British plans to extend the state's powers to monitor emails and other social media, and set up secret courts to hear evidence gathered by intelligence agencies, are threatening to destroy the country's ruling coalition.

When the Queen reads an annual agenda-setting speech to parliament on May 9, the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition of Prime Minister David Cameron is expected to unveil sweeping legal reforms to give police and security forces the power to monitor all digital communications and establish special courts that can review top secret intelligence information.

But before the new laws have even been introduced they have ignited a storm of controversy with back-bench Conservative MPs and Liberal Democrat leaders both warning of a potential invasion of privacy and attacks on individual legal rights.

Pyongyang, North Korea - A senior North Korean army official says his country is armed with "powerful mobile weapons" capable of striking America.

Vice Marshal Ri Yong Ho emphasized the importance of defending the North against the U.S. and South Korea as Pyongyang marked the 80th anniversary of the nation's army Wednesday.

He told officials at the April 25 House of Culture that the weapons could defeat the U.S. "at a single blow."

North Korea made another unusual claim Monday, promising "special actions" that would reduce Seoul's government to ashes.

North Korea is believed to have nuclear weapons but not the technology to put them on long-range missiles. A rocket launch that the U.S. claimed was a North Korean attempt to test missile technology failed this month.

Call it a mantra, a litany, or a to-don't list, but the drip, drip, drip of Afghan disaster and the gross-out acts accompanying it have already resulted in one of those classic fill-you-in paragraphs that reporters hang onto for whenever the next little catastrophe rears its ugly head. Here's how that list typically went after the Los Angeles Times revealed that troops from the 82nd Airborne had mugged for the camera with the corpses or body parts of Afghan enemies: "The images also add to a troubling list of cases -- including Marines videotaped urinating on Taliban bodies, the burning of Korans, and the massacre of villagers attributed to a lone Army sergeant -- that have cast American soldiers in the harshest possible light before the Afghan public."

That is, of course, only a partial list. Left out, for instance, was the American "kill team" that hunted Afghan civilians "for sport," took body parts as trophies, and shot photos of their "kills," not to speak of the sniper outfit that posed with an SS banner, or the U.S. base named "Combat Outpost Aryan." (For Afghans, of course, it's been so much worse. After all, what Americans even remember the obliterated wedding parties, eviscerated baby-naming ceremonies, blown away funerals, or even the eight shepherd boys "armed" with sticks recently slaughtered by helicopter, or any of the "thorough investigations" the U.S. military officially launched about which no one ever heard a peep, or the lack of command responsibility for any of this?)

When a war goes bad, you can be thousands of miles away and it still stinks like rotting cheese. Hence, the constant drop in those American polling numbers about whether we should ever have fought the Afghan War. Yes, war strain will be war strain and boys will be boys, but mistake after mistake, horror after horror, the rise of a historically rare phenomenon -- Afghan soldiers and policemen repeatedly turning their guns on their American "allies" -- all this adds up to a war effort increasingly on life support (even as the Obama administration negotiates to keep troops in the country through 2024).

So the Senate Banking Committee is beginning hearings today on the MF Global scandal, hearings entitled, "The Collapse of MF Global: Lessons Learned and Policy Implications." Apparently the government has already moved to the reflective, introspective, South Park-ian, "You know, I learned something today!" stage in its examination of the scandal, despite the fact that the government's official "response" hasn't even started yet, i.e. authorities have yet to arrest a single person in this brazen billion-dollar theft story.


To make an obvious comparison: Much like the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman case, the outrage here goes beyond the fact of the horrific crime. An equally profound insult in both cases lay in the fact that that serious crime obviously had been committed, and yet authorities refused to act for months. This situation with former Goldman chief and U.S. Senator Jon Corzine and the officials of MF Global involves a less physically savage offense, but the authorities' refusal to act is every bit as incredible.

Nobody disputes the fact that MF Global officials dipped into customer accounts and took over $1.6 billion of customer money. We not only know that company officials reached into customer accounts, we know they brazenly lied to bondholders, ratings agencies and investors about the firm's financial condition ("MF Global's capital and liquidity has never been stronger," wrote the CFO of MF Global's holding company, on the same day Moody's downgraded it to junk status).

We even know that eighteen days before the firm went bust, company officers discussed how quickly to return money to customers, and even contemplated, in writing, the possibility of not returning the money right away. This is from a risk-assessment document prepared by company officers entitled "Break the Glass":

...Who do we want to be after the storm? How quickly do we want to send cash back to clients, what is the message if we do not send immediately, what is the strategy if we want to keep the customer and wait until the storm passes?

In the wake of the 2008 crash it's often been said that one of the major problems in getting the public to grasp the crimes committed by banks and financial companies is the extreme complexity of the transactions used. The mortgage-backed-securities scam by itself was really just a common fraud scheme, but it was cloaked in the extremely complex verbiage and advanced math of derivatives transactions, which made it possible for bankers to bluff their way through an argument that no crimes had been committed.

Is it inappropriate for disgraced CEOs to remain on the boards of public companies?

This is the issue New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin looks at in his latest article.

Sorkin cites examples like former Fannie Mae CEO James Johnson, who, despite having stepped down from the government-sponsored enterprise in 1999, is considered to have set in motion the 2008 collapse of the housing market. Today Johnson sits on the boards of Goldman Sachs and Target. Last week, prominent Sequoia Fund manager David M. Poppe wrote a public letter to his investors urging them to vote against Johnson's re-election to Goldman's board.

Other fallen CEOs who still sit on corporate boards include Chuck Prince, notorious for guiding Citigroup to disaster, who is now a director at Xerox and Johnson & Johnson, and Stanley O'Neal, who similarly brought Merrill Lynch to the brink of collapse, and is now a board member at Alcoa.

Persons of the moment Eduardo Castro-Wright, a Wal-Mart vice chairman who has been a principal figure in the retail giant's bribery scandal, and Andrea Jung, who stepped down as Avon CEO because of a bribery investigation, will also undoubtedly see their directorships at MetLife and Apple receive heightened scrutiny.

This is a story about how one Belgian man single-handedly cracked an international child pornography ring. Or at least, it appears to be. The story goes like this: 9 June this year, and two men meet in Amsterdam. One is Robbie Van Der Planken, 23, a veteran of the local sex industry who started working in the city's boy brothels at the age of 12. The other is Marcel Vervloesem, a 46-year-old Belgian who heads the so-called Morkhoven Action Group, whose avowed aim is "to look for missing persons and to defend people who are discriminated against in the broadest sense of the word, using any means necessary". Vervloesem is searching for a boy who disappeared in Berlin in 1993, and who he believes is now working in an Amsterdam brothel. He thinks Robbie may be able to help him with his investigation.

Unknown to Robbie, Vervloesem is not alone. Other members of the Action Group are covertly watching the meeting. And they've noticed something odd - a stranger taking pictures. So they follow him, all the way to his home in the seaside town of Zandvoort. His name is Gerrit-Jan Ulrich and he's a 49-year-old computer salesman. He's also Robbie's longtime lover. Vervloesem approaches Ulrich and tells him about his investigation. Two days later, Ulrich calls the Belgian late at night and invites him over to his flat.

When they meet, Ulrich apparently tells Vervloesem that he is at the centre of an international child pornography network. In his flat he has five computers hooked up to phone lines on which he runs a bulletin-board service called Apollo. Punters dial up, pay a fee and can then gain access to tens of thousands of illegal photographs. He gives Vervloesem a computer disk containing 9,000 pictures, together with other disks which contain the names and bank details of Apollo customers from all over the world.

The Supreme Court has ruled that a suspect's fourth amendment rights in US prisons are outweighed by jail house security. In a 5 to 4 vote, law enforcement has the right to strip search anyone taken into custody. We take a closer look into the new ruling.

The printed page is slowly but surely ceding ground to e-book platforms like Amazon's Kindle, Barnes & Noble's Nook, Samsung's Android-based Galaxy Tab, and Apple's market-leading iPad.

The advantages of e-books are obvious: For example, you can store all your books in one gadget, look up words you don't know, or highlight passages so you can revisit them or share them on Facebook or Twitter.

What you might not know, however, is that Amazon actually tracks every passage you highlight on your Kindle to compile its list of the most highlighted passages of all time, as BoingBoing notes.

No. 1 on the list, highlighted by 17,784 Kindle users as of today, is a passage from Susanne Collins' Catching Fire, the second book in her bestselling Hunger Games trilogy: "Because sometimes things happen to people and they're not equipped to deal with them."

In fact, of the 25 most highlighted passages, only five are not from The Hunger Games, which is telling.

The tale of Katniss and her fight against the oppressive Panem regime is a massive hit among its intended young adult audience, as exemplified by the $360 million-and-counting box office take of Lionsgate's movie adaption of the novel. That The Hunger Games is omnipresent in the most highlighted passages list indicates that the young audience is indeed taking to e-books in huge numbers.

Again, it's another death knell for paper books, which will one day probably become cool, ironic collectibles the way vinyl records are today.

Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion. ~ Arthur Koestler

Our greatest illusion is to believe that we are what we think ourselves to be. ~ H.F. Amiel

If we only knew what Illusion is, we would then know the opposite: what Truth is. This Truth would liberate us from slavery. ~ Boris Mouravieff

The experience of disillusionment is one that is common to all. It is safe to say that at some time or another, every human being has had the experience of believing in something that turned out not to be true. The initial shock that comes when one's perception of the world is revealed to be at odds with the hard facts of reality can range anywhere from mild disappointment to a feeling of overwhelming psychological trauma.

Whatever the degree of deception, the realization that one has been believing in a lie is a painful experience, not only psychologically but physically as well. Like a punch to the stomach, it can feel like one's breath has been taken away. And because our beliefs about the world are interconnected with other beliefs fixed in our brains, the destruction of one belief can often lead to a cascade of collapse of many others.

When a person is confronted with facts that contradict currently held belief systems, they have one of two choices. The first choice is to go into denial mode by rejecting the facts as being untrue in order to prop up their chosen belief system and continue living as before. The second choice is to accept the new data and try and reconstruct a new internal paradigm or map of reality that accommodates the new information, which may mean putting into question all other beliefs associated with the old model.

The second choice is difficult and takes a great deal of strength in order to let go of one's preconceived ideas and accept the new and factual data. The first choice is easy because it requires no effort, pain, sadness, or reordering of one's life or values. It is also more comfortable, and because humans generally prefer comfort over pain, the first choice is often the default option.

The exact moment when a person becomes aware of facts that go against what is believed to be true, they experience what psychologists call cognitive dissonance; it is that tense, uncomfortable sensation that what one sees is so out of sync with what one already believes to be true, that the mind instantly rejects it, even when the facts are plain and indisputable.

It is in this moment of experiencing cognitive dissonance (you can recognize it by the tension and discomfort that triggers a "knee-jerk" reaction) that the crucial battle for truth over fiction takes place. If a person can muster the awareness and strength of will to not give in and take the comfortable route by immediately dismissing the facts outright, and hold the conflicting information in their minds while consciously experiencing the negative feelings associated with cognitive dissonance, the resulting liberation can be transformational. It has to be experienced to be believed!

HRWF (23.04.2012) - France has taken new initiatives to prevent "sectarian drifts" in the health and school education sectors.

New MIVILUDES manual on "Health and Sectarian Drifts"

MIVILUDES has just published a new manual entitled "Health and sectarian drifts".

It is designed for health professionals to warn them against so-called sectarian drifts. The Preface explains that promises and recipes of healing, well-being and personal development are at the heart of sectarian drifts.

It includes a list of the most widespread "pseudo therapies" as Annex 1. It contains such names as Ayurvedic (traditional Indian medicine), biomagnetism, energetic medicine, nature cures, relaxation therapy...

However, the criteria given in the chapter "How does one fall under the undue influence of a therapeutic guru?" show that the concept of "sectarian drifts" is applied much more broadly and could concern religious minorities since it mentions as approaches by "pseudo" therapists "a seducing approach through an offer of personal enhancement, of spirituality or therapy".