I know it’s just a formula, but I still don’t like the tag on the Allawi quote: BAGHDAD Iraq will create a security service to tackle the insurgency in the country, Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said Thursday. The new service, the General Security Directorate, “will annihilate those terrorists’ groups, God willing,” Allawi said during a…
LONDON (Reuters): The Butler report on Iraq intelligence has sparked accusations that Prime Minister Tony Blair has adopted a presidential style and runs “government by sofa” with a coterie of unelected advisers. This is very worrying since, as every student of history knows, it were all them Grand Vizier geezers sitting around on sofas smoking…
Mr Wang Qin, “credit officer of the Hang Seng Bank Ltd”, who has a not very well “concealed business suggestion” for me involving Ibrahim Moussa and US20M and culminating in an offer to provide me with Tiscali broadband @ £15.99/month. The mail is sent from wang_qin24@tiscali.co.uk, although I assume he means wang_qin24*7@tiscali.co.uk.
John Prescott was actually being extremely clever when he announced yesterday that Labour “will reduce and probably eliminate the homeless by 2008.” Eliminate, says the OED, comes from eliminare, to thrust out of doors, expel (e, out of + limen, liminis, threshold), so it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Mr Prescott was constructing…
It seems that the local parasite class is going to stop moaning about Bush and his Saudis for long enough tomorrow to welcome Prince Sultan ibn Salman, apparently secretary-general of the Saudi “Supreme Commission for Tourism”, who is here to open some anti-democratic jamboree down at the Forum, to which local women’s groups presumably haven’t…
This is interesting. Unipeak reproduces my site (your site) dynamically on theirs, as it were, turns off my ads, and turns on theirs. The site is presented as a tool to help among others the poor old Chinese, but the fact that my material ends up being cached by Google as if it were theirs…
With a high proportion of Guardianistas seemingly convinced by the thesis of that notorious pre-Ockhamite, Mr Moore, that things are better seen “as if in the continuous story of a divinity who spent his time reading and devising the Weekly Puzzle Magazine” (Eco, Travels), it is interesting to note that The Guardian might (almost, kind…
Sez Rob (via Memepool). There’s a generation-by-generation analysis of the techniques buried somewhere around here, but it has got slightly less amusing recently: early last month I was getting up to 200/hr – not good, even if they do go straight to trash – and, though that problem has been killed, new contact emails receive…
There’s an interesting piece by Michael Obinna in the Nigerian Vanguard in which he complains of “errors of usage in Standard English [being] seen as Nigerian Standard English”, by which he means something distinct from Nigerian pidgins. Although Ethnologue has come across Australian standard English, it doesn’t seem to have heard of Nigerian standard English,…
With no disrespect intended, and given that it is easier to organise wars and other historical events in the mind when they are grouped in series, the Charles Jenkins incident is probably all that will be generally remembered of the Korean War, and Charles Jenkins has outstanding lugs, would it not be pragmatic to begin…