2006

One development that has been held out as good news in Iraq is the transfer of the Provincial Reconstruction Team concept from Afghanistan, associated with US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and Gen. David Barno, not to mention Bob Bran of Blogistan. PRTs were essentially invented as a response to the obvious need to expand security out…

1st Royal Scots deployed to Iraq this week, in a movement that I don’t think was part of the routine brigade roulement. Underneath the racket about paedo shitbags and surveillance dolphins parenting binge estates, it rather vanished into the background noise, but there is an interesting point here. Out of the battalion from the British…

Just who was it who chartered Irbis’s Ilyushin-18D UN-75005, serial number 187010204 as a “private” flight from Kabul to Sharjah on Tuesday at 1235 local time? They weren’t using a BIS- flight number, but the aircraft registration as a general aviation movement. And – why haven’t we heard of the old crate (well, it’s not…

Interesting analysis on WSC’s drinking habits. Professor Warren Kimball of Rutgers, editor of the WSC-FDR correspondence and several erudite books on the two leaders, maintains that Churchill was not an alcoholic -“no alcoholic could drink that much!”

As I first heard from the statistics log, the wanted arms dealer Arkadi Gaidamak’s son Alexandre is trying to buy Portsmouth FC. Gaidamak was one of the people at the heart of the Angolan wing of the Elf scandal, next to Pierre Falcone, and is wanted by the French police and Interpol. This hasn’t stopped…

…to say NO to Identity Cards.

This is rather worrying, no? Spanish general and CINC Land Forces says the army has an obligation to intervene if the Catalans get more autonomy. Chief of General Staff asks Defence Minister for authority to sack him. Defence Minister goes one better, puts him under house arrest! Is it me – or is everyone else…

I saw three jets come sailing in, on Christmas Day in the morning. Jet Line International-owned Ilyushin-76T ER-IBV, serial 3243699, at Santa Maria on the Azores (presumably refuelling on a trans-Atlantic trip), but apparently going under the banner of Aerocom, the firm rousted from Moldova for being too corrupt and whose planes are known to…

Firedump has gone a little cold over Christmas, so it’s clearly time to bump it. Just before Christmas, I invited the public to get in touch with the Romanian government regarding the BAC-111 said to be used by San Air General Trading, 3C-QRF, serial no. 61, which is currently in storage at Bucharest-Baneasa airfield. I’ve…

Via the good people at RepRap, this paper from Cornell University on how to print out zinc-air batteries. Amusingly, despite the more polished presentation, the Cornell team’s gizmo shares the pleasantly homemade look of the RepRap down at Bath University…and there was I thinking it was British eccentricity.