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Police secretly snapping up to 14 million drivers a day
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POLICE chiefs are facing the threat of a High Court privacy action over a nationwide network of cameras that is being used to take up to 14m photographs of motorists every day.
The images are being stored daily on a huge “Big Brother” database linked to automatic numberplate recognition (ANPR) technology to track vehicles’ movements.
Pope Vows To Get Church Pedophilia Down To Acceptable Levels
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Calling the behavior shameful, sinful, and much more frequent than the Vatican was comfortable with, Pope Benedict XVI vowed this week to bring the widespread pedophilia within the Roman Catholic Church down to a more manageable level.
Addressing thousands gathered at St. Peter’s Square on Easter Sunday, the pontiff offered his “most humble apologies” to abuse victims, and pledged to reduce the total number of molestations by 60 percent over the next five years.
“This is absolutely unacceptable,” Pope Benedict said. “It seems a weakening of faith in God has prevented our priests from exercising moderation when sexually abusing helpless minors.”
“And let me remind our clergy of the holy vows they all took when they entered the priesthood,” he continued. “They should know that they’re only allowed one small child every other month.”
The pope said he was deeply disappointed to learn that the number of children sexually abused by priests was almost 10 times beyond the allowable limit clearly outlined in church doctrine. Admitting for the first time in public that the overindulgent touching of “tender, tender young flesh” had become a full-blown crisis, the Holy Father vowed to implement new reforms to bring the pedophilia rate back down to five children per 1,000 clergy.
Whistleblower Report: Leaked Video Shows U.S. ‘Coverup’
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On July 12, 2007, Chmagh and Noor-Eldeen, members of the Reuters Baghdad bureau were killed on a reporting assignment in the neighborhood of New Baghdad. Witnesses said they were struck by gunfire from U.S. attack helicopters; at least nine other people were reportedly killed in the incident, and two children were wounded. Reuters had sought to obtain gunsight video shot by the Apache attack helicopters and other incident reports, but the U.S. military has not released the footage to the news organization.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said the organization was able to obtain a copy of the footage from an unnamed person (credited in the video as “our courageous source”). “The material was encrypted with a code, and we broke the code,” Assange said.
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This story, however, is significant in another respect: It shows how a website dedicated to anonymous leaks has become a venue for a more traditional model of investigative reporting. “In terms of journalism efficiency, I think we discovered a lot with a small amount of resources,” Assange said. Combining leaked material and sending reporters into the field, he added, was a “powerful combination.”
Do as we say, not as we do
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It’s tempting, with the election just round the corner, to score a few cheap political points at the expense of Labour and the conservatives over the ‘Ashes to Ashes’ poster scandal… so I will.
If you haven’t been following the story, the Labour party took a photo of actor Philip Glenister as Gene Hunt from Ashes to Ashes, photoshopped in David Cameon’s face and put it on a poster with a tagline about going back to the 80s. The Conservatives took Labour’s image, and changed the words to something more positive, and put it on their own posters. The problem is that it appears neither of them bothered with the trivial matter of getting approval from the copyright holders.
If you’ve looked at both posters on line, that’s 2 of your 3 strikes, courtesy of parties that are backing the Digital Economy Bill, while committing copyright infringement themselves.
The Vatican is the Toyota of the religious world. You just know there were number-crunchers in a back room somewhere finding the least cost solution — where the costs of cleaning out the pervy priests was just less than the cost of paying (literally only, of course) for their sins.
This is proof (as if we needed it) that the Catholic Church is a for-profit enterprise. Because if they were a church, the only acceptable number of molestations would be zero.
“Because if they were a church, the only acceptable number of molestations would be zero.” You’re familiar with The Onion, are you?
Thing is, I was totally falling for it.
That’s the thing about the Onion. Their satire is so well-done, so hard hitting and so close-to-home, it can be pretty hard to be sure it’s satire.
The Wikipedia entry on The Onion has a good summary of high profile instances where The Onion was taken seriously…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_onion#The_Onion_taken_seriously
OK, my bad. I went off half cocked. The Onion is to be commended for hitting the perfect note on this one.
But isn’t it a sad state of affairs when a simple recovering Cathoholic so readily believes there truly are men in some back room weighing the costs and benefits of abuse.