2005

Excellent guest editorial at Juan Cole’s concerning the danger of paralysis in post-election Iraq. Personally, I suspect that a scenario like the one he describes, in which the new constitutional assembly locks up in a permanent veto of the constitutional draft and/or the government, is both likely and dangerous. In a sense, it may be…

A little while ago we made the acquaintance of dodgy Afghan airline KAM-AIR and its fleet of ex-Viktor Bout aircraft, back here. We touched on the surprising appearance of YA-GAA, the Boeing 727 formerly operated for Afghan warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum by Chris Barrett-Jolley after his departure from Britain and before his coke-smuggling conviction, and…

Phil Hunt of Cabalamat Journal reports on a happy development: the European directive on software patents, famously prevented from passing quickly by the Polish delegation’s refusal to let it through (hence the “Thank you, Poland” campaign), has now been kicked solidly into touch by the European Parliament. The parliamentary legal affairs committee decided by an…

Over at the Daily Kos, an interesting story is up concerning the Iraqi woman who appeared with George Bush at the State of the Union address. If you recall, she was the one who hugged the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq. It turns out that she has every reason to be grateful to…

The mighty FT has a very interesting story today about the exposure of an extremely worrying arms deal in the Ukraine. Regular readers will be well aware that I’ve been hoping that the Ukrainian revolution may lead to us discovering much more about the Viktor Bout system – Kuchma’s Ukraine was, next to Transdnistria and…

The Georgian Prime Minister (German link) has been found dead in a friend’s flat, apparently gassed by the stove. The friend, a provincial governor, also died. The article quotes the director of the Tbilisi gas board (not a source I ever thought I’d quote) as saying that a high concentration of gas was detected in…

Time to update the blogroll! Soj, Nadhezda, Chris Lightfoot, Toby, Eurosavant, the Dubai Webmaster and some obscure economist can all have a link.

CNN has a hotster of a story about that “Oil for Food Scandal!” that the Right has been hyperventilating about. The short version is that, according to official documents, the US Government was happy to ignore the smuggling of oil out of Iraq because it served other purposes, specifically keeping Jordan and Turkey sweet. This…

Eurosavant has an excellent post on the Iraqi elections: sensible, measured and rich in links. See also Straight Banana, with an interesting analysis of the unlikely similarities between the British and EU constitutions. Or there’s Chris Lightfoot with a statistical view of immigration and the media. Compare and contrast Greg of Belgravia Dispatch‘s messianic ravings:…

The Periscope has the following comment on a post about Moldova: “The communist President Vladmir Voronin, is afraid of war, he is not the actual Warlord of the situation, compared to the Board of Directors, he is sitting privately anticipating his own thoughts of crime? I only meant he is a practicing magician of Russian…