August 2004

Torture quite OK really, says High Court The High Court has ruled that evidence gained through torture is admissible so long as the torture was not “connived at” by agents of the Crown. This is insane. What happened to the “poisoned tree”? (the legal principle that any evidence gained by illegal means, even evidence gained…

Some interesting developments on the energy politics front. For a start, a giant contract has just been signed by Centrica (which owns the British Gas name) and a Malaysian oil firm to import huge quantities of liquified natural gas into the UK. This has been one of the running long term stories of the last…

Whitelocks Luncheon Bar in Leeds is possibly the best pub in the world. Hidden in one of the oldest surviving parts of Leeds (Turk’s Head Yard), on the site of a Knights Templar cross, it is an astonishing Victorian fantasy of black wood panelling, mirrors, plush and porcelain, divided by a curtain between a long…

A while ago, on the 1st of July the story broke via the Financial Times that the US was to intensify counter-terrorist efforts in West Africa after revelations concerning Liberian dictator Charles Taylor’s connections both with the CIA and Al-Qa’ida. This was covered both here and also at Laura Rozen’s War and Piece. The Financial…

Due to the failure of Blogstreet’s RSS panel service, there has been no Ranter Coverage section for a while. There is now a temporary version in operation courtesy of BlogFuel. This may have to become permanent, as Blogstreet has now been dead to the world for a week, all login and contacts pages pointing to…

Anthony Wells has an amusing post about compulsive parliamentary candidate Lieutenant-Commander Bill Boakes, who stood for election at every opportunity from 1951 to 1981 on a platform that varied from being a democratic monarchist campaigning for equal pay for women to being the “Air, Road, Public Safety White Resident” candidate (rather less fun). All very…

Back last summer I blogged on the destruction of a US Army tank in Iraq by insurgents using an unusual weapon. Wild speculation ranged at the time from a 1940 Soviet antitank rifle, perhaps souped up with new ammunition, to the first-ever use in anger of an electro-magnetic railgun. In the fullness of time consensus…

Multiple blogs report that the US Defence Department planned a raid into Liberia to capture the al-Qa’ida agent Khalfan Ghailani in November, 2001, but then cancelled it. Ghailani was eventually captured in Pakistan last week. Ghailani is said to have been sent to Liberia in 1999 to head AQ’s diamond trading activities, (link), where he…

Just back from a trip to god’s own county. Sighted in Bradford – billboards for the approaching referendum on a devolved government for Yorkshire. Now, I’m in favour of this, and I was a little surprised to see the lack of much campaigning activity. I would have thought that nothing would be an easier sell…

Well, the latest Orange Alert didn’t need much debunking – apparently the information involved originates from 2000. “Federal authorities said on Monday that they had uncovered no evidence that any of the surveillance activities described in the documents was currently under way.” This was, of course, widely predicted after the New Republic story that an…