CNN link “Supporters of maverick Muslim cleric Moqtada al-Sadr controlled government, religious and security buildings in the holy city of Najaf early Tuesday evening, according to a coalition source in southern Iraq. The source said al-Sadr’s followers controlled the governor’s office, police stations and the Imam Ali mosque, one of Shia Muslim’s holiest shrines. Iraqi…
Read More Getting worse – al-Sadr supposedly controls NajafThanks to the excellent Spy Blog, the blog operated by the Watching Them Watching Us campaign for the regulation of surveillance technology, I now know that the controversial Anti-Terrorism, Crime, and Security Act 2001 made it a criminal offence to “detonate a nuclear weapon in the UK without permission”. What? All these years it was…
Read More Nuclear explosions – illegal in UK!Well, it has all finally happened. The potential for trouble represented by the Shia militias has been converted into actuality, and General Abizaid’s staff have supposedly been given 48 hours to think of possible sources of reinforcement (link). A cynic might say that Muggins Britain will be top of the begging letter list when it…
Read More Iraq – the black weekend and the new warI’ve just taken a peek into our search referrals. The horror..the horror..and that’s without the horde of perverted googlers who the last post will no doubt draw to us like flies to shit. (Still, it’s all traffic..) Who the hell searched for “email a-z information of churches” and hit the Ranter? Now that’s just filthy.
Read More Our strangest search requestCNN reports that a man from Los Angeles (where else?) has gone to jail after meeting a woman in a chatroom dedicated to rape fantasies. Unfortunately for all concerned he broke into the wrong flat…. “The victim stopped the attack by yelling and attacking Howard’s testicles. Howard then asked for the name the victim used…
Read More Now that’s a real cockupMr. Wightman has now declared on his website first that he would close down the site because he was being “treated like a criminal for trying to save kids” (puke!), and now apparently that the whole thing will be translated into Portuguese. One wonders why, but not what. The what is pretty clear – he’s…
Read More More on the nanniebots – a fit of childishnessDue to an unaccountable outbreak of laziness, when I saw the story about an IT consultant from Wolverhampton and his chatroom monitoring programs (Nanniebots) that appeared to pass the Turing test I didn’t blog it. (Original New Scientist story and transcript here, The Register, BBC news, Need To Know) Basically, his claim was that he…
Read More Wolverhampton’s Turing..what happened next?Just to put this on record – the Daily Express is running with “THE TEEN BOMBERS” as its (huge) headline today. The story is apparently the arrest of a suspected al-Qa’ida cell as detailed below, but the headline sounds so much like a band that I had an odd feeling that I might have been…
Read More The joy of headlineBBC NEWS link Police have seized half a ton of ammonium nitrate fertiliser, in a self-storage warehouse near Heathrow Airport. Further action resulted in eight arrests. Those arrested are apparently all British. (What was that about fighting a war on terrorism in Iraq?) The stuff in question is a old favourite in the terrorist kitchen.…
Read More BBC NEWS Terror suspects held in raidsJuan Cole’s Informed Comment link “A subcommittee of the Israeli Parliament has issued a report sharply critical of Israeli intelligence failures concerning weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It notes that Mossad thought Iraq’s programs and stockpiles were a threat, which they were not, and yet seemed unaware of how much progress Libya had made…
Read More Juan Cole – how the Israelis got it wrong and helped us do likewise