ceedee’s posterous

Supermarket giant Sainsbury's is in the final stages of a deal to take over the former Woolworths store in Bath.

The firm is expected to complete negotiations at the end of this month on the premises at Moorland Road in Oldfield Park which would become its third store in the city.

Sainsbury's will also open a 6,200 sq ft store in Bath's £360 million SouthGate centre in November which is likely to create around 30 jobs.

The chain is looking to open a large store as part of a development on a six-acre site between St Martin's Primary School and Three Ways School in Odd Down, which would then bring the total number of stores in Bath to five.

The claim that immigrants jump the queue for council houses will be exposed as a myth next week by an exhaustive national survey.

It will undermine Gordon Brown's promise to let local authorities give "more priority" to people with local links in the allocation of empty properties. His move was widely seen yesterday as a response to the suspicion – successfully exploited in last month's local and European elections by the British National Party – that white families were losing out to new arrivals in obtaining council or housing association homes.

The policy, echoing Mr Brown's ill-fated "British jobs for British workers" slogan, brought warnings from the opposition and immigration groups that the Prime Minister was allowing the BNP to set the political agenda.

The Independent has learned that a two-year investigation has failed to uncover "queue jumping" by immigrants and will describe the belief in its existence as a popular prejudice.

The inquiry – based on analysis of authority housing allocation and interviews with housing association managers – was set up two years ago by Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, and the Local Government Association. Its conclusions will be set out next week. Mr Phillips conceded at the time the inquiry was established that there was a widespread public belief that migrants received unfair advantages.

But research last year discovered 90 per cent of people in council properties were born in Britain. New arrivals in the country represented 2 per cent of the general population, but less than 3 per cent of those in social housing.

MEXICO CITY — Could Mexican cities become Latin Amsterdams, flooded by drug users seeking penalty-free tokes and toots?

That is the fear, if somewhat overstated, of some Mexican officials, especially in northern border states that serve as a mecca for underage American drinkers.

The Mexican legislature has voted quietly to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of pot, cocaine, methamphetamine and other drugs, an effort that in the past has proved highly controversial.

There has been less protest this time around, in part because there hasn’t been much publicity.

Some critics have suggested that easing the punishment on drug possession sends the wrong message at a time when President Felipe Calderon is waging a bloody war on major narcotics traffickers. The battle between law enforcement authorities and drug suspects has claimed more than 11,000 lives in the past 2.5 years.

But it was Calderon himself who proposed the decriminalization legislation.

His reasoning: It makes sense to distinguish between small-time users and big-time dealers, while re-targeting major crime-fighting resources away from the former and toward the latter and their drug lord bosses.

“The important thing is ... that consumers are not treated as criminals,” said Rafael Ruiz Mena, secretary general of the National Institute of Penal Sciences. “It is a public health problem, not a penal problem.”

Mobiles and the net are hugely popular among young Iranians

As protests continue in Iran, details are emerging of the technology used to monitor its citizens.

Iran is well known for filtering the net, but the government has moved to do the same for mobile phones.

Nokia Siemens Network has confirmed it supplied Iran with the technology needed to monitor, control, and read local telephone calls.

It told the BBC that it sold a product called the Monitoring Centre to Iran Telecom in the second half of 2008.

Data inspection

Nokia Siemens, a joint venture between the Finnish and German companies, supplied the system to Iran through its Intelligent Solutions business, which was sold in March 2009 to Perusa Partners Fund 1LP, a German investment firm.

The product allows authorities to monitor any communications across a network, including voice calls, text messaging, instant messages, and web traffic.

But Nokia Siemens says the product is only being used, in Iran, for the monitoring of local telephone calls on fixed and mobile lines.

Rather than just block traffic, it is understood that the monitoring system can also interrogate data to see what information is being passed back and forth.

A spokesman described the system as "a standard architecture that the world's governments use for lawful intercept".

[Iran] is also struggling to compete with an opposition that call on the skills of one of the world's most vibrant blogging communities and plenty of tech-savvy folks. Rory Cellan-Jones BBC technology corespondent Read the dot.life blog in full Analysing the Arabic blogosphere

He added: "Western governments, including the UK, don't allow you to build networks without having this functionality."

Asked by the BBC about the firm's attitude to doing business in Iran, Nokia Siemens said: "We do have a choice about doing business there, and on balance providing connectivity means there is a net benefit."

He explained that millions of Iranians were getting mobile phone services through Nokia. "The amount of information that is coming out of Iran from ordinary users because they have connectivity that they would not have had before is of a net benefit to them."

"I don't think Iran would have expanded its mobile network and its connectivity to its citizens if it had not had this capability."

Nokia Siemens markets the Monitoring Centre product to 150 countries around the world where it does business. The firm says it does not supply the system to China or to Burma.

The phone monitoring system sits side-by-side with the extensive net filtering system Iran has constructed in recent years.

Traffic in and out of Iran is largely controlled by Iran Telecom. On 13 June, the day after presidential elections, data traffic come to an almost complete halt, according to analysis by network security firm Arbor Networks.

Since then, traffic has gradually recovered, and analysts have speculated that the slowdown and re-start was caused by authorities putting in place filtering and monitoring systems.

Because Iran is effectively reading every message, this results in an inevitable slow down of traffic.

In mid-June, the OpenNet Initiative, which surveys net-watching efforts, updated its survey of net use in Iran and said the nation was: "investing in improving its technical capacity to extensively monitor the behavior of its citizens on the internet."

It said women's rights activists arrested in the nation had been shown transcripts of instant messages they had sent.

"If true," said the survey, the evidence, "would support the existence of an advanced surveillance program."

The Wall Street Journal, in "Iran's Web Spying Aided By Western Technology" adds:

The Iranian government had experimented with the equipment for brief periods in recent months, but it had not been used extensively, and therefore its capabilities weren't fully displayed -- until during the recent unrest, the Internet experts interviewed said.

"We didn't know they could do this much," said a network engineer in Tehran. "Now we know they have powerful things that allow them to do very complex tracking on the network."

Deep packet inspection involves inserting equipment into a flow of online data, from emails and Internet phone calls to images and messages on social-networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Every digitized packet of online data is deconstructed, examined for keywords and reconstructed within milliseconds. In Iran's case, this is done for the entire country at a single choke point, according to networking engineers familiar with the country's system. It couldn't be determined whether the equipment from Nokia Siemens Networks is used specifically for deep packet inspection.

All eyes have been on the Internet amid the crisis in Iran, and government attempts to crack down on information. The infiltration of Iranian online traffic could explain why the government has allowed the Internet to continue to function -- and also why it has been running at such slow speeds in the days since the results of the presidential vote spurred unrest.

Users in the country report the Internet having slowed to less than a tenth of normal speeds. Deep packet inspection delays the transmission of online data unless it is offset by a huge increase in processing power, according to Internet experts.

Iran is "now drilling into what the population is trying to say," said Bradley Anstis, director of technical strategy with Marshal8e6 Inc., an Internet security company in Orange, Calif. He and other experts interviewed have examined Internet traffic flows in and out of Iran that show characteristics of content inspection, among other measures. "This looks like a step beyond what any other country is doing, including China."

 

Terror watchdog accuses police of intervening without evidence or suspicion

Only 1 per cent of searches using terrorism legislation led to an arrest

White members of the public are being unlawfully detained by the police in order to give "racial balance" to stop-and-search statistics, a report by the Government's watchdog on terror laws has found.

Lord Carlile, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, said he knew of cases where suspects were stopped by officers even though there was no evidence or suspicion against them.

He warned that police were wasting money by carrying out "self-evidently unmerited searches" which were an invasion of civil liberties and "almost certainly unlawful".

Lord Carlile, a QC and Liberal Democrat peer, condemned the wrongful use of Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000, in his annual report on anti-terror laws.

He said police were carrying out the searches on people they had no basis for suspecting so they could avoid accusations of prejudice.

As the terror threat against Britain is largely from Islamist extremists, the figures show disproportionately more Muslims and therefore more Asians being searched than whites.

But the peer said police should stop trying to balance the figures, and it may be that an "ethnic imbalance" is a "proportional consequence" of policing.

Civil liberty lawyers and black and Asian groups reacted angrily. Raj Joshi, vice-chairman of the Society of Black Lawyers, accused the police of playing into the hands of far-right organisations like the BNP. "The latest statistics show exactly what black and Asian communities have been saying for years: that they are being unfairly treated from stop and search through to sentence and punishment in the criminal justice system," he said.

"It is not enough to use anti-terror laws to target Asian communities when we have been told that the police rely on so-called intelligence-led policing."

Lord Carlile wrote in his report published yesterday: "I have evidence of cases where the person stopped is so obviously far from any known terrorism profile that, realistically, there is not the slightest possibility of him/her being a terrorist, and no other feature to justify the stop. In one situation the basis of the stops was numerical only, which is almost certainly unlawful and in no way an intelligent use of the procedure."

They'd have put Cherie Blair on the inquiry, only she'd have charged a fee

It's unlikely anything so interesting will come out of the inquiry into the Iraq war announced by Gordon Brown. Because it will be held entirely in secret, and is not allowed to "apportion blame", as this will prevent the inquiry being "clogged up by expensive lawyers."

Apparently this will encourage those called to be "more candid" about their behaviour. So why not change the whole legal system for similar reasons? Murderers would be so much more candid in a trial if they weren't weighed down by the thought of their comments being made public. "Between you and me I strangled the lot of them," they'd laugh, whereas once they're in that big room with lawyers and blame getting in the way they're BOUND to clam up.

How much quicker the law could be resolved without all that paraphernalia of cross-examining and working out who was telling the truth and other money-wasting nonsense. Just ask someone whether they did it, and if they say "Not really," or "I had to kill them because I'd heard they had some destructive weapons," the judge could say "Well that's pretty much cleared it up – who's next?"

And what a liberal turn Gordon Brown's taken with this "refusal to blame" attitude. He must have been listening to a radical parenting workshop in a field in Devon, so those responsible will be told, "OK – I'm hearing negative thought-lines resulting from imaginary-weapons-of-destruction-syndrome yeah, but I don't want you to feel blame for all the deaths OK, instead I want you to digest an alternative activity strategy of public speaking and praying so as not to stifle your creativity yeah."

In an effort to represent the expertise of many layers of society, the team running the inquiry has been drawn from a wide cross-section of knights. (To be fair only four out of the five in the team are knights. The other is a baroness, because New Labour stands by its slogan, "For the many not the few").

They're not even neutral knights, because Sir Lawrence Freedman wrote a memo on which Blair based a speech proposing war, and Sir Martin Gilbert has already said Blair and Bush may be seen as "akin to Roosevelt and Churchill." So why are they bothering to have an inquiry at all? It would make more sense to have a dinner party. Then they could release its conclusions that: 1) There was little alternative to war; 2) The recession is creating some wonderful opportunities for property in Italy; and 3) Sir John and Sir Roderic both knew the same masters at Eton, isn't that amazing?

They'd probably have put Tony and Cherie Blair on the inquiry team, except that Cherie would have charged an appearance fee and it would end up costing more than all the lawyers.

One minister defended the war yesterday by boasting that the levels of violence in Iraq are now at their lowest since 2003. So after six years and a million dead the place is finally back to the level of violence that existed before the invasion happened. But it's justified because one of the dead was Saddam, although with this new system of secrecy and disastrous wars for which no one in the government is to blame, if he was still around they'd be after him for advice.

Not enough time to write myself but, luckily for me, Justin at Chicken Yoghurt has already done a better job than I could:

Iraq inquiry: arse-coveringly late and secret

So, in an attempt to restore the smashed trust in our political system and our politicians, to give us the ‘different type of politics, a more open and honest dialogue‘ he promised upon becoming prime minister, Gordon Brown has said the inquiry into the Iraq war will be held in private and will not report back until Summer 2010 (that is, after the general election).

In parliament today he was unable to say whether the inquiry will have the power to compel witnesses to appear before it or whether they will have to give evidence under oath. Brown did his best to blame the Tories for the way the inquiry will be conducted. ‘The opposition wanted a Franks style inquiry [the inquiry into the Falklands war] and that’s what we’re having,’ he said making it sound like a generous concession to Tory lobbying. You’re all in this one together, lads.

One of the members of the inquiry’s committee is Sir Lawrence Freedman, professor of War Studies at King’s College, London. Writing in the Independent in 2003 at the outbreak of the war, he had this to say…

Even if it takes time to dislodge Saddam’s regime, the US – and also Britain – will emerge from this conflict hardened in their power and ready to exercise far greater influence over not only the development of Iraq but also the wider Middle East.

Let’s hope Sir Lawrence is better at recording history than he is at predicting it.

Last month, President Obama vowed to bar the release of photographs that depict torture (or detainee abuse, depending on your truthspeak) at military prisons during the Bush administration. Today, this news, about transcripts of those torture videotapes that were destroyed by the CIA in 2005. I'm seeing a pattern here...

The Obama administration objected yesterday to the release of certain Bush-era documents that detail the videotaped interrogations of CIA detainees at secret prisons, arguing to a federal judge that doing so would endanger national security and benefit al-Qaeda's recruitment efforts.

In an affidavit, CIA Director Leon E. Panetta defended the classification of records describing the contents of the 92 videotapes, their destruction by the CIA in 2005 and what he called "sensitive operational information" about the interrogations.

CIA Urges Judge To Keep Bush-Era Documents Sealed (Washington Post, via @dangillmor)