The Yorkshire Ranter

Today’s Sun headlines with PARAS TO BLITZ DRUG LORDS. What on earth can they mean? For a horrible, sick-throat here-we-go moment I thought they were reporting some half-bright great idea from No.10 to send the Parachute Regiment into, say, Holmewood or Feltham, or perhaps any number of dinner parties, on a desperate mission to blast…

I’m really disappointed, having read more reports about the discovery of an “insurgent chemical factory” in Mosul, to discover that the first reports that made it a “chemical weapons” story weren’t true. The irony would have been perfect. But, of course, an idea whose time has gone dies terribly hard – even though there isn’t,…

Time again to nominate a name for the TYR Orwell Awards, issued at the year’s end to the person responsible for the most egregious political misuse of the English language…this week was difficult, partly due to a lot of candidates but also because none of them quite had that spark of sinister inspiration that distinguishes…

Yesterday was Lords Reform Day in the blogosphere, marking 94 years of the statement in the Parliament Act 1911 that it was time to have an upper house established on a “popular rather than hereditary foundation”. Strangely, among the many bloggers who responded to a call on Pledgebank to contribute, there was a remarkable degree…

Chris Morris has apparently joined the Iraqi insurgency:Link. On a barren stretch of road in northern Iraq, a dog rigged with explosives approaches a group of Iraqi police officers. Detonated by remote control, the bomb tears the dog apart but doesn’t harm the cops. In a war where the line between civilian and soldier is…

The most northerly inhabited island in Britain, Unst, hopes to build its economy on producing hydrogen fuel from wind power and rain, both of which it has in abundance. For the last thirty years, the biggest employer, practically the only employer, was a huge RAF over-the-horizon radar station, built to guard NATO’s northern flank –…

This story is chilling: “It then emerged that in June 1992, a Visegrad police inspector, Milan Josipovic, had received a macabre complaint from the manager of Bajina Basta hydroelectric plant across the Serbian border, asking whoever was responsible to please slow the flow of corpses down the Drina. They were clogging up the culverts in…

When I was a student at the University of Vienna, life was often rendered more interesting by the antics of the Burschenschaften, weird student fraternities partly left over from the 1840s who enjoyed rituals such as dressing up in bizarre coloured period fig, giving themselves silly names, drinking industrial quantities of ale – oh, and…

The Portadown News is a cracker this week. “Ian Paisley has promised to keep Sinn Fein out of government by keeping himself out of government. “There will be no surrender to the IRA’s surrender,” the leader of Northern Ireland’s largest party said. “After fifty years, republicans are just as dangerous as I have always needed…