In 2013, Twitter received 352 removal requests, of which 306 emanated from the French authorities, in other words 87%.

(Translation Alizée Ville)

The European Commission is set to authorize the growing of genetically modified maize on European soil, despite 19 member states voting against the move, highlighting the "absurd" rules of weighted votes in the EU.

In a debate on Tuesday, 19 EU member states indicated that they would vote against the authorization of genetically modified maize because of health and environmental concerns and opposition in the European Parliament.

But because of the so-called comitology rules of the EU, their votes will be insufficient to overturn the decision of bigger member states that support the introduction of insect resistant Pioneer 1507.

The UK and Spain are both in favor of GM crops, while Germany abstained and France is staunchly against their introduction.

European health Commissioner Tonio Borg said on Tuesday that the commission is now legally bound to approve the crop. Borg insisted that extensive research since 2001 had shown the crop was safe.

Britain has argued that without GM crops, Europe risks becoming "the museum of world farming," and that there is a clear scientific case for GM, while Spain has said that its farmers need to be able to compete with non-EU nations that can grow GM produce.

Ally or not, the US does not have an agreement with any country that would prevent espionage in light of national security concerns, President Obama said on Tuesday, prior to an official state dinner with a European head of state.

During a joint press conference with French President Francois Hollande, Obama was asked whether his selection of France for the first state visit of his second term as president signalled a post-spying agreement with America's European ally. Through documents supplied by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, it was revealed that the NSA spied on French citizens and the internal communications of France's foreign ministry and diplomats.

"There's no country where we have a no-spy agreement," Obama answered.

Would you like to have an RFID microchip implanted under your skin? If you are anything like me, you would never allow such a thing to be done. But many others, especially among the younger generations, see things very differently. RFID microchip implants and other forms of "wearable technology" are increasingly being viewed as "cool", "trendy" and "cutting edge" by young people that wish to "enhance" themselves. And of course the mainstream media is all in favor of these "technological advancements".

For example, the BBC just published a piece entitled "Why I Want A Microchip Implant". We are told that such implants could solve a whole host of societal problems. Identity theft and credit card fraud would be nearly eliminated, many other forms of crime would be significantly reduced, children would never go missing and we wouldn't have to remember a vast array of passwords and PIN numbers like we do now. We are told that if we just adopted such technology that our lives would be so much better. But is that really the case?

As our society becomes "digitally integrated", technologists tell us that it is "inevitable" that wearable technology will become as common as smart phones are today. And the BBC article that I just mentioned is very eager for that day to arrive...

Ultimately, implanted microchips offer a way to make your physical body machine-readable. Currently, there is no single standard of communicating with the machines that underpin society - from building access panels to ATMs - but an endless diversity of identification systems: magnetic strips, passwords, PIN numbers, security questions, and dongles. All of these are attempts to bridge the divide between your digital and physical identity, and if you forget or lose them, you are suddenly cut off from your bank account, your gym, your ride home, your proof of ID, and more. An implanted chip, by contrast, could act as our universal identity token for navigating the machine-regulated world.

And for some people, that day is already here. In fact, at some technology conferences people actually line up to get chipped...

This month at the Transhuman Visions conference in San Francisco, Graafstra set up an "implantation station" offering attendees the chance to be chipped at $50 a time. Using a large needle designed for microchipping pets, Graafstra injected a glass-coated RFID tag the size of a rice grain into each volunteer. By the end of the day Graafstra had created 15 new cyborgs.

How creepy is that?

There are eerie parallels between the stock market's recent behavior and how it behaved right before the 1929 crash.

That at least is the conclusion reached by a frightening chart that has been making the rounds on Wall Street. The chart superimposes the market's recent performance on top of a plot of its gyrations in 1928 and 1929.

The picture isn't pretty. And it's not as easy as you might think to wriggle out from underneath the bearish significance of this chart.

The growing disconnect between the Fed's policies and people's lives means we need to start exploring economic alternatives

Janet Yellen, the United States' Federal Reserve's new Chair, and I were graduate economics students around the same time at Yale University. The professor who shaped the macroeconomics we learned was James Tobin. He taught us to be Keynesian economists: that is, to accept capitalism as the sole object and focus of our studies, to celebrate it as the best possible system, and to preserve it against its own serious faults. Keynesian economics teaches that to secure capitalism's blessings requires systematic government intervention in the workings of the economy.

Yale doctorates during those years certified that we had learned how the monetary and fiscal policies offered by Keynesianism comprised the government's optimum tools of economic intervention. Central banks (in the US, this meant the Federal Reserve) would administer monetary policy. This meant manipulating the quantity of money in circulation and interest rates. Legislatures and executives would administer fiscal policies, namely, manipulating tax rates and government expenditures. The goals of both monetary and fiscal policies would be to prevent private capitalism's instability (its recurring swings between sharp upturns and downturns), or at least to ensure the downturns were short and shallow (unlike the long and deep 1930s Great Depression that inspired Keynes's work).

Successive Chairs of the Federal Reserve sought to manipulate the nation's monetary system to those ends, so far as possible. Whatever their party affiliation (Bernanke is a Republican, while Yellen is a Democrat) they coordinate their monetary policies with the fiscal policies pursued by the sitting president and Congress. Indeed, policy differences have been limited and rarely arose among them in their shared quest to manage capitalism's inherent and immensely costly instability. Thus, from the standpoint of economics, the two parties are better understood as two wings of one capitalist party in the US sharing virtually dictatorial political influence.

I can't really comment in any informed way on societies in the East, except to point to the Chinese slave workers who produce mountains of plastic crap for Western nations to use and then dump in the ground and oceans; the Middle East's role as a bombing target, 'terrorist' recruiting ground and civil war factory for Western warmongers, and South East Asia and Africa as a block of new 'nations' born out of the 'white man's burden' to civilize their people via brutal colonization and then grant them 'independence' in the form of never-ending debt to Western banks.

In the West, on the other hand, where I live, I can say with confidence that our modern society, its political and social conventions, customs and morality, has passed its expiry date and is well and truly moribund. If I were a political or social cartoonist, the image would be a giant rotting corpse plastered in thick make up and doused in cheap perfume with a greedy banker's hand up its ass making it move and talk to fool the public into thinking that they actually have a future to look forward to.

Leading the cast in this tragicomedy (heavy on the tragi) we find our psychopathic leaders and their media whores trying extra hard to convince us that everything is just fine. But that smell, that stench of lies and the screaming contradiction between what they say and what we can all see (if we look) is making it increasingly hard to believe them, and even our own wishful thinking.

Those who mean to lord over us, such as the Department of Defense, have now called people who grow their own food 'radical' and extremists. Sound familiar? It's just like the US calling other nations terrorists when our government has terrorized more of the 'free' world than we could even imagine. It has basically called its own citizens terrorists already with NSA spying.

How in the world has it come to this? Americans are becoming 'serfs' to their own government much the same way that the British monarchy forced self-sufficient farmers to divide up their land into mono-cropping plots so that they could tax the heck out of everyone and make them reliant upon the same system of tenet farming which then enslaved the masses.

What's worse, even the founding fathers are considered 'extremists' by the Pentagon, according to a new training manual that labels farmers as such. This bit of information was discovered by the legal watchdog, Judicial Watch, as part of a Freedom of Information Act request, and was included in over 133 documents provided by the Air Force.

To teach our military to root out 'extremism' in a 'student guide', those who would decide to grow some organic cabbage, non-GMO corn, and tomatoes, for example, would be considered a threat to national defense. Even though the document says that this is 'for training purposes only' and 'do not use on the job,' why on earth would such a reference be made? It is simply preposterous.

The Carlyle Group... the Bush Family... the Bin Laden family... Booz Allen Hamilton... the NSA.

One big happy family coming up with "US policy", then profiting from it, coming up with more "US policy", then profiting from it again...

Edward Snowden didn't actually work for the NSA; he worked for a contractor called Booz Allen Hamilton. How did it come to be that Snowden, working for a private company, was able to leak information about a top secret surveillance program? Watch and learn that the 'NSA' is no longer a public government agency...

• Former prostitute's lawyer questions Andy Coulson's appointment as Cameron's communication chief
• Mark Lewis claims former NotW editor was helped into No10 role by his paper's 'soft' coverage of story
• Osborne has repeatedly denied Natalie Rowe's claims about drug-taking
• Miss Rowe says she was victim of phone hacking

George Osborne is facing questions over his relationship with Andy Coulson after claims he was paying back a favour by helping the former News of the World editor get a job with the Tories.

A lawyer representing phone hacking victims says the now-defunct tabloid underplayed their coverage of sex and drugs allegations against him in October 2005.

Six years ago the paper ran on its front page hotly disputed claims from former prostitute and ex-drug user Natalie Rowe that the Chancellor took cocaine in his early 20s, before he became an MP.

Mark Lewis said Mr Coulson, editor of the paper the time the story broke in October 2005, deliberately played down the scandal in the leader column, effectively saving Mr Osborne's political career.