U.K. – Page 131 – Infinite Unknown

UK government to introduce the most radical copyright proposal ever, declares war on principles of free speech, privacy, freedom of assembly, the presumption of innocence, and competition

November 22, 2009 by Infinite

Leaked UK government plan to create ‘Pirate Finder General’ with power to appoint militias, create laws

A source close to the British Labour Government has just given me reliable information about the most radical copyright proposal I’ve ever seen.

Secretary of State Peter Mandelson is planning to introduce changes to the Digital Economy Bill now under debate in Parliament. These changes will give the Secretary of State (Mandelson — or his successor in the next government) the power to make “secondary legislation” (legislation that is passed without debate) to amend the provisions of Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (1988).

What that means is that an unelected official would have the power to do anything without Parliamentary oversight or debate, provided it was done in the name of protecting copyright. Mandelson elaborates on this, giving three reasons for his proposal:

1. The Secretary of State would get the power to create new remedies for online infringements (for example, he could create jail terms for file-sharing, or create a “three-strikes” plan that costs entire families their internet access if any member stands accused of infringement)

2. The Secretary of State would get the power to create procedures to “confer rights” for the purposes of protecting rightsholders from online infringement. (for example, record labels and movie studios can be given investigative and enforcement powers that allow them to compel ISPs, libraries, companies and schools to turn over personal information about Internet users, and to order those companies to disconnect users, remove websites, block URLs, etc)

3. The Secretary of State would get the power to “impose such duties, powers or functions on any person as may be specified in connection with facilitating online infringement” (for example, ISPs could be forced to spy on their users, or to have copyright lawyers examine every piece of user-generated content before it goes live; also, copyright “militias” can be formed with the power to police copyright on the web)

Mandelson is also gunning for sites like YouSendIt and other services that allow you to easily transfer large files back and forth privately (I use YouSendIt to send podcasts back and forth to my sound-editor during production). Like Viacom, he’s hoping to force them to turn off any feature that allows users to keep their uploads private, since privacy flags can be used to keep infringing files out of sight of copyright enforcers.

This is as bad as I’ve ever seen, folks. It’s a declaration of war by the entertainment industry and their captured regulators against the principles of free speech, privacy, freedom of assembly, the presumption of innocence, and competition.

This proposal creates the office of Pirate-Finder General, with unlimited power to appoint militias who are above the law, who can pry into every corner of your life, who can disconnect you from your family, job, education and government, who can fine you or put you in jail.

OECD warning: Britain risks ‘debt spiral’

November 20, 2009 by Infinite

Britain’s banksters and their bonuses have been momentarily saved, but the taxpayer has been looted like there will be no tomorrow.

The UK is broke and the pound sterling will soon go through a real currency crisis, thanks to the spend the UK into oblivion team Brown/Darling and to the printing press King of the Bank of England.

Mission accomplished!

Britain is at growing risk of a “public debt spiral” unless the Government takes “drastic” action to cut the deficit, according to the OECD, world’s leading economic institution.

Britain faces having the biggest deficit in the developed world until 2017.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development said that even if Britain reduces its deficit in line with other leading nations, it will still have the rich world’s biggest deficit from now until 2017 and potentially beyond, casting serious doubt on its economic credibility.

The warning coincided with shock public finance statistics showing that public borrowing in October was 88 times what it was in the same month last year, making it likely that the Chancellor will miss his £175bn borrowing forecast this year.

The double blow is acutely embarrassing for Downing Street, coming ahead of next month’s pre-Budget report and only 24 hours after it pledged to create a Bill to halve the deficit within four years and to reduce debt every year for the coming decade.

In fact, the OECD predicted in its annual Economic Outlook, Britain’s deficit was likely to be even higher next year than this year, at 13.3pc, raising the prospect that the Government could break its own law in its very first year.

Britain’s deficit will remain higher than any other major country, including even Iceland and Ireland, unless the Government takes far more drastic action to repair it, said the OECD’s acting chief economist Jørgen Elmeskov.

“Halving the deficit would be a start, but since the UK is starting out from a deficit which is in double figures, one should go further still,” he said. “The concern is that there could be a cost spiral – where debt increases, hitting confidence in the market, which pushes up interest rates, and this leads to even higher deficits.”

The prospect of interest payments on Britain’s rapidly growing debt rising to 12pc of tax revenues has already prompted Standard & Poor’s to issue a warning about the security of the UK’s credit rating.

UK Nanny State: Health and Safety Snoops to Enter Family Homes

November 18, 2009 by Infinite

Privacy and freedom have left the UK:

– UK: Big Brother Government to ’spy’ on every phone call, email and web search (Telegraph)

– Big Brother Britain: £380 a MINUTE spent on tracking every click online (Daily Mail)

– Police in £9m scheme to log ‘domestic extremists’; Police rebranded lawful protest as ‘domestic extremism’ (Guardian)

– Council bans British parents from public playgrounds, because they have not undergone criminal record checks (Telegraph)

– UK: ‘Snoop’ power is used 1,400 times a day to intercept private data (Times)

– UK: Government To Install Surveillance Cameras In Private Homes (Prison Planet)

– Insane British Government Global Warming Ad: Panic, Little Ones, It’s The Carbon Monster (The Australian)

– Now Big Brother targets Facebook (Independent)

– Right to privacy broken by a quarter of UK’s public databases, says report (Guardian)

Health and safety inspectors are to be given unprecedented access to family homes to ensure that parents are protecting their children from household accidents.

New guidance drawn up at the request of the Department of Health urges councils and other public sector bodies to “collect data” on properties where children are thought to be at “greatest risk of unintentional injury”.

Council staff will then be tasked with overseeing the installation of safety devices in homes, including smoke alarms, stair gates, hot water temperature restrictors, oven guards and window and door locks.

The draft guidance by a committee at the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) has been criticised as intrusive and further evidence of the “creeping nanny state”.

Until now, councils have made only a limited number of home inspections to check on building work and in extreme cases where the state of a house is thought to pose a serious risk to public health.

Nice also recommends the creation of a new government database to allow GPs, midwives and other officials who visit homes to log health and safety concerns they spot.

British military forces told to ‘bribe’ the Taliban with ‘bags of gold’

November 17, 2009 by Infinite

Taliban fighters at an undisclosed location in Afghanistan: British forces are being told to buy off potential recruits with ‘bags of gold’ (Reuters)

British forces should buy off potential Taliban recruits with “bags of gold”, according to a new army field manual published yesterday.

Army commanders should also talk to insurgent leaders with “blood on their hands” in order to hasten the end of the conflict in Afghanistan.

The edicts, which are contained in rewritten counter-insurgency guidelines, will be taught to all new army officers. They mark a strategic rethink after three years in which British and Nato forces have failed to defeat the Taliban. The manual is also a recognition that the Army’s previous doctrine for success against insurgents, which was based on the experience in Northern Ireland, is now out of date.

The new instructions came on the day that Gordon Brown went farther than before in setting out Britain’s exit strategy from Afghanistan. The Prime Minister stated explicitly last night that he wanted troops to begin handing over districts to Afghan authorities during next year – a general election year in Britain.

Addressing the issue of paying off the locals, the new manual states that army commanders should give away enough money to dissuade them from joining the enemy. The Taliban is known to pay about $10 (£5.95) a day to recruit local fighters.

Major-General Paul Newton said: “The best weapons to counter insurgents don’t shoot. In other words, use bags of gold in the short term to change the security dynamics. But you don’t just chuck gold at them, this has to be done wisely.”

British commanders in Afghanistan and Iraq have complained that their access to money on the battlefield – cash rather than literal gold – compares poorly with their US counterparts.

UK: Big Brother Government to ‘spy’ on every phone call, email and web search

November 11, 2009 by Infinite

Time to wake up!

Every phone call, text message, email and website visit made by private citizens is to be stored for a year and will be available for monitoring by government bodies.

All telecoms companies and internet service providers will be required by law to keep a record of every customer’s personal communications, showing who they have contacted, when and where, as well as the websites they have visited.

Despite widespread opposition to the increasing amount of surveillance in Britain, 653 public bodies will be given access to the information, including police, local councils, the Financial Services Authority, the ambulance service, fire authorities and even prison governors.

They will not require the permission of a judge or a magistrate to obtain the information, but simply the authorisation of a senior police officer or the equivalent of a deputy head of department at a local authority.

Ministers had originally wanted to store the information on a single government-run database, but chose not to because of privacy concerns.

However the Government announced yesterday it was pressing ahead with privately held “Big Brother” databases that opposition leaders said amounted to “state-spying” and a form of “covert surveillance” on the public.

It is doing so despite its own consultation showing that it has little public support.

The Home Office admitted that only one third of respondents to its six-month consultation on the issue supported its proposals, with 50 per cent fearing that the scheme lacked sufficient safeguards to protect the highly personal data from abuse.

UK government: All schoolchildren may be vaccinated against H1N1 swine flu

November 18, 2009November 7, 2009 by Infinite

Dictatorship!

Before you allow this to happen take a look at this:

– Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – Shocking Vaccine Cover Up

– Junk Science And The Flu Vaccine Scam Revealed

– Dr. Gary Null Speaking Out at the NYS Assembly Hearing on Vaccinations, Fraud, Junk Science, Crimes Against Humanity and Profit

– Doctor, cited on FOX News as expert on infectious diseases, would not give highly toxic swine flu vaccine to his children

– Dr. Leonard Horowitz: The CDC’s Vaccination Genocide

– First wave of vaccine will be mostly nasal spray, a LIVE FLU VIRUS

– Nanoparticles used in untested swine flu vaccines

– Study: Causal Connection Between Thimerosal and Autism Established

– Historical facts exposing the dangers and ineffectiveness of vaccines

– Exposed: ‘The Swine Flu Hoax’ by Andrew Bosworth, Ph.D.

– D r. Russell Blaylock: Harmful Effects of Swine Flu Vaccine

– Squalene: The Swine Flu Vaccine’s Dirty Little Secret Exposed

Swine flu vaccine: All schoolchildren may get vaccinated as government considers extending vaccination programme. Photograph: John Amis/AP

All healthy schoolchildren may be vaccinated against swine flu, the Department of Health revealed today, as it issued guidance on how to help pregnant women who catch the infection.

Confirmation that the government is considering extending the vaccination programme came as the Conservatives called for all pupils to be immunised against the H1N1 virus.

Cases of the disease in England increased only marginally this week to 84,000, according to official estimates. The latest figures show 154 people have died from swine flu – 105 in England, eight in Wales, 31 in Scotland and 10 in Northern Ireland. Seventeen people have died in the UK in the past week.

The chief medical officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, confirmed the government’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation is examining whether to extend the vaccination programme.

Bank of England extends quantitative easing to £200 billion

November 7, 2009 by Infinite

Quantitative easing is creating money out of thin air or “printing money.”
Quantitative easing increases the money supply, creates inflation and devalues the currency.
Inflation is a hidden tax. Quantitative easing is absolute stealing from the people.

“By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.“
– John Maynard Keynes

“In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. … This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists’ tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists’ antagonism toward the gold standard.”
– Alan Greenspan

BoE warned that UK banks are still failing to provide enough credit to businesses and households as it held interest rates at 0.5%

Steve Bell, The Guardian, Friday 6 November 2009

The Bank of England will expand its programme of money creation by £25bn over the next three months to boost Britain’s recession-hit economy, Threadneedle Street announced today as it left interest rates unchanged again.

Warning that UK banks are still failing to provide enough credit to businesses and households, the Bank said it would increase the size of quantitative easing (QE) to £200bn.

The Bank’s nine-strong monetary policy committee also pegged bank rate at its record low level of 0.5%, where it has been since March. It said cheap borrowing and QE were needed to prevent inflation falling below its 2% target.

In a statement, the Bank said: “On balance, the committee believes that the prospect is for slow recovery in the level of economic activity, so that a substantial margin of under-utilised resources persists.”

Although the Bank said there were signs of recovery in the world economy, it added that output in the UK had dropped by 6% since the start of a recession that has now lasted for six quarters, the longest period of decline since records began in 1955. “Households have reduced their spending substantially and businesses investment has fallen especially sharply,” the statement said.

Offiicial data released today showed that manufacturing output improved in September, and the MPC said that there were signs a “a pick-up in economic activity may soon be evident”.

Under the QE programme, the Bank of England buys bonds from the commercial banks, thereby providing lenders with extra cash to lend. It received permission from the chancellor, Alistair Darling, to extend the scheme.

UK: Personal insolvencies jump to record high as middle class and famous are hit

November 7, 2009 by Infinite

The number of borrowers collapsing under the weight of their debts has soared to an all-time high.

Insolvent: ex-England football star John Barnes and pop singer Kerry Katona

A record 35,242 personal insolvencies were registered in the third quarter of the year — about 3,000 in London — the most since records began in 1960.

The total, up 28 per cent in a year, has been fuelled by a sharp rise in middle class families unable to cope with their finances, according to debt advisers.

Related articles:
– Personal insolvencies rise 28% to 49-year high (Times Online)
– Insolvencies jump to record high (Reuters)
– Largest number of insolvencies in at least half a century (Telegraph)

Famous figures who have filed for bankruptcy in the recession include former England football star John Barnes and former Atomic Kittens singer Kerry Katona.

The tally for 2009 is now certain to pass last year’s figure of 106,544 and could hit 130,000, with some experts predicting a further rise next year and in 2011.

North Sea oil collapse is dragging UK economy down with it

November 7, 2009 by Infinite

Oil wealth was the secret saviour of the economy, but no longer

Production of North Sea oil has halved in the past decade Photo: EPA

What was the industry that powered Britain towards prosperity in the 1980s, and made us one of the most dynamic and successful nations in the Western world? I’ll give you a clue: it was described by a prime minister as “God’s gift” to the British economy; its revenue stream pumped ever larger amounts of cash into the Exchequer – and its subsequent collapse has helped send the public finances spiralling towards disaster.

If your first reaction was “the City”, think again. The answer is North Sea oil. One of the peculiarities of British politics – and economics – is the reluctance to take into account the critical contribution of oil to the economy. We spend so much time droning on about our excessive reliance on the financial sector that we tend to ignore this elephant in the room. But the truth is that, for the past quarter of a century, Britain has been a petro-economy. In 1999, we were producing more oil than Iraq, Kuwait or Nigeria. The following year, we pumped out almost twice as much natural gas as Iran – a country with reserves that are the envy of the world.

The result is that while we are apt to attribute the sudden spurt in Britain’s prosperity in the mid- to late-1980s to a deregulated and reinvigorated City, it owed far more to the massive windfall from the North Sea. Take a look at the numbers. In 1979, when Margaret Thatcher came to power, the amount Britain owed, as a nation, was £88.6 billion. In the subsequent six years, taxes from the North Sea (which had been pretty much non-existent previously) generated an incredible £52.4 billion.

This was no temporary windfall: last year, thanks to record oil prices, the Treasury had its largest ever haul from the North Sea, at £13 billion. This colossal sum equates to more than 3p on the basic rate of income tax – and it was thanks in great part to such revenue that Labour was able to sustain public spending in recent years without a drastic increase in interest rates or having to pass the extra costs on to consumers in the form of higher taxes.

The benefits went far beyond the public finances. Were it not for the cushion provided by oil exports, the deficit in Britain’s current account – its international ledger – would have been one of the worst in the Western world. Moreover, much of the massive rise in business investment in the years before the financial collapse was due entirely to spending in the North Sea. In short, without oil, recent history would have been vastly different. Growth would have been weaker, consumer spending less and the public finances decidedly more parlous. That’s not to say Britain would have been an economic pygmy – just that oil is a luxury that has permitted us to live much more comfortably.

Former UK ambassador: CIA sent people to Uzbekistan for extreme torture, to be ‘raped with broken bottles,’ ‘boiled alive’ and ‘having their children tortured in front of them’

November 5, 2009 by Infinite

This is a MUST-READ.

This is “winning the hearts and minds of people” in action. This is how the US creates real terrorists.

Soldiers wake up! You die for nothing in Afghanistan except corporate profit benefiting only the elite.

The following videos were posted to YouTube by the Real News Network on Oct. 26 and Nov. 4, 2009.

The CIA relied on intelligence based on torture in prisons in Uzbekistan, a place where widespread torture practices include raping suspects with broken bottles and boiling them alive, says a former British ambassador to the central Asian country.

Craig Murray, the rector of the University of Dundee in Scotland and until 2004 the UK’s ambassador to Uzbekistan, said the CIA not only relied on confessions gleaned through extreme torture, it sent terror war suspects to Uzbekistan as part of its extraordinary rendition program.

“I’m talking of people being raped with broken bottles,” he said at a lecture late last month that was re-broadcast by the Real News Network. “I’m talking of people having their children tortured in front of them until they sign a confession. I’m talking of people being boiled alive. And the intelligence from these torture sessions was being received by the CIA, and was being passed on.”

Former UK ambassador Craig Murray

Human rights groups have long been raising the alarm about the legal system in Uzbekistan. In 2007, Human Rights Watch declared that torture is “endemic” to the country’s justice system.

Murray said he only realized after his stint as ambassador that the CIA was sending people to be tortured in Uzbekistan, country he describes as a “totalitarian” state that has never moved on from its communist era, when it was a part of the Soviet Union.

Suspects in Uzbekistan’s gulags “were being told to confess to membership in Al Qaeda. They were told to confess they’d been in training camps in Afghanistan. They were told to confess they had met Osama bin Laden in person. And the CIA intelligence constantly echoed these themes.”

“I was absolutely stunned — it changed my whole world view in an instant — to be told that London knew [the intelligence] coming from torture, that it was not illegal because our legal advisers had decided that under the United Nations convention against torture, it is not illegal to obtain or use intelligence gained from torture as long as we didn’t do the torture ourselves,” Murray said.

IT’S THE PIPELINE, STUPID

Murray asserts that the primary motivation for US and British military involvement in central Asia has to do with large natural gas deposits in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. As evidence, he points to the plans to build a natural gas pipeline through Afghanistan that would allow Western oil companies to avoid Russia and Iran when transporting natural gas out of the region.

Murray alleged that in the late 1990s the Uzbek ambassador to the US met with then-Texas Governor George W. Bush to discuss a pipeline for the region, and out of that meeting came agreements that would see Texas-based Enron gain the rights to Uzbekistan’s natural gas deposits, while oil company Unocal worked on developing the Trans-Afghanistan pipeline.

“The consultant who was organizing this for Unocal was a certain Mr. Karzai, who is now president of Afghanistan,” Murray noted.

Afghan policeman kills 5 British soldiers, escapes; Taliban claims attack, says Brown

November 4, 2009 by Infinite

In this image made from video, Wednesday Nov. 4, 2009, a casualty is unloaded into an ambulance before being taken to a base hospital in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, after five British soldiers were shot dead in an attack. The five soldiers, three from the Grenadier Guards and two from the Royal Military Police, were killed in the Nad-e’Ali district of Helmand Province on Nov. 3, where they were training and operating with Afghan security forces, when an Afghan policeman opened fire on them inside a checkpoint.
(AP Photo/APTN)

KABUL – An Afghan policeman opened fire on British soldiers in the volatile southern province of Helmand, killing five before fleeing, authorities said Wednesday, raising concerns about discipline within the Afghan forces and possible infiltration by insurgents.

The attack Tuesday afternoon came a month after an Afghan policeman on patrol with U.S. soldiers fired on the Americans, killing two. Training and operating jointly with Afghan police and soldiers is key to NATO’s strategy of dealing with the spreading Taliban-led insurgency and, ultimately, allowing international forces to leave Afghanistan.

Attacks such as these will heighten concern about the effectiveness of the Afghan forces.

Lt. Col. David Wakefield, spokesman for the British forces, told Sky News that the soldiers had been mentoring Afghan national police and had been working and living in the police checkpoint in Helmand’s Nad-e-Ali district.

The government spent £4,350 per family to bailout Britain’s banksters

November 4, 2009 by Infinite

Every family in the country is now facing a tax liability of £4,350 to prop up Britain’s banking system after Alistair Darling announced the biggest bail-out in history.

The Government is injecting a further £30bn into Lloyds and RBS.

The Chancellor confirmed that the Government would pump an extra £25.5 billion into Royal Bank of Scotland, and declared that it was the only way to keep the business alive.

Taxpayers have poured a total of £53.5 billion into RBS, including the £20 billion part-nationalisation last year and another £8 billion that was set aside as insurance against further trouble in the future.

In total, the Government has put £74 billion of taxpayers’ money into the banks, including RBS, Lloyds and HBOS, since the start of the financial crisis last year.

The Conservatives claimed the latest bail-out equated to an extra tax liability of £2,000 for every one of the 17 million families in the country. This comes on top of the £2,350 to which every household is already exposed as a result of previous attempts to prop up the financial system.

Insane British Government Global Warming Ad: Panic, Little Ones, It’s The Carbon Monster

November 3, 2009 by Infinite

There is no such thing as man-made global warming! (See information at the end of the article.)

Global warming is just propaganda designed by the elite with their puppet Al Gore as frontman to loot the taxpayer and take away more of your civil rights.

– EU Proposes €50bn Climate Change Deal Ahead of December’s Global Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen

Watch:

– Lord Christopher Monckton: Is President Obama Poised to Surrender the Constitution and US Sovereignty to World Government?

IF you don’t reduce your carbon footprint, then puppies will drown and bunny rabbits will die. And a terrifying, jagged-toothed monster with crazy hooked hands will descend from the clouds to eat you up.

Believe it or not, that is the message being delivered by the British government to children, in a L6 million ($10.7m) advertising campaign designed to scare the next generation witless about the alleged horrors of global warming.

Taking environmentalist propaganda to a new low, the TV ad shows a father reading a nightmarish bedtime story to his perturbed-looking young daughter.

He tells her of a land where the “weather is very, very strange”. There are “awful heatwaves” and “terrible storms and floods”. A cartoon bunny is shown crying as it starves on the dried, cracked earth, while elsewhere a puppy drowns in floodwaters.

Above it all, a sooty, blackened monster – CO2 made hideous flesh – surveys the horrors with a grotesque grin on its face.

And just in case the little girl, and the millions of children that the TV ad is aimed at, thinks this is merely a twisted fairytale, her father makes clear that it is reality.

It is the “horrible consequence”, he says, of human beings using too much CO2, much of which comes from “everyday things like keeping houses warm and driving cars”.

In short? Children who live in warm houses and who get lifts to school or football practice should feel guilty, because their evil antics are causing dogs to die and cute rabbits to go hungry.

Winter crisis could see UK ‘run out of gas within six hours’

November 1, 2009 by Infinite

Tories want energy companies ordered to increase reserves

UK could run out of gas within six hours this winter (Action Press/Rex Features)

The UK could run out of gas within six hours this winter, the Observer has learned. The revelation has sparked a row between the Conservatives and Labour over who is doing more to keep the heating on. Last winter, the UK was left with only three days of reserves when foreign energy companies started exporting gas to supply their European customers after Russia cut supplies that used a pipeline through Ukraine.

A spokeswoman for Ed Miliband’s energy and climate change department said that under a civil contingency act he had the power to halt exports from the UK if the Queen had signed the order.

Charles Hendry, the shadow energy minister, told the Observer that the current minimum requirements on companies to keep gas in storage were not tough enough to safeguard the security of the UK’s energy supplies.

Labour hit back this weekend, accusing the Conservatives of “blighting progress” on building more gas storage facilities by blocking planning reforms proposed by the government.

If its storage facilities are full, the UK has enough gas supplies for about 16 days, based on average demand. France’s storage capacity would last a maximum of 91 days and Germany’s 73 days.

Council bans British parents from public playgrounds, because they have not undergone criminal record checks

October 29, 2009 by Infinite

Only council-vetted “play rangers” are now allowed to monitor youngsters in two adventure areas in Watford while parents must watch from outside a perimeter fence.

The Watford Borough Council policy has been attacked as insulting and a disgrace by furious relatives who say they are being labelled as potential paedophiles.

It will further fuel concerns over a growing nanny state amid the deepening row over the Government’s new national anti-paedophile database.

That will see at least 11 million adults have to be vetted to work with children or vulnerable adults, including parents who give officials lifts to and from social or sports clubs.

Councillors in Watford claim they are only following Government guidelines and cannot allow adults to walk around playgrounds “unchecked”.

But Osfted dismissed the ban while parents branded it “a joke”.

The rules have been imposed at Harwoods and Harebreaks adventure recreation grounds.

Activities on the half acre sites include a skateboard half-pipe, a zip line, rope swings, den building, arts and crafts, plus a wide range of indoor and outdoor sports activities.

Play rangers currently patrol both parks – which are specifically for children aged five to 15 – and are fully qualified and have been cleared by the Criminal Records Bureau.

Parents already have to ‘register’ their child on arrival at the free playgrounds so staff have their contact details in the event of an accident.

Police in £9m scheme to log ‘domestic extremists’; Police rebranded lawful protest as ‘domestic extremism’

October 26, 2009 by Infinite

Lawful protest is now ‘domestic extremism’. (Activism is ‘extremism’.)

– How police rebranded lawful protest as ‘domestic extremism’ (Guardian)

Thousands of activists monitored on network of overlapping databases

Detailed information about the political activities of campaigners is being stored on IT systems. Photograph: Fiona Hanson/PA

Police are gathering the personal details of thousands of activists who attend political meetings and protests, and storing their data on a network of nationwide intelligence databases.

The hidden apparatus has been constructed to monitor “domestic extremists”, the Guardian can reveal in the first of a three-day series into the policing of protests. Detailed information about the political activities of campaigners is being stored on a number of overlapping IT systems, even if they have not committed a crime.

Senior officers say domestic extremism, a term coined by police that has no legal basis, can include activists suspected of minor public order offences such as peaceful direct action and civil disobedience.

Three national police units responsible for combating domestic extremism are run by the “terrorism and allied matters” committee of the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo). In total, it receives £9m in public funding, from police forces and the Home Office, and employs a staff of 100.

An investigation by the Guardian can reveal:

FTSE 100 chief executives receive inflation-busting pay rises averaging 7.4 per cent

October 26, 2009 by Infinite

FTSE 100 chief executives have received inflation-busting pay rises averaging 7.4 per cent over the past year, almost making up for a 29 per cent drop in their bonuses, according to a report published Monday.

Incomes Data Services, the pay research group, said company chiefs’ salaries were growing twice as fast as the pay of shop-floor workers.

Their total remuneration fell just 1.5 per cent in spite of collapsing profits in one of the deepest postwar recessions, it said. Chief executives were still earning, on average, as much as in 2006, when the economy was booming.

Britain stays in recession – GDP data market reaction: Sterling tumbles

October 24, 2009 by Infinite

Shock economic figures today stunned the City by revealing that Britain is wallowing in its longest recession since records began.

The official statistics — which showed that the economy contracted by 0.4 per cent — prompted a furious new row about the Government’s handling of the economy.

The figures, from the Office for National Statistics, mean that national output has now fallen for an unprecedented six successive quarters.

Martin Bentham and Joe Murphy
23.10.09

Full article here: London Evening Standard

Sterling gets hammered against the dollar:

… and against the euro:

By Miles Johnson
Oct 23, 2009 09:51

Full article here: Financial Times

Big Brother Britain: £380 a MINUTE spent on tracking every click online

October 22, 2009 by Infinite

Big Brother: Social networking visits will be logged under the massive expansion of state spying

An astonishing £380 a minute will be spent on surveillance in a massive expansion of the Big Brother state.

The £200million-a-year sum will give officials access to details of every internet click made by every citizen – on top of the email and telephone records already available.

It is a 1,700 per cent increase on the cost of the current surveillance regime.

Last night LibDem home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne described the sum as ‘eye-watering’.

‘There is already enough concern at the level of Government snooping,’ he said.

‘In an era of tough spending choices, it cannot be a justified response to the problems we face as a country to lavish millions of pounds a year on state spying.

‘The increase in money spent on tapping phones and emails is all the more baffling when Britain is still one of the few countries not to allow intercept evidence in court, even in terrorist cases.’

State bodies including councils are already making one request every minute to spy on the phone records and email accounts of members of the public.

The number of snooping missions carried out by police, town halls and other government departments has rocketed by 44 per cent in two years to a rate of 1,381 new cases every day.

Ministers say the five-year cost of the existing regime is £55.61million, an average of £11million a year. This is paid to phone companies and service providers to meet the cost of keeping and providing private information about customers.

Lloyds short-selling doubled last week as traders predict share collapse

October 28, 2009October 19, 2009 by Infinite

Short-selling in Lloyds Banking Group doubled last week in a sign that traders and hedge funds expect shares in the 43.5pc state-owned bank to collapse when it launches a £25bn fund-raising in order to escape the Government’s asset protection scheme.

Stock-lending, a key indicator of short-selling, doubled to 3.5pc of Lloyds’ total share capital in just four days last week, according to Data Explorers, as concern mounts about the bank’s ability to raise £25bn through a combination of debt for equity swaps, assets sales and a rights issue of up to £11bn.

The Financial Services Authority (FSA) and the Government are understood to have expressed grave concern that Lloyds may not be able to raise enough cash to extradite itself from the scheme.

The Treasury and the FSA were last night holding emergency talks about an escape plan, which has yet to be given the green light by either body.

Teenager fined £175 for possessing a ‘grossly offensive’ pornographic image on his mobile phone

October 16, 2009 by Infinite

I have no idea what “grossly offensive” (pornographic) images are.

Why did the police search his mobile phone?

A Lowestoft teenager has become one of the first people to fall foul of a new law which bans the possession of “grossly offensive” pornographic images.

In January this year, a new law came into force as part of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 making it an offence to possess any extreme images which are deemed to be “grossly offensive, disgusting or otherwise of an obscene character”.

Yesterday, Lowestoft teenager Damien Wentworth, of Laurel Road, was fined after police found a short video on his mobile telephone which contained an extreme image.

Wentworth pleaded guilty to possessing an extreme pornographic image.

His solicitor Richard Mann said: “Technically, he is guilty of the offence, but I would say that he didn’t even know it was an offence to have this on his phone. It is a law which came into force this year, so it is hardly a surprise that he didn’t know.”

“He was not putting it on the internet or distributing it to anybody.”

Wentworth was ordered to pay £175 in fines and costs. Magistrates also ordered the destruction of the image.

The new law covers any images, including those stored on mobile telephones, DVDs and on computer hard disks.

Gag on Guardian reporting MP’s ‘Trafigura toxic waste scandal’ question lifted

October 14, 2009 by Infinite

Related article:
– Guardian gagged from reporting parliament:
“The Guardian has been prevented from reporting parliamentary proceedings on legal grounds which appear to call into question privileges guaranteeing free speech established under the 1688 Bill of Rights.

Today’s published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.”

The question from Paul Farrelly MP which was subject to a gagging order related to the Trafigura toxic waste scandal

How the Guardian reported the Trafigura dumping story

The existence of a previously secret injunction against the media by oil traders Trafigura can now be revealed.

Within the past hour Trafigura’s legal firm, Carter-Ruck, has withdrawn its opposition to the Guardian reporting proceedings in parliament that revealed its existence.

Labour MP Paul Farrelly put down a question yesterday to the justice secretary, Jack Straw. It asked about the injunction obtained by “Trafigura and Carter-Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton Report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura”.

David Heath MP: ‘The public have a right to know what is said in the House of Commons’ Link to this audio

The Guardian was due to appear at the High Court at 2pm to challenge Carter-Ruck’s behaviour, but the firm has dropped its claim that to report parliament would be in contempt of court.

Here is the full text of Farrelly’s question:

“To ask the Secretary of State for Justice what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of legislation to protect (a) whistleblowers and (b) press freedom following the injunctions obtained in the High Court by (i) Barclays and Freshfields solicitors on 19 March 2009 on the publication of internal Barclays reports documenting alleged tax avoidance schemes and (ii) Trafigura and Carter-Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura.”

Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian editor, welcomed the move. He said: “I’m very pleased that common sense has prevailed and that Carter-Ruck’s clients are now prepared to vary this draconian injunction to allow reporting of parliament. It is time that judges stopped granting ‘super-injunctions’ which are so absolute and wide-ranging that nothing about them can be reported at all.”

At Westminster earlier today urgent questions were tabled by the Liberal Democrats in an attempt to get an emergency debate about the injunction.

Bloggers were active this morning in ‘speculating’ (Bloggers came up with the correct answer, which pressed the UK censorship into allowing the Guardian to report it now.) about what lay behind the ban on the Guardian reporting parliamentary questions. Proposals being circulated online included plans for a protest outside the offices of Carter-Ruck.

The ban on reporting parliamentary proceedings on legal grounds appeared to call into question privileges guaranteeing free speech established under the 1688 Bill of Rights.

The demise of the US dollar

October 22, 2009October 6, 2009 by Infinite

From the article:
“These plans will change the face of international financial transactions,” one Chinese banker said. “America and Britain must be very worried. You will know how worried by the thunder of denials this news will generate.”

Robert Fisk’s report is accurate and the following denial is just disinformation:

– Oil states say no talks on replacing dollar (Reuters):
ISTANBUL/SYDNEY (Reuters) – Big oil producing nations denied a British newspaper report on Tuesday that Gulf Arab states were in secret talks with Russia, China, Japan and France to replace the U.S. dollar with a basket of currencies in trading oil.

The dollar eased in response to the report, which was written by The Independent’s Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk and cited unidentified sources in Gulf Arab states and Chinese banking sources in Hong Kong.

The plan is to bring down the US. The US constitution is still a major threat to the ‘New World Order’ and the elite.

US citizens need to be disarmed, their freedoms and the dollar need to be destroyed, so that the new global currency and the ‘New World Order’ can be established.

The elite wants to turn the US into a Third World country.

Prepare yourself for the greatest collapse in history.

Got gold (silver, food, water, guns and ammunition)?

– Gold Jumps to Record High as Inflation Outlook Fuels Investor Demand

In a graphic illustration of the new world order, Arab states have launched secret moves with China, Russia and France to stop using the US currency for oil trading

Iran announced late last month that its foreign currency reserves would henceforth be held in euros rather than dollars.

In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.

Secret meetings have already been held by finance ministers and central bank governors in Russia, China, Japan and Brazil to work on the scheme, which will mean that oil will no longer be priced in dollars.

The plans, confirmed to The Independent by both Gulf Arab and Chinese banking sources in Hong Kong, may help to explain the sudden rise in gold prices, but it also augurs an extraordinary transition from dollar markets within nine years.

The Americans, who are aware the meetings have taken place – although they have not discovered the details – are sure to fight this international cabal which will include hitherto loyal allies Japan and the Gulf Arabs. Against the background to these currency meetings, Sun Bigan, China’s former special envoy to the Middle East, has warned there is a risk of deepening divisions between China and the US over influence and oil in the Middle East. “Bilateral quarrels and clashes are unavoidable,” he told the Asia and Africa Review. “We cannot lower vigilance against hostility in the Middle East over energy interests and security.”

This sounds like a dangerous prediction of a future economic war between the US and China over Middle East oil – yet again turning the region’s conflicts into a battle for great power supremacy. China uses more oil incrementally than the US because its growth is less energy efficient. The transitional currency in the move away from dollars, according to Chinese banking sources, may well be gold. An indication of the huge amounts involved can be gained from the wealth of Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar who together hold an estimated $2.1 trillion in dollar reserves.

Iran’s Nuclear Program: Iran truthful, in treaty compliance; US & Israel lying, in treaty violation

October 1, 2009 by Infinite

This article is a must-read.

“The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.” – H. L. Mencken

We hold these Truths to be self-evident…

The title is of this article is alarming, and accurate. It will brief you on:

· the treaty that manages Iran’s nuclear program,
· the status of compliance with Iran, the US with the UK and now France, and Israel,
· analysis for the disinformation delivered by the US, UK, France, Israel.

The treaty in question: The Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT): The Non-Proliferation Treaty[1] (NPT) was designed to limit nuclear weapon development, facilitate availability of nuclear energy, and lead to global nuclear disarmament. The treaty allows any country to develop nuclear material for energy, receive the assistance of the nuclear countries to do so (US, UK, France, Russia, and China), and then be inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to verify they do not refine fissionable material beyond energy-grade (3-5%) to weapons-grade (over 85%). To date, no NPT country with a nuclear energy program has developed nuclear weapons. Iran and the US are signatories of NPT. Therefore, the legal and Constitutional US response is to help Iran develop nuclear energy.

Status of compliance: You need three brief paragraphs of history to put the present into context: in 1953, the United States CIA, led by one of President Theodore Roosevelt’s grandsons, initiated a coup in Iran (Operation Ajax[2]) to remove the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh. The Iranian government was understandably dissatisfied with the terms of its contract with the Anglo-Persian Oil Company that allowed British interests to claim 85% of the oil profit from Iran.[3] Iran voted to nationalize the oil industry in 1951 after the British declined to renegotiate the terms. The US-led coup was successful, and the royal monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi,[4] became virtual dictator. Fearing popular reprisal, Pahlavi’s government was supported by the CIA in creating the Iranian SAVAK, a vicious secret police for the Shah’s dictatorial government.[5] We can only assume that the oil revenue sharing agreement with the Shah was acceptable to the US and UK.

Under the Eisenhower administration, the US cooperated with the Shah’s government for the development of Iranian nuclear energy through the “Atoms for Peace” program.[6] President Ford agreed to US full cooperation to help Iran build about two dozen nuclear energy plants. When the Iranian people overthrew the Shah’s government in 1979, the US stopped cooperating. The US backed Iraq in their invasion of Iran in 1980 and throughout the war until 1988, seeking a more US-friendly Iranian government. The US provided Saddam Hussein with chemical and biological weapons to use against Iran that the W. Bush administration later used as justification for invading Iraq.[7] Since 1979, the US has worked to prevent Iran having a nuclear energy program, even under the legal provisions of the NPT, and reneged on a multi-billion dollar contract to deliver nuclear fuel to Iran without refunding Iran’s money.[8]

Therefore, all US administrations since Carter in 1979 have committed lies of omission by not disclosing to the public Iran’s treaty-right to nuclear energy under NPT. US political “leadership” obfuscates the issue with rhetoric of Iran’s “nuclear program” to link energy with weapons.[9] Ironically, the US is in additional violation of NPT by developing new nuclear weapons and threatening to use them rather than work for global disarmament as per treaty terms.[10] The US actions are also in violation of the UN Charter in threatening war.[11]

The UK and France are out of NPT compliance by not assisting Iran for nuclear energy development and then accepting the reasonable terms of full monitoring of nuclear refinement that has had a perfect history for safety and compliance for over 40 years. Israel is not signatory to NPT; they ironically choose what they accuse of Iran: a secret nuclear weapons program estimated at 200 warheads. Israel has also been found by the UN’s Human Rights Council to be in numerous violations of War Crimes against Gaza.

The previous three paragraphs are plain vanilla history in conservatively-known content. This means it is encyclopedic and not disputed by government or argued by historians. It should be clear to you that “leadership” from both political parties and mainstream media do not provide the necessary context of history and treaty facts to evaluate the Bush and Obama administrations’ statements threatening war with Iran. Their collective use of the term “nuclear program” is intentionally conflating the two distinct technologies of legal low-grade energy refinement with illegal very high-grade weapons refinement. We could also call it fraud, as it deliberately misinforms.[12]

Iran is in compliance of NPT by having all facilities disclosed and open for IAEA monitoring. On Monday September 21, 2009 Iran disclosed to IAEA per NPT terms of 180 day notification of a new nuclear energy facility that is about 18 months away from operation. For discussion, read here.

Bank of England calls unprecedented emergency meeting of economists

September 28, 2009September 28, 2009 by Infinite

Quantitative Easing is ‘printing money’ (creating money out of thin air).

The Bank of England and the government are destroying the pound.
The Fed and the US government are destroying the dollar.
The UK and the US are broke.
The US is in an even worse position than the UK.

The Bank of England has summoned the City’s leading economists to an unprecedented meeting in Threadneedle Street, as the pound plunges amid growing confusion over its radical Quantitative Easing (QE) policy.

The Bank will host a seminar of all London’s major economists next Tuesday – the first time it has invited them in en masse in recent memory – in what has been construed as a sign that it fears market participants are starting to lose faith in its efforts to pump cash into the economy. The move has also sparked speculation that it is poised to announce a major change to the monetary policy framework, although insiders dismissed such suggestions.

It came after the minutes from the Bank’s latest Monetary Policy Committee meeting revealed that the idea of cutting the interest rate banks are paid on the reserves they hold there was not discussed this month. The pound has lurched lower in recent weeks, thanks in part to speculation that the Bank will impose charges on banks for holding excessive amounts of cash in reserve at its vaults. Under QE, it is pumping £175bn into the economy, but much of this cash is sitting in banks’ reserve accounts rather than being recycled and flowing around the broader economy.

The suspicion that the Bank will soon take action to mitigate this has pushed down market interest rates sharply and contributed to an almost 5pc fall in the pound against other leading currencies. It has caused gilt prices and short-term interest rates to fluctuate wildly in recent weeks.

The Bank’s seminar, chaired by deputy Governor Charlie Bean, alongside chief economist Spencer Dale and markets director Paul Fisher, is intended to clear up this confusion. It sparked anticipation in the City not merely because the Bank has a reputation for extreme secrecy, but because some suspect it may come alongside an announcement over the Bank’s reserves policy. Others suspect the Bank is concerned that many think either that QE amounts to printing money, much as Zimbabwe and Weimar Germany did, or that it simply is not working.