The government appears to have backtracked on a pre-election promise to delete the DNA profiles of innocent people stored on police databases, in a move that has outraged civil liberties groups.

A letter sent by Home Office minister James Brokenshire to a committee of MPs considering legislation on DNA retention revealed that the profiles of innocent citizens will be retained, but anonymised and removed from the Police National Database.

It turns out there's a method behind the FBI's raids of suspected Anonymous members around the country. The bureau is working from a list, provided by PayPal, of the 1,000 internet IP addresses responsible for the most protest traffic during Anonymous' DDoS attacks against PayPal last December.

FBI agents served 40 search warrants in January on people suspected of hosing down PayPal during "Operation Payback" - Anonymous' retaliatory attack against companies who blacklisted WikiLeaks. On July 19, the feds charged the first 14 defendants under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and raided an additional 35 suspects for evidence.

Also Gummi Bears, zombies, other common fakes

What do Gummi Bears and amputated fingers have in common? They've both been demonstrated as techniques for defeating fingerprint scanners. Now, a German company called Dermalog Identification Systems is using the way skin changes colour under pressure to block both the soft sweet and the dead hand of the zombie from accessing systems protected by fingerprint scans.

The problem is that if a scanner responds only to the image of the fingerprint, you don't need a living print to be accepted. An impression of a print on a Gummi Bear, or if you're of a more gruesome mindset, a finger removed from a user (either living or dead), can be scanned as a valid fingerprint.

However, if you've ever looked at what happens to skin if you put pressure on it, you'll know that it changes colour. Dermalog has tagged that colour change as the characteristic that can separate the living from the dead.

• He believes in war you can do things like that without guilt'
• Breivik could be housed in the £150m Halden Prison - considered one of the most luxurious jails in the world
• Police say it will take two more weeks to find all the bodies

Mass murderer Anders Breivik was forced to ask his lawyer how many innocents he killed because he took so many drugs during his one man killing spree, his lawyer revealed yesterday.

The Norwegian fanatic regards himself as a 'warrior', thinks he has started a '60-year war' and will be hailed as the 'saviour' of Western Europe in decades to come, said Geir Lippestad.

But before gunning down 76 people, he swallowed a cocktail of drugs known as an 'ECA stack' to make him 'strong and efficient' and rapidly lost count of the death toll.

It included ephedrine, a powerful stimulant sometimes used by athletes to improve performance, and caffeine and aspirin.

Breivik, who also listened to his iPod during the massacre, said the 'ephedrine rush' would increase his 'aggressiveness, physical performance and mental focus'.

Tim DeChristopher, who was sentenced Tuesday to two years in federal prison and a $10,000 fine for disrupting a Bureau of Land Management auction in 2008, had an opportunity to address the court and the judge immediately before his sentence was announced. This is his statement:

Thank you for the opportunity to speak before the court. When I first met Mr. Manross, the sentencing officer who prepared the presentence report, he explained that it was essentially his job to "get to know me." He said he had to get to know who I really was and why I did what I did in order to decide what kind of sentence was appropriate. I was struck by the fact that he was the first person in this courthouse to call me by my first name, or even really look me in the eye. I appreciate this opportunity to speak openly to you for the first time. I'm not here asking for your mercy, but I am here asking that you know me.

Mr. Huber has leveled a lot of character attacks at me, many of which are contrary to Mr. Manross's report. While reading Mr Huber's critiques of my character and my integrity, as well as his assumptions about my motivations, I was reminded that Mr Huber and I have never had a conversation. Over the two and half years of this prosecution, he has never asked my any of the questions that he makes assumptions about in the government's report. Apparently, Mr. Huber has never considered it his job to get to know me, and yet he is quite willing to disregard the opinions of the one person who does see that as his job.

The United States Air Force has been training young missile officers about the morals and ethics of launching nuclear weapons by citing passages from the New Testament and commentary from a former member of the Nazi Party, according to newly released documents.

The mandatory Nuclear Ethics and Nuclear Warfare session, which includes a discussion on St. Augustine's "Christian Just War Theory," is led by Air Force chaplains and takes place during a missile officer's first week in training at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

The Christian Just War Theory has been touted by Rep. Ron Paul, a 2012 presidential candidate, during campaign stops.

St. Augustine's "Qualifications for Just War," according to the way it is cited in a 43-page PowerPoint presentation, are: "to avenge or to avert evil; to protect the innocent and restore moral social order (just cause)" and "to restore moral order; not expand power, not for pride or revenge (just intent)."

Americans know that something fundamental is amiss. They sense - rightly - that they are being misled no matter which political party does the leading.

A long misinformed public lacks the tools to grasp how they are being deceived. Without those tools, Americans will continue to be frustrated at being played for the fool.

When the "con" is clearly seen, "the mark" (that's us) will see that all roads lead to the same duplicitous source: Israel and its operatives. The secret to Israel's force-multiplier in the U.S. is its use of agents, assets and sayanim (Hebrew for volunteers).

Key agencies of the American financial aristocracy are beginning to assert themselves directly and openly in the mounting political crisis in Washington, demanding a deal that would combine raising the federal debt ceiling with trillions of dollars in cuts in social spending.

The Obama administration has forecast that soon after next Tuesday, August 2, the government will be unable to pay its bills without further borrowing, now barred because the Treasury reached the current debt ceiling of $14.3 trillion in early May.

Late Monday, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the main center for the trading of derivatives, one of the major forms of financial speculation, announced that it would no long classify short-term Treasury bills as risk-free when used as collateral by traders. The exchange also will require traders to provide larger amounts of longer-term Treasury bonds when using them as collateral.

Once upon a time, in a land that now seems to have been populated by tooth fairies and unicorns, there was a political party that had a set of core beliefs to which they actually adhered.

Among them was that actually balancing the budget, as opposed to just talking about it, was sacrosanct. Slow change, while necessary, had to be balanced against the traditions of the United States, ones that had mostly served us well over two centuries.

Foreign military adventures should be limited to our national security interests. And one of the single most important components of diplomacy was protecting the economic interests not only of an elite few, but of the great many Americans who toiled in our factories and fields.

By feeding the rich and their corporations one massive tax break after another, lawmakers have thrown a monstrous monkey wrench into our national finances.

Once upon a time in America, back a century ago, our nation's rich paid virtually nothing in taxes to the federal government. And that same federal government did virtually nothing to better the lives of average Americans.

But those average Americans would do battle, over the next half century, to rein in the rich and the corporations that made them ever richer. And that struggle would prove remarkably successful. By the 1950s, America's rich and the corporations they ran were paying significant chunks of their annual incomes in taxes - and the federal projects and programs these taxes helped finance were actually improving average American lives.

America's wealthy, predictably, counterattacked - and, by the 1980s, they were scoring successes of their own.

Today, the rich and their corporations no longer bear anything close to their rightful share of the nation's tax burden. The federal government, given this revenue shortfall, is having a harder and harder time funding initiatives that help average working families. The result: a "debt crisis."

This "debt crisis" in no way had to happen. No natural disaster, no tsunami, has suddenly pounded the United States out of fiscal balance. We have simply suffered a colossal political failure. Our powers that be, by feeding the rich and their corporations one massive tax break after another, have thrown a monstrous monkey wrench into our national finances.

Some numbers - from an Institute for Policy Studies report released this past spring - can help us better visualize just how monumental this political failure has been.

If corporations and households taking in $1 million or more in income each year were now paying taxes at the same annual rates as they did back in 1961, the IPS researchers found, the federal treasury would be collecting an additional $716 billion a year.