Remember this post and a firm calling itself Aerospace Consortium FZE, of Fujairah, that was mysteriously settling bills relating to entirely different firms in Kenya using Phoenix Aviation, Johnsons Air, GST Aero and Asterias Commercial planes to send mortar bombs to Liberia? Take a look at this: not sure about sourcing, but a company of…
Read More Aerospace Consortium FZEYou may remember the shooting down of the RAF Hercules aircraft XV179 on election day, 2005, in Iraq. This blog ran quite a lot of stuff about it – some reasonable, some utterly ludicrous speculation. In the event, it turned out that the plane really was involved in special forces support (contrary to my scepticism…
Read More A Slight Return to XV-179One of the Jetline International-run Ilyushin 62 jets, 5A-DKR ex. RA-86554, has been destroyed in an accident at Moscow (Domodedovo). Apparently the aircraft, which came in from Tripoli for overhaul, overran the runway and came to rest 500 metres off-airport, breaking into three parts. Crew are safe. Interestingly, the Il-62s and other large aircraft at…
Read More 5A-DKR DestroyedScienceblogs.com has rapidly become one of the best things on the Web, and today I saw this post of Pharyngula’s regarding a crazed god-nut college in the US where you can be disciplined for “making eye babies”, touching a person of the opposite sex (your own is fine, though homosexuality is a big no-no), or…
Read More Optical intercourseCharles Taylor has been re-nailed, after a day or so of freedom on the lam from the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone. I was amused by this description of his arrest on the Nigerian-Cameroonian border: The former Liberian leader had arrived at the frontier in a Range Rover jeep with diplomatic corps number plates,…
Read More Who Are You Going to Massacre Next?Liberian ex-dictator, war criminal and utter bastard Charles Taylor has done a runner from his Nigerian exile to avoid extradition to the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone, says the Nigerian government. Taylor has been living in comfortable exile in Calabar, Nigeria since an unairworthy Boeing 727 belonging to Ali Kleilat rescued him from his…
Read More ALERT! Charles Taylor is on the runAmong the bad news from Iraq, I seem to have forgotten that our old friends the New-Old Iraqi Army are back. In early 2005, this blog covered a succession of big, sophisticated, company-sized or more assaults launched by Iraqi insurgents on a number of targets – notably Abu Ghraibh prison and the Palestine Hotel. Worrying…
Read More NOIA is BackSo the Tories are going to sell Smith Square in order to pay off their chunk of those dodgy loans. That’s funny – didn’t they sell it before? Back in 2004, after Michael Howard won an election of one to become Tory leader, one of the first things he announced was that the Tories would…
Read More Future Reminiscences of a Real Estate OperatorNot so long ago I posted regarding the LEO computer and the question of what a British-dominated geek culture would look like. This post was picked up by a certain high-traffic blog, with the result that it saw shack rocking levels of page requests all week. Some answers from readers included a recommendation of Francis…
Read More More on alternate geek historyTYR, 15th of May 2005: South of Baghdad, they will find it harder to make progress, as they will be running up the demographic hillside and into both the Badr Corps and Sadrist heartlands. The Sunni insurgents are probably more militarily capable, but don’t have the numbers. Somewhere along the demographic transition line, the front…
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