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Files just released to the National Archives under the ’30-year rule’ reveal that Harold Wilson’s Labour government dismissed ID cards in 1974, even after IRA bombs in Guildford and Birmingham had killed 25 people and injured hundreds. Home Secretary Roy Jenkins condemned ID cards as “expensive and ineffective” and also feared that they would seriously infringe civil liberties. You can get more details via the link on our news page

We all know that times and attitudes change but a statement by another well known Labour politician, speaking at their Party conference in October 1995 regarding Michael Howard’s plans to introduce ID cards, only serves to emphasise by how much:

“And instead of wasting hundreds of millions of pounds on compulsory ID cards as the Tory Right demand, let that money provide thousands of extra police officers on the beat in our local communities.”

This certainly sounds sensible, who could possibly have said it?

Tony Blair�

The future Prime Minister’s rhetoric was (unsurpisingly) misleading. This is not a matter of being left or right, as a glance at NO2ID’s supporter list shows.

Full transcript of Blair’s speech to the Labour Congress on 3 October, 1995

“Life is Random” is, if you’re to believe the rumors, the slogan of a new flash-memory iPod. (more info here

Tomorrow we’ll know for sure..

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Some parts of the Maldives were so severely lashed by last month’s tsunami that the government says the map of the paradise cluster of nearly 1,200 tiny islands literally needs to be redrawn.

If the view from a low-flying seaplane is anything to go by, it is easy to see why.

A sweep over the large Hakuraa Club Resort in the southern reaches of the Indian Ocean island chain reveals how waves have torn into the centre of the crescent shaped island and sucked out tonnes of sand. The roof of a beach bungalow floats oddly intact near Medhufushi Resort, surrounded by wood that used to be the rest of the building.

All over the eastern fringe of the Meemu atoll, palm trees bob about in clear waters like dead centipedes in a giant bath.

Some are still rooted to what was dry land before the tsunami struck two weeks ago but is now underwater, more than 30 metres (100 feet) out to sea.

Most of the low-lying Maldives escaped the full fury of the tsunami — triggered by an earthquake off Sumatra — because the landmass was too small for the waves to crest on.

But without the protection of reefs, the southeastern stretch of atolls famed for some of the world’s best scuba diving took a direct hit, with waves as high as 12 feet packing enough power to batter islands into new shapes and in some cases wipe them off the map all together.

“The tsunami changed the map of the Maldives so much that we need to commission a new survey of the country,” said Mohamed Shareef, an environmental expert who works for President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom’s communications unit.

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The most unique, and perhaps most remarkable feature discovered on Iapetus in Cassini images is a topographic ridge that coincides almost exactly with the geographic equator. The ridge is conspicuous in the picture as an approximately 20-kilometer wide (12 miles) band that extends from the western (left) side of the disc almost to the day/night boundary on the right. On the left horizon, the peak of the ridge reaches at least 13 kilometers (8 miles) above the surrounding terrain. Along the roughly 1,300 kilometer (800 mile) length over which it can be traced in this picture, it remains almost exactly parallel to the equator within a couple of degrees. The physical origin of the ridge has yet to be explained. It is not yet clear whether the ridge is a mountain belt that has folded upward, or an extensional crack in the surface through which material from inside Iapetus erupted onto the surface and accumulated locally, forming the ridge. The origin of Cassini Regio is a long-standing debate among scientists. One theory proposes that its dark material may have erupted onto Iapetus’s icy surface from the interior. Another theory holds that the dark material represented accumulated debris ejected by impact events on dark, outer satellites of Saturn. Details of this Cassini image mosaic do not definitively rule out either of the theories.

A snowbound Union Pacific freight train receives assistance in Truckee, Calif., as consecutive snowstorms hit the Sierra Nevada range, Saturday, Jan. 8, 2005. (AP Photo/Dino Vournas)

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Library officials in two southern Mississippi counties have banned Jon Stewart’s best-selling “America (The Book)” over the satirical textbook’s nude depictions of the nine U.S. Supreme Court justices.

“I’ve been a librarian for 40 years and this is the only book I’ve objected to so strongly that I wouldn’t allow it to circulate,” said Robert Willits, director of the Jackson-George Regional Library System of eight libraries in Jackson and George counties.

“We’re not an adult bookstore. Our entire collection is open to the entire public,” Willits said. “If they had published the book without that one picture, that one page, we’d have the book.”

Wal-Mart has declined to stock the book because of the page, which features the faces of the nine Supreme Court justices superimposed over naked bodies. The facing page has cutouts of the justices’ robes, complete with a caption asking readers to “restore their dignity by matching each justice with his or her respective robe.”

Two U.S. servicemen search for pieces of debris from a U.S. Navy Seahawk helicopter which crashed in a rice paddy less then a kilometer away from Banda Aceh’s airport early Monday morning Jan 10, 2005. The crew members were all able to leave the aircraft and were airlifted to a U.S. Navy ship off the coast. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong)