Courtesy of the Financial Times, the latest news on the financial sector's most self-allegorizing activity: death hedging.  Or more prosaically, the develpment of 'longevity derivatives' and associated indices, through which fund managers can hedge against the risk that people (not to speak of broker-dealers) might not die soon enough.  In this update, Deutsche Börse has introduced live (so to speak) data feeds from undertakers to find out the age of the bodies they bury.

Death data drive new market

From Private Eye, a brief update on the lie detector system soon to be used across the UK on suspected 'benefit thieves'*, i.e. all claimants.  The system comes from Mossad, but what's really alarming is that it is administered by scorched-earth PFI war machine Capita.
*NB. Readers with no sympathy for 'benefit thieves' have come to the wrong website.

Outsourcing
LIE OF THE LAND

Lie–detector technology developed by Mossad for interrogating suspeted Palestinian terrorists is being used in British Jobcentres.

We are standing on the brink of an immense revelation. The revelation of people to states. In the UK – the surveillance workshop of the world – people are becoming increasingly visible through IT projects like the Electronic Patients Record and the National Identity Register, as well as a forthcoming points-based immigration regime premised on the ability to identify subjects and then track and cross-reference their data as never before. Joining-up data, and hence governance, is the name of the game.

Another stitched-up ALMO vote just in time for the upgrading of housing (i.e. mortgagee home 'ownership') to Top Government Priority!  (For those of you who've just joined us, an ALMO is the pre-privatization of council estates palmed off either by Brezhnevite 'voting', as here in Lambeth, or by simple decree, as in Hackney, on tenants who stubbornly fail to volunteer for transfer to the private sector.)  In this case the miraculous 51% majority was delivered by excluding 'spoiled' answers to questions like: