The Yorkshire Ranter

Various British blogs, especially around Tim Ireland’s Bloggerheads, are getting terribly het up about the news that Zack Exley, an internet activist from MoveOn.org, has come over to the UK to work on the Labour campaign team. Tim has got to the point of crossing Atrios and the Washington Monthly off his blogroll because they…

The director of the French national library, Jean-Noel Jeanneney, is not, it seems, happy about Google’s project to put the collections of major libraries online in full text. Harvard, Michigan, Stanford, the Public Library of New York, and the Bodleian have signed up. It’s certainly an inspiring aim – to make everything in the great…

Not so long ago, a comment drew my attention to the heavy losses of officers the US Army and Marines were suffering in Iraq. I’ve been putting off a full blog post on this for a while, because it involves maths and ghoulishness, but after I saw this at the Washington Monthly: “The Army is…

Nick Barlow has been doing an excellent job digging into the various God-bothering groups involved in the Jerry Springer – The Opera protest and the utterly disgusting campaign against the Maggie’s cancer centre for accepting a donation from the Springer production. He connects the interlocking front groups to a right-wing Catholic organisation called “Tradition, Family,…

Via Wampum, this article regarding an unusual application of WiFi networking – setting off claymores! The US Army in Iraq is apparently using the well-loved 802.11 standard that makes grand people’s laptops connect to the net in airports to control command-detonated mines used for perimeter defence. Great. The weapon concerned is not technically a land…

Mark Ames of the Exile has an excellent report from the Moldovan election campaign. Read it, it’s good and terrible.

Why am I not in the least surprised by this? Titan, Inc., one of the companies involved in supplying privately-employed interrogators at Abu Ghraibh, has been caught paying out huge bribes to the president of Benin in order to get contracts. They shelled out two wedges of a million bucks each for him, and tossed…

Steam locomotive explosion, Ukraine….east/west cargo airline cia….and the best of the lot, nick the chicken bulgarian gangster.

Immigration Minister Des Browne has just been on BBC Radio 5! As we haven’t had any ID knocking copy for a while, I think some of his points deserve scrutiny. For a start, can anyone take his answer to a caller complaining about the cost of the scheme seriously? Mr. Browne felt moved to reply…

Back on Monday, 7th February I blogged on the suggestion that a jury-rigged SA-4 might have been responsible for the destruction of the RAF C-130K on election day in Iraq. We went into some detail about the SA-4 system and flagged the secondary optical guidance as a possible candidate. We can now say with confidence…