The United States is often considered a world leader when it comes to deploying the latest biometric security and surveillance technologies. But it could have an unlikely new competitor: Ecuador.

According to Russian company the Speech Technology Center, the small Latin American country has successfully completed installation of "the world's first biometric identification platform, at a nation-wide level, that combines voice and face identification capabilities."

As I reported back in September, Speech Technology Center operates under the name SpeechPro in the United States. The company's controversial technology enables authorities to build a massive database containing several million "voiceprints" of known criminals, suspects, or persons of interest.

When authorities want to ID speakers on an intercepted call, the recording is entered into the database, which provides a match with what SpeechPro claims is about 97 percent accuracy. The system that the firm says it has provided to Ecuador also allows authorities to accumulate a large image database of suspects, with a facial recognition tool that supplements the so-called "VoiceGrid." While facial recognition technology in the past has lacked accuracy, SpeechPro says it has invented algorithms which "deliver reliable results even when facial characteristics have undergone physical changes."

Why is the church still such a force in our society when most of us disregard its clerics' teachings?

A few months ago, Suffolk police stopped me for driving over 30mph. My excuse that East Anglia was so flat it was impossible not to break the limit did not wash, and they sent me on a speed awareness course. Very good it was too. After surveying the human cost of bad driving, I resolved never to speed again. Unfortunately, the instructor was over-fond of his own voice and his lecture went on for hours. "I hope he winds up soon," I whispered to the woman next to me. "I am meant to be speaking to the National Secular Society."

She was a little astonished and a little amused. "A National Secular Society? Why does Britain need a National Secular Society? Surely the secularists have won?"

It can feel that way. The number of people who say they have no religion jumped from 15% in the 2001 census to 25% in 2011. If the remaining 75% were believers, this leap in free-thinking would be significant but not sensational. But those who say they are religious are not faithful to their creeds, or not in any sense that the believers of the past would have recognised. Church attendance is in constant decline. Every year that passes sees congregations become smaller and greyer. As striking as the fall in religious observance is the public's near total disregard for the teachings of the clerics and prelates, who could once claim to be society's moral guides.

Democrats and Republicans alike embrace torture and assassination policies that are an attack on 800 years of civil law.

Eric Bailey: The last four years have seen significant changes in American federal policy in regards to human rights. One of the few examples of cooperation between the Democratic and Republican parties over the last four years has been the passing of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2012. This bill has given the United States military the power to arrest American citizens, indefinitely, without charge, trial, or any other form of due process of law and the Obama administration has and continues to fight a legal battle in federal court to prevent that law from being declared unconstitutional. Obama authorized the assassination of three American citizens, including Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son, admittedly all members of Al Qaeda - all without judicial review.

Additionally, the Guantanamo Bay prison remains open, the Patriot Act has been extended and the TSA has expanded at breakneck speeds. What is your take on America's human rights record over the past four years and can you contrast Obama's policies with those of his predecessor, George W. Bush?

A Milan court fined a Moroccan woman at the center of Silvio Berlusconi's sex-for-hire scandal (EURO)500 ($650) on Monday for failing to appear as a witness twice at the former premier's trial. It ordered her to testify in January.

Karima el-Mahroug, also known as Ruby, is the last witness to be called in the sensational trial that accuses Berlusconi of having paid for sex with el-Mahroug when she was 17, and then trying to cover it up. Both deny having had sex.

The court ordered el-Mahroug, who is in Mexico on vacation, to testify on Jan. 14, confirming the necessity of her testimony.

Prosecutors have accused the defense, which called el-Mahroug as a witness, of engaging in a strategy to delay a verdict - which has included calling witnesses who have failed to show. Italian law does not carry particularly strict penalties against witnesses who fail to appear, and in some cases the court may decide their participation is not essential.

Prosecutors are scheduled to give their closing arguments on Jan. 28, followed by the defense on Feb. 4.

"The Farmers Assurance Provision" is the title of a rider, Section 733, inserted into the House of Representatives 2013 Agriculture Appropriations Bill. Somehow, as a farmer, I don't feel the least bit assured.

The only assurance it provides is that Monsanto and the rest of the agriculture biotech industry will have carte blanche to force the government to allow the planting of their biotech seeds.

In addition, the House Agriculture Committee's 2012 farm bill draft includes three riders - Sections 1011, 10013 and 10014. These amendments would essentially destroy any oversight of new Genetically Engineered (GE) crops by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).

When something unbelievably evil happens in one of our schools, like the recent murder of 27 children and teachers at the Newtown School in Connecticut, the media always tells us the same thing: blame the lone nut(s). But history suggests that many if not most schoolyard massacres, like other large-scale acts of domestic terrorism, have a much more sinister agenda.

Sheriff Pat Sullivan, who ran the Columbine investigation, was arrested last year and convicted of coercing sexual favors from a child in exchange for methamphetamine. His ridiculously short sentence, served in the jail that bears his name, amounted to a slap on the wrist. Rumor has it that Sullivan is part of a pedophile network along the lines of the Finders of Lost Children and the perpetrators of the Franklin Scandal child sex ring.

Some Columbine victims' family members suspect that Sheriff Sullivan was involved in a "butt rape" incident involving the alleged Columbine shooters. Were those shooters mind-controlled sex-abuse victims?

Rogue intelligence agents and their psychiatrist colleagues have been brainwashing "lone nuts" to commit murder at least since the CIA's MK-Ultra program achieved its objectives circa 1960.

Why would such "rogue networks" want to send brainwashed Manchurian Candidates into schools to massacre children?

Let's allow one of the terrorists themselves to answer that question.

In my "quickie" article published less than an hour after the news broke about the Connecticut school shooting, I tried to inject some historical context into the discussion - and do it as fast as possible. Since we know that many if not most "lone nut" massacres are actually false-flag operations, we might as well assume that this one is too. Getting that message out early, in order to shape public opinion while it is still malleable, should be a top priority of everyone who wants to put the real terrorists out of business.

Friday's radio guest Paul Rea responds: "To avoid any appearance of reflexively pour new wine into old cognitive categories, you might consider gathering information, to emerging narratives, and then providing critique of them." I agree that there is a place for this kind of critique - the "judicious study" by the "reality-based community" of the false realities created by "history's actors." But unfortunately, Karl Rove was right: No amount of "judicious study" of false-flag events is ever going to undo the powerful first impressions hammered into the deepest levels of the public mind by media propaganda.

So the first priority of all truth-seekers must be to "catapult the counter-narrative" as quickly as possible.

Dreams in Infrared

A soldier sets out to graduate at the top of his class. He succeeds, and he becomes a drone pilot working with a special unit of the United States Air Force in New Mexico. He kills dozens of people. But then, one day, he realizes that he can't do it anymore.

For more than five years, Brandon Bryant worked in an oblong, windowless container about the size of a trailer, where the air-conditioning was kept at 17 degrees Celsius (63 degrees Fahrenheit) and, for security reasons, the door couldn't be opened. Bryant and his coworkers sat in front of 14 computer monitors and four keyboards. When Bryant pressed a button in New Mexico, someone died on the other side of the world.

The container is filled with the humming of computers. It's the brain of a drone, known as a cockpit in Air Force parlance. But the pilots in the container aren't flying through the air. They're just sitting at the controls.

Bryant was one of them, and he remembers one incident very clearly when a Predator drone was circling in a figure-eight pattern in the sky above Afghanistan, more than 10,000 kilometers (6,250 miles) away. There was a flat-roofed house made of mud, with a shed used to hold goats in the crosshairs, as Bryant recalls. When he received the order to fire, he pressed a button with his left hand and marked the roof with a laser. The pilot sitting next to him pressed the trigger on a joystick, causing the drone to launch a Hellfire missile. There were 16 seconds left until impact.

"These moments are like in slow motion," he says today. Images taken with an infrared camera attached to the drone appeared on his monitor, transmitted by satellite, with a two-to-five-second time delay.

With seven seconds left to go, there was no one to be seen on the ground. Bryant could still have diverted the missile at that point. Then it was down to three seconds. Bryant felt as if he had to count each individual pixel on the monitor. Suddenly a child walked around the corner, he says.

In the wake of the mass murders that took place in Newtown, Connecticut on Dec. 14, information on the shooter, and his family, is slowly being discovered by law enforcement other sources. One interesting connection to the tragedy that took place at the Sandy Hook school is that the father of Adam Lanza has a connection to the theater shootings that took place in Aurora earlier this year by James Holmes.

Both fathers of the shooters were allegedly expected to testify in the Libor scandal that rocked the banking world in June.

The father of Newtown Connecticut school shooter Adam Lanza is Peter Lanza who is a VP and Tax Director at GE Financial. The father of Aurora Colorado movie theater shooter James Holmes is Robert Holmes, the lead scientist for the credit score company FICO. Both men were to testify before the US Sentate in the ongoing LIBOR scandal. The London Interbank Offered Rate, known as Libor, is the average interest rate at which banks can borrow from each other. 16 international banks have been implicated in this ongoing scandal, accused of rigging contracts worth trillions of dollars. HSBC has already been fined $1.9 billion and three of their low level traders arrested.

Libor scandal grows as the fathers of two mass murderers were to testify

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a motive and a link. This coincidence is impossible to overlook. Two mass shootings connected to LIBOR. - Fabain4Liberty via Before it's News

Tokyo - Japan's conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) surged back to power in an election on Sunday just three years after a devastating defeat, giving ex-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe a chance to push his hawkish security agenda and radical economic recipe.

Exit polls by television broadcasters showed the LDP winning nearly 300 seats in parliament's powerful 480-member lower house, while its ally, the small New Komeito party, looked set to win about 30 seats.

That would give the two parties the two-thirds majority needed to over-rule parliament's upper house, where no party has a majority and which can block bills, which should help to break a deadlock that has plagued the world's third biggest economy since 2007.

An LDP win will usher in a government committed to a tough stance in a territorial row with China, a pro-nuclear energy policy despite last year's Fukushima disaster and a potentially risky prescription for hyper-easy monetary policy and big fiscal spending to beat deflation and tame a strong yen.