No beheadings in this story, though. Congolese radio station aims to give a microphone to those whose voices have never been heard before. I liked this line: The show’s technicians – after getting caught in Army-militia crossfire twice – finally managed to put up antennas in the region’s more remote rain forest areas. So now…
Read More Just to make a living and help out the CongoleseLong-time readers of our series on Viktor Bout may remember the Jamestown Foundation Terrorism Monitor’s report which implicated various people in Sierra Leone in terrorist financing. We’ve been interested for a long time in West Africa, and the links between Charles Taylor’s regime and Al-Qa’ida, not to mention the missing 727 case. One of the…
Read More TYR Exclusive: Interview with Paddy McKayRemember this post? It looks to me like they cut back their activities over Christmas, whilst it was on the table. But now, with this explicitly rejected, and the talk of “the 80 per cent solution” and such..well, all that keeps it from being a betrayal is that there was no explicit offer, at least…
Read More Surging insurgentsCurrently in Barcelona for the 3GSM World Congress, the mobile phone industry’s annual shindig. And, blogging from the TYR Deployable Intelligence Centre Kit, aka my laptop, a length of cat 5 and a slightly iffy Internet connection, here I am. First, though, a warning to travellers. If you are heading to Barcelona on BA, Iberia…
Read More 3GSM World Congress: Iberia Pax BewareIs it my imagination, or did the New-Old Iraqi Army cut back its activity during December, only to crank the voltage back up since the “surge” announcement? Since then, we’ve seen the resumption of mass-casualty bombings, the seriously weird assassination of a complete US Army Civil Affairs team in Najaf by men posing as either…
Read More Ours go up to 11How did I miss this? Perhaps through not reading the Kazakh press. A clutch of airlines were kicked off the Kazakh registry in October, including the storied GST Aero. (Gcached version here.) The story also mentions Phoenix Aviation, not sure why as it’s not a UN-registry outfit, and Reem Air. At the same time, Moldova…
Read More GST Aero DumpedNot a song-title title, and not really a jet – an Antonov-26 instead. Via AllAfrica.com, we learn that a plane hitherto thought to have been stolen has been seized in Beni, Province Orientale, DRC on the instructions of Interpol. Le Phare of Kinshasa reports that the aircraft was operated by an ex-Soviet crew led by…
Read More Interpol and a Mystery JetAn interesting couple of mystery-jet stories – last week saw an aircraft using a Flying Dolphin/Dolphin Air callsign (ICAO: FDN), the company in Sharjah that took over the assets of Viktor Bout’s Santa Cruz Imperial and that continues to deal with Phoenix Aviation, pass through Dubai en route to Baghdad. Not that unusual, but interestingly…
Read More When you feel the heat you’ve got to move your fleetI knew roughly what Resource Accounting and Budgeting was all about, but I never imagined they could invent a system that would require NHS trusts to pay back any overspend twice. Especially as, at the same time, the introduction of payment-by-results means that their income scales directly with their output. So, they can’t reduce the…
Read More Paying the cost to be the boss (of the civil service)So what is in the Memorandum of Understanding old Virus Drayson signed with the Pentagon and Lockheed-Martin? As far as I know, he says it guarantees that no USAF personnel would be necessary in the chain of command. This says very little in and of itself. No US personnel are necessary in the chain of…
Read More Operational sovereignty