· Millions of dollars given to opposition, claim critics
· Venezuelan groups’ details hidden from list

The US government has been accused of trying to undermine the Chávez government in Venezuela by funding anonymous groups via its main international aid agency.

Millions of dollars have been provided in a “pro-democracy programme” that Chávez supporters claim is a covert attempt to bankroll an opposition to defeat the government. (more…)

Skies filled with drones by 2016?

The UK is examing the possible deployment of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) within 10 years across Britain’s airspace for a range of civilian tasks including traffic control and environmental monitoring, The Guardian reports. (more…)

WASHINGTON - D.C. police are installing a dozen surveillance cameras in city neighborhoods.

The cameras were authorized in the emergency crime legislation passed by the D.C. Council earlier this summer.

Police say officers won’t usually be monitoring them in real time, but will watch replays of the video they record while investigating crimes. (more…)

RENO — Vice President Dick Cheney predicted Monday that a recent federal court ruling finding a warrantless surveillance program unconstitutional will be overturned on appeal.

He also said U.S. troops will stay in Iraq until the job is done. (more…)

LONDON - Amid the chaos of London’s morning rush hour it is easy to overlook many things. Surveillance cameras are one of them. People either ignore them or have gotten used to the numerous cameras sited all over the city. Paying a little bit of attention though enables you to realize the vast number of cameras in use . be it a subway station, an office building, a museum, a street, or a store, surveillance cameras are there. There are even cameras placed at the entrance of some ladies’ rooms. It is virtually impossible to find a public spot that is free from the constant stare from them. (more…)

The Vatican’s chief exorcist is no fan of Harry Potter.

Father Gabriele Amorth, who is Pope Benedict XVI’s “caster out of demons,” told Vatican Radio: “Behind Harry Potter hides the signature of the king of the darkness, the devil.” (more…)

The oldest detainee at Guantanamo Bay — an Afghan man who is at least 71 and hobbled around the U.S. prison in Cuba using a walker — has been sent home, his lawyer said Monday. (more…)

CONCORD, N.H. A University of New Hampshire professor who thinks government officials orchestrated the 9-11 attacks said he doesn’t impose his opinions on students, but teaches them to discuss and debate differing viewpoints.

Psychology professor William Woodward belongs to Scholars for 9-11 Truth, whose members believe that Bush administration officials either planned the attacks or allowed them to happen in order to get public opinion behind their policies.

Governor John Lynch says Woodward’s beliefs are crazy and offensive. He has asked the university system’s trustees to investigate Woodward’s teaching practices. (more…)

The government needs broader access to airline passenger information to identify potential hijackers, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said in an article published Tuesday.

“How do we thwart a terrorist who has not yet been identified?” Chertoff wrote in an op-ed article in Tuesday’s editions of The Washington Post. (more…)

Dick Morris, who just last week told the Hannity & Colmes audience that the reason Republicans are unpopular is because Bush has been so successful “we feel that magically the terrorists have disappeared,” was back again last night (8/29/06) with some new theories about public opinion. This time, he admitted that people think the war in Iraq is a mess and advised Republicans that they should stop talking about it and focus on the war on terror. Democrats, on the other hand, need to do the opposite. “Democrats have to understand that the Patriot Act is popular, snooping in libraries is popular, wiretaps without warrants is popular.” (more…)

Texas leader seeks answers about plan that includes NAFTA corridor

A Texas congressman is asking his colleagues as well as American citizens nationwide to join him in opposing a plan that describes itself as seeking more security and more prosperity for the United States, when in fact it may do neither.

Rep. Ron Paul has written his weekly “Texas Straight Talk” column about the “Security and Prosperity Partnership Of North America (SSP),” which, he says, “will likely make us far less secure and certainly less prosperous.” (more…)

A very strange editorial appears today in the New York Daily News. Entitled To stop terror, track everyone in U.S. - Be Our Guest, the piece has nothing to do with terrorism in the US or surveillance as the title suggests, but instead calls for a preemptive attack on Iran. (more…)

Relations between Monsanto, Delta & Pine Land and the USDA, on closer scrutiny, show the deep and dark side of the much-heralded genetic revolution in agriculture. It proves deep-held suspicions that the Gene Revolution is not about ‘solving the world hunger problem’ as its advocates claim. It’s about handing over control of the seeds for mankind’s basic food supply—rice, corn, soybeans, wheat, even fruit, vegetables and cotton—to privately owned corporations.

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From WRH:

The real problem is that genes from genetically modified crops contaminate other crops. There is no way to stop it. Monsanto’s only visible action to stop the spread of GM genes into other crops is to sue farmers whose fields are contaminated by being downwind from a GM field. Dubiously legal and patently unscientific, such actions do not address the real core issue of GM genes escaping into the wild and affecting not only non GM crops but wild plants which lack commercial value but are critical to sustaining the natural food chain.

All it will take is one, just one, mutation that allows the terminator gene to escape into the wild and whole sections of the natural food chain will collapse.

Washington — Warning that another terror strike against the United States cannot be ruled out, Vice-President Dick Cheney has said the recent court ruling to end a terrorism-related telephone tapping programme was “just dead-wrong.'’

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