2004

The UKIP (or Swivel-Eyed Loons, as blogging SOPs oblige me to call them)’s Godfrey Bloom, MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber has made a fool of himself by trying to get on to the European Parliament’s women’s rights committee despite his obvious handicap. To the obvious handicap he lost no time in adding several more…

Story (in German) It is reported that the three US civilians accused of operating a private jail in Kabul (see below) have claimed before an Afghan court that they acted with the knowledge and encouragement of the US Army in Afghanistan. Their leader, Jonathan Keith Idema, claimed to have handed over “international terrorists” on two…

Well, perhaps the longest and most tiresome defence policy spin war in memory is over and the full details are out. In some ways it wasn’t as bad as the tireless briefers kept suggesting to susceptible papers like the Telegraph – the maximum horror versions included, for example, the scrapping of both the RAF’s Jaguar…

Boo! to the Voice of America thanks to one of their employees, who searched the web for “phone lines porno sao tome” and somehow hit the Ranter (we are the 30th Yahoo result for that). What the broadcaster desperate for West African dirty talk (or possibly information on dialler scams) got would have been the…

Yet another crisis week for the government has gone by without apparently doing any damage. The Butler report punched in but again failed to either nail down the prime minister or to convincingly clear him. Where Lord Hutton’s report denied that anything was wrong, Butler’s made it abundantly clear that plenty was wrong, but crucially…

We are the no. 1 Google result for “UK disposable soldier“. We are also no. 18 for “email contacts of sweethearts company in asia“. Trust me, it’s as bad as it sounds.

Essential viewing tonight – not just one but two BBC documentaries on Saudi Arabia (This World, 2100, BBC2, and The House of Saud, 2320, BBC2), and another produced from 6 months’ secret filming of BNP meetings (The Secret Agent, 2100, BBC1). Highlights include their shirt-pocket führer Nick Griffin ranting madly about Muslims raping white girls…

Spyblog agrees with my reaction to the Mexican microchip story – astonishment and horror-fixation, roughly – quoting a AP story including some even weirder implications. Jewelry and mobile phones loaded with RFID chips indeed. Of course, the next step would be to carry your own scanner so as to know if anyone was pinging the…

It was considered sensational when an Airbus A300 belonging to DHL was hit by a surface-to-air missile near Baghdad last year(link, picture), narrowly surviving after the crew succeeded in manoeuvring back to the airport and landing without the hydraulics – they could only control the aircraft by varying the thrust on the engines separately. It…

Man shot self in testicles after drinking 15 pints of lager and “arguing with lifelong friend over whose turn it was to buy beer”.