Are we living in the last days of being wild and 'natural' humans? We take for granted that our thoughts are private, owned by us, and always will be.

The other day, I took some photos of wild geese in Canada, but when I blew up the photos, I was dumbfounded to see white plastic collars on their necks, with numbers. These tracking numbers were RFID tags of sorts. RFID (Radio Frequency Identification Devices), is a tracking technology.

RFID technology is currently used on banking, library books, pets, cattle, autos, medications, and some humans (such as for patient identification purposes). The replacement of bar codes in grocery stores is another application of RFID chips, for the stated purpose of expediting the 'checking out process'. YES, it is true, there are conveniences associated with RFID technology, but it boils down to tracking. Tracking sounds like being organized, or civilized. But when tracking goes into every facet of our lives, it has chilling consequences.

Today, there are beta tests being conducted in some schools, in Florida, Mississippi, Texas, and Louisiana. This is to track children, if they get to class on time, or, spend too much time where they should not. They are being required to wear tracking necklaces.

Tracking, and surveillance of 'smart' things (phones, cards, chickens), are, in theory 'keeping us safe'. Already, the US Department of Agriculture demands that ranchers use RFID chips to monitor their livestock. Tracking things is one thing, but tracking your biology?

The Fix the Debt coalition is using the so-called "fiscal cliff" to push the same old corporate agenda of more tax breaks while shifting the burden on to the rest of us.

Brace yourself for one of the most aggressive corporate lobbying campaigns of all time. And one of the most hypocritical.

"Fix the Debt " is a coalition of more than 80 CEOs who claim they know best how to deal with our nation's fiscal challenges. The group boasts a $60 million budget just for the initial phase of a massive media and lobbying campaign.

The irony is that CEOs in the coalition's leadership have been major contributors to the national debt they now claim to know how to fix. These are guys who've mastered every tax-dodging trick in the book. And now that they've boosted their corporate profits by draining the public treasury, how do they propose we put our fiscal house back in order? By squeezing programs for the poor and elderly, including Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

Fix the Debt claims their agenda is not just about spending cuts. But when it comes to their tax proposals, they use the slippery term "pro-growth reform" to push for cuts in deductions that are likely to include credits for working families and - you guessed it - more corporate tax breaks. Chief among these is a proposal to switch to a territorial system under which corporate foreign earnings would be permanently exempted (instead of being taxed when they are returned to America).

This idea, also supported by the Bowles-Simpson deficit commission, would make it even more profitable for big corporations to use accounting tricks to disguise U.S. profits as income earned in tax havens. Citizens for Tax Justice estimates that such tax haven abuse will cost the Treasury more than $1 trillion over the next decade.

Police across Canada are urging Ottawa to resurrect a controversial Internet surveillance bill that would allow them to monitor Canadians' digital activities in real-time without a warrant.

­The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police has made a plea to on the federal government to pass Bill C-30, also known as the Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act ahead of a gathering by the provincial and federal justice ministers next week.

The group is concerned that Parliament will be closed down before the legislation is passed.

"We have a fear that it will die on the order paper," said Vancouver Police Chief Jim Chu, who is also the president of the association. "And if it does, then our investigators will be constrained and victims will suffer greater harm because of that," the Canadian Press reports.

Deputy police chief Warren Lemcke agreed with Chu's assessment, saying that "right now there are gangsters out there communicating about killing someone and we can't intercept that," as cited by CBC news.

The legislature, introduced in the Canadian Parliament last February, demands that the country's telecommunication industry provide law enforcement with the "authority to intercept communications and to require telecommunications service providers to provide subscriber and other information, without unreasonably impairing the privacy of individuals, the provision of telecommunications services to Canadians or the competitiveness of the Canadian telecommunications industry."

Havana - Cuba accused the United States Friday of helping its opponents access the Internet as part of a drive to undermine the Havana government.

The accusation, leveled in a foreign ministry statement, comes amid a simmering dispute over the jailing of American contractor Alan Gross three years ago for distributing laptops and electronic gear to members of the island's Jewish community.

It also follows the growing international prominence of Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez, whose prize-winning Generation Y blog has often challenged Cuba's communist regime.

The foreign ministry said diplomats at the US Interests Section were "promoting, advising, instructing, training, financing and supplying (government opponents) with diverse media and technology."

"Diplomats from that office are permanently inciting these people ... to undertake provocative actions ... and act against the Cuban constitutional order," it said in the statement published in the official newspaper Granma.

The US Interests Section "has gone to the extreme of undertaking training tasks, establishing illegal Internet centers in its offices to provide training and courses to people ... in flagrant violation of the Geneva Convention."

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has insisted his aim is to establish a Palestinian state only alongside Israel's pre-1967 boundaries with the West Bank and Gaza.

Israel recently accused him of seeking to supplant its sovereign territory.

But Mr Abbas, who was born in the town of Safed, told Israeli TV he accepted it was now part of Israel and that he would have no right to residency there.

Palestinians have historically demanded the right of return for refugees.

Hundreds of thousands fled or were displaced from their homes in the course of Israel's war of independence in 1948-49 and during the 1967 Middle East war.

Today, they and their descendants live mainly in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. Some five million are registered as refugees with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (Unrwa).

Israel argues that all refugees should relinquish any aspirations to return to what is now its territory, and instead be absorbed by Arab host countries or by a future Palestinian state, as Israel did with large numbers of Jews who were expelled or fled from Arab lands after 1948.

At least 18 people were killed on Friday in a huge blaze that erupted after gunmen opened fire on a passenger van at a petrol stall in restive southwest Pakistan, officials said.

Senior local official Abdul Mansoor Kakar told AFP that four gunmen opened fire on the van with automatic rifles, igniting petrol drums by the roadside and triggering a massive inferno.

The incident took place in the outskirts of Khuzdar, around 250 kilometres (155 miles) southwest of Quetta, the capital of insurgency-hit Baluchistan province.

Baluchistan is one of Pakistan's most impoverished and dangerous provinces, despite having large gas and oil reserves, and it is plagued by sectarian violence as well as attacks by Taliban militants and separatist insurgents.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack.

A number of stalls selling petrol smuggled from Iran were engulfed in the fire, Kakar said, with stallholders among the dead.

Rome - Hidden away somewhere within the labyrinth of the Pentagon there must be a top secret euphemism department engaged in the invention of the Orwellian surrogate words that have crept surreptitiously into the American English vocabulary and from there translated into many other languages. In my mind I see a unit of studiously serious executives, coffee mugs in their hands and their neckties awry, devising senseless terms for terrible things and used unthinkingly by people today from New York to California, from Maine to Texas. The goal of my imaginary secret unit is to render ugly terms meaningless or to transform them into their opposite. To quote the perceptive Scottish writer, Candia McWilliam, "plain words are always under threat." There are words that don't say what they mean and there are words that say what they don't mean.

Intensified or enhanced interrogation sounds oh so much more genteel than the hideous word TORTURE. Collateral damage goes down quite well instead of the savage bombing and strafing of a funeral procession or a wedding party. Military leaders themselves have come to love the suggestive word "footprints" to indicate the evidence of America's powerful presence throughout the world: "We were here and we leave this little sign with you." A little footprint, maybe a fleet of super bombers or Predator drones.

The point to keep in mind is that the names of things, issues, objects of life change, but the substance of the object itself remains - torture will always be torture, no matter what the gnomes propose and the media parrot.

Today, though generally unknown among the public, the relatively new term, "lily pad", is making its way forward to describe not that beautiful manifestation of nature but the new version of America's over 1000 military bases and garrisons spreading across some 150 countries of planet Earth. You can always count on those Pentagon gnomes. They regularly come up with something new. It remains unclear however if they first invent the terms and the military executes their implications or if the military experiments with a new lethal strategy and the gnomes then give it a purified label.

The US mission in Benghazi that came under attack by militants on September 11 was mainly a secret CIA operation, the Wall Street Journal reports, shedding new light on the deadly assault.

President Barack Obama's administration has faced a storm of pre-election questions about why there was not more security at the US consulate where four Americans, including ambassador Chris Stevens, were killed on September 11.

The Wall Street Journal said on Friday the mission was mainly a CIA operation, adding that of the 30 American officials evacuated from Benghazi following the assault, just seven worked for the State Department.

It also identified the two security contractors killed in the attack - former Navy SEALs Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty - as working for the Central Intelligence Agency and not the State Department.

In a break from tradition, it said CIA director David Petraeus did not attend the ceremony when the coffins arrived back on American soil in order to conceal the CIA operation in eastern Libya.

The Southeast Asian country of Laos in the late 1950s and early 60s was a complex and confusing patchwork of civil conflicts, changes of government and switching loyalties. The CIA and the State Department alone could take credit for engineering coups at least once in each of the years 1958, 1959 and 1960. No study of Laos of this period appears to have had notable success in untangling the muddle of who exactly replaced whom, and when, and how, and why. After returning from Laos in 1961, American writer Norman Cousins stated that "if you want to get a sense of the universe unraveling, come to Laos. Complexity such as this has to be respected."¹

Syria 2012 has produced its own tangled complexity. In the past 18 months it appears that at one time or another virtually every nation in the Middle East and North Africa as well as members of NATO and the European Union has been reported as aiding those seeking to overthrow the regime of Bashar al-Assad, while Russia, China, and several other countries are reported as aiding Assad. The Syrian leader, for his part, has consistently referred to those in combat against him as "terrorists", citing the repeated use of car bombs and suicide bombers. The West has treated this accusation with scorn, or has simply ignored it. But the evidence that Assad has had good reason for his stance has been accumulating for some time now, particularly of late. Here is a small sample from recent months:

• "It is the sort of image that has become a staple of the Syrian revolution, a video of masked men calling themselves the Free Syrian Army and brandishing AK-47s - with one unsettling difference. In the background hang two flags of Al Qaeda, white Arabic writing on a black field ... The video, posted on YouTube, is one more bit of evidence that Al Qaeda and other Islamic extremists are doing their best to hijack the Syrian revolution." (New York Times, July 24, 2012)
• A leading German newspaper reported that the German intelligence service, BND, had concluded that 95% of the Syrian rebels come from abroad and are likely to be members of al Qaeda. (Die Welt, September 30, 2012)
• "A network of French Islamists behind a grenade attack on a kosher market outside Paris last month also planned to join jihadists fighting in Syria ... Two suspects were responsible for recruiting and dispatching people 'to carry out jihad in some countries - notably Syria'," a state prosecutor said. (Associated Press, October 11, 2012)
• "Fighters from a shadowy militant group [Jabhat al-Nusra] with suspected links to al-Qaida joined Syrian rebels in seizing a government missile defense base in northern Syria on Friday, according to activists and amateur video. ...The videos show dozens of fighters inside the base near a radar tower, along with rows of large missiles, some on the backs of trucks." (Associated Press, October 12, 2012)
• "In a videotape posted this week on militant forums, the Egyptian-born jihadist Ayman al-Zawahiri ... urged support for Syria's uprisings." (Associated Press, October 28, 2012)

Furious that state involvement in major terror attacks is being exposed to a wider audience than ever before via the Internet, a UK think tank closely affiliated with the Downing Street has called for authorities to infiltrate conspiracy websites in an effort to "increase trust in the government".

"A Demos report published today, The Power of Unreason, argues that secrecy surrounding the investigation of events such as the 9/11 New York attacks and the 7/7 bombings in London merely adds weight to unsubstantiated claims that they were "inside jobs," reports the London Independent.

In other words, the fact that the overwhelming amount of evidence indicates that both 7/7 and 9/11 were "inside jobs" of one form or another, and that huge numbers of people are now aware of this via the increasing influence of the Internet, is hampering efforts to commit more acts of terror, therefore the government needs to change its strategy.

In the report, Demos, "recommends the Government fight back by infiltrating internet sites to dispute these theories." One of the tools Demos already employs to "fight back" against conspiracy theories is by labeling anyone who challenges the government's official story as an extremist or a terrorist recruiter.