THE HANDSTAND

Britain will be first country to monitor every car journey

Britain is to become the first country in the world where the movements of all vehicles on the roads are recorded. A new national surveillance system will hold the records for at least two years.

Using a network of cameras that can automatically read every passing number plate, the plan is to build a huge database of vehicle movements so that the police and security services can analyse any journey a driver has made over several years.

The network will incorporate thousands of existing CCTV cameras which are being converted to read number plates automatically night and day to provide 24/7 coverage of all motorways and main roads, as well as towns, cities, ports and petrol-station forecourts.

By next March a central database installed alongside the Police National Computer in Hendon, north London, will store the details of 35 million number-plate "reads" per day. These will include time, date and precise location, with camera sites monitored by global positioning satellites.

Already there are plans to extend the database by increasing the storage period to five years and by linking thousands of additional cameras so that details of up to 100 million number plates can be fed each day into the central databank.

EU to water down energy saving plans

Ambitious EU plans to reduce energy consumption in private households and public institutions have been watered down.

Member states will be asked to save a minimum 9 percent energy over a nine-year period by making current energy consumption more efficient. But the goals will not be binding, according to a deal struck between MEPs and EU governments on Tuesday (6 December).

The original directive on "promotion of end-use efficiency and energy services" was presented by the European Commission two years ago.

It sets out clear mandatory targets for annual energy savings at member state level for the period 2006-2012 by making use of electricity, gas, heating oil and transport more efficient.

The commission estimates that the bloc's energy consumption is approximately 20 percent higher than can be justified on economic grounds.

"The directive will kick off an energy efficiency offensive in the member states", said German social democrat MEP Mechtild Rothe, a member of the parliament’s delegation in the talks.

"Member states will have to adopt multi-annual energy efficiency action plans, in which they must set out intermediate goals and the measures needed to attain them", the MEP added.

Some MEPs regretted that the goals were not binding.

Once the directive is adopted, member states will have a period of two years to transpose it into national law.

Action plans must be sent to the commission no later than 30 June 2007, according to the deal, which will be voted on in the plenary of the European Parliament in Strasbourg next week.

Papers reveal UK's nuclear aid to Israel

David Leigh
Saturday December 10, 2005
The Guardian

Fresh and apparently incriminating documents have come to light under the Freedom of Information Act on the way Britain helped Israel obtain its nuclear bomb 40 years ago, by selling it 20 tonnes of heavy water.

The Whitehall files not only confirm that Britain was a knowing party to the deal, but also contain subsequent intelligence assessments confirming that the sale of heavy water, which is used to produce plutonium, was crucial to Israel's nuclear weapons programme.

It was first revealed earlier this year by BBC Newsnight that sales of heavy water to Israel had secretly taken place in 1958. But Kim Howells, a Foreign Office minister, subsequently claimed that "the UK was not in fact a party to the sale of heavy water to Israel". He sought to blame Norway, saying Britain had merely negotiated "the sale back to Norway of surplus heavy water".

But Mr Howells' claims were undermined last night when Newsnight produced documents from the National Archives. A Joint Intelligence Bureau report to spy chiefs on March 27 1961 says: "The main Israeli achievement in the importing line relates to 20 tonnes of heavy water ... which the UK Atomic Energy Authority had contracted to buy from Norway and later found to be surplus to their requirements ... negotiations were undertaken whereby the water ultimately passed into Israeli hands."

Contrary to Mr Howells' claim that Britain could not impose safeguards, the papers also show that Britain deliberately agreed not to demand safeguards over the Israeli sale, and officials said it would be "over-zealous" to do so.

Those struggling to come to terms with Germany's absurd "holocaust denial" laws must first understand that they really have nothing to do with the alleged Jewish holocaust and the affirmation or refutation thereof. If that were the case, there would be no reason to use them, since the truth, being self-evident and requiring neither proof nor vast armies of supporting lawyers and judges, would stand on its own merits and win the day.

These statutes, which also require that a defendant charged with such "crimes" be represented by a lawyer who is expressly forbidden under the same punitive laws from introducing in court evidence that would support his client's arguments, fly in the face of basic human intelligence and make a mockery of the rule of law in the so-called age of reason.

Anyone who has studied the witchcraft trials in Europe will recall that any lawyer who did too good a job defending a witch would find themselves accused of witchcraft as a result. Is it any wonder there were so many convictions and executions? Yet we know today that (outside of movies) there are no real witches riding broomsticks over the rooftops.