Russia hit out on Tuesday at U.S. plans to deploy an anti-missile shield on Polish soil, saying the move was an attempt to destabilize the balance of power.

Washington is investing billions of dollars to develop a missile defense system which would use rockets to shoot down hostile missiles. It is considering placing its biggest anti-missile site outside the United States and is talking to Poland and the Czech Republic about possible locations.

This USA is pushing buttons…not THE button, but it is only a matter of time if they keep this up. (more…)

Each morning, the 16,000 students in the Spring Independent School District in suburban Houston swipe their ID tags as they climb onto the school bus. A radio frequency tag tracks them, as it does when they arrive at school and as they leave the building.

Nearly 1,000 cameras watch them all day. Every visitor — parents, volunteers, the guy who fills the Coke machine — must surrender his or her driver’s license to a secretary who checks it against a national database of sex offenders. This fall, nearly one in three schools literally trap visitors inside a “secure vestibule,” a bulletproof glass room, until they’re checked out.

School used to feel like a prison, now it really is one! (more…)

Encouraging school kids to be informants when necessary may be one way to stop violence before it erupts, a summit called by President George W. Bush was told Tuesday.

“Our first line of prevention is really having good intelligence,” Delbert Elliott, director of the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence in Boulder, Colo., told participants in a conference called by the Bush administration in the wake of a spate of recent shootings in schools. (more…)

A controversial new study contends nearly 655,000 Iraqis have died because of the war, suggesting a far higher death toll than other estimates.

The timing of the survey’s release, just a few weeks before the U.S. congressional elections, led one expert to call it “politics.”

Yeah, killing more than half a million Iraqis is just “politics”… (more…)

It’s no secret that China in recent years has stepped up its repression of political, religious and journalistic freedoms, to only the mousiest of objections from the outside world.

Less well known is that China feels so unconstrained that it is brazenly harassing dissidents in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., too. (more…)

International watchdog Reporters Without Borders doubts Russian President Vladimir Putin’s pledge to bring killers of the famous Russian journalist to justice.

Putin vowed on to hunt down the killers of journalist Anna Politkovskaya Tuesday, saying he had information the killers wanted to whip up anti-Russian feelings across the world. “We must be clear that it was a dreadful and unacceptable crime which cannot be allowed to go unpunished,” Putin said in his first public remarks on the killing. (more…)

Parents, listen up. How would you like to keep a closer eye on what your son or daughter is doing behind the wheel?

You can through a program called “STOPPED: Sheriff’s Telling Our Parents & Promoting Educated Drivers. The program is in 27 counties in Michigan. Sheriff’s departments in Saginaw, Bay, Gratiot, Arenac and Huron counties are all on board.

The goal is to reduce risky teenage driving by getting parents involved. If a ticket is paid for and taken care of, young driver’s don’t have to tell their parents if they got pulled over and got a ticket. (more…)

TOKYO — A strong earthquake in northern Japan on Wednesday may have led the Tokyo government to suspect that North Korea had conducted a second nuclear test.

In Washington, White House spokesman Blair Jones said U.S. officials had not detected any evidence of additional North Korea testing. (more…)

Using RFID in the retail supply chain is reasonably common these days - but taking the chips down to the level of individual items is still met with raised eyebrows.

Few pilots are underway, and even fewer real world rollouts, but one Dutch bookshop chain is leading the way.

BGN has 42 stores across the country and has just gone live with its first item-level RFID rollout. Each of the books in BGN’s Almere store is chipped and a second store, in Maastricht, will soon go the same way, allowing the retailer to track each book from its central warehouse to the shop floor. (more…)

Sky News has obtained chilling new evidence of mobile execution buses being used by the Chinese government. It comes less than two years before China hosts the next Olympic Games.

• Flashback: Pro-Torture, Pro-Tyranny Media Rebukes Brave Falun Gong Protester

Watch video: (more…)

Why?

Because the suspects are NEITHER ARAB, NOR MUSLIM.

A RETIRED Grange dentist is accused of being part of a bomb plot after a record number of explosives were seized in a Lancashire town. David Bolais Jackson, 62, of Trent Road, Nelson, was arrested on Friday in the Lancaster area after leaving his Grange practice for the last time. Jackson was charged with being in possession of an explosive substance for an unlawful purpose. (Notice the absence of terrorism charges) (more…)

Sack Parliament! from Indymedia.org.uk

At 1pm on Monday October 9th, up to one hundred and fifty angry and concerned people converged on the Palace of Westminster, to sack parliament. The plan was to surround parliament and cause parliamentary activities to cease. MPs, Lords and civil servants would be prevented from re-opening Parliament.

(more…)

Keith Olbermann reports that company Rumsfeld was on the board of in 2000 sold North Korea technology to build nuclear weapons. And it only took the mainstream media six years to pick up on the story!

US secretary of state says her country will not attack North Korea, refuting suggestion that Pyongyang’s nuclear program was aimed at staving off American invasion. Rice also rejects direct talks with Koreans

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Tuesday the United States would not attack North Korea, rejecting a suggestion that Pyongyang may feel it needs nuclear weapons to stave off an Iraq-style US invasion. President George W. Bush, Rice said, has told the “the North Koreans that there is no intention to invade or attack them. So they have that guarantee. … I don’t know what more they want.” (more…)

The Swiss government is planning to put wiretaps on internet phone conversations, according to Swiss newspaper reports. The software will be supplied by a Swiss company, said reports.

Wiretapping landlines and mobile telephones is an established part of crime prevention, but VoIP (voice over internet protocol) calls are a new phenomenon and harder to bug. (more…)