March 2006

It’s been reasonably widely reported that the British and US governments have fallen out about the terms of British participation in the Joint Strike Fighter (F-35 or JSF) project. The RAF and Royal Navy are planning to buy a considerable number of the aircraft’s STOVL (Short Take-Off Vertical Landing) variant as the eventual replacement for…

Just been given a copy of Georgina Ferry’s book on LEO, the pioneering family of business computers developed by Lyons in the late 1940s. I was broadly aware that they had been a long way ahead of everyone else, having been the first company to use a computer to do anything useful and also having…

The problem that caused some 2005 archives to render in tiny text should now be solved.

Does anyone else remember the rigged treason trial of Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai? The state’s case turned on tapes prepared by a so-called “political consultant” named Ari Ben-Menashe, who had filmed himself talking about a coup near Tsvangirai and then provided the tapes to the prosecution. It turned out that Ben-Menashe was an egregious…

Is what the court found this bloke to be. Mark Connolly, 49, of Anglesey, was convicted of four counts of manslaughter over the accident on the West Coast Main Line in February 2004 in which four men were killed by a runaway wagon that had been held in place with bits of wood. Send the…

The LA Times has the details on that story with the bloke from Tiger Telematics, the Ferrari of which there are only 399 in the world, the high-speed crash and the mysterious pseudo-police who arrived at the crash site. (Google “Stefan Eriksson” to catch up.) Eriksson, 44, is a former executive with the video game…

Kieran “Crooked Timber” Healy batters a prediction that U.S. religious conservatives are fated to outbreed the effete eurodhimmisexofascist coastals into the middle of next week. Well. It’s an interesting thought, as many point out in the comments, that (even hypothetically) the funders of creationist themeparks might succeed through Darwinism. It’s also the basis, I think,…

Via Blairwatch, a thrilling oration from minister of state Kim Howells. “People describe Iraq as a mess, but it is a mess that can’t launch an attack now on Iran; a mess that won’t be able to march into Kuwait; it’s a mess that can’t develop nuclear weapons. So yes it’s a mess but it’s…

After yesterday’s revelations, more news from Kenya about those Armenian Russians from Dubai. The East African Standard, having survived the government’s censorblitz, reports that, indeed, the two men of mystery didn’t arrive by air as they said, but drove to their press conference at Jomo Kenyatta airport in a government car.. The Standard learnt from…

Cole: Minister of Interior Bayan Jabr announced that a plot had been foiled to place hundreds of Sunni Arab troops actually loyal to the insurgency in position at the Green Zone and then to have them rush embassy offices and take diplomatic hostages. TYR, 25/02/06: Those tanks the Iraqi minister of defence is threatening to…