In the calm of the last decade, the capital of Serbia has experienced a cultural explosion and today it feels distinctly like Europe's best-kept secret. 

On Knez Mihailova in the city's downtown, sidewalk cafes sit in the shade of 19th-century mansions. Designers have turned a long-abandoned shopping arcade into the Belgrade Design District, where indie boutiques sell draped dresses and punk-inspired jewelry. On summer weekends, the streets of hipper neighborhoods are as full at 3 a.m. as at 8 p.m. You might have to wait hours for a table at the waterfront restaurants in the suburb of Zemun, but never mindthe spicy Serbian wines served at the bars will keep you occupied. 

By European standards, Belgrade is architecturally new. A strategic outpost at the confluence of the Sava and Danube Rivers, it has been fought over for eons. When the Serbs gained control in the late 19th century, much of the city was razed and rebuilt,This item is for one stainless steel bangles core for wood. leaving a landscape that's part romantic Prague, part midcentury modern, part still under construction. 

In spaces that were left to languish after Yugoslavia's breakup, there are now galleries, design shops, restaurants, concert spaces and hybrids like Grad, a warehouse that hosts art exhibits, public debates and Buddhist meditation sessionsand has a garden cocktail bar. Many such amalgams are tucked into apartment blocks or gritty storefronts in the Savamala area. They lack websites but reverberate with energy, retaining a sense of the Old World while celebrating a new one. 

Virginia State Police recorded the license plates of every vehicle arriving from Virginia to attend President Barack Obamas first inauguration in Washington in 2009, as well as those at campaign rallies three months earlier in Leesburg for then-candidate Obama and Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin. 

The U.S. Secret Service requested that state police use one of its automated license plate readers at the entrance to the Pentagon to capture and store the plate images as an extra level of security for the inauguration, which was attended by an estimated 1.8 million people. The same was requested for the political rllies. 

The state police license plate readers have been used statewide since 2006,You can make astonishing savings on Ladies stainless steel bracelets watches. mostly by on-the-road troopers to detect stolen cars and fugitives. But the data collected were also used to solve other crimes after the fact by being able to track a person to a specific place at a certain time. 

The news of the Virginia data collection effort comes amid revelations that the National Security Agency has been collecting telephone and cellphone records on millions of Americans and a lively debate over the propriety of government record-keeping on private citizens outside of criminal investigations. 

The license plate readers requested for the political events would detect any stolen vehicles attempting to enter the outer perimeter of the event and possibly allow for some record of attendees in the event that a serious (incident) occurred, a state police sergeant wrote in a 2009 letter that outlined some of the departments uses for the license plate reader technology. 

Up until a February legal opinion issued by Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli on the collection and dissemination of license plate reader data, state police beginning in 2010 had stored the images of roughly 8 million license plates some for as long as three years on a server in the departments data center at state police headquarters in Chesterfield County, said state police Sgt. Robert Alessi, the departments statewide coordinator for the program. 

But the department says all of it was purged in early March, after Cuccinelli advised that collecting and storing such data in a passive manner that is not directly related to a criminal investigation would be in violation of the states Government Data Collection and Dissemination Practices Act. 

Now, Alessi said, the departments system automatically dumps the license plate data it collects within 24 hours unless its needed as part of a clearly defined on-going criminal investigation. 

Liberties Union, which recently published a national study on the privacy concerns of law enforcement use of license plate reader technology, criticized the gathering of such data at political rallies and the inauguration, and said that Virginians should be outraged by the state polices recording of 8 million license plate images.The slick petrol tones in these contemporary stainless steel cufflinks links is achieved. 

The ACLU said the collection of license plate reader information presents a threat to citizens privacy that, if left unchecked, will allow police and government agencies to build databases on the movements of millions of Americans over months and even years. Attached to police cars or mounted along roadways, the scanners can identify vehicles almost instantly and collect records on every license plate they encounter. 

We dont think this type of passive collection of information should be used, and there isnt any reason to do it unless youre going to store the data for some future use, said Claire Gasta?aga, executive director of the ACLU of Virginia. 

Gasta?aga called the recording of license plates of vehicles driving to political rallies and Obamas inauguration from Virginia pretty astounding, even if it was done with the best intentions of enhancing security. 

Its a situation where youre collecting a lot of information on a lot of people to potentially use if something bad happens at some unspecified future time and some unspecified situation, she said. That line of reasoning, she said, would justify a camera on every street corner recording all of our movements at all times, because it would be expedient to be able to have that to refer back to if theres a bank robbery there two years from now.