From Popbitch: Abu al-Zarqawi is the mastermind behind this week’s gruesome hostage beheadings in Iraq. By filming himself doing the beheadings and then selling the resulting snuff movies as DVDs all over the Middle East, al-Zarqawi has turned himself into radical Islam’s hottest celebrity. What nobody has pointed out is how influenced by hip hop…
The news (via Normblog) that the Iranian justice system has strung up a mentally incapable and unrepresented 16-year old girl for getting to know a boy shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise to anyone who has heard the stories of those who escaped the revolution or the various officially sanctioned torture and murder…
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…
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…
Says Marwan Issam from his computer games stall in a centre of Sunni terrorism: We have things now we didn’t have before, like the internet, mobile phones and satellite television but the quality is not as good as we expected. And we still don’t have enough electricity. Damn, sounds like Iraq’s caught up with Spain.
Talking of the Italian hostages in Iraq, Alessandro Cevese, foreign ministry flunkey recounted a moment of high tension when one of the kidnappers tried to strip Mr Stefio of his wedding ring. The 34 year old had said he would sooner be shot. “The kidnapper at that point replied: ‘Then, I’ll take you outside’ and…
Invited by Tony Blair, the Iraq national team is apparently playing a British parliamentary XI tomorrow and then heading up the M1 to West Brom to take on that well-known Midlands outfit, Trinidad and Tobago. The Spanish authorities have refused them visas, presumably out of political spite, and Mr Bush has not replied to their…
Say what you like about the Hamsa squatters, but their PR operation is slick, and I’m 99% sure the following graffiti is their work. It appeared roughly 24 hours after the outbreak of a riot at the Quatre Camins gaol here which left a deputy governor in intensive care: The revolting state of Spanish prisons…