A Brit Abroad

retropolitics:

Documents Fail to Exonerate ‘Enhanced Interrogation’ Techniques

Cheney just doesn’t get it! He could’ve been correct, maybe more intelligence was garnered by these techniques, if you hold a gun to someone’s head they’re likely to tell you what you want to hear, if you threaten to rape someone’s wife and child they’ll confess to anything, BUT IT DOESN”T MAKE IT RIGHT! Bad guys do this, good guys do it right!

skylounge:

jmarie3:

jhnbrssndn:

shaneguiter:

President Obama on Tuesday will nominate Ben S. Bernanke to a second term as chairman of the Federal Reserve, administration officials said.

The announcement is a major victory for Mr. Bernanke, a Republican who was appointed by President George W. Bush almost four years ago and who had briefly served as chairman of Mr. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers.

A top White House official said Mr. Obama had decided to keep Mr. Bernanke at the helm of the Fed because he had been bold and brilliant in his attempts to combat the financial crisis and the deep recession.

Like I said, same shit, different person in the big house.  Bold and brilliant?  More like a dog and pony show for the public.

Wow, Obama. Bernanke? Bold and brilliant? Really?

Bollox! This is the twat who “Boldly & Brilliantly” turned a blind eye to what caused the mess in the first place.

jhnbrssndn:

publiccommunication:

People who persist in swapping copyrighted films and music will have their internet connections cut off under tough new laws to be proposed by the government today.

The measures also include taking the power to target illegal downloaders away from regulator Ofcom and giving it to ministers to speed up the process.

The decision to cut off peer-to-peer filesharers is unexpected since it was ruled out by the government’s own Digital Britain report in June as going too far.

In the report, the then communications minister Lord Carter said illegal filesharers should receive letters warning them their activities could leave them open to prosecution. If that failed to reduce piracy by at least 70%, Ofcom would have the power to call on internet companies such as BT to introduce so-called “technical measures” to combat piracy. The most draconian of these measures was to slow down a persistent filesharer’s broadband connection, but it would not appear until 2012.

But today the government will take the unusual step of proposing much stricter rules midway through the Digital Britain consultation process. Illegal filesharers will still get warning letters but if they continue to swap copyrighted material they could have their internet connection temporarily severed, although it may be possible to retain basic access to online public services.

A similar law in France under which filesharers could be cut off for up to a year was recently kicked out by the country’s highest court as unconstitutional. In the UK, privacy groups are likely to challenge any similar legislation as contrary to human rights law.

This means of course that the copyright owners have now persuaded the government to do their work for them. Surely if the copyright owners are the party being offended against then it is up to them to take whatever legal action they deem necessary through the legal system, otherwise we once more have the spectre of presumed guilt with the need to prove ones innocence, a recipe for disaster again.

A gang of children as young as seven put a rope around a boy’s neck and strung him up from a tree, the victim’s mother said today.

This is disturbing!

The Public Sector Borrowing Requirement for July came in at £8.016 billion.  That means the government was over-spending by more than £258 million per day last month, which is living beyond our collective means by more than  £10 million an hour, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Gordon Brown and Ed Balls reckon the government should spend even more.  John Redwood blogs “No wonder the Governor thinks we ought to print some more money – who is going to lend us all this?” The Zimbabwean dollar rose 15% against the British pound last month…

I spent a few days in Martha’s Vineyard once - what a boring place it was.

A senior Scotland Yard officer, Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville, warned police must do more to head off a crisis in public confidence over the use of surveillance cameras.

DCI Neville said officers need to improve their results to make captured images count against criminals.

He said there are more than a million CCTV cameras in London and the Government has spent £500 million on the crime-fighting equipment.

But he admitted just 1,000 crimes were solved in 2008 using CCTV images as officers fail to make the most of potentially vital evidence.