As London prepares for the Olympics, bureaucrats and law-makers have been busy too - enacting a range of rules and regulations. Draconian measures are already excluding some people from the country, while a number of residents have been banned from the games -simply because they've objected to the construction of Olympic facilities near their homes. RT's Laura Smith has more.
Puppet Masters
One cannot change reality by changing the words you use to describe reality. Look beneath the rhetoric, and glimpse the truth.
Russia's newly-inaugurated President Vladimir Putin speaks during a reception marking Victory Day at the Kremlin in Moscow, on May 9, 2012.
Raising new questions about Moscow-Washington ties, Putin, who took the oath as the new Russian leader on Monday, informed Obama of his decision during a telephone call on Wednesday.
He noted the need to stay in Moscow to finalize cabinet appointments in the new Russian government, citing he will send Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev in his place.
Putin had been expected at the G8 summit at Camp David to hold talks with the US president in a first test of whether the "reset" policy between the Kremlin and the White House will survive his return to the presidency.
The Prime Minister dismissed new French president Francois Hollande's claim that Britain was 'indifferent' to the fate of the eurozone, insisting it was essential for our economy that the Continent recovers.
'We want the euro area to succeed,' Mr Cameron said in an interview with the Daily Mail. 'It's 40 per cent of our exports. It's vitally important these economies get back to growth.
'The difficulty for us is we take a different view about the euro. We didn't join. We think that single currencies really require single governments if they are going to work properly.
'We have to recognise that the euro is a project in enormous transition. It could go in any number of different ways.
© Kai-Otto Melau/Alamy
Opt-in blocks to combat pornography can be easily avoided, say experts.
Opt-in blocks to combat pornography can be easily avoided, say experts.
Proposals for a default block on internet pornography have been criticised as impractical and potentially counterproductive by technology experts and civil liberties campaigners, setting them at loggerheads with groups such as the NSPCC ahead of a potentially stormy government consultation.
David Cameron announced last week that the government would consult on methods to improve online child protection, including a system whereby filters on adult material were set as default. Anyone wanting to access such content would have to "opt in" with their internet service provider.
The idea, advocated by a number of MPs as the best way to safeguard minors, was the chief recommendation of an independent parliamentary inquiry into online child protection, chaired by Tory backbencher Claire Perry and published last month. It has also been vociferously championed by the Daily Mail.
But according to many in the technology community the proposal is unrealistic. They say that a combination of web-aware children and ever-resourceful pornography sites would leave a network-level block struggling to be effective.
Purported bomb maker Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri
MI5 reportedly recruited a British passport holder of Saudi origin with the mission to infiltrate Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and gather intelligence which could be used to kill purported master bomb maker Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri in a drone strike.
Once the double agent had been recruited, MI6 collaborated with Saudi intelligence and the asset was sent to Yemen, where he successfully infiltrated militants and walked away with the explosive device currently being analysed by the FBI in Virginia.
Upon completing his mission the man reportedly travelled from Yemen to Saudi Arabia, via the United Arab Emirates, where the underwear bomb was passed to the agent's British handlers. He also provided intelligence which was used to kill purported "director of external operations" for Al Qaeda, Fahd al-Quso, in a CIA drone strike in Yemen on Sunday.
That's right, this huge corporate media manufactured story was literally a NON EVENT with the terrorist actually being an operative who then turned the bomb over to the Central Intelligence Agency.
In an all too predictable next move, the corporate media is now running direct homeland security advertisements for body scanners throughout the entire world.
Immediately after the release of this full scale propaganda story, the corporate CIA run media went to work promoting the dangerous naked body scanners and literally worshipping homeland securities draconian "security" measures.
Speaker: Nigel Farage MEP, Leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), Co-President of the 'Europe of Freedom and Democracy' (EFD) Group in the European Parliament
Debate: Statement by the President of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz MEP, on the occasion of Europe Day
Comment: On February 15th UK MEP Nigel Farage gave an interview to Russia Today, in which he used the example of what is happening in Greece to explain how those who are making peaceful revolution impossible are making violent revolution inevitable:
© Keith Bedford/Reuters
Jamie Dimon, chairman and chief executive of JP Morgan Chase and Co, whose bank announced a massive trading loss of $2 billion, and counting, on Thursday.
Jamie Dimon, chairman and chief executive of JP Morgan Chase and Co, whose bank announced a massive trading loss of $2 billion, and counting, on Thursday.
Major banks hoping to thwart calls for tighter banking restrictions were dealt a blow by news that JPMorgan Chase lost $2 billion in a trading blunder that proponents of new rules say more stringent regulation would curtail.
The spectacular trading meltdown came despite assurances from bankers that existing layers of regulations, internal safeguards and proper oversight are adequate to prevent such disasters. Those critical mechanisms failed to surface a sprawling series of bad bets that reverberated through the global financial markets.
JPMorgan's shares were slammed Friday after Jamie Dimon, CEO of the largest bank in the U.S., said in a conference call late Thursday that his bank's trading losses resulted from a 'flawed' hedging strategy that was "poorly constructed, poorly reviewed, poorly executed, and poorly monitored."
Dimon has been a vocal opponent of a regulation that would restrict certain types of risk-taking by banks, aka the Volcker rule, proposed in the aftermath of the financial crisis by former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volcker.
Comment: Banks and bets, it's a lot like a casino.
© Unknown
Living in America is becoming very difficult for anyone with a moral conscience, a sense of justice, or a lick of intelligence. Consider:
We have had a second fake underwear bomb plot, a much more fantastic one than the first hoax. The second underwear bomber was a CIA operative or informant allegedly recruited by al-Qaeda, an organization that US authorities have recently claimed to be defeated, in disarray, and no longer significant.
This defeated and insignificant organization, which lacks any science and technology labs, has invented an "invisible bomb" that is not detected by the porno-scanners. A "senior law enforcement source" told the New York Times that "the scary part" is that "if they buil[t] one, they probably built more."
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared that "the plot itself indicates that the terrorists keep trying to devise more and more perverse and terrible ways to kill innocent people." Hillary said this while headlines proclaimed that the US continues to murder women and children with high-tech drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Africa. The foiled fake plot, Hillary alleged, serves as "a reminder as to why we have to remain vigilant at home and abroad in protecting our nation and in protecting friendly nations and peoples like India and others."
We have had a second fake underwear bomb plot, a much more fantastic one than the first hoax. The second underwear bomber was a CIA operative or informant allegedly recruited by al-Qaeda, an organization that US authorities have recently claimed to be defeated, in disarray, and no longer significant.
This defeated and insignificant organization, which lacks any science and technology labs, has invented an "invisible bomb" that is not detected by the porno-scanners. A "senior law enforcement source" told the New York Times that "the scary part" is that "if they buil[t] one, they probably built more."
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared that "the plot itself indicates that the terrorists keep trying to devise more and more perverse and terrible ways to kill innocent people." Hillary said this while headlines proclaimed that the US continues to murder women and children with high-tech drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Africa. The foiled fake plot, Hillary alleged, serves as "a reminder as to why we have to remain vigilant at home and abroad in protecting our nation and in protecting friendly nations and peoples like India and others."
Comment: The global push towards internet control has no greater ally than internet pornography. All healthy people would agree, with one third of boys now addicted to soul-crushing porn, that blocking children's access to it could be a good plan or at least a move in the right direction.
But do we really think governments give a damn what our children are watching online?
Beyond the Dutroux Affair: The reality of protected child abuse and snuff networks in a world ruled by psychopaths