Brit License Plates Get Chipped: “The British government is preparing to test new high-tech license plates containing microchips capable of transmitting unique vehicle identification numbers and other data to readers more than 300 feet away.

Officials in the United States say they’ll be closely watching the British trial as they contemplate initiating their own tests of the plates, which incorporate radio frequency identification, or RFID, tags to make vehicles electronically trackable.

…Proponents argue that making such RFID tags mandatory and ubiquitous is a logical move to counter the threat of terrorists using the roadways, and that it will scoop up insurance and registration scofflaws in the process.

…Privacy advocates are less enthusiastic about the technology. ” (Wired)

“Signs of impending disaster are everywhere, but the House of Saud has chosen to pray that the moment of reckoning will not come soon—and the United States has chosen to look away. So nothing changes: the royal family continues to exhaust the Saudi treasury, buying more and more arms and funneling more and more ‘charity’ money to the jihadists, all in a desperate and self-destructive effort to protect itself.

The fact is that the West, especially the United States, has left the Saudis little choice. Leading U.S. corporations hire and rehire known Saudi crooks and known financiers of terrorism to represent their interests, so that they can land the deals that will pay the commissions back in Saudi Arabia—commissions that will further erode the budget and thus further divide the ruling class from everyone else. Former CIA directors serve on boards whose members have to hold their noses to cut deals with Saudi companies—because that’s business, that’s the price of entry, that’s the way it’s done. Ex-Presidents, former prime ministers, onetime senators and congressmen, and Cabinet members walk around with their hands out, acting as if they’re doing something else but rarely slowing down, because most of them know it’s an endgame too. But sometime soon, one way or another, the House of Saud is coming down.”

“Until public broadcasting signals that it can provide entertaining and demonstrably educational programming for television, the Internet, and the classroom, public broadcasting does not deserve to be treated as a sustainable enterprise. If it does rise to that challenge, reaching once again for the educational ideals that animated its founding, the public, corporate, and foundation monies it has been struggling to preserve for the last decade will be made available. And that, not partisan politics, is Patricia Harrison’s and public broadcasting’s real challenge.”

“Daryl Atkins’ fate has rested in the hands of a jury. Atkins, 27, sentenced to death in 1998, would’ve been removed from death row if the jury decided he was mentally retarded.

After about 15 hours of deliberation, the jury of six men and six women decided Friday that Atkins’ defense attorneys failed to show that he is retarded.

…During seven days of testimony, defense attorneys spoke of Atkins’ problems performing simple tasks, his inability to distinguish left from right or odd from even and his repeated academic failure. The defense argued that IQ test scores showed he had less intelligence than 96 percent of Americans.

Prosecutors contended that Atkins’ IQ scores showed he was a slow learner but not retarded and argued that he failed in school because he chose to abuse drugs, skip school and commit crimes.”