Lille - Dozens of “French” “youths” clashed with police in a town in northeast France overnight, burning cars during a rampage triggered by the killing of a 22-year-old man, an official said on Sunday.

Two police officers, two firefighters and five residents suffered minor injuries during the violence that raged until Sunday morning in Vitry-le-Francois, said Sylvaine Astic from the regional prefect’s office.

Armed with baseball bats and firebombs, about 50 “youths” went on a rampage, torching cars and setting fire to garbage bins in the town of 17 000 people, Astic told AFP.

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The compulsory identity card could be used to carry out surveillance on people, MPs warned today.

Members of the Home Affairs Select Committee said it was concerned that the way the authorities use sensitive data gathered in the multi-billion pound programme could “creep” to include spying.

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Chief Constable Julie Spence is singing the praises of one of the most ‘crucial’ members of her Cambridgeshire policing team.

Not a brilliant detective or a resourceful community liaison officer, instead she goes by the title of Translation Services Manager.

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Under the guise of urban warfare training the 26th Expeditionary Unit an elite group of U.S. Marines will conduct a martial law training exercise at 26 “surrendered” locations in central Indiana from June 4th thru the 17th. While state officials and media are doing their best to assure the public that this military takeover of civilian property is somehow a good thing, ignoring the Posse Comitatus Act which fundamentally prohibits these types of exercises. These two weeks of training are also a contradiction of military tradition against deployments among the civilian population dating back to the end of the Civil War. Why then are the citizens of Indianapolis and six other Indiana towns being made to take part in two weeks of patrols and ambushes?

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Wanna tap e-mail, voice and Web traffic for the government? Well, here’s your chance. Comcast, the country’s second-largest Internet provider, is looking for an engineer to handle “reconnaissance” and “analysis” of “subscriber intelligence” for the company’s “National Security Operations.”

Day-to-day tasks, the company says in an online job listing, will include “deploy[ing], installing] and remov[ing] strategic and tactical data intercept equipment on a nationwide basis to meet Comcast and Government lawful intercept needs.” The person in this “intercept engineering” position will help collect and process traffic on the company’s “CDV [Comcast Digital Voice], HSI [High Speed Internet] and Video” services.

Since May 2007, all Internet providers have been required to install gear for easy wiretapping under the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA. Anyone taking this position, Comcast says, will have to be “knowledgeable with … standards such as CALEA.” (The company is all too happy to “intercept its customers’ communications” for a fee of a thousand dollars, Secrecy News revealed last year.)

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The number of serious stabbings has increased by more than 50 per cent in less than a decade, it has been revealed.Nearly 6,000 victims were treated in hospital last year for stab or slash wounds. This compares with around 3,800 people injured in 1998.

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Gordon Brown’s case for holding terrorism suspects without charge for 42 days is bogus and little more than scaremongering, according to Sir John Major.

The former Conservative Prime Minister, writing in The Times today, said that Mr Brown’s security measures were more likely to encourage terrorist recruitment than defeat the extremist threat to Britain.His remarks coincided with mounting concerns among antiterrorist police that concessions made to win Labour backbench support for the 42-day proposal had created a complex and almost unworkable scheme.

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