August 2005

The most northerly inhabited island in Britain, Unst, hopes to build its economy on producing hydrogen fuel from wind power and rain, both of which it has in abundance. For the last thirty years, the biggest employer, practically the only employer, was a huge RAF over-the-horizon radar station, built to guard NATO’s northern flank –…

This story is chilling: “It then emerged that in June 1992, a Visegrad police inspector, Milan Josipovic, had received a macabre complaint from the manager of Bajina Basta hydroelectric plant across the Serbian border, asking whoever was responsible to please slow the flow of corpses down the Drina. They were clogging up the culverts in…

When I was a student at the University of Vienna, life was often rendered more interesting by the antics of the Burschenschaften, weird student fraternities partly left over from the 1840s who enjoyed rituals such as dressing up in bizarre coloured period fig, giving themselves silly names, drinking industrial quantities of ale – oh, and…

The Portadown News is a cracker this week. “Ian Paisley has promised to keep Sinn Fein out of government by keeping himself out of government. “There will be no surrender to the IRA’s surrender,” the leader of Northern Ireland’s largest party said. “After fifty years, republicans are just as dangerous as I have always needed…

An official email reaches me, telling all staff that our company’s journalists must now pay the full delegate fee, plus 10% if they want lunch, when they attend conferences arranged by our conferences division. So – let’s get that straight. I pay £1,000 to the conferences division and charge it to expenses. Publishing is down…

..the things that set the parameters of our ideas. Those formative events and thoughts that go with us on whatever weird trajectory we take through life. Politics is always like that, which is one of the reasons I mourn Robin Cook. A short list of my own founding concerns would run something like this: The…

Just in case you’ve yet to become convinced I harbour a blood loathing of Hull…Annie Mole of the Tube blog reports that Hull City AFC fans were heard chanting “You’re just a town full of bombers” at Queen’s Park Rangers this weekend, bearing out everything I said about them.

Over at t’Sharpener, Justin has a long post about Basra, the growth of theocracy in Iraq, Steven Vincent’s criticism of the British occupation authority’s alleged indulgence of political Shi’ism, and a perceived lack of support from the pro-war side for secularism in Iraq. I was moved to drop off this comment, which ought to be…

Nobody will go. As the right honourable gentleman said last week, there will be no regrets and no resignations. Not only is this a Government that cannot accept blame, it is a Government with no shame. Robin Cook MP, House of Commons debate on the Scott Report on illegal arms exports to Iraq, 1996. He…

First: TYR is the second result on Google for “What was Ernest Hemingway doing when he was falsely reported dead? You can’t begin to imagine how proud I am. Secondly, it’s about time to recognise some blogs I’ve started reading. So: Actually Existing Phil, Irregular Anthony, Indigo Jo of Blogistan, John B of Shot By…