The Yorkshire Ranter

BBC NEWS | World | Europe | Russia election candidate missing Ivan Rybkin, an opposition candidate in the Russian presidential elections, has disappeared a few days after his campaign ran a full-page ad in the Kommersant accusing Vladimir Putin of being in the pocket of big business. In a further attack, he gave an interview…

FT.com / World / Arab-Israel “The Bush administration is trying to enlist European support for a grand plan to reform the Arab and Islamic world and integrate it within a western security umbrella. American and European Union officials held a meeting in Washington last week on the so-called “greater Middle East” initiative, an evolving project…

Discovered a new and interesting webthing! It is called Delicious and it is a device for keeping one’s internet bookmarks – with the key feature that you give them search tags, so the whole thing becomes a searchable database of whatever its users find useful or interesting. Whatever you search out of it – for…

Just reviewing the site statistics, and what do I find among the googlers? Someone has searched for “arrogant american blog uk” and hit the Ranter. Strange, because it doesn’t appear in the first ten pages of results. Other amusing search strings include “Turkeyish money” and “Lord Brocket & the book he wrote in prison”. I…

In the wake of the court case between Ryanair and the European Commission, one thing seems to have evaded public attention. Part of the controversial subsidy paid by the government of Wallonie to the much-loved Irish airline was supposedly to fund “pilot training”. Funny that. Ryanair are infamous in the trade for a variety of…

In the case of a man who murdered a school teacher and stored her corpse in a unity he hired at a Big Yellow Self-Storage branch in Brighton, a court has handed down a sentence of life imprisonment. The victim’s family are apparently demanding strict controls on porn sites after the revelation that the killer…

Ungodly Politics has an interesting post concerning George W. Bush and the problems of being the only candidate in the election – it’s not as easy as you think! According to updated figures from the New Hampshire Secretary of State’s office, which only today posted a final figure on the total number of ballots cast,…

The Commons debate on Hutton has been halted by a group of protestors who call themselves Oxford Citizens for Truth. They moved into the public gallery and chanted “no more whitewash!” until the Speaker suspended parliament for 10 minutes. Hardly surprising on the same day the Independent made itself the first paper to go back…

Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, chief scientist of the Pakistani nuclear programme, has made a plea for mercy on national television after being accused of illegally supplying other countries, especially Libya, Iran and possibly even North Korea with advice and even detailed designs for nuclear equipment. AQK is a Pakistani hero, who worked in the 1970s…

As we’re all going to have another inquiry into the intelligence assessments about Iraq, I thought I’d record my feelings as they happened and make some predictions based (I hope) on reason. “The prime minister has announced that there will be a new inquiry into intelligence failures..” (Emotion: Relief/Schadenfreude) “The inquiry will consist of Privy…