July 2008

Bible Publishers Sued for Anti-Gay References

A Michigan man is seeking $70 million from two Christian publishers for emotional distress and mental instability he received during the past 20 years from versions of the Bible that refer to homosexuality as a sin.

Bradley LaShawn Fowler, a gay man, claims his constitutional rights were infringed upon by Zondervan Publishing Co. and Thomas Nelson Publishing, both of which, he claims, deliberately caused homosexuals to suffer by misinterpretation of the Bible.

Fowler, 39, is seeking $60 million from Zondervan and another $10 million from Thomas Nelson.

According to a USA Today report, Fowler’s two separate suits against the publishers claim the intent of the Bible revisions that refer to homosexuals as sinners reflect an individual opinion or a group's conclusion.

Fowler says the deliberate changes made to first Corinthians, chapter six, verse nine caused him "or anyone who is a homosexual to endure verbal abuse, discrimination, episodes of hate, and physical violence ... including murder."

Fowler, who is representing himself in both lawsuits, claims the publishers are misinterpreting the Bible by specifically using the word homosexuals, which made him an outcast from his family and contributed to physical discomfort and periods of demoralization, chaos and bewilderment.

“These are opinions based on the publishers and they are being embedded in the religious structure as a way of life," he tells a local NBC TV station affiliate in Grand Rapids.

Fowler admits that every Bible printed is a translation that can be interpreted in many ways, but he says specifically using the word “homosexual” is not a translation but a change.

Fowler says Zondervan Bibles published in the ‘80s used the word homosexuals among a list of those who are “wicked' or unrighteous and won't inherit the kingdom of heaven.”

Zondervan, for its part, issued a statement to the Grand Rapids press stating it does not translate the Bible or own the copyright for any of the translations it publishes

“We rely on the scholarly judgment of the highly respected and credible translation committees behind each translation and never alter the text of the translations we are licensed to publish,” the statement reads.

“We only publish credible translations produced by credible Biblical scholars.”

U.S. District Judge Julian Abele Cook Jr., who will hear Fowler’s case against Thomas Nelson, says the court “has some very genuine concerns about the nature and efficacy of [Fowler’s] claims."

Source: Newsmax.com

Greens are the enemies of liberty

by Brendan O'Neill, The Guardian.

Imagine a society where simply speaking out of turn or saying the "wrong thing" was openly discussed as a crime against humanity, and where sceptics or deniers of the truth were publicly labelled "criminals", hauled before the press and accused of endangering humanity with their grotesque untruths.

Imagine a society where even some liberals demanded severe restrictions on freedom of movement; where people campaigned for travelling overseas to be made prohibitively expensive in order to force people to stay at home; and where immigration was frowned upon as "toxic" and "destructive".

Imagine a society so illiberal that columnists felt no qualms about demanding government legislation to force us to change our behaviour; where the public was continually implored to feel guilty about everything from driving to shopping – and where those who refused to feel guilty were said to be suffering from a "psychological" disorder or some other species of mental illness".

Surely no one would put up with such a society? Yet today, all of the above things are happening – under what we might call the tyranny of environmentalism – and people are putting up with it.

In the current debate on liberty, we hear a lot about the attack on our democratic rights by the government's security agenda, but little about the grave impact of environmentalism on the fabric of freedom. It seems to me that green thinking – with its shrill intolerance of dissenting views, its deep distaste for free movement and free choice, and its view of individuals, not as history-makers, but as filthy polluters – poses a more profound threat to liberty even than the government's paranoid anti-terrorist agenda.

Environmentalists are innately hostile to freedom of speech. Last month James Hansen, one of the world's leading climate change scientists, said the CEOs of oil companies should be tried for crimes against humanity and nature. They have been "putting out misinformation", he said, and "I think that's a crime". This follows green writer Mark Lynas's insistence that there should be "international criminal tribunals" for climate change deniers, who will be "partially but directly responsible for millions of deaths". They will "have to answer for their crimes", he says. The American eco-magazine Grist recently published an article on deniers that called for "war crimes trials for these bastards… some sort of climate Nuremberg."

It is the mark of shrieking authoritarianism to look upon dissenting views not simply as wrong or foolish, but as criminal. Throughout history inquisitors and censors have sought to silence sections of society by labelling their words as "dangerous" and a threat to safety and stability; now environmentalists are doing the same. Their demonisation of sceptics as "deniers" has had a chilling effect on public debate. The environmentalist ethos is hostile to free movement, too. Behind the greens' attacks on road-building and cheap flights there lurks an agenda of enforced localism. What most of us experience as a liberty – the ability to drive great distances or to travel overseas, something our forebears only dreamt of as they spent their entire lives in the same town – has been relabelled under the tyranny of environmentalism as a "threat to the planet".

The Optimum Population Trust, which counts Jonathon Porritt among its patrons, says mass immigration is "a route to environmental collapse". It believes the UK is overpopulated and wants to "balance immigration with emigration".

Not surprisingly, opportunistic anti-immigrant outfits have borrowed elements of this argument. The British National Party now argues that "our countryside is vanishing beneath a tidal wave of concrete" as a result of house-building for immigrants. "Immigration is creating an environmental disaster", the BNP says.

But perhaps the main way that environmentalism undermines the culture of freedom is by its ceaseless promotion of guilt. In the environmentalist era, we are no longer really free citizens, so much as potential polluters. We are continually told – by government, by commentators, by radical activists – that everything we do, from wearing disposable nappies to using deodorant to allowing ourselves to be cremated, is harmful to our surroundings.

Liberty – true liberty – requires that people see themselves as self-respecting, self-determining subjects, capable of making free choices and pursuing the "good life" as they see fit. Today, by contrast, we are warned that we are toxic, loaded, dangerous specimens, who must always restrain our instincts and aspire to austerity. This is not conducive to a culture of liberty; indeed, it represents a dangerous historic shift, from the Enlightenment era of free citizenship to a new dark age where individuals are depicted as meek in the face of more powerful, unpredictable forces: the gods of the sea, sky and ozone layer.

And what of those individuals who say "to hell with environmentalism" and continue living the way they want to? Apparently, in the words of the Ecologist, they have a disordered "psychology"; they are victims of "self-deception and mass denial".

Some greens openly admit they are on the side of illiberalism. George Monbiot describes environmentalism as "a campaign not for more freedom but for less". Environmentalism is instinctively and relentlessly illiberal, and it is doing more to inculcate people with fear, self-loathing and a religious-style sense of meekness than any piece of anti-terror legislation ever could. If you believe in freedom, you must reject it.

Source: Comment, The Guardian.

COMMENT: Some interesting background to the Enviromentalists from the American Thinker: "With the first Earth Day in 1970 the Left had a movement uniquely poised to damage free market economies worldwide, and both socialists and neo-pagans swarmed into the movement. The collapse of the Eastern Block in the ‘80's, followed by the rise of Global Warming theory, gave great impetus to those who believe in a command economy, as this movement had the means, the emotional appeal, and could be manipulated to produce the desired ends; the radical reorganization of Humanity. So what we have witnessed in the Global Warming debate is a perfect storm of anti-Christian philosophies parading as science. Materialists, Socialists, and Left-leaning types found common cause with neo-pagans and anti-Christian spirituality to advocate a New World Order dressed as a movement to save the planet. A friendly media has nurtured and supported it, and it has advanced through a string of sacraments; separating trash, installing low wattage light bulbs, driving hybrid vehicles, etc. Environmentalism is in all of the schools, and children are being frightened by end-of-the-world scenarios by the prophets of doom while having the Green ethos inculcated in them through letter-writing campaigns and "Earth friendly" checklists. The Environmentalists, heavily financed by left-wing think tanks and environmental-activist organizations, are hurrying to push through Draconian emission standards and to stifle any debate-and that debate is plentiful, indeed." The Return of the Old Gods, A challenge to Green Evangelicals.

An Ark of the Earth has been built to house the Earth Charter, leaving us in no doubt as to the new religion: earth worship! Is the Ark of the Earth, man's attempt to copy the Ark of the Covenant?

Anglican bishop John Chane says 'demonic' conservatives going in wrong direction

A leading Anglican bishop has condemned conservatives as "demonic" for using his church as a punch bag.

The Bishop of Washington, the Right Rev John Chane, a leading liberal in the Episcopal Church in the United States, accused conservatives of leading the church in a "dangerous" direction.

Bishop Chane, whose diocese covers the American capital, said: "I think it's really very dangerous when someone stands up and says, 'I have the way and I have the truth and I know how to interpret holy scripture and you are following what is the right way.'

"I think it's really very, very dangerous and I think it's demonic ... the Episcopal Church has been demonised. It has been a punching bag and I'm sick of being a punching bag as a Bishop and I'm sick of my church, my province being a punching bag. Do we deserve criticism, absolutely. No question about it."

Bishop Chane is one of the 125 bishops from the Episcopal Church attending the Lambeth Conference, a gathering of 650 Anglican bishops from 38 provinces around the world in Canterbury.

About 230 bishops, mainly from the Global South provinces of Nigeria, Uganda, Rwanda and Kenya, are boycotting the conference because of the liberal direction of the Western church on sexuality and the Bible. More than 290 conservatives, including most of the 230, attended the recent Global Anglican Future Conference, or Gafcon, in Jerusalem which set up an alternative Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans to rival the official structures of the Anglican Communion.

Bishop Chane was talking to a BBC2 documentary on Gafcon, Battle of the Bishops, to be broadcast soon.

Dr Peter Akinola, the Nigerian primate, who is among those boycotting Lambeth, told the BBC: "Gafcon is a rescue mission - it is our duty to rescue whatever is left of the church from error, from all those, whoever they are, who have chosen to mutilate, to distort and to even deny the Gospel and to preach something different from what we know."

The Archbishop of Jos, in Nigeria, Benjamin Kwashi, another Lambeth boycotter and a man tipped as a likely successor to Dr Akinola, criticised the last Lambeth conference, held ten years ago. He said: "At Lambeth 98 we were looking for a place where we could cry our hearts out and pray and look for the support of the wider Church who would bless us and pray for us. You don't need much money, you just need some words of encouragement. Those things were absent.

"Respect is earned. When it is thrown away, gathering it can be difficult. From the Mother Church of England, there is the assumption that therefore we can do anything and Africans will automatically come with us, or respect us. I think that is an insult.

"So now Gafcon is an alternative to that, where we can cry together, look at our struggles, HIV and Aids problems, infant mortality, all those issues that dehumanise us as Africans. The wider Anglican world, if you ask my opinion, don't want to listen to us.'

BBC 2's This World: Battle of the Bishops is on July 21 at 7pm.

Source: The Times

Council bans woman from epileptic son's taxi

THE mother of a disabled and severely epileptic teenager has been banned from travelling to school with him – because she hasn’t been police checked.

Jayne Jones, of Aberfan, had previously been riding in the council-provided taxi with her 14-year-old son Alex on mornings she feared he was prone to having fits.

But now officials have told her she can only travel with her son once she has undergone a Criminal Record Bureau (CRB) check.

Mrs Jones, a mother of two, yesterday hit out at the bureaucracy which, she says, has left her son travelling to school with no-one trained to administer specialist life-saving treatment in the event of an epileptic attack.

“I have to be CRB checked before I can ride in a taxi with my own son,” she said. “And now they’ve said if I pass the check and am allowed to ride with him I can go to the school but then have to make my own way back to my home in Aberfan.

“I have to be checked to go in a taxi with him, but if I was able to take him in my own car they wouldn’t care and even offered to pay me expenses.

“I don’t want money – I need him to get back and fore to school.”

Alex suffers from cerebral palsy as well as severe intractable epilepsy, and can suffer fits before school. On particularly bad mornings Mrs Jones would accompany him to Greenfield School, Pentrebach, near Merthyr Tydfil, in case she needed to give him his specialised treatment during a fit.

However, when officials at Merthyr Tydfil County Borough Council discovered she was travelling with her son they told her to stop. A few days later a request for a Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) check landed on her doorstep.

Mrs Jones, a full-time carer to Alex, is reluctantly in the process of having the check done, for which the council has waived the fee.

Alex, who was born with his condition, takes a combination of 32 anticonvulsant tablets each day, and the drop-attacks he suffers could one day kill him.

He currently travels to school with Victoria Taxis.

“The taxi company is great and they carry Alex’s medication but they won’t use it. And they’d know how to put him in the recovery position if needs be,” she said.

On Boxing Day last year, Alex was taken to hospital for a six-hour surgery which saw him fitted with a special lifesaving device called a VNS (Vagus Nerve Stimulation) therapy system.

The VNS is fitted under the skin in the chest and works like a pacemaker to help control electrical signals which can malfunction and cause him to seize.

However, Mrs Jones and her husband Malcolm, 42, are the only people trained to use the VNS therapy. His taxi escort is not trained and Mr Jones has to work, so no-one in the taxi could help Alex should he need it.

Mrs Jones, who also has an eight-year-old son, Lucas, said the VNS was “the best Christmas present” anyone could give them as it has improved Alex’s quality of life immensely.

Council officials last night said they could not comment on individual cases but defended its police-checking policy.

But one day she could need to administer the lifesaving jolts and may not be there as the council have refused to let her ride with him.

A spokesman for Merthyr Council said: “We cannot comment on particular cases but can confirm that CRB checking is a requirement of our transport provisions in relation to adults travelling on home-to-school transport in the capacity of an escort.“This is a standard requirement and has been for several years. Any adult acting as an escort will, in the public gaze, be viewed as acting with the full acquiescence of the council and hence with its implied authority.

“For the protection of the council and all vulnerable persons in its care it’s essential all those endowed with an authority, implicit or explicit, should meet the security requirements within the transport contract provisions.”

Source: WalesOnline.

Big Brother: The Google cars that will photograph EVERY front door in Britain

Plans by Google to photograph millions of British homes and publish them online have been condemned as a 'gross invasion of privacy'.

The internet giant's StreetView website will allow anyone in the world to type in a UK address or postcode and instantly see a 360-degree picture of the street.

It will include close-ups of buildings, cars and people. Critics say the site is a 'burglar's charter' that makes it easy for criminals to check out potential victims.

The pictures also show people leaving and entering hospitals, health clinics, adult shops and hotels. Although their faces are deliberately blurred, many could still be recognised by their clothing and hair colour.

The site was launched in major American cities last year.

Google has confirmed it is now in the process of photographing Britain as part of the Street View project.

Cars emblazoned with the company's logo and carrying massive 360-degree cameras have been spotted circling the streets of British cities in recent weeks.

The data watchdog, the Information Commissioner's office, is so concerned about StreetView that it has written to Google demanding privacy guarantees. A Google spokeswoman said: 'Google works hard to make sure that our products respect both users' expectations of privacy, and local privacy laws, in each country in which they are launched. Google Maps Street View is no exception.'

StreetView is designed to complement Google Earth, a collection of satellite pictures that covers every square mile of the globe.

Google Earth has come under fire for the level of detail in its overhead pictures, which have become enormously popular.

The pictures don't just show which homes have swimming pools or tennis courts, they can reveal the model and colour of cars, whether gardens have furniture and even sunbathers lying outside.

Source: Daily Mail.

Toddlers who dislike spicy food 'racist'

The National Children's Bureau, which receives £12 million a year, mainly from Government funded organisations, has issued guidance to play leaders and nursery teachers advising them to be alert for racist incidents among youngsters in their care.

This could include a child of as young as three who says "yuk" in response to being served unfamiliar foreign food.

The guidance by the NCB is designed to draw attention to potentially-racist attitudes in youngsters from a young age.

It alerts playgroup leaders that even babies can not be ignored in the drive to root out prejudice as they can "recognise different people in their lives".

The 366-page guide for staff in charge of pre-school children, called Young Children and Racial Justice, warns: "Racist incidents among children in early years settings tend to be around name-calling, casual thoughtless comments and peer group relationships."

It advises nursery teachers to be on the alert for childish abuse such as: "blackie", "Pakis", "those people" or "they smell".

The guide goes on to warn that children might also "react negatively to a culinary tradition other than their own by saying 'yuk'".

Staff are told: "No racist incident should be ignored. When there is a clear racist incident, it is necessary to be specific in condemning the action."

Warning that failing to pick children up on their racist attitudes could instil prejudice, the NCB adds that if children "reveal negative attitudes, the lack of censure may indicate to the child that there is nothing unacceptable about such attitudes".

Nurseries are encouraged to report as many incidents as possible to their local council. The guide added: "Some people think that if a large number of racist incidents are reported, this will reflect badly on the institution. In fact, the opposite is the case."

Source: The Telegraph

RFID enabled tickets for Olympic opening and closing

The Olympics in Beijing has become a platform for rapid technology development and deployment in China. One of the new technologies becoming more commonplace is RFID (Radio Frequency Identification). Beijing has been using RFID subway passes for a while, and nothing but the best for the 2008 Games means RFID tags in the tickets.

A source at BOCOG
has offered more details about the RFID-enabled tickets being issued for the Beijing Olympics this summer: All tickets to the opening and closing ceremonies will include RFID tags containing personal information about the ticket holder, including passport information and home and e-mail addresses.

Officials originally planned to embed RFID tags in all 6.8 million tickets issued for all Olympics events. These plans apparently went by the wayside, along with a plan to include place a photo of each ticket holder on their ticket. The RFID tags will only be in tickets for the opening and closing events, and photos of the tickets released to the press show no photos on them.

The technology was developed by Tsinghua University's Beijing Tsinghua Tongfang Microelectronics Company. The RFID chip’s dimensions of 0.3 square millimeters and 50 microns in thickness means it won’t even be noticeable by ticket holders.

The ticket holder's information is included in an attempt to thwart counterfeiting of the tickets, but the tickets have raised concern among security experts, who worry that the system may cause delays when entering the stadium or that the data on the RFID tags
may be easy prey for hackers.

Chinese officials say the Games' security team will employ a team of at least 4,000 IT experts with 1,000 servers at their disposal. The system is currently being tested and readied for the Games.

Source: Danwei.org

Israel electric car project aims to wipe out oil

Israel today announced backing for Project Better Place, intended to switch motor transportation from oil to electric, and by a massive coincidence one of the project's prime movers, Shai Agassi of Better PLC, was evangelising at the DLD (Digital Life, Design) show in Munich. His objective, he says, is to "take one country off oil in a way that is repeatable." Israel is that country.

And the model is the mobile phone. Really. The point of choosing Israel, says Agassi, is that doing it in a chaotic country is important, and he claims Israel is the most chaotic nation he knows. Plus there are helpful limits to how far you can drive in Israel - the endurance of a electric car on one 'fill up' is about 200km, and that easily covers the furthest you can go within Israel.

He takes a pretty rational view of how far people are prepared to go to save the planet, and when it comes to cars that's not very far. It's got to be your car, no shares, with performance and size at least equivalent to today's models. It's got to be affordable (which includes image and cred, so lose points for non 'green' Hummers), and it's got to be fairly easy to 'fill up'. That last one's one of the gotchas of electric, and it's Agassi's primary point of attack. So you've got a vehicle that allows people to be green without it actually costing them anything to do so, and you've got the 'filling stations'.

Which work this way. Israel will be blanketed with a network of battery exchange stations and roadside charge points which allow the cars to be charged whenever they're parked. Agassi suggests there will be about 500,000 of these, and points out that it's doable, because they've got them in Sweden, Norway and parts of Canada, where if you don't plug in when you stop your engine freezes. Charge points and swap stations mean there's no need for lengthy charge periods, so 'filling up' should take no more time than it does currently at a petrol station.

Israel's helping with the economics. It currently taxes electric vehicles at 10 per cent and petrol at 72 per cent, and the government has promised to keep the electric car tax at that level until at least 2015. The switchover to electric vehicles is where the mobile phone model comes in.

Say the motorist pays the equivalent of their current annual petrol bill for a mileage plan, they could be given the car to use, and it would become theirs after four years. Other mobile plans could operate - all you can eat unlimited mileage, pay as you go, and so on. The plan is to have the first of the cars on the road in 2009, 100,000 in 2010 and Israel off oil within ten years.

Vehicles are being produced by Nissan and Renault, and significantly Agassi suggests France as another possible target, helped by French government policies. London, which already operates a world-famous congestion charge, he mentions as a possible single city target market. But he possibly underestimates the London Livingstone regime, which takes a somewhat more hair-shirted and autophobic view of green issues. Something that perpetuates these instruments of death and undermines the bendy bus programme surely won't fit the picture. Project Better Place is also backed by Israel Corp, the major local refinery operator. As Israel has no oil, flexibility probably makes sense to the outfit.

Gotchas? The mobile phone model requires a pretty high hardware refresh rate, and if the auto makers are to be kept in the game they're going to want people to be moving up every few years. Cheaper cars, which the electric ones could effectively be, would also tend to induce people to refresh more often, so there are recycling issues to be addressed, and the carbon costs of manufacturing to be factored in. It's green without pain, but maybe when the maths is done it'll turn out less green than you might think, and maybe you end up with even more cars on the roads.

And where does the electricity come from? How green is that? That's not Agassi's department, but it could be a big boost for Professor David Faiman of Ben-Gurion University, who has a cunning plan involving the Negev desert, huge mirrors and solar energy. He was also at DLD, so more on this later in the week.

Source: The Register

The Guardian publishes the biofuels report they didn't want you to read

Seventeen pages of graphs, footnotes and economic modelling; oh, and another couple of pages of bibliography. Hardly the stuff to get the pulse racing, you might think.

But in the week since the Guardian exclusively revealed the contents of the World Bank's draft internal report on the link between biofuels and food prices, its findings have been reported in newspapers, blog and broadcast media from Durban to Delhi.

What's caused all the fuss? Well, the World Bank report argues that the drive for biofuels by American and European governments has pushed up food prices by 75%. That is in stark contrast with the White House's claims that using crops for fuel, rather than food, has only pushed prices up by 2-3%.

All the other factors discussed - rising demand for food from China and India, back-to-back droughts in Australia - are, the report says, marginal:

Without the increase in biofuels, global wheat and maize stocks would not have declined appreciably and price increases due to other factors would have been moderate.

The implication of this report, then, is that crop-derived fuels have been the ultimate cause of food riots, starvation and high prices around the world. And it is not an anti-biofuels campaigner who arrived at that conclusion, but an internationally respected World Bank economist with three decades' experience in tracking commodity markets.

This is controversial stuff. It was certainly too controversial for the World Bank to publish when the report was completed back in April.

One source told me the study had gone all the way up to Robert Zoellick, the head of the World Bank, but was not published because "it was too hot for the Bank to handle".

Prompted by the Guardian's report, the Bank may now push the report out - although it may not be in quite this form. We'd rather you saw the original, which is why we're publishing it today, here: PDF of World Bank biofuels report.

Source: The Guardian

FSB Report on the Israeli Soldier Death

The Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB) is reporting to Prime Minister Putin and President Medvedev today that France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy ‘narrowly escaped’ an assassination attempt during his departure from Israel's Ben-Gurion airport [top photo left] in an attack which left one French Security Officer and one Israeli policeman dead.

To the ‘sanitized’ Western propaganda reports being given to their peoples on this attempt against the French President’s life we can read as reported by Israel’s Ynet News Service:

“The incident caused a scare during the ceremony, prompting body guards to rush VIPs away from the area. The armored cars of President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert were rushed to the ceremony site, and the two were taken away from the area.

Meanwhile, the French president was taken into his airplane, which was waiting on the runway, by his own bodyguards. After the circumstances of the incident became clear, the bodyguards allowed Peres and Olmert to board the plane and bid Sarkozy farewell.”

Russian Security Analysts are also stating that this ‘first version’ of the Western propaganda media reports, that an Israeli Border Policeman ‘committed suicide’ during President Sarkozy’s farewell ceremony, is ‘ludicrous’ to explain away this assassination attempt as only the most vetted Israeli policeman are allowed near foreign heads of state by Israel’s Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations (Mossad).

These reports further point out that Israel’s Prime Minister Olmert had just this past week extended the term of Mossad director Meir Dagan’s for another year due to Dagan’s ‘extreme’ anger towards the French Leader for his Nations mending relations with both Lebanon and Syria, both of which were former protectorates of Colonial France.

Israeli right wing extremist ‘anger’ against President Sarkozy turned to ‘hatred’, these reports continue, after Sarkozy’s earlier address to Israel’s Knesset stating that Jerusalem must be divided, and as we can read as reported by the Washington Post News Service:

“French President Nicolas Sarkozy told the Israeli parliament Monday that there could be no Middle East peace unless Israel drops its refusal to cede sovereignty over parts of Jerusalem claimed by the Palestinians, challenging one of Israel's most emotionally held positions.”

Further fueling Israel’s anger against President Sarkozy was his demand for the Israelis to immediately halt their building of settlements on Palestinian land and France’s latest rush to provide its Arab Allies with nuclear power, including United Arab Emirates, Jordan and Morocco.

Russian Military Analysts point out that the right wing factions of the Israeli government would feel ‘fully justified’ in the killing of President Sarkozy as he is himself of Jewish background (and had lost 57 family members to the German Nazis) and under Israel’s laws is a citizen of Israel, and by his negotiation with Israel’s enemies in the Arab World also under these laws, is a traitor.

It should be further noted that Israel’s fanatic right wing forces have used assassinations in the past to protect their homeland, including the 1995 killing of Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by the orthodox Jew Yigal Amir for Rabin having negotiated the Oslo Accords with the Palestinians.

Source: John Burke's Society

OUR COMMENT: President Sarkosy is one of the MOST dangerous person's on the world scene today, he is pushing the European project more than any other person, arming the enemies of Israel and is a "traitor" nor does he regard the God of His Fathers. He certainly is one person to watch on the world scene.

Is Europe Repainting Its Nazi Past?

Europe's soccer games have long been the preserve of boisterous fans, drunken brawls and riots. Lately, they have also become the province of anti-Semites and neo-Nazis who comfortably spew hateful epithets in the anonymity of crowded stadiums where they enjoy a troubling measure of support.

In recent years, soccer crowds have gone so far as to simulate the hissing of Nazi gas chambers, pairing the sound with Nazi salutes. In Belgium, Muslim fans at a soccer match between Israel and Belgium shouted "Jews to the gas chambers" and "strangle the Jews," while waving Hamas and Hezbollah flags. Freed from the restraints of acceptable behavior, with inhibitions loosened by alcohol consumption and the intense camaraderie of team spirit, soccer fans freely unleash anti-Semitic slurs with abandon and without fear of retribution.

This alarming behavior prompts questions as to whether anti-Semitism is becoming acceptable again in a Europe that has forgotten its Nazi past, and whether guilt has been supplanted by denial. Is the era of Nazism being re-examined and re-framed in a more positive light that contributes to such gratuitous and ugly outbursts?

Two recent disturbing incidents appear to support this idea, raising legitimate concerns that Europe is indeed repainting its Nazi past. The first incident occurred on June 16 during the televised, Euro 2008 soccer match between Germany and Austria. The words to the nationalistic first stanza of Deutschland Uber Alles, usually avoided since the fall of the Third Reich, were displayed in subtitles on Swiss television.

    Germany, Germany above everything,
    Above everything in the world,
    When it always for protection and defense,
    Brotherly sticks together.
    From the Meuse to the Neman
    From the Adige to the Belt.

Responding to the controversy generated by the broadcast, SRG, the Swiss company that televised the offensive lyrics, claimed that the editors who were responsible for subtitling for the match made an innocent mistake as a result of stress and poor research. The national coordinator for subtitling, Gion Linder apologetically stated, "We are going to hold a special history lesson for all German-speaking staff to explain the issues surrounding the national anthem."

Also at the Euro 2008, the No. 4 designee on the list of most-wanted Nazi war criminals and on Interpol's Most Wanted list cheered the team from his native Croatia at the European Championship in southern Austria. Milivoj Asner, the 95-year-old former police chief and Gestapo agent who sent hundreds of Jews, Serbs and Gypsies to their deaths, lives openly in Klagenfurt, Austria, under an assumed name, although his real identity and his Nazi-affiliated past is known and in some cases, admired by locals.

Former Austrian Freedom Party leader Joerg Haider, whose party was accused of supporting an anti-Semitic platform, refers to Asner as a "treasured" neighbor and told Der Standard, the Austrian daily newspaper, "He's lived peacefully among us for years, and he should be able to live out the twilight of his life with us."

Shielding Asner from justice, the Austrian government has resisted efforts to prosecute him. When Croatia demanded his extradition in 2005, Austria initially claimed that Asner was an Austrian citizen and was thereby exempt from extradition proceedings. Later admitting that he lacked Austrian citizenship, the authorities insisted that Asner was too ill to stand trial. Recently, the Austrian government informed a group of Jewish Nazi hunters that Asner was "not capable enough to be questioned or go before a court." Yet, a fit, confident Asner was recently filmed on a three-hour outing, strolling about town, attending a soccer match and visiting local cafes. 

Dr. Efraim Zuroff, the director of the Jerusalem-based, Simon Wiesenthal Center, which hunts Nazis and war criminals worldwide, exclaimed,

"Austria has long had a reputation as a paradise for war criminals and now they've been caught in the act. It is time for them to do what is right and help bring Nazi war criminals to justice. If this man is well enough to walk around town unaided and drink wine in bars, he's well enough to answer for his past."

Zuroff added, "This is clearly a reflection of the political atmosphere which exists in Austria and which in certain circles is extremely sympathetic to suspected Nazi war criminals."  

Ironically, in March, Austria assumed the chairmanship of the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research. Clearly, by allowing a leading Nazi war crimes suspect to live freely in its midst, Austria demonstrates a poor commitment to Holocaust remembrance and derides the importance of seeking justice for its victims.

These two incidents, the posting of the lyrics to the Nazi anthem and the indifference to the presence of a wanted Nazi war criminal, indicate that Europeans may be beginning to rethink their Nazi past and view it in a more acceptable light. To nonchalantly dismiss the seriousness of the "mistaken" subtitles as job stress and ignorance and to shield a former member of the Gestapo from prosecution, indicates fading memories of the Nazi-era atrocities and, more seriously, a refusal to admit Europe's complicity in the greatest crime against humanity in modern times.

These incidents are not isolated. They occurred against a background of steadily increasing anti-Semitism in Europe since 1990, according to multiple country surveys conducted by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). In 2002, the ADL found that 1 in 5 Europeans harbor strong anti-Semitic views and that 49% of those surveyed believe that Jews talk too much about the Holocaust.

In Europe, comparisons are often made between Israelis and Israeli soldiers and Nazis and the SS. These simplistic comparisons ignore the basic reality that that Israelis are fighting suicide bombers and rocket barrages in a defensive war against annihilation and the Holocaust was a premeditated genocide against an entire religious group. The insistence that Israel's current struggle to survive is on a par with the inhumanity of the Holocaust is a blatant distortion. It is fueled by an undercurrent of Jew hatred.

It has also become commonplace in Europe to hear the Holocaust downplayed as an atrocity and equated instead with current racist attitudes. This, in effect, softens the immensity and horror of the Holocaust. It becomes recast as merely a social gaffe that only occasionally is carried to extremes by small groups, rather than its reality as a systematic, mass extermination. Such soft-pedaling of the Holocaust helps engender and legitimize anti-Semitism and should be a grave cause for concern for the future of European Jewry.  

Despite philosopher George Santayana's well-known warning - "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it." - Europe appears today stubbornly headed down the road to forgetting its past. This bodes poorly for the future of Jews on the continent and has chilling implications for all of us worldwide.

Source: American Thinker

June 2008

UK considers RFID tags for prisoners

The UK government is considering implanting prisoners with RFID tags containing data on identity, address and criminal record.

The RFID tags, about the size of two grains of rice, would be injected under the skin and could be scanned by a reader.

There are also proposals to link the RFID tags to a larger GPS device to monitor the location of high risk prisoners.

"We have wanted to take advantage of this technology for several years because it seems a sensible solution to the problems we are facing in this area, " a senior minister told the Independent on Sunday.

"We have looked at it and gone back to it and worried about the practicalities and the ethics. But, when you look at the challenges facing the criminal justice system, its time has come."

The Ministry of Justice has confirmed that it is considering the proposal as part of plans to modernise the prison system.

Human rights groups have pounced on the proposal, however, describing it as "degrading".

Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, said: "If the Home Office does not understand why implanting a chip in someone is worse than an ankle bracelet, they do not need a human-rights lawyer they need a common-sense bypass.

"Degrading offenders in this way will do nothing for their rehabilitation and nothing for our safety, as some will inevitably find a way round this new technology."

The RFID proposals are designed to address problems with the existing tagging system which uses a transmitter strapped to the ankle.

Over 2,000 of the 17,000 offenders fitted with the ankle tags have escaped by tampering with, or simply cutting off, the device.

Curfew breaches for the past two years are up 283 per cent, and further development of the system has been halted until these problems can be sorted out.
Harry Fletcher, assistant general secretary of the National Association of Probation Officers, stated that the RFID proposal would be unhelpful.

"This is the sort of daft idea that comes up from the department every now and then, but tagging people in the same way we tag our pets cannot be the way ahead," he said.

"Treating people like pieces of meat does not seem to represent an improvement in the system, which works well enough as it is.

"Knowing where offenders like paedophiles are does not mean you know what they are doing."

The UK has been moving faster than most in the use of RFID, including plans to tag exam papers.

Similar schemes in the US have been banned, and there are fears about the health risks and security of RFID implants.

Source: Computer Active

Met Police officers to be 'microchipped' by top brass in Big Brother style tracking scheme

Every single Metropolitan police officer will be 'microchipped' so top brass can monitor their movements on a Big Brother style tracking scheme, it can be revealed today.

According to respected industry magazine Police Review, the plan - which affects all 31,000 serving officers in the Met, including Sir Ian Blair - is set to replace the unreliable Airwave radio system currently used to help monitor officer's movements.

The new electronic tracking device - called the Automated Personal Location System (APLS) - means that officers will never be out of range of supervising officers.

But many serving officers fear being turned into "Robocops" - controlled by bosses who have not been out on the beat in years.

According to service providers Telent, the new technology 'will enable operators in the Service's operations centres to identify the location of each police officer' at any time they are on duty - whether overground or underground.

Although police chiefs say the new technology is about 'improving officer safety' and reacting to incidents more quickly, many rank and file believe it is just a Big Brother style system to keep tabs on them and make sure they don't 'doze off on duty'.

Some officers are concerned that the system - which will be able to pinpoint any of the 31,000 officers in the Met to within a few feet of their location - will put a complete end to community policing and leave officers purely at the beck and call of control room staff rather than reacting to members of the public on the ground.

Pete Smyth, chairman of the Met Police Federation, said: "This could be very good for officers' safety but it could also involve an element of Big Brother.

"We need to look at it very carefully."

Other officers, however, were more scathing, saying the new system - set to be implemented within the next few weeks - will turn them into 'Robocops' simply obeying instructions from above rather than using their own judgement.

One officer, working in Peckham, south London, said: "They are keeping the exact workings of the system very hush-hush at the moment - although it will be similar to the way criminals are electronically tagged. There will not be any choice about wearing one.

"We depend on our own ability and local knowledge to react to situations accordingly.

"Obviously we need the back up and information from control, but a lot of us feel that we will simply be used as machines, or robots, to do what we are told with little or no chance to put in anything ourselves."

He added: "Most of us joined up so we could apply the law and think for ourselves, but if Sarge knows where we are every second of the day it just makes it difficult."

Another officer, who did not want to be named, said: "A lot of my time is spent speaking to people in cafes, parks or just wherever I'm approached. If I feel I've got my chief breathing down my neck to make another arrest I won't feel I'm doing my job properly."

The system is one of the largest of its kind in the world, according to Telent, the company behind the technology, although neither the Met nor Telent would provide Police Review with any more information about exactly how the system will work or what sort of devices officers will wear.

Nigel Lee, a workstream manager at the Met, said: "Safety is a primary concern for all police forces.

"The area served by our force covers 620 miles and knowing the location of our officers means that not only can we provision resource more quickly, but should an officer need assistance, we can get to them even more quickly."

Forces currently have the facility to track all their officers through GPS devices on their Airwave radio headsets, but this is subject to headsets being up to date and forces buying the back office systems to accompany them, according to Airwave.

Steve Rands, health and safety head for the Met Police Federation, told Police Review: "This is so that we know where officers are. Let us say that when voice distortion or sound quality over the radio is lost, if you cannot hear where that officer telling you where he is, you can still pinpoint his exact position by global positioning system.

"If he needs help but you cannot hear him for whatever reason, APLS will say where he is."

Source: Daily Mail

Householders fury over 'Big Brother' council plan to enter 2,000 properties for 'statistical survey'

A Town Hall scheme to 'inspect' the inside and outside of thousands of private homes was condemned yesterday as a 'tax raising snooper's charter'.

Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council has written to 2,000 homeowners asking permission to enter properties to assess the condition of homes as part of a general 'statistical survey.'

But suspicious residents believe the 'inspections' represent the latest intrusion of privacy in an increasingly 'Big Brother' state and could be a method to raise council tax bands.

Nationwide, officials have already been condemned for putting microchips in wheelie bins to monitor family rubbish and boosting the number of traffic cameras to raise revenue.

One council even recently used laws intended for anti-terrorist surveillance to spy on a family who were wrongly accused of lying on a school application form.

The local authority in Doncaster claims its home inspection plan will help to improve housing in the South Yorkshire town - but refused to explain how.

An Edinburgh-based firm of chartered surveyors has been appointed to carry out the 10-week review which will include an internal and external property inspection of each home selected.

All rooms inside will be viewed and the council promises 'this will not involve any disruption to your home or contents.'

Homeowners are to be asked 'general details' about themselves, their household, any concerns about their home and the local environment.

Property landlord Lewis Frame, 59, who lives in a six-year-old four-bedroom semi-detached home in Bessacarr, Doncaster said: "My immediate thought when I received the letter was that it was a scam by a shady company wanting to gain access to properties.

"I couldn't believe it came from the council. Why they can't assess the local housing situation through their own housing stock is beyond me.

"Why do they need to gain access to a new house like mine? If any officials come to my door they will be told in no uncertain terms where to go.

"The council has dropped a clanger and they should tell us the real reason behind this so-called survey or otherwise people will think something devious is going on."

Retired civil servant John Overton, 70, who lives with his wife Susan at Barnby Dun, Doncaster also received a letter and fears it is an attempt to boost tax.

He said: "I am quite happy with my home and I do not want anyone coming round. It is a snooper's charter. Doncaster Council is strapped for cash and all they are after is your money.

"The last thing I want is a rate increase especially when the rates are going up but the services are going down.'

The Labour-run council promised in the letters all information will be used for 'strategic statistical purposes' only.

But Councillor Garth Oxby, leader of the Alliance of Independent Members said: "The council is intruding into our lives at every possible opportunity and are checking up on people more and more and there are more restrictions than ever.

"It really is frightening. We really are going over the top here and this is in addition to all the surveillance cameras around the town.

"It is very worrying. I believe it is not a move to check on housing but part and parcel of a move to increase council tax throughout the borough."

Doncaster Council was reluctant to talk about the "Big Brother" claims yesterday but said it was a voluntary Government initiative.

Peter Dale, the council's acting managing director said: "Surveying houses is normal practice and all councils are required by the Government to carry out this type of work every five years.

"We have brought in additional support to help us speed up and improve housing conditions in Doncaster."

Last year it was revealed that state officials have 266 separate powers to enter a person's home.

The Centre for Policy Studies said officials could enter a property to carry out a fact-finding mission for landmines, search for material or tools related to nuclear explosions, measure rooms to regulate overcrowding or check for unlicensed scrap metal dealing.

The research also highlighted the power to enter a home to check for the presence of foreign bees, prevent signalling to smugglers, survey the seal population and cull seals, check the legality of imported plants, check for any offences related to stage hypnotism and to erect signs indicating a danger to aircraft.

In October Gordon Brown promised to scale back these 'piecemeal' powers to protect civil liberties.

Source: Daily Mail

Council used terror law to spy on fishermen

A council that used controversial powers to spy on a family to check whether they were living in the correct school catchment area has done the same to keep an eye on local fishermen, it emerged yesterday.

Poole borough council is using the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa) - a law brought in to combat terrorism and cyber crime - to scrutinise people gathering shellfish.

The Dorset harbour has valuable populations of cockles, oysters, mussels and clams. Officials used the controversial law to make sure stocks were not being harmed or taken from banned areas.

Human rights campaigners said the revelations, which the council released under the Freedom of Information Act, illustrated why the Ripa law should be reformed.

Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, said: "You do not use a sledgehammer to crack a nut. You can care about serious crime and terrorism without throwing away our personal privacy.

"The law must be reformed to require 'sign-off' by judges, not self-authorisation by over-zealous bureaucrats."

Last month the council admitted spying on a family to check they were living in the correct school catchment area. Jenny Paton, 39, Tim Joyce, 37, and their three daughters had their movements scrutinised and timed by an undercover official.

A detailed log of the family's activities was kept with statements including "curtains open and all lights on in premises", but no action was taken against them.

Since then it has emerged that councils are using the powers for a variety of offences, such as littering or dogs fouling pavements.

Some local authorities have used the act more than 100 times in the last 12 months to conduct surveillance, mainly against people suspected of being linked to rogue trading, benefit fraud and antisocial behaviour involving criminal damage.

Poole and other councils have argued that the act is not simply intended to target very serious criminals and terrorists.

According to the Home Office, the act "legislates for using methods of surveillance and information gathering to help the prevention of crime, including terrorism".

Poole said it had used the act 17 times since 2005. In March of that year, it used the law to "ascertain which person caused damage to a barrier". In September 2006, Poole used it again to "identify persons continually vandalising door entry systems to ground floor flats".

In addition, the council used the powers to try to find out who was stealing from a tip and to monitor a property from which it thought drugs were being dealt.

On four occasions the powers were used to see if fishermen were gathering shellfish from a prohibited area in Poole harbour.

Council officials have said the surveillance lasted on average for two weeks for the purpose of "preventing or detecting crime or for preventing disorder".

Tim Martin, head of legal and democratic services at the council, said: "Illegal shellfish dredging can cause harm to the conservation of stocks in the harbour and could also lead to a potentially serious public health risk if illegally fished stock is not fit for consumption."

Source: The Guardian

Police Snap Children During Stop & Search

Scotland Yard has admitted its officers have been photographing children who are stopped and searched even after they have been found to be innocent.

Police in Lambeth, south London, claim the tactic helps fight street crime and insist the pictures are kept on a database only for intelligence-gathering purposes. But the civil rights group Liberty has condemned the measure, and a leading community group working with the police has described the tactic as "sinister".

On Wednesday, police announced the temporary suspension of the tactic after meeting with the community police consultative group for Lambeth.

Last week, Sandra Moodie told how her son Jordan had been stopped and searched by plainclothes officers on his way home from school. They found he was carrying only school books, but took his picture.

Critics claim it marks the return of a new form of the "sus" law. James Welch, the legal director of Liberty, said: "The police don't have carte blanche to do anything that they think will help prevent crime; they have obligations under the Human Rights Act and the Data Protection Act."

In a statement, the police said: "The [Met] has, since 1998, employed the tactic of overtly photographing or filming persons in the street as a way of preventing offences, gathering evidence and intelligence and identifying offenders."

Source: The Guardian

Big Brother Cameras in Planes -

In-flight surveillance could foil terrorists in the sky

CCTV cameras are bringing more and more public places under surveillance – and passenger aircraft could be next.

A prototype European system uses multiple cameras and "Big Brother" software to try and automatically detect terrorists or other dangers caused by passengers.

The European Union's Security of Aircraft in the Future European Environment (SAFEE) project uses a camera in every passenger's seat, with six wide-angle cameras to survey the aisles. Software then analyses the footage to detect developing terrorist activity or "air-rage" incidents, by tracking passengers' facial expressions.

The system performed well in tests this January that simulated terrorist and unruly passenger behaviour scenarios in a fake Airbus A380 fuselage, say the researchers that built it.

Systems to analyse CCTV footage – for example, to detect violence (with video) or alert CCTV operators to unusual events – have been designed before. But the SAFEE software must cope with the particularly challenging environment of a full aircraft cabin.

Threat indicators

As crew and passengers move around they often obscure one another, causing a risk the computer will lose track of some of the hundreds of people it must monitor. To get around this, the software constantly matches views of people from different cameras to track their movements.

"It looks for running in the cabin, standing near the cockpit for long periods of time, and other predetermined indicators that suggest a developing threat," says James Ferryman of the University of Reading, UK, one of the system's developers.

Other behaviours could include a person nervously touching their face, or sweating excessively. One such behaviour won't trigger the system to alert the crew, only certain combinations of them.

Ferryman is not ready to reveal specifically which behaviours were most likely to trigger the system. Much of the computer's ability to detect threats relies on sensitive information gleaned from security analysts in the intelligence community, he tells New Scientist.

Losing track

But Mohan Trivedi of the University of California, San Diego, US, is sceptical. He has built systems that he says can track and recognise individual people as they appear and disappear on different floors of his laboratory building.

It correctly identifies people about 70% of the time, and then only under "optimal conditions" that do not exist inside an airplane cabin, he says.

"[Ferryman's] research shows that a system detects threats in a very limited way. But it's a very different thing using it day in and day out." Trivedi says. "Lighting and reflections change in the cabin every time someone turns on a light or closes a window shade. They haven't shown that they have overcome these challenges."

Ferryman admits that his system will require thousands of tests on everyday passengers before it can be declared reliable at detecting threats.

The team's work is being presented this week at the International Conference on Computer Vision Systems in Greece.

Source: NewScientistTech

Pensioners seized by Heathrow police - over 'inflammatory' protest T-shirts

Three pensioners were questioned and escorted from Heathrow after police decided the Stop Airport Expansion slogan on their T-shirts was ‘inflammatory’.

Mike Lacey, John Wilding and his wife Tessa were stopped as they tried to join a demonstration against plans for a third runway.

Police took their names, addresses and descriptions and followed them out of a bus terminal, warning they would be arrested if they returned within 24 hours.

Now the three have written to Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair, accusing the officers of harassment and abuse of their ‘stop and search’ powers.

They were stopped despite police knowing that a demonstration against the extra runway was taking place nearby.

Mr Lacey, a 71-year-old grandfather who used to work for Christian Aid,  Dr Wilding, also 71 – a retired academic and emeritus reader in psychology at the University of London – and his English teacher wife Tessa, 60, live in Slough, which will be badly affected by noise and pollution if the runway is built.

They were on their way to join a march to the village of Sipson, which is likely to be flattened if the runway goes ahead.

As they walked into the main bus terminal at Heathrow to catch a connecting service, they were stopped by five Met Police officers who accused them of breaching airport bylaws.

In a ‘stop and search form’ officers wrote that Mr Lacey was questioned because he had been ‘seen in the bus terminal wearing inflammatory clothes’.

Mr Lacey said: ‘The process took half an hour and the police were unable to give any justification for their behaviour.

‘When we asked why we had been stopped, they said the bus station was private property and only airline passengers and people meeting flights were allowed to use it.

'If that is the case, thousands of people broke the law that day.’

Dr Wilding said: ‘Their manner was overbearing and arrogant. My wife in particular felt intimidated.

'I have no doubt we were singled out because of our T-shirts.’

The protest on May 31 attracted 3,000 demonstrators.

Scotland Yard said a 1996 bylaw enabled police to stop people and ask them to explain what they were doing at the airport, as it was private property.

A spokeswoman added: ‘Three people were stopped and asked to account for their presence. They were not searched. The officers correctly interpreted the bylaws.’

Source: Daily Mail

Jersey: Now They Can Lock You Up Indefinately!

By Andy Sibcy

THE Home Affairs Minister has sent shock waves through the legal profession by authorising the indefinite detention of suspects without charge.

On 5 June, Senator Wendy Kinnard amended the criminal code that had limited pre-charge detention to 36 hours.

She did so under delegated powers enjoyed by the minister under the terms of the Police Procedures and Criminal Evidence (Jersey) Law.

However, that same law states that before such changes to codes are made, the minister is required to publish a draft of the changes and consult interested parties. She did neither of these