December 2005

Berlusconi under investigation for bribing a lawyer, as Laura Rozen put it. As I put it: Berlusconi under investigation for bribing a British cabinet minister’s husband. The lawyer, your keen & agile minds will no doubt have guessed, is none other than David Mills, husband of fascinating Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell. Prosecutors have accused Berlusconi…

Has anyone else noticed a worrying decline in the quality of commenting in the general blogosphere? It’s not so much the long-established blogs with enough traffic to draw a serious comments thread, as these usually have enough of a community to be partly self-policing, but those blogs that have recently switched on comments who are…

APPARENTLY, the Foreign Office don’t want ex-ambassador and ex-parliamentary candidate Craig Murray to publish the following letters regarding good friend of the UK, Uzbekistan, and their forward-leaning views on dated human rights ideas. After all, the Prime Minister thinks individual rights not to be tortured need to be balanced against the right of the State…

The Germans have a nice word for people like this character: What is even more remarkable however, after an investigation by The Times, is that just ten years ago Christian Bailey, whose US company is under investigation for planting fake news stories in Iraqi newspapers, was a nerdy, socially awkward English school-leaver called Jozefowicz. The…

Since the beginning of Op. Firedump, some readers have asked for me to comment on an article by one Wayne Madsen alleging that Bout, Chichakli and Co. have close contacts with various Texas Republicans. Well, if so it would be rather what I was expecting, but I have to say I’ve read the article and…

Not only is TYR the no.10 result on Yahoo! for “the sun page 7 fella”, but someone at U.S. Joint Forces Command googled for iraq oil pipeline schematic and got us as the 7th highest result. If you were a US Army staff officer dealing with Iraq, wouldn’t you keep one on your desk? If…

Remember that deal the Kurds made with a Norwegian oil firm? Not a bad deal at all; that must have taken a good month’s drilling, and they’ve struck 100 million barrels of oil. I wonder how Heritage Oil of Tim Spicer fame is getting on with their Kurdish drilling project? But they ain’t much for…

Well, that wasn’t very impressive, was it? So far, I’ve yet to get an answer from the Romanians regarding 3C-QRF, if you don’t count MS Outlook Out of Office flags. But, somebody has noticed – I keep noticing people from the Romanian Civil Aviation Authority searching the web for 3C-QRF, which I suppose suggests action…

It is reported that the Government is beginning to have second thoughts regarding Operation HERRICK, the deployment of British forces to Afghanistan next spring under which the UK-led NATO Allied Rapid Reaction Corps HQ will take over both an expanded ISAF, the Provincial Reconstruction Teams, and a British-led strike force in Helmand Province. The plan…

In past posts on TYR, we’ve often mentioned a BAC-111 aircraft registered 3C-QRF, serial number 61. This plane belongs to the curious Jetline International of Sharjah, who we’ve discussed quite a bit. Aerotransport.org lists 3C-QRF as operated by Jetline for San Air General Trading, Richard Chichakli’s firm, which is now on the UN sanctions blacklist…