2004

Linky (German) Metro AG, a German supermarket operator, is suing the publishers of the Duden Dictionary of Foreign Words for defining “metro” as “the underground railway, especialy in Paris and Moscow”. Not only that, but they have also had a pop at the public transport services of Hamburg, Munich and Berlin for using the M-word.…

Will it be the Canadian police over his involvement with Hollinger (including a $3.1 million performance bonus for running a venture fund that lost 24% of its value every year) or the FBI on the AIPAC/Pentagon spy scandal? My view on the spy story is that it’s not so much about the information that got…

“American interrogators working in Iraq have obtained as much as 50 percent more high-value intelligence since a series of coercive practices like hooding, stripping and sleep deprivation were banned, a senior American official said Monday. Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the American commander in charge of detentions and interrogations, said that the number of “high-value” intelligence…

I’m not going to try to say anything profound about the Beslan school massacre. All anything I say will do is to repeat that this is a horror so depraved it’s blank, like trying to talk to a fish. What answer can there be to this? Discussing the grim politics that took Russia to this…

Congratulations to Laura Rozen on breaking out the story on Douglas Feith’s staff, the AIPAC and the fake “uranium from Niger” documents. Good work!

No blogging for the past week. I’ve been away.

Here at the Ranter, one of my regular targets is the delusion held by many Conservatives that somehow, if they could just get into the Foreign Office, they could create a mighty alliance with such great powers as – er – Denmark and Estonia to rewrite the European Union treaties in such a way as…

The Smoking Gun has a list of pornographic comics and films that were either seized or permitted by Canadian Customs on the US border. “Housewives at Play” – verboten! “Housewives and Hot Moms at Play” – all well and good. How d’you reckon they work these things out?

Some time ago it was suggested to me that the US Government fuel contracts with Viktor Bout’s airlines had some connection with the Turks and Caicos Islands, a British tax paradise in the Caribbean. You may recall from the Ranter passim that the contracts were numbered in the series TBTC followed by 2 digits. The…

Link Thurlow said he had lost his medal citation for that incident over two decades ago and stood by his account that there was no enemy fire at the time. His account was further called into question by a battle damage assessment report on another Swift boat, PCF-51, involved in the March 13 action. The…