One day we will all happily be implanted with microchips, and our every move will be monitored. The technology exists; the only barrier is society’s resistance to the loss of privacy

By the time my four-year-old son is swathed in the soft flesh of old age, he will likely find it unremarkable that he and almost everyone he knows will be permanently implanted with a microchip. Automatically tracking his location in real time, it will connect him with databases monitoring and recording his smallest behavioural traits.

Most people anticipate such a prospect with a sense of horrified disbelief, dismissing it as a science-fiction fantasy. The technology, however, already exists. For years humane societies have implanted all the pets that leave their premises with a small identifying microchip. As well, millions of consumer goods are now traced with tiny radio frequency identification chips that allow satellites to reveal their exact location. (more…)

The debate over how to punish Iran for its refusal to suspend sensitive nuclear fuel work resumes in New York Monday with Western diplomats confident that the UN Security Council will approve targeted sanctions against Tehran by Christmas.
Ambassadors of the Security Council’s five permanent members — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — plus Germany are to meet informally Monday morning to consider a revised sanctions draft resolution, which was circulated Friday to the full 15-member Council, diplomats said.

Following inconclusive talks among senior officials of the six powers in Paris last Tuesday, the sponsors slightly amended the draft to try to make it more palatable to Russia and China. The two countries have opposed previous proposals as too tough and unlikely to persuade Tehran to comply with UN demands that it halt all uranium enrichment activities. (more…)

Snow fences help keep drifts from piling up on the missile silos. Heat-sensing security devices that monitor the edges of this 800-acre installation are sometimes set off by wayward moose.

And the soldiers here, members of the 3-year-old 49th Missile Defense Battalion of the Alaska National Guard, were just selected to help field test for the Army the third generation of the Extended Cold Weather Clothing System, seven layers of synthetic meant to resist the brutal winds that rip past the snow-clad peaks of the Alaska Range.

Four years after President Bush ordered a limited missile defense system to be built and nearly a quarter century after Ronald Reagan first proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative, this sub-Arctic outpost, once a cold war training site and still a cold-weather training site, is where progress on the long-embattled missile system is perhaps most evident, military officials say. (more…)

Iran’s foreign minister delivered a blunt challenge to the United States on Saturday, saying Tehran is willing to help U.S. troops withdraw from neighboring Iraq but only if Washington makes some tough policy changes.

Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki claimed U.S. troops were responsible for at least half the violence tearing apart Iraq and that their departure would pay security dividends for the entire region.

“If the United States changes its attitude, the Islamic Republic of Iran is ready to help with the withdrawal from Iraq,” Mottaki told the International Institute of Strategic Studies conference here. “Fifty percent of the problem of insecurity in Iraq is the presence of foreign troops.” (more…)

Russian prosecutors investigating the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, the former spy, want to travel to London to question a billionaire Russian exile and a Chechen associate.

The move is likely to further strain relations between Russia and Britain, which have been undermined by allegations that the FSB, the former KGB, might be involved in the killing. Russian authorities are also suspected of disrupting the BBC Russian service’s coverage of the murder.

The Russian investigators’ targets are Boris Berezovsky, a billionaire businessman who employed Litvinenko and is a long-standing critic of Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, and Akhmed Zakayev, a Chechen exile the Russians have wanted to extradite on terrorism charges, which he denies.

“There is no doubt that we will demand to question Berezovsky and Zakayev,” said a source close to the Moscow inquiry. “They both knew Litvinenko and could hold vital information.” (more…)

The politicians and officials at the heart of the David Kelly scandal have been showered with honours, promotions or lucrative retirement jobs in the three years since the scientist’s death.

While the Kelly family continue to mourn quietly in private, The Mail on Sunday today reveals how the men and women who share the blame for his demise have prospered.

On the eve of the third anniversary of the Hutton Report into the affair, an investigation charts the upward career paths of figures central to the inquiry who were called to give evidence or played a major part from behind the scenes.

The senior officials accused of covering up No10’s manipulation of the intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction have gone on to be rewarded with some of the most glamorous jobs in the public sector. (more…)

A child’s need for a father will no longer be a consideration when a woman seeks fertility treatment, ministers will say this week.

The move – which comes despite widespread public opposition and which will give single women and lesbians the right to treatment – forms part of a shake-up of Britain’s embryology laws. One of the key proposals would allow research on test-tube embryos that were part-human, part-animal — referred to as “chimeras”.

Caroline Flint, the Health Minister: ‘the over-arching aim is to pursue the common good’
The changes, which ministers say have “fundamental social, legal and ethical aspects”, are set out in a Department of Health “command paper” seen by The Sunday Telegraph. (more…)

The Metropolitan Police unlawfully tapped the phone of one of their own senior officers, it was reported today.

The force listened to calls made by Chief Superintendent Ali Dizaei, legal adviser to the National Black Police Association (NBPA) and one of Britain’s most senior ethnic minority police officers.

The interception has been ruled unlawful by the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, the BBC reported.

The NBPA said the tapping included calls in which Mr Dizaei gave advice to black and Asian colleagues in disputes with their own forces.

It said Mr Dizaei’s calls were tapped during a police investigation called Operation Helios, during which the force recorded 3,500 private calls. (more…)

WILKES-BARRE — Everyone on Public Square is being watched through a tower of surveillance cameras.

Many people say the cameras make them feel safer and deter crime downtown, while civil liberty advocates argue they are an invasion of privacy.

The cameras on Public Square were installed as a test system at a minimal cost to the city to increase security downtown, said City Administrator J.J. Murphy. The city only paid for the shipping costs for these cameras, he said.

Elsewhere in the city, nine surveillance cameras were installed in city hall and nine in the Department of Public Works Garage. The city purchased the cameras earlier this year from Interlogic Technologies for $9,850. (more…)

TEHRAN — Despite talk of a possible rapprochement between Tehran and Washington, Iran sees no sign of the United States changing its policy toward the Islamic state, Iran’s Foreign Ministry said on Sunday.

The Bush administration has come under growing pressure to reach out to Iran to try to calm escalating violence in Iraq. A key recommendation of a bipartisan U.S. report on how to tackle Iraq said Washington should engage Iran and Syria directly.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said on Saturday that Iran was prepared to talk to the United States about Iraq, but only once Washington had announced clear plans to withdraw its troops from the country. (more…)

Secret talks in which senior American officials came face-to-face with some of their most bitter enemies in the Iraqi insurgency broke down after two months of meetings, rebel commanders have disclosed.

The meetings, hosted by Iyad Allawi, Iraq’s former prime minister, brought insurgent commanders and Zalmay Khalilzad, the US ambassador to Iraq, together for the first time.

After months of delicate negotiations Allawi, a former Ba’athist and a secular Shi’ite, persuaded three rebel leaders to travel to his villa in Amman, the Jordanian capital, to see Khalilzad in January.

“The meetings came about after persistent requests from the Americans. It wasn’t because they loved us but because they didn’t have a choice,” said a rebel leader who took part. (more…)

Foreign Office has asked ministers to ditch the phrase invented by Bush to avoid stirring up tensions within the Islamic world

Cabinet ministers have been told by the Foreign Office to drop the phrase ‘war on terror’ and other terms seen as liable to anger British Muslims and increase tensions more broadly in the Islamic world.
The shift marks a turning point in British political thinking about the strategy against extremism and underlines the growing gulf between the British and American approaches to the continuing problem of radical Islamic militancy. It comes amid increasingly evident disagreements between President George Bush and Tony Blair over policy in the Middle East.

Experts have welcomed the move away from one of the phrases that has most defined the debate on Islamic extremism, but called it ‘belated’. (more…)

Confidential report speaks of ’serious tensions’ in the coalition over strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan

British intelligence officers and military commanders have accused the US of undermining British policies in Iraq and Afghanistan, after the sacking of a key British ally in the Afghan province of Helmand.

British sources have blamed pressure from the CIA for President Hamid Karzai’s decision to dismiss Mohammed Daud as governor of Helmand, the southern province where Britain deployed some 4,000 troops this year. Governor Daud was appointed in mid-year to replace a man the British accused of involvement in opium trafficking, but on Thursday Mr Karzai summoned him to Kabul and sacked him, along with his deputy.

“The Americans knew Daud was a main British ally,” one official told The Independent on Sunday, “yet they deliberately undermined him and told Karzai to sack him.” The official said the Defence Secretary, Des Browne, was “tearing his hair out”. (more…)

Mankind has had less effect on global warming than previously supposed, a United Nations report on climate change will claim next year.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says there can be little doubt that humans are responsible for warming the planet, but the organisation has reduced its overall estimate of this effect by 25 per cent.

In a final draft of its fourth assessment report, to be published in February, the panel reports that the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has accelerated in the past five years. It also predicts that temperatures will rise by up to 4.5 C during the next 100 years, bringing more frequent heat waves and storms.

The panel, however, has lowered predictions of how much sea levels will rise in comparison with its last report in 2001. (more…)

An attempted terrorist attack in Britain over the Christmas period is “highly likely”, the Home Secretary said today.

John Reid said that around 30 conspiracies were under preparation, and the current threat level was “very high indeed”.

He told GMTV Sunday that he did not think it an attack was inevitable, but that “the terrorists only have to get through once, as they did on July 7, for us to see the terrible carnage that it causes”. (more…)