July 2004

Essential viewing tonight – not just one but two BBC documentaries on Saudi Arabia (This World, 2100, BBC2, and The House of Saud, 2320, BBC2), and another produced from 6 months’ secret filming of BNP meetings (The Secret Agent, 2100, BBC1). Highlights include their shirt-pocket führer Nick Griffin ranting madly about Muslims raping white girls…

Spyblog agrees with my reaction to the Mexican microchip story – astonishment and horror-fixation, roughly – quoting a AP story including some even weirder implications. Jewelry and mobile phones loaded with RFID chips indeed. Of course, the next step would be to carry your own scanner so as to know if anyone was pinging the…

It was considered sensational when an Airbus A300 belonging to DHL was hit by a surface-to-air missile near Baghdad last year(link, picture), narrowly surviving after the crew succeeded in manoeuvring back to the airport and landing without the hydraulics – they could only control the aircraft by varying the thrust on the engines separately. It…

Man shot self in testicles after drinking 15 pints of lager and “arguing with lifelong friend over whose turn it was to buy beer”.

It is reported that senior Mexican officials including the attorney-general have had identifying chips implanted into their persons. These are intended to control access to sensitive information and provide a means of locating them in the event of kidnapping. Presumably the “chips” are RFID devices, which would emit a radio signal containing a unique identifier…

The Register reports that a group of Romanians have invented wireless mobile music sharing. “Instead, it’s a small two-man smartphone software company based in Bucharest. Best known for its Symbian Series 60 software, Simeda recently introduced a small piece of file discovery software for wireless Pocket PCs which implemented Apple’s Rendezvous service. Now they’ve gone…

Sunday Times report Almost all the news concerning the British sector in Iraq has involved the area around Amara in one way or another, but it’s been hard to pull together. The Sunday Times (Sunderer, perhaps?) has done a good job though, with this story on the Princess of Wales’ Royal Regt in the area.…

NO question as to what the main story at the moment is. The suggestion that Blair was talked out of resigning last month is a beauty, whose importance is only borne out by the race by cabinet ministers to distance themselves from it. A small industry has already grown up producing weird conspiracy-ish explanations. One…

The Guardian reports that Afghan police in Kabul have uncovered a group of mercenaries who were operating their own prison under the cover of an “import business”. In the building they had several people hanging upside down, who had apparently been beaten up first. Lovely. Although the group’s leader is apparently one Jonathan Keith Idema,…

Firm whose washing machine cooked worker fined £325,000 This case, which I blogged at the time, has finally been nailed down. To recap, Paul Clegg ventured into a 40ft long industrial washing machine to clear it of sheets tangled in the workings. He was overcome by heat inside the thing, but although people outside knew…