Eideard

Daniel Gárate’s career came crashing to earth a few weeks ago. That’s when the Los Angeles Police Department warned local real estate agents not to hire photographers like Mr. Gárate, who was helping sell luxury property by using a drone to shoot sumptuous aerial movies. Flying drones for commercial purposes, the police said, violated federal aviation rules.

His career will soon get back on track. A new federal law, signed by the president on Tuesday, compels the Federal Aviation Administration to allow drones to be used for all sorts of commercial endeavors — from selling real estate and dusting crops, to monitoring oil spills and wildlife, even shooting Hollywood films. Local police and emergency services will also be freer to send up their own drones.

But while businesses, and drone manufacturers especially, are celebrating the opening of the skies to these unmanned aerial vehicles, the law raises new worries about how much detail the drones will capture about lives down below — and what will be done with that information. Safety concerns like midair collisions and property damage on the ground are also an issue…

“As privacy law stands today, you don’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy while out in public, nor almost anywhere visible from a public vantage,” said Ryan Calo, director of privacy and robotics at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford University…

Drone proponents say the privacy concerns are overblown. Randy McDaniel, chief deputy of the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Department in Conroe, Tex., near Houston, whose agency bought a drone to use for various law enforcement operations, dismissed worries about surveillance, saying everyone everywhere can be photographed with cellphone cameras anyway. “We don’t spy on people,” he said. “We worry about criminal elements.”

Who determines who is an “criminal element”? You got it. Sheriff Randy McDaniel.

The American Civil Liberties Union and other advocacy groups are calling for new protections against what the A.C.L.U. has said could be “routine aerial surveillance of American life…”

“We see a huge potential market,” said Ben Gielow of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, a drone maker trade group.

Anyone else see a huge potential for Uncle Sugar to watch over every waking moment of our lives spent outdoors?

A group of militia members arrested nearly two years ago in southern Michigan effectively operated as a “social club” that amassed guns and bombs to defend themselves, not to plot a war against the government, their lawyers said Monday at the start of a trial for seven of the defendants…

“David Stone was exercising his God-given right to blow off steam and open his mouth,” his lawyer, William W. Swor, told jurors.

But the federal authorities contend that the Hutaree (pronounced hu-TAR-ee) was on the brink of carrying out a plan to begin attacking police officers, possibly by killing one and then using improvised explosives to ambush mourners at the officer’s funeral…

Nine members of the Hutaree were arrested in March 2010, days after Mr. Stone declared, “It’s go hour,” in a voice mail to an undercover federal agent who had been training with the group, Mr. Graveline said. The seven now on trial are charged with seditious conspiracy, attempting to use weapons of mass destruction and various firearm charges. If convicted, they could be sentenced to life in prison…

One of the nine arrested, Joshua Clough, pleaded guilty in December to a firearm charge that carries a minimum sentence of five years in prison. Another defendant, Jacob Ward, was ruled incompetent to stand trial and is undergoing treatment.

Mr. Graveline said the authorities have seized about 100 firearms, including some illegal short-barrel rifles and machine guns, and 148,000 rounds of ammunition from the defendants’ homes. He showed jurors one table covered with guns and held up other examples of evidence collected, including flak jackets, ghillie suits used to camouflage snipers, Kevlar helmets, night-vision goggles and bomb-making instructions…

Mr. Swor described Mr. Stone as a preacher’s son who was raised in an “apocalyptic tradition” and studied the Book of Revelation. Mr. Stone, who invented the name Hutaree because he thought it sounded like something from the “Star Wars” movies his sons liked, believed he needed to be able to defend his family from the Antichrist, Mr. Swor said.

It’s easy enough to dismiss fools like this as paranoid and deluded. Except for the fact that the arrests were initiated because the threat level to the lives of citizens and police seemed elevated and immediate.

The reality is that these murderous clowns aren’t any funnier than any other rightwing gang – from the KKK to posse comitatus militias – who have murdered innocent people for decades.

Rupert Murdoch faces revolt from his own staff…after journalists angry at the arrest of five senior colleagues accused the company of throwing them to the wolves.

The 80-year-old media mogul is due to fly into Britain this week to address workers at his Wapping plant and reassure them of his commitment to his remaining UK newspaper titles. But he is likely to receive an angry reception after five more journalists on The Sun were arrested as part of Operation Elveden – the police investigation into allegations of bribery.

The arrests early on Saturday morning were the second batch in a fortnight and sources close to the investigation have indicated that they are unlikely to be the last.

Journalists at The Sun yesterday accused the company’s Management Standards Committee (MSC), which handed a huge amount of information to detectives, of allowing a “witch-hunt” to take place.

One angry journalist said the MSC were behaving like “reptiles” in order to protect the reputation of Mr Murdoch’s parent company in the United States.

Ten senior journalists on the paper have now been arrested and bailed as detectives probe allegations that they illegally paid police officers and other public officials for information. But staff at the paper said many of the allegations were “pathetic” and related to matters many years ago where reporters had bought drinks for contacts in the pursuit of legitimate stories…

One source at Wapping said: “There is a real feeling of anger, deepening anger but also defiance about what is going on. But there is not the mood for a strike, as people are loyal to the paper but perhaps not the people who run it…”

It has also now emerged that the Sun’s parent company News Corp could face an investigation by officials under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The law allows American companies to be fined hundreds of millions of dollars for illegal activities overseas.

It would be pleasant change in political practices on the part of governments in both the US and UK to offer Murdoch something more than a powder puff spank on his poo-poo. He probably owns more politicians in the British Parliament than Exxon-Mobil does in the US Congress.

Italy in the winter of tracking tax evaders

Police fanned out across Milan in late January halting more than 350 vehicles, mostly luxury SUVs and Porsches.

At checkpoints, including one adjacent to the fashionable Corso Como, the police got the driver’s license and registration, which they passed on to the national tax agency. The tax authorities will use the data to check if the cars’ owners had declared enough income — and of course paid the right amount of income taxes — to justify their lifestyles.

It was at least the fifth raid targeting wealthy Italians since a Dec. 30 sweep at the posh Cortina d’Ampezzo ski resort, where 251 high-end cars were stopped, including Ferrari and Lamborghini supercars… Rome, Portofino on the Italian Riviera and Florence have also been targeted…

Italian authorities are applying to luxury-car owners the same logic they displayed more than a year ago, when tax agents started tracking down the owners of yachts berthed in Italy’s harbors to see if they were current on their tax payments.

In the raid in Cortina D’Ampezzo, tax agents found that 42 luxury car owners had declared income of less than 30,000 euros for 2010 and 2009. Another 19 luxury cars were owned by businesses which posted a loss in the previous year. The sweep in Florence discovered a builder with no tax record who was driving a Mercedes with his wife who was receiving social assistance. Tax officials also found a German owner of a BMW X5 SUV with no declared income, according to the website of the tax agency’s Florence office.

This is serious stuff for the government, which estimates that tax evasion costs the country about 120 billion euros a year in lost revenue…

The collection effort is part of Prime Minister Mario Monti’s plan to curb record borrowing costs on Italy’s 1.9 trillion-euro debt and avoid following Greece, Portugal and Ireland which all had to seek bailouts.

Demand for vehicles from the likes of Ferrari and Maserati brands and Lamborghini slumped 53 percent in January, with just 66 supercars sold, according to Anfia, the association of Italian carmakers. The new taxes and high-profile dragnets have also sent exotic-car prices down 20 percent, according to dealer association Federauto…

Still, for Ferrari, which earns higher profit margins than any other Fiat unit, it’s not the end of the world. There’s plenty of demand outside Italy for the company’s sports cars.

“Italy isn’t a concern for Ferrari as it sells its cars abroad,” Marchionne said last month in Detroit.

I wonder what people like John Boehner and Harry Reid intend to drive when they retire from Congress – and they no longer have to lie quite as much as they do now about what they really care about.

You have to feel sorry for the police officers who are required to frisk people for guns or knives – after all, if someone who doesn’t want to be arrested is carrying a lethal weapon, the last thing that most of us would want to do is get close enough to that person to touch them. That’s why the New York Police Department teamed up with the United States Department of Defense three years ago, and began developing a portable scanner that can remotely detect the presence of a gun on a person’s body. The NYPD announced the project yesterday.

The device uses infrared light rays to image radiation being emitted by a person’s body. Wherever a solid metal object such as a gun is blocking those rays from reaching the body, a silhouette of that object will appear on the scanner’s screen. So far, the technology only works from a distance of about 1 meter, although NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly hopes that its range can ultimately be extended to at least 25 meters.

The plan is for the scanner to be mounted on a van, then used on suspects who would otherwise have to be physically searched.

Har. Long way to go, folks.

Coppers will not only follow your every step – they’ll count the number of zipper teeth on your fly.

Constable Kynan Lang inspects the garage which the ‘stolen’ car rolled into at Stirling

A car reported as stolen from an Australian car park has been reunited with its owner, after apparently parking itself in a closed garage.

Adelaide police say they think the car rolled down an incline in the car park, across a street and into a garage forcing itself under the roller doors. The door closed behind it and the car remained undetected for 17 days until the home-owners returned from holiday.

Fearing a burglary, they called police, who deduced the curious turn of events.

“Although the roller door was closed, it had been damaged slightly and pushed out of its tracks,” a police spokesman is quoted in Australian media as saying.

Police believe that the car had not been left in the parking gear and so rolled though the car park and eventually “forced itself under the roller door, parking perfectly inside the garage where it remained safely under cover for 17 days”.

Har!

Capuchin habit of using bones of dead monks as decoration

An Italian prisoner who was serving out his sentence in an institution run by Capuchin monks has begged to return to jail rather than submit to the rigours of monastic life.

David Catalano this week fled the halfway house in Sicily for the second time in six weeks, complaining that the regime run by the bearded Capuchins was too austere. The 31-year-old inmate first ran away from the Santa Maria degli Angeli halfway house, near the town of Enna in central Sicily, at the end of November.

He turned himself into a police station, was re-arrested, and sent back.

But the criminal, who was serving a sentence for theft and had been sent to the institution under a form of house arrest, made a fresh break on Monday evening. “I don’t want to go back with the Capuchins,” he told probation officers…

The authorities acceded to his request – he was promptly sent to a prison in the nearby town of Nicosia.

The Capuchins are an off-shoot of the Franciscans, from whom they split in the early 16th century. They advocated a much simpler, more rigorous monastic code based on poverty, prayer and penance…not allowed to own property or handle money, and their food was obtained by begging…

I’d call it cruel and unusual punishment – even for a society like Italy – paying homage to religious foolishness.

Tormenting yourself to please some invisible dude in the sky has been left behind by most mainstream religions. The nutballs remaining are on their own.

Just part of cultural history – Kelpies – sculpture

A pioneering police division has cut serious violent crime by a record 20% by identifying and tackling specific “problem families” and helping to find jobs for young people in trouble.

Police in North Lanarkshire have identified the most prolific problem families in different council wards and used a combination of persuasion and compulsion to get young people into work, sport and training.

The new figures from the police division show there have been 90 fewer victims of serious assault in the past year – with estimated savings of £2 million for the police and NHS…

Divisional Commander Chief Superintendent Graham Cairns said: “We know that a small number of people are responsible for most of our crime.

“By mapping out diversionary activities and connecting kids into ongoing activities that interest them we have reduced youth disorder by 43% in the last two years and that is massive. We cut serious assaults by 20% last year and they are down a further 14% so far this financial year…overall violence has been cut by 22% and that includes murder and attempted murder.

“We ran a Pathfinder initiative for kids who are emerging on our radar and we work with them over consecutive months before going on an outward-bound weekend with them.

“They get to know the cops and we get to know them, but they also get to break down barriers with the other local kids whom they perhaps saw as a threat…As an extension of this we have now had meetings with employability agencies and are trying to connect those kids into training for employment.

“Some kids come from families with maybe three generations of worklessness and if we are to break that cycle then we have to be proactive in doing it.

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Reuters Pictures used by permission

Anti-government protesters shout slogans while standing in front of laser beams emitted by riot police in the village of Diraz west of Manama, Bahrain December 29, 2011. Hundreds of anti-government protesters took to the streets demanding the downfall of the regime. Riot police fired tear gas to disperse and prevent demonstrators from entering the main highway.

There’s always some stupid hooligan at a football match in Europe who tries to blind a striker or goalkeeper during a critical moment in play. FIFA and national football associations try – to varying degrees – to stop these dullards from causing injury. Arrest and bans are not at all unusual.

And then we have police departments doing the same thing.

Norway’s holiday butter shortage leads to criminal solutions

Two Swedes have been arrested by Norwegian police for smuggling more than 250kg of butter into the country, offloading one consignment for more than £25 a packet.

The two men, from the Northern city of Umea, managed to make their first delivery before a police patrol stopped their van on Saturday evening.

“They allegedly sold the coveted butter packets in Beitstad Steinkjer before they drove north along the county road 17,” police officer Lars Letnes told Norway’s Adresseavisen newspaper.

“Then they were stopped by a police patrol, which found 250kg of butter in the small van.” A sudden spike in demand has left Norway with a butter shortfall of between 500 and 1,000 tonnes, leaving the country’s citizens facing Christmas without their seven traditional varieties of home-cooked biscuit…

The arrests follow the seizure earlier this month of a 90kg consignment found stashed in the car of a Russian man at the Norwegian-Swedish border. The Norwegian police plan to destroy the confiscated butter.

They could always switchover to lard. That’s the traditional way to handle shortages of plaque in your circulatory system in New Mexico.