The Yorkshire Ranter

Since the beginning of Op. Firedump, some readers have asked for me to comment on an article by one Wayne Madsen alleging that Bout, Chichakli and Co. have close contacts with various Texas Republicans. Well, if so it would be rather what I was expecting, but I have to say I’ve read the article and…

Not only is TYR the no.10 result on Yahoo! for “the sun page 7 fella”, but someone at U.S. Joint Forces Command googled for iraq oil pipeline schematic and got us as the 7th highest result. If you were a US Army staff officer dealing with Iraq, wouldn’t you keep one on your desk? If…

Remember that deal the Kurds made with a Norwegian oil firm? Not a bad deal at all; that must have taken a good month’s drilling, and they’ve struck 100 million barrels of oil. I wonder how Heritage Oil of Tim Spicer fame is getting on with their Kurdish drilling project? But they ain’t much for…

Well, that wasn’t very impressive, was it? So far, I’ve yet to get an answer from the Romanians regarding 3C-QRF, if you don’t count MS Outlook Out of Office flags. But, somebody has noticed – I keep noticing people from the Romanian Civil Aviation Authority searching the web for 3C-QRF, which I suppose suggests action…

It is reported that the Government is beginning to have second thoughts regarding Operation HERRICK, the deployment of British forces to Afghanistan next spring under which the UK-led NATO Allied Rapid Reaction Corps HQ will take over both an expanded ISAF, the Provincial Reconstruction Teams, and a British-led strike force in Helmand Province. The plan…

In past posts on TYR, we’ve often mentioned a BAC-111 aircraft registered 3C-QRF, serial number 61. This plane belongs to the curious Jetline International of Sharjah, who we’ve discussed quite a bit. Aerotransport.org lists 3C-QRF as operated by Jetline for San Air General Trading, Richard Chichakli’s firm, which is now on the UN sanctions blacklist…

…more right-wing than you can imagine. Think about it – here we have a character who having paffled through the election campaign saying that Tory foreign policy has to be about more than Zimbabwe and Gibraltar, but has just made William Hague his shadow foreign secretary. Hague’s brief is apparently to “target Jacques Chirac”. How…

Physicists at the University of Cape Town have invented a way of printing out photovoltaic cells (solar panels, but the phrase doesn’t fit here) on paper. The point is to produce solar gear that is cheap above all”; Professor David Britton, its inventor, argues that people who can’t afford to buy the conventional panels, which…

Earlier this week, the US Department of the Treasury’s order to freeze the assets of a variety of Viktor Bout companies was extended to the entire world by the UN Security Council’s sanctions committee. All assets belonging to the persons and organisations named in this list are now subject to confiscation anywhere in the world.…

Al-Qa’ida as a branch of the hotel industry, from Jamie Kenny. Which made me laugh. I’ve just got back from a GSM conference in Cape Town, and no doubt I’ll get around to posting something worthy about leapfrog development and the like in the next days, but at the moment I feel like cheap laughs…