Most companies have an employee assistance program, often a toll-free phone number workers can call in a crisis. But at some businesses, employees need only hail the company chaplain for help.

Corporate Chaplains of America, a Christian non-denominational counseling service based in Raleigh, N.C., provides chaplain service as a workplace benefit.

The chaplains can assist with stressful situations that affect workers, including divorce, financial problems, and lately, home loan modifications and foreclosures.

Fear of job loss and the fragile economy prompted Southern Waste Systems in Lantana, Fla., to enlist Corporate Chaplains of America.

“We know that when anxiety is high in people, they don’t produce for themselves and for the company,” said Patti Hamilton, vice president for business development at Southern Waste Systems, a private company that collects, processes and recycles waste.

The company’s owners, a Catholic family, added the chaplain benefit because they wanted to “make people feel safe,” Hamilton said. “It’s not about religion. I’m Episcopalian, and they let me in.”

Southern Waste Systems recently flew a priest in a helicopter over its 10 locations in South Florida, for a blessing of its 360 employees. Accompanying him was the company’s regular chaplain, Albert Beltran, who makes regular rounds at Southern Waste Systems and other South Florida companies.

“We try to help out with everyday things that just pop up in people’s lives,” Beltran said. “So many times they don’t have someone to talk to.”

Happy events, such as someone getting married, also can cause stress, Beltran says. “We show up once a week at each of our locations. That helps us build relationships with people. If they pick up that phone, they’ll be talking with someone they know is a friend,” he said.

Any discussion between an employee and the chaplain is confidential, unless the employee wants the chaplain to address a situation with the business owner or a supervisor. A chaplain would report any employees who threaten harm to themselves or others.

Don Campion, owner of Banyan Air Services in Fort Lauderdale, which provides services for corporate and private aircraft, is upfront about his Christian faith being part of the company’s values: The motto “We honor God in all we do” appears on the company website and in the office lobby.

“My upbringing as a Christian spills over to my work ethic,” Campion said. But not all company workers are Christian, he said. The purpose of Corporate Chaplains is not to bring religion to the workplace, but to “bring caring to a higher level,” he said.

For employees who don’t belong to a church, the chaplain often is the one to conduct the funeral when a family member dies. At Banyan, an employee’s spouse passed away, and the chaplain took care of the arrangements. Beltran “is a resource, like a treasured grandfather might be to some younger person who doesn’t have the experience or the answers to so many of life’s challenges,” Campion said.

Business owners who include their religious faith in their company’s mission or values are protected by their First Amendment rights. “They have free exercise protection as long as it’s not discrimination or harassment,” said Allan Weitzman, an employment lawyer with Proskauer Rose in Boca Raton, Fla.

But if workers don’t get hired or promoted because they don’t share the business owner’s religion, that’s considered discrimination under the law. Offering a chaplain service wouldn’t likely cause any legal issues, Weitzman said, as long as the chaplain is accommodating to requests from those who don’t share the same faith.

Some business owners who offer the chaplain benefit say they have never had an objection from an employee about it.

Tom Ellis, co-owner with his wife Denise of delivery company Palm Express in Sunrise, Fla., has used Corporate Chaplains for his 100 employees for four years. “I thought at first my associates would say, ‘We don’t like having some (chaplain) around here.’ It was just the opposite. They say, ‘Thank you so much for doing this.’ ”

Chaplain Helio Munoz started a Bible study group at Palm Express for the truck drivers and regularly holds a prayer meeting with the company’s leadership. “If we have a big business decision to make, we pray about it and look to the Lord,” Ellis said.

The chaplain visits truckers as they come in during the early morning and when they return in the evening. Truck driver Steven Canalejo said he likes the access to a chaplain as an employee benefit. He and his wife were baptized by Munoz, and they consider him a friend. “He opens his heart to you,” Canalejo said.

Layoffs are another situation where chaplains are often called upon to talk with employees. Beltran said he often stays in touch with dismissed workers just to listen to them or provide resources.

Beltran’s most challenging crisis in the workplace was when an employee died in an unusual accident at his job. He counseled co-workers, held a memorial service at the company, and was involved in the family’s funeral. “It was very traumatic,” he said.

But most of the time, it’s a case of helping employees manage stress. The chaplain recommends employees regularly get away from their work or life pressures by taking a trip, turning off the cell phone and getting some rest.

- Prophecy News Watch

There needs to be a clear distinction between true biblical prosperity and the gospel of materialism, said two African theologians who are experts in the area of prosperity gospel.

The message that God blesses those who give crosses the line from biblical into prosperity gospel when it becomes self-serving and is used to support the preacher’s extravagant lifestyle, said Kwabena Asamoah, the academic dean and associate professor of Religion and Pentecostal Theology at Trinity Theological Seminary in Legon, Ghana, at the recent Lausanne III conference.

Asamoah, who also served as senior research fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religion at Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass., in 2004, defines prosperity gospel as “preaching, interpreting, teaching the word of God and the Gospel of Jesus Christ our Lord in a self-serving manner that places its emphasis on consumerism to suggest that the possession of material things, of those wealth are necessary indicators of general Christianity and God’s approval.”

“Prosperity is not alien to Scripture,” explained Asamoah last Saturday at the multiplex session titled, “Poverty, Prosperity and the Gospel.”

“God does promise to bless His people. But prosperity gospel distorts the blessing to mean only material blessing.”

The African theologian was joined by Femi Adeleye, associate general secretary for Partnership and Collaboration with the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. Adeleye’s special areas of interests are poverty and wealth, and the prosperity gospel.

Adeleye pointed to John 10:10, a verse often used to support material prosperity. He emphasized that the Greek word for life used in the Bible is zoe, which means life in the spirit and in the soul. Zoe is different from bios, which refers to physical, material life. Therefore, what Jesus is telling his followers is to have an abundant life in the spirit and not necessarily in material riches.

“So in this discussion about prosperity gospel, it is important to have an educated, biblical interpretation,” Adeleye emphasized.

The respected African Christian leader shared that he has tried to study the prosperity gospel over the last 20 years and found that it thrives significantly in contexts of extreme poverty where there is little potential wealth and where the minority controls much of the money.

He challenged churches to do more than “dangle the carrot of prosperity before people” and to deliberately look for opportunities to provide vocational training and other ways to lift people out of poverty.

Several participants in the multiplex commented during the Q&A time that the church needs to do a better job teaching the value of work and to be more active in addressing how people can get out of poverty, which the prosperity gospel addresses.

“Giving is part of our worship but prosperity gospel makes giving a transactional activity,” commented Asamoah. Believers are taught that when they make an offering to God they can expect a certain return. But God blesses according to His wisdom and it is not necessarily material wealth.”

“We cannot use offerings to buy God’s grace and that is what prosperity gospel doing,” said the Ghanian theologian.

More than 4,000 Christian leaders representing over 190 nations attended Lausanne III last week in Cape Town. The purpose of the Lausanne Congress was to bring the global body of Christ together to discuss how to best evangelize the world.

- Prophecy News Watch

If you stacked all the Bibles sitting in American homes, the tower would rise 29 million feet, almost 1,000 times the height of Mount Everest.

More than 90 percent of American households own a Bible, and the average family owns three, according to pollsters at the Barna Group. The American Bible Society hands out 5 million copies each year; 1.5 billion Gideon Bibles wait in hotel rooms worldwide.

Scripture outsells the latest diet fads, murder mysteries and celebrity bios year after year. Evangelical publishers alone sold an estimated 20 million Bibles in recession-battered 2009, raking in about $500 million in sales, according to Michael Covington, information and education director of the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association.

“Bibles are in many ways a cash cow,” said Phyllis Tickle, a former longtime religion editor at Publishers Weekly. “The Bible is the mainstay of many a publishing program.”

However, some Christian scholars wonder whether that popularity can sometimes be a bad thing, as a major new translation and waves of books marking the 400th anniversary of the venerable King James Bible inundate the market this fall.

The many translations and “niche Bibles” (think, “The Holy Bible: Stock Car Racing Edition”) sow confusion and division among Christians, invite ridicule from relativists and risk reducing God’s word to just another personal-shopping preference, the scholars say.

“I think we are drifting more and more to a diverse Babel of translations,” said David Lyle Jeffrey, former provost of Baylor University and an expert on biblical translations. Jeffrey thinks Americans need a “common Bible” — a role the King James version played for centuries — to communicate the grandeur of Scripture without reducing it to “shopping-center-level” discourse.

“When we have so much diversity, we lose our common voice,” he said. “It is in effect moving away from a common membership in the body of Christ into disparate, confusing misrepresentations of the rich wisdom of Scripture, which ought to unify us.”

Leland Ryken, an English professor at Wheaton College, a leading evangelical school in Illinois, was more blunt.

“When there is wide divergence among Bible versions, readers have no way of knowing what the original text really says,” Ryken said. “It’s like being given four different scores for the same football game or three contradictory directions for getting to a town in the middle of the state.”

Christian publishers, meanwhile, say they have an obligation — even a divine calling — to make Scripture ready and readable to as many people as possible.

Despite the Bible’s ubiquity, Americans are not necessarily reading or absorbing Scripture, said Paul Franklyn, associate publisher of the Common English Bible, a new translation sponsored by five mainline Protestant publishers.

For example, half of Christians cannot name the four Gospels; a third cannot identify Genesis as the Bible’s first book, according to a recent study by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

The new Common English Bible aims to present an easy-to-read translation from the “theological center,” Franklyn said. Its New Testament debuts this fall; the entire Bible is due next year.

Despite the profitability of Bible publishing, penetrating the crowded market is a “big risk,” requiring equal parts scholarship and salesmanship, Franklyn said. The Common English Bible publishers spent $1 million on the translation and will dole out another $3 million to get people to “pay attention” to it, he said.

Scholars estimate that at least 200 English translations have been published since 1900, many of them revisions of earlier texts. Sorting out the differences between the New American Bible and New American Standard Bible (NASB Bible), for example, can be daunting for even experienced readers.

The market can be so confusing and crowded that half of customers who visit Christian stores to buy a Bible leave without one, according to a study presented to Christian retailers in 2006.

“Heck, I’m overwhelmed, and I’m supposed to know what the hee-haw I’m doing,” Tickle said, author of “The Great Emergence,” a well-regarded book on the future of Christianity.

There’s even a cottage industry of experts to help people choose what Bible. Paul Wegner, a professor at Phoenix Seminary in Arizona who conducts church conferences about the Bible, says Christians constantly ask why there are so many different Bibles, and which is the “right” one. “People almost throw up their hands, there are so many Bibles out there,” he said. “Maybe they’ve created a market for me.”

To counter consumer confusion, publishers began marketing Bibles based on “felt needs,” or secular interests, said Andy Butcher, an editor at the journal Christian Retailing.

Christian publisher Zondervan’s 2010 catalog of Bibles (“The Book of Good Books”) runs 223 pages and includes Bibles tailored toward black children, students, spiritual seekers, women with cancer, busy dads, new moms, recovering addicts, surfers, grandmothers and camouflage enthusiasts.

Tim Jordan, a marketing manager at B&H Publishing Group, a leading Christian publisher that sells niche Bibles, compared them to conversation starters. “It’s just being smart about where people are at and trying to meet them there,” he said. “We need to engage people into the Bible.”

Ryken, however, suspects publishers’ motives may be more economic than spiritual.

By definition, niche Bibles are designed to corner a market segment, he said. In the process, “the Bible loses its identity as the authoritative word of God and becomes something trivial, on par with shoes for hikers or luggage for the international set.”

- Prophecy News Watch

What Bible is the Vatican reading? Senior Church Official Rejects God’s Covenantal Relationship With The Jewish People

This past Saturday, a synod of bishops in Rome tossed the theological equivalent of a hand grenade, threatening to blow up decades of efforts to improve Catholic- Jewish relations.

In a press conference at the Vatican, Monsignor Cyril Salim Bustros, a Greek Melkite archbishop from Boston and president of the Church’s Commission for the Message, launched a blistering attack against the very foundation of Jewish belief.

“The Holy Scriptures,” Bustros declared, “cannot be used to justify the return of Jews to Israel and the displacement of the Palestinians, to justify the occupation by Israel of Palestinian lands.”

Not stopping there, he went on to state that “we Christians cannot speak of the ‘promised land’ as an exclusive right for a privileged Jewish people… There is no longer a chosen people.”

And so, in one fell swoop, a senior Church official sought to deny the unique, covenantal relationship between God and the Jews, rejecting the divine promise to restore the people of Israel to their Land. One cannot help but wonder: What Bible is the Vatican reading? Whichever one it is, it must be missing a few pages, as even a cursory glance at the Scriptures makes clear that the Jewish people’s right to the Land of Israel is indisputably ordained.

Take, for example, Isaiah 14:1-2: “The Lord will have compassion on Jacob; once again He will choose Israel and will settle them in their own land.” Or how about Jeremiah 11:5, where God says: “I will fulfill the oath I swore to your forefathers, to give them a land flowing with milk and honey…” And then there’s Ezekiel 34: 11-13. And Hosea 3:4-5. And Amos 9:14-15. And Obadiah 1:17, Zephaniah 3:19-20 and Zechariah 8:7-8.

You get the point. But it doesn’t seem that the Catholic Church does.

After the Lebanese-born Bustros’s remarks caused a furor, the Vatican spokesman waited two days before issuing a mealy-mouthed statement which did little to calm the storm.

“If one wants a summary of the synod’s position, attention must currently be paid to the ‘Message,’ which is the only written text approved by the synod in the last few days,” the Vatican’s Father Federico Lombardi said. “There is also a great richness and variety in the contributions made by the fathers, but which as such should not all be considered as the voice of the synod as a whole.”

Lombardi’s efforts to contain the fallout won’t fool anyone. There is no getting around the fact that this convocation of bishops was called by the pope himself. Moreover, the perception around the world was that the Vatican had officially delegitimized Israel while assaulting Judaism itself. As Catholic writer William Doino Jr. noted: “In a statement meant to be fully and intensely Christian, Israel was singled out for blame and criticism. That’s not fair, much less Christian.”

Indeed, this entire episode is little more than a cheap bit of politics wrapping itself in the robes of religion. Bustros and his colleagues clearly have a political ax to grind with the Jewish state, and they shamefully do not hesitate to invoke the sacred for this most profane of goals.

My Christian friends tell me that the words “Palestine” and “Palestinians” do not even appear in the New Testament. So the learned bishops could not have come up with the idea of the “occupation of Palestine” while attending Sunday school.

Furthermore, by Bustros’s own definition, the founder of Christianity would also have to be considered an “occupier” and a “settler,” for according to Christian belief, Jesus the Jew was born and raised in Bethlehem.

That is the very same Bethlehem that Bustros would now like to see become part of a Palestinian state.

No matter how one looks at it, the synod’s unbridled insult to Israel and the Jewish people cannot be allowed to stand. If it is not denounced and corrected forthwith, it will quickly be exploited by Israel’s enemies to stir up still more hatred.

In A letter to Cardinal-elect Kurt Koch, the newly-appointed head of the Vatican’s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, the Anti-Defamation League rightly singled out Bustros’s remarks as “the worst kind of anti-Judaism, bordering on anti-Semitism.”

It called on Koch to “swiftly and publicly correct Archbishop Bustros’s shocking and damaging statements,” and to clarify whether his “interpretation of the synod’s final report reflects the intention of the synod on these profound theological matters.”

I would take it one step further. Given the Catholic Church’s long and dark history of anti-Jewish persecution, it is only fitting that the pope himself speak out loudly and clearly on this issue. It is incumbent upon Pope Benedict to transform this turn of events into a profound opportunity to atone for what the Church has done to the Jewish people through the centuries.

Ironically, it was 45 years ago today, on October 28, 1965, that the Second Vatican Council approved a document known as Nostra Aetate, which heralded a sea change in the Church’s position toward Jews. In its wake, much has been accomplished in enhancing relations.

But Bustros and his hate-filled rhetoric now threaten to undermine nearly half a century of dialogue and progress. What a terrible shame that would be.

For while the Church may pride itself on preaching love and tolerance, when it comes to its attitude toward the Jews, it still has a long way to go.

- Prophecy News Watch

On November 12, 2010, Universal Pictures will release a new movie entitled Skyline, which deals with alien spacecraft that suck up the humans who look into the bright blue light these spacecraft project, and then vanish. I believe this movie is more than just the product of the wild imaginations of some cleaver science fiction writers who seek nothing more than to entertain the public and win an academy award for themselves for best picture. I believe this movie may very well play an important role in end time prophecy.

Whether or not intelligent life exists on other worlds is irrelevant in this article and I will not debate the issue here. What is significant is that reports of unidentified flying objects has been around since the beginning of history with literally millions of people reporting to have seen them, yet official contact with their occupants has (supposedly) never been established. Our government, as well as governments around the world, have vehemently denied the existence of alien spacecraft. In fact, the vehemence in which governments have denied their existence builds a strong case for an official worldwide cover-up conspiracy, which makes the possibility of the existence of extra terrestrial life even more believable.

The Rapture of the Church is certain to cause a worldwide panic as an unbelieving public scrambles to explain the disappearance of hundreds of millions of people in an instant. We also know that the anti-Christ will be revealed and empowered shortly after the Rapture. 2 Thessalonians 2:9-12 tells us that the end times antiChrist will tell a lie and that God will send a strong delusion so that all of the unbelievers who are left on the Earth after the Rapture will believe this lie:

“Even him, whose coming is after the working of Satan with all the powers and signs and lying wonders, and with all deceivableness in them that perish; because they receive not the love of the truth, that they might be saved. And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie. That they might be damned who believe not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness”.

What is this lie? The Bible doesn’t tell us, but I can certainly make an educated guess. On September 21, 1987, President Ronald Reagan made what I consider to be a very prophetic statement when he told the Forty Second Session of the General Assembly of the United Nations “How quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.” Is it possible this great lie will be that alien beings from another world abducted the millions of people who just vanished.

Chapter 13 of Revelation also tells us that the anti-Christ will tell a lie that will cause the entire world to willingly follow him. I am at a loss to think of any other lie which the anti-Christ could use that would cause the remaining population of the Earth to forget their differences so quickly and unite with him.

On March 16, 1979, a movie about a nuclear accident and related cover-up was released by Columbia Pictures entitled The China Syndrome. That was just 12 days before the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in Pennsylvania. Many dozens of nuclear scientists have since lined up to say that despite the accident at Three Mile Island nuclear power is still safe. Nevertheless, the public has chosen to believe Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon, and Michael Douglas over the legion of scientists who all have the title “PhD after their name. As a result, the development of nuclear power has all but ceased in the United States as well as many other countries around the world. The power of Hollywood to influence the masses cannot be underestimated and can easily trump the logic and reason of science.

Before I start to sound too condescending I need to confess that many years ago I attended some Star Trek conventions. I know there is no such thing as the Star Ship Enterprise, the Federation of Planets does not exist, and most of the technology that I witnessed on the show was Hollywood illusion and trickery. But still, I saw the characters in real life and even shook hands with some them. For a brief moment the line between reality and fiction seemed to get a bit fuzzy.

The release of a new movie from Hollywood does not, in itself, mean the end of the world is upon us. However, I cannot help but wonder if it is just me, or is there a lot going on in the UFO community all of a sudden that somehow suspiciously suggests that something big is about to happen. For example:

Almost 400 years after it imprisoned Galileo under threat of torture for challenging the view that the Earth was the center of the universe, the Vatican announced that the existence of intelligent extra-terrestrial life may be possible.

The Popes’ astronomer said that he would baptize an alien from another world if it asked him to.

After many decades of silence a group of retired nuclear officers have recently come forward to announce that alien spacecraft visited military installations and disarmed nuclear warheads on intercontinental ballistic missiles.

On September 11, 2010 a UFO forced the closure of an airport in Baotau, Mongolia, for approximately 1 hour while other air traffic was diverted to prevent commercial airliners from crashing into it. On July 7, 2010 the Xiaoshan airport in Hangzhou , China, was closed for approximately 1 hour due to a UFO hovering above it. There have been a total of 8 reports of major UFO sightings in China during a 4 month period.

Astronomers recently announced that they are “100 percent certain” that alien life exists on Earth-like planets.

Theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking, presumably one of the smartest men on the planet, recently felt compelled to declare to the world that he is almost certain that alien life exists in other parts of the universe and that we should avoid contact with such species because it might be devastating to humanity.

The United Nations has an Office of Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA). Recent articles in the media both confirm and deny the existence of an ambassador at this office to be the designated representative who makes first contact with intelligent alien life from another planet.

Maybe all of the events which are now occurring are merely a coincidence and my feeling of being bombarded by a preponderance of suggestions about the potential existence of evil alien life as the cause of the impending Rapture of the Church are unfounded. In less than a month the movie Skyline will be released and millions of moviegoers will witness everyday people being snatched up into alien spacecraft in high definition living color on a wide screen with the most realistic surround sound that our technology can produce. Will this sow the seeds of suggestion in the minds of millions of people around the world? I think so. Is the Rapture closer than most people think? I am absolutely convinced of that.

- Prophecy News Watch

Overlay Asset Management, a $20bn foreign exchange manager, is launching a currency basket it claims represents a “virtual world reserve currency”.

Its Wealth Preservation Currency Index consists of the currencies of the world’s 15 largest economies, weighted by their gross domestic product, adjusted for purchasing power parity.

The PPP element ensures a higher weighting to emerging market currencies than is commonplace in other currency baskets, with the Chinese renminbi (accessed through non-deliverable forward contracts) accounting for 16 per cent, Indian rupee 6 per cent and Brazilian real 4 per cent.

In contrast the International Monetary Fund’s special drawing rights, the nearest approximation to a global currency, consists purely of a basket of developed world currencies.

Overlay says the hedging tool has attracted the interest of sovereign wealth funds, particularly from the Middle East and East Asia, pension funds, insurance companies, wealthy individuals and family offices, while a number of central banks are purportedly keen to use it as a benchmark for their forex reserves.

“The idea is not really to make money, it is to preserve your worldwide purchasing power. It is a wealth preservation strategy over the long term,” said Hélie d’Hautefort, chief investment officer of Overlay, a division of BNP Paribas, which is co-managing the index.

Overlay’s rationale is that investment portfolios are often heavily exposed to the dollar, but many investors have doubts as to whether the greenback can retain its value and remain the world’s primary reserve currency.

However, hedging back to an investor’s base currency is unattractive, it argued, because “no single currency seems safe under the current market conditions and hedging into any one of them may be dangerous”.

Instead, Overlay said, risk was reduced by hedging to all 15 currencies in an index that was a “close proxy” to what a world reserve currency would be, were it to exist. “There is a currency war. If you think there is a trend for emerging market currencies to appreciate or at least for the volatility of currencies to fluctuate a lot, your best interest is to switch your base currency into a basket of currencies because you have less risk,” said Mr d’Hautefort.

- Prophecy News Watch

Rising food prices and shortages could cause instability in many countries as the cost of staple foods and vegetables reached their highest levels in two years, with scientists predicting further widespread droughts and floods.

Although food stocks are generally good despite much of this year’s harvests being wiped out in Pakistan and Russia, sugar and rice remain at a record price.

Global wheat and maize prices recently jumped nearly 30% in a few weeks while meat prices are at 20-year highs, according to the key Reuters-Jefferies commodity price indicator. Last week, the US predicted that global wheat harvests would be 30m tonnes lower than last year, a 5.5% fall. Meanwhile, the price of tomatoes in Egypt, garlic in China and bread in Pakistan are at near-record levels.

“The situation has deteriorated since September,” said Abdolreza Abbassian of the UN food and agriculture organisation. “In the last few weeks there have been signs we are heading the same way as in 2008.

“We may not get to the prices of 2008 but this time they could stay high much longer.”

However, opinions are sharply divided over whether these prices signal a world food crisis like the one in 2008 that helped cause riots in 25 countries, or simply reflect volatility in global commodity markets as countries claw their way through recession.

“A food crisis on the scale of two or three years ago is not imminent, but the underlying causes [of what happened then] are still there,” said Chris Leather, Oxfam’s food policy adviser.

“Prices are volatile and there is a lot of nervousness in the market. There are big differences between now and 2008. Harvests are generally better, global food stocks are better.”

But other analysts highlight the food riots in Mozambique that killed 12 people last month and claim that spiralling prices could promote further political turmoil.

They say this is particularly possible if the price of oil jumps, if there are further climatic shocks – suchas the floods in Pakistan or the heatwave in Russia – or if speculators buy deeper into global food markets.

“There is growing concern among countries about continuing volatility and uncertainty in food markets,” said Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank. “These concerns have been compounded by recent increases in grain prices.

“World food price volatility remains significant and in some countries, the volatility is adding to already higher local food prices.”

The bank last week said that food price volatility would last a further five years, and asked governments to contribute to a crisis fund after requests for more than $1bn (£635m) from developing countries were made.

“The food riots in Mozambique can be repeated anywhere in the coming years,” said Devinder Sharma, a leading Indian food analyst.

“Unless the world encourages developing countries to become self-sufficient in food grains, the threat of impending food riots will remain hanging over nations.

“The UN has expressed concern, but there is no effort to remove the imbalances in the food management system that is responsible for the crisis.”

Mounting anger has greeted food price inflation of 21% in Egypt in the last year, along with 17% rises in India and similar amounts in many other countries. Prices in the UK have risen 22% in three years.

The governments of Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Indonesia, Brazil and the Philippines have all warned of possible food shortages next year, citing floods and droughts in 2010, expected extreme weather next year, and speculation by traders who are buying up food stocks for release when prices rise.

Food prices worldwide are not yet at the same level as 2008, but the UN’s food price index rose 5% last month and now stands at its highest level in two years.

World wheat and maize prices have risen 57%, rice 45% and sugar 55% over the last six months and soybeans are at their highest price for 16 months.

UN special rapporteur on the right to food, Olivier de Schutter, says a combination of environmental degradation, urbanisation and large-scale land acquisitions by foreign investors for biofuels is squeezing land suitable for agriculture.

“Worldwide, 5m to 10m hectares of agricultural land are being lost annually due to severe degradation and another 19.5m are lost for industrial uses and urbanisation,” he says in a new report.

“But the pressure on land resulting from these factors has been boosted in recent years by policies favouring large-scale industrial plantations.

“According to the World Bank, more than one-third of large-scale land acquisitions are intended to produce agrofuels.”

But the World Development Movement (WDM) in London warned that food speculation by hedge funds, pension funds and investment banks was likely to prompt further inflation.

According to the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission, speculators on the trading floor of the Chicago Exchange bought futures contracts for about 40m tonnes of maize and 6m tonnes of wheat in the summer.

Longtime hedge fund manager Mike Masters, who has worked with WDM, said: “Because there is already much more capital available in the world than hard commodities, speculators can increase the price of consumable commodities, like foodstuffs or energy, much higher than traditional consumers and producers can react.

“When derivative markets are linked to commodity markets, this nearly unlimited capital from the financial sector can cause excessive price volatility.”

US government reports of much cooler-than-normal water temperatures in the Pacific, which traditionally lead to extreme weather around the world, last week added to food price uncertainties.

- Prophecy News Watch

Did you know that The Department of Defense has an ongoing research project to remote control soldier’s emotions and tolerance for stress? A soldier who didn’t display fear in dangerous situations and didn’t experience fatigue, would make a better fighting machine. And what better way to turn a human being into a mere machine devoid of personal freedom and autonomy. In a world that is under total surveillance, there is not likely to be much we could call freedom. Freedom to speak or think would be freedom to speak or think what the authorities permit.

In my new book, Mass Surveillance and State Control: The Total Information Awareness Project, I detail the ways in which our personal privacy has been and continues to be eroded and how we are now heading toward a brave new world of total information awareness and control. Now afoot is an interconnected web of trends toward greater and greater modes of control, which will predictably advance with the advent of new technologies and the loosening of constitutional safeguards against the abridgment of privacy. Accordingly, what is needed now more than ever before in the history of humankind is a vigilant, well organized, grass roots effort to stem this malignant tide before it is too late.

Steadily escalating is the program of warrantless wiretapping of millions of American’s personal, electronic communications, which began under the Bush administration. This mass dragnet of personal email messages, phone calls, and Internet searches is now being done with a virtual blank check from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FIS) courts, which were originally created in 1978 to assure that, in gathering foreign intelligence, the government would not abridge the Fourth Amendment rights of Americans.

The Obama administration has blocked law suits against telecom companies such as AT&T for assisting the National Security Agency in this mass dragnet of electronic communications; and it has also sealed up the ability of American citizens to seek redress by suing the federal government, even if it can be shown that such wiretaps had been unlawfully conducted.

The Obama administration has just announced its intention to make it easier to wiretap Internet communications that use encryption such as Blackberry transmissions, social networks like Facebook, and direct peer to peer transmissions like Skype. The Justice Department is also now seeking to get a federal appeals court to overturn a ruling prohibiting the clandestine planting of GPS tracking devices on people’s cars without a warrant.

Congress has recently reauthorized the most invasive provisions of the U.S. Patriot Act. Pursuant to this Act, in the course of conducting a terrorism investigation, if a federal agent discovers evidence implicating a person in a crime, this information can be admissible in convicting the individual of that crime. Thus, if a person is under surveillance by the FBI and if it is discovered therein that this person is growing or possesses marijuana, then this information can be used to secure a criminal conviction, even though the information was acquired without probable cause. What is more, pursuant to the Patriot Act, the FBI agent would not need a warrant to conduct the terrorist investigation through which the incriminating information was acquired.

Amid such thin and ever diminishing legal protections, as surveillance technologies continue to be developed and expanded, we can expect increasingly greater and greater abridgments of privacy.

Consider, for example, how the Transportation Security Agency has recently advanced beyond the use of metal detection devices, baggage scanners, and physical searches. After an unsuccessful attempt by a would-be terrorist to ignite a bomb in Times Square, the Obama administration has stepped up use of body scanners at airports, which electronically undress people, exposing even their genitals. This may be just the tip of the iceberg.

The Defense Department is presently developing a new generation of scanning technology that can scan brains. Given the evisceration of Fourth Amendment protections, what legal safeguards are left to prevent government from taking its national security interests to the next level of requiring all air travelers to have their brains scanned for “suspicious” thoughts before boarding their flights? Changes of such magnitude do not happen overnight but occur incrementally. Once we give up our right to privacy regarding our bodies, it is that much easier to do the same regarding our minds.

In public places such as a city street Americans have been well advised not to expect privacy. However, in their own homes, Americans have always enjoyed a right to privacy. Unfortunately, the public/private distinction has already begun to be dismantled. A global positioning (GPS) device on your car over weeks, months, or years can paint an elaborate profile of you—whether you are having an affair, how often you frequent the local tavern, what people you visit, what political gatherings you attend, what congregation to which you belong, how often you attend services, and so on.

Radio frequency Identification (RFID) tracking devices placed on the things you buy are also a potential goldmine of private information about you; and it may be only a matter of time before these items come complete with both RFID and GPS tracking capabilities.

Most of us have also become increasingly aware of the presence of surveillance cameras on the nation’s roadways as well as city streets. These surveillance cameras have also found their way into facilities such as banks and other “sensitive,” privately owned properties. While some of these cameras are unmanned, others run live feeds that are monitored 24-7 by law enforcement. Such cameras are also plugged into a network of federal databases such as the FBI’s biometric database, and, through use of special biometric identifiers (including facial recognition software), can integrate this data with the live feeds from these video surveillance cameras.

Technologies now also exist that can “see” through walls. Without the need for warrants, the hunt for terrorists can literally end up in your bedroom.

Did you know that Thomson Reuters, which controls Reuter’s News Service, now also maintains a massive data warehouse consisting of the personal information of millions of Americans? This includes health, credit card, and banking records, and virtually all other online, personal data. Military contractors such as Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) supply data mining software to government agencies such as the NSA, which enables these agencies to analyze the information in this massive database, including integrating it with other personal data such as email and phone conversations, web sites you have visited, and Internet searches you have conducted.

Did you consider that the software, which integrates and parses through this massive web of information, is prone to yielding false positives? In other words, by some fluke, you can end up on a government watch list, or worse, branded an “unprivileged enemy belligerent,” taken into custody, and given “enhanced interrogated.” It is no longer a matter of thinking you have nothing to hide when everyone is now considered a terrorist suspect.

As detailed in Mass Surveillance and State Control, these and other technological, social, political, legal, financial, and economic factors key into an integrated web of emerging state controls, which are part of an even larger picture. This larger picture includes the changing politico-corporate landscape of media and telecommunication companies with an insatiable appetite for increasing their bottom lines through military contracts, relaxed Federal Communication Commission (FCC) regulations, the granting of mergers, corporate tax breaks, and other forms of incentives for cooperating with the prevailing government authority.

This larger picture also includes a “war on terror” and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which have been used to justify ever increasing levels of state surveillance; a revolving door between government officers and military contractors; a current trend toward control of both content and conduit of the Internet (the gutting of “net neutrality”) by behemoth companies such as Comcast; and a transnational quest for political and economic power and control.

Unfortunately, the prognosis for the survival of the free world is quite bleak if the stated trends are not stopped very soon. It is the ever constant creep of a culture of control that presents the most insidious danger. As we begin to accept increasingly greater and greater restrictions on our civil liberties, the technology to further abridge these liberties continues to expand and lead the way to even greater abridgements. This process is subtle and we are not likely to notice that our freedom is gone until it is too late, or maybe not even then. In the end, we may consider ourselves a “free” people but have little understanding of what that even means.

- Prophecy News Watch

Forget touchscreens, the iPhones and iPads of the future might be controlled by something even more impressive: the human mind.

Scientists have discovered that it is possible to manipulate complex visual images on a computer screen using only a handful of brain cells.

The study, published in Nature, found that when volunteers had their brains connected to a computer displaying two merged images, they could force the computer to display one of the images and discard the other.

The signals transmitted from each subject’s brain to the computer were derived from just a small number of brain cells.

‘The subjects were able to use their thoughts to override the images they saw on the computer screen,’ said the study’s lead author, Itzhak Fried, a professor of neurosurgery at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The study is remarkable in the development of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), devices that allow people to control computers or other devices with their thoughts.

BCIs have been hailed as the future for allowing people with locked-in syndrome to communicate or control prosthetic limbs using only their minds. Studies in the past have shown how BCIs can be used perform simple tasks, such as controlling a computer cursor, with just a few brain cells.

But in this study, BCI technology was used to understand how thoughts and decisions are shaped by a group of brain cells.

‘This is a novel and elegant use of a brain-computer interface to explore how the brain directs attention and makes choices,’ said Debra Babcock, a program director at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

The study involved 12 people with epilepsy who had fine wires implanted in their brains to record seizure activity – a common way of locating areas of the brain that are responsible for seizures.

In this study, the wires were inserted in the medial temporal lobe, a brain region important for memory and the ability to recognise complex images, including faces.

While the recordings from their brains were transmitted to a computer, the research subjects viewed two pictures superimposed on a computer screen, each picture showing a familiar object, place, animal or person.

They were told to select one image as a target and to focus their thoughts on it until that image was fully visible and the other image faded away. The monitor was updated every one-tenth of one second based on the input from the brain recordings.

As a group, the subjects attempted this game nearly 900 times in total, and were able to force the monitor to display the target image in 70 per cent of these attempts.

Subjects tended to learn the task very quickly, and often were successful on the first try.

The brain recordings and the input to the computer were based on the activity of just four cells in the temporal lobe. Prior research has shown that individual cells in this part of the brain respond preferentially – firing impulses at a higher rate – to specific images.

For instance, one cell in the temporal lobe might respond to seeing a picture of Marilyn Monroe, while another might respond to Michael Jackson. Both were among the celebrity faces used in the study.

Dr. Fried’s team first identified four brain cells with preferences for celebrities or familiar objects, animals or landmarks, and then targeted the recording electrodes to those cells.

The team found that when subjects played the image-switching game, their success appeared to depend on their ability to power up cells that preferred the target image and suppress cells that preferred the non-target image.

‘The remarkable aspects of this study are that we can concentrate our attention to make a choice by modulating so few brain cells and that we can learn to control those cells very quickly,’ said Dr. Babcock.

- Prophecy News Watch

Scientists at The University of Manchester have developed software for mobile phones that can track your facial features in real-time.

Eventually it will be able to tell who the user is, where they are looking and even how they are feeling.

The method is believed to be unrivalled for speed and accuracy and could lead to facial recognition replacing passwords and PIN numbers to log into internet sites from a mobile phone.

‘Existing mobile face trackers give only an approximate position and scale of the face,’ said Dr Phil Tresadern, lead researcher on the project.

Scientists at The University of Manchester have developed software for mobile phones that can track your facial features in real-time

‘Our model runs in real-time and accurately tracks a number of landmarks on and around the face such as the eyes, nose, mouth and jaw line
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‘A mobile phone with a camera on the front captures a video of your face and tracks twenty-two facial features. This can make face recognition more accurate, and has great potential for novel ways of interacting with your phone.’

Originally intended as part of a face- and voice-verification system for access to mobile internet applications such as email, social networking and online banking, alternative uses for the device could include fun applications that, for instance, attach virtual objects to the user’s face as they move around.

‘At this stage, we’re particularly interested in demonstrating uses for the face-tracking part of the technology, which is the area The University of Manchester is involved in,’ said Dr Tresadern, who is based in Manchester’s School of Cancer and Enabling Sciences.

‘It is very fast and I can’t find anything that can rival it on a mobile phone.’

Face verification is already used in laptops, webcams and the Xbox 360 Kinect but this is the first time the technology is being used with such sophistication in mobile devices such as smartphones.

The new software, built on 20 years of research at the University, has been demonstrated on a Nokia N900 for the EU-funded “Mobile Biometrics” (MoBio) project.

- Prophecy News Watch