2005

…more right-wing than you can imagine. Think about it – here we have a character who having paffled through the election campaign saying that Tory foreign policy has to be about more than Zimbabwe and Gibraltar, but has just made William Hague his shadow foreign secretary. Hague’s brief is apparently to “target Jacques Chirac”. How…

Physicists at the University of Cape Town have invented a way of printing out photovoltaic cells (solar panels, but the phrase doesn’t fit here) on paper. The point is to produce solar gear that is cheap above all”; Professor David Britton, its inventor, argues that people who can’t afford to buy the conventional panels, which…

Earlier this week, the US Department of the Treasury’s order to freeze the assets of a variety of Viktor Bout companies was extended to the entire world by the UN Security Council’s sanctions committee. All assets belonging to the persons and organisations named in this list are now subject to confiscation anywhere in the world.…

Al-Qa’ida as a branch of the hotel industry, from Jamie Kenny. Which made me laugh. I’ve just got back from a GSM conference in Cape Town, and no doubt I’ll get around to posting something worthy about leapfrog development and the like in the next days, but at the moment I feel like cheap laughs…

I am the No.1 result on Google for “botulism anorak”, immediately ahead of this amusing site. I’m also a hit for dubai dominatrix, if a long way down the Yahoo! rankings. More interestingly, someone on the Government Secure Intranet googled tom kelly guardian iraq visit private. I’m result number three. Interestingly, again, one “Tony Evans”…

The LA Times, a frequent reader of this blog, reports that the Kurds are cutting their own deals to explore for oil, and the Iraqi central government are Not Happy. After all, they have every reason not to be, given the burning issue of how the oil revenue from the existing oilfields is distributed –…

Many other bloggers have descended on the CIA secret jail story and are probably doing it better than I am. If you want a round-up I endorse and recommend Soj. But there are some things I feel ought to be flagged. As anyone who reads this regularly ought to know, I suspect that Taszar airbase…

Three terrorist cells exposed in Baghdad. Two were led by the same renegade Interior Ministry official and the other by the director of a private investment company. Does anyone else wonder if he was playing the markets (petrol? cement? security/protection racket?) in relation to his spare-time activities? This really is getting like Vietnam with worse…

Cole quotes Arabic press reports that representatives of the “guerrilla movement” in Iraq met with the Iraqi political parties, other Arab states, and US intelligence at a conference in Cairo, where they stated their terms. The terms are as follows: 1) working to end the foreign occupation;2) compensation to the Iraqis for the damages arising…

..has a use. Who knew? “The Attorney General’s ban is ridiculous, untenable, and redolent of guilt. I do not like people to break the Official Secrets Act … we now have allegations of such severity, against the US President and his motives, that we need to clear them up. If someone passes me the document…