The Yorkshire Ranter

It’s about control. And we don’t have it. An oil pipeline from the northern Iraqi oilfields to the main refinery in Baiji was blown up, and what happened? “The secondary pipeline about 60km west of Kirkuk, which carries oil to refineries in the city of Baiji, was bombed at around 3am (0000 GMT) on Monday,…

The Sunday Times reports that two unmarked civil aircraft have allegedly been used by US agents to transfer prisoners to such countries as Egypt, Uzbekistan and Syria, allegedly in order for them to be interrogated under torture. Witnesses to transfers describe the prisoners being handcuffed, dressed in nappies and sedated by suppository before their departure.…

Back in early 2000, if you had barged into Tommy’s Bar at Royal Holloway, University of London, and demanded of me who had most impressed me in the last six months, I would have unhesitatingly told you that John Towers, the former production director of Rover Group who had just saved the Rover plant from…

Have just begun using Mozilla/Firefox! And have discovered that the Ranter looks weird in it! And that the clock doesn’t work! (Cue Mozilla users saying “Clock? There’s a clock?”) Just another reason to begin the long delayed Ranter Redesign…

In the wake of Yasser Arafat’s death, many well-informed voices have raised concerns that a damaging factional struggle might break out and possibly damage the peace process. On one side, a hard-line sect united in adulation of their leader and in their trust in force. On the other, the forces of an established bureaucracy hoping…

It now seems that, just as predicted, the insurgents have been slipping out of Fallujah. As predicted, they headed north towards Kurdistan….where the state of emergency doesn’t apply. And, as predicted, they created mayhem. The Guardian reports on the eruption of fighting in Mosul, where rebels have apparently gained control of the streets at least…

It is reported that out of the 500 Iraqi soldiers in the 36th (Commando) Battalion who are going into Fallujah with the first wave of Marines, only 170 of them turned up. This is yet another example of the new Iraqi forces being wholly unreliable, and is especially worrying as the battalion was meant to…

Brad DeLong has an interesting chart of the USD over the last two years, illustrating the point.

Keith Olbermann of MSNBC’s Countdown ran with the voting oddnesses last night, covering much of the stuff that has been blogged heavily in the last few days. For example, those mystery voters: “Interestingly, none of the complaining emailers took issue with the remarkable results out of Cuyahoga County, Ohio. In 29 precincts there, the County’s…

Well, the bollocks is officially over and Allawi has “given the go-ahead”. Now for the show. A “source” has suggested to me that most of the guerrillas have already exfiltrated and are intending to create mayhem in the rear once the US Marines are thoroughly committed. The hardly reported massacre of police in the Haditha/Haqlaniya…