Alternate Seat of TYR

That’s what happens when an Antonov-12 runs right off the runway, engines churning, and hits a parked Boeing 727. But that isn’t the interesting bit.
The 727 was 9L-LEF; and what it was doing in Pointe Noire, Congo-Brazzaville, when it’s meant to be with Iraqi Airways is a very good question indeed. Like all the Iraqi [...]

FT: the AirTanker bond issue has, not surprisingly, gone pear-shaped as the monoline insurers fall apart. The story includes some vital detail on precisely what the Defence Procurement PFI team and the consortium have been doing all this time; essentially, trying to finance the deal at an acceptable rate of interest in the middle of [...]

The Tory is sure to leap on the news that, as Dr Rant points out, there is little point in doing a “deep clean” of hospitals because hospital-acquired diseases are propagated by the staff. Strange, I remember when Michael Howard floated a whole election campaign on the line “How difficult can it be to keep [...]

Interesting article in Aviation Leak & Space Technology about the Chinese air defence system, built of standard telecoms/IT stuff. Encrypted IP over many different bearers, landline fibre rather than microwave, that sort of thing. Two things come to mind:
1) Americans; can you just accept that Huawei exists and its engineers are competent? OK? You don’t [...]

Nonbarking dog of the year, 2007 was the fact that the increasingly heavyweight NATO force in Afghanistan’s logistics are dependent on the road from Kandahar-Quetta-Karachi, that is to say through Taliban and Baluch rebel country to Pakistan’s most politically unstable and violent city. As you’ll see at the link, someone finally attacked trucks on it [...]

James Graham asks: does your candidate for Mayor of London pass the 7th July competence test?
This is of course a strong suit for the Liberals; perhaps the only one going in a dead campaign. Picking Brian Paddick as the candidate against lardbucket and International Marxists for Police Bullets was a cracking idea; wouldn’t JG’s suggestion [...]

I would like to take this opportunity to make clear that I stand for surgery. We know that the queen of specialisations is a highly effective treatment for many different conditions; British surgeons are respected around the world. In fact, I believe we would be failing in our moral duty to patients of all kinds [...]

Someone in Pakistan googles for US army jobs in pakistan as cctv operator.

Dear Lazyweb: I have a mystifying Linux problem.
To begin the tale, I’ve been running Mandriva Linux on my laptop since last October with considerable satisfaction; I use KDE and the Metisse 3D window manager. However, I had to disable the ACPI power management support to get the thing working; eventually I grew tired of this [...]

Russians!
Not just Alissa this time; the Il-78 tankers, A-50 AWACSki, Bears and Backfires got to come out and play with the entire Russian navy. I think they’re trying to make some sort of point.