The Yorkshire Ranter

Four men have been arrested on terrorism charges apparently after they were induced to attempted to buy so-called “red mercury” from a man who turned out to be Mahzer Mahmood, the News of the World‘s “investigations editor”. The NOTW broke this story today under the headline “Dirty Bomb Foiled by News of the World“. BBC…

….and unsurprisingly, they show it’s not very good. Allawi told Washington Post reporters and editors on Friday that “for now the only place which is not really that safe is Fallujah, downtown Fallujah. The rest, there are varying degrees. Some — most — of the provinces are really quite safe.” The Kroll reports are based…

Which Nigerian spammer are You? Taken it several times, but can’t get Viktor out of it yet…mind you, the code for the result doesn’t work but still pushes my sidebar out. So fuckem.

One little-publicised problem for the investigation of hostage-takings in Iraq may have been created by a lack of Internet security awareness among Western businesses operating in Baghdad. Although videos issued by the al-Zarqawi group tend to be uploaded to the websites they appear on at round about the same time of day – a regularity…

A German computer science student has built an electromechanical version of the iconic video game, Pong! In a tribute to computing pioneers, Niklas Roy renounced the use of semiconductors, transistors and the like, building a form of computer out of old telephone relays to handle the logic. The game has identical user features to the…

Interesting follow up in the light of my recent post. “Three British soldiers were killed, one of them in a two-and-a-half-hour battle in downtown Basra that resembled the movie “Black Hawk Down,” Wilde said. “That made it just absolutely clear that the middle of the city was under Sadr militia control,” Wilde said. British troops,…

Yorkshire Soul of Ilkley, thanks for the link.

D’you think they’ll fire a special commemorative bullet for the 100,000th shot fired in a month in the British zone of Iraq? Like they used to with the 100,000th (or whatever) car to run off a production line? The BBC has an excellent story here which, among other things, points out that the British battalion…

How George Dubya Won The Lottery Game For GTech Interesting Greg Palast story on former National Lottery operator GTech, and how Dubya avoided the war. “Why did the Texas government work so hard at saving GTech’s licence? An unsigned letter to the US Justice Department, which was evidence in the civil suit, points to one…

Reviewing the vexed topic of the Viktor Bout contracts with the US military…it strikes me that we can draw some parallels between reports. Doug Farah reported that one of the contracts was given to Jetline and subcontracted to Skylink (Farah). The original fuel contracts (to BGIA and Air Bas) make no mention of either Jetline…