreign connection to the attack but that far too many questions remain.   (RELATED: See our Problem > Reaction > Solution archive for more background info)

Boxing Day: Tuesday 26th December 2006: -

• U.S. military deaths in Iraq pass 9/11 toll - The deaths of six more American soldiers in Iraq pushed the U.S. death toll to at least 2,978 -- five more than the number killed in the September 11 attacks -- as bombs killed more than 20 people in Baghdad on Tuesday. At least 89 U.S. soldiers have died so far this month, making it the deadliest this year after October's toll of 106, and adding pressure on President George W. Bush to find a strategy to extricate 135,000 U.S. troops from the messy war. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have died since the invasion in 2003 to topple Saddam Hussein, which Bush said was an integral part of the "war on terror" following the Sept 11, 2001, attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. U.S. officials say 2,973 people were killed in those attacks, excluding the 19 hijackers.

• Saddam loses death sentence appeal - An Iraqi appeals court on Tuesday upheld a ruling that Saddam Hussein should hang for crimes against humanity, Iraq's national security adviser told Reuters. Under the statute governing the Iraqi High Tribunal, the death sentence must be carried out within the next 30 days. The former Iraqi leader and two former aides were sentenced to death in November for crimes against humanity over the killings of 148 Shi'ites from the town of Dujail after he escaped assassination there in 1982. "The court just upheld the verdict and sentence," Iraq's national security adviser Mowaffaq al-Rubaie told Reuters.

• Project to tag Tokyo neighborhood with RFID: Will blanket Ginza shopping district - A location-based services trial that will see a famous Tokyo neighborhood blanketed with around 10,000 RFID (radio frequency identification) tags and other beacons got its start earlier this month. The Tokyo Ubiquitous Network Project seeks to install RFID, infrared and wireless transmitters throughout Tokyo's Ginza area, which is the most famous shopping area in the capital. The tags and transmitters will provide location-related information to people carrying prototype readers developed for the trial, said Ken Sakamura, a professor at The University of Tokyo and the leader of the project. The system works by matching a unique code sent out by each beacon with data stored on a server on the Internet. The data is obtained automatically by the terminal, which communicates back to the server via a wireless LAN connection and requests the data relevant to the beacon that is being picked up. Sakamura envisages the system will be able to provide users with basic navigation and information about the shops and stores in the area in at least four languages: Japanese, English, Chinese and Korean. For example, bringing the terminal close to an RFID tag on a street lamp will pinpoint the user's location and the system will be able to guide them to the nearest railway station while walking past a radio beacon in front of a shop might bring up details of current special offers or a menu for a restaurant.    (RELATED: See our Total Global Surveillance archive)

• VeriChip Corporation Signs 3-year, $750,000 Distribution Contract: iChip Corporation to distribute the full VeriChip product line in South Africa - Applied Digital Solutions, Inc. and its subsidiary, VeriChip Corporation ("VeriChip"), announced today that iChip Corporation has acquired the distribution rights for all VeriChip radio frequency identification (RFID) products in South Africa, including VeriMed for patient identification, Roam Alert for wander prevention, HUGS for infant protection, and ToolHound. The three-year agreement is valued at US$750,000 and represents the first international deployment for the patient identification and medical information system.

• Big Brother Eyes Your Car - In Britain, you won’t drive without being watched from the air. Cameras everywhere. You are going over the speed limit, you are watched immediately. You are driving without a license, you are caught. That’s the way it will be in Big Brother’s Overview, according to Mary Jordan of the Washington Post Foreign Service. Millions of vehicles will come under the surveillance eyes. Not one wheel will miss the eye scan. License plates are read. They are put into a national detail bank. Within a second or two, vehicles will be tabbed and marked. Is the car stolen? Is it wheeling cocaine? Is it on its way from a crime scene? It will all be marked and scrolled.

• AUSTRALIA: Your data private?: Access all areas is on the cards - The Minister for Human Services, Joe Hockey, wants to convince Australians that the most complex and expensive IT project in Australian history - his proposed Access Card - is all about our convenience. It will, Hockey boasts, replace 17 other cards: for example the Medicare card, veterans' gold card and pensioner concession card. Sounds great, but most people don't have 17 cards. They have just one: their Medicare card. For most of us this means replacing our Medicare card with a supercharged version chock-full of personal information.

Christmas Day: Monday 25th December 2006: -

...from the team behind cremationofcare.com

• Worship God, not technology, Pope says on Christmas - Pope Benedict said in his Christmas message on Monday that mankind, which has reached other planets and worships technology, cannot live without God or turn its back on the hungry. It was shameful that in "this age of plenty and unbridled consumerism" many remained deaf to the "heart-rending cry" of those dying of hunger, thirst, disease, poverty, war and terrorism. In his "Urbi et Orbi" (to the city and the world) message, he made a heartfelt appeal for peace and justice in the Middle East, an end to the "brutal violence" in Iraq and a solution to fratricidal conflicts in Darfur and other parts of Africa.

• James Brown dies aged 73 - James Brown, the dynamic, pompadoured "Godfather of Soul", whose rasping vocals and revolutionary rhythms made him a founder of rap, funk and disco, died today in Atlanta, aged 73. Brown, whose career spanned six decades, was taken to hospital yesterday with pneumonia, said his agent, Frank Copsidas, and died with longtime friend Charles Bobbit at his side. Brown’s music was a major influence on modern music, and his work has been sampled by rap artists from the 1980s to this day, his famous 1960s and 1970s break beats becoming the basis of hip hop.

• I WONDER IF THIS RITUAL (A COUPLE OF DAYS AGO) HAS ANY CONNECTION TO THE FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPT OF THE BIRTH OF CHRIST BEING CELEBRATED TODAY: Druids - and a wizard - celebrate solstice at Stonehenge - Pagans and druids assembled in the early morning mist for a celebration of the winter solstice at Stonehenge yesterday. Many were dressed in flowing robes in white or earth colours while one man came dressed as a wizard. A pagan wedding ceremony was conducted amid the stones. Experts are divided as to whether the prehistoric stone monument was put up to mark the winter solstice or or the summer solstice, which usually draws a bigger crowd.   (RELATED: See our archive Illuminati Symbolism: The Sun of God for background info)

• £1,000 fine for failing to update identity cards - A draconian regime of fines, which would hit families at times of marriage and death, is being drawn up by ministers to enforce the Identity Card scheme. Millions of people, from struggling students to newly-wed women and bereaved relatives, will face a system of penalties, netting more than £40 million for the Treasury. People would be fined up to £1,000 for failing to return a dead relative's ID card, while women who marry will have to pay at least £30 for a new card if they want to use their married name, risking a £1,000 fine if they do not comply.

• Can antidepressants make some people suicidal? - Can antidepressants really drive some people to commit suicide? That is a question the Food and Drug Administration has had to wrestle with for nearly two decades. For most of that time, the agency has insisted that SSRI-type antidepressants such as Prozac or Paxil are lifesavers that prevent suicide. When someone taking one of these medications considered or committed suicide, this tragedy was frequently explained as the result of the underlying illness, not the medicine. After years of denying any link, however, a panel of experts assembled by the FDA has recommended a warning be added to the official label. It will alert physicians and patients that the risk of suicide is almost twice as high among young adults taking such medicines.   (RELATED: See our Compromised Health archive)

Christmas Eve: Sunday 24th December 2006: -

• Department of Homeland Security violated privacy - The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) admitted it violated the Privacy Act two years ago by obtaining more commercial data about US airline passengers than it had announced it would. Seventeen months ago, the government accountability office (GAO), Congress' auditing arm, reached the same conclusion -- the department's transportation security administration (TSA) "did not fully disclose to the public its use of personal information in its fall 2004 privacy notices as required by the Privacy Act."

• THE SCHMUCK OF THE IRISH: Bono receives honorary knighthood - Irish rock star and rights campaigner Bono has been awarded an honorary knighthood, the British Embassy in Dublin said on Saturday. "Her Majesty The Queen has appointed Bono to be an honorary Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in recognition of his services to the music industry and for his humanitarian work," the embassy said in a statement. Fellow Irish rocker Bob Geldof, also a high-profile rights campaigner, received the same award in 1986. Honorary knighthoods are awarded to non-British nationals. A statement on the U2 Web site (www.u2.com) said Bono was "very flattered to be honoured, particularly if the honour ... opens doors for his long standing campaigning work against extreme poverty in Africa."

• 2001 Anthrax Attacks on U.S. Congress Were Inside Job - The perpetrator of the 2001 anthrax attack on Congress likely was a government scientist employed at the Army's Ft. Detrick, Md., bioterrorism lab having access to a "moonsuit" that made it possible to safely process and manufacture super-weapons-grade anthrax, a bioterrorism authority says. Although only a "handful" of scientists had the ability to perpetrate the crime, the culprit, or culprits, among them may never be identified as the FBI ordered the destruction of the anthrax culture collection at Ames, Ia., from which the Ft. Detrick lab got its pathogens, the authority said.   (RELATED: See our Problem > Reaction > Solution archive for more background info)

• FBI Releases John Lennon Surveillance Documents - The final pages of US government documents detailing John Lennon's left-wing activities in the early 1970s have been released following a 25 year legal battle. Historian Jon Wiener first asked for the Federal Bureau Of Investigation (FBI) surveillance report on Lennon in 1981, just months after the former Beatle was murdered in December 1980, to aid his book Come Together: John Lennon In His Time.

• TREADING ON OLD GROUND AGAIN YET THEY CALL IT AN 'EXCLUSIVE' STORY: Found: The mystery white Fiat Uno driver in Diana death crash - The father of a man who was driving a white Fiat Uno in Paris the night Princess Diana was killed has sensationally admitted his son had the car painted red just hours after the fatal crash and revealed his suspicions that his son was involved. Le Van Thanh was questioned by French detectives in 1997 after forensic experts established the white paint on his car matched that found on the wreckage of the Mercedes Diana was travelling in.

Friday 22nd December 2006: -

• Australia: City under terror watch - UNMANNED closed-circuit television camera spy planes and trucks with hidden cameras are among options canvassed in a top secret report into security coverage in Adelaide. The report, considered by a top-level State Government and Adelaide City Council committee, is part of Premier Mike Rann's post-London bombing plan to improve CCTV coverage in the city centre. One Capital City Committee member, who wished to remain anonymous, said the report included options for "more coverage and different ways of surveillance, like trucks and unmanned planes and so on". "It was an enormous report and the dollars being talked about to fund it was amazing," the committee member said. "You'd think we were terrorist target No. 1."   (RELATED: See our Total Global Surveillance archive)

• George Orwell Was Right: Spy Cameras See Britons' Every Move - It's Saturday night in Middlesbrough, England, and drunken university students are celebrating the start of the school year, known as Freshers' Week. One picks up a traffic cone and runs down the street. Suddenly, a disembodied voice booms out from above: ``You in the black jacket! Yes, you! Put it back!'' The confused student obeys as his friends look bewildered. ``People are shocked when they hear the cameras talk, but when they see everyone else looking at them, they feel a twinge of conscience and comply,'' said Mike Clark, a spokesman for Middlesbrough Council who recounted the incident. The city has placed speakers in its cameras, allowing operators to chastise miscreants who drop coffee cups, ride bicycles too fast or fight outside bars. Almost 70 years after George Orwell created the all-seeing dictator Big Brother in the novel ``1984,'' Britons are being watched as never before. About 4.2 million spy cameras film each citizen 300 times a day, and police have built the world's largest DNA database. Prime Minister Tony Blair said all Britons should carry biometric identification cards to help fight the war on terror.

• North American Union leader says merger just crisis away: Leading intellectual force behind effort toward EU-style unity looks at future - Robert Pastor, a leading intellectual force in the move to create an EU-style North American Community, told WND he believes a new 9/11 crisis could be the catalyst to merge the U.S., Mexico and Canada. Pastor, a professor at American University, says that in such a case the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America, or SPP – launched in 2005 by the heads of the three countries at a summit in Waco, Texas – could be developed into a continental union, complete with a new currency, the amero, that would replace the U.S. dollar just as the euro has replaced the national currencies of Europe.

• US Digital Fingerprint Identification Systems Market to reach US$160 Million by 2010 - Systems for automatic identification of fingerprints are gaining momentum in US these days, and it’s expected that their sales will touch a mark of US$ 160 Million annually by the year 2010, indicate the govt. market researcher INPUT. On 5 December 2006, Motorola announced that it has won a contract by the govt. agencies of Norway. As part of the contract, Motorola will be in charge of providing 800 stations for biometric screening. According to INPUT, the governmental agencies of US will gradually move from mutual processing of fingerprint cards to the use of digital methods for automated identification of fingerprints. “This changeover marks the commencement of a true lifecycle oriented approach to public safety and justice automated fingerprint-identification systems (AFIS) that will include very few long term overhauls, more technological upgrades and refreshes every three-five years”, as per Chris Dixon – senior industry analyst at INPUT. The Norwegian identification system can identify people through an assortment of biometric data, plus the iris & face characteristics and through AFIS.

• THE NEXT STEP IN THE GAME OF TOTALITARIAN TIP-TOE: Germany To Add Fingerprints To Passports - Germany’s Cabinet said this week it would propose a new law requiring passports to store two fingerprint images starting in November 2007. Since 2005, Germany has been issuing passports with contactless smart card chips that store a digital photo of the bearer along with biographical information. The European Union has mandated that member states start adding fingerprint data to their passports by 2009, to provide a more reliable way to verify an individual’s identity.

• UK ID cards 'may still fail' - The government's ID card rethink is a step towards common sense--but the controversial plan still risks failure, according to academics. The London School of Economics (LSE) Identity Project has been a leading critic of the ID card project but the team said it welcomes the shift in the government's position. Dr Edgar A Whitley, the LSE team's research coordinator, said the new action plan represents a "total rethink" of the original plans that were proposed by the Home Office.

• More Communities Throw out Fluoridation - Legislators and officials are responding to newly published evidence of fluoride's adverse effects and rejecting fluoridation. This December, Juneau, Alaska and Martin County, Florida voted fluoride out of their drinking water. A Tennessee state legislator urged water companies to stop fluoridation. And the Vermont Department of Health sent a fluoridation warning to all Vermont dentists and pediatricians. December 19, Martin County, Florida commissioners reversed their 2002 fluoridation mandate. Commissioners said fluoride studies raised health doubts, and they werent convinced an oral health problem exists in their county.

• Gates, like Rumsfeld, promotes objectives of world government panel - After the Republicans suffered their election thumping, President Bush replaced Defense Secretary Rumsfeld with former CIA Director Robert Gates. So much for progress. Like Rumsfeld, Gates is a veteran member of the world government promoting Council on Foreign Relations. He supported attacking Iraq despite the fact that Bush's justifications were unsupportable. Gates also previously served on Bush's Iraq Study Group, headed by CFR veterans James Baker and Lee Hamilton. Since the 1940s, every U.S. secretary of Defense, State and Treasury, and hundreds of other high level federal appointees have been council members.

• University of Texas in San Antonio Gets New Beverages Machines With Cashless Card Readers - The University of Texas in San Antonio has introduced 20 new Pepsi machines equipped with cashless card readers in conjunction with the first price increase in two years, according to USTA Today, the college newspaper. After the vending operator notified the college there would be a price increase, the college negotiated to have cashless card readers. The 20 new Pepsi machines at the 1604 Campus accept payment by UTSACard or cash.   (RELATED: See our Cashless Society Control Grid archive)

• Holiday crisis as Bank of Ireland goes cashless - WITH Christmas just around the corner Bank of Ireland (BOI) customers in Britain have been told there’s no money at the inn. Most of the banks’ British branches have switched to cashless facilities just days before the biggest spending bonanza of the year. One family affected by the bank’s decision is the Roe family in Croydon. Mrs Roe said: “I just can’t believe they have done this. It is a major blow. My son Martin went to his BOI branch in Croydon on Monday to withdraw money and he was told he wouldn’t be able to. It’s very wrong. He has loads of money but he just can’t get his hands on it.”

Thursday 21st December 2006: -

• U.S. Marine charged with murder in Haditha deaths - The U.S. military charged a Marine squad leader with 13 counts of murder in the killings last year of unarmed civilians in Haditha, Iraq, one of the man's defense lawyers said on Thursday. The charges handed down against Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich carry a maximum penalty of life in prison, but do not include premeditated murder, said attorney Mark Zaid.  Wuterich led a squad at the center of the probe into the Nov. 19, 2005, shooting of 24 unarmed men, women and children in the western Iraqi town. It is one of a series of cases in which U.S. service members have been accused, and in some cases convicted, of involvement in killing civilians.

• AP: Pentagon wants $99.7B more for wars - The Pentagon wants the White House to seek an additional $99.7 billion to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to information provided to The Associated Press. The military's request, if embraced by President Bush and approved by Congress, would boost this year's budget for those wars to about $170 billion. Military planners assembled the proposal at a time when Bush is developing new strategies for Iraq, such as sending thousands of more U.S. troops there, although it was put together before the president said the troop surge was under consideration.

• U.S. study says teens increasingly turning to legal drugs to get high - Teens increasingly are getting high with legal drugs like painkillers and mood stimulants, and they're turning to cough syrup as well, says a government survey released Thursday. The annual study by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, conducted by the University of Michigan, showed mixed results in the country's longtime campaign against teen drug abuse. It found that while fewer teens overall drank alcohol or used illegal drugs in the last year, a small but growing number were popping prescription painkillers like OxyContin and Vicodin and stimulants like Ritalin.

• In Iraq, journalist deaths spike to record in 2006: Majority are murdered; worldwide death toll rises - Violence in Iraq claimed the lives of 32 journalists in 2006, the deadliest year for the press in a single country that the Committee to Protect Journalists has ever recorded. In most cases, such as the killing of Atwar Bahjat, one of the best-known television reporters in the Arab world, insurgents specifically targeted journalists to be murdered, CPJ found in a new analysis. Worldwide, CPJ found 55 journalists were killed in direct connection to their work in 2006, and it is investigating another 27 deaths to determine whether they were work-related. Detailed accounts of each case are posted on CPJ’s Web site. The figures reflect increases from 2005, when 47 journalists were killed in direct relation to their work, while 17 others died in circumstances in which the link to their profession was not clear. CPJ, founded in 1981, compiles and analyzes journalist deaths each year.

Wednesday 20th December 2006: -

• A GREAT WAY TO CONDITION A GENERATION TO ACCEPT A POLICE STATE: A lockdown and search at Coolidge High School on Thursday afternoon yielded no illegal drugs - "We had a hunch that today would be a good day for a lockdown," explained Tim Hamilton, CHS principal. "We like to do these every now and then to ensure that the students know we remember them and are looking out for their safety." Hamilton said the high school administration worked with the Coolidge Police Department and Pinal County Juvenile Probation Department to set up the lockdown. At 12:45 p.m. on Dec. 14, four officers from those departments joined Hamilton and CHS deans Vance Danzy and Craig Cutshaw to comb the school for illegal materials. Hamilton said the seven members of the search party divided into three teams to expedite the process. It took the three teams about an hour and a half to scour the entire school site. "I'm pleased to announce that we checked every student and every classroom, and no illegal drugs were found," he said.

• LendingTools sees spike in fingerprint scanner sales - LendingTools.com said today it has seen a surge in sales of fingerprint recognition software and scanners. Eric Goering, LendingTools president and chief executive, said his Wichita-based company has placed more than 3,000 fingerprint scanners in the past two months. Goering attributes the increase to a Dec. 31 deadline by the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council requiring banks and correspondent bank processors to bolster their security systems for financial transactions over the Internet.   (RELATED: See our Cashless Society Control Grid archive)

• Big Brother Britain - We are experiencing the chill wind of technology driven authoritarianism and whether we like it or not it’s not going to go away. Increased surveillance of our daily lives is a fact of life; be it the DNA database, the growth of CCTV, the profiling of “would be offenders”, the continued hyping of the terrorist menace and advances in surveillance or security technology ostensibly to get us up to speed for the 2012 London Olympics. Britain’s national DNA database is the largest and most advanced in the world. It’s a detective’s dream. Last year 20,000 people were convicted with the help of DNA evidence. Technicians can now get a DNA profile from an “ear print” left on a glass window and another new technique can identify offenders through a relative’s DNA. But there is a downside. DNA hoarding has grown massively under Mr Blair’s “control freak” administration. Initially DNA samples were only taken from those convicted of serious offences. But now the Criminal Justice Act 2003 allows the police to retain DNA samples from anyone who is arrested, irrespective of whether they are charged.   (RELATED: See our Total Global Surveillance archive)

Tuesday 19th December 2006: -

• ID card plan sparks fears over data security - The computer database behind the government's controversial ID card scheme will be an amalgamation of existing IT networks, rather then one built from scratch, John Reid announced today. But he insisted that this did not amount to a U-turn. Originally, the record system, known as the national identity register, was to have been entirely newly-built, in order to avoid contamination from errors in existing database files on individuals. But, in a 33-page progress report on the timetable for an identity card scheme, the home secretary revealed that instead the database would be compiled from amalgamated information from three separate Whitehall databases.

• William Rodriguez Has Been Invited To Iran - William Rodriguez, the last survivor of the North Tower has been formally invited by the Iranian Government to give a series of presentations about 9/11 in Iran. The reason he was invited, was because they saw his presentation in front of 22,000 Muslims during his recent U.K. tour. The Ministry of Cultural Affairs thought it would be a good idea as a "Peace Mission" to bring Rodriquez to Iran. Rodriquez says that he "feels very honored that he has been tapped to do these series of presentations as a peace initiative, and he feels he will be more protected in these countries than in his own." Given that the Venezuelan Government thought enough of Willie to provide him 5 bodyguards during his stay there, I can see why. The dates are not yet specified, but will be announced in the beginning of March 2007.   (RELATED: See our 9/11 archive and our affiliated site 911truthskipton.com)

• Another Man dies after police use Taser: Nude male described as aggressive, combative - Officials with the Lafayette Police Department stand by their use of a Taser gun during a Sunday morning altercation with a nude, and allegedly combative, 29-year-old Carencro man, who would later die at a local hospital from unknown complications. Officials are waiting on an autopsy report to determine the exact cause of Terrill Enard's death. According to Lafayette police Sgt. Mark Francis, police believe Enard was under the influence of some type of unknown substance. Francis said Enard was strong, aggressive, combative and unresponsive.

• Hockey player fired for not signing flag for troops: Some support coach of Saint John Sea Dogs; others defend young Quebecer's freedom of expression - A junior hockey player has been ousted from the Saint John Sea Dogs after he did not sign a Canadian flag that the team was sending to troops in Afghanistan. Dave Bouchard — a 20-year-old from Jonquière, Que., who played left wing on the Quebec Major Junior team — said he thought someone else had already signed his name. But Sea Dogs coach Jacques Beaulieu said he did not accept that explanation and cut him from the team after Saturday's game.

• NYC violated Constitution by jailing protesters - New York City violated the U.S. Constitution for more than two months in 2001 with a policy to detain arrested protesters overnight instead of giving them summonses to appear in court, a U.S. federal jury found on Monday. The suit stemmed from the city's handling of the mass protests and arrests in New York immediately after the 1999 killing by police of unarmed Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo, who was hit by 19 shots. An eight-person jury in Manhattan federal court found that the city's police department violated the First Amendment right to free speech and the 14th Amendment right to due process between May 1, 2001, and July 13, 2001, by its policy of locking up protesters overnight in city jails. However, the same jury ruled that the 350 protester plaintiffs failed to show that in the two years before 2001 the city followed an unwritten policy of locking up protesters.

Monday 18th December 2006: -

• 'Model pupil' ends up with criminal record for a push in the playground - The police were accused of "invading the classroom" last night after a 14-year-old schoolboy ended up with a criminal record for pushing over a boy he suspected of bullying his younger brother. The boy, a prefect who is described as a "model pupil" by his school, was given a formal reprimand by officers after an investigation. His name and offence have now been placed on the Police National Computer. His reprimand for a "violent crime" will also remain on the separate Criminal Record Bureau (CRB) database, jeopardising his hopes of following in his parents' footsteps and becoming a teacher.

• EU announces plans for European driving license - The European Union parliament last week gave final approval for a pan-European driving license scheme. The current plan is to create a database tracking drivers' history throughout Europe, rather than allowing drivers with a bad record in one country to obtain a new license in a different country. Individual European State governments would have a choice of whether to issue the new forgery-proof licenses for 10 or 15 years. The credit card-style license, with photograph and possibly a microchip, will begin introduction in 2013; phasing in of the new license will be completed by 2032.

• Georgia lawmakers gear up to oppose national ID requirements: SS number, birth certificate, possibly fingerprints would be connected to driver's license - Imagine a massive database accessible by government officials throughout the U.S. containing your name, address, photograph, Social Security number, birth certificate, citizenship status — and possibly even your fingerprints and retinal scan. Then imagine having to supply proof of all of that information the next time you apply for a driver's license. The scenario could become reality as part of the Real ID Act, passed by Congress in 2005 to combat fraudulent identification, in part as a result of the events of Sept. 11, 2001.   (COMMENTARY ON THAT LAST PART: Hence we are hell-bent on exposing 9/11 for the fraud that it is - See our 9/11 archive and our affiliated site 911truthskipton.com)

• Home Office bumps up innocents on DNA Database: Eight times figure previously announced - Less than two thirds of people whose profile is stored on the National DNA Database are there for having been cautioned or convicted of a criminal offence, Home Office figures have revealed. In response to a parliamentary question, John Reid last week responded that 3,457,000 individuals are on the database, but 1,139,445 have no criminal record. The figure is eight times the total of 139,463 reported by the Home Office Earlier in March. The news sneaked out on Monday last week, at the height of the Ipswich serial killings manhunt. The Tories this weekend accused the government of burying bad news and called for a vote on whether the innocent should be included in the database.

• Murder plot by MI6 man - Detectives at Scotland yard investigating the death of Princess Diana did uncover an assassination plot by an MI6 officer. The sensational admission is buried in the report by Lord Stevens. Yet it is the first time anyone in the service has formally said that he believes it does have a James Bond-style licence to kill. The astonishing admission will trigger questions in Parliament about whether MI6 has an unofficial policy of proposing state-sponsored assassinations.   (RELATED: See our popular Diana Assassination archive)

• Sir Ian to be 'criticised', not disciplined, over Stockwell: New inquiry finds no evidence that the Met Commissioner misled the public after last year's police shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes - Sir Ian Blair, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, is understood to be among those officers singled out for criticism in an official report into the handling of the aftermath of the Stockwell shooting. The Met chief is on a list drawn up by law-yers of people who will receive a formal letter from the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), warning them of the findings. Sources close to the inquiry said: "Clearly there was a cock-up and the buck stops with him."

• INTERNATIONALLY KNOWN RADIO TALK HOST, ROUGHED UP BY AUSTIN TX COPS 
  
  www.jackblood.com Exclusive Report: -
  
  On Sunday morning, December 17, 2006, syndicated radio host Jack Blood was Pepper sprayed and arrested by Austin PD. He received multiple injuries to his Face, hands, arms, back, and legs in a 12 hour ordeal in police custody.
  
  Following an after party for “The Arab League” with many fans and supporters of Jack Blood at the Jackalope on Austin Texas’s famous 6th street, Jack was standing at the back alley exit of the club waiting to leave, and talking to fans. Out of nowhere a fight broke out between two Hispanic males and one Caucasian victim who turned out to be an employee of the Jackalope.
  
  The victim was knocked unconscious by the two perpetrators who were continuing to attack the defenseless victim. Without any fear for his own safety, Jack Blood jumped in and fended off the attackers and chased them away while dozens of onlookers witnessed the mêlée.
  
  As Jack was standing over the unconscious victim to protect him from any possible further attacks until an ambulance could arrive, an Austin Police officer (APD Harvey 4694) came rushing into the scene and without identifying himself, or asking questions of the gathering mob… Proceeded to pepper spray Mr. Blood directly in the eyes, before violently cuffing him and hauling him off to jail.
  
  No attempt was made to investigate the beating, or to identify the suspects of the assault.
  
  The Victim was rushed to Breckenridge Hospital with a broken Nose and multiple injuries.
  
  Jack Blood was transferred from the county jail receiving quarters to Breckenridge Hospital for high blood pressure and hypertension, where he was rigidly handcuffed to a gurney for 4 hours. He was not allowed to use a restroom, and several officers told him he would have to urinate in his cloths, an unacceptable command. Bottled urine samples were later illegally obtained by the authorities against Mr. Blood’s will. 
  
  “I did not ask to go to the hospital and refused treatment” said Jack Blood. “As I was not given the proper respect by my jailers, I fought back by unleashing a 3 hour Info-Tirade against Officer Harvey, making sure to wake him up every time he closed his eyes to sleep. Fair is fair and I will admit that they had a tiger by the tail trying to hold me,” said Blood.
  
  A bit of humor interjected itself into the story when the doctor treating Mr. Blood admitted several times to both Blood and his jailer that he was a “Big Fan” of Deadline Live with Jack Blood, heard daily on 100.1 FM in Austin Texas. He vouched for Mr. Blood’s character to no avail. 
  
  Jack was released Sunday Afternoon with a promise to appear later in the week to face charges of Public Intoxication. “Yes I had a few drinks,” said Blood, “But I was in no way intoxicated, or a threat to the public. Indeed I believe that I was doing the officer’s job by jumping in to save a defenseless victim of what may have been a racially motivated attack. There are multiple witness, including the victim who are prepared to back my story,” Jack went on to say. “I Plan to fight the charges and clear my name.”
  
  If this is the kind of treatment that Americans are to receive when standing up to help a fellow citizen in need, then we do indeed find ourselves in troubled times.
  
  www.jackblood.com is currently awaiting a statement from the APD.

• US accused of using aid to sway UN votes - The United States uses its aid budget to bribe those countries that have a vote in the United Nations Security Council, giving them 59% more cash in years when they have a seat, according to research by economists. Kofi Annan, the outgoing UN Secretary General, expressed his frustration at the power the US wields over the UN in his parting speech last week. In a detailed analysis of 50 years of data, Harvard University's Ilyana Kuziemko and Eric Werker provide the clearest evidence yet that money is used by the council's richest member to grease the wheels of diplomacy.

• Brief: Homeland Security Faces Questions Over Biometrics: Congress wants it to track people leaving the country, but GAO says that kind of capability is five years or more away - A key piece of one of the Homeland Security Department's biggest technology projects is facing doubts about whether it's feasible today given the current state of biometric technology. The project involves using some type of standardized biometric technology to track the departure of foreign visitors, to ensure those who enter the country are the same as those leaving. Congress mandated that in the $10 billion U.S. Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology program passed after the Sept. 11 attacks. Yet it will be at least five years before biometric technology is advanced enough for an infrastructure that can verify identities of people leaving the country via roadways without undue delays, says a report last week from the Government Accountability Office. Having motorists stop for a biometric check would mean major traffic jams or require huge expansion of border processing facilities. Homeland Security is evaluating technology to do the job. And it's already using biometrics, including fingerprint scanning, at 154 entry points to the country.

Sunday 17th December 2006: -

• ANOTHER STRAW-MAN IN THE DIANA ASSASSINATION WHITEWASH: Dodi was two timing Diana - One of Dodi Fayed's closest aides has broken a nine-year silence to reveal the truth about his relationship with Princess Diana - finally shattering his father's claims that the pair were in love. Sara Blackiston told how Dodi two-timed Diana with his American fiancee Kelly Fisher - with neither woman aware that they were together in St Tropez with the same man. And after ditching Kelly, she reveals, Dodi pursued Diana armed with an unlimited gold Harrods store card provided by Mohamed Al Fayed on the understanding that his playboy son was to land the greatest prize of all.   (COMMENTARY: Observe how the mainstream media like to focus on the whole 'was she pregnant/going to marry Dodi?' speculation. This is one of the bigger straw-man arguments of the whole Diana assassination cover-up which has been peddled by the buffoon Mohammad Al Fayed. Rather like the 9/11 truth issue of 'What really hit the Pentagon?'. If we focus on issues that we have room for doubt (either way) on and make our entire case hinge on unknown factors, we may find ourselves doing harm to our cause.)

• New security device may let you keep your shoes on at the airport - Air passengers have been grousing about taking off their shoes for five years as of this Christmas Eve. But the days of going barefoot through metal detectors might be numbered, at least for some travelers. A new explosives detection device, called Shoescanner, has been approved as part of the Registered Traveler program, where passengers pay a fee to be background checked and funneled faster through airport security. After operating experimentally in Orlando, the Transportation Security Administration is expected to allow Registered Traveler to start up next year at airports across the nation, likely including Miami, Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood and Palm Beach international airports. When it does, travelers who opt to enroll might not have to remove their loafers, pumps and other footwear.

• Washington D-C archdiocese settles with clergy-abuse victims - The Archdiocese of Washington D-C has agreed to pay one-point-three (m) million dollars to 16 men who say they were sexually abused by priests as far back as 1962. An attorney representing the group says they're in "severe distress, emotionally, psychologically, financially and spiritually" and felt now was a good time to settle. The allegations stem from events that occurred between 1962 and 1982. Two of the men who are receiving settlement money had already lost legal claims against the archdiocese. Eight priests were involved in the allegations. They've all been removed from ministry.   (RELATED: See our The Elites Abuse of Children archive)

• Row goes on over school soft drinks - When school students slake their thirst with a cold Diet Coke after a hot summer lunchtime on the playing field, few are likely to consider the cocktail of controversy they are drinking. The Government thought it was on to a public-health winner this week in securing the voluntary agreement of Coke and Pepsi's suppliers to withdraw their full-sugar fizzy and energy drinks from schools by 2009. But when the Ministers of Health and Education had finished promoting the novelty of their anti-obesity deal, health campaigners started howling that it was a lost opportunity because diet drinks would continue to be available. Coca-Cola Amatil and Frucor Beverages intend to continue selling fruit juice and carbonated diet drinks, several of which contain caffeine. Green Party health spokeswoman Sue Kedgley complained of children continuing to be exposed to the caffeine, acids and artificial sweeteners like aspartame in diet drinks.   (RELATED: See our Compromised Health archive)

• Jamaica: Senate approves wiretap bill - The Senate passed the Interception of Communications or "wiretap" Act Friday, giving the police and the military increased powers to tap the telephones of individuals suspected or accused of criminal involvement. Although the Act requires that a judge in chamber must approve the interception of information, the commissioner of police or the chief of staff of the Jamaica Defence Force (JDF) can now authorise the tapping of additional telephones, without prior court approval, as long as a warrant had already been approved for the individual, and as long as an application is made to the court for approval within seven days of the action.   (RELATED: See our Total Global Surveillance archive)

• Security guards soon could carry stun guns: Bill would expand stun gun use beyond law enforcement - A little-noticed bill that would let more people use Tasers and stun guns in Michigan is awaiting Gov. Jennifer Granholm's likely signature, though critics hope she wields her veto pen. The legislation approved by the state Senate 30-7 last week and passed unanimously by the House in September would exempt detention facilities and private security officers at some hospitals and malls from a ban against using stun guns. Police officers and others in law enforcement have been able to carry the weapons since 2002. Stun guns and Tasers -- a police favorite because they can be fired from a distance -- temporarily disable people with electric shocks and are billed as a safer way to subdue combative suspects. But some question Taser-related deaths and worry the technology is used too routinely, not as a last resort.

• Electronic giving comes to churches - When the big ice storm hit a couple of weeks ago, it left the pews of St. Dominic Savio Roman Catholic Church in Affton unusually empty on Sunday. The weekly offertory that day was down by 22 percent compared with the first weekend of previous months, said Laura Albes, St. Dominic's director of advancement. But the Lord works in mysterious ways, and to Albes and St. Dominic's pastor, the Rev. John S. Siefert, that storm became a marketing tool — a perfect way to illustrate to the congregation why automatic electronic giving is in the parish's future. Bad weather, summer vacations, flu season — all can seriously interrupt Sunday giving, the money that helps pay a church's utilities, maintenance, outreach programs and other bills. But if a church can convince its members to allow it to debit parishioners' bank accounts or charge their credit cards automatically, fluctuations in donations could become history. "We're heading toward a cashless society in five to eight years when the checking system won't be there to support churches," said Brian Walsh, president and founder of Faith Direct. "That will have a huge impact on collections if we don't get people to embrace this technology."   (RELATED: See our Cashless Society Control Grid archive)

• Alexander Litvinenko: "killed for sensitive info on Kremlin boss" - Yuri Shvets, a former Russian spy now based in America says Alexander Litvinenko was killed because he had collected sensitive information on a high-ranking Kremlin official. Shvets made the revelation in a story published by the Sunday Times in Great Britain and said Litvinenko, a former Russin spy had been doing due diligence work for a British company on the official, who was facilitating a business deal.

• San Francisco 9/11 Truth Tea Party Dumps Official Whitewash in the Bay - On Saturday, December 16, 2006, on a bitter cold day in San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf district, about forty hardy patriots came out with the intent to expose the lies and omissions of the 9/11 Commission Report by passing out information to tourists and locals, by reciting most of the omissions and deceptions in the official document, and then dumping the offensive whitewash in the San Francisco Bay. Marking the 223 anniversary of the Boston Tea Party where 18th century colonists decided to reject onerous and unjust taxation by dumping tea in the Boston harbor, these modern day patriots, some with fifes and drums, marched from Pier 39 past curious, and some stunned, onlookers to the end of the Municipal Pier at Aquatic Park. They then proceeded to dump the 9/11 Commission Report to its watery grave to boisterous “hoorays” from the crowd gathered.   (RELATED: See our 9/11 archive and our affiliated site 911truthskipton.com)

• Obese should have health warnings on their clothes - Oversize clothes should have obesity helpline numbers sewn on them to try and reduce Britain's fat crisis, a leading professor said today. And new urban roads should only be built if they have cycle lanes, according to Naveed Sattar, Professor of Metabolic Medicine at the University of Glasgow. He is calling for more government intervention with a central agency set up to deal with the problems of obesity.

Saturday 16th December 2006: -

• Boy in coma; cops' hogtie under probe: Restrained by police as his family watched, a disabled 18-year-old lies in a coma at a Coral Gables hospital. The family says he was `hogtied.' - It wasn't the first time the Colindres family had to call police because their severely autistic son, Kevin, had become aggressive. Twice before, Miami police took the 18-year-old to a psychiatric hospital for treatment. But Tuesday night, the family says, officers specially trained to calm people with mental illness ''hogtied'' Kevin, sat on him until he stopped breathing, then resisted the family's entreaties to call an ambulance.   (RELATED: See our Police State archive)

• Passenger’s fury at station strip search: ‘Travellers screened as drugs are openly sold in street’ - AN innocent man subjected to a humiliating strip search has lashed out at police for randomly screening commuters at a Tube station while pushers openly sell drugs outside. Andrew McIntosh, 41, was on his way to work as executive chef of a string of upmarket bars around Inverness Street when police with sniffer dogs stopped him at the top of the escalators in Camden Town station on Friday. Mr McIntosh, who says he has never used drugs, objected to the use of the police dog. He said: “Next thing there were four guys around me, telling me I would have to be searched. “I’m just an innocent bystander, going to work to earn my crust. People are brazenly selling drugs in Inverness Street every single day from about 2pm, and I’ve been fished out of a queue of people coming up the escalators, doing nothing wrong. “I tried to phone my boss, but they took my phone from me and told me I might be trying to warn my drug dealer.”

• ALA Responds to UCLA Taser Incident - American Library Association (ALA) President Leslie Burger has written a strongly-worded letter to Norman Abrams, acting chancellor of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), urging him to reexamine security practices in light of the November 14 incident in which a UCLA student was Tasered in the library by campus police. The incident, caught in part on a cellphone camera and broadcast on YouTube, began after the student resisted showing his ID to an unarmed student Community Service Officer because he believed the request to be racial profiling. However, it remains unclear why the campus police officers who responded decided to use the Taser on a noncompliant though nonviolent student.

• THE TOTALITARIAN TIP-TOE... INNIT COOL!: 'Wave and pay' integrates with mobile phones Back to News - A consumer trial in New York City is set to see MasterCard's 'wave and pay' technology integrated with mobile phones. The phones are to be enabled with near-field communication (NFC) which, when combined with the contactless wave and pay method, allows users to pay for low-cost items via their handset, 3G Portal reports. It is, according to Ed Garofalo, vice president of Citi Cards, "the first step in the convergence of the wallet with the mobile phone". By holding the phone next to a secure PayPass terminal, the user's funds are debited in the same way that a debit card would function.

• Wave and pay cards set to put an end to queues: Spending: If you are buying a cheap item like a paper, you could soon swipe and go - British shoppers could be buying cheaper items by swiping their bank card past a till-mounted reader as early as next year. Transport for London said this week that it has signed an exclusive deal with Barclays that will see the first bank cards being issued with the latest "wave and pay" technology chips installed. For the first time they will allow users to pay for low-cost items such as coffees or newspapers without stopping to input in a Pin number or sign a form.   (RELATED: See our Cashless Society Control Grid archive)

• Use of RFID in ePassport and National ID Cards Coming Under Fire - The separate initiatives put forth by the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to utilize RFID in passports, identification cards and drivers licenses are coming under fire from various directions. At issue: Concerns that the radio frequency method of storing data on national electronic ID cards—the ePassport, PASScard, and electronic driver's license—is neither secure nor private.

• Gift cards pack flash with cash - Retailers push the design limits and add features to liven things up - Target is selling gift cards that can store and play music. McDonald's has presented a fashion show featuring a dress made of its gift cards. And the e-business extremelygifted.com is selling a 35-pound cube of concrete with a gift card inside. With prepaid cards becoming one of the biggest hits this holiday season, businesses are scrambling to impress shoppers with unusual designs and cool features. "It's the principle of a peacock with a tail — if you are flashy, people will notice," said Betsy Gelb, professor of marketing and entrepreneurship at the University of Houston's Bauer College of Business.

Friday 15th December 2006: -

• Capital to increase use of cameras - Mexico City may not look much different a year from now, but if its government´s plan to install 4,000 new video surveillance cameras during 2007 is carried out, the nation´s capital will likely have a different feel to it. Residents and visitors will certainly feel more watched, with one, two or several wireless cameras set up in each of the city´s 1,352 "territorial units" carved out for crime prevention purposes. Joel Ortega, chief of police, is hoping they´ll also feel safer.

• Race to the Moon for Nuclear Fuel - NASA's planned moon base announced last week could pave the way for deeper space exploration to Mars, but one of the biggest beneficiaries may be the terrestrial energy industry. Nestled among the agency's 200-point mission goals is a proposal to mine the moon for fuel used in fusion reactors -- futuristic power plants that have been demonstrated in proof-of-concept but are likely decades away from commercial deployment. Helium-3 is considered a safe, environmentally friendly fuel candidate for these generators, and while it is scarce on Earth it is plentiful on the moon.

• VIDEO: 1989 News: Call boys in Bush Sr's Whitehouse - NBC news report about Sex scandal involving Bush Sr. whitehouse, and underage male prostitutes. Was not covered on TV much after this. This was the tip of the iceberg known as The Franklin Scandal: -

Thursday 14th December 2006: -

• Diana report is a 'cover-up' - THE official report into the death of Princess Diana was dismissed as an "establishment cover-up" tonight. Harrods owner Mohamed al Fayed, whose son Dodi died alongside Diana in the 1997 Paris car crash, claimed Lord Stevens’ three-year investigation was "garbage". And he even branded the former Metropolitan Police commissioner a "mental case" for dismissing the theory she was murdered. His furious comments came after the Metropolitan Police’s Operation Paget inquiry concluded the couple and their French driver Henri Paul simply died in a tragic accident.   (COMMENTARY: You can read the 872 page Operation Padget document by downloading it here - Pdf format... not really worth the paper!)

• Princes urge end to speculation - Prince William and Prince Harry want the "conclusive findings" of the investigation into their mother's death to bring an end to speculation surrounding the crash. Clarence House said the brothers were grateful for the thoroughness of the high-profile inquiry into the tragic accident that killed Diana, Princess of Wales. Former Metropolitan Police commissioner Lord Stevens declared that allegations that the Princess was murdered were "unfounded".

• British Diana inquiry leaves open questions - The official rejection of conspiracy and murder allegations in connection with the death of Princess Diana almost 10 years ago is unlikely to silence speculation about her tragic death, British analysts said Thursday. Lord Stevens, the former head of Scotland Yard who led the three- year inquiry, Allegations of Conspiracy to murder Lady Diana, said his team had found that there was 'no conspiracy and no cover-up' in the death of Diana and her lover, Dodi al-Fayed. His painstaking work concluded that the couple, along with French chauffeur Henri Paul, died in a 'tragic accident' when their black Mercedes car crashed in a Paris underpass just after midnight of August 31, 1997. 'We have left no stone unturned,' said Stevens about his 900-page report. But he also admitted, 'I have no doubt that speculation as to what happened that night will continue and that there are some matters, as in many other investigations, about which we may never find a definitive answer.'

• IT'S OFFICIAL... TWO PLUS TWO REALLY DOES EQUAL FIVE!: Diana verdict: it was just an accident - The official report into the death of Princess Diana today dismisses all the conspiracy theories. Diana and Dodi Fayed died in a simple car crash in a Paris underpass because their driver Henri Paul tried to outrun paparazzi while intoxicated with drink and drugs, Lord Stevens will announce. Prince Charles, William and Harry have been briefed on the 900-page report compiled by the former Met chief and a team of detectives at a cost of £4 million. The princes are said to be 'disgusted' at learning details of how the paparazzi photographed their mother before the arrival of the emergency services at the scene in the Pont de l'Alma tunnel in August 1997. They are said to be considering releasing photographs of the final moments of their mother's life to shame the photographers involved. The sons believe that but for the involvement of the paparazzi their mother would still be alive today and hope the report will finally draw a line under the circumstances surrounding her death.   (RELATED: See our recently up-dated Diana Assassination archive)

• Boston Air Traffic Controller Says 9/11 An Inside Job: Knew people in FAA on day of hijackings who said intercept procedures should have been enacted as normal - A former Boston Center air traffic controller has gone public on his assertion that 9/11 was an inside job and that Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon tracked three of the four flights from the point of their hijacking to hitting their targets. In an astounding telephone interview, Robin Hordon claims air traffic controllers have been ignored or silenced to protect the true perpetrators of 9/11. A recording of the phone conversation was posted on Google video late yesterday by the Pilots For 9/11 Truth organization.   (RELATED: See our 9/11 archive and our affiliated site 911truthskipton.com)

• Mother Says School Wants Her Son On ADD Meds - Sabrina Nichols says they've tried half a dozen medications for her 9-year-old son Jacob's attention deficit disorder. Meds, she says, have turned him into a zombie. His eyes are barely open in this years' school photo all because she says his Manteca school has strongly recommended it. “He needs this for his education. He'll focus but after two years it's not working,” said Nichols. While Jacob has a lot of energy his parents think the school should test him for a learning disability and not be so quick to make assumptions at parent teacher conferences. “It's always been the same answer: Ritalin ADHD. They're there to help educate your son but I feel like they just want to push meds on him. It's a pacifier not a solution,” said Nichols.

• Join us to fight national ID card - PEOPLE worried about the creeping Big Brother society are meeting in Coventry tonight to campaign against national identity cards. They're setting up a local branch of the national campaign NO2ID and have the support of former MEP Christine Oddy. Ms Oddy represented Coventry and North Warwickshire in the European Parliament for a decade before leaving the Labour Party in 1999. She believes ID cards infringe civil liberties and won't deter or detect criminals.

• Number of Journalists Jailed Worldwide Continues To Rise: Survey says increasing number of Internet journalists imprisoned - The number of journalists imprisoned worldwide for their work has increased for the second straight year, with about a third of the jailed journalists involved in Internet dissemination of information, according to the global press advocacy group the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). The New York-based CPJ said its annual worldwide census found that 134 journalists were imprisoned on December 1, an increase of nine from the 2005 survey. Of the total, some 49 Internet journalists were imprisoned in 2006, the highest number CPJ has tallied in its annual survey. China, Cuba, Eritrea and Ethiopia were the top four jailers among the 24 nations that imprisoned journalists, said the CPJ in a December 7 statement. "Anti-state" allegations such as subversion, divulging state secrets and acting against the interests of the state are the most common charges used to imprison journalists worldwide, said the CPJ, adding that 84 journalists are jailed under these charges, many by the Chinese, Cuban and Ethiopian governments.

• Fighting Sexual Exploitation and Abuse by UN Peacekeepers - Allegations of sexual abuse and exploitation by United Nations peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, Haiti and elsewhere have tarnished the reputation of the world Organization. Speakers at a recent meeting at UN Headquarters outlined a "zero-tolerance" policy toward this problem and discussed innovative ways to fight it, including DNA sampling and an "anti-prostitution campaign" for 2007.

• Police complaints are on the up - THE number of complaints against police officers jumped by more than 3,000 last year, the official watchdog has revealed. The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) said the rise - taking the number of complaints beyond the 26,000 mark - was down to increased confidence in its complaints procedure. But the leader of Britain's rank-and-file police officers said that almost 90 per cent of the complaints were unsubstantiated.

• Charges dropped against suspected airline bomb plotter - Terrorist charges against a Briton suspected of being a key figure behind an alleged suicide plot to blow up airliners this summer were dropped yesterday by a Pakistani court. In a move which surprised British security and intelligence officials, a court in Rawalpindi ruled that allegations relating to Rashid Rauf, a Muslim of dual British-Pakistani nationality, did not "fall in the category of terrorism". However, he is being kept in custody facing criminal charges which include impersonation, forging documents and possessing explosives. British officials said yesterday the move would not affect their request for Mr Rauf's extradition, which relates to an earlier allegation dating to April 2002.   (RELATED: See our Problem > Reaction > Solution archive for more background information on the phony airline terror threat of August 2006)

Wednesday 13th December 2006: -

• VeriChip Infant Protection Product Now Used in One-In-Three U.S. Hospitals and Birthing Centers: Over 1,100 Installations To-Date in the United States - Applied Digital (Nasdaq: ADSX), through its VeriChip Corp. subsidiary, announced today that it has passed an important milestone in the sale and use of VeriChip's infant protection systems, with one-out-of-three Hospitals and Birthing Centers in the United States now using systems manufactured by VeriChip. This includes systems sold under both the Hugs and HALO brand names. VeriChip believes that it has the largest installed base of infant protection systems of any company in the industry. Revenues from sales of VeriChip's infant protection systems increased by 28% during the first three- quarters of 2006 as compared to pro forma revenue from such systems during the comparable period in 2005.   (RELATED: See our Total Global Surveillance archive)

• Life-Prints Introduces a New Solution for Child Identification and Protection Software - Many parents go out of their way to find technological solutions to protect their children. Some invest in current photo child ID cards, medical information bracelets and detailed record organization systems. While these are all helpful proactive measures, a new generation of child protection tools has evolved. Life-Prints is revolutionizing the way home-based technology is used to protect children by formatting critical data specifically for law enforcement purposes.

• Victory for anti-war protesters - Campaigners have won a legal battle to prove their rights to protest were violated when police stopped them from attending an anti-war demonstration. About 120 Iraq war protesters were held on coaches by police near RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire in March 2003. The High Court and Court of Appeal had already ruled police acted unlawfully in holding protesters on the coaches. But on Wednesday Law Lords ruled police did violate the right to freedom of expression and lawful assembly.

• Barclaycard, Oyster in UK "wave and pay" card deal - Contactless payment cards will be rolled out more widely in London next year under an agreement announced on Wednesday by credit card operator Barclaycard and the owners of the widely used London transport card Oyster. Barclaycard and Oyster will be combined on one card, which will also include new "wave and pay" technology allowing users to pay for low value transactions at participating retailers, Barclaycard said in a statement. It said the agreement with TransSys, the consortium which runs Oyster card in partnership with Transport for London, will involve a live trial and then a rollout to customers later in 2007.   (RELATED: See our Cashless Society Control Grid archive)

• Report: Point-of-Sale Cashless Payment Reaches 30,000 U.S. Merchants - As of September, more than 30,000 U.S. merchant locations had point-of-sale (POS) hardware that could read and authorize contactless payment tools, and more than 13 million consumers had the payment devices, according to Celent, as reported in Tech News World. The company predicted that number will reach 20 million by the end of 2006; by 2011, contactless payments will capture 15 percent of the target market.

• RFID Tagging For Hotel Lodge In Ohio - A family resort in Mason, Ohio is due to open on December 14 with a new service - RFID wristbands for identification and the convenience of point-of-sale purchases. The technology is to be provided by California's Precision Dynamics. Some of the enhanced features that come with the RFID-enabled wrist-bands for hotel guests will include keyless entry into their rooms, cashless payment options etc. Jim Metzger, general manager of Great Wolf Lodge at Paramount's Kings Island in Mason, Ohio told contactlessnews.com, "The wristband system has been embraced by guests and employees at both the Pocono Mountains, Pennsylvania and Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada locations and we expect the same here at Mason," adding, "The system is a great way to provide the utmost in safety and convenience for our guests."

• U.S. Agency denies tapping Diana's phone (Must be true then! ) - The United States' super-secret eavesdropping agency said it had 39 classified documents containing references to the late Diana, Princess of Wales, but never targeted her phone conversations for monitoring. Those documents were previously released in response to a Freedom of Information Request in 1998, the agency noted. The statement by the National Security Agency comes amid media reports in London about secret recordings of Diana's telephone communications that apparently surfaced during the British investigation into her 1997 death in a Paris car crash.   (RELATED: See our popular Diana Assassination archive)

• New powers to target child support debtors - Parents who fail to pay child maintenance will face curfews and confiscation of their passports, in a radical shake-up of child support services. John Hutton, the work and pensions secretary, today confirmed that the Child Support Agency will be replaced by a Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission in 2010, backed by extra enforcement powers.

• AUSTRALIA: Pubs, banks could be banned for asking for smartcard ID - BANK or pub workers who demand their customers produce the Federal Government's new smartcard as a form of ID could go to jail for up to five years or be fined $55,000, under draft legislation. Companies that demand the card would face fines of up to $275,000. The Government's $1.1 billion access card will replace up to 17 social service cards such as the Medicare card by 2010 and will be required by anyone who wants to get government benefits. But privacy and consumer advocates have raised fears that because almost every Australian will need one, the access card could become an ID card. The Government's legislation is designed to address fears that the access card is an Australia card in disguise.

• For Rumsfeld, `war on terror' is misleading label - Does Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have second thoughts about the war in Iraq? Columnist Cal Thomas put that question to Rumsfeld in an interview last week. The following is an excerpt from their exchange. The full interview is posted here. Cal Thomas: With what you know now, what might you have done differently in Iraq? Donald Rumsfeld: I don't think I would have called it the "war on terror." I don't mean to be critical of those who have. Certainly, I have used the phrase frequently. Why do I say that? Because the word "war" conjures up World War II more than it does the Cold War. It creates a level of expectation of victory and an ending within 30 or 60 minutes of a soap opera. It isn't going to happen that way. Furthermore, it is not a war on terror. Terror is a weapon of choice for extremists who are trying to destabilize regimes and, [through] a small group of clerics, impose their dark vision on all the people they can control. So "war on terror" is a problem for me.

• Anthrax attack on US Congress made by scientists and covered up by FBI, expert says - The terrorists who perpetrated the 2001 anthrax attack on Congress likely were US government scientists at the army's Ft. Detrick, MD., bioterrorism lab having access to "moonsuits" that enabled them to safely process and manufacture super-weapons-grade anthrax, an eminent authority on the subject says. Although only a "handful" of scientists had the ability to perpetrate the crime, the culprit among them may never be identified as the FBI ordered the destruction of the anthrax culture collection at Ames, IA., from which the Ft. Detrick lab got its pathogens, the authority said.   (RELATED: See our Problem > Reaction > Solution archive for more background info)

Tuesday 12th December 2006: -

• Terror stop and search questioned - The UK's senior counter terrorism police officer has questioned the value of stop-and-search powers. Andy Hayman, the Metropolitan Police's assistant commissioner responsible for anti-terror probes, said few arrests or charges arose from such searches. "It is very unlikely that a terrorist is going to be carrying bomb-making equipment around... in the street," he told a London police authority hearing.

• Better body armour might have saved soldiers, inquests are told - Inquests into the deaths of two servicemen have raised fresh questions about the standard of equipment for British soldiers in the Iraq conflict. A coroner examining the death of Guardsman Anthony Wakefield, who might have survived if he had been wearing better body armour, urged the Ministry of Defence to improve the delivery of protective equipment, and an inquest into the death of tank commander Sgt Steven Roberts heard evidence that suggested his pistol and armour were inadequate.

• Technology gives police on the street instant ID info - With a quick imprint of a suspect's two fingers on a handheld device, Columbus police can get instant access to an individual's identity without a trip to the booking office. The department announced Monday it is testing 40 of the RapID wireless units it purchased recently for about $3,000 each using a federal Homeland Security grant. Police say the new technology saves time by eliminating a trip to a downtown booking station. Typically, it would be used to check the identity of someone without proper ID who uses a name police suspect is not real.

• Big brother plan to fight crime - A BIG BROTHER-STYLE surveillance system covering 2,000 Coventry businesses will go ahead if bosses agree to pay an extra "tax". Up to 300 new CCTV cameras will be installed, with the ability to read car number plates and link into police computers. And as part of the scheme, goods could be fitted with mini-bugs to emit radio signals which would make them trackable if they were stolen.   (RELATED: See our Total Global Surveillance archive)

• German Casinos Secure with Cross Match Technologies Facial Recognition Solution - Cross Match Technologies, Inc., a leading global provider of high-quality interoperable biometric identity applications and solutions, today announced that Casino Esplanade, Spielbank Hamburg’s new casino in Hamburg, Germany, has deployed Cross Match’s FaceSnap/FaceCheck facial recognition system to ensure the safety and control of casino visitors. Cross Match’s FaceSnap/FaceCheck identification system examines each visitor individually without direct physical interaction. Special video cameras gather the facial data of every guest as each enters the casino and matches the scan with a database to identify potential threats. Banned gamblers are routinely denied access to the casino with FaceSnap/FaceCheck, which also acts as a public deterrent to suspect visitors, promoting the safety of the casino’s guests.

Monday 11th December 2006: -

• New voice recognition-based identification, verification and payment system for school cafeterias - CellMax Systems Ltd. and point-of-sale (POS) system producer PCS Revenue Control Systems, Inc., have announced the joint development of a rapid, voice recognition-based identification, verification and payment system for school cafeterias. The system, which will be piloted in Q1 2007, has an initial potential market of 800 U.S. school districts. The system provides a practical, non-intrusive solution to the logistical challenges faced every day by school facilities managers – tracking meal accountability, enhancing student per minute processing time and increasing line speed – all to ensure kids get the meals they’re entitled to, and get them fast. It also circumvents several major technological roadblocks previously posed to voice biometrics by the lunchroom set: rowdiness (background noise) and sudden voice change (affecting false acceptance/rejection rates).

• Report: U.S. Tapped Diana's Phones: Transcripts Hold No New Information About How Princess Died, Report Says - An official British report into the crash that killed Princess Diana concludes that a U.S. intelligence agency was bugging Diana's phone without the approval of its British counterpart on the night of her death, according to British newspaper reports. But the 39 transcripts held by the unspecified agency contain no new information about how she died, the report adds. The report will confirm the existence of the files, but does not reveal their contents nor offer an explanation.    (RELATED: See our popular Diana Assassination archive)

• New Technologies Could Move Video Surveillance to New Level - Surveillance cameras are sprouting up in more and more places, forming an ever more powerful tool for solving crimes after they happen. But what about using them to prevent or stop criminal and terrorist acts? This requires that someone, or something, watch these rapidly multiplying video feeds 24-7. And that’s the problem. Paying people to adequately monitor dozens, or even hundreds, of surveillance cameras can be highly expensive. Plus, humans tend to get bored and lose focus staring at security TV monitors hour after hour, day after day. Computerized monitoring would seem to be the obvious answer, but creating software programs that can recognize suspicious activities or suspect individuals has proven highly difficult.

• Malaysia to introduce RFID number plates - THE ROAD TRANSPORT Department of Malaysia is set to introduce RFID licence plates in a bid, it says, to stop car thieves thieving cars. Each plate will contain information about the vehicle and its owner which means that coppers can scan cars at roadblocks and see if the car has been stolen. Currently your average car tea leaf will swap the licence plate when they nick a motor, however this might not be such a good idea if they have RFID plates. Not only will the data have to match the plate but the owner of the car should be nearby in case the copper wants to check the driver’s identity.   (RELATED: See our Total Global Surveillance archive)

• RFID technology 'can save lives' - The ability of radio frequency identification technology (RFID) has been recognised by the National Stroke Association (NSA) of America as providing a "critical role" in medical treatments. An RFID system that is able to be implanted and used in conjunction with a handheld RFID scanner provides information for medical professionals and aims to assist them in giving the correct treatment as quickly as possible. This information, provided by the VeriMed Patient Information System, was highlighted as "vital", according to the NSA, which recognised the technology as able to deliver "appropriate" treatment which led to "better patient outcomes".

• ADHD drugs may have 'addictive and emotional' side effects - They are drugs that doctors give to 8-year-olds. How dangerous can they be? Plenty. Medical experts said that drugs like Ritalin and Adderall are prescribed to children -- and adults -- with attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, for specific reasons. Those reasons don't apply to other people. "They could have addictive and emotional side effects,'' said Dr. Simon Ovanessian, medical director of the Center for Child and Adolescent Services at Danbury Hospital. Both Ritalin -- methylphenidate -- and Adderall -- a combination of amphetamine and dextroamphetamine -- are stimulants. Although it seems counter-intuitive, they help people with ADHD concentrate.   (RELATED: See our Compromised Health archive)

Sunday 10th December 2006: -

• Spies paid Paul £2000 before Diana crash - CHAUFFEUR Henri Paul was receiving cash handouts from spymasters on the night he died, it was claimed last night. Until now, Paul’s whereabouts in the hours leading up to the Paris car crash that killed Princess Diana and her lover Dodi Fayed have not been known. Now it is thought he spent between 7pm and 10pm meeting a handler from France’s equivalent of MI5, the DST (Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire). French sources claim that Paul was paid £2,000 for information – and that he was over the drink-drive limit because he had been celebrating his windfall.   (RELATED: See our popular Diana Assassination archive)

• Diana verdict: An accident. But did US bug her calls?: The Stevens report into the deaths of Diana, Princess of Wales, and Dodi Fayed will conclude this Thursday that there was no murder arranged by MI6, no establishment cover-up and nothing to sustain the numerous conspiracy theories that have been proliferating in the nine years since their fatal accident. Francis Elliott and Sophie Goodchild report on the official version of events that leaves Mohamed al-Fayed unsatisfied - There could be no more eloquent image of indestructible continuity: the date of Prince William's passing-out parade from Sandhurst has fallen perfectly for the Royals' spin-doctors. On Thursday the official report on the death of Diana, the late Princess of Wales, will touch off renewed claims of an "establishment cover-up" from Mohamed al-Fayed, whose son Dodi also died in the crash. But the next day, "the Firm" led by the Queen herself, will be out in force at the elite military academy, taking the salute of the future king as he marches past.

• Ex-spy calls for bombing inquiry - Former spy David Shayler has cast doubt on who was responsible for the London bombings and called for a public inquiry. The Middlesbrough-born ex-MI5 man has claimed the official version of the attacks on three underground trains and a double decker bus in the capital on July 7 last year is riddled with inaccuracies. He has produced a 40 minute documentary in which he questions a number of issues ranging from the September 11, 2001, attack on the US, and the 7/7 attacks in London.   (RELATED: See our 7/7 London Bombings archive)

HERE IS THE 40 MINUTE DOCUMENTARY 'MIND THE GAP' MENTIONED IN THE ABOVE ARTICLE: -

• Banks tighten online security: Transferring some money? OK. First, what's your favorite movie? - Customers of St. Paul-based Western Bank will soon have to jump through a few extra hoops to log into their accounts online. In addition to their standard username and password, customers at the bank will be instructed to choose a picture from a list of pre-selected options — puppies, butterflies, sunsets, etc — and to make up a phrase, such as "How now brown cow." They'll also have to answer questions about their favorite movie or where they went to high school. The extra steps are intended to make online banking more secure and guard against instances of identity theft and fraud. Over the next few months, just about all banks will be asking for a little something extra from their customers. Some, like Western, will ask additional questions. Others will require customers to use a token, like a key fob, or their fingerprints to sign into their accounts electronically.

• Bill would ban ‘mercury vaccine’ - The first bill in the legislative hopper for the 2007 session is one near and dear to Lawrence’s Linda Weinmaster and a number of parents across the state. Senate Bill 1 would ban the use of mercury-based thimerosal in childhood vaccines. “I’m somewhat optimistic that it will pass this session,” Weinmaster said. “We’re going to give it our best try.” Weinmaster and many others claim that thimerosal, which is used as a preservative in some vaccines, has caused the recent increase in the number of autistic children. Weinmaster’s 15-year-old son, Adam, has several impairments that she attributes to vaccinations. Federal officials maintain there is no association between the disorders and thimerosal. Critics, however, say the studies are flawed and note that mercury is a known toxin.   (RELATED: See our Compromised Health archive)

• Lennon offered to sing for the IRA: Beatle was so incensed by Bloody Sunday in 1972 that he met leading Belfast Provo in New York - John Lennon met the IRA and offered to sing at a fundraising concert for republicans after Bloody Sunday, according to a new book about the murdered Beatle out next month. The pacifist singer was so incensed about the British army's killing of 13 unarmed demonstrators in Derry in 1972 that he agreed to hold talks with an IRA representative in New York shortly afterwards. But such was Lennon's confused thinking about Ireland that during his talks with a leading Belfast Provo he also suggested doing a gig for working-class Northern Ireland Protestants.

• Britain Worried About Excessive Surveillance - Many Britons are concerned about the increased use of cameras and biometrics in their country, according to a poll by YouGov published in the Daily Telegraph. 79 per cent of respondents believe the country can accurately be described as a surveillance society. In 2004, home secretary David Blunkett strongly campaigned in favour of a national identity card system. The plan contemplates setting up a database that would contain the fingerprints and/or eye scan of every single person in Britain. The government estimates that the full implementation of the plan will cost $10.5 billion U.S. over the next 10 years.

Saturday 09th December 2006: -

• TEN YEARS (OF OPPORTUNITY TO TAMPER WITH THE EVIDENCE) LATER, THE VERDICT COMES IN... BUT DOES ANYONE WITH AT LEAST HALF A BRAIN REALLY BUY THE RESULT?: Princess Diana's driver was drunk: BBC - New DNA evidence proves the driver of Princess Diana's car was drunk on the night of her fatal crash in a Paris underpass in 1997, the BBC reported. The tests confirm that original post-mortem blood samples were from driver Henri Paul and that he had three times the French legal limit of alcohol in his blood, the BBC said, quoting from a documentary. Paul, Diana, 36, and her lover Dodi Fayed, 42, were killed when their Mercedes crashed in the Pont d'Alma tunnel in Paris on August 31, 1997 while the couple were being followed by media photographers. Rumours and conspiracy theories continue to swirl around the death of the former wife of Prince Charles, the heir to the British throne, despite a French judge's 1999 ruling that the crash was an accident.   (RELATED: See our popular Diana Assassination archive)

• The plan to destroy America – via the dollar - The value of the U.S. dollar on the international market is continuing to plummet, despite record growth in the US economy. Since October, the dollar has fallen 4 percent against both the euro and the Japanese yen. And this week, the dollar hit the lowest it has been against the euro since March 2005. With the Dow setting records every week and America creating more jobs than it can fill, why is the dollar falling? There are several reasons.

• 'Children killed' in US Iraq raid - Six children and eight women are among at least 32 people killed in a US air raid northwest of Baghdad, according to Iraqi police and local officials. Khedr Hussein, an Iraqi police major, said 32 people were killed at Ishaqi, 90km north of Baghdad. Mayor Amer Alwan told Reuters news agency that US aircraft bombed two homes in the early hours of Friday.

• Britain most at risk from al-Qaeda attack: report - Britain is the Western country most at risk to suffer a terrorist attack at the hands of the al-Qaeda terror network, the Financial Times reported on Thursday, citing unnamed government officials. The newspaper also said that the terror group was rebuilding its headquarters' operations in Pakistan, making Britain particularly vulnerable because of the large number of British residents who travel to the South Asian country on a regular basis. "It's an emerging pattern. Training is taking place in Pakistan and contacts are continuing after the training," one unnamed official told the FT. The conclusions have been reached on examination of past plots and various other evidence.

• Rare TV NEWS report about WTC bombing FBI Foreknowledge - In the course of the trial it was revealed that the FBI had an informant, a former Egyptian army officer named Emad A. Salem. Salem claims to have informed the FBI of the plot to bomb the towers as early as February 6, 1992. Salem's role as informant allowed the FBI to quickly pinpoint the conspirators out of the hundreds of possible suspects. Salem, initially believing that this was to be a sting operation, claimed that the FBI's original plan was for Salem to supply the conspirators with a harmless powder instead of actual explosive to build their bomb, but that the FBI chose to use him for other purposes instead. He secretly recorded hundreds of hours of telephone conversations with his FBI handlers; reported by Ralph Blumenthal in the New York Times, Oct. 28, 1993, secton A,Page 1: -

(RELATED: See our Problem > Reaction > Solution archive for more background info)

Friday 08th December 2006: -

• UK plans 'real-time' no-fly lists plus fingerprint ID for air travel: 'No finger, no fly' to commence at Heathrow - As has been illustrated all too frequently in the past, they don't tell immigration ministers anything - and, if what he had to say this week at the official unveiling of Heathrow's biometric trial is anything to go by, current incumbent Liam Byrne is no exception. Quoted in the Telegraph, Byrne observes that he does not see the Heathrow system as being a "stand-alone scheme", and that the Government wanted to see it used as part of efforts to control immigration and to check the identity of people coming to this country. So perhaps now would be a good time for us to introduce Mr Byrne to those aspects of the scheme that haven't been widely publicised, but in which his department is intimately involved. They're to do with universal biometric entry validation for British airports, and with checking the records, including immigration status, of those participating in the current trial, miSense.

• Medsafe warns of ADHD drug's side effects - A drug linked to violent behaviour in hyperactive children in Australia is available in New Zealand, but comes with warnings about its side-effects. The drug, Strattera, is used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and is available in New Zealand unsubsidised by Pharmac. It is soon due to be subsidised in Australia but the government's Therapeutic Goods Administration found it was the probable cause of violent mood swings in a couple of children, including a 12-year-old who ripped her fingernails out.   (RELATED: See our Compromised Health archive)

• Officer is held in attack on teen - A Los Angeles police officer was arrested Thursday on suspicion of assault after he was caught on videotape applying a chokehold to a handcuffed 16-year-old boy inside the Central Division station, authorities said. The officer's alleged actions were recorded by a hidden camera that had been installed after some chairs at the station had been vandalized. The videotape appears to show the officer, Sean Joseph Meade, 41, locking the teenager's neck in a chokehold for several seconds, according to sources in the department who have viewed it. Moments later, Meade allegedly removed the boy's handcuffs and challenged him to a fight, said the sources, who spoke on condition that they not be named.

• One Third Of Jailed Journalists Are Bloggers: Increasing authoritarian trends as governments target Internet for regulation, censorship, control - A new report by the Committee to Protect Journalists warns of increasing authoritarian attitudes towards the free flow of information on the Internet as statistics reveal that of the estimated 134 journalists jailed for their work worldwide, a full third are Internet writers and bloggers.

• US outlines privacy safeguards – and reveals plans to mine personal data: 'Invasive and unprecedented' - The US Government signalled some willingness this week to address concerns over citizens' privacy, but also launched a scheme which will analyse secret airline passenger risk profiles and keep them for 40 years. The US Government released guidelines which it says will protect the privacy of US citizens in an era of increasing data collection and information sharing by and between Government bodies.

Thursday 07th December 2006: -

• Diana pre-inquest hearing public - The coroner in charge of the Princess Diana inquest has decided to hold a preliminary hearing in January in public, rather than in private. Mohammed Al Fayed had mounted a legal challenge over holding the hearing about Diana and his son Dodi privately. UK law states inquests must be held in public, but early hearings need not be. The Judicial Communications Office said Lady Butler-Sloss had been persuaded to change her mind because of public interest in the case. "The reasons she had in mind that led her to conclude initially that the meeting should be held in private were entirely pragmatic - such as the size of the courtroom," said a spokesman.   (RELATED: See our popular Diana Assassination archive)

• Rampant Fraud At Dept. Of Homeland Security - The massive federal agency created after the 2001 terrorist attacks to patrol the nation’s borders and guard it against terrorism is infested with criminal employees who regularly commit fraud, theft and smuggling. In its short history the Department of Homeland Security has battled widespread corruption from within and the problem seems to be growing. A lengthy report filed with Congress this week details the severe misconduct of many of the agency’s 180,000 employees.

• Pay By Touch buys parent of Green Stamps - A San Francisco start-up bought an icon of the past -- the company behind S&H Green Stamps -- in its bid to shape how consumers pay at the register in the future. Pay By Touch, which has developed biometric technology that allows shoppers to pay by verifying their fingerprint at the register rather than swiping a debit or credit card, announced Wednesday it will pay more than $100 million in cash and stock to acquire S&H Solutions of Delray Beach, Fla. Pay By Touch, founded in 2002, sees the deal as a ``perfect fit'' in its plan to use the fingerprint to preclude the need to carry around debit and credit cards, cut merchant costs by processing transactions to sidestep Visa and MasterCard's networks, and steer customized promotions to consumers.

• Mars Photos Seem to Show Recent Water Flows - Scientists launched new fantasies of life on Mars Wednesday when they revealed remarkable new findings that suggest water may still be flowing on the alluring Red Planet. The results came to light through an analysis of photographs taken by an orbiting space probe. Pictures of gullies on the sides of Martian craters taken by the Mars Global Surveyor several years ago, and then again more recently, revealed differences.

• Actor James Brolin Latest Celebrity To Publicly Doubt 9/11: Follows in footsteps of David Lynch on same day - Actor James Brolin, the husband of Barbara Streisand, has today become the latest celebrity figure to publicly question the official story behind 9/11, after he encouraged viewers of a top rated ABC talk show to check out a 9/11 truth website. Brolin appeared as a guest on The View Wednesday morning and according to e mails we have been receiving in numbers, towards the end of the show the actor questioned 9/11 and urged the audience to check out the website 911weknow.com, which is a website that purports to expose how the twin towers and Building 7, which wasn't hit by a plane, were brought down via controlled demolition.

• 9/11 survivor tells Skipton audience of strange explosions - A WORLD-famous 9/11 survivor came to Skipton to give his controversial account of the day's earth-shattering events. Decorated hero William Rodriguez was the last person to leave the North Tower before it collapsed and is credited with saving the lives of dozens of people. However, the former caretaker now believes his own government was involved in the attacks and claims he heard bomb-like explosions in the building before and after it was hit by an airliner.   (RELATED: See our 9/11 archive and our affiliated site 911truthskipton.com)

Wednesday 06th December 2006: -

• Chinese man secretly executed after protest - A court in southwestern China has secretly executed a man who took part in an environmental protest which turned into a riot, a lawyer and a family member said on Wednesday. Three others were jailed, one of them for life, they said. The four had been among thousands of people who took to the streets in Sichuan province in 2004 in anger over a hydropower project that would flood 100 000 people out of their homes. Chen Tao, who was accused of "deliberately killing" a riot police officer during the protest, was executed, Cai Dengming, whose son was Chen's co-defendant, told Reuters.

• TOTALITARIANISM BY COERCION: Priority plane boarding for passengers who scan - Air passengers who agree to new fingerprint and face checks are to be given fast-track clearance through passport control as Heathrow. Under the new security system launched today, travellers will be able to speed up their progress onto planes by allowing immigration officers to take scans of their fingerprints, eyes and face. The biometric information will then allow their details to be checked by scanners as they check-in and board and cut the time on security checks.

• Jeweler Was Told To Lie In Princess Diana Case - A key witness in the inquiry into the death of Britain's Princess Diana recently claimed police threatened him to change his evidence. Jeweler Alberto Repossi - who claims he sold Diana's lover Dodi Al Fayed an engagement ring the day before the couple were killed in a car crash in Paris on August 31, 1997 - alleges he was put under pressure by investigators to retract the statement he gave to Lord Stevens, who is leading the inquiry. There is speculation that investigators did not want evidence that Diana and Dodi were to become engaged to be made public, as it would fuel conspiracy theories championed by Dodi's father Mohammed Al Fayed that the princess was murdered as part of a secret plot to prevent her from marrying a Muslim.   (RELATED: See our popular Diana Assassination archive)

• AMERICAN FILM DIRECTOR DAVID LYNCH GOES PUBLIC ON 9/11: David Lynch speaks about 9/11 - More info coming soon, but for now you can view the video below: -

(RELATED: IMDB info on David Lynch ALSO: See our 9/11 archive and our affiliated site 911truthskipton.com)

• Blaze kills daughter of 9/11 pilot - Tragedy struck a 9/11 family for a second time when the daughter of one of the hijacked pilots was killed in a suspicious blaze in New Jersey yesterday. Wendy Burlingame, 32, and her two dogs died when flames ripped through her 10th-floor apartment in Guttenberg, Hudson County. Burlingame was the daughter of American Airlines pilot Charles (Chick) Burlingame, whose plane crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. "It's just an extreme tragedy," said Tim Sumner, who knew Wendy Burlingame from the 9/11 Families survivor group. "It's an amazing blow to that family."   (WHY IS THIS STORY RELEVANT?: Well, Navy pilot Charles Burlingame was the main pilot of Flight 77 (this was the plane which allegedly went into the Pentagon). Before his untimely demise, Burlingame had recently, in a Reserve assignment at the Pentagon, been part of a Task Force that drafted the Pentagon's emergency response plan on what to do in case a plane hit the very building which his own plane - we are led to believe - did.  And now his daughter has died in a fire which the police are saying is 'suspicious'.)

• High school in Irvine drops plan to scan fingerprints: Proposal was supposed to speed food lines and deter theft at University High, but school district officials scrap the idea after privacy issues are raised - A plan to scan the fingerprints of 2,200 Irvine high school students to ease lunch lines was scrapped this week after angry parents argued it would violate teens' privacy rights. A spokesman for the Irvine Unified School District said district administrators had been unaware of University High School's proposal and had halted its implementation.

• Radiation find in British embassy - Small traces of a radioactive substance have been found at the British embassy in Moscow following a precautionary check, the Foreign Office has said. But the embassy has insisted there is no risk to public health. The announcement comes as British police in Moscow continue their investigation into the death of ex-Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko. The former KGB agent's death on 23 November, in London, has been linked to the highly toxic isotope polonium-210. "Slight traces of radiation were found but the level was lower than that which would pose a risk to health," a senior British diplomat said.

• Full review urged for surveillance program: Activists criticize privacy board - Civil liberties advocates urged a White House privacy board yesterday to aggressively review the government's warrantless surveillance program. The Privacy and Civil Liberties Board, created in late 2004 after a recommendation by the Sept. 11 commission, held its first hearing with testimony from nongovernment specialists on ways to protect Americans' rights during the war on terror. Its five members, who left the agenda open, repeatedly found themselves under scrutiny.

• Mayor maintains anti-fluoride stance - The Mayor of Rockhampton says she is not going to change her mind on her opposition to putting fluoride into the water supply. A Central Queensland University survey indicates more than three-quarters of Queenslanders support fluoridation, and even more think it is safe and prevents tooth decay. Mayor Margaret Strelow says she believes no government has the right to "mass medicate" the community, but concedes the council may vote otherwise on the issue when it arises. "This is a personal choice, there are other ways to access fluoride and my vote is no and will remain no," she said.   (RELATED: See our Compromised Health archive)

• New bid to put fluoride in Bradford water - The fluoridation of water in Bradford would bring benefits for the population, according to a new oral health action plan. Bradford and Airedale Teaching Primary Care Trust will present its draft oral health action plan to a meeting of Bradford Council's Health Improvement Committee tomorrow. Key to the plan is the need for water fluoridation, which the tPCT believes would optimise exposure to fluoride and therefore reduce tooth decay.

• A manned moon base within 20 years - Nasa's bold plan: First extraterrestrial living site would be used to launch missions to Mars - The space agency Nasa yesterday unveiled plans to build a permanent base on the moon within 20 years that will allow humans to live there. The base will be used as a launching site for missions to Mars, as well as for analysis of the Earth from space. "We're going for a base on the moon," said Scott Horowitz, Nasa associate administrator for exploration, at a press briefing in which he detailed plans for the first permanent human presence on an extraterrestrial body, 50 years after Apollo astronauts walked on the moon.

• Boy Booked for Opening Christmas Present - A fed-up mother had her 12-year-old son arrested for allegedly rummaging through his great-grandmother's things and playing with his Christmas present early. The mother called police Sunday after learning her son had disobeyed orders and repeatedly taken a Game Boy from its hiding place at his great-grandmother's house next door and played it. He was arrested on petty larceny charges, taken to the police station in handcuffs and held until his mother picked him up after church.

• How every-day foods can adversely effect your child’s health - Do you know how the everyday foods you are feeding your children are affecting them? Are they really providing the nourishment you hope will enable them to reach their full potential? There are so many hidden ingredients in our foods that can lead to dysfunction in a child’s body which can result in behavioral problems, learning disabilities, growth and development issues, skin problems, and even physical challenges. Before feeding your children their next meal or snack, learn what the most common ingredients are that can have an adverse affect on them. The first, and most common ingredient, is sugar. This can be the white refined type, the evaporated type or even the fruit type. Corn syrups, in any variation also fall into this category. The average person living in the United States today consumes 165 pounds of sugar per year. Think of it this way: this is the weight of an average male who is 5’9” tall. Now, there are those who eat less than that, and there are those who eat even more than that. The types of products that contain sugar are countless: fruit drinks, breakfast cereals, condiments like ketchup and barbeque sauce, salad dressings, sodas, cookies, cakes, candy, gum, breads, pastas, and even frozen foods.

Tuesday 05th December 2006: -

• 'Students should face pre-exam security tests to stamp out fraud' - Pupils taking exams should be forced to take biometric security tests to cut down on cheating, the exam watchdog said. A Government-backed report is recommending tougher measures such as fingerprint or retina scanning to prevent students drafting in friends to take exams in their place. Exam boards are forced to disqualify candidates every year for passing off others as themselves in GCSE and A-level exams. The report, commissioned by Government exams watchdogs, also called for widespread trials of 007-style detectors to trap pupils using mobile phones to cheat in exam halls.   (RELATED: See our Police State archive)

• Industry group urges caution on U.S. plan for RFID-enabled ID cards: Security and privacy concerns need to be addressed - A government plan to use radio frequency identification (RFID) chips in a proposed passport card program for U.S. citizens is drawing fire from some quarters. The identification cards would be needed by residents who don't have passports for verifying their identity at land and sea border crossings. The Smart Card Alliance, a nonprofit industry body representing several large vendors of smart-card and RFID technologies, this week formally urged the government to reconsider a decision to use RFID technology in personal ID verification cards. The alliance cited security and privacy concerns for its stance.

• Five Suing Maker Of Paxil Over Deaths - The maker of the anti-depressant Paxil has been hit with five new lawsuits claiming the drug caused heart defects with serious health consequences, including the death of an Omaha child. The lawsuits allege that Paxil use by pregnant mothers led to heart defects that killed Keagan Hargitt, of Omaha, among others. Other families in Ohio and West Virginia also are suing. The families are being represented by a Los Angeles law firm, which on Tuesday filed five lawsuits in a Pennsylvania state court.

• Suicide attempts rise with antidepressants - Suicidal patients taking antidepressants have a "markedly increased" risk of additional suicide attempts but a "markedly decreased" risk of dying from suicide, a large Finnish study has found. The research into nearly 15,400 patients hospitalized for suicide attempts between 1997 and 2003 showed that "current antidepressant use was associated with a 39 percent increase in risk of attempted suicide, but a 32 percent decrease in risk of completed suicide and a 49 percent reduced risk of death from any cause," the authors wrote in a report published in the Dec. 4 issue of Archives of General Psychiatry.   (RELATED: See our Compromised Health archive)

• Kissinger Blocks Truth About POWs With Pentagon Appointment: POW activist Bob Dumas says Kissinger twisted hands in Washington to get 'unqualified lapdog' to head up Department of Defense's POW office - According to POW activist Bob Dumas, Henry Kissinger now has his "greasy little Nazi fingers" in top Pentagon affairs, recently appointing lapdog, Charles Ray, to head up the Defense Department's POW Affairs office. Dumas, who has been searching for his POW brother for 50 years since the Korean War, said he was tipped-off by a Pentagon insider about the recent appointment, claiming Kissinger wants to keep a lid on the truth behind the explosive POW issue by appointing an "unqualified yes man."

• Why The Quiet Release Of The Doubletree 9/11 Video?: Where was the FOX news fanfare? Total media blackout suggests new strategy may be to ignore 9/11 questions - There has been a total media blackout on the release of the Doubletree Hotel video that shows the explosion at the Pentagon on 9/11 but does not reveal any footage of the impact. This may suggest that the corporate media has adopted a new strategy of ignorance towards questions concerning the official 9/11 story.

Monday 04th December 2006: -

• Study shows ID card dissent - Hundreds of thousands of people are likely to refuse to register on the database that will underpin the identity card scheme, according to a survey. A YouGov poll published in the Telegraph on Monday found a significant revolt against the scheme. A fifth of those asked said that they would risk a fine or prison sentence rather than be registered. The results demonstrate public suspicion of how information on the database is used by the government. Some 66 per cent said they don't trust any government "not to divulge it improperly to others". And 48 per cent thought the information would not be accurate and reliable. The poll shows that because of the increased use of CCTV cameras and speed cameras, 79 per cent thought Britain is now "a surveillance society".  (RELATED: See our Total Global Surveillance archive)

• ID cards don't work – even Tony says so - On this page a few weeks ago, Tony Blair set out his case for the ID card scheme that his Government is preparing to foist upon the British people over the next eight years or so. This was, presumably, a different Tony Blair from the one whose thoughts I stumbled across at the weekend while digging out books for the local Christmas fair. New Britain: My Vision of a Young Country, published in 1996, was a collection of newspaper articles and speeches that encapsulated Mr Blair's Third Way political philosophy, the prospectus on which he would be elected to office the following year. On the cover, he said: "When we make a promise, we must be sure we can keep it. That is page one, line one of a new contract between the Government and the citizen."

• Three Academies to put in cashless smartcards for pupils - Three state-of-the-art academies will provide pupils and staff with a new multi-application smartcard solution, MYRIAD, from market-leading G2 Integrated Solutions (G2IS) when they open this September (2006). G2 Integrated Solutions has scooped a trio of contracts to supply academies including Grace Academy in Solihull, David Young Community Academy in Leeds and North Liverpool Academy, Liverpool with their MYRIAD solution. The MYRIAD solution will be used for cashless catering and student ID production. It can also be integrated with academy library systems and as a first for the industry it can be used to manage door access at schools, with students using the MYRIAD card to swipe in and out of various areas.   (RELATED: See our Cashless Society Control Grid archive)

• FURY OVER MERCURY VACCINE FOR SCOTS - CHILDREN and pregnant women in Scotland are being given a flu vaccination that has poisonous mercury. Two years ago, the UK Government announced the withdrawal of mercury-based thiomersal vaccinations after they were linked to autism. But Scottish Health Minister Andy Kerr last week confirmed it is still being used in flu vaccines north of the Border. In reply to a question from the SSP's Carolyn Leckie, Kerr said: "In this year's flu programme, there is only one vaccine (Fluarix) which contains thiomersal and could be offered to pregnant women and children."   (RELATED: See our Compromised Health archive)

• Controversial US envoy quits post - The controversial US ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, is to leave his post, the White House says. Mr Bolton looked unable to win the necessary Senate support for him to continue in the job, which he had obtained on a temporary basis. Democrats in the chamber objected to his combative approach at the UN.

• Man dies after Taser incident at Downtown hotel - A man died last night after police officers used a Taser on him and wrestled him inside a Downtown hotel. Columbus police were investigating the incident, which began at 9:24 p.m. inside the Columbus, a Renaissance Hotel, 50 N. 3rd St. The man, whose name wasn't released, had assaulted a hotel security guard after refusing to leave Bar 41, a bar in the lobby that faces 3rd Street, police said. Officers who responded to the scene tried to arrest the man, who resisted. One officer used the Taser on the man, but it didn't stop him, said Sgt. Kevin Corcoran, Police Division spokesman.

• Video Is a Window Into a Terror Suspect’s Isolation - One spring day during his three and a half years as an enemy combatant, Jose Padilla experienced a break from the monotony of his solitary confinement in a bare cell in the brig at the Naval Weapons Station in Charleston, S.C. That day, Mr. Padilla, a Brooklyn-born Muslim convert whom the Bush administration had accused of plotting a dirty bomb attack and had detained without charges, got to go to the dentist.

• NAFTA SUPER-DISASTA: FOREIGN FIRM BIDS FOR CONTROL OF TEXAS FREE TRADE CORRIDOR - American Free Press has learned that a group of foreign companies, which currently lease a toll road in Indiana and are looking at buying up other highways across the country, has its eyes on the Trans-Texas Corridor, or TTC. The TTC is a planned toll road system through the Lone Star State that will largely be used for trucking foreign merchandise into the United States on the wings of the North American Free Trade Agreement. It will be a major leg of the so-called “NAFTA Superhighway,” and, according to watchdog groups, it will lead to more cheap goods flooding the country and will be devastating to the U.S.-based trucking industry. In the April 17, 2006 edition, AFP reported that ITR Concessions LLC, a partnership of Cintra of Spain and the McQuarie Bank of Australia, spent $3.85 billion to lease the Indiana Toll Road from the state for 75 years.

• JAPAN TO DEVELOP THE SMALLEST UNMANNED SURVEILLANCE PLANE - JAPANESE DEFENCE MINISTRY IS DEVELOPING THE SMALLEST UNMANNED SURVEILLANCE PLANE, DESIGNED TO WEIGH 400 GRAMS WITH 60 CENTIMETER WINGS AND CAPABLE TO MONITOR THE ENEMY'S MOVEMENTS ON JAPANESE TERRITORIES. A DEFENCE OFFICIAL TOLD JAPANESE NIKKEI SHIMBUN NEWSPAPER THAT THE PLANE, WHICH IS BEING DEVELOPED ACCORDING TO A PAPER MODEL, WILL HAVE A BODY MADE OF POLYSTYRENE FOAM AND AN ELECTRIC ENGINE. THE PLANE WILL ALSO BE EQUIPPED WITH A CAMERA, TRANSMITTING PICTURES TO JAPAN'S SELF-DEFENCE FORCES BUT WILL HAVE NO OFFENSIVE CAPACITIES. MOREOVER, THE DISTANCE THE PLANE CAN CROSS AT A STRETCH HAS NOT BEEN DECIDED YET, THE NEWSPAPER ADDED. IT IS TO NOTE THAT THE JAPANESE SURVEILLANCE PLANE WILL BE EQUIPPED WITH A GLOBAL POSITIONING SYSTEM (GPS) THAT DETERMINES LOCATIONS WORLDWIDE AND NAUTICAL DIRECTIONS.

• World’s oldest ritual discovered: Worshipped the python 70,000 years ago - A new archaeological find in Botswana shows that our ancestors in Africa engaged in ritual practice 70,000 years ago — 30,000 years earlier than the oldest finds in Europe. This sensational discovery strengthens Africa’s position as the cradle of modern man. A startling archaeological discovery this summer changes our understanding of human history. While, up until now, scholars have largely held that man’s first rituals were carried out over 40, 000 years ago in Europe, it now appears that they were wrong about both the time and place. Associate Professor Sheila Coulson, from the University of Oslo, can now show that modern humans, Homo sapiens, have performed advanced rituals in Africa for 70,000 years. She has, in other words, discovered mankind’s oldest known ritual.   (RELATED: The Symbolism Archive - The Serpent)

• HOFFMAN: 'BUSH MANIPULATES 9/11' - Acclaimed screen star DUSTIN HOFFMAN has slammed US President GEORGE W BUSH for manipulating the 9/11 terrorist attacks to facilitate the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The RAIN MAN actor now feels "self-conscious" about being American because he can understand why the nation has become a focus for resentment around the world. He says, "I think that the administration manipulated the grief of 9/11. They did it then and they do it now. "Everybody knows why they wanted to go into Iraq and it had nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction.

Sunday 03rd December 2006: -

• Travelers quietly scored as security risks: Assessments, which can't be contested, can affect jobs and government contracts, civil liberties advocates say - Without their knowledge, millions of Americans and foreigners crossing U.S. borders in the past four years have been assigned scores generated by government computers rating the risk that the travelers are terrorists or criminals. The travelers are not allowed to see or directly challenge these risk assessments, which the government intends to keep on file for 40 years. The government calls the system critical to national security following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Some privacy advocates call it one of the most intrusive and risky schemes yet mounted in the name of anti-terrorism efforts.

• Iraq not working out: Rumsfeld - TWO days before he resigned as US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld sent a classified memo to the White House acknowledging that the Bush Administration's strategy in Iraq was not working, and calling for a serious course correction. "In my view it is time for a major adjustment," wrote Mr Rumsfeld, who had spearheaded the dogged stay-the-course policy. "Clearly, what US forces are doing in Iraq is not working well enough or fast enough." Nor did Mr Rumsfeld seem confident that the Administration would easily develop an effective alternative. To limit the political fallout from changing course, he suggested the Administration consider a campaign to lower public expectations.

• MI5 whistleblower set for Ipswich - FORMER MI5 officer and famous whistleblower David Shayler is set to visit Ipswich to question the US Government's explanation behind the 9/11 attacks. The Ipswich Truth Campaign is welcoming Shayler to a meeting later this month where it will screen a documentary film narrated by the former intelligence officer. The film is called Short Changed and is an analysis of the events of September 11, 2001. It will be followed by talks from Shayler on the subject of state terrorism, and fellow former MI5 officer Annie Machon on the aims of the 911 truth movement. Machon is secretary of the 911 Truth Campaign in Britain and Ireland.

PHOTOS FROM THE RECENT WILLIAM RODRIGUEZ VISIT, ORGANISED BY 911 TRUTH SKIPTON AND THE WEST YORKSHIRE TRUTH CAMPAIGN. Thanks to everyone who turned up and for all of your excellent feedback.  We shall be holding future events in and out of Skipton. There are plans for William to come back in early 2007, so watch this space for more info! RELATED: Visit the personal website of William Rodriguez, go to 911keymaster.com

Saturday 02nd December 2006: -

• Privacy concerns as more clubs scan IDs - MORE hotels and nightclubs are adopting the controversial practice of scanning patrons driver's licences before letting them in, causing anxiety over privacy issues. Popular pubs such as the Hawthorn, the Palace at Camberwell, the Arcadia at South Yarra and the Harp at Kew demand patrons hand over their driver's licences to be scanned. Several nightclubs, including the Q Bar in South Yarra and Pulse at Dandenong, also use scanners.

• Nurses fear 'Big Brother' - Hamilton Health Sciences is looking into using electronic tracking to monitor its employees. The Privacy Commissioner of Canada has been asked to give an opinion on using radio frequency identification (RFID) tags to track the whereabouts of staff and certain patients. "At this point, do we have plans to do it? No," said Bill MacLeod, vice-president of research at Hamilton Health Sciences. "I can't say we're never doing it because the technology has that potential." Privacy commissioner Jennifer Stoddart was unavailable for comment yesterday, but spoke out against this type of continual surveillance of employees in a speech at Ryerson University this week. "Continual surveillance is dehumanizing," she said. "There is a line to be drawn when it comes to surveillance and where this line is drawn cannot simply be dictated by whatever the latest technology can offer. Just because we can put workers under extreme surveillance doesn't mean we should."

• UN to discuss child abuse claims - The United Nations has said it will hold a conference in New York on Monday to address the issue of the sexual abuse of children by UN peacekeepers. The issue was highlighted in a BBC report earlier this week, with claims of children being subjected to rape and prostitution in Haiti and Liberia. The UN said it had not known about the case in Liberia and it could not substantiate the second case in Haiti. But a UN spokesman said even one case of sexual abuse was one case too many.

• Unseen Photos of Bohemian Grove Found - These photos were literally found on disc in a stack around the office. They contain dozens of photos from the Bohemian Club, most of which are circa 1926-27. Amongst photos of (largely unidentified) notable individuals attending the meetings are photos of plays performed and various angles of the nefarious owl god Moloch. One such photo looks strikingly similar to the images in the Cremation of Care ritual (top photo), as photographed by Alex Jones and Mike Hanson in 2000. Many of these photos have never before been seen by Alex Jones himself.   (RELATED: See our popular Bohemian Grove archive)

• Same sex domestic abuse 'hidden' - The work, by academics at the Universities of Bristol and Sunderland, reveals most domestic abuse survivors do not report it to the police. The report says this is partly because they do not recognise it as domestic abuse and see it as their own problem. But also they do not believe they will get a sympathetic response.

• VeriChip(TM) Announces Results of Italian National Institute Two-Year Clinical Study of VeriMed System: Study Reports Full Patient Acceptance and Flawless Data Retrieval with No Complications - Applied Digital Solutions (Nasdaq: ADSX - News), though its subsidiary VeriChip Corporation, announced today the results of a clinical study on its VeriMed System for patient radio frequency identification (RFID) conducted by the Spallanzi National Institute of Rome Italy and sponsored by the Italian Ministry of Health. The two-year, 10 patient study was designed to evaluate the safety and efficacy of the VeriMed implantable RFID microchip and the functionality of the VeriMed System in the management of patients with chronic infectious diseases undergoing care at the Institute. The study reported no complications or side effects related to the insertion procedure, flawless access of the ID number using the hand-held reader, and universal acceptance within the patient study group. Based on the results of the study, the exclusive VeriChip distributor for Italy plans to petition the Italian Ministry of Health for full availability of the VeriMed System through the Italian National Health Service.

• Princess Diana's Death Inquest To Be Made Public - The inquiry into the death of Princess Diana will soon be revealed. The investigation about the "people's princess" is set to be published in late December. Lord Stevens' investigation - which has taken three years to complete - will determine whether the 1997 Paris car crash was an accident. Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss - the senior judge assigned to hear the case - has not yet confirmed her arrangements but wants to hold preliminary hearings on January 8 and 9 without the press or public present.   (RELATED: See our Diana Assassination archive)

• Nike+ IPod = Surveillance - If you enhance your workout with the new Nike+ iPod Sport Kit, you may be making yourself a surveillance target. A report from four University of Washington researchers to be released Thursday reveals that security flaws in the new RFID-powered device from Nike and Apple make it easy for tech-savvy stalkers, thieves and corporations to track your movements. With just a few hundred dollars and a little know-how, someone could even plot your running routes on a Google map without your knowledge. The Nike+ iPod gives runners real-time updates about the speed and length of their workouts via a small RFID device that fits into the soles of Nike shoes, and broadcasts workout data to a small receiver plugged into an iPod Nano.

• Early Astronomical ‘Computer’ Found to Be Technically Complex - A computer in antiquity would seem to be an anachronism, like Athena ordering takeout on her cellphone. Decoding the Ancient Greek Astronomical Calculator Known as the Antikythera Mechanism (Nature)But a century ago, pieces of a strange mechanism with bronze gears and dials were recovered from an ancient shipwreck off the coast of Greece. Historians of science concluded that this was an instrument that calculated and illustrated astronomical information, particularly phases of the Moon and planetary motions, in the second century B.C.

• School may ban unvaccinated students - A Cook County, Ill., Public Health Department official says the county may ban students not vaccinated for whooping cough from public schools. Catherine Counard, the county's assistant medical director for communicable disease, said New Trier Township High School, which has been the site of a recent outbreak of whooping cough, has not canceled all extracurricular activities, despite recommendations from the health department, the Chicago Tribune reported Thursday. Counard said students who have not been vaccinated may be barred from attending school if the outbreak continues to grow.

• Democrat Side of War Party Calls for More Mass Murder and Misery in Iraq - “Although the Democrats are very uncomfortable with the way the Iraq policy is being executed, they are at pains not to appear that they are shortchanging troops in the field,” Loren Thompson, CEO of the Lexington Institute, yet another “think tank,” this one connected at the hip to the neocon infested Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the Associated Press. “This is their opportunity to show that they, too, are pro-defense,” that is to say pro-killing Iraqis in prodigious numbers with an inventory of truly heinous weapons.

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