It has swept across the world killing at least 300 people and infecting thousands more. Yet the swine flu pandemic might not have happened had it not been for the accidental release of the same strain of influenza virus from a research laboratory in the late 1970s, according to a new study.
Scientists investigating the genetic make-up of flu viruses have concluded there is a high probability that the H1N1 strain of influenza "A" behind the current pandemic might never have been re-introduced into the human population were it not for an accidental leak from a laboratory working on the same strain in 1977.
Yesterday, the Department of Health announced a further surge in the number of cases in Britain with another 1,604 confirmed over the weekend, and the death of a nine-year-old girl in Birmingham with underlying medical complications; the third death in Britain from swine flu-related problems.
Souls, spirits, ghosts, gods, demons, angels, aliens, intelligent designers, government conspirators, and all manner of invisible agents with power and intention are believed to haunt our world and control our lives. Why?
The answer has two parts, starting with the concept of “patternicity,” which I defined in my December 2008 column as the human tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise. Consider the face on Mars, the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich, satanic messages in rock music. Of course, some patterns are real.
Finding predictive patterns in changing weather, fruiting trees, migrating prey animals and hungry predators was central to the survival of Paleolithic hominids.
The problem is that we did not evolve a baloney-detection device in our brains to discriminate between true and false patterns. So we make two types of errors: a type I error, or false positive, is believing a pattern is real when it is not; a type II error, or false negative, is not believing a pattern is real when it is. If you believe that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is just the wind (a type I error), you are more likely to survive than if you believe that the rustle in the grass is just the wind when it is a dangerous predator (a type II error). Because the cost of making a type I error is less than the cost of making a type II error and because there is no time for careful deliberation between patternicities in the split-second world of predator-prey interactions, natural selection would have favored those animals most likely to assume that all patterns are real.
ALL HAIL THE NWO! Gordon Brown declared that a $1 trillion package to stimulate economic growth agreed at yesterday's G20 summit in London will ensure that the world pulls out of recession more quickly.
Speaking after the one-day summit of the world's richest nations in the Docklands, the Prime Minister said there were "no quick fixes", adding: "Today's decisions will not immediately solve the crisis. But we have begun the process by which it will be solved."
He said: "This is the day that the world came together to fight back against the global recession, not with words, but with a plan for global recovery and for reform and with a clear timetable for its delivery."
"A new world financial order has been born, almost by accident, because of this crisis"
It is the ultimate in unmanned drones: the Pentagon has revealed plans for a surveillance aircraft that will fly more than 12 miles above the ground for 10 years without landing.
"It is absolutely revolutionary," said Werner Dahm, chief scientist for the air force. "It is a cross between a satellite and a Global Hawk [spy plane]."
The 450ft-long (137-metre) craft will be developed at a cost of $400m (£260m), with a prototype one-third of that length due to be ready by 2014.
The US military hopes the blimp, floating 12 miles above a surveillance area in near space, will give it a better understanding of events on the ground. It will be equipped with a radar system able to provide unprecedented detail over a wide area from hundreds of miles away.
Dame Stella Rimington, the former head of MI5, has accused the Government of exploiting public fear of terrorism to restrict civil liberties. Her comments came on the same day as a report published by international jurists suggested that Britain and America have led other countries in "actively undermining" the rule of law and "threatening civil liberties" in the guise of fighting terrorism.
In an interview with the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia, Dame Stella said that a series of increasingly draconian policies have led British citizens to "live in fear and under a police state". The 73-year-old said: "Since I have retired I feel more at liberty to be against certain decisions of the Government, especially the attempt to pass laws which interfere with people's privacy.
"It would be better that the Government recognised that there are risks, rather than frightening people in order to be able to pass laws which restrict civil liberties, precisely one of the objects of terrorism: that we live in fear and under a police state."
Paranoia, once assumed to afflict only schizophrenics, may be a lot more common than previously thought. According to British psychologist Daniel Freeman, nearly one in four Londoners regularly have paranoid thoughts. Freeman is a paranoia expert at the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College and the author of a book on the subject.
Experts say there is a wide spectrum of paranoia, from the dangerous delusions that drive schizophrenics to violence to the irrational fears many people have daily. "We are now starting to discover that madness is human and that we need to look at normal people to understand it," said Dr. Jim van Os, a professor of psychiatry at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. Van Os was not connected to Freeman's studies.
Britain's security agencies and police would be given unprecedented and legally binding powers to ban the media from reporting matters of national security, under proposals being discussed in Whitehall.
The Intelligence and Security Committee, the parliamentary watchdog of the intelligence and security agencies which has a cross-party membership from both Houses, wants to press ministers to introduce legislation that would prevent news outlets from reporting stories deemed by the Government to be against the interests of national security.
The committee also wants to censor reporting of police operations that are deemed to have implications for national security. The ISC is to recommend in its next report, out at the end of the year, that a commission be set up to look into its plans, according to senior Whitehall sources.
With every telephone call, swipe of a card and click of a mouse, information is being recorded, compiled and stored about Britain's citizens.
An investigation by The Sunday Telegraph has now uncovered just how much personal data is being collected about individuals by the Government, law enforcement agencies and private companies each day.
In one week, the average person living in Britain has 3,254 pieces of personal information stored about him or her, most of which is kept in databases for years and in some cases indefinitely.
The data include details about shopping habits, mobile phone use, emails, locations during the day, journeys and internet searches.
Councils have been urged to stop using controversial surveillance powers for "trivial" offences.
Bosses have been warned by the head of the Local Government Association (LGA) that they risk alienating the public for so-called snooping.
They may also be stripped of the right to use spying methods.
But Sir Simon Milton defended councils that used surveillance to tackle fly tippers, rogue traders and tax and benefit fraudsters.
There has been growing anger about the methods used by councils to probe minor crimes, such as dog fouling.
The powers were introduced under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act as part of the Government's anti-terror drive but it is claimed some councils are abusing the powers.
A face recognition system will scan faces and match them to biometric chips on passports. Photograph: Image Source/Getty
Airline passengers are to be screened with facial recognition technology rather than checks by passport officers, in an attempt to improve security and ease congestion, the Guardian can reveal.
From summer, unmanned clearance gates will be phased in to scan passengers' faces and match the image to the record on the computer chip in their biometric passports.
Border security officials believe the machines can do a better job than humans of screening passports and preventing identity fraud. The pilot project will be open to UK and EU citizens holding new biometric passports.
But there is concern that passengers will react badly to being rejected by an automated gate. To ensure no one on a police watch list is incorrectly let through, the technology will err on the side of caution and is likely to generate a small number of "false negatives" - innocent passengers rejected because the machines cannot match their appearance to the records.
In 1993, the dawn of the Internet age, the liberating anonymity of the online world was captured in a well-known New Yorker cartoon. One dog, sitting at a computer, tells another: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Fifteen years later, that anonymity is gone.
It’s not paranoia: they really are spying on you.
Technology companies have long used “cookies,” little bits of tracking software slipped onto your computer, and other means, to record the Web sites you visit, the ads you click on, even the words you enter in search engines — information that some hold onto forever. They’re not telling you they’re doing it, and they’re not asking permission. Internet service providers are now getting into the act. Because they control your connection, they can keep track of everything you do online, and there have been reports that I.S.P.’s may have started to sell the information they collect.
Miami police could soon be the first in the United States to use cutting-edge, spy-in-the-sky technology to beef up their fight against crime.
A small pilotless drone manufactured by Honeywell International, capable of hovering and "staring" using electro-optic or infrared sensors, is expected to make its debut soon in the skies over the Florida Everglades.
If use of the drone wins Federal Aviation Administration approval after tests, the Miami-Dade Police Department will start flying the 14-pound (6.3 kg) drone over urban areas with an eye toward full-fledged employment in crime fighting.
This is something that was covered in our Message Boards a while back. It is a youtube clip discussing how America, Canada, and Mexico are planning to 'merge' into 1 controlled area - simply dubbed 'The North American Union'.
Thanks go out to Louis Fourie via Email for pointing this out.
A newly declassified document shows that J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had a plan to suspend habeas corpus and imprison some 12,000 Americans he suspected of disloyalty.
Hoover sent his plan to the White House on July 7, 1950, 12 days after the Korean War began. It envisioned putting suspect Americans in military prisons.
Hoover wanted President Harry S. Truman to proclaim the mass arrests necessary to “protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage.” The F.B.I would “apprehend all individuals potentially dangerous” to national security, Hoover’s proposal said. The arrests would be carried out under “a master warrant attached to a list of names” provided by the bureau.
The names were part of an index that Hoover had been compiling for years. “The index now contains approximately twelve thousand individuals, of which approximately ninety-seven per cent are citizens of the United States,” he wrote.
The Department of Homeland security is forging ahead and finalizing plans to use a network of spy satellites for domestic surveillance despite the fact that the Congressional committee supposedly overseeing the program has had no update on it for over three months.
A report in today's Wall Street Journal suggests that Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff is in the process of finalizing a charter for the program this week, regardless of the fact that it is supposed to be suspended.
The DHS had declared that the program was "on hold" after its existence was made public in August, prompting an outcry amongst civil libertarians and lawmakers.
Demands to justify the congressional legality of the satellites, which were originally mandated for foreign surveillance, followed the revelation that a new department branch called the National Applications Office would oversee the program and be responsible for providing images from the satellites to non military law enforcement agencies.
Critics have called for cuts to DHS funding, stressing that the program is in direct violation of the Posse Comitatus act, which prevents the use of military for domestic law enforcement. It also violates the fourth amendment as the satellites are capable of seeing through the walls of people's homes.
"Civil liberties - such as the rights to liberty and assembly and freedom of speech - are ancient rights enshrined in common law as well as modern rights enshrined in international human rights legislation. But if they are not to be eroded by the political class whose desire is always to acquire greater power then people need to remain vigilant. In the 60s, the cultural direction suggested that any attempt by the government to increase its power over the people would automatically be challenged. Many ordinary people decided they were no longer going to bend the knee automatically to the government."
Nearly two-thirds of Americans think it is possible that some federal officials had specific warnings of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, but chose to ignore those warnings, according to a Scripps Howard News Service/Ohio University poll.
A national survey of 811 adult residents of the United States conducted by Scripps and Ohio University found that more than a third believe in a broad smorgasbord of conspiracy theories including the attacks, international plots to rig oil prices, the plot to assassinate President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and the government's knowledge of intelligent life from other worlds.
The high percentage is a manifestation, some say, of an American public that increasingly distrusts the federal government.
"You wouldn't have gotten these numbers a year or two after the attacks themselves," said University of Florida law professor Mark Fenster. "You've got an increasingly disaffected public that is unhappy with the administration."
Children are to be tracked in school via radio chips sewn into their uniforms.
The manufacturer is marketing the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) surveillance system nationwide, following a trial with 19 pupils at Hungerhill School in Doncaster this year.
The chip is embroidered into school uniforms using conductive 'smart threads'. A teacher can then scan these to view the pupil's identity, photo, whether they misbehaved in lessons and their school attendence record.
Hungerhill headteacher Graham Wakeling said the pilot was "not intrusive to the pupil in the slightest" because tracking would not go beyond the school's gates.
However, the chip has drawn criticism from civil liberties groups. David Clouter, from LeaveThemKidsAlone, a campaign group, was appalled by the idea.
"To put this in a school badge is complete and utter surveillance of the children. Tagging is what we do to criminals we let out of prison early," he said.
Stanton Friedman, a physicist who once worked for such giants as Westinghouse and General Electric, has devoted much of his adult life to ferreting out clues in the UFO controversy.
Pitching his case before more than 600 campus audiences, Friedman concludes that alien aircraft have been around for decades and that governments have tried to keep an airtight lid on them.
He has five reasons for a massive and sustained cover-up that he labels “the cosmic Watergate.”
1. Government agents want to figure out how crashed aircraft work.
2. No one wants any enemy governments to know what has been discovered.
3. If some trusted public figures, say the queen of England and the pope, disclosed UFOs, society would be shaken up, and earthlings would begin thinking of themselves as such, rather than as citizens of individual nations.
4. The fourth problem is the fundamentalist Christian perspective that aliens are “the work of the Devil,” quoting 700 Club founder Pat Robertson and the late Rev. Jerry Falwell. The two said earth contains the only intelligence life in the universe, he said.
5. A public confirmation would lead to economic chaos, and lastly, secrecy is a way of life in government.
This morning, you left the house tagged with a tracking device that the government can use to find out where you have been and where you are going.
I'm talking, of course, about your cell phone. Mobile phones communicate continuously with cellular towers in order to receive calls, sending out a signal registering its existence and identity with the provider's nearest towers. The provider stores this cell-site data, which can be triangulated to determine the customer's physical location.
While most courts considering the issue have held that police need "probable cause" to track your movements, a new decision (.pdf) last week out of the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts holds that law enforcement need show only "relevance to an ongoing investigation" to get a historical record of your past movement (something like the Jeffy trail in The Family Circus cartoon).
Why are courts treating past and prospective tracking so differently, and should they?
The problem starts with a basic congressional assumption that real-time information in transit is more private than stored information -- a bias that is enshrined in various laws that protect wire and electronic communications. Congress has imposed stronger limits on how real-time information is accessed and used.
Presidential power is spiraling out of control, making George W. Bush the most powerful American leader since at least WWII, according to a new analysis.
But the current president, now entangled in a controversy over his recent decision to assert Executive Privilege, can’t take full credit for the power grab, the researchers argue. A number of factors have converged over the past 60 years to turn the American presidency into a position of incredible influence that has a negative effect on American politics and which won't change just because someone else takes charge of the White House.
In their new book "Presidential Power: Unchecked and Unbalanced" (W. W. Norton, 2007), Johns Hopkins University political scientists Benjamin Ginsberg and Matthew Crenson trace the history of the presidency since the middle of last century, uncovering a series of murder mystery-like motives, means and opportunities that have shaped the executive branch into the most powerful institution on the globe.
Ginsberg and Crenson are not the only researchers to spot the radical change.
“The presidency has grown in size and in power throughout the 20th century,” agreed Christopher S. Kelley, a political scientist at Miami University in Ohio.
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We are living in strange times. One exceptionally warm winter is enough – irrespective of the fact that in the course of the 20th century the global temperature increased only by 0.6 per cent – for the environmentalists and their followers to suggest radical measures to do something about the weather, and to do it right now.
In the past year, Al Gore’s so-called “documentary” film was shown in cinemas worldwide, Britain’s – more or less Tony Blair’s – Stern report was published, the fourth report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was put together and the Group of Eight summit announced ambitions to do something about the weather. Rational and freedom-loving people have to respond. The dictates of political correctness are strict and only one permitted truth, not for the first time in human history, is imposed on us. Everything else is denounced.
The author Michael Crichton stated it clearly: “the greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda”. I feel the same way, because global warming hysteria has become a prime example of the truth versus propaganda problem. It requires courage to oppose the “established” truth, although a lot of people – including top-class scientists – see the issue of climate change entirely differently. They protest against the arrogance of those who advocate the global warming hypothesis and relate it to human activities.
As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not in communism. This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning.
THE NHS is spending more than £1million a month on mind-altering drugs designed to help to calm hyperactive children.
Doctors now write almost 7,500 prescriptions a week for Ritalin tablets, known as “chill pills”.
They cost about £200 a year per child and are likely to cost taxpayers a total of £12.48million this year, figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act have revealed.
The revelation comes as new figures show that Ritalin or similar drugs are being linked to at least 11 deaths in Britain.
It's not uncommon here also in the U.S School systems to have nearly 30+% and some schools said to have as high as 40+% of the kids on ritilin or some form of mind altering drug.
Schools are to get the go-ahead to fingerprint pupils as young as five, in new measures to be approved by the Government.
Ministers will issue guidance telling schools they have the right to collect biometric data and install fingerprint scanners. But the decision has angered opposition MPs who say collecting fingerprints from children will be a gift to identity thieves.
The guidance will say that personal data, including fingerprints and eyeball scans, can be collected from pupils and used to monitor attendance, so long as schools consult parents first and do not share the data with outside bodies.
Schools will be able to place fingerprint scanners at the entrances to classrooms, the school gates and even in cafeterias. Fingerprint and eyeball scans would make it easy for schools to track children during the day, and tell if they are playing truant, or even what they have eaten for lunch.
TONY Blair wants to hand the European Union radical new powers in his last act as Prime Minister, it emerged today.
The Prime Minister has welcomed controversial plans to bring back the troubled EU constitution by the back door - totally bypassing the need for public referendums on sweeping new powers for Brussels.
German chancellor Angela Merkel has suggested ditching the name "constitution" from the title and instead calling it an "amending treatyÓ - to avoid having to seek the approval of voters.
French and Dutch voters rejected the original plan - which would hand Brussels the power to represent individual countries at the UN and change national laws - two years ago.
Cover Ups 
The Department of Homeland security is forging ahead and finalizing plans to use a network of spy satellites for domestic surveillance despite the fact that the Congressional committee supposedly overseeing the program has had no update on it for over three months. 
