The Yorkshire Ranter

The Ranter is a googlewhack for “malet broadband frequency jammer”. Requested by someone in India. Note for policemen: we have no jammers of any kind. UN inspectors welcome.

Another business opportunity rebuilding the new Iraq: probably the world’s most lucrative taxi service. If you need to get into Baghdad from the airport (or more importantly the other way round), £2,750 now buys you a ride. That’s a car and driver for you, and a chase car with four South African mercenaries toting Heckler…

I have just completed transferring documents the Ranter refers to from my ex-college webspace to a commercial server. And updating all the links. BEER! Please report any brokens to me. Thanks.

David Blunkett has recently been quoted as saying that his proposed compulsory ID card and its database holding records on all citizens is just like a supermarket loyalty card. In fact, even nicer. Because those terrible supermarkets might hold details like these: “‘Store loyalty cards keep continuously updated details such as the size of a…

Edward at the Fistful of Euros delivers a (good) post on the sliding dollar/soaring euro issue and the wisdom or otherwise of a central bank intervention to prop up the buck, or at least manage decline. He, rightly I think, points up the inconsistency in US Treasury Secretary John Snow’s recent remarks – Snow said…

Does anyone else have this odd thought that nothing will symbolise our times so much in future as – the shredder? Think about it. It’s today’s secular confessional – you shovel the paper trail of your sins into the grey plastic maw, hit the button and a few seconds later, you are shriven. Unlike the…

Le Monde reports extensively on the background of the Ivory Coast crisis. Interestingly, it seems that an embarrassing situation was narrowly avoided when the French occupied the Hotel Ivoire (the best in town, naturally) as their HQ and evacuee registration point. On the 21st floor, they discovered a telephone-tapping centre operated by some 46 Israeli…

Eric Umansky picks out a New York Times story concerning the performance or otherwise of the New Iraqi security forces. The key para: “Colonel Gubler said things had gotten so bad that when the Americans attacked Falluja, the Ramadi police were told not to come to work “just so we could differentiate them” from revenge-minded…

The Gaurdina covers the announcement that our Foreign Secretary was aware in January of the coup plot in Equatorial Guinea. This, of course, was the one that involved well-known mercenaries and Mark Thatcher. The Conservatives are now pushing hard on this on the grounds that this was “unlawful”. It may just be poor writing, but…

Kos reporting some interesting figures about the counts that are still going on in Ohio/