December 2004

The Boston Globe reports on the frankly sinister plan for the inhabitants of Fallujah now that “it’s over”. The US Marine Corps is apparently going to bring back the 300,000 or so people who fled the city in time for the elections. So they can fully enjoy the benefits of democracy, certain special arrangements have…

Cabalamat Journal has an interesting post on the European Union and its influence in the world under the amusing title The European Union is the Borg. They’ve also started blogrolling us, so have a link! They refer to this article in the Washington Post by Robert “Paradise and Power” Kagan. Some points – I think…

If the current Identity Cards Bill is passed, remember that appealing against decisions involved is a crime. Well, not quite. Even though most of the monster fines – up to £2,500 a time if your card fails to swipe properly and is considered “damaged” – will be treated as a “civil penalty” rather like an…

Among the portfolio of accusations against David Blunkett, there is one I suspect is the most significant of the lot but hasn’t got the ink it deserves. In accordance with the best Labour traditions, of course, it’s also one of the matters that the Home Office’s self-investigation doesn’t cover. Mind you, the Sunday Torygraph did…

Chris Lightfoot runs a detailed critique of the ID Cards Bill, and pulls up exactly what I did on Tuesday. That is, the Bill’s killer clauses that give the Government powers to force us to carry the cards (despite their denials), to force us to show them to use the NHS, public education and social…

Today is the 20th anniversary of the world’s worst ever industrial accident, at Bhopal in India. Thousands – we don’t know exactly how many – of people were gassed when a huge tank of methyl isocyanate leaked at Union Carbide’s plant there. Multiple layers of safety should have been present but were not. The victims…

The FT reports, via Suburban Guerrilla, on a bizarre request by US cinema distributors to the director of a film version of The Merchant of Venice. Michael Radford was a little surprised when he was asked to “paintbox the wallpaper”, as he didn’t think wallpaper existed in the 16th century. Closer examination showed that the…

Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell has been summoned to Congress’ Judiciary Committee to answer a detailed list of electoral irregularities. It’s too long to repost here, but as a taster, it includes places where there was a 124% turnout, others where 5,000 more people voted for a Democratic judge than for a Democratic president,…

The Guardian’s separatist insurgency gathers pace towards all-out civil war. After the now-notorious articles on the Ukraine by Jonathan Steele and John Laughland, it was the paper’s liberal-hawk tendency’s turn to hit back. On Tuesday, columnist David Aaronovitch delivered this rant about Mr. Laughland, who returned fire in the letters page the next day. Bizarrely,…

The French socialist party’s membership has voted yes to the European Constitution in an internal referendum. This probably kiboshes the former prime minister Laurent Fabius’s attempt to rebuild his career after his disgrace in the contaminated blood scandal. I’m not sorry, especially given some of the No camp’s arguments – Fabius argued that the constitution…