Uncategorized

100 years to this day – Orville and Wilbur Wright made the first ever controlled and sustained manned flight. Another good reason why, as soon as this post publishes, I’m off for a beeer.

The Guardian reports today that plans for dealing with an outbreak of smallpox in Britain have been published. The arrangements include the establishment of emergency clinics, to be co-located with district general hospitals, within 24 hours of a smallpox case being confirmed anywhere in the world. These sites would require 140 staff each, who the…

Another issue which militates in favour of a legal conclusion is that it ought to be a much clearer case than that against Milosevic. Much of the geologically slow wrangling at The Hague has been about the application of the principle of command responsibility for war crimes. Given that Saddam Hussein held the posts of…

An interesting precedent to what I suppose will now be the Hussein Case seems to have occurred in the British intervention in Sierra Leone in 2000. It might well throw some light on the differing views of legality and its importance between the UK and US to consider what happened immediately after the capture of…

They got him in the end, of course – dragged out of a hole in the ground when the loyalty finally ran out. The now-whats gape, though. On the same weekend no less than 30 Iraqi policemen were killed. There was much talk about his trial. About crucial intelligence, weapons, terrorists. Does anyone really believe,…

I notice that, back on the 14th of May, our much despised Secretary of State for Defence Geoff Hoon said in parliament that “All the requisite numbers of boots and clothing and equipment were there..the truth is that when they went into operations all of our forces were given the right boots. There was sufficient…

Various media sources have been reporting supposedly “anti-terrorist” demonstrations in Iraq, including to its shame the BBC (what’s going on there at the moment?). It seems, though, that portraying the demos as pro-CPA just because they are anti-Ba’ath might be unwise at best. “One group that mobilized its cadres for this demonstration was the Iraqi…

So, apparently the boss of the Iraqi secret service we’re creating (to replace the 300 out of 700 soldiers who have deserted from the Iraqi army we’re creating? It’s true that intelligence can make up for a shortage of manpower, but this is ridiculous!), one Iyad Allawi, is a former Ba’athist spook – what a…

We welcome three outstanding blogs – Living with Caucasians, a blog covering goings-on in Georgia, Slugger O’Toole and the Broom of Anger – two excellent Northern Irish newsbloggers. If you didn’t read this – you wouldn’t know that the “Police Fund IRA spies” story has been debunked. And you do now.

“On Dec. 6, according to a union spokesperson interviewed by phone, a convoy of 10 Humvees and personnel carriers descended on the old headquarters building of the Transport and Communications Workers union, in Baghdad’s central bus station, which has been used since June as the office of the Iraqi Workers Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU).…