OTHER NEWS CLIPS

By Richard Reeves, Universal Press Syndicate

I have seen the future and it is personal. Or "personalized." Those were the buzzwords this year at Renaissance Weekend, the gathering of hundreds of accomplished men and women from walks of life as separate as church and state.

"Personalized" was the word favored by Oren Etzioni of the University of Washington, an authority on artificial intelligence. He talked about each of us having an "intelligent agent," that is, an almost invisible friend living, probably, in cellular phones--something like a cross between a bottled genie and the little men who turn on the light when you open a refrigerator.

"You will be able to talk into the phone [or other device] and tell your car you're on your way," he said. "It will know where to go without more help from you…. Or you can say, 'I want to call Chicago' and the phone will get you the best deal on the call." "Or, you can ask a pretzel bag, 'Are you fresh?"' said Bill Cheswick of Bell Labs. He was not kidding. Computer chips will be the size of big gnats. "There are computers in hotel doorknobs right now. Next you'll be talking to light bulbs and shirts." Mr. Cheswick did not tell us what you would talk to the shirt about, but they'll think of something.

The implications of all that are many and enormous, but Mr. Etzioni focused on shopping. Mr. Etzioni said your intelligent agent, which would know everything about you, including shoe size, foot shape and personal quirks would be a shopper with infinite time and patience, even as it worked almost instantaneously everywhere in the world (or on the Web) to find you or me the perfect shoe at the best price. Sorry, Nike. Forget the swoosh, close the stores.

On future medicine, Ian Hunter, a microbiotics professor at MIT, talked about a most personal, inside-out health care system, your own "virtual body." At birth, a "body" would be created from each person's genetic data and as life went on, basic medical examinations would be comparisons between the real you and the projected you of the virtual body. Any differences between the model and the real you would be the first indicator of medical problems.

This is not pie in the sky; this is where we are. Science is moving and changing so fast now that John Cramer, a University of Washington physicist, who certainly spoke for me, said the only thing we can be certain of is that "everything we know is wrong."

(Reuters) They found Wolfgang Dircks on his sofa in his small Hamburg apartment last month. He had died while watching television sometime before Christmas--five years ago.

No one noticed when the 43-year-old divorced, disabled loner had passed away. No one had apparently even noticed when he was alive.

The lonely death of the retired welder made headlines when his mummified remains were found, but hardly a month passes in Germany without a similar report of an isolated soul having died weeks, months or even years before being discovered.

The ghoulish find in the one-room Hamburg flat has led to a bout of national soul-searching as Germans ask themselves: Has German society really become that cold?

"It's tragic, but unfortunately it happens all the time in an industrial society like ours," said Luebbo Roewer, a spokesman for the German Red Cross in Bonn. "People don't look after one another the way they once did. Families are disintegrating. People don't care anymore."

Sociologists and social workers say that Germans are increasingly living "next to each other" rather than "with each other" and that it is possible for people like Dircks to disappear without being missed.

"I'm sure that there are undiscovered corpses lying in apartments all over Germany right now," said Ralph Kirscht, a former vicar who is now director of a Bonn counseling center. "The disintegration of society is a huge problem in Germany and the social climate is getting worse all the time."

Kirscht said that he once attended the funeral of a travelling salesman who had been dead for three months before anyone noticed. "More and more people are leading isolated lives," he said. "They have no friends, no family. It's perverse that people can die and no one notices. But it happens all the time."

The European Union is quietly getting ready to approve legislation that will allow the police to eavesdrop both on Internet conversations and Iridium satellite telephone calls without obtaining court authorization.

The legislation is part of a much wider memorandum of understanding between the E.U., the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Norway, a nonmember European nation. That agreement allows authorities to conduct telecom surveillance across international borders, according to a Europol document leaked to members of the European Parliament.

If approved, the agreement would permit real-time, remote monitoring of e-mail, as well as of calls placed on satellite telephone networks such as those maintained by Iridium and Globalstar. Unlike most laws in Europe, the agreement will allow law enforcement to listen in without a court order.

Ironically, in September, the European Parliament called for accountability of Echelon, the U.S. National Security Agency's spying network that is reportedly able to intercept, record, and translate any electronic communication--telephone, data, cellular, fax, e-mail, or telex.

Under European law, representatives of each member nation can pass legally binding resolutions. Further, the resolutions don't require the approval of either the European Parliament or the individual parliaments of EU members.

Joseph Farah, WorldNetDaily

* Your e-mail communications and phone calls overseas are being intercepted by a global government surveillance system.

* Your cellular phone calls to your elected government officials are being monitored by the same mysterious Echelon program controlled by the U.S. National Security Agency.

* Your international faxes are also being copied and analyzed by this 50-year-old international civilian espionage organization.

"Wow," you say. "This is scary stuff. How could our government get away with this? Whatever happened to our right of privacy?"

Most of what we know about Echelon we owe to the investigative reporting of New Zealander Nicky Hager, who spent 12 years digging into the system--work that resulted in the 1996 book Secret Power: New Zealand's Role in the International Spy Network.

Here's how Echelon works: First, it targets all international phone company tele-communications satellites from five ground intercept stations. Second, the system targets other civilian communications satellites. And third, another group of facilities monitors international communications as they are relayed from undersea cables to microwave transmitters.

Sounds like an impossible task, doesn't it? But just think of how easy it is for your own personal computer to search the Internet for keywords. That's the same concept employed by Echelon. Each country involved in the program selects categories of intercept interest and corresponding keywords and phrases. Through this method, Echelon has the potential to intercept millions of communications.

The civil rights implications of such spying by our own government is chilling, but it's pretty much old hat. The late CIA Director William Colby testified to Congress more than 20 years ago that the NSA monitored every overseas call made from the United States.

The first annual awards defending the individual's right to privacy have been made at a ceremony in London. The 1998 UK Big Brother Awards were held on the 50th anniversary of the writing of George Orwell's novel, 1984. Privacy International announced winners it judged to be the modern-day equivalents of Big Brother in the novel.

Director Simon Davies said the time was now right for the awards. "Surveillance has now become an inbuilt component of every piece of information technology on the planet, we've got a long way to go to wind the clock back," he said.

Menwith Hill in Yorkshire, a listening station used by America's National Security Agency and described as the biggest U.S. spy station in the world, won the special lifetime achievement award.

By Mark Boal, Village Voice

NEW YORK -- Cameras stare as you browse at Barnes and Noble or rent a video at Blockbuster. They record the way you handle the merchandise at Macy's or how you glide to the music at the Union Square Virgin Megastore. Grab latte at Starbucks, and cameras are watching every sip you take. Peering from skyscrapers with lenses that can count the buttons on a blouse three miles away, they watch every move you make.

With little public awareness and no debate, the scaffolding of mass surveillance is taking shape. "I feel like Paul Revere, shouting 'The cameras are coming, the cameras are coming.'" says Norman Siegel, the New York Civil Liberties Union's executive director.

All summer, a crew of NYCLU volunteers scoured Manhattan on a mission to pinpoint every street-level camera. Next month, Siegel will unveil their findings: a map showing that cameras have become as ubiquitous as streetlights. It's impossible to say how many lenses are trained on the streets of New York, but in one eight-block radius, the NYCLU found over 300 in plain sight. And as one volunteer acknowledges, "There are tons of hidden cameras we didn't catch."

That's because it's routine in the security trade to buttress visible cameras with hidden ones, "so everything's covered and it doesn't look like a fortress," as one consultant says. If you listen to the people who install them, cameras are as common and elusive as shadows.

New York is hardly the only spy city. More than 60 American urban centers use closed-circuit television in public places. In Baltimore, police cameras guard downtown intersections. In San Francisco, tiny cameras have been purchased for every car of the subway system. In Los Angeles, the camera capital of America, some shopping malls have central surveillance towers, and to the north in Redwood City, the streets are lined with parabolic microphones. Even in rustic Waynesville, Ohio, the village manager is proud of the cameras that monitor the annual Sauerkraut Festival.

America is fast becoming what Gary Marx calls "a surveillance society," where the boundary between the private and the public dissolves in a digital haze. "The new surveillance goes beyond merely invading privacy … to making irrelevant many of the constraints that protected privacy," Marx writes in Undercover: Police Surveillance in America. For example, mass monitoring allows police to eliminate cumbersome court hearings and warrants. Immediately after a crime, cops check cameras in the vicinity that may have captured the perpetrator on tape.

So, as surveillance expands, it has the effect of enlarging the reach of the police. Once it becomes possible to bank all these images, and to call them up by physical typology, it will be feasible to set up an electronic sentry system giving police access to every citizen's comings and goings.

This apparatus isn't limited to cameras. Recent mass-transit innovations, such as the MetroCard, are also potential surveillance devices. A MetroCard's magnetic strip stores the location of the turnstile where it was last swiped. In the future, Norman Siegel predicts, it will be possible for police to round up suspects using this data. E-Z Passes already monitor speeding, since they register the time when drivers enter tollbooths. Once transportation credits and bank accounts are linked in "smart cards" (as is now the case in Washington, D.C.), new surveillance vistas will open to marketers and G-men alike.

Already the FBI clamors for the means to monitor any cell-phone call. Meanwhile other government agencies are developing schemes of their own. The Department of Transportation has proposed a rule that would encode state drivers' licenses, allowing them to double as national identity cards. Europeans know all about internal passports, but not even the East German Stasi could observe the entire population at a keystroke. "What the secret police could only dream of," says privacy expert David Banisar, "is rapidly becoming a reality in the free world."

What's more, spy cams are getting smaller and cheaper all the time. "A lens that used to be 14 inches long can now literally be the size of my fingernail," says Gregg Graison of the spy shop Qüark. Such devices are designed to be hidden in everything from smoke detectors to neckties.

"Once the new surveillance systems become institutionalized and taken for granted in a democratic society," warns Gary Marx, they can be "used against those with the 'wrong' political beliefs; against racial, ethnic, or religious minorities; and against those with lifestyles that offend the majority."

New York police taped large portions of the Million Youth March in Harlem. Social psychologists say that taping political events can affect a participant's self-image, since being surveilled is unconsciously associated with criminality. Ordinary citizens shy away from politics when they see activists subjected to scrutiny. As this footage is splayed across the nightly news, everyone gets the message: hang out with dissenters and you'll end up in a police video.

But even ordinary life is altered by surveillance creep. Once cameras reach a critical mass, they create what the sociologist Erving Goffman called, "a total institution," instilling barely perceptible feelings of self-consciousness. Deprived of public privacy, most people behave in ways that make them indistinguishable: you're less likely to kiss on a park bench if you know it will be on film. Over the long run, mass monitoring works like peer pressure, breeding conformity without seeming to.

Communications professor Carl Botan documented these effects in a 1996 study of workplace surveillance. Employees who knew they were being surveilled reported higher levels of uncertainty than their co-workers: they were more distrustful of bosses, their self-esteem suffered, and they became less likely to communicate. The result was "a distressed work force."

It's a brave new world. There are thousands of watchers in Spycam City--a ragtag army as likely to include your neighbor as your boss or the police. In 1998, anybody could be watching you.

(David:) Poor Orwell, if he'd walk into the world today and see just what it's really like, he'd probably die of fright! In his day it was all science fiction, a make-believe story to entertain people, but now it's reality--one that's not going to go away. Soon enough the Antichrist will be able to control the masses, and he'll be keeping an eye on you.

(Religion Today) Charles Duke went to the moon and back, but he says his biggest thrill is finding God. A former astronaut and retired brigadier general, Duke is one of only 12 men to walk on the moon. But that thrill and subsequent business success wasn't enough to fill his life--without Jesus Christ--he says. He spent 72 hours on the moon in 1972 as part of the Apollo 16 mission. Walking on the moon "was not a spiritual experience for me," Duke said. "I wasn't searching for God in those days. I had about all of God I thought I needed, and that was one hour every Sunday morning in church … I really was not a Christian, but a 'churchian.'"

Linda Bowles

The cover of the July 20 issue of Newsweek magazine was designed to get my attention. I picked it up from the rack at my local bookstore and gave it a closer look. It portrayed a drawing of a woman looking through a telescope and a man looking through a microscope. In bold letters, the cover proclaimed the title of the week's featured story, "SCIENCE FINDS GOD."

I was happy to learn that an increasing number of scientists have experienced a leap of reason, and become convinced that the universe is purposeful and rational. I know angels rejoice at the news.

However, the story title, "Science Finds God," reflects a self-centered, rather childlike view that man is at the center of the universe. What struck me as funny was the idea that God has been lost and now is found. God is not lost. Scientists have not found God. God has found scientists. Thank God for that.

I was also amused at the idea that God may be "found" by looking billions of light years out into space or looking deeply into a microcosm of DNA and atoms. The Creator is way out there or way down there, hard to find and out of sight.

God has not hidden Himself. He has made Himself manifest everywhere. We are surrounded by miracles. Everything scientists see through a telescope or a microscope that leads them to the thought of a living Creator can be found in my backyard--or yours.

Let's keep our perspective. In the struggle to find concordances between God and science, the burden is on science.

Scientists do not create natural laws or phenomena; they merely investigate them. Scientists seek to learn about the handiwork of another.

Scientists cannot add one speck of matter to the universe, or take one speck away. They may, within natural limits, rearrange the specks.

It is the job of scientists to construct theories and hypotheses to account for established facts. Scientists have not, nor will they ever be able to, construct a godless hypothesis that will account for the existence of life and the existence of an infinite universe.

Surely, by now it must be obvious that there are spiritual laws at work in the universe and in our lives, beyond the reach of our senses, even senses extended by telescopes and microscopes.

Science can teach us much about the what and the how of things, but essentially nothing of the why of things.

Science has no answers for those dread questions that come to us at night, waking us from sleep: Why am I here? What does it all mean? Is death the end?

As British author Aldous Huxley observed, "Science has 'explained' nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness."

There is a light that will fight our darkness. There is a Creator who will find those who seek Him and lead them to it.

(Jesus speaking:) More and more people are beginning to see the truth and accept that there is something out there greater than they are, responsible for things over which they have no control. Some do not want to accept that it is I, and so place other names on what they cannot explain.
Satan tries to blind their eyes and stop their ears to any idea that there might be a plan for them and for the universe they live in. He is the author of confusion, and so he aggressively promotes the ideas of confusion and chance, saying that they must look inward to themselves to find all the answers, as they can only trust and rely on themselves and there is nothing more.
But at least even this willingness to accept that there is something more and greater than they are is good, as then the little seeds of faith that I implant in their hearts and minds can grow and I can start to show them more as I speak to their hearts with My still, small voice.

(CBN) With nation linked to nation through the economics of trade and the financial markets, and certain regions of the world almost perpetually on the brink of war, some believe there's a real need for world government.

(David:) There will never be total peace without the Savior--the real Savior, that is, not the false so-called savior who is nothing more than the Devil incarnate. There can never be total peace till the hearts of men are changed and the hearts of those that make war are subdued.
That's a lot of what we'll be doing at the beginning of the Millennium--making peace, causing people to live together in harmony, and punishing those who rebel. But once they have been subdued by the Lord, there'll be peace for a thousand years. Jesus will rule over all, and we'll reign in righteousness with Him! 

Cash is headed for a whole new dimension. MasterCard has invested millions in the development of an E-cash system called Mondex. Smart Mondex cards have tiny embedded microchips that can store not only electronic dollars but also five other types of currency, an abbreviated medical history and even a personalized electronic "key" that can open everything from your apartment to your office. Says Henry Mundt, MasterCard executive vice president for global access: "The chip that we are putting on the card now will form the platform for the ultimate in remote access for consumers to their funds, anytime, anywhere. What we really see happening in the future is consumers being able to design their cards to meet their individual needs. We refer to that as moving more toward life-style cards." E-cash is already everywhere, from highway tolls to subways.

Technology and finance have become one and the same. As William Niskanen, chairman of the Washington-based CATO Institute, puts it, "The distinction between software and money is disappearing." And nowhere is that truer than in the world of cold, hard cash.

Paper money is, in its way, amazing stuff. It is, for instance, easily transferable and widely accepted. You can pay the baby sitter without even thinking about the complex financial dynamics underlying the transaction. Cash--especially U.S. dollars--is also portable, storable and exchangeable. (Just ask the thousands of Russian Mafiosi who pay for nearly everything with $100 bills.) But paper cash does have some awful drawbacks. Lose it and it's gone; sit on it and it may lose its value overnight: think about what just happened in Asia, or earlier in South America.

Enter electronic cash. The idea of digital money is simple enough: instead of storing value on paper, find a way to wrap it in a string of digits that's more portable and (most important) smarter than its paper counterpart. Smart money? Well, yes. Because digital cash is endlessly mutable, you can control it much more precisely than paper money. Think about the $2,000 check you send to your daughter at college for expenses. How is that money really spent? Books … or beer? Electronic cash takes that relatively simple transaction--passing an allowance--and makes it into a much more intelligent process. And one that hardly requires something as old-fashioned as a bank.

For starters, you can send the money over the Internet encoded in an E-mail instead of sending a check. Your daughter can store the money any way she wants--on her laptop, on a debit card, even (in the not too distant future) on a chip implanted under her skin. And, you can program the money to be spent only in specific ways. You might instruct some of the digits to go for books, some for food and some for movies. Unless you pass along a few digits that can be cashed at the local pub, she'll have to find someone else to buy the drinks.

Smart, digital cash may also address some of the other problems of paper money. If you lose your digital cash, for example, you will be able to replace it instantly by asking your computer to invalidate the disappeared digits and replace them with a fresh set. And unlike paper money--which stops earning interest as it shoots out of the ATM slot--smart money can keep earning interest until the moment you spend it.

This "cash-interest phenomenon" may sound trivial, but it's a link to a whole other revolution in finance: the dissolution of the government monopoly on money. After all, if some small bank in Luxembourg or Belize is willing to pay you more interest on your digital cash, who are you to argue? Government money will still exist, but so will dozens of other currencies, each tailored to a specific need and endlessly convertible and exchangeable. Says Howard Greenspan, president of Toronto-based Heraclitus Corp., a management consulting firm: "In the electronic city, the final step in the evolution of money is being taken. Money is being demonetized. Money is being eliminated."

Maybe. Digital cash, for all its charms, is still climbing a tough road to acceptance. "Between 40% and 50% of transactions today use cash and checks," says Steve Cone, an executive at Fidelity Investments. And there are plenty of folks who still like cold cash just fine. Says economist Bruce Skoorka: "Look, every day there's a guy who shows up at a bank in Bogota with a big box full of cash. You think he wants to travel with a traceable digital-cash card?"

In fact, in the eyes of some digital-cash Pollyannas, one of the great things about traceable, bit-based cash is that it will do away with whole categories of cash-based crime. "Paper money is, I hate to say it, the root of all evil," says DigiCash founder Chaum, who argues that the traceability of electronic cash will mean the end of some types of crime. "What kidnapper would take a ransom payment by check? Once you build the infrastructure for electronic cash, the incremental cost of replacing paper money is small. And the social benefits could be amazing."

But the China Syndrome aspect of all this interconnected finance is among its most worrisome features. What if the whole interconnected computer network crashes? (For that matter, what if just your part does?) What if a hacker breaks in at the wrong place? This new electronic world challenges everything we thought we knew about finance, but maybe not what we know about economics. Will a high-speed global economy put an end to the boom and bust of the business cycle, or will it create dangerous interlinkages across borders, where a bad year for the Mexican economy, say, might accidentally trigger a global depression?

(David:) There it is, in black and white, printed by the world itself! They're slowly getting people turned on to the convenience and the availability of such cash systems, and before long there'll be a chip, as they said right here--the damnable, diabolical, devilish, Satan-inspired Mark of the Beast!
All of you who may be scoffing and sitting back and criticizing those who see the urgency of getting out the Word now had better take notice. This isn't something that we wrote. No, this comes from the mouth of their own people. Maybe this is what it's going to take for some people who've been doubting the Word to see that it's the truth. The Bible has predicted just this sort of thing.

By Patrick O'Connor

A few weeks ago, I was talking to a good friend of mine, a self-confessed "electronic nerd" who casually mentioned that the US government recently launched a new satellite into space.

Nothing unusual in this, you might think. But this is no ordinary satellite. When it beams down to Earth, this satellite can read handwritten documents. A great improvement, my friend said, over the existing spook satellites which can only read license plate numbers!

He went on to say that the US government is working on a satellite capable of looking through walls. This should give you pause to reflect when taking a shower!

I was skeptical that things had really gotten so bad, so I decided to do some poking around and called some of my old friends in the "spook business" to see if they could put me in the picture. Below, I outline just some of what I learnt.

Phones. There is an agency in the US which, with the assistance of its sister agency in the UK, can completely blanket the world with its eavesdropping capabilities. The agency obviously doesn't listen to every conversation, but it does listen to and record any conversation containing a key word.

It works like this: You are talking to aunt Sally and you mention that Uncle Ralph's boy, Fred, was recently apprehended for selling drugs. Bingo… "Selling drugs" activates a "key word" computer program and your conversation is automatically recorded.

You can be talking in English, Spanish, Hindustani or any of 120 languages. It doesn't matter: the computer is programmed to be fluent in all of them.

The "Big Ear," as it is nicknamed, will then store your conversation until its content can be filtered through another program. If this program determines your conversation is "significant," a government operative will listen to it and on the basis of what he hears, he can launch further monitoring of your calls or prompt an investigation into your affairs.

The "Big Ear" is not programmed to put conversations into their proper context. So be careful not to use words such as "money" and "laundering" in the same sentence. "Dad sent me some money because I don't even have enough to get my laundry." It is always a good idea to be circumspect when using the phone. You may be using "key words" in a totally innocent manner, but this could still draw you under the spotlight.

Have you ever received complaints from friends that they can't reach you on your private phone line, because it's always engaged? If this ever happens to you, call in a security expert to check your phone instruments. You may be the victim of the Hook.

The Hook is a small, almost undetectable computer chip placed in the telephone. It enables the person who placed it to send a signal down your line. This signal activates your phone in such a way it becomes a transmitter and will relay any conversation held near the phone back to the eavesdropper. In this way, your private conversations can be monitored and recorded from any location in the world. What gives the Hook away is that your phone will be engaged whenever the snoop monitors the private conversations in your home or office.

(David:) You'd better watch out for your conversations on the phone, folks! These may seem to be days of relative peace and openness, but the Enemy is always watching and listening, and some of his cohorts in worldly governments may be monitoring your lines. You're not evildoers, but you'd better avoid all appearance of evil, and avoid saying anything that could cause you or others you're talking to any trouble. Be wise as serpents and harmless as doves.

Professor Ruut Veenhoven of Erasmus University in the Netherlands has compiled a world database of happiness, measuring life expectancy against subjective life appreciation in 48 industrialized nations.

Sadly, residents of the Baltic states scored among the least cheerful--and they can't blame it on the long, dark winters. Iceland ranked the happiest.

"At least we beat Russia," one Latvian said. "That's all that matters."

Saddest states:

1. Bulgaria

2. Nigeria

3. Belarus

4. Russia

5. Latvia

6. Lithuania

7. India

8. Estonia

9. Romania

10. South Africa

From Byron and Mercy, Lithuania

What Children See and Do: Studies of Violence on TV. (The Christian Science Monitor) The simplicity of the experiment at the day-care center and the starkness of the results stunned the parents.

When a class of two- to five-year-olds watched public television's big-hearted purple dinosaur, "Barney," they sang along, marched along, held one another's hands, and laughed together.

The next day, the same class watched the aggressive teenage avengers, "Power Rangers." Within minutes, they were karate-chopping and high-kicking the air--and one another.

"Even though the goal of these programs isn't to teach, our kids are learning because they're always learning," says David Walsh of the National Institute on Media and the Family, who conducted the experiment.

According to the National Television Violence Study, prime-time violence, on both broadcast and cable networks, has increased since 1994. The study also concluded that the way violence is portrayed in most instances--glamorized, sanitized, and without negative consequences--poses a serious risk to children.

"These patterns teach children that violence is desirable, necessary, and painless," says Dale Kunkel of the University of California at Santa Barbara, where the study was done.

(The Age Melbourne) Society's obsession with materialism and violent films has resulted in many children growing up with little or no understanding of moral or spiritual values.

Ms. Diane Tilmann, an American educational psychologist, said materialism and violence in films had diverted "time and focus away from traditional pastimes and the transmission of culture and spiritual values. We have not yet recognized the profound influence of violence in films on youth. It is time to look at what we are creating."

Addressing a United Nations-sponsored conference on education in Melbourne, Ms. Tilmann cited recent United States statistics on television viewing habits which found that the average 11-year-old had watched 10,000 murders on television.

Another survey showed that 45 percent of Americans said they would want $1 million to give up their television while 25 percent said they would need more than $1 million.

"One can sit in front of TV and simply have the mind filled. Many children, consequently, have limited time for the essential tasks of childhood which are critical for physical, cognitive, emotional, spiritual and social growth," Ms. Tilmann said.

(David:) It's funny that when studies like this come out, people think they're finding out something new! When children's heads get packed so full of violence, of course they're going to imitate it and become like that! "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he." If you're constantly feeding and thinking and meditating on all that System junk, of course that's how you're going to be! The world is reaping what it's sown, the fruits of all these violent images, and will continue to even more in the future.
The Devil got just what he wanted. He not only got all this violence and horrible imagery that's filling these kids' hearts and minds, but he's successfully deceived people into taking away what would have balanced it out--all the good influences of the Lord and His love, the Bible and prayer. So there's not much left except the monopoly that the Devil has on their minds and hearts through television. He's been taking full advantage of it, too--brainwashing them to become his little violent robots to hurt instead of love.

He would know. (UPI) Ted Turner told graduates at Virginia Commonwealth University that there are more important things in life than making lots of money. The media baron said he was qualified to say such a thing, "having made a lot" himself. Turner--who founded CNN, TBS and TNT and owns the Atlanta Braves--told his audience that he is proudest of his family. He urged the graduates to put family first and make sure that they pursue careers they can enjoy. Turner also advised his audience not to watch "too much TV."

Twenty-five South Koreans a day kill themselves. (AP) An average of 25 South Koreans a day are committing suicide, with most believed driven to desperation by economic woes, prosecutors said. Thousands of companies have collapsed, and the number of jobless people has doubled to more than 1.5 million since South Korea called in the IMF in December to bail out its floundering economy. High interest rates and dried-up credit also left many families bankrupt. In South Korea's Confucian society, men often equate business failure or inability to support their family with dishonor.

Child vaccine linked to autism. (BBC) A study by doctors at the Royal Free Hospital in London has suggested that a common childhood vaccine may be linked with autism and cause an intestinal disorder. The head of the research team, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, raised alarms because children's behavior changed drastically shortly after they received the controversial single dose of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine. He believes that the combination of the three virus strains may overload the body's immune system and cause the bowel disorder to develop.

The body of evidence. (The London Times) In the course of our lives, we will on average spend 3-1/2 years eating, 12 months talking and two weeks kissing. We will spend six months on the lavatory and shed 19 kg of dead skin. Parents exhausted by chasing after young offspring will learn that by the age of two, the average infant will have crawled 93 miles (150 km). These and other fascinating facts have been uncovered by a team of BBC researchers working on the series The Human Body.

Fat is latest foreign invader in France. (Reuters) Excess fat has become the latest foreign invader in France, following on the heels of burgers and Hollywood films. "Obesity, a plague that has come from the other side of the Atlantic, is poisoning Europe," said the French daily Le Parisien. The study found that 16 million people, or 37 percent of the French population, were overweight. More than eight percent were obese--sufficiently overweight to pose a significant threat to health--and about one percent were severely obese. Dieticians have been warning for years that the French are gradually going the way of the Americans, eating more and more high-fat fast food and getting less and less exercise.

Martyrs. (Christian Daily News) According to an estimate appearing in the January issue of the International Bulletin of Missionary Research, the average number of Christian martyrs per year worldwide is 163,000.

(AP) It was the German religious reformer Martin Luther who said, "If you're not allowed to laugh in Heaven, I don't want to go there."

The Rev. Lowell D. Streiker, a Christian comedian, agrees. Streiker tells more than 2,000 jokes in his new book, An Encyclopedia of Humor.

Some samples: Did you hear the one about the rabbi, the minister and the priest who went fishing? When the fish were not biting, the rabbi and the priest got out of the boat and walked across the water to find a good spot.

The minister, too, got out of the boat, but each time he started to sink and had to clamber back on board.

"Do you think that we should tell him where the rocks are?" the priest finally said to the rabbi.

Or how about the story of the older Baptist woman who walked into a Methodist church one Sunday? The pastor asked her why she was a Baptist, and she replied that it was because her parents and grandparents had been Baptists.

"Ma'am, that's really not a good reason to be a Baptist," the preacher said. "Suppose your mother and your father, and your grandmother and your grandfather had been morons, what would you have been?"

Without batting an eye, she replied, "I guess I'd have been a Methodist."

Geoff Metcalf

Privacy has become an anachronism, something that we used to have but which is almost nonexistent nowadays. It is illegal for the United States to spy on its citizens … kinda. The laws have been circumvented by a mutual pact among five nations. Under the terms of the UKUSA agreement, Britain spies on Americans and America spies on British citizens, and then the two conspirators trade data.

This system is called ECHELON, and has been kicking around in some form longer than I have. The result of the UKUSA treaty signed by the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand was and is to have a vast global intelligence monster which allegedly shares common goals. The system is so "efficient" that reportedly National Security Agency (NSA) folk from Fort Meade can work from Menwith Hill in England to intercept local communications without either nation having to burden themselves with the formality of seeking approval or disclosing the operation.

The London Telegraph reported in December of last year that the Civil Liberties Committee of the European Parliament had officially confirmed the existence and purpose of ECHELON. "A global electronic spy network that can eavesdrop on every telephone, e-mail and telex communication around the world will be officially acknowledged for the first time in a European Commission report."

The report noted: "Within Europe all e-mail, telephone and fax communications are routinely intercepted by the United States National Security Agency, transferring all target information from the European mainland via the strategic hub of London, then by satellite to Fort Meade in Maryland via the crucial hub at Menwith Hill, in the North York moors in the UK.

"The ECHELON system forms part of the UKUSA system, but unlike many of the electronic spy systems developed during the Cold War, ECHELON is designed primarily for non-military targets: governments, organizations and businesses in virtually every country."

Long ago and far away, Adolf Hitler was talking to Hermann Rauschning and said, "The people about us are unaware of what is really happening to them: They gaze fascinated at one or two familiar superficialities, such as possession and income and rank and other outworn conceptions. As long as these are kept intact, they are quite satisfied. But in the meantime they have entered a new relation: a powerful social force has caught them up. They themselves are changed. What are ownership and income to that? Why need we trouble to socialize banks and factories? We socialize human beings."

I see someone has made a TV movie of "Brave New World." Are we to view it as a work of fiction, or a foreshadowing of what looms in the very near future?