The Bush administration said yesterday that it plans to start using the nation’s most advanced spy technology for domestic purposes soon, rebuffing challenges by House Democrats over the idea’s legal authority.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said his department will activate his department’s new domestic satellite surveillance office in stages, starting as soon as possible with traditional scientific and homeland security activities — such as tracking hurricane damage, monitoring climate change and creating terrain maps.
Sophisticated overhead sensor data will be used for law enforcement once privacy and civil rights concerns are resolved, he said. The department has previously said the program will not intercept communications.
Ron Paul lays out some tough questions, and only asks for an immediate response to one of them. The question was whether President Bush could bomb Iran without the approval of Congress. However, Petraeus avoids answering, even though surely a Four-Star General should know whether it is legal to bomb a country without the approval of Congress or not.
(AXcess News) – Gas pumps in the United States tell the same story as rice prices in Thailand: Inflation is a global phenomenon this year.
Oil hit a record $112 per barrel this week, and a United Nations official warned of continued pressure on food prices, which by one index are up 45 percent in the past year.
The challenges are worst in developing nations, where raw materials account for a larger share of consumer spending. But another factor – the sagging value of the US dollar – means that imports cost more in America and other nations that peg their currencies to the dollar.
Still, regardless of this currency phenomenon, several broad forces are pushing prices up.
After years of strong global economic growth, prices of oil, grains, and some metals have spiked. Investors are adding fuel to that fire by buying up hard assets like commodities, which are viewed as a hedge against inflation.
More fundamentally, many nations have been relatively loose in the creation of money supply. For all the news about interest-rate cuts by the Federal Reserve, this trend goes well beyond US shores.
Tens of thousands of Australian households will have their rubbish and recycling monitored by tracking devices placed in their dustbins in a move dubbed by the media as “Bin Brother”.
Officials on Monday confirmed that 78,000 new council-issued bins in the eastern suburbs of Sydney have been fitted with small radio frequency tags, which allow for data collection.
Each bin will transmit a unique identification code to the rubbish truck which weighs and empties it each week, allowing officials to identify how much waste is produced at each address.
Imagine a world of streets lined with video cameras that alert authorities to any suspicious activity. A world where police officers can read the minds of potential criminals and arrest them before they commit any crimes. A world in which a suspect who lies under questioning gets nabbed immediately because his brain has given him away.
Though that may sound a lot like the plot of the 2002 movie “Minority Report,” starring Tom Cruise and based on a Philip K. Dick novel, I’m not talking about science fiction here; it turns out we’re not so far away from that world. But does it sound like a very safe place, or a very scary one?
It’s a question I think we should be asking as the federal government invests millions of dollars in emerging technology aimed at detecting and decoding brain activity. And though government funding focuses on military uses for these new gizmos, they can and do end up in the hands of civilian law enforcement and in commercial applications. As spending continues and neurotechnology advances, that imagined world is no longer the stuff of science fiction or futuristic movies, and we postpone at our peril confronting the ethical and legal dilemmas it poses for a society that values not just personal safety but civil liberty as well.
Consider Cernium Corp.’s “Perceptrak” video surveillance and monitoring system, recently installed by Johns Hopkins University, among others. This technology grew out of a project funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — the central research and development organization for the Department of Defense — to develop intelligent video analytics systems. Unlike simple video cameras monitored by security guards, Perceptrak integrates video cameras with an intelligent computer video. It uses algorithms to analyze streaming video and detect suspicious activities, such as people loitering in a secure area, a group converging or someone leaving a package unattended. Since installing Perceptrak, Johns Hopkins has reported a 25 percent reduction in crime.
But that’s only the beginning. Police may soon be able to monitor suspicious brain activity from a distance as well. New neurotechnology soon may be able to detect a person who is particularly nervous, in possession of guilty knowledge or, in the more distant future, to detect a person thinking, “Only one hour until the bomb explodes.” Today, the science of detecting and decoding brain activity is in its infancy. But various government agencies are funding the development of technology to detect brain activity remotely and are hoping to eventually decode what someone is thinking. Scientists, however, wildly disagree about the accuracy of brain imaging technology, what brain activity may mean and especially whether brain activity can be detected from afar.
Yet as the experts argue about the scientific limitations of remote brain detection, this chilling science fiction may already be a reality. In 2002, the Electronic Privacy Information Center reported that NASA was developing brain monitoring devices for airports and was seeking to use noninvasive sensors in passenger gates to collect the electronic signals emitted by passengers’ brains. Scientists scoffed at the reports, arguing that to do what NASA was proposing required that an electroencephalogram (EEG) be physically attached to the scalp.
ROME (Reuters) – Food riots in developing countries will spread unless world leaders take major steps to reduce prices for the poor, the head of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said on Friday.
Despite a forecast 2.6 percent hike (This is disinformation.) in global cereal output this year, record prices are unlikely to fall, forcing poorer countries’ food import bills up 56 percent and hungry people on to the streets, FAO Director General Jacques Diouf said.
“The reality is that people are dying already in the riots,” Diouf told a news conference.
“They are dying because of their reaction to the situation and if we don’t take the necessary action there is certainly the possibility that they might die of starvation. Naturally people won’t be sitting dying of starvation, they will react.”
The FAO said food riots had broken out in several African countries, Indonesia, the Philippines and Haiti. Thirty-seven countries face food crises, it said in its latest World Food Situation report.
KABUL, April 14 (Reuters) – Impoverished Afghans struggling with rising wheat prices are not expected to get any relief soon with no sign prices are going to come down, a United Nations official said on Monday.
Top finance and development officials from around the world called in Washington on Sunday for urgent action to stem rising food prices, warning that social unrest will spread unless the cost of basic staples is contained.
Afghanistan is one of the world’s poorest countries with half its 25 million people living below the poverty line.
Wheat prices in Afghanistan have risen by an average of 60 percent over the last year with certain areas seeing a rise of up to 80 percent, the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) said.
On March 11 a new documentary was aired on French television (ARTE – French-German cultural TV channel) by French journalist and filmmaker Marie-Monique Robin, The World According to Monsanto – A documentary that Americans won’t ever see. The gigantic biotech corporation Monsanto is threatening to destroy the agricultural biodiversity which has served mankind for thousands of years.
I highly recommend this video. This is so important.
At the age of 77, Mr. Soros, one the world’s most successful investors and richest men, leapt out of retirement last summer to safeguard his fortune and legacy. Alarmed by the unfolding crisis in the financial markets, he once again began trading for his giant hedge fund — and won big while so many others lost.
Mr. Soros has always been a controversial figure. But he is becoming more so with a new, dire forecast for the world economy. Last week he rushed out a book, his 10th, warning that the financial pain has only just begun.
“I consider this the biggest financial crisis of my lifetime,” Mr. Soros said during an interview Monday in his office overlooking Central Park. A “superbubble” that has been swelling for a quarter of a century is finally bursting, he said.
A family who were wrongly suspected of lying on a school application form have discovered that their local council used anti-terrorism surveillance powers to spy on them.
The family, from Poole in Dorset, said they had been tailed for three weeks by council officials trying to establish whether they had given a false address in an attempt to get their three-year-old daughter a place at a heavily oversubscribed local nursery school, which their two older children had attended. The family had in fact done nothing wrong, and the investigation was eventually aborted.
Yesterday it emerged that Poole borough council had legitimately used the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act to monitor the family. This involved keeping a detailed log of their movements for two weeks, following the mother’s car as she took her three children to school each day and even watching the family home to ascertain their sleeping habits.
The Act, passed in 2000, was supposed to allow security agencies to combat terrorism.
The 39-year-old mother, a businesswoman who wished to remain anonymous, said: “I can’t imagine a greater invasion of our privacy. I’m incensed that legislation designed to combat terrorism can be turned on a three-year-old. It was very creepy when we found out that people had been watching us and making notes. Councils should be protecting children, not spying on them.”
The council defended its right to investigate families in a covert manner, saying it had used the law twice in the past year to successfully prove parents were lying about where they lived.
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (Reuters) – The Bush administration and Republican allies in Congress are again pushing for seed money to explore options for putting a multibillion-dollar layer of ballistic-missile interceptors in space.
Last year, the Democratic-controlled Congress rejected the administration’s request for $10 million to resume studies on the idea, first floated in the 1980s as part of then-President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative.
Derided by critics as “Star Wars,” the concept has been embraced by missile-defense backers as potentially more effective than sea- and ground-based parts of an emerging shield against missiles that could be tipped with chemical, germ or nuclear warheads.
(GRANTS PASS, Ore.) – Scientists listening to underwater microphones have detected an unusual swarm of earthquakes off central Oregon, something that often happens before a volcanic eruption – except there are no volcanoes in the area.
Scientists don’t know exactly what the earthquakes mean, but they could be the result of molten rock rumbling away from the recognized earthquake faults off Oregon, said Robert Dziak, a geophysicist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Oregon State University.
There have been more than 600 quakes over the past 10 days in a basin 150 miles southwest of Newport. The biggest was magnitude 5.4, and two others were more than magnitude 5.0, OSU reported.
The big problem with inflation is that people get low blood sugar when they are hungry, and soon their moods turn sour. I know this for a fact because if breakfast or brunch or lunch or coffee break or dinner or any snack is five minutes late, I involuntarily turn into a screaming monster from hell demanding to know who stole my food and vowing bloody revenge. I can only imagine the anger when hunger is caused because someone can’t afford to buy food!
This “inability to buy food” is one of the problems with inflation, and that ugliness is now here, as we read from Bloomberg.com that “The World Bank in Washington says 33 nations from Mexico to Yemen may face ‘social unrest’ after food and energy costs increased for six straight years.” Hahaha! No kidding?
World Bank chief Robert Zoellick says, “Thirty-three countries around the world face potential social unrest because of the acute hike in food and energy prices”, and that since 2005, “the prices of staples have jumped 80%”.
Like what? Like corn and wheat, which are making the news by rising like crazy, and the latest food emergency is that “Rice, the staple food for half the world,” is now double the price of a year ago, and a fivefold increase from 2001. Yikes!
100% inflation in the price of rice in one year! And 500% in seven years! Yikes again! No wonder that Jody Clarke at MoneyWeek.com reports that “Since January 2005 the average price of a loaf of bread in the US has risen 32%. Overall, US retail food prices rose 4 % last year, the biggest jump in 17 years, says the US Department of Agriculture. Meanwhile restaurant owners have been even harder hit, with wholesale price increases of 7.4%. That’s the biggest jump in nearly three decades, according to the National Restaurant Association.”
And worse yet for us alcohol-besotted worthless lushes out here, heroically keeping bartenders and comely barmaids gainfully employed year around, the price of hops, an integral ingredient in beer making, has soared from $4 a pound to $40.
The Marketbasket Survey, conducted by the American Farm Bureau Federation, says a basket of things like bread, milk, eggs and pork chops will cost you $3.50, or 8.9%, more this year than last. Both a five-pound bag of flour and a dozen eggs are up over 40% since January 2007.“
As Finance Ministers Convene Here, Multiple Crises Test Their Ability to Cope
Financial markets are tumbling. The world economy is starting to sputter. Food prices have shot up so far, so fast, that there are riots in the streets of many poor nations.
It’s a hard time to be one of the masters of the global economy.
Those leaders — finance ministers from all over the world — are gathering in Washington this weekend to sort out their reactions to the most profound global economic crises in at least a decade. The situation could reveal the limitations that international economic institutions face in dealing with the risks inherent to global capitalism.
“There’s got to be something coming out of the weekend, a way to visibly assume public responsibility for trying to limit the damage that financial markets can do to our society,” said Colin Bradford, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “The pressure is on politicians this weekend to come up with an answer. . . . What is the power structure going to do about this?”
The Group of Seven finance ministers of major industrialized countries meet today, and the governing boards of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank will meet tomorrow and Sunday. Their agendas: in the case of the G-7 and IMF, countering the breakdown in financial markets; in the case of the World Bank, food inflation that threatens to drive more of the world’s poorest people into starvation.
Llosa del cavall reservoir in Sant Llorencs de Morunys, north of Solsona
Spain is suffering its worst drought in more than four decades, pitting the country’s regions against each other in a fierce battle over water resources.
There has been 40 per cent less rain than usual since October 1 across the nation as a whole, according to the Meteorology Institute, although in some regions the impact has been far worse. Mediterranean regions such as Catalonia and Valencia have been the worst affected – they have had less rain than at any time since 1912.
Farmers in Catalonia fear they could lose their crops altogether if it does not rain in coming weeks, and Britons with homes on the coast could soon face restrictions on water.
The situation in Barcelona – Catalonia’s capital and top tourist draw – could soon become critical. Water reserves there are at 19 per cent of capacity – they must be shut down when they reach 15 per cent because there is too much sediment near the bottom. José Montilla, president of Catalonia, said: “We must prepare for the worst.”
Would you want other people to know, all day long, exactly where you are, right down to the street corner or restaurant?
Unsettling as that may sound to some, wireless carriers are betting that many of their customers do, and they’re rolling out services to make it possible.
Sprint Nextel Corp. has signed up hundreds of thousands of customers for a feature that shows them where their friends are with colored marks on a map viewable on their cellphone screens. Now, Verizon Wireless is gearing up to offer such a service in the next several weeks to its 65 million customers, people familiar with it say.
WSJ’s Jessica Vascellaro tests out Loopt’s new buddy-tracking device to see whether it’s helpful for hooking up with friends or just another invasion of privacy.
Making this people-tracking possible is that cellphones today come embedded with Global Positioning System technology. With it, carriers have already offered mapping features such as turn-by-turn driving instructions. But they long hesitated to offer another breakthrough made possible by GPS — tracking of cellphone users’ whereabouts in real time — because of privacy and liability concerns.
WASHINGTON — President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney both signed off on using harsh interrogation techniques against suspected terrorists after asking the Justice Department to endorse their legality, news agencies have learned.
The Associated Press reported earlier that senior Bush administration officials took care to insulate President Bush from a series of meetings where CIA interrogation methods, including waterboarding, which simulates drowning, were discussed and ultimately approved.
However, ABC News is now reporting that President Bush himself was aware of the discussions and approved the controversial interrogation tactics himself.
“Well, we started to connect the dots, in order to protect the American people.” Bush told ABC News. “And, yes, I’m aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved.”
PORT-AU-PRINCE (Reuters) – Haiti’s government fell on Saturday when senators fired the prime minister after more than a week of riots over food prices, ignoring a plan presented by the president to slash the cost of rice.
Sixteen of 17 senators at a special session voted against Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis, an ally President Rene Preval placed at the head of a coalition cabinet in June 2006 that was meant to unite the fractious Caribbean nation.
Dumpster-diving firm collected Social Security numbers of activists
A private security firm managed by former Secret Service officers spied on myriad environmental organizations throughout the 1990s and the year 2000, thieving documents, trying to plant undercover operations and collecting phone records of members, according to a new report.
Documents obtained by James Ridgeway, a Mother Jones correspondent formerly with the Village Voice, reveals the contractor collected confidential internal records — donor lists, financial statements — even Social Security numbers, for public relations outfits and “corporations involved in environmental controversies.”
Beckett Brown International also offered “intelligence” services to the Carlyle Group, the controversial DC-based investment company; “protective services” for the National Rifle Association; “crisis management” for the Gallo wine company and for Pirelli; “information collection” for Wal-Mart.
“Also listed as clients in BBI records,” Ridgeway reveals: “Halliburton and Monsanto.”
BOSTON – Mumps made an alarming comeback in the United States in 2006 and may take years to completely eradicate, federal health experts reported on Wednesday.
The outbreak of the viral disease came despite the widespread use of a second dose of a mumps vaccine, produced by Merck, beginning in 1990.
(CNSNews.com) – Government scientists are studying the feasibility of sending nearly microscopic particles of specially made glass into the Earth’s upper atmosphere to try to dampen the effects of “global warming.” The idea, while “interesting,” said one leading global warming skeptic, is “not practical” and, if done on a large scale, could depress the ozone layer and cause other problems.
Details from documents Cybercast News Service obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show that scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Savannah River National Laboratory in Aiken, S.C., are developing computer models of what might happen if a huge amount of particulate matter is shot into the stratosphere.
The particles, consisting of a very fine and special form of glass – “porous-walled glass microspheres” – would be able to absorb a certain amount of carbon dioxide, and would reflect sunlight away from the Earth.
Communist Chinese-style political oppression came to San Francisco on Wednesday when police, acting on the orders of Chinese paramilitary cops, removed and shoved to the sidewalk an Olympic torch bearer for displaying a Tibetan flag, as the woman’s pleas that she had the right to free speech as an American citizen fell on deaf ears.
Equally outrageous as Carter having her right to free speech violated is the fact that San Francisco police were following the orders of the Chinese paramilitary cops who turned her over to them in the first place. This is completely illegal and lawsuits need to be brought on the basis that the city allowed foreign cops to police Americans, which is completely unlawful unless a state of martial law has been announced. The people of San Francisco have a basic human right to know whether or not their city is operating under martial law.
In a You Tube video, Majora Carter, the founder and Executive Director of Sustainable South Bronx, and co-founder of Green for All, is seen being reprimanded by police before being pushed to the sidewalk during the Olympic procession.
Watch the clip.
“I was carrying a flag for Tibet and the Chinese guards came and took it from me,” said Carter.
“I’m an American citizen, if I want to stand and support other people in Tibet I can do so – and I was not given that right,” she continued.
“Free Tibet! Because we’re American, we can do that,” exclaimed Carter.
According to the New York Daily News, “Carter said a Chinese paramilitary squad escorting the torch pounced and turned her over to cops, who pushed her into the crowd.”
“I was expressing my right as an American citizen using freedom of speech in support of people who don’t have it,” Carter said. “It just became really clear to me what was going on in Tibet and I wanted to do something,” Carter told the media.
“Apparently, I’m not part of the Olympic torch-bearing entourage anymore,” she quipped.
The Coca-Cola Company, who had sponsored Carter to represent them during the torch relay, were nonplussed about the incident.
“It’s unfortunate that Ms.Carter used an invitation to participate in the torch relay as a platform to make a personal, political statement,” a company spokeswoman said.
Majora Carter talks to the media after she is shoved to the sidewalk and kicked out of the Olympic procession by San Francisco police – acting on the orders of Chinese paramilitary police.
“It would be more disgusting not exercising my constitutional right,” Carter responded.
Carter was asked to make the statement by Students for a Free Tibet in Memphis during last week’s events to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s death.
A report in the New York Daily Newsquoted an NYPD police officer and a retired FDNY fireman, both of whom also carried the torch and chastised Carter’s actions as “disgusting and appalling,” seemingly ignorant of that fact that such protests are outlawed in China because it is a Communist police state, unlike America which is supposed to be “the land of the free” where a God-given right to freedom of speech is afforded to every American citizen.
The incident coincides with an announcement by Jacques Rogge, the president of the International Olympic Committee, who said that athletes who display Tibetan flags, even in the privacy of their own rooms, could be expelled from this summer’s Games in Beijingunder anti-propaganda rules.
This is not the first time that American police have displayed behavior more befitting of their Communist Chinese counterparts. During a March 14th rally in New York, peaceful Tibetan demonstrators were beaten up by cops who also threatened to kill them, during a sickening attack that was also caught on video.
————————————
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Friday, April 11, 2008
Seattle – US regulators on Thursday ordered a ban on all commercial salmon fishing off California, Oregon and Washington in an emergency effort to help the decimated salmon population to recover. Under the terms of the ban only limited recreational salmon fishing will be allowed on holiday weekends off the Oregon coast.
According to official figures the salmon stock is at a historic low point as fewer and fewer fall chinook, or king salmon, have been returning to the Sacramento and Klamath rivers, over the last three years. The dismally low numbers have not been seen since 1954 and 1964, state officials say.
Fishermen and scientists blame three main factors for the shortfall. Mismanagement of the rivers, whose waters are often dammed and diverted to irrigate fields; overfishing, and the absence of up normal ocean upwelling – which usually stirs up tons of the ocean’s offshore nutrients which are the essential food needed by young salmon to survive.
Today’s update on import prices once again paints a troubling picture on pricing pressures.
Import prices jumped 2.8% last month, the U.S. Labor Department reports. That’s the highest since last December’s unnerving 3.2% spike. More troubling is the fact that the 2.8% rise in March is in the upper range for monthly changes going back to the 1980s. Adding insult to injury, import prices soared 14.8% measured over the 12 months through last month, as our chart below shows. That’s the highest 12-month rate in the Labor Department’s archives, which goes back to 1982 as per the web site.
The “good news,” if we can call it that, is that much of the rise in import prices was due to higher energy costs. And energy prices can’t rise forever–we hope. In any case, the 14.8% surge in import prices over the past year falls to 5.4% after stripping out energy. But the lesser rise in non-petroleum import prices is hollow comfort once you recognize that the 5.4% annual pace is the highest since the 1980s. The basic trend, in short, is not in doubt, no matter how you slice the import-price pie.
How troubling is a 5.4% rise in non-petroleum imports? In search of an answer, consider that inflation generally in the U.S. is climbing by 4.0%, based on the annual rise in consumer prices through February. And the nominal (pre-inflation adjusted) annualized pace of economic expansion in 2007’s fourth quarter was 3.0%. In other words:
* non-petroleum import prices are advancing at a roughly 33% faster rate than general inflation
* non-petroleum import prices are rising 80% faster than the nominal growth of GDP
Taking flight: Magpie Geese migrate across the Northern Territory after
arriving from Indonesia (file photo) (Getty Images: Ian Waldie)
Birds are considered an accurate barometer of the state of the environment, so when the numbers of migratory birds fall, scientists consider it cause for concern.
Now the first major long-term survey assessing shore birds from Broome to Sydney has found that Australia’s massive migratory population has plummeted by up to 75 per cent over the last 25 years.
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Llosa del cavall reservoir in Sant Llorencs de Morunys, north of Solsona
