March 2005

The FAZ reports in detail on the death of Chechen leader Aslan Maskhadov at the hands either of spetsnaz commandos or perhaps his bodyguard, depending on who you read. Interestingly, the mighty if perhaps not terribly exciting German broadsheet reports, quoting sources in the pro-Russian boss of Chechnya’s staff, that Maskhadov’s death might not have…

The city council in my beloved Bradford has been caught spying on its own citizens. Jason Teasdale of the Telegraph & Argus (in the roof of whose offices I did work experience with the Rugby League Express) reports: ” Bradford Council has been branded a “Big Brother” authority for allowing more and more of its…

“Five soldiers were killed overnight in Iskandariya when a coffin attached to a car’s rooftop exploded near their checkpoint, the Iraqi army said.” Via Juan Cole. Note that, adding them up, the current daily deathrate seems to be about 30 assorted people.

I am the third highest Yahoo! result for yorkshire wank groups. What have I done to deserve this? Dave of Backword has had a whole clutch, though, including the unbeatable are commoners good in the government or bad?, strangely enough a search carried out through Swiss Google. He ought to check the IP address, there’s…

Some time ago, I ran this post regarding dubious Afghan airline KAM-Air. Since then, of course, KAM has made itself notorious in another way by flying a Boeing 737 full of passengers into a mountain. Back on the 16th of January, I mentioned that Kam’s fleet included aircraft from Phoenix Aviation in Kyrgyzstan, the 727…

The RAF Board of Inquiry has completed its interim report on the RAF C-130K loss in Iraq, a previous subject of Ranter coverage. So far all we have to go on is the content of a statement to Parliament by Geoff Hoon, which is here. The meat is as follows: “Based on the evidence currently…

Various British blogs, especially around Tim Ireland’s Bloggerheads, are getting terribly het up about the news that Zack Exley, an internet activist from MoveOn.org, has come over to the UK to work on the Labour campaign team. Tim has got to the point of crossing Atrios and the Washington Monthly off his blogroll because they…

The director of the French national library, Jean-Noel Jeanneney, is not, it seems, happy about Google’s project to put the collections of major libraries online in full text. Harvard, Michigan, Stanford, the Public Library of New York, and the Bodleian have signed up. It’s certainly an inspiring aim – to make everything in the great…

Not so long ago, a comment drew my attention to the heavy losses of officers the US Army and Marines were suffering in Iraq. I’ve been putting off a full blog post on this for a while, because it involves maths and ghoulishness, but after I saw this at the Washington Monthly: “The Army is…

Nick Barlow has been doing an excellent job digging into the various God-bothering groups involved in the Jerry Springer – The Opera protest and the utterly disgusting campaign against the Maggie’s cancer centre for accepting a donation from the Springer production. He connects the interlocking front groups to a right-wing Catholic organisation called “Tradition, Family,…