June 2005

Ministers were told of need for Gulf war ‘excuse’, says the Murdoch Times. Another memo, it seems. The leaks are coming thick and fast now, no? “The warning, in a leaked Cabinet Office briefing paper, said Tony Blair had already agreed to back military action to get rid of Saddam Hussein at a summit at…

Two years ago today, The Yorkshire Ranter was born in a striplit computer room in Royal Holloway College’s International Building. Since then we’ve had ranting, spam, funnies, mystery jets, vituperation, stupidity, more ranting, and some terrible afternoons spent with HTML and frustration. I’ve picked over yards of extremely dull official documents, debated the EU with…

Why is it that nobody ever gets it right about GPS? Every time the magic navigation system is mentioned in the national press, someone always tells us that the satellites “track” the user. This time, it was the Grauniad, and worse still, it was its normally fantastic science supplement, Life. In a report about the…

Remember all that kerfuffle about the 2004 local elections in Birmingham? When three Labour councillors were kicked out by a special election court because it turned out they’d been forging huge quantities of postal votes? When Judge Richard Mawsley said that the election “would have disgraced a banana republic”? Where the police discovered two of…

In our last mystery-aircraft post, we were looking into the affairs of a firm called Transafrik, which operates 11 of CIA frontco Southern Air Transport’s Hercules aircraft in Angola and holds UN contracts in various places. TA was based in Sao Tome for years, and I recently discovered that a Swiss merchant named Hellinger started…

Well, the referendum week is past and the people have spoken. As usual with referendums , though, deciding what they said is already proving to be tough. No is clear enough, but it is increasingly obvious that there were as many noes as there were voters. That’s democracy for you. It’s also one of the…

Then at least mystery turboprops. The New York Times has a big story on the CIA’s air proprietaries, the new-old network of anonymous charter airlines that provide spook transport with deniability (at least until those pesky journalists get at them). Flying has been a CIA business since the agency was founded – the year after,…

The Independent got its head caught between the cheeks this weekend (If you wonder why I’m so behind, it’s because blog builds up over time and I have to find opportunities to vent spleen). They ran their usual screamer front page with a giant headline “The Real Cost of Air Travel” and a map of…

Last week, the London Evening Standard, or the Daily Mail with a lobotomy as I prefer to think of it, carried a significant report about the plans for the final, much-belated commercial use of the Millenium Dome. The Standard loyally swooned over the two huge arenas, the indoor street of bars and restaurants, the exhibition,…