2005

Quick update on the German political mess. First, Franz Müntefering has confirmed he’s still going to take up his seat as Minister for No. Second, the SPD has picked Matthias Platzeck, the minister-president of Brandenburg, as its leader. Third, the CSU has apparently fallen out with Edmund Stoiber after his decision to not join the…

This post is the 1003rd item on TYR, in 856 days since the 10th of June, 2003. That makes 1.17 posts per day on average.

Well, the Fiendish Müntemerkel didn’t last long. German democracy makes a lot of things explicit that are assumed in the UK – for example, where the British assume the leader of the largest party will form the government, and know that if not he or she can be disposed of through a vote of no…

Laura Rozen has news on the Italian end of the Niger-uranium scandal. Apparently, Mr. Martino walked in to the US, UK and French embassies to hawk his documents without success before he finally got them accepted at the Pentagon. What I’d like to know: what did the Italians stand to gain that was worth pushing…

Kathryn Cramer and Co.’s latest Google Earth overlays for the Pakistani earthquake and Hurricane Wilma are up. Just a word: Carlos of No Such Blog has been back to Key West. His home is standing, but the car is dead, and he estimates 60 per cent of his books have been ruined, which is terrible.…

Indian seismologist says that mobile phones tend to fail 100 to 150 minutes before an earthquake. Going by the details the article gives, the mechanism must be the frequency shifts he describes – if transmissions around 1000MHz are shifted up to 1800-1900 and 2000MHz, that would put them right in two out of four GSM…

Last night’s RL test match, between Great Britain and New Zealand, pointed up something it’s easy to forget, thanks to the dearth of internationals. That is how the character of league-playing nations varies. The Australians usually come on tour with three annoying, but transparently gifted stars, but they aren’t the point. Neither is their traditional…

According to today’s Observer, No.10’s Respect Tsar (it nearly spells taser, after all) Louise Casey has turned against one of Blair’s brilliant ideas, specifically the scheme to take away “disruptive families’” housing benefit. Apparently she is concerned that the children of such homes have suffered enough without being turned out in the street where, one…

Well, accounts are now out of the insurgent attack on the Palestine Hotel. Apparently, there were three suicide car bombers…stop-groups in the streets around…and a storming party in the wings to take advantage of the car explosions. It sounds very much like the big assault on Abu Ghraibh that I blogged up in June. This…

In our last post we discussed watching other people’s Axis network cameras using Google’s inurl: command. In this post we shall have a look at how to control them. I now know that the inurl:axis-cgi search isn’t new. In fact, it’s just one of a wedge of Google searches that bring up plenty of cams…