One in four people being added to the UK’s huge national DNA database is a child. Do you think this is right? Not much shocks us at Q Wealth, but playing with kids’ DNA still shocks us. Not to mention that we are researching zan article right now on forced adoptions in the UK, where perfectly kids are forcibly removed from perfectly health parents… but more on that later. Watch this space.

According to Christopher Hope of The Telegraph, this “figure provides further evidence that the Government’s “Big Brother” national database is increasingly targeting young people before they are old enough to vote.”

The news has prompted concerns from civil liberties campaigners that Britain is a “surveillance state”. Wow, at Q Wealth we would never have figured that !!!

Liberal Democrat Justice spokesman Jenny Willott is quoted as saying:

There is something horribly Big Brotherish about a society that is adding over 5,000 kids a month to a DNA database when they’re not even old enough to get a National Insurance Number.

To read the full text of The Telegraph’s article, go here:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/04/07/ncrime207.xml

An article just published by Egan Orion in “The Inquirer” reveals a:

Secret pact allows the US to spy on UK motorists

The British Home Secretary secretively signed a “special certificate” last year that gives foreign security agencies real-time access to traffic camera images and related data monitoring British motorists on highways throughout the UK.

Opposition politicians and civil liberties advocates yesterday accused Gordon Brown’s government of attempting to hide from Parliament its covert plans to facilitate international surveillance of UK citizens in violation of privacy laws.

Under the authorisation signed last July 4 by Jacqui Smith, video feeds and still images captured from roadside TV cameras, along with personal data derived from them, can be transmitted out of the UK to countries such as the US, that are outside the European Economic Area.

If you would like to read the full story, it is at:

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/04/21/quiet-pact-allows-spy-uk

A worrying but informative article by Carrick Mollenkamp (Wall Street Journal, April 16th) about how “one of the most important barometers of the world’s financial health could be sending false signals.”

LIBOR, the London Interbank Offered Rate, is becoming unreliable because, so the article speculates, banks are sending in false reports. In other words, banks are providing misleading information to Reuters about their financial situations.

For those readers not famililar with LIBOR, it’s a measure of the average interest rate at which banks make short-term loans to one another. Banks typically set their lending rates at a certain “spread” above Libor: A company with decent credit, for example, might pay an interest rate of Libor plus one-half percentage point. A risky “subprime” mortgage may carry an interest rate of Libor plus six or more points. If you check the small print on your loan agreement, most likely it makes reference to the LIBOR rate.

LIBOR is set every morning for ten different currencies. Although the actual rates at which banks borrow from each other are known only to the lenders and borrowers, every morning before eleven o’clock coffee, London time, “panels” of banks send data to Reuters, on what it would cost them to borrow a “reasonable amount” in a designated currency. The USD Libor panel, for example, consists of 16 banks, including Bank of America, J.P. Morgan Chase, HBOS and HSBC. Reuters uses the reported borrowing rates to calculate Libor “fixings.” As Reuters’ spokesman is quoted as saying, “It is their data alone we distribute. Reuters is purely the facilitator.”

LIBOR is trusted implicitly in the financial community… or should I say, it was been truisted implicitly until late last year. The concern expressed in the WSJ article is that,

“Some banks don’t want to report the high rates they’re paying for short-term loans because they don’t want to tip off the market that they’re desperate for cash. The Libor system depends on banks to tell the truth about their borrowing rates. Fibbing by banks could mean that millions of borrowers around the world are paying artificially low rates on their loans. That’s good for borrowers, but could be very bad for the banks and other financial institutions that lend to them.”

The article goes on to quote Chris Freemott, a Naperville, Illinois, mortgage banker who depends on Libor to tell him how much his firm, All America Mortgage Corp, owes First Tennessee bank for a credit line that he uses to make loans. As Mr Freemott says, concerns about LIBOR’s reliability are “actually kind of frightening if you really sit and think about it.”

Of course, if this info makes the public newspapers, that means the cat is out of the bag. We can be sure that the banking community no longer trust LIBOR. Fundamentally, this translates into what we already knew: banks can no longer trust each other.

We live in interesting times.

Original source:

http://www.petermacfarlane.net/2008/04/18/wsj-says-major-banks-may-be-falsifying-reports-to-hide-desperation/

It’s Fun to Know: Wacky Warning Labels

By Suzanne Richardson

The fear of lawsuits can make people do crazy things. That includes putting ridiculous warning labels on their products.

Case in point: I bought a package of pre-cut celery at the grocery store. The label said something like “Pre-Cut, Pre-Washed Celery.” Underneath, in smaller letters, it read: “Caution: May contain celery.” I kid you not. (Sorry I didn’t think to take a picture.)

The Michigan Lawsuit Abuse Watch keeps an eye out for crazy labels like this in its annual Wacky Warning Label Contest. This year – the contest’s 11th – the winning label (found on a small tractor) read “Danger: Avoid Death.”

(Source: mlaw.org) This article appears courtesy of Early To Rise, the Internet’s most popular health, wealth, and success e-zine. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com.

In the latest of a series of examples of lack of care of personal data by governments and the private sector, British banking giant HSBC has admitted losing a computer disc with the details of 370,000 customers, according to a BBC News report.

The disc was lost in March after being sent by courier from the bank’s life insurance offices in Southampton, to a reinsurer’s office in Folkestone, Kent.

As well as name, date of birth and value of the insurance cover held by each customer, the disc also apparently revealed the customer’s policy number and whether or nor the customer was a smoker.

Despite the reassurances from HSBC, it admitted that although the data on the disc had not been encrypted, just controlled with simple password access which is easily bypassed.

“We hold up our hands and say it wasn’t good enough,” the bank’s spokesman is quoted as saying. “The documents should have been encrypted.”

“The HSBC incident is just the latest example of careless behaviour by a big organisation regarding personal information.” says the BBC article, which goes on to quote other examples from recent news:

• A laptop computer with the personal details of more than 200 children was stolen from a medical centre in Shropshire.
• The Courts Service lost four CDs in the post with personal details from court cases.
• Information about nearly 600,000 people went missing when a Royal Navy officer had his laptop stolen from a car in Birmingham.
• Hundreds of documents from the Department of Work and Pensions containing sensitive personal data were found dumped on a roundabout in Devon.
• Nine NHS trusts in England admitted losing patient records covering hundreds of thousands of adults.
• 14,000 customer records were lost by the Skipton building society.
• Ministers revealed in December that, earlier in 2007, details of three million candidates for the British driving theory test had gone missing while being processed… in the USA!

“Organisations which process personal information must ensure it is held securely. This is an important principle of the Data Protection Act,” said the office of the Information Commissioner’s Office.

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/business/7334249.stm

Travellers should avoid using Heathrow until the airport abandons its plans for the mass fingerprinting of passengers. That is the advice from the NO2ID Expats’ group. “Other hubs, whether in the UK or in other EU countries, should be preferred for the time being,” the group says in a press release. Heathrow wants to fingerprint and photograph both domestic passengers and international travellers with onward connections to other British or Irish airports. But on 26 March, following a warning from the Information Commissioner’s Office that the measure may be illegal, the fingerprinting was suspended.

The photographing or “biometric capture” of passengers is going ahead. Those who refuse will be denied access to their flights. On its website, BAA states that the measure is “required by the Department for Transport”. But when a NO2ID expat member asked the DfT about this, the reply was: “This is a border and immigration issue [Border & Immigration Agency] and may I suggest you contact them with your query”. He did so. In response, the BIA sent him, presumably by mistake, an e-mail chain revealing interdepartmental chaos. It includes the following view from HM Inspector, BIA: “This is certainly not a BIA issue”. The biometric checks are, the inspector argues, “for domestic flights which is most certainly a DfT and/or BAA issue around how they have set up Terminal 5″. The enquirer turned to BAA. To date, no reply has been received.

For more details visit the NO2ID Expats website at http://no2id-expats.chown.ch