Global News

Report: Nazis Were Given ‘Safe Haven’ in US

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Dr. Josef Mengele in 1956, left. Arthur Rudolph, center, in 1990, was a rocket scientist for Nazi Germany and NASA. John Demjanjuk in 2006.

WASHINGTON — A secret history of the United States government’s Nazi-hunting operation concludes that American intelligence officials created a “safe haven” in the United States for Nazis and their collaborators after World War II, and it details decades of clashes, often hidden, with other nations over war criminals here and abroad.

The 600-page report, which the Justice Department has tried to keep secret for four years, provides new evidence about more than two dozen of the most notorious Nazi cases of the last three decades.

It describes the government’s posthumous pursuit of Dr. Josef Mengele, the so-called Angel of Death at Auschwitz, part of whose scalp was kept in a Justice Department official’s drawer; the vigilante killing of a former Waffen SS soldier in New Jersey; and the government’s mistaken identification of the Treblinka concentration camp guard known as Ivan the Terrible.

The report catalogs both the successes and failures of the band of lawyers, historians and investigators at the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, which was created in 1979 to deport Nazis.

Perhaps the report’s most damning disclosures come in assessing the Central Intelligence Agency’s involvement with Nazi émigrés. Scholars and previous government reports had acknowledged the C.I.A.’s use of Nazis for postwar intelligence purposes. But this report goes further in documenting the level of American complicity and deception in such operations.

The Justice Department report, describing what it calls “the government’s collaboration with persecutors,” says that O.S.I investigators learned that some of the Nazis “were indeed knowingly granted entry” to the United States, even though government officials were aware of their pasts. “America, which prided itself on being a safe haven for the persecuted, became — in some small measure — a safe haven for persecutors as well,” it said.

Read moreReport: Nazis Were Given ‘Safe Haven’ in US

Exorcists Wanted: Apply to Catholic Church

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Horned Hand or The Mano Cornuto: this gesture is the Satanic salute, a sign of recognition between and allegiance of members of Satanism or other unholy groups.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Wanted: a few good men to cast out devils.

Overwhelmed with requests for exorcists, U.S. Roman Catholic bishops are holding a special training workshop in Baltimore this weekend to teach clerics the esoteric rite, the Catholic News Service reported.

The church has signed up 56 bishops and 66 priests for the two-day workshop that began on Friday, seeking to boost the small group of just five or six American exorcists that the church currently has on its books.

“There’s this small group of priests who say they get requests from all over the continental U.S.,” Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Springfield, Illinois, was quoted as saying.

“Actually, each diocese should have its own” exorcist, he added.

Read moreExorcists Wanted: Apply to Catholic Church

Video Of China Completing 15 Story Hotel In 6 Days

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Repeat after us – there is no Chinese bubble </sarc>.

Although none is needed, here is some commentary:

As the United States and China battle over the finer points of currency manipulation at the G-20 summit, American negotiators may want to take note of this startling testimonial to the productivity of Chinese workers: A construction crew in the south-central Chinese city of Changsha has completed a 15-story hotel in just six days. If nothing else, this remarkable achievement will stoke further complaints from American economic pundits that China’s economy is far more accomplished than ours in tending to such basics as construction.

Read moreVideo Of China Completing 15 Story Hotel In 6 Days

US to ‘store’ additional $400 million in emergency military equipment in Israel

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(JTA) — The United States will store an additional $400 million in emergency military equipment in Israel.

The new equipment, which will arrive in Israel over the next two years, will be available to Israel in the event of an emergency. It will bring to $1.2 billion the amount of American military equipment being stockpiled in Israel by 2012.

Congress approved the storage of new weapons in Israel last month, but the story was first reported this week in Defense News magazine by its Israel-based reporter, Barbara Opall-Rome. The agreement between Israel and the United States includes the conditions under which the Israel Defense Forces may use the equipment, Haaretz reported.

Israel used some U.S. stockpiles of weapons during the Second Lebanon War.

The new equipment includes smart bombs and other precision weaponry, according to reports, and can be used by U.S. troops anywhere in the world.

Read moreUS to ‘store’ additional $400 million in emergency military equipment in Israel

‘Cyber-Celebrity’ Makes $635,000 From The Sale Of Virtual Space Station

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Cyber-celebrity and virtual entrepreneur Jon Jacobs

Many people might balk at the idea of paying even a dollar for virtual cow in a game like Farmville. But Jon Jacobs has just sold a virtual space station he’s spent the past five years managing for a whopping $635,000 in total, making over half a million dollars. Who would devote so much time and investment into something that doesn’t exist in the real world?

Make no mistake, Jacobs isn’t your stereotypical gamer geek. An actor, filmmaker, cyber-celebrity and entrepreneur, Jacobs deals with movie and music moguls, running a business out of a 6,900 square-foot office in the heart of Hollywood, in the historic El Capitan Theatre building on Hollywood Boulevard, with windows overlooking the Kodak Theatre. Jacobs has a penchant for flamboyant dress. He has his own theme song. Jacobs’ story is a larger-than-life tale that blurs the line between real-life and virtual-life fame and fortune.

In virtual life, Jacobs is the avatar “Neverdie,” perhaps the most famous person in the whole of the Entropia Universe, a massively multiplayer online gaming platform designed by Swedish developer MindArk with a real cash economy. Until recently, Neverdie was the owner of one of the hottest virtual properties in Entropia, Club Neverdie, situated on a virtual asteroid around Entropia’s first planet, Planet Calypso. Jacobs bought the virtual asteroid back in 2005 for $100,000, after taking out a mortgage on his real-life house.


Jacobs’ avatar “Neverdie”

Taking out a hundred grand to buy virtual property may have seemed like poor business sense, but Jacobs had a plan. He turned Club Neverdie into a must-visit destination, one that includes more than a dozen bio-domes, a night club, stadium and a mall, where other players flocked to spend real cash on virtual goods and services. Jacobs was making around $200,000 in annual revenue, enough to comfortably support him and his family. Some might wonder why Jacobs didn’t instead start a real-life business like most others. Jacobs’ answer, “games made sense.” Club Neverdie was a “turnkey business” for him — besides dropping in from time to time to check on the property, the business largely ran itself and had no other employees besides himself.


Club Neverdie

In the recent $635,000 sale, Jacobs sold off his virtual property in chunks. The largest portion went to another avatar by the name of John Foma Kalun, who paid $335,000. This single transaction may be the largest virtual transaction ever, supplanting the previous record set by Erik “Buzz” Lightyear, another Entropia resident who bought The Crystal Palace Space Station for $330,000 in 2009.

Read more‘Cyber-Celebrity’ Makes $635,000 From The Sale Of Virtual Space Station

Ireland Denies €60 Billion Bailout Talk As EU Puts On Pressure

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The Irish Government has been forced to make a second denial in two days that it is preparing to go to the EU for a multi-billion euro bail-out.


IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn played down fears that Ireland needs a bail-out

On Saturday night reports suggested that Irish officials had already held talks with the European Financial Stability Fund about a rescue package of between €60bn (£51bn) and €80bn.

European Central Bank officials were also reported to have urged the country to take emergency aid in order to stop concerns about the Irish economy spreading to neighbouring countries.

Germany is said to be pressing Ireland to seek aid before a November 16 meeting of European finance ministers to calm market volatility and win agreement on making investors help pay for future bailouts, according to Bloomberg, citing a German government official.

However, a spokesman for the Irish government told The Sunday Telegraph: “There are no talks on an application for emergency funding from the European Union.”

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), tried to play down fears that Ireland could require rescue funding.

Read moreIreland Denies €60 Billion Bailout Talk As EU Puts On Pressure

Texas Officials Covered Up Dangerously Radioactive Tap Water For Years

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This video is part one of an investigative series by CBS affiliate KHOU, aired Nov. 9, 2010:

This video is part two of an investigative series by CBS affiliate KHOU, aired Nov. 10, 2010:

Texas officials charged with protecting the environment and public health have for years made arbitrary subtractions to the measured levels of radiation delivered by water utilities across the state, according to a series of investigative reports out of Houston.

Those subtractions, based on the test results’ margin of error, made all the difference for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ): without the reduction, demonstrated levels of dangerous radiation would have been in excess of federal limits for years.

This was being done in direct contravention of an order by the US Environmental Protection Agency, which told state regulators in 2000 to stop subtracting the margin of error.

The findings are part of an investigation by Houston CBS affiliate KHOU.

Confronted by reporter Mark Greenblatt, TCEQ staffer Linda Brookins claimed that the radiation was “natural” and people shouldn’t be concerned. She also refused to read on camera the EPA’s order to stop subtracting margins of error from radiation test results.

KHOU called it “Texas math,” in part two of its ongoing series.

Thanks to the TCEQ’s under-reporting of radioactive content, one particular water provider in Harris County was able to skirt needed maintenance for years, even though uncensored tests showed radiation was almost always above legal limits.

Independent tests, the station noted, showed that some of the radiation contained harmful alpha particles, which can cause cell mutations and increase the risk of cancer.

The practice of under-reporting radiation continued until last year, when the EPA once again demanded Texas comply with the law.

Read moreTexas Officials Covered Up Dangerously Radioactive Tap Water For Years

China To Be World’s Biggest Economy Within Two Years

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Barack Obama greets China’s Paramount Leader, Hu Jintao (Photo: Getty)

Here’s a finding that will have any red-blooded American spluttering into his cornflakes. According to the Conference Board, a highly respected economic research association, China will overtake the US as the world’s biggest economy by 2012, or within two years.

OK, so in dollar terms, that’s obviously not going to be the case. It will be a lot longer than two years before China overtakes the US on that measure. But in terms of purchasing power parity, according to the Conference Board’s latest world economic outlook, China is already nearly there, and by 2020 will have reached a size of output which is nearly half as big again as the US.

Here’s the Wkipedia link explaining what PPP is, but broadly speaking the idea is to measure output according to the volume, not the price of goods and services produced. The assumption made is that identical goods will have the same price in different markets. In practice, this is obviously not the case. A taxi ride in Beijing, for instance, will cost you approximately a tenth of what it costs in London. But it is essentially the same service.

Read moreChina To Be World’s Biggest Economy Within Two Years

MIT Scientists Develop GMO Plant That Produces Pharmaceutical Drugs

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(NaturalNews) Splicing and dicing natural plant compounds and patenting them for profit may be a thing of the past for drug companies, at least in terms of them having to do it manually in a laboratory. It might seem like something out of a science fiction movie, but a team of scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has actually developed a way to genetically engineer plants that are programmed to create pharmaceutical drugs instead of their natural healing compounds.

You read that right. Sarah O’Connor and her colleagues from MIT added bacterial genes to periwinkle plants that altered their natural alkaloid production system, causing them to accept external chemical additions. Chemists then added halogens like chlorine and bromine to the plants’ biosynthetic mechanisms, which altered the composition of the final alkaloids. So instead of producing their natural alkaloids, the altered periwinkles literally started producing synthetic pharmaceutical drug versions of those alkaloids instead.

The process is similar to the type of genetic engineering that takes place with food crops, except this process goes a step further. Dubbed “metabolic engineering”, the process of altering the actual molecular output of plants shapes the very compounds they produce. And by manipulating these expressions, scientists can induce plants to grow a variety of different synthetic compounds that can be patented by drug companies.

The work is highly disturbing because periwinkles and other plants already produce natural, safe compounds that serve a therapeutic purpose. Vinblastine, the alkaloid naturally produced by periwinkles that was manipulated as part of the study, is already effective at treating cancer, for instance.

Read moreMIT Scientists Develop GMO Plant That Produces Pharmaceutical Drugs

A lesson from China in where power lies

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The Chinese elitists treat their own people like worthless shit and built their power on the desperation of the poor and on the destruction of the environment.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Flashback:

– Mao Zedong ‘Killed 45 Million In Four Years’, The Greatest Mass Murderer In World History

China believes its economic success reflects its superior culture.


President Barack Obama (left) meets Chinese President Hu Jintao for a bilateral meeting in Seoul ahead of the start of the G20 summit  Photo: AFP/GETTY IMAGES

The leaders of the G20 group of rich and developing nations met in Seoul this week for what might reasonably be described as their first post-crisis summit. But it also had the feeling of the first post-Western summit. China, the world’s second richest nation and its rising power, believes that the financial crisis was actually a “North Atlantic crisis”. Now that the worst of it is over, Beijing sees little reason to swallow the medicine for someone else’s sickness. The summit therefore broke up – none too amicably – without really addressing the trade imbalances that were one of the root causes of the crisis, or America’s worry that Beijing is gaining an unfair advantage by artificially keeping its currency weak. Instead, China flexed its muscles and got what it wanted: a watered-down statement that will not force it to change course. If President Obama hoped that the G20 would burnish his image as a world statesman after the disaster of the midterm elections, those hopes were disappointed.

It is inescapable that we are witnessing a historic shift of economic power from West to East. David Cameron has certainly taken this on board, judging by the caution with which he and his Cabinet members treated China during their visit earlier this week. The Prime Minister approached the subject of human rights far more obliquely than he did as leader of the Opposition. Whether this was wise judgment or a failure of nerve is difficult to say. Although China treats dissidents with gross inhumanity, the more it is lectured on the subject, the more intransigent it becomes. In a sense, that is convenient for Mr Cameron: if protesting about repression makes the situation worse, then Britain can concentrate on trade with a fairly clear conscience.

Certainly, China is leaving Seoul with even more of a swagger in its step. Its regional ambitions are unchecked: if anything, they have been further provoked by America’s insistence that the resolution of territorial disputes in the South China Sea is a “national interest”.

Read moreA lesson from China in where power lies

USDA Plans To Allow GM Sugar Beet Planting During Lawsuit

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DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — Federal agriculture officials have released a plan to let farmers plant genetically modified sugar beets while a lawsuit over them is resolved, but farmers fear a partial lifting of a court-ordered ban won’t come in time for next year’s crop.

A federal judge in California issued an order last summer halting the planting of genetically modified sugar beets until the U.S. Department of Agriculture completes an environmental impact study on how the beets could affect conventional crops. The ruling had a widespread effect since nearly all the nation’s sugar beet farmers had converted to genetically modified seed.

Half of the nation’s sugar comes from sugar beets, and 95 percent of them are grown using so-called Roundup Ready seed produced by St. Louis-based Monsanto Co. The seeds are engineered to withstand the weed killer Roundup, allowing farmers to reduce the use of other chemicals and limit tilling, which kills weeds but can contribute to erosion.

Read moreUSDA Plans To Allow GM Sugar Beet Planting During Lawsuit

McDonald’s, KFC, Kellogg’s, Unilever, Mars And PepsiCo To Help Write UK Health Policy

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Department of Health putting fast food companies at heart of policy on obesity, alcohol and diet-related disease


McDonald’s and other food companies will help write policy on obesity and diet-related diseases. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian

The Department of Health is putting the fast food companies McDonald’s and KFC and processed food and drink manufacturers such as PepsiCo, Kellogg’s, Unilever, Mars and Diageo at the heart of writing government policy on obesity, alcohol and diet-related disease, the Guardian has learned.

In an overhaul of public health, said by campaign groups to be the equivalent of handing smoking policy over to the tobacco industry, health secretary Andrew Lansley has set up five “responsibility deal” networks with business, co-chaired by ministers, to come up with policies. Some of these are expected to be used in the public health white paper due in the next month.

The groups are dominated by food and alcohol industry members, who have been invited to suggest measures to tackle public health crises. Working alongside them are public interest health and consumer groups including Which?, Cancer Research UK and the Faculty of Public Health. The alcohol responsibility deal network is chaired by the head of the lobby group the Wine and Spirit Trade Association. The food network to tackle diet and health problems includes processed food manufacturers, fast food companies, and Compass, the catering company famously pilloried by Jamie Oliver for its school menus of turkey twizzlers. The food deal’s sub-group on calories is chaired by PepsiCo, owner of Walkers crisps.

Read moreMcDonald’s, KFC, Kellogg’s, Unilever, Mars And PepsiCo To Help Write UK Health Policy

Study: Dangerous Chemicals in Food Wrappers Migrate Into Food

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ScienceDaily (Nov. 9, 2010) — University of Toronto scientists have found that chemicals used to line junk food wrappers and microwave popcorn bags are migrating into food and being ingested by people where they are contributing to chemical contamination observed in blood.

Perfluorinated carboxylic acids or PFCAs are the breakdown products of chemicals used to make non-stick and water- and stain-repellent products ranging from kitchen pans to clothing to food packaging. PFCAs, the best known of which is perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), are found in humans all around the world.

“We suspected that a major source of human PFCA exposure may be the consumption and metabolism of polyfluoroalkyl phosphate esters or PAPs,” says Jessica D’eon, a graduate student in the University of Toronto’s Department of Chemistry. “PAPs are applied as greaseproofing agents to paper food contact packaging such as fast food wrappers and microwave popcorn bags.”

In the U of T study, rats were exposed to PAPs either orally or by injection and monitored for a three-week period to track the concentrations of the PAPs and PFCA metabolites, including PFOA, in their blood. Human exposure to PAPs had already been established by the scientists in a previous study. Researchers used the PAP concentrations previously observed in human blood together with the PAP and PFCA concentrations observed in the rats to calculate human PFOA exposure from PAP metabolism.

“We found the concentrations of PFOA from PAP metabolism to be significant and concluded that the metabolism of PAPs could be a major source of human exposure to PFOA, as well as other PFCAs,” says Scott Mabury, the lead researcher and a professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Toronto.

“This discovery is important because we would like to control human chemical exposure, but this is only possible if we understand the source of this exposure. In addition, some try to locate the blame for human exposure on environmental contamination that resulted from past chemical use rather than the chemicals that are currently in production.

“In this study we clearly demonstrate that the current use of PAPs in food contact applications does result in human exposure to PFCAs, including PFOA. We cannot tell whether PAPs are the sole source of human PFOA exposure or even the most important, but we can say unequivocally that PAPs are a source and the evidence from this study suggests this could be significant.”

Read moreStudy: Dangerous Chemicals in Food Wrappers Migrate Into Food

US Courts Helping Banks Screw Over Homeowners

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The foreclosure lawyers down in Jacksonville had warned me, but I was skeptical. They told me the state of Florida had created a special super-high-speed housing court with a specific mandate to rubber-stamp the legally dicey foreclosures by corporate mortgage pushers like Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan Chase. This “rocket docket,” as it is called in town, is presided over by retired judges who seem to have no clue about the insanely complex financial instruments they are ruling on — securitized mortgages and laby­rinthine derivative deals of a type that didn’t even exist when most of them were active members of the bench. Their stated mission isn’t to decide right and wrong, but to clear cases and blast human beings out of their homes with ultimate velocity.

They certainly have no incentive to penetrate the profound criminal mysteries of the great American mortgage bubble of the 2000s, perhaps the most complex Ponzi scheme in human history — an epic mountain range of corporate fraud in which Wall Street megabanks conspired first to collect huge numbers of subprime mortgages, then to unload them on unsuspecting third parties like pensions, trade unions and insurance companies (and, ultimately, you and me, as taxpayers) in the guise of AAA-rated investments. Selling lead as gold, shit as Chanel No. 5, was the essence of the booming international fraud scheme that created most all of these now-failing home mortgages.

The rocket docket wasn’t created to investigate any of that. It exists to launder the crime and bury the evidence by speeding thousands of fraudulent and predatory loans to the ends of their life cycles, so that the houses attached to them can be sold again with clean paperwork. The judges, in fact, openly admit that their primary mission is not justice but speed. One Jacksonville judge, the Honorable A.C. Soud, even told a local newspaper that his goal is to resolve 25 cases per hour. Given the way the system is rigged, that means His Honor could well be throwing one ass on the street every 2.4 minutes.

Foreclosure lawyers told me one other thing about the rocket docket. The hearings, they said, aren’t exactly public. “The judges might give you a hard time about watching,” one lawyer warned. “They’re not exactly anxious for people to know about this stuff.” Inwardly, I laughed at this — it sounded like typical activist paranoia. The notion that a judge would try to prevent any citizen, much less a member of the media, from watching an open civil hearing sounded ridiculous. Fucked-up as everyone knows the state of Florida is, it couldn’t be that bad. It isn’t Indonesia. Right?

Well, not quite. When I went to sit in on Judge Soud’s courtroom in downtown Jacksonville, I was treated to an intimate, and at times breathtaking, education in the horror of the foreclosure crisis, which is rapidly emerging as the even scarier sequel to the financial meltdown of 2008: Invasion of the Home Snatchers II. In Las Vegas, one in 25 homes is now in foreclosure. In Fort Myers, Florida, one in 35. In September, lenders nationwide took over a rec­ord 102,134 properties; that same month, more than a third of all home sales were distressed properties. All told, some 820,000 Americans have already lost their homes this year, and another 1 million currently face foreclosure.

Read moreUS Courts Helping Banks Screw Over Homeowners

Big Brother Britain Has Grown Out of All Proportion

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Britain’s surveillance culture has been expanded out of all proportion to any threats we face – and it’s getting worse, says Alex Deane, director of Big Brother Watch and former chief of staff to David Cameron.


Britons are already the most-watched citizens in the democratic world because of an array of systems including CCTV Photo: PSL IMAGES

Even when Thatcher’s ministers were being pulled from the rubble of the Grand Hotel in Brighton, we never allowed threats to distort our way of life. Now, we let accusations of dog fouling and fiddling school catchment areas to justify unprecedented snooping. We face the prospect of improving technology allowing the state to monitor us in every moment of our lives.

DNA profiles of over a million innocent people are still on the national database, and despite all promises to the contrary such records are still being added.

Local councils authorise themselves to mount covert surveillance of residents under powers meant for serious crimes and terrorism – to catch people putting bins out at the wrong time, for dog fouling, breaking the smoking ban, littering, noise nuisance. It’s entirely out of proportion; the cure is worse than the disease. Innocent victims have no right to know that they were watched, so it’s not scaremongering, but simply stating the obvious, to say it could have happened to you.

Council-run CCTV cameras have trebled in the last ten years. We’re the only country that’s gone so far down this path: the Shetland Islands have more CCTV cameras than San Francisco’s Police Department. The capture and retention of the images of innocent people without their consent is now de rigueur. ‘Nothing to hide, nothing to fear’ we’re told – but the reverse should apply in a free society. If you have done nothing wrong, why should the state record your whereabouts and what you’re doing?

Read moreBig Brother Britain Has Grown Out of All Proportion

Eat a Bagel, Lose Your Baby

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The ACLU of Pennsylvania recently filed a civil rights lawsuit on behalf of a couple whose newborn baby was kidnapped by Lawrence County Children and Youth Services (LCCYS) because her mother recklessly consumed an “everything” bagel from Dunkin’ Donuts the day before the birth.

Jameson Hospital, where Isabella Rodriguez was born on April 27, has a policy of testing expectant mothers’ urine for illegal drugs and reporting positive results to LCCYS, even without any additional evidence that the baby is in danger of neglect or abuse.

LCCYS, in turn, has a policy of seizing such babies from their homes based on nothing more than the test result. Unfortunately for Isabella’s parents, Elizabeth Mort and Alex Rodriguez, Jameson sets the cutoff level for its opiate test so low that it can be triggered by poppy seeds, which is why two caseworkers and two Neshannock Township police officers visited their home the day after baby and mother returned from the hospital.

LCCYS seized the three-day-old girl and put her in foster care for five days before conceding it had made a mistake.

In their complaint (PDF), Mort and Rodriguez say the “seize first, ask questions later” policy jointly implemented by Lawrence County and the Jameson Health System (motto: “there’s no place like home”) is not required by state or federal law and represents a conspiracy to deprive parents of their 14th Amendment rights.

Read moreEat a Bagel, Lose Your Baby

Police Recruits Screened for Digital Dirt on Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter etc.

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Law enforcement agencies are digging deep into the social media accounts of applicants, requesting that candidates sign waivers allowing investigators access to their Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter and other personal spaces.

Some agencies are demanding that applicants provide private passwords, Internet pseudonyms, text messages and e-mail logs as part of an expanding vetting process for public safety jobs.

More than a third of police agencies review applicants’ social media activity during background checks, according to the first report on agencies’ social media use by the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), the largest group of police executives. The report out last month surveyed 728 agencies.

“As more and more people join these networks, their activities on these sites become an intrinsic part of any background check we do,” said Laurel, Md., Police Chief David Crawford.

Privacy advocates say some background investigations, including requests for text message and e-mail logs, may go too far.

“I’m very uneasy about this,” says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “Where does it all stop?”

Read morePolice Recruits Screened for Digital Dirt on Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter etc.

EU Data Retention Directive: Sweden proposes bill to store telephone calls, text messages, email and other internet traffic for six months

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Emails and mobile phone text messages would be stored for six months by internet service providers (ISPs), according to a bill presented by the Swedish government on Thursday to bring the country in line with EU data retention rules.

Critics have come down hard on the proposal, which would compel telephone and broadband providers to retain electronic data for six months, the shortest possible time in accordance with EU directives.

Justice Minister Beatrice Ask explained that the bill is concerned about privacy when she presented the legislative proposal on Thursday.

“The proposal means that the information can only be disclosed for crime-fighting purposes,” Ask said a news conference.

The government has proposed that the law come into force on July 1st, 2011. It is part of the introduction of the disputed EU Data Retention Directive.

The directive would force member states to legislate the storage of telephone calls, text messages, email and other internet traffic. The aim is to prevent and solve crimes.

The Data Retention Directive has been severely criticised by those who believe that such rules restrict privacy protection and create a surveillance society.

Read moreEU Data Retention Directive: Sweden proposes bill to store telephone calls, text messages, email and other internet traffic for six months

Genetically Modified Mosquitoes Have Been Released In The Wild

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Criminals of the worst kind!

Alternative medicine can heal both dengue fever and malaria.

Genetically altered mosquitoes thwart dengue spreaders


No offspring for you (Image: CDC/Phanie/Rex Features)

An outdoor trial of mosquitoes genetically engineered to sabotage Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which spread dengue fever, has been declared a success by scientists in the field.

The trial is first time genetically modified mosquitoes have been released in the wild. The strategy promises to provide a new weapon against dengue, a disease that infects 50 million people annually and kills 25,000. In the past year, dengue has reappeared in the US for the first time in 65 years, and in southern Europe.

By the end of the six-month trial on a 16-hectare plot, populations of the native insects, which spread the dengue virus had plummeted.

“It’s a proof of principle, that it works,” says Angela Harris of the Mosquito Control and Research Unit on the Caribbean island of Grand Cayman, where the trial took place. The MCRU conducted the trial with Oxitec, the company in Oxford, UK, that bred the GM mosquitoes.

Read moreGenetically Modified Mosquitoes Have Been Released In The Wild

18 Percent of Americans Cannot Put Food on The Table

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Nearly one in five Americans have said that there had been times over the past year when they could not afford to put food on the table, despite record participation in a food stamp scheme.


People look at job listings at a government-run employment center in Las Vegas. One in five say they have struggled to put food on the table in the past year Photo: AFP

The number was only marginally lower than in September 2009, when record numbers said they were reliant on government-provided food, according to research by Gallup.

The new figures have raised objections to plans in Congress to end increased funding provided to the scheme by the Recovery Act, which was passed in early 2009 when the economic crisis started to affect families heavily.

Moves under consideration would take an estimated $59 (£37) a month worth of food from low-income families.

Read more18 Percent of Americans Cannot Put Food on The Table

Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez Defends State Takeovers of Apartments

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CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Facing a wave of criticism from business leaders, President Hugo Chavez is defending his order for government officials to seize control of residential complexes.

Chavez promised Sunday to crack down on construction and real estate companies that he accused of unjustly boosting prices, which he labeled “housing fraud.”

The president, a self-proclaimed revolutionary who idolizes Cuba’s Fidel Castro and is currently on a visit to Havana, called his decision last week to order the expropriation of six residential complexes and “the temporary occupation” of eight gated communities in Caracas and other cities “an act of justice.”

Venezuela’s consumer protection agency and state prosecutors are investigating complaints that construction companies and real estate firms are illegally charging buyers high interest on unfinished apartments, even though the buyers settled on a price years ago and made down payments.

“We have decided to put an end to this type of organized crime,” Chavez wrote in his weekly newspaper column.

Companies accused of violating consumer-protection regulations deny any wrongdoing.

Apartment owners affected by the measures have had mixed reactions.

Read moreVenezuela’s President Hugo Chavez Defends State Takeovers of Apartments