The Yorkshire Ranter

That’s it, then. Blair is officially dead as a political force. All the whipping, all the attempts to get support from the far right of the Tories, even trying to draw the Paisleyites (the last reserve of the desperate in British politics) didn’t work. The 90-day detention provisions are dead by 31 votes, and who…

…cutlasses sonic blasters and prepare to repel boarders! Cruise ship attacked by RPG-wielding Somali pirates, fights back with a device that blasts the buggers with noise. More traditionally, the captain attempted to run down the pirates’ boat, too. Dunno what to make of this, though: One of the rockets certainly hit the ship — it…

One thing about the Internet is that it’s very easy to overfocus on points of language that would rarely disturb you otherwise. Take the French police trade union chap who used the word “guerrilla” with regard to rioting recently. Everyone you’d expect to latched onto this as proof, proof! that the decadent Yurpeans were doomed…

Inconsequential: last night, Guy Fawkes’ Night, the Railway Hotel not far from my flat burned off four hundred quid in fireworks, the good stuff..green flashes, golden and purple rain, and explosions. Yes. Bangs so good they hurt, and triggered the burglar alarms on all the blank-windowed Thatcherite Heathrow-corridor office blocks, setting the RIM building squealing…

Stand well back, please, because I’m about to bloviate a tad. In the last few days I’ve been participating in a couple of fascinating comments threads, over at Phil Carter’s Intel Dump, where they’ve been having an open Iraq thread, and also on John Robb’s Global Guerrillas with regard to the Palestine Hotel attack and…

After yesterday’s revelations in the Washington Post that the CIA was keeping detainees in “several Eastern European democracies”, today has seen an unseemly scramble of mutual accusation. Anyone familiar with recent politics could have prepared a shortlist of ex-communist states closely allied with the US that might have been candidates, but the exact degree of…

Quick update on the German political mess. First, Franz Müntefering has confirmed he’s still going to take up his seat as Minister for No. Second, the SPD has picked Matthias Platzeck, the minister-president of Brandenburg, as its leader. Third, the CSU has apparently fallen out with Edmund Stoiber after his decision to not join the…

This post is the 1003rd item on TYR, in 856 days since the 10th of June, 2003. That makes 1.17 posts per day on average.

Well, the Fiendish Müntemerkel didn’t last long. German democracy makes a lot of things explicit that are assumed in the UK – for example, where the British assume the leader of the largest party will form the government, and know that if not he or she can be disposed of through a vote of no…

Laura Rozen has news on the Italian end of the Niger-uranium scandal. Apparently, Mr. Martino walked in to the US, UK and French embassies to hawk his documents without success before he finally got them accepted at the Pentagon. What I’d like to know: what did the Italians stand to gain that was worth pushing…