The Yorkshire Ranter

Chris Lightfoot runs a detailed critique of the ID Cards Bill, and pulls up exactly what I did on Tuesday. That is, the Bill’s killer clauses that give the Government powers to force us to carry the cards (despite their denials), to force us to show them to use the NHS, public education and social…

Today is the 20th anniversary of the world’s worst ever industrial accident, at Bhopal in India. Thousands – we don’t know exactly how many – of people were gassed when a huge tank of methyl isocyanate leaked at Union Carbide’s plant there. Multiple layers of safety should have been present but were not. The victims…

The FT reports, via Suburban Guerrilla, on a bizarre request by US cinema distributors to the director of a film version of The Merchant of Venice. Michael Radford was a little surprised when he was asked to “paintbox the wallpaper”, as he didn’t think wallpaper existed in the 16th century. Closer examination showed that the…

Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell has been summoned to Congress’ Judiciary Committee to answer a detailed list of electoral irregularities. It’s too long to repost here, but as a taster, it includes places where there was a 124% turnout, others where 5,000 more people voted for a Democratic judge than for a Democratic president,…

The Guardian’s separatist insurgency gathers pace towards all-out civil war. After the now-notorious articles on the Ukraine by Jonathan Steele and John Laughland, it was the paper’s liberal-hawk tendency’s turn to hit back. On Tuesday, columnist David Aaronovitch delivered this rant about Mr. Laughland, who returned fire in the letters page the next day. Bizarrely,…

The French socialist party’s membership has voted yes to the European Constitution in an internal referendum. This probably kiboshes the former prime minister Laurent Fabius’s attempt to rebuild his career after his disgrace in the contaminated blood scandal. I’m not sorry, especially given some of the No camp’s arguments – Fabius argued that the constitution…

AP reports on the collapse of security on the roads of Iraq, including the route to Baghdad airport. Although the military now call it RPG Alley and the British Embassy has banned its staff from using it, the alternatives are even worse. After all, the route to the western border passes through Ramadi and Fallujah.…

The Kyiv Post reports on the frantic events yesterday in Ukraine (separatist referendum called off due to insufficient supply of separatists, vote of no confidence in the prime minister, prime minister says he will ignore it, talks break down, talks back on, agreement reached – maybe..). Broadly, the government side agreed to the principle of…

(Part of an occasional series) The draft ID Cards Bill is now out, (you can get a copy here) and it is just as bad as we thought. After all, you might think a huge government database linking all its information about all of us was bad enough. But what would you say to this?…

Ha’aretz reports on Ukrainian Jews’ view of the election crisis, revolution, etc. They quote Leonid Finberg, director of the Jewish Institute of Kiev, as follows: “”I am convinced the article was commissioned to blacken the name of Yushchenko and sabotage a source of support for him,” said Leonid Finberg, director of the Judaica Institute in…