Friday, Dec 27th
Last update09:27:41 AM GMT
Special Interest Glance
A German Catholic bank has apologised to investors and promised to sell its shares in a contraception producer, a weapons firm and tobacco companies.
Director of the Cologne-based Pax Bank, Winfried Hinzen told the city’s Domradio, “We want to apologise to our customers that this mistake has happened," according to a report in Sunday's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
The WHO has refused to release the Minutes of a key meeting of an advisory vaccine group – packed with executives from Baxter, Novartis and Sanofi – that recommended compulsory vaccinations in the USA, Europe and other countries against the artificial H1N1 “swine flu” virus this autumn.
Frank McCourt, the author of Angela's Ashes, a prize-winning "epic of woe" about his childhood in Ireland, died in New York yesterday at the age of 78.
He had been gravely ill with meningitis and recently was treated for melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer. He died in a Manhattan hospice, his brother Malachy McCourt said.
The original recordings of the first humans landing on the moon 40 years ago were erased and re-used, but newly restored copies of the original broadcast look even better, NASA officials said on Thursday.
NASA admitted in 2006 that no one could find the original video recordings of the July 20, 1969, landing.
A group of doctors has demanded an inquest into the death of government scientist David Kelly – saying the verdict of suicide should be overturned. It comes as a documentary to be screened later this week claims Dr Kelly may have been killed because he knew about secret germ warfare plans.
No coroner's inquest was held into his death and the results of a post-mortem examination were never made public. But the Hutton inquiry commissioned by Tony Blair concluded that the 59-year-old scientist died of blood loss after cutting his wrist with a blunt gardening knife.
According to a former 31-year IBM employee, the highly-publicized, mandatory switch from analog to digital television is mainly being done to free up analog frequencies and make room for scanners used to read implantable RFID microchips and track people and products throughout the world.
So while the American people, especially those in Texas and other busy border states, have been inundated lately with news reports advising them to hurry and get their expensive passports, “enhanced driver’s licenses,” passport cards and other “chipped” or otherwise trackable identification devices that they are being forced to own, this digital television/RFID connection has been hidden, according to Patrick Redmond.
Redmond, a Canadian, held a variety of jobs at IBM before retiring, including working in the company’s Toronto lab from 1992 to 2007, then in sales support. He has given talks, written a book and produced a DVD on the aggressive, growing use of passive, semi-passive and active RFID chips (Radio Frequency Identification Devices) implanted in new clothing, in items such as Gillette Fusion blades, and in countless other products that become one’s personal belongings. These RFID chips, many of which are as small, or smaller, than the tip of a sharp pencil, also are embedded in all new U.S. passports, some medical cards, a growing number of credit and debit cards and so on. More than two billion of them were sold in 2007.
Whether active, semi-passive or passive, these “transponder chips,” as they’re sometimes called, can be accessed or activated with “readers” that can pick up the unique signal given off by each chip and glean information from it on the identity and whereabouts of the product or person, depending on design and circumstances, as Redmond explained in a little-publicized lecture in Canada last year. AFP just obtained a DVD of his talk.
Noted “Spychips” expert, author and radio host Katherine Albrecht told AMERICAN FREE PRESS that while she’s not totally sure whether there is a rock-solid RFID-DTV link, “The purpose of the switch [to digital] was to free up bandwidth. It’s a pretty wide band, so freeing that up creates a huge swath of frequencies.”
As is generally known, the active chips have an internal power source and antenna; these particular chips emit a constant signal. “This allows the tag to send signals back to the reader, so if I have a RFID chip on me and it has a battery, I can just send a signal to a reader wherever it is,” Redmond stated in the recent lecture, given to the Catholic patriot group known as the Pilgrims of Saint Michael, which also is known for advocating social credit, a dramatic monetary reform plan to end the practice of national governments bringing money into existence by borrowing it, with interest, from private central banks. The group’s publication The Michael Journal advocates having national governments create their own money interest-free. It also covers the RFID issue.
“The increased use of RFID chips is going to require the increased use of the UBF [UHF] spectrum,” Redmond said, hitting on his essential point that TV is going digital for a much different reason than the average person assumes, “They are going to stop using the [UHF] and VHF frequencies in 2009. Everything is going to go digital (in the U.S.). Canada is going to do the same thing.”
Explaining the unsettling crux of the matter, he continued: “The reason they are doing this is that the [UHF-VHF] analog frequencies are being used for the chips. They do not want to overload the chips with television signals, so the chips’ signals are going to be taking those [analog] frequencies. They plan to sell the frequencies to private companies and other groups who will use them to monitor the chips.”
Albrecht responded to that quote only by saying that it sounds plausible, since she knows some chips will indeed operate in the UHF-VHF ranges.
“Well over a million pets have been chipped,” Redmond said, adding that all 31,000 police officers in London have in some manner been chipped as well, much to the consternation of some who want that morning donut without being tracked. London also can link a RFID chip in a public transportation pass with the customer’s name. “Where is John Smith? Oh, he is on subway car 32,” Redmond said.
He added that chips for following automobile drivers – while the concept is being fought by several states in the U.S. which do not want nationalized, trackable driver’s licenses (Real ID ) – is apparently a slam dunk in Canada, where license plates have quietly been chipped. Such identification tags can contain work history, education, religion, ethnicity, reproductive history and much more.
Israel has much to be proud of, but one dubious distinction it might prefer to do without is that the People of the Book have the highest proportion of hackers per Internet user in the world.
The United States sports the highest absolute number of denial of service attacks. But Israel boasts the most malicious mischief per surfer in the world.
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