A proposed unmanned floating airship surveillance system is being hailed by city officials in Ogden, Utah as one way to fight crime in its neighborhoods.

"We believe it will be a deterrent to crime when it is out and about and will help us solve crimes more quickly when they do occur," Ogden City Mayor Matthew Godfrey told Reuters.

Bloodshed, tears, but no democracy. Bloody turmoil won't necessarily presage the dawn of democracy

The end of the age of dictators in the Arab world? Certainly they are shaking in their boots across the Middle East, the well-heeled sheiks and emirs, and the kings, including one very old one in Saudi Arabia and a young one in Jordan, and presidents - another very old one in Egypt and a young one in Syria - because Tunisia wasn't meant to happen. Food price riots in Algeria, too, and demonstrations against price increases in Amman. Not to mention scores more dead in Tunisia, whose own despot sought refuge in Riyadh - exactly the same city to which a man called Idi Amin once fled.

If it can happen in the holiday destination Tunisia, it can happen anywhere, can't it? It was feted by the West for its "stability" when Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali was in charge. The French and the Germans and the Brits, dare we mention this, always praised the dictator for being a "friend" of civilised Europe, keeping a firm hand on all those Islamists.

Tunisians won't forget this little history, even if we would like them to. The Arabs used to say that two-thirds of the entire Tunisian population - seven million out of 10 million, virtually the whole adult population - worked in one way or another for Mr Ben Ali's secret police. They must have been on the streets too, then, protesting at the man we loved until last week. But don't get too excited. Yes, Tunisian youths have used the internet to rally each other - in Algeria, too - and the demographic explosion of youth (born in the Eighties and Nineties with no jobs to go to after university) is on the streets. But the "unity" government is to be formed by Mohamed Ghannouchi, a satrap of Mr Ben Ali's for almost 20 years, a safe pair of hands who will have our interests - rather than his people's interests - at heart.

For I fear this is going to be the same old story. Yes, we would like a democracy in Tunisia - but not too much democracy. Remember how we wanted Algeria to have a democracy back in the early Nineties?

After parents protest, Elmhurst school says BMI data will no longer affect report card

Chicago, Illinois - Elmhurst students have long been checked on how long it takes to run a mile or whether they can do a pushup. But another physical fitness assessment tool has some parents fuming - one that aims at finding out whether their kids are too hefty.

A child's "body mass index," a computation of body fat based on height and weight, was one of six tests used at Hawthorne Elementary School to determine the physical fitness grade on a student's progress report.

But that practice ended abruptly Tuesday after about 25 parents met with school officials to express their displeasure with how the BMI data were being used. One mother broke into tears as she described how it affected her fourth-grade daughter.

A former Swiss banker who said he gave Wikileaks details of rich tax evaders has been found guilty of breaching Switzerland's strict bank secrecy laws.

A judge at Zurich's Regional Court did so even though the leaked documents referred to accounts in the Cayman Islands.

Judge Sebastian Aeppli fined Rudolf Elmer more than 6,000 Swiss francs ($6,250; £4,000).

But he rejected prosecution demands to give Elmer an eight-month prison sentence.

Former prime minister will call for Barack Obama to take the lead in helping the 81 million people under the age of 25

Gordon Brown will warn on Thursday that the world faces youth unemployment of "epidemic proportions", as he urges joint action by the G20 group of developed and developing nations to tackle rising joblessness.

During a speech in London, the former prime minister will call for Barack Obama to take the lead in boosting education, training and job opportunities for the 81 million people under the age of 25 who are currently without work.

"Unemployment is an international timebomb for both developed and developing worlds," Brown will say in the Ted Kennedy/John Harvard memorial lecture.

The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

- John Stuart Mill

In 2003, after my book Unequal Protection was first published, I gave a talk at one of the larger law schools in Vermont. Around 300 people showed up, mostly students, with a few dozen faculty and some local lawyers. I started by asking, "Please raise your hand if you know that in 1886, in the Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad case, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are persons and therefore entitled to rights under the Constitution and the Bill of Rights."

Almost everyone in the room raised their hand, and the few who didn't probably were new enough to the law that they hadn't gotten to study that case yet. Nobody questioned the basic premise of the statement.

And all of them were wrong.

We the People are the first three words of the Preamble to the Constitution; and from its adoption until the Robber Baron Era in the late nineteenth century, people meant human beings. In the 1886 Santa Clara case, however, the court reporter of the Supreme Court proclaimed in a "headnote" - a summary or statement added at the top of the court decision, which is separate from the decision and has no legal force whatsoever - that the word person in law and, particularly, in the Constitution, meant both humans and corporations.

Thus began in a big way (it actually started a half century earlier in a much smaller way with a case involving Dartmouth University) the corruption of American democracy and the shift, over the 125 years since then, to our modern corporate oligarchy.

If government is going to act as a scientific arbiter, it needs to have clean hands. That means getting private commercial interests out of the decision-making process.

In this week's vitamin D update, we discussed the glaring conflict of interest in the recent IOM report on vitamin D. Unfortunately this is not an isolated case. Consider also the recent fluoride debacle.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls fluoride in drinking water "one of the ten great public health achievements of the 20th century," except earlier this month they stated that the levels they previously mandated are too high, and HHS and EPA are taking steps to prevent excessive exposure to it. Children's teeth are getting pitted and turning black or brown from dental fluorosis. An increasing number of scientists and health professionals argue that fluoride exposure has a negative impact on the whole body, including joint pain, hypothyroidism, kidney and liver damage, and the possibility of bone cancer.

Despite the best efforts by the American mainstream financial media, the eager PR division of the United States Dollar Ponzi Scheme, to paint the rosiest of rosy pictures for blindly optimistic readers, the stubborn image of a debt-swollen jobless behemoth economy slowly toppling persists. No matter how much U.S. departmental data is primped, polished, and primed, no amount of lipstick is going to transform this fat pig into a princess.

This week's top harbinger headline points to the fact that the United States is once again bumping its fat head on the ceiling of its spectacularly stratospheric debt ceiling of $14.3 TRILLION dollars. That means an act of congress is once again necessary to lift that limit. The alternative is either a) a revaluation of the U.S. Dollar to reflect the depreciation inherent in Quantitative Sleazing as part of a debt restructuring, or b) default.

Default? Could it be?

Never, according to bright-eyed Harvard educated economists and Forexperts.

"The likelihood of a restructuring of US sovereign debt is zero," says MF global currency and fixed income analyst Jessica Hoversen. "As for a downgrade, while it's theoretically possible, it is still extraordinarily unlikely."

Well that's one opinion.

Urged by one and all to "tone down" what media pundits and political elites describe as "strident," even "violent" rhetoric that has "poisoned" our "national conversation" and "sharply polarized" the population, the shooting rampage in Tucson which claimed six lives, including that of a nine-year-old girl is, in fact, emblematic of the moral bankruptcy and utter hypocrisy of those selfsame capitalist elites.

Faced with an unprecedented economic crisis that has destroyed the lives of tens of millions our fellow citizens, not to mention aggressive wars which have cratered entire societies and murdered hundreds of thousands of people who have done us no harm, when, pray tell, will the "conversation" turn to the unprecedented annihilation of democratic institutions and the rule of law which exonerates, even celebrates, those who murder, maim and torture on an industrial scale?

Just last week, the Obama administration announced plans to roll-out an "identity ecosystem" for the internet. Although passed over in silence by major media, at the risk of being accused of "incivility," particularly when it comes to the "hope" fraudster and war criminal in the Oval Office, Americans need to focus--sharply--on the militarists, political bag men and corporate gangsters working to bring George Orwell's dystopian world one step closer to reality.

The chief executive of one of Germany's leading space companies has lost his job because of the Wikileaks saga.

OHB-System's Berry Smutny was reported in a cable to have told US diplomats that Europe's Galileo satellite-navigation project was a "stupid idea".

Bremen-based OHB-System is part of the consortium that will build Galileo's first 14 operational spacecraft.

Although Mr Smutny has denied the cable's contents, OHB's board has decided to remove him from his post.

A company spokesman told BBC News that Mr Smutny had left OHB-System with immediate effect.

A statement from OHB-System on Monday said its supervisory board had "passed a unanimous resolution to revoke Mr Smutny's appointment", adding that it "disapproves these conversations and the quotes attributed to Mr Smutny".
Controversial project

Berry Smutny was alleged to have told diplomats at a meeting in Berlin in October 2009 that Galileo, a flagship space programme of the EU, was a waste of taxpayers' money.

The cable, which was published by the Norwegian daily Aftenposten last Thursday, quoted the OHB-System chief as saying, "I think Galileo is a stupid idea that primarily serves French interests", and, in particular, French military interests.