cryptogon.com

The demand to put armed air marshals on to the flights is part of a travel clampdown by the Bush administration that officials in Brussels described as “blackmail” and “troublesome”, and could see west Europeans and Britons required to have US visas if their governments balk at Washington’s requirements.

According to a US document being circulated for signature in European capitals, EU states would also need to supply personal data on all air passengers overflying but not landing in the US in order to gain or retain visa-free travel to America, senior EU officials said.

And within months the US department of homeland security is to impose a new permit system for Europeans flying to the US, compelling all travellers to apply online for permission to enter the country before booking or buying a ticket, a procedure that will take several days.

The data from the US’s new electronic transport authorisation system is to be combined with extensive personal passenger details already being provided by EU countries to the US for the “profiling” of potential terrorists and assessment of other security risks.

Washington is also asking European airlines to provide personal data on non-travellers – for example family members – who are allowed beyond departure barriers to help elderly, young or ill passengers to board aircraft flying to America, a demand the airlines reject as “absurd”.

Seven demands tabled by Washington are contained in a 10-page “memorandum of understanding” (MOU) that the US authorities are negotiating or planning to negotiate with all EU governments, according to ministers and diplomats from EU member states and senior officials in Brussels. The Americans have launched their security drive with some of the 12 mainly east European EU countries whose citizens still need visas to enter the US.

Lawyers for the driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, asked for the records to support their argument that prolonged isolation and harassment at the Guantanamo prison have mentally impaired him and compromised his ability to aid in his defense on war crimes charges.

“All known records have been produced with the exception of the 2002 Gitmo records,” one of the prosecutors, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Timothy Stone, told the court. “They can’t find it.”

He said the military was still looking for the records kept at the remote U.S. naval base in southeast Cuba, which he referred to by its nickname.

President George W. Bush authorized the Guantanamo court to prosecute suspected al Qaeda members on grounds that the existing military and civilian courts were not adequate to prosecute terrorism charges against war captives who are not part of any national army.

The project could be operational by the end of 2009.

Oceanlinx’s unit combines the established science of the Oscillating Water Column (OWC) with its own patented turbine technology, and has successfully completed a full scale trial at its pilot unit at Port Kembla, Australia.

Each WEC is about 65 by 100 feet and 15-25 feet high and will not likely affect views from land.

An OWC, is a chamber which is open underneath the waterline and allows the water inside the OWC to rise and fall, compressing and displacing the air inside, driving it past a turbine which is housed at the narrowest point in the chamber, located above the waterline.

Since the OWC chamber narrows, the air is accelerated to its highest velocity as it passes the turbine allowing for maximal extraction of the energy. The oscillatory wave motion causes a similar oscillatory airflow through the chamber, and the turbine converts energy on both the up and down stroke.

The unique characteristic of this turbine is its blade pitch control system which enables it to rotate in the same direction irrespective of the direction of the air flow. This turbine, converts the energy in the airflow into mechanical energy which drives an electrical generator. The Oceanlinx turbine uses variable pitch blades which, with the slower rotational speed and higher torque of the turbine, improves efficiency and reliability and reduces the need for maintenance.

The incident at the Flotel Safe Scandinavia platform was being treated as a hoax last night and a 23-year-old woman had been detained.

Jake Molloy, general secretary of the Offshore Industry Liaison Committee union, said a woman on the rig had told colleagues she had dreamt a bomb was on the platform.

“Before long it had grown arms and legs,” he told the Daily Record. “The next thing, workers were being evacuated.” The alarm was raised on an accommodation block which is attached by a bridge to an oil rig in the Britannia field.

Fourteen helicopters, including five from the RAF, were involved in the rapid airlift, 115 miles north east of Aberdeen. The accommodation block was evacuated and the workers moved across the bridge to the rig after the alarm was raised, but the emergency was over before all the workers had been airlifted away.

Aberdeen Coastguard said 161 of the 539 workers had been flown out before the rescuers were stood down in the afternoon.

At 5pm, the Ministry of Defence confirmed that all of its aircraft had been sent home. The company which runs the rig, Britannia Operator Ltd, then began returning the evacuated workers to the platform.

A friendly looking logo – a drawing of a house surrounded by the sun – adorns the brochure police have drafted to explain and promote the initiative, “Safe Homes.” Photos of officers playing baseball with children and chatting with teenagers dot the pamphlet. Twice, police have taken calls from listeners on a black radio station in Roxbury.

Click here to read this article in Spanish. (Haz click aquí para leer este artículo en español.)

“I was told to provide the names, addresses and activities of any Venezuelan or Cuban doctors or field workers I come across during my time here,” Fulbright scholar John Alexander van Schaick told ABCNews.com in an interview in La Paz.

Van Schaick’s account matches that of Peace Corps members and staff who claim that last July their entire group of new volunteers was instructed by the same U.S. Embassy official in Bolivia to report on Cuban and Venezuelan nationals.

The State Department says any such request was “in error” and a violation of long-standing U.S. policy which prohibits the use of Peace Corps personnel or Fulbright scholars for intelligence purposes.

“We take this very seriously and want to stress this is not in any way our policy,” a senior State Department official told ABCNews.com.

The Fulbright scholar van Schaick, a 2006 Rutgers University graduate, says the request came at a mandatory orientation and security briefing meeting with Assistant Regional Security Officer Vincent Cooper at the embassy on the morning of Nov. 5, 2007.

According to van Schaick, the request for information gathering “surfaced casually” halfway through Cooper’s 30-minute, one-on-one briefing, which initially dealt with helpful tips about life and security concerns in Bolivia.

“He said, ‘We know the Venezuelans and Cubans are here, and we want to keep tabs on them,'” said van Schaick who recalls feeling “appalled” at the comment.

“I was in shock,” van Schaick said. “My immediate thought was ‘oh my God! Somebody from the U.S. Embassy just asked me to basically spy for the U.S. Embassy.'”

A similar pattern emerges in the account of the three Peace Corps volunteers and their supervisor. On July 29, 2007, just before the new volunteers were sworn in, they say embassy security officer Vincent Cooper visited the 30-person group to give a talk on safety and made his request about the Cubans and Venezuelans.

“He said it had to do with the fight against terrorism,” said one, of the briefing from the embassy official. Others remember being told, “It’s for your own safety.”

Peace Corps Deputy Director Doreen Salazar remembers the incident vividly because she says it was the first time she had heard an embassy official make such a request to a Peace Corps group.

Salazar says she and her fellow staff found the comment so out of line that they interrupted the briefing to clarify that volunteers did not have to follow the embassy’s instructions, and she later complained directly to the embassy about the incident.

“Peace Corps is an a-political institution,” Salazar says. “We made it clear to the embassy that this was an inappropriate request, and they agreed.”

Indeed, the State Department admits having acknowledged the infraction and assuring Salazar that it would not happen again. Yet, it was just four months later that Fulbright scholar van Schaick says he was asked by the same embassy official, Cooper, to “spy” on the Cubans and Venezuelans.

A U.S. Embassy official in La Paz, Bolivia said Cooper was referring all calls for comment to the State Department in Washington.

“There was an acceptance among the G7 that resources should be raised by selling gold,” Padoa-Schioppa, who is also the head of the IMF’s steering committee (IMFC), told reporters after a meeting of G7 finance ministers in Tokyo.

He said the agreement would be finalised in April and would complement spending cuts being drawn up by the IMF under its new managing director, Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

“The current gold price means a flow of income can be ensured,” Padoa-Schioppa said.

Morgan Stanley analyst Stephen Jen said the Fund held 103.4 million ounces of gold worth some $92 billion at current market prices. That was up from $23 billion just five years ago.

InfraGard started in Cleveland back in 1996, when the private sector there cooperated with the FBI to investigate cyber threats.

“Then the FBI cloned it,” says Phyllis Schneck, chairman of the board of directors of the InfraGard National Members Alliance, and the prime mover behind the growth of InfraGard over the last several years.

InfraGard itself is still an FBI operation, with FBI agents in each state overseeing the local InfraGard chapters. (There are now eighty-six of them.) The alliance is a nonprofit organization of private sector InfraGard members.

“We are the owners, operators, and experts of our critical infrastructure, from the CEO of a large company in agriculture or high finance to the guy who turns the valve at the water utility,” says Schneck, who by day is the vice president of research integration at Secure Computing.

“At its most basic level, InfraGard is a partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the private sector,” the InfraGard website states. “InfraGard chapters are geographically linked with FBI Field Office territories.”

In November 2001, InfraGard had around 1,700 members. As of late January, InfraGard had 23,682 members, according to its website, www.infragard.net, which adds that “350 of our nation’s Fortune 500 have a representative in InfraGard.”

To join, each person must be sponsored by “an existing InfraGard member, chapter, or partner organization.” The FBI then vets the applicant. On the application form, prospective members are asked which aspect of the critical infrastructure their organization deals with. These include: agriculture, banking and finance, the chemical industry, defense, energy, food, information and telecommunications, law enforcement, public health, and transportation.

FBI Director Robert Mueller addressed an InfraGard convention on August 9, 2005. At that time, the group had less than half as many members as it does today. “To date, there are more than 11,000 members of InfraGard,” he said. “From our perspective that amounts to 11,000 contacts . . . and 11,000 partners in our mission to protect America.” He added a little later, “Those of you in the private sector are the first line of defense.”

He urged InfraGard members to contact the FBI if they “note suspicious activity or an unusual event.” And he said they could sic the FBI on “disgruntled employees who will use knowledge gained on the job against their employers.”

In an interview with InfraGard after the conference, which is featured prominently on the InfraGard members’ website, Mueller says: “It’s a great program.”

The ACLU is not so sanguine.