The Yorkshire Ranter

The Grauniad interviews the new political editor of the Sun, George Pascoe-Watson. (Note – unlike everything else on the Guardian’s website, this article is trapped in a futile registration ghetto. Use Bugmenot). Murdoch press people are usually at pains to point out that the big boss, the Dirty Digger, call him whatever you like hardly…

We had something of a hit last autumn with our detailed guide on how to control other people’s CCTV cameras online (not, of course, that I’m suggesting you actually do that. Nuh.), here, and here. Recently, there has been a wave of people searching Google for the axis/cgi string that signals the presence of one…

All the US reconstruction funding for Iraq, all $18 billion, has now been spent or committed and there will be no more. What sticks out, though, in the light of the great pay-for-play journalism affair, is this: “It is easy for the Americans to say, ‘We are doing reconstruction in Iraq,’ and we hear that.…

The ever-helpful Sharjah Airport website reports that old friends British Gulf International’s flight BGK1222 from Bagram AFB is delayed, expected in at 1630. The Irbis flight from Riyan is also running late, but the corresponding BGK1221 to Bagram got off all right, as did another to a destination given as “unknown”. Would passengers for the…

Some months ago, we took note of a curious twist in the scandals surrounding Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff and Texan politico Tom DeLay. You may recall that they were revealed to have been involved in exporting Russian night-sights to a group of West Bank settlers, and to have received cash and hospitality from a mysterious…

Somebody chose this winter to release a joke newswire story regarding the State of Narnia’s decision to walk out of WTO talks in Hong Kong into the wild. The financial news agency AFX was apparently Patient Zero in the outbreak, which spread to other financial news sites including Forbes. Everyone and his dog has blogged…

Berlusconi under investigation for bribing a lawyer, as Laura Rozen put it. As I put it: Berlusconi under investigation for bribing a British cabinet minister’s husband. The lawyer, your keen & agile minds will no doubt have guessed, is none other than David Mills, husband of fascinating Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell. Prosecutors have accused Berlusconi…

Has anyone else noticed a worrying decline in the quality of commenting in the general blogosphere? It’s not so much the long-established blogs with enough traffic to draw a serious comments thread, as these usually have enough of a community to be partly self-policing, but those blogs that have recently switched on comments who are…

APPARENTLY, the Foreign Office don’t want ex-ambassador and ex-parliamentary candidate Craig Murray to publish the following letters regarding good friend of the UK, Uzbekistan, and their forward-leaning views on dated human rights ideas. After all, the Prime Minister thinks individual rights not to be tortured need to be balanced against the right of the State…

The Germans have a nice word for people like this character: What is even more remarkable however, after an investigation by The Times, is that just ten years ago Christian Bailey, whose US company is under investigation for planting fake news stories in Iraqi newspapers, was a nerdy, socially awkward English school-leaver called Jozefowicz. The…