Monday, October 24, 2011
News for Monday, October 24, 2011
Israel Orders VeriChip for Israeli Defense Force
PositiveID, the company that manufactures the VeriChip RFID tag, has announced a deal to provide the Israeli Defense Force with the chip. The VeriChip, which is primarily marketed as a device for retrieving medical records using the VeriMed package, also has a number of other useful applications. PositiveID's VeriPay system, where the chip is used like a credit card to authorize financial transactions, is already employed by the Baja Beach Club in Spain. A few years ago, VeriChip Corporation revealed they were in talks with the US Administration to implant the 1.4 million service personnel with a VeriChip, replacing the metal 'dog tags' currently worn by the troops. The secular news article reported at the time that the "device is usually implanted above the triceps area of an individual’s right arm, but can also by implanted in the hand if scanned at the proper frequency". Other articles have confirmed that the VeriChip is indeed often implanted in the hand rather than behind the shoulder blade. Now it seems the IDF is interested in acquiring the technology.
"The Company's integration partner intends to provide the microchips to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), the State of Israel's military force. Marc Poulshock, PositiveID's Vice President of Business Development, said, "We believe there are many important applications for the VeriChip and our associated intellectual property including next-generation identification and bio-sensing capabilities. Our partner is looking to help healthcare organizations, militaries including the IDF, and governments with their disaster preparedness and emergency response needs."The IDF have not said what they will use the technology for, but with the recent release of Gilad Shalit, perhaps preventing further kidnappings of its soldiers by Palestinian terrorists might form part of their reasoning for that.
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PositiveID Corporation Receives VeriChip Order For Use With Israeli Military
October 2011
Delray Beach, FL (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) - PositiveID Corporation ("PositiveID" or "Company") (OTCBB:PSID), a developer of medical technologies for diabetes management, clinical diagnostics and bio-threat detection, announced today that it has received an order for its VeriChip™ microchip to be used for disaster preparedness and emergency management in Israel by an integration partner.
The VeriChip radio frequency identification (RFID) microchip was cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2004 for patient identification. The VeriChip can also be used to assist in the management of emergency situations and disaster recovery in conjunction with a customized camera capable of receiving both RFID scanned data and GPS data wirelessly, and a Web-enabled database for gathering and storing information and images captured during emergency response operations.
The Company's integration partner intends to provide the microchips to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), the State of Israel's military force.
Marc Poulshock, PositiveID's Vice President of Business Development, said, "We believe there are many important applications for the VeriChip and our associated intellectual property including next-generation identification and bio-sensing capabilities. Our partner is looking to help healthcare organizations, militaries including the IDF, and governments with their disaster preparedness and emergency response needs."•
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(May our Lord God help us people, looks like this is the mark of the beast and it's headed our way! )
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Obama Pulls Terror Training Manuals Referencing Islam
Deputy U.S. Attorney General James Cole confirmed on Wednesday the Obama administration was recalling all training materials used by the law enforcement and national security communities, in order to eliminate all references to Islam.
“I recently directed all components of the Department of Justice to re-evaluate their training efforts in a range of areas, from community outreach to national security,” Cole told a panel at the George Washington University law school.
The move comes after complaints from Muslim advocacy organizations, including the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), which was identified as Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas front group in the 2004 Holy Land Foundation terror fundraising trial.
CAIR founders Omar Ahmad and Nihad Awad were originally officers of the Islamic Association of Palestine (IAP), described by former FBI analyst and US Treasury Department intelligence official Mathew Lewitt as, "intimately tied to the most senior Hamas leadership."
Both Ahmad and Awad participated in a meeting held in Philadelphia on October 3, 1993, that involved senior leaders of Hamas, the Holy Land Foundation (which was designated in 1995 by Executive Order, and later convicted in court, as an organization that had raised millions of dollars for Hamas) , and the IAP.
According to electronic surveillance of the meeting subitted as evidence in the Holy Land trial by the FBI, "the participants went to great length and spent much effort hiding their association with the Islamic Resistance Movement [Hamas].... Participants at the meeting discussed forming a 'political organization and public relations body,' "whose Islamic hue is not very conspicuous."
In a Wednesday Los Angeles Times op-ed, Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) president Salam al-Marayati threatened the FBI with a total cutoff of cooperation between American Muslims and law enforcement if the agency failed to revise its law enforcement training material.
Maintaining the training materials in their current state “will undermine the relationship between law enforcement and the Muslim American community,” al-Marayati wrote.
Ties between CAIR and MPAC, both of whom have been guests of honor at numerous Federal events and symposiums, and Obama administration dinners, are well documented. Both organizations are members of the American Muslim Political Coordination Council, which seek to coordinate political advocacy efforts. •
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Foreign buyers scooping up U.S. homes
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Hey, wealthy foreigners! Want to live in the U.S.? Buy a home here.
International purchases of American homes are ramping up, and a new Senate bill designed to boost the ailing real-estate market would encourage globe-trotting investors to buy even more.
The bill, co-sponsored by Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Mike Lee (R.-Utah) would grant a U.S. visa to international investors who agree to spend at least $500,000 on residential real estate here!
If passed, the legislation could add to a surge in homebuying by international purchasers over the past year or two that's already given some local U.S. markets a welcome boost.
Foreigners spent $82 billion buying up U.S. homes in the 12 months ended in March, up 24% from a year earlier, according to the National Association of Realtors (NAR). That represents 8% of total U.S. sales.
In places like South Florida, international buyers already account for a whopping 25% of the market. California, Texas and Arizona also attract many foreign buyers, as do Hawaii and New York.
South Florida condo sales have been surprisingly strong, said Brad Hunter, chief economist for Metrostudy, a housing analytics company. "And the majority of those sales are to South Americans and Canadians," he said. •
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Teenage girl in coma after she's burned alive by friends in 'satanic ritual'
An 18-year-old South African woman was in a coma Monday after being doused in petrol and burned alive by friends in a Johannesburg park, in what police suspect was a satanic ritual.
The attack took place in Johannesburg
Kirsty Theologo suffered burns over three quarters of her body, damaging her lungs and throat, when she was set alight in a park in southern Johannesburg, her sister Samantha told The Star newspaper.
A 16-year-old girl tried to put out the flames by rolling Theologo in the sand, burning herself in the process, the paper said. She was also hospitalised.
Samantha Theologo claimed the group ran away, telling South African media that her sister and the other girl had to walk two kilometres for help.
“I wasn’t home, but my mom told me she found my sister in the bathroom washing her face," she was quoted as saying. “My mom said it was horrific.”
The Star cited a medical source as saying the girls were driven to hospital by their pastor. •
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Vatican calls for global authority on economy, raps “idolatry of the market”
(Saint Peter's Basilica at the Vatican October 23, 2011/Giampiero Sposito)
The Vatican called on Monday for the establishment of a “global public authority” and a “central world bank” to rule over financial institutions that have become outdated and often ineffective in dealing fairly with crises. The document from the Vatican’s Justice and Peace department should please the “Occupy Wall Street” demonstrators and similar movements around the world who have protested against the economic downturn.
“Towards Reforming the International Financial and Monetary Systems in the Context of a Global Public Authority,” was at times very specific, calling, for example, for taxation measures on financial transactions. “The economic and financial crisis which the world is going through calls everyone, individuals and peoples, to examine in depth the principles and the cultural and moral values at the basis of social coexistence,” it said.
It condemned what it called “the idolatry of the market” as well as a “neo-liberal thinking” that it said looked exclusively at technical solutions to economic problems. “In fact, the crisis has revealed behaviours like selfishness, collective greed and hoarding of goods on a great scale,” it said, adding that world economics needed an “ethic of solidarity” among rich and poor nations.
“If no solutions are found to the various forms of injustice, the negative effects that will follow on the social, political and economic level will be destined to create a climate of growing hostility and even violence, and ultimately undermine the very foundations of democratic institutions, even the ones considered most solid,” it said.
It called for the establishment of “a supranational authority” with worldwide scope and “universal jurisdiction” to guide economic policies and decisions.
Asked at a news conference if the document could become a manifesto for the movement of the “indignant ones”, who have criticised global economic policies, Cardinal Peter Turkson, head of the Vatican’s Justice and Peace department, said: “The people on Wall Street need to sit down and go through a process of discernment and see whether their role managing the finances of the world is actually serving the interests of humanity and the common good. “We are calling for all these bodies and organisations to sit down and do a little bit of re-thinking.” •
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Turkey quake kills at least 279, hundreds missing
ERCIS, Turkey (Reuters) - Rescuers searched the rubble of collapsed buildings Monday for survivors and victims of a major earthquake that killed at least 279 people and injured more than 1,300 in mainly Kurdish southeast Turkey.
Rescue and relief efforts focused on the city of Van and the town of Ercis, 100 km (60 miles) to the north, but hundreds were also feared dead in remote villages of mud-brick houses after Sunday's 7.2 magnitude quake, Turkey's strongest in a decade.
Desperate survivors cried for help beneath heaps of smashed concrete and twisted metal, some using mobile phones to tell friends they were alive, as earth-moving machines and troops raced against time in Van and Ercis.
Thousands of people made homeless by the quake were forced to spend a second night outdoors in the hilly, windswept Van region, enduring near-freezing temperatures. Families huddled round open fires that glowed in the dark. Some stayed in tents put up on soccer pitches, living on handouts from aid agencies.
The U.N. disaster agency said almost 1,000 buildings had collapsed, many of them poorly built. A Red Crescent spokesman said the agency was preparing to provide refuge for as many as 40,000 people, though it was so far impossible to tell how many would need shelter.
Some residents of Van and outlying villages complained of a lack of government assistance, despite the dispatch of troops, mobile kitchens and up to 13,000 tents.
"We have to fit 37 people in one tent," said Giyasettin Celen, a 29-year-old who lost three family members in Dogonu Koyu, a village beside Lake Van where he said 15 people died.
"Our lost ones were carried like animals, on top of each other, in a transport van. Our main source of income here is livestock breeding, but we don't have anywhere to keep them. We will have to sell them now," he said.
Throughout the day, rescue workers pulled people out alive.
"Be patient, be patient," rescuers in Ercis told a whimpering boy pinned under a concrete slab with the lifeless hand of an adult, a wedding ring on one finger, visible just in front of his face.
A Reuters photographer saw a woman and her daughter being freed from beneath a concrete slab in the wreckage of a six-storey building.
"I'm here, I'm here," the woman, named Fidan, cried out hoarsely. Talking to her regularly while working for more than two hours to find a way through, rescuers cut through the slab, first sighting the daughter's foot, before freeing them.
CRANES SHIFT RUBBLE
In Van, an ancient city of one million on a lake ringed by snow-capped mountains, cranes shifted rubble from a collapsed six-storey apartment block where 70 people were feared trapped.
One woman, standing beside a wrecked four-storey building, told a rescue worker she had spoken to her friend on her mobile phone six hours after the quake trapped her in the wreckage.
"She's my friend and she called me to say that she's alive and she's stuck in the rubble near the stairs of the building," said her friend, a fellow teacher. "She told me she was wearing red pajamas," she said, standing with distraught relatives begging the rescue workers to hurry.
Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan flew to Van to assess the scale of the disaster. It is a quake-prone area that is a hotbed of activity for Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants.
Erdogan said he feared for the fate of villages with houses made of mud brick, saying: "Almost all buildings in such villages are destroyed."
Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc said the death toll had reached 279, with 1,300 injured, and more were unaccounted for.
The quake brought fresh torment to impoverished southeast Turkey, where PKK militants fighting a decades-long insurgency killed 24 Turkish troops south of Van last week.
The area it struck, near the border with Iran, is remote and mountainous, with long distances between villages and people who live off stock-raising, arable farming and trading.
The hardest-hit town was Ercis, a town of 100,000, where 55 buildings crumpled, including a student dormitory.
At one collapsed four-storey building, firemen from the major southeastern city of Diyarbakir were trying to reach four missing children. Aid workers carried two large black bags, one apparently containing a child's body, to an ambulance. An old woman wrapped in a headscarf walked alongside sobbing.
A distressed man paced back and forth before running toward the rescue workers on top of the rubble. "That's my nephew's house," he sobbed as workers tried to hold him back.
ARMY BATTALIONS
The Red Crescent has delivered 5,000 tents to Ercis alone and a tent city has been set up at Ercis stadium. But residents said tents were being given only to relatives of police and soldiers, a possible source of tension if confirmed.
"The villages have not received any help yet. Instead of making a show, politicians should be visiting them. The Turkish military says they sent soldiers, where are they?" said a municipality official in Van who did not want to be named.
Ibrahim Baydar, a 40-year-old tradesman from Van, accused the government in Ankara of holding back aid. "All the nylon tents are in the black market now. We cannot find any. People are queuing for them. No tents were given to us whatsoever."
Rescue efforts were hampered by power outages after the quake toppled electricity lines to towns and villages.
More than 200 aftershocks have jolted the region since the quake, lasting around 25 seconds, struck at 1041 GMT Sunday.
"I just felt the whole earth moving and I was petrified. It went on for ages. And the noise, you could hear this loud, loud noise," said Hakan Demirtas, 32, a builder who was working on a construction site in Van at the time.
"My house is ruined," he said, sitting on a low wall after spending the night in the open. "I am still afraid, I'm in shock. I have no future, there is nothing I can do."
The Red Crescent said about 100 experts had reached the earthquake zone to coordinate rescue and relief operations. Sniffer dogs had joined the quest for survivors.
Major geological fault lines cross Turkey, where small tremors occur almost daily. Two large quakes in 1999 killed more than 20,000 people in the northwest.
The quake had no impact on Turkish financial markets when they opened Monday.
In Van, construction worker Sulhattin Secen, 27, said he had at first mistaken the rumble of the quake for a car crash.
"Then the ground beneath me started moving up and down as if I was standing in water. May God help us. It's like life has stopped. What are people going to do?" •
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Jerusalem Police Stand Down from Terror Alert
Israel's Jerusalem District Police commander announced the city had returned to normal security levels after being on high alert on Monday. The General Security Services, however, are continuing their to pursue intelligence related to the matter.
Earlier Monday, helicopters, ground forces and medics are on high alert after intelligence officials warned of an imminent terrorist attack in Jerusalem.
A large number of police were deployed at entrances to the capital as helicopters over overhead. The warning focused on the neighborhood of Romema, located near the Central Bus Station at the western entrance to Jerusalem.
Pictures of the suspected terrorist were distributed, and police searched areas of the Belz Yeshiva.
Security forces and volunteers responded to the security alert of a terrorist attack on the heels of last week’s release of 477 terrorists and security prisoners in exchange for the return of kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit.
Nearly 600 more prisoners and terrorists will be released in two months in the second stage of the arrangement.
Since the release, terrorists have staged at least three stabbing attacks, one of them seriously wounding a teenage boy in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramot on the Sabbath.
An Arab terrorist earlier this year killed one tourist and wounded approximately 20 others in a bomb attack at the Jerusalem Convention Center, located on a street parallel to the bus station. •
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May God help us and come quickly. In Your Name I pray, Precious Jesus! -Missygirl*
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