If Bout agreed to cooperate with the Justice Department in a plea agreement sparing him life in prison, “we’ll certainly want to know more from him about the circumstances of those Iraq contracts,” said a law-enforcement official with detailed knowledge of the criminal case against Bout. The official was referring to large U.S. military contracts…
Read More the intersection of Wikileaks and ViktorfeedWe’ve seen plenty of this sort of stuff before: These networks such as the UnCut movement or the student movement with outstanding micro-organisations such as the UCL Occupation (which has received over 60,000 hits on its blog in a little under a week) who have so dynamically organised yesterday, today and going forward will inevitably…
Read More False dichotomy watchSo I went to protest the London Lib Dems’ conference, held in the late Blairite magnificence of Haverstock School NW3. Arriving punctually, what did I find? No Liberals. In fact, not only had they vanished from the Haverstock, it turned out they’d given up on the whole idea of having a conference and punted it…
Read More the lack of liberalsSometimes, somebody does a web site listing protests against the cuts so you don’t have to.
Read More public service announcementOdd thought, working on NetworkX visualisations of lobbying activity. So much of whether the finished image is any use or not is an aesthetic decision, nothing to do with the actual graph metrics in any formal or programmatic way. Randomly fiddle with the scaling factor, or increase the multiplier you apply to the nodes’ link…
Read More failSo Viktor Bout got extradited at last. As a result, I was interviewed by Radio Free Europe’s Irina Lagunina. They wanted to hear about how the whole Viktor-blogging project got started – I told them about the Defence Energy Support Center files and the T-DODAACs and the like, and the plane spotter websites, and the…
Read More An interview with Radio Free EuropeIn the last month or so I’ve begun adding blogs to my RSS queue again. I’m surprised by this; I didn’t expect to find that the form still had so much energy. Perhaps this isn’t so optimistic after all. Meanwhile, watch this space.s
Read More RecombinationI wrote about this piece about brewing beer in southern Sudan, and incidentally creating a power station and a water works and a tiny industrial working class. Well, SAB-Miller did a scenario-planning exercise about this sort of thing and came up with some truly odd answers. In the worst-case scenario: a market with limited access…
Read More le bateau ivre, port of call: MogadishuWe keep having power cuts. In eight days, we had three, all of them between 5.30am and 6am, which all lasted most of the morning. I know exactly when they happen, because the smoke alarms start beeping and wake me up. My partner claims she was warmer on a demo than she was in the…
Read More local news: power cutsFrom comments on this post, Against Viktorfeed: *sigh* When is it going to get recognised that you can’t spot an arms flight just by who used to own the aircraft. Jubba Airways isn’t some unknown cargo entity – it’s one of the main commercial passenger carriers into Mogadishu and other parts of Somalia. Are they…
Read More hoisted from comments