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The extreme measure is the latest in South Africa’s escalating war against armed robbers who target banks and cash delivery vans. The number of cash machines blown up with explosives has risen from 54 in 2006 to 387 in 2007 and nearly 500 last year.

The technology uses cameras to detect people tampering with the card slots. Another machine then ejects pepper spray to stun the culprit while police response teams race to the scene.

But the mechanism backfired in one incident last week when pepper spray was inadvertently inhaled by three technicians who required treatment from paramedics.

Patrick Wadula, spokesman for the Absa bank, which is piloting the scheme, told the Mail & Guardian Online: “During a routine maintenance check at an Absa ATM in Fish Hoek, the pepper spray device was accidentally activated.

“At the time there were no customers using the ATM. However, the spray spread into the shopping centre where the ATMs are situated.”

In conjunction with the police, Absa is using the technology at 11 sites, identified as high-risk by branch managers.

Rarely disclosed publicly, the so-called memorandum of understanding (MOU) gives banks a chance to work out their problems without the glare of outside attention, the paper said.

Financial institutions that fail to address deficiencies can be slapped with harsher penalties that include a publicly announced cease-and-desist order, the newspaper said.

According to the paper, the order was imposed in early May, shortly after shareholders of the bank stripped Chief Executive Kenneth Lewis of his duties as chairman.

The MOU is the most serious procedural action taken against Bank Of America by federal regulators since the financial crisis erupted, the newspaper said.

The report said the MOU surprised some Bank Of America executives who had not expected federal regulators to issue such a formal rebuke. It said the bank responded swiftly with six directors resigning since May 26.

Bank of America faces a series of deadlines, some at the end of July and others in August, the paper said.

Corporate policies prevented him from buying local products, he says, so he joined forces with four other former Sobeys franchisees and formed the independent Hometown Grocers Co-Op.

“We feel that local food, local presence is huge in our market and we wanted to take advantage of that,” Kropf says.

Canadians are increasingly subscribing to the “buy local” and “100 mile diet” philosophies due to concerns over imported food, Kropf adds. “The pressure was always mounting — the more recalls, the more bad press from China or wherever the product was coming from. I know that in our case, our private label pickles are made in Indonesia. I couldn’t believe that.”

As a franchisee for a large grocery chain, Kropf says, corporate policies stipulating that he only buy federally inspected meat prevented him from stocking local products. Most federally inspected meat in Canada comes from large corporations such as Maple Leaf, Cargill and Tyson.

“Most of our beef was Alberta beef. Chicken and pork could be U.S., so to me, that was a concern that, you know, we’ve got all these farmers in our back yard,” Kropf says.

The nine stores have retained their wholesale relationship with Sobeys for items such as dog food, spices and breakfast cereals, but the chilled meat section of Kropf’s store in Elora, Ont., is now stacked high with fresh pork, chicken and beef that comes from no farther than 60 kilometres away.

The stores are located in southern Ontario communities such as Arthur, Durham, Lucknow and Palmerston.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” says the man. “Our records show that your eleven-year-old daughter has not been immunized for genital warts.”

“And your four-year-old still needs the chicken-pox vaccine,” says the woman.

“He will not be allowed to start kindergarten unless he gets that shot, you know,” says the man—smiling from ear to ear.

“So, can we please come in?” asks the woman. “We have the vaccines right here,” she says, lifting up a black medical bag. “We can give your kids the shots right now.”

“We are from the government,” says the man, “and we’re here to help.”

Is this a scene from the over-heated imagination of an addlepated conspiracy theorist? Or is it something akin to what is actually envisioned by the health-care reform bill approved this week by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pension Committee.

The committee’s official summary of the bill says: “Authorizes a demonstration program to improve immunization coverage. Under this program, CDC will provide grants to states to improve immunization coverage of children, adolescents, and adults through the use of evidence-based interventions. States may use funds to implement interventions that are recommended by the Community Preventive Services Task Force, such as reminders or recalls for patients or providers, or home visits.”

Home visits? What exactly is the state going to do when it sends people to “implement interventions” in private homes designed “to improve immunization coverage of children”?

The draft of the bill posted on the committee Web site provides more details.

Title III of the bill is entitled, “Improving the Health of the American People.” It includes four subtitles. They are: “Subtitle A: Modernizing Disease Prevention of Public Health Systems,” “Subtitle B: Increasing Access to Clinical Preventive Services,” “Subtitle C: Creating Healthier Communities,” and “Subtitle D: Support for Prevention and Public Health Information.”

The program authorizing home “interventions” to promote immunizations falls under “Subtitle C: Creating Healthier Communities.” This subtitle directs the secretary of health and human services to “establish a demonstration program to award grants to states to improve the provision of recommended immunizations for children, adolescents, and adults through the use of evidence-based, population-based interventions for high-risk populations.”

She was bundled into a van and abducted as she left her home in Chechnya on Wednesday morning, a colleague said. Her body was found in Ingushetia.

The Russian President Dmitry Medvedev expressed “outrage” at the murder, and ordered a top-level investigation.

Ms Estemirova had been investigating human rights abuses in Chechnya for the independent Memorial group.

Memorial is one of Russia’s best known rights groups, working to document Soviet-era abuses and those taking place more recently, especially in Chechnya.

In recent months, she had been gathering evidence of a campaign of house-burnings by government-backed militias.

Forcefully taken

Ms Estemirova, a single mother in her 40s, had worked in the past with the activists Anna Politkovskaya, who was shot dead in 2006, and Stanislav Markelov, who was killed in January this year.

In 2007 she was awarded the inaugural Anna Politkovskaya Prize, and had also received awards from the Swedish and European parliaments, Memorial said.

In a statement the group said she “was forcefully taken from her house into a car and shouted that she was being kidnapped” at about 0830 local time (0430 GMT).

Her body was found in woodland near Nazran, the main city in neighbouring Ingushetia, about nine hours later. She had bullet wounds to the head and chest.

Dangerous work

The New-York based human rights group Human Rights Watch (HRW) said Ms Estemirova had been working on “extremely sensitive” cases of human rights abuses in Chechnya.

“There is no shred of doubt that she was targeted due to her professional activity,” said Tanya Lokshina, HRW’s Russian researcher in Moscow.

Ms Estemirova was engaged in very important and dangerous work, says the BBC’s Rupert Wingfield-Hayes in Moscow, investigating hundreds of cases of alleged kidnapping, torture and extra-judicial killings by Russian government troops or militias in Chechnya.

Memorial says it believes that government security services of some nature must be involved in her killing.

Our correspondent says no evidence of that has emerged so far, but that it was the government sponsored militias that had most to fear from her work.

The Government in Delhi recently created the Unique Identification Authority, a new state department charged with the task of assigning every living Indian an exclusive number. It will also be responsible for gathering and electronically storing their personal details, at a predicted cost of at least £3 billion.

The task will be led by Nandan Nilekani, the outsourcing sage who coined the phrase “the world is flat”, which became a mantra for supporters of globalisation. “It is a humongous, mind-boggling challenge,” he told The Times. “But we have the opportunity to give every Indian citizen, for the first time, a unique identity. We can transform the country.”

If the cards were piled on top of each other they would be 150 times as high as Mount Everest — 1,200 kilometres.

India’s legions of local bureaucrats currently issue at least 20 proofs of identity, including birth certificates, driving licences and ration cards. None is accepted universally and moving from one state to the next can easily render a citizen officially invisible — a disastrous predicament for the millions of poor who rely on state handouts to survive.

It is hoped that the ID scheme will close such bureaucratic black holes while also fighting corruption. It may also be put to more controversial ends, such as the identification of illegal immigrants and tackling terrorism. A computer chip in each card will contain personal data and proof of identity, such as fingerprint or iris scans. Criminal records and credit histories may also be included.

Mr Nilekani, who left Infosys, the outsourcing giant that he co-founded, to take up his new job, wants the cards to be linked to a “ubiquitous online database” accessible from anywhere.

Last weekend, employees at the 17th-century manor house, which is accustomed to hosting corporate dos and chocolate-box weddings for well-heeled clients, were left speechless when 350 masked guests stripped off at the stroke of midnight and engaged in group sex of bacchanalian proportions.

According to those who witnessed the spectacle, security guards gave up trying to persuade copulating couples to go to their rooms because almost every guest at the party was “otherwise engaged” with a fellow reveller.

Grahame Bond, the hotel’s multimillionaire owner, had hired his 30-room house out for £9,000 to a Dutch company who planned to host a private party, charging guests £65 a ticket. When a convoy of BMWs, Aston Martins and Porsches swept up the driveway on Saturday evening and disgorged their masked occupants, staff assumed they were dealing with a fabulously well-attired fancy-dress party.

But at the stroke of midnight, the atmosphere suddenly changed. “We began the evening by serving the guests Kir Royals and the champagne flowed,” Mr Bond recalled yesterday. “There was a man – the party organiser – telling guests in a loud voice that they were all under a spell. Then, at the stroke of midnight, he told them that if they kissed a guest the spell would be broken. I couldn’t believe my eyes. It suddenly turned into a scene from Eyes Wide Shut.”

Wherever Mr Bond and his dumbfounded staff looked, they could see revellers indulging in group sex. “Everywhere there were couples having sex,” he said. “Over the banisters alone I counted four couples at it.”

Exclusive swinging parties have long been a staple for the debauched doyens of Mayfair, but locals from the nearby village of Goathurst were flabbergasted. “My staff were astonished and it wasn’t long before word got out,” admitted Mr Bond, a property developer who acquired Halswell House in 2004 and has since spent more than £5m renovating the building.

Whoever is seeding the restaurant gossip is being fairly specific. A source tells us that a loose-lipped Twitter staffer recently dished at a lunch that the company has allowed a federal agency to set up a tap to monitor a “firehose” of its data, including private details on users, presumably including private “direct messages,” IP addresses and account information. The Feds — the NSA would seem the most logical agency —then analyze the data to mine for information they deem of interest.

Twitter, it is said, is one of only a handful of internet companies large enough for the Feds to bother setting up such monitoring.