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“They’re just gentle, curious, fun-loving animals. (They’re) safe around children,” said Dave Swickard of Lonesome Dove Farm.

If you spend a little time around Swickard’s herd, you’ll understand why he’s sold on alpacas.

“You can see it’s compounding without any more initial investment,” Swickard said.

Swickard started three years ago with four breeding females. The Swickards now have 18 alpacas and two guard llamas.

“Breeding stock is where the profitability in the business is at,” Swickard told KMBC’s Bev Chapman.

Females sell for between $10,000 and $25,000. Stud-quality males have sold for six figures.

“You feel that density; you feel that fineness,” Swickard said, referring to the quality of the animals’ coats.

Swickard’s goal as a breeder is to produce the thickest, softest fiber possible for a yarn that is lightweight, warm as wool, and non-allergenic. He’d also like to invest his money in something relatively safe.

“Mortgages,” Swickard said.

Alpacas are one of the oldest domesticated animals on the planet. Their history dates back to the Incas of the South American Andes.

The video is sent from unmanned and manned aircraft to intelligence analysts at ground stations in the United States and abroad. They watch video in real time of people getting in and out of cars, loading trunks, dropping things or picking them up. They can even see vehicles accelerate, slow down, move together or make U-turns.

“The dynamics of an urban insurgency have resulted in a rapid increase in the number of activities visible in the video field of view,” according to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Although the exploits of the Predator, the Global Hawk and other airborne collectors of information have been widely publicized, there are few authoritative descriptions of what they can see on the ground.

But some insights into the capabilities of the Predator and other aircraft can be drawn from a DARPA paper that describes the tasks of a contractor that will develop a method of indexing and rapidly finding video from archived aerial surveillance tapes collected over past years.

“The U.S. military and intelligence communities have an ever increasing need to monitor live video feeds and search large volumes of archived video data for activities of interest due to the rapid growth in development and fielding of motion video systems,” according to the DARPA paper, which was written in March but released last month.

Last month, Kitware, a small software company with offices in New York and North Carolina, teamed up with 19 other companies and universities and won the $6.7 million first phase of the DARPA contract, which is not expected to be completed before 2011.

During the Cold War, satellites and aircraft took still pictures that intelligence analysts reviewed one frame at a time to identify the locations of missile silos, airplane hangars, submarine pens and factories, said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, an expert in space and intelligence matters.

“Now with new full-motion video intelligence techniques, we are looking at people and their behavior in public,” he said.

The resolution capability of the video systems ranges from four inches to a foot, depending on the collector and environmental conditions at the time, according to the DARPA paper. The video itself is also shaped by the angle to the ground from which it is shot, although there are 3-D capabilities that allow viewers on the ground to manipulate videos of objects so they can see them from different vantage points.

Systems also exist that allow tracking, moving-target detection of objects under forest or other cover and determination of exact geographic location. Development is underway of systems that allow recognition of faces and gait — in other words, human identification.

Currently, because there are so many activities or objects to be watched for hints of suspicious behavior, “more analysts . . . watch the same, real-time video stream simultaneously,” according to DARPA. “If any of the given activities or objects are spotted, the analyst issues an alert to the proper authorities.”

Future collection systems are expected to provide even more imagery, cover areas greater than 16 square miles and make it more difficult “for a limited number of analysts to effectively monitor and scrutinize all potential activities within the streaming field of view,” DARPA wrote.

Today’s volume of intelligence data, beyond just streaming video, already “makes it very difficult to detect specific events in real time and too time intensive to search archived video,” the DARPA paper said. The effort underway is designed to find a way to index similar activity, then search and retrieve it from archives. The proposed new system should be able to analyze real-time streaming video as it is received in a ground station and match it on command to archived video from more than one video library.

Prosecutors claimed Won Jeong-Hwa, 35, entered South Korea posing as a refugee when in fact she was a spy with handlers in Pyongyang.

But the defence painted a different picture of Won, who has confessed and signed a pledge of repentance and loyalty to South Korea.

The court heard how she began her career as a spy after falling into the hands of the North’s secret services and being “brainwashed.” She was arrested for stealing zinc, a scrap metal which North Koreans often smuggle into China in return for food.

Fearful for her life, she claimed in her defence that she complied with her orders only to protect her family, who would now be at grave risk and possible execution.

A tearful Won had pleaded for leniency at a previous hearing.

“I wanted to turn myself in but I just could not because of fears for my relatives in the North,” she said in a choking voice.

“I repent my past activities. I just want a chance to live again with my daughter in South Korea.”

Investigators said Won had served jail time for theft in the North and feared possible execution for another theft.

She fled to northeast China but returned home and in 1998 became a spy for the North’s espionage agency.

Her first task was to arrange the kidnap of North Korean defectors in China, they said.

“In China, I earnestly carried out various missions, helping kidnapping North Korean defectors and South Koreans and engaging in drug trafficking,” Won told the court.

In 2001 she entered South Korea and lived as a housewife and mother, having married a South Korean businessmen, with whom she had a daughter, now seven.

Meanwhile, she sought out army officers in accordance with her orders from Pyongyang — photographs and business cards belonging to 23 were found in her belongings. She slept with them and eventually became the long-term lover of one, Captain Hwang.

She used him to obtain secret information, according to evidence produced at her trial.

This included details of military installations, weapons systems and lists of defectors. Soon, she was commissioned to find Hwang Jang-yop, the North’s highest-ranking defector who lives under guard in the South, and kill two South Korean agents with a poisoned needle. The plot did not go ahead.

She was also convicted of taking part in the kidnapping of a South Korean businessman in China, who was smuggled into the North.

Perhaps the oddest feature of her case is how she first aroused suspicion. She had been hired to talk to South Korean soldiers of the evils of life in the North. Touring military bases provided good cover for her activities. But in her 33rd lecture she loosed a volley of pro-Pyongyang propaganda.

While the Paris metro and rail networks already operate around 9,500 CCTV devices, police have only 330 at their disposal to survey outside public areas. The new plan, dubbed “A Thousand Cameras for Paris”, will raise that number to more than 1,200 – with most installed in high-risk areas and outside railway and underground stations.

The figure is still small compared with London, where each citizen is caught on average several hundred times a day. Britain has about four million closed-circuit security cameras compared with France’s 340,000.

In a little noticed move, federal officials this month have declared a series of public health emergencies relating to potential weapons of biological terror.

On Oct. 1, Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt declared an anthrax public health emergency. On Oct. 10, he declared health emergencies for smallpox, radiation sickness from the detonation of a nuclear device and poisoning from botulinum toxins, the active ingredient of Botox.

There’s no clear evidence that terrorists have managed to weaponize anthrax or stolen large caches of Botox from cosmetic surgeons in Beverly Hills.

But by declaring these public health emergencies, HHS has granted manufacturers of anti-terrorism drugs and vaccines and others involved with the products protection from lawsuits if the drugs were to cause unfortunate side effects.

In the past, drug companies have shied from vaccine development because of low profit margins and legal risks. The actions of HHS are a necessary reassurance to persuade companies to make the drugs, and doctors and other providers to administer them, federal officials and some terrorism experts say.

But consumer advocates see it as a giveaway to the drug industry that strips the public of legal protections.

“It gives the manufacturers and other people involved a ‘get out of jail free’ card,” said Joan Claybrook, president of Washington-based Public Citizen.

“These are potentially dangerous products. There could be a bad vaccine, and suppose people relied on that?” Claybrook asked. “There is no deterrent if there’s no liability.”

The emergency declarations cover a host of antibiotics to fight anthrax infection, anthrax and smallpox vaccines, and a drug to stimulate white blood cell production in people harmed by radiation.

Concerns about the safety of vaccines against potential bioweapons have been raised repeatedly in recent years. Some soldiers, for example, have balked at anthrax vaccinations. And a federal effort to inoculate 500,000 doctors, nurses and other health care workers against smallpox resulted in only about 40,000 volunteering for the vaccine.

Health and Human Services’ authority to grant drugmakers liability protection comes from a controversial measure that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and House Speaker Dennis Hastert added to a Defense Department appropriations bill in the waning days of 2005.

The Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act targets liability protections for products used during epidemics and pandemics, or as security countermeasures.

The HHS secretary can trigger the protections by declaring that a public health emergency exists or that there’s a “credible risk” of one in the future.

And legal immunity can apply to anyone involved in the development, testing, manufacture or distribution of the drugs. Also covered is anyone who prescribes, dispenses or administers the drugs, including state and local government officials.

Public Citizen and the Consumer Federation of America were among the groups that protested the bill.

In a letter to Frist and Hastert, Sen. Ted Kennedy and 20 other members of Congress called the measure “a stealth provision to shield manufacturers from responsibility for making faulty drugs and vaccines.”

Due to the opacity of the market, which is one of the most complex, least regulated and least understood in the global financial system, it is still not clear how many contracts have to be settled or which institutions will take the ultimate hits once the billions of dollars worth of contracts have been unravelled. The collapse of Lehman Brothers, is expected to trigger credit default swap (CDS) protection pay-outs of about $400bn but because the contracts were sold many times through different counterparties it is not yet known who will be liable.

One commentator said: “This will be the greatest illustration of the follies of Wall Street and how unnecessarily complicated the wild off-track betting became in the past few years.”

Five years ago Warren Buffett, the iconic American investor, warned that the chaotic profusion of derivatives used by companies and hedge funds to fund financial growth were “financial weapons of mass destruction.’’

Bankers in the City and on Wall Street are bracing for yet another round of turbulence as the contracts are unwound.

The Bank of England and the Federal Reserve in America have said they will keep their special liquidity windows open late on Tuesday night to allow the contracts to settle.

“What I see is a system where we have more centers of gravity” Nowotny said today in an interview with Austrian state broadcaster ORF-TV. “I see for the future a tri-polar development, and I don’t think that there will be fixed exchange rates between these poles.”

The leaders of the U.S., France and the European Commission will ask other world leaders to join in a series of summits on the global financial crisis beginning in the U.S. soon after the Nov. 4 presidential election, President George W. Bush, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and European Commission President Jose Barroso said in a joint statement yesterday.

Nowotny said he was “skeptical” when asked whether the Bretton Woods System of monetary policy, set up after World War II and revised in 1971, could be revived to aid global currency stability. The U.S. meeting should aim to strengthen financial regulation, define bank capital ratios and review the role of debt-rating agencies.

Phone buyers would have to present a passport or other official form of identification at the point of purchase. Privacy campaigners fear it marks the latest government move to create a surveillance society.

A compulsory national register for the owners of all 72m mobile phones in Britain would be part of a much bigger database to combat terrorism and crime. Whitehall officials have raised the idea of a register containing the names and addresses of everyone who buys a phone in recent talks with Vodafone and other telephone companies, insiders say.

The move is targeted at monitoring the owners of Britain’s estimated 40m prepaid mobile phones. They can be purchased with cash by customers who do not wish to give their names, addresses or credit card details.

The pay-as-you-go phones are popular with criminals and terrorists because their anonymity shields their activities from the authorities. But they are also used by thousands of law-abiding citizens who wish to communicate in private.

The move aims to close a loophole in plans being drawn up by GCHQ, the government’s eavesdropping centre in Cheltenham, to create a huge database to monitor and store the internet browsing habits, e-mail and telephone records of everyone in Britain.