This just keeps getting worse: The Times reports that the Government has rejected 300 out of 700 Iraqi employees who applied for resettlement, mostly under the 12 month rule. That’s a rejection rate of just under half. Curiously, the Foreign Office’s own scheme has turned down 38 out of 180; this seems to suggest that…
Read More Iraqi Employees: It Gets WorseWhat conclusions should we draw from the failure of the US’s Future Imagery Architecture reconnaissance satellite program? After all, under longstanding and still secret agreements with the US, Britain has not developed any satellite reconnaissance capability because the US promises to provide us with access to the product from theirs. This has been denied at…
Read More Dodgy ChequesBring back the Office of Technology Assessment, say the Hoofnagles at Scienceblogs. Good point; for about thirty years, the US Congress had its own staff of scientists and engineers whose task it was to provide the legislature with independent technical advice, until it got zapped by Newt Gingrich. I’m sure it would do them some…
Read More Office of Technical AssessmentThe Board of Inquiry into the loss of the Hercules C-130K XV206 on landing at Lashkar Gah, Afghanistan on the 24th of May last year (see here) has reported (pdf link). More documents are here. After much effort, and extensive exploration of all sorts of other options, the Board concluded that (as was blindingly obvious…
Read More Reading the Documents: XV206British withdrawal from southern Iraq is now in the foreseeable future, with the concentration at Basra Air Station, the impending closure of Basra Palace PJCC, and the departure of the first 500 troops. Therefore, it is high time to consider the fate of Iraqis who took our side during the occupation. Denmark, whose government originally…
Read More Resist the betrayalDoug Farah‘s book on Viktor Bout is out. You can read an excerpt in this month’s Men’s Vogue, which is certainly a fittingly Hunter Thompson-esque scene for him, and an interview. Salient points include this: I think one of the most startling moments for me was when we were talking to Treasury Department people doing…
Read More Book alert: Doug Farah vs Viktor BoutYou probably don’t know that the government wants to implement wholesale filtering of URL requests from the end of next month, do you? Not that the national press, TV, or anything else has reported on it, nor has there been any serious parliamentary debate. Nuh. But the Home Office is pressurising British ISPs to install…
Read More It’s for your own good (again)Last Friday, the Guardian reported that servicemen on leave from Iraq were spending their time camping in a queue at RAF Coltishall in the hope of buying the houses their families lived in before they were sold to the public. It’s another fine achievement of Michael Portillo’s 1996 deal to flog the entire MOD housing…
Read More All the atrocities, and how to take advantageSomeone decides to rake through the Elf-Aquitaine embers, with the result that 42 persons are sent for by the judge. Including a whole slew of politicians – carrier-grade rightwing thug Charles Pasqua, crooked prefect for the Var Jean-Charles Marchiani, professional president’s son Jean-Christophe “Papa M’a Dit” Mitterand, and slightly surprisingly, Mitterand’s right hand man and…
Read More More updates from the crime beatIt’s quite well-known that I don’t think very much of Niall Ferguson’s intellectual credibility. But this is special, in the sense of “I’m not different…I’m special.” I’m not going to take issue with his bizarre contention that saying sorry for the slave trade is why the Iranians grabbed the boarding party from Cornwall. I am,…
Read More Here Comes the Equestrian Statue