PJC Journal – Original

Lower Saxony and Baden-Wuerttemberg in the west and
Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania in the east were the first to ban smoking
in public places, while the other 13 regions have pledged to introduce
bans by next year.

The three banned smoking in schools, hospitals and state
institutions, but Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania will wait until January
2008 before joining the other two states in outlawing smoking in bars
and restaurants.

“It's a promising start,” said Martina Poetschke-Langer at the German Cancer Research Centre in Heidelberg.

Almost a third of Germans smoke.

The states are allowed their own exemptions and can set their own fines, which are due to vary from €5 to €5000 (source)

However, as in all modern democratic societies, the lobbies maintain
their power… the one exception to the smoking ban in the Bavarian state
(no surprise) is: “Smoking is still allowed in tent festivals”. So, if
you’ve booked your ticket for Oktoberfest next year, don’t come
expecting a smoke-free beer drinking environment… that will take a few
more decades.

Lighting up became a mark of freedom and tolerance after smoking was banned by Hitler's Nazi regime in the 1930s.

The further back you look, the further forward you can see – Winston Churchill

The EU Referendum blog has been closely looking at the English version of the EU Constitution reform treaty, repeated here to spread the word.

Now that the official English version of the revamped constitution
- the so-called “reform” treaty – has been published, we can get down
to studying it in detail. And, as one of our forum commentators noted,
we should avoid getting bogged down in the detail, As he wrote,
“getting lost in the nitty gritty of EU law can led one to missing the
bigger overall picture.”

The bigger overall picture is, in fact, hidden in plain sight, in the very first line of the preamble, which states: “Recalling the historic importance of the ending of the division of the European continent …”.

This is, in fact, the equivalent of “towards ever closer union …”
introduced in this form in the Nice Treaty, and not there by accident.
It highlights the fundamental aim of the “reform” treaty and all those
that preceded it – political integration.

It cannot be
emphasised enough that that is the primary purpose of all EU treaties.
They may aim to accomplish other things (such as “streamlining” the
text) but those are always secondary, no less than in this “reform”
treaty.

Now, for there to be a political union – and that is the
ultimate objective of the European Union – it must have a government
which must have supreme authority over all the governments of the
member states. Its development started with the Treaty of Rome,
amplified by case law from the ECJ (which established the supremacy of
community law), and it continues apace in this treaty, bringing the
government close to the finished state.

This is to be seen in a
new Article 9 of the treaty where the “Union's institutions” are set
out. And it is here that the genius of the original draftsmen must be
acknowledged, in their use of an anodyne term “institutions”. Although
linguistically correct, the more precise term would be “government”.
The moment you use that word, everything falls into place.

Turning to this new Article 9 then, we see the following, with our amendments (in italics) to make the text more precise:

1. The Union shall have an institutional governmental
framework which shall aim to promote its values, advance its
objectives, serve its interests, those of its citizens and those of the
Member States, and ensure the consistency, effectiveness and continuity
of its policies and actions. The Union's institutions government shall be:

the European Parliament

the European Council

the Council

the European Commission (hereinafter referred to as the “Commission”),

the Court of Justice of the European Union

the European Central Bank,

the Court of Auditors.

2. Each institution The government
shall act within the limits of the powers conferred on it in the
Treaties, and in conformity with the procedures and conditions set out
in them. The institutions government shall practise mutual sincere cooperation.

By
comparison with the previous treaty (Article 7 TEU), we see two
additions, the European Council and the European Central Bank, both of
which existed in previous treaties but now become fully-fledged
institutions – i.e., part of the government – of the Union.

The key change, though, is the addition of the European Council. The significance of this, we have rehearsed in detail but certain elements bear repetition.

In
short, the heads of states and governments of the member states, who
comprise the European Council, cease to represent their own member
state interests and become absorbed into a tier of the EU government,
bound by its laws and obliged to further the aims and objectives of the
Union.

This is actually set out in the first part of the
paragraph, which states that it (and the rest of the government) “shall
aim to promote its (the Union's) values, advance its objectives, serve
its interests, those of its citizens and those of the Member States…”.

It
is no coincidence that that, in the pecking order, the Union comes
first, the “citizens” second and the member states third and last. That
states the priorities and the order of preference. By this means, our
heads of states and governments become subservient to the European
Union.

The same, incidentally, applies to the council (of ministers). Currently, the commission website tells us that:

…each
minister in the Council is answerable to his or her national parliament
and to the citizens that parliament represents. This ensures the
democratic legitimacy of the Council's decisions.

This
is only theoretically the case but, under the new treaty, it can no
longer be so, even in theory. As members of the EU's government, each
minister is bound by treaty to “promote its (the Union's) values,
advance its objectives, serve its interests…” before those of their
citizens and own states. They no longer represent their states, but the
European Union. They are not accountable to their own parliaments or
peoples, but to the ECJ.

As we observed earlier, anyone who is
looking for a change in the fundamental relationship between the
European Union and the member states should start here, with Article 9.

By
bringing the European Council into the maw of the EU, together with the
full-time president (who is also a member of the European Council), and
making both European Council and council of ministers subject to the
Union's aims and objectives, the EU is that much closer to creating its
supreme government of Europe, through which to rule us all.

All
the “colleagues” need now is an elected president of the European
Council (which will surely come if this treaty is not stopped) and they
will be there.

The Portuguese premier who is hosting the IGC said he did not think there would be
any difficulties satisfying the UK Government.

But you are going to
have one hell of a problem satisfying the UK public.

 

We
don’t want a liar as Prime Minister, we especially don’t want an unelected liar
as Prime Minister who is going to sell our birthright.

We
demand honesty from now on, we demand a referendum on the European Constitution
Treaty.

Sign the No.10 Petition
for a referendum now.

“The European Union must be destroyed” – “L'Union Européenne diot être détruite”

CETERVM CENSEO CONVENTUM EVROPÆAM ESSE DELENDAM

NuLab – Destroying Britain
from the inside out.

The U.K. government does not have adequate mechanisms in place to
secure data transfer, according to a report prepared on behalf of the
Cabinet Office.

Government departmental security is in silos, and there are
currently no adequate mechanisms in place to share data, according to
the report, the Independent Review of Government Information Assurance.

In some parts of government and the wider public sector, there is a
lack of comprehensive understanding of information security risks,
according to the review, which examined best practice and security
issues that need addressing.

There also need to be specific standards for identity registration,
management and use, and security needs to be measured and audited to a
defined standard, said the report.

The findings echo statements by a key government advisor who claimed that civil servants lack security awareness.

“What keeps me awake at night is that, with some notable exceptions,
across government, there's too little awareness of the scale and
breadth of the risk facing us at the moment,” Lieutenant General Sir
Edmund Burton, a key advisor to the Cabinet Office on information
assurance, said in February.

Just a few weeks before that, security experts expressed their concerns over the U.K. government's data-sharing plans.

(source)

A German security researcher who demonstrated last year that he
could clone the computer chip in an electronic passport has revealed
additional vulnerabilities in the design of the new documents and the
inspection systems used to read them.

Lukas Grunwald, an RFID expert who has served as an e-passport
consultant to the German parliament, says the security flaws allow
someone to seize and clone the fingerprint image stored on the
biometric e-passport, and to create a specially coded chip that attacks
e-passport readers that attempt to scan it.

Grunwald says he's succeeded in sabotaging two passport readers made
by different vendors by cloning a passport chip, then modifying the
JPEG2000 image file containing the passport photo. Reading the modified
image crashed the readers, which suggests they could be vulnerable to a
code-injection exploit that might, for example, reprogram a reader to
approve expired or forged passports.

“If you're able to crash something you are most likely able to
exploit it,” says Grunwald, who's scheduled to discuss the
vulnerabilities this weekend at the annual DefCon hacker conference in
Las Vegas.

Read the full story here.

Say NO to ID Cards, Say NO to the Database State.