If you’re wondering why I’m posting this creepy picture:

just read this…

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Each year since 1997, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and Privacy International have undertaken what has now become the most comprehensive survey of global privacy ever published. The Privacy & Human Rights Report surveys developments in 70 countries, assessing the state of technology, surveillance and privacy protection.

The most recent report published in 2006 is probably the most comprehensive single volume report published in the human rights field. The report runs to almost 1,200 pages and includes about 6,000 footnotes. More than 200 experts from around the world have provided materials and commentary. The participants range from law students studying privacy to high-level officials charged with safeguarding constitutional freedoms in their countries. Academics, human rights advocates, journalists and researchers provided reports, insight, documents and advice.

This year Privacy International took the decision to use the report as the basis for a ranking assessment of the state of privacy in all EU countries together with eleven benchmark countries. This project was first considered in 1998 but was postponed pending availability of adequate data. We now have the full spectrum of information at our disposal and we hope to publish the rankings on an annual basis.

Links:

Privacy and Human Rights 2005.

Ratings Table of EU and Leading Surveillance Societies (PDF).

Briefing paper on the ratings table (PDF).

Each of the countries are available within a larger PDF file in alphabetic order (approx size 2MB each file).

• Argentina to Chile
• China to Georgia
• Greece to Latvia
• Lithuania to Peru
• Phiippines to Sri Lanka
• Sweden to Venezuela

Everybody I know who has a dog usually calls him “Rover” or “Spot”. I call mine Sex. Now, Sex has been very embarrassing to me. When I went to the City Hall to renew the dog’s license, I told the clerk that I would like a license for Sex. He said, “I would like to have one too!” Then I said, “But she is a dog!” He said he didn’t care what she looked like. I said, “You don’t understand… I have had Sex since I was nine years old.” He replied, “You must have been quite a strong boy.”

When I decided to get married, I told the minister that I would like to have Sex at the wedding. He told me to wait until after the wedding was over. I said, “But Sex has played a big part in my life and my whole world revolves around Sex.” He said he didn’t want to hear about my personal life and would not marry us in his church. I told him everyone would enjoy having Sex at the wedding. The next day we were married at the Justice of the Peace. My family was barred from the church from then on.

When my wife and I went on our honeymoon, I took the dog with me. When we checked into the motel, I told the clerk that I wanted a room for me and my wife and a special room for Sex. He said that every room in the motel is a place for sex. I said, “You don’t understand… Sex keeps me awake at night.” The clerk said, “Me too!”

One day I entered Sex in a contest. But before the competition began, the dog ran away. Another contestant asked me why I was just looking around. I told him that I was going to have Sex in the contest. He said that I should have sold my own tickets. “You don’t understand,” I said, “I hoped to have Sex on TV.” He called me a show off.

When my wife and I separated, we went to court to fight for custody of the dog. I said, “Your Honor, I had Sex before I was married but Sex left me after I was married.” The Judge said, “Same here!”

Last night Sex ran off again. I spent hours looking all over for her. A cop came over and asked me what I was doing in the alley at 4 o’clock in the morning. I said, “I’m looking for Sex.” My case comes up next Thursday.

Well now I’ve been thrown in jail, been divorced and had more damn troubles with that dog than I ever foresaw. Why just the other day when I went for my first session with the psychiatrist, she asked me, “What seems to be the trouble?” I replied, “Sex has been my best friend all my life but now it has left me for ever. I can’t live any longer being so lonely.” and the doctor said, “Look mister, you should understand that sex isn’t a man’s best friend so go get yourself a dog.”

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Petty Officer Third Class Dustin E. Kirby clutched the injured marine’s empty helmet. His hands were coated in blood. Sweat ran down his face, which he was trying to keep straight but kept twisting into a snarl.

He held up the helmet and flipped it, exposing the inside. It was lined with blood and splinters of bone.

“The round hit him,�? he said, pausing to point at a tiny hole that aligned roughly with a man’s temple. “Right here.�?

Petty Officer Kirby, 22, is a Navy corpsman, the trauma medic assigned to Second Mobile Assault Platoon of Weapons Company, Second Battalion, Eighth Marines. Everyone calls him Doc. He had just finished treating a marine who had been shot by an Iraqi sniper.

“It was 7.62 millimeter,�? he continued. “Armor piercing.�?

He reached into his pocket and retrieved the bullet, which he had found. “The impact with the Kevlar stopped most of it,�? he said. “But it tore through, hit his head, went through and came out.�?

He put the bullet in his breast pocket, to give to an intelligence team later. Sweat kept rolling off his face, mixed with tears. His voice was almost cracking, but he managed to control it and keep it deep. “When I got there, there wasn’t much I could do,�? he said.

Then he nodded. He seemed to be talking to himself. “I kept him breathing,�? he said.

[..]

In one course, an advanced trauma treatment program he had taken before deploying, he said, the instructors gave each corpsman an anesthetized pig.

“The idea is to work with live tissue,�? he said. “You get a pig and you keep it alive. And every time I did something to help him, they would wound him again. So you see what shock does, and what happens when more wounds are received by a wounded creature.�?

“My pig?�? he said. “They shot him twice in the face with a 9-millimeter pistol, and then six times with an AK-47 and then twice with a 12-gauge shotgun. And then he was set on fire.�?

“I kept him alive for 15 hours,�? he said. “That was my pig.�?

“That was my pig,�? he said.

He paused. “Smith is my friend.�?

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Bechtel Corp. went to Iraq three years ago to help rebuild a nation torn by war. Since then, 52 of its people have been killed and much of its work sabotaged as Iraq dissolved into insurgency and sectarian violence.

Now Bechtel is leaving.

The San Francisco engineering company’s last government contract to rebuild power, water and sewage plants across Iraq expired on Tuesday. Some employees remain to finish the paperwork, but essentially, the company’s job is done.

Bechtel’s contracts were part of an enormous U.S. effort to put Iraq back on its feet after decades of wars and sanctions. That rebuilding campaign, once touted as the Marshall Plan of modern times, was supposed to win the hearts of skeptical Iraqis by giving them clean water, dependable power, telephones that worked and modern sanitation. President Bush said he wanted the country’s infrastructure to be the very best in the Middle East.

But Bechtel — which charged into Iraq with American “can-do” fervor — found it tough to keep its engineers and workers alive, much less make progress in piecing Iraq back together.

“Did Iraq come out the way you hoped it would?” asked Cliff Mumm, Bechtel’s president for infrastructure work. “I would say, emphatically, no. And it’s heartbreaking.”

The funny thing is, there are legions of Iraqi engineers out of work right now who would rebuild the country for pennies on the dollar (just like they did it after Gulf War I). Instead the USA shovels cash into the furnaces of Bechtel and KBR, and the unemployed engineers are left on the wayside…or perhaps they’re making IEDs in their ample spare time.

Click here to view full image (5298 kb)

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Scientists have conclusively demonstrated the extent of the link between the Sahara desert and the Amazon rainforests.

It might sound unlikely, but their work has shown that the Amazon rainforest depends on dust from one tiny area of the Sahara desert to restock its soil with nutrients and minerals. Analysis of images from NASA’s MODIS satellite have revealed the Bodélé, a region of the Sahara not far from Lake Chad, as the source of more than half the material that fertilises the rainforest.

The Bodélé depression was already known as one of the largest sources of dust in the world, but the scientists involved in the research say no one had any idea of the scale of the region’s importance to the Amazon. It transpires that if the Bodélé was not there, the Amazon would be a mere wet desert.

Dr Ilan Koren, lead author of the paper said: “Until now no one had any idea how much dust [The Bodélé] emits and what portion arrives in the Amazon. Using satellite data, we have calculated that it provides on average more than 0.7 million tons of dust on each day that it is actively emitting dust.”

The dust is swept into the atmosphere by the surface winds in the Sahara. The Bodélé region loses most of its dust during the spring and winter months, unlike the rest of the Sahara, because of its unique geography.

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One of the best-kept secrets in London was the lecture series Andras Schiff gave in parallel to his electrifying cycle of Beethoven sonatas at the Wigmore Hall. In May a friend managed to get a ticket for me – and I was simply dazzled by the performance he put on – a riveting mixture of erudition, analysis, passion, wit and memory. Schiff talked for more than two and a half hours about three lateish sonatas – and for anyone interested in these peaks of the piano repertoire they were quite compelling.

It seemed such a waste that all this scholarship and revelation should not have a wider audience. I learned from the Wigmore Hall’s director, John Gilhooly, that the lectures had all been recorded – and neither he nor Schiff needed much persuading that the obvious place to podcast them was on the Guardian’s new arts and entertainment blog. Over the next seven weeks you’ll have the chance to download the series of seven lectures.

Schiff marks the start of his complete cycle of 32 Beethoven piano sonatas with this first lecture-recital, which you can listen to and download here.

Part 1: Piano Sonata in F minor, Op 2, No 1
Download here

Part 2. Piano Sonata in A, Op 2, No 2
Download here

Part 3. Piano Sonata in C, Op 2, No 3
Download here

Part 4. Piano Sonata in E flat Op 7

Download here

For more live recordings from the Wigmore Hall, see: www.wigmore-hall.org.uk

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John McDonogh High School has at least 25 security guards, at the entrance, up the stairs and outside classes. The school has a metal detector, four police officers and four police cruisers on the sidewalk.

In the last six weeks, students at McDonogh, the largest functioning high school here, have assaulted guards, a teacher and a police officer. A guard and a teacher were beaten so badly that they were hospitalized.

The surge hints at a far-reaching phenomenon after Hurricane Katrina, educators here say. Teenagers in the city are living alone or with older siblings or relatives, separated by hundreds of miles from their displaced parents. Dozens of McDonogh students fend largely for themselves, school officials say.

“They are here on their own,�? Wanda Daliet, a science teacher, said. “They are raising themselves. And they are angry.�?

The principal, Donald Jackson, estimated that up to a fifth of the 775 students live without parents.

“Basically, they are raising themselves, because there is no authority figure in the home,�? Mr. Jackson said. “If I call for a parent because I’m having an issue, I may be getting an aunt, who may be at the oldest 20, 21. What type of governance, what type of structure is in the home, if this is the living conditions?�?

And the biggest priority on this school? Getting the football team back into the league.

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Who can remember all the way back to last summer, when we had daylight saving time, baseball, and $3 a gallon gasoline prices?

Not American car buyers, apparently, and you can see the evidence in the results of October auto sales.

Sales of big pickup trucks and SUVs went through the roof – doubling from the year before in some cases. Sales of small, fuel efficient cars, meanwhile, remained stagnant. It is as if all that moaning and groaning about price gouging by oil companies never happened.

Actually, it is worse than that. American consumers have reinforced all the stereotypes they are labeled with: short attention spans, lack of social consciousness and thinking with their wallets.

Does anyone seriously believe that having once spiked up to $3 with very little provocation, gasoline prices won’t do it again? Have they forgotten about the ongoing instability in the Middle East, where most of our oil comes from? And have they stopped caring about traffic density, scarce resources or global warming? And if they haven’t, why aren’t they exercising better sense in their vehicle preferences?

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Attorney Tom Connolly was arrested by South Portland police this morning, after motorists reported a man with a gun near Interstate 295. It turns out the gun was part of a Halloween costume, but it looked real enough to passersby and police. Connolly was dressed in an Osama Bin Laden costume and holding a fake gun and a sign that said “I love TABOR”. Officers drew their weapons on Connolly, who was taken into custody a few minutes later. It will be up to the District Attorney’s office to decide what charges to file, but police say one possibility is a charge of terrorizing. Connolly is a well-known attorney. He ran an unsuccessful campaign for governor in 1998. In 2000, Connolly tipped the media off to a 1970′s DUI arrest by presidential candidate George W. Bush.

Now in Texas as well:

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Early voting for the November election started Monday, and during this first week of it, Jefferson County has experienced high turnout.
By the end of Saturday, which was the sixth day of early voting, the Jefferson County Clerk’s office was reporting that 7,416 had cast ballots.
When you add the number of absentee ballots mailed in, turnout stands at 7,774 voters.
Rogers Park (2,200 voters) and the Nederland Recreation Center (1,673 voters) have seen the most voters of all the nine early voting sites in the county.
Early voting runs through Friday, November 3rd.
KFDM continues to get complaints from Jefferson County voters who say the electronic voting machines are not registering their votes correctly.
Friday night, KFDM reported about people who had cast straight Democratic ticket ballots, but the touch-screen machines indicated they had voted a straight Republican ticket.
Some of those voters including Lamar University professor, Dr. Bruce Drury, believe the problem is a programming error.

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She smiled at me, checked that the name on my license matched the name on my boarding pass, and used a yellow hi-liter to mark the boarding pass with what looked exactly like a one-inch line. (Do I need to tell you that they sell yellow hi-liters in just about every single store in America?) As she handed “my papers�? back to me, she paused. She looked me in the eyes. She smiled. And then she said, “I can’t see your eyes.�?

I raised my hand to my face to remove my sunglasses and stopped. She wasn’t smiling because she was nice. She was smiling because she was suffering from False Authority Syndrome! The poor child. In the most disarming, rational, peaceful, and kind voice at my command, I said, “You don’t need to see my eyes.�?

“You have to remove your sunglasses, sir.�?

“No, actually, I don’t.�?

“I can’t let you past here with your sunglasses on.�?

“Yes, you can.�?

At this point she became obviously frustrated and confused. She looked at me as if I was a freshly-shaved Osama bin Laden in a sports coat and khakis. She became stern. “Take them off, please.�?

“There’s no law that says I can’t wear my sunglasses in the airport. ma’am�?

“Yes, there is. It’s a rule.�?

“It’s not a rule.�?

“It is. I can’t let you pass.�?

“Yes, you can.�?

She took my boarding pass and used her yellow hi-liter to turn the line into an X. An X of shame and potential threat. She called to the top-of-the-stairs officer, “Threat alert!�?

Do you feel safer yet?