The Guardian carried a large excerpt from George Monbiot’s coming book this week in which he launched a formidable attack on aeroplanes, on the grounds that they are indefensible in terms of climate change. I find it hard to work out his logic. For a start, if you get the data, you’ll find that, when…
Read More George Monbiot is WrongRemember the strange case of Khalid Rashid? South African muckrakers Noseweek have much more news on it.
Read More Noseweek has NewsSeveral people have sent me this story from the Times (a newspaper that seems to be improving at the moment, despite being a Murdoch property). It deals with a British-owned airline, Avient, and its extremely dodgy activities in the DR Congo. As well as shifting arms in and diamonds out, Avient went so far as…
Read More Avient and their new marketJust a quick update on this one. The Nimrod MR-2 lost with its entire crew over Afghanistan was XV230, the first one to be delivered to the RAF in October, 1969. She was also the first to get the colour display version of the Thomson Searchwater 2000 radar, which is a detail. What is less…
Read More Nimrod UpdateAssociated Press reports on the arrival of only the second aircraft at Mogadishu since the civil war broke out, allegedly with a cargo of armaments for the new rulers, the Islamic Courts Union, to fight the Ethiopians. There’s a photo, too… The aircraft is a no-title Ilyushin 76 which according to AP was registered in…
Read More Have you seen this aeroplane?So George Galloway’s involved himself in the deportation of one Khalid Rashid, a Pakistani national deported from South Africa in unusual circumstances. He was rousted and taken to an air force base, where he was placed aboard a plane chartered by the Ministry of Home Affairs which took him…well, we don’t know where it took…
Read More Khalid Rashid: A Strange CaseThis post back in January dealt with Rudyard Kipling’s excursions into science fiction, As Easy as ABC and With the Night Mail, and a curious contemporary relevance. Strange, in the light of their vision of a future ruled by a globalised technocracy in nuclear-powered airships, to see this article, “A Conceptual Vision for Near-Space Operations”…
Read More Global Kipling, AgainYou can find my comment here.
Read More If it’s Greek-Turkish dogfight you’re afterLaura Rozen reports that Archer Logistics, corruption monkey/hookergate boss Brent Wilkes’ company, as well as being offered a contract to run a “secret plane network” for the CIA was given the opportunity to ship “anything” to or from Iraq, piggybacking on their shipments of bottled water and other stores. As one of Doug Farah’s sources…
Read More Secret Plane NetworkWere purchased from leftover Bosnian war stocks for the Iraqi security forces by U.S. agents in BiH, and flown out of the country by Aerocom in four runs with the Ilyushin 76 ER-IBV, serial no. 3423699. But where they were delivered remains a mystery, and it is feared that the weapons actually went to the…
Read More 99 Tonnes of Guns