Rybkin appears!

Der Standard

According to Der Standard of Austria and Interfax, Ivan Rybkin has reappeared. According to his campaign manager, he spent the weekend at a friend's house in Kiev and had decided not to watch television for a while. BBC report

How very odd.

Rybkin - he didn't re-appear, then.

The Russian presidential candidate Ivan Rybkin, who disappeared in mysterious circs on Friday shortly after registering his candidacy, has not re-appeared as his backer Boris Berezovsky suggested he might. From the Moscow Times:
"Gennady Gudkov, a member of the State Duma security committee, said Monday afternoon that security service officials had told him that Rybkin might have been located at a sanatorium in Odintsovo, just west of Moscow.

Calls to the sanatorium indicated that Rybkin had never been there. The presidential administration, which owns the sanatorium, also denied Rybkin had ever been there.

Gudkov later retracted his statement, saying that his sources might have been joking."


Well, that's clear then. At the same time, a murder investigation was opened and then reclosed. The weirdness shows no sign of abating, but at least you can't take guns into parliament any more.

Reference the FT.com story

The other example of technical/economic cooperation as a solvent for political fury I was thinking of, but failed to produce on Friday, were the sewers of Nicosia. The sewerage system of the divided city was (I think) the work of a colonial engineer who modelled the system on that set up for London in the 1850s by Sir Joseph Bazalgette, with the mains laid out so that the shit would be unfailingly carried away by gravity. An elegant solution, and one that obviously had no connection to the political map above ground. When the city was divided on racial lines after the civil war and the 1974 Turkish intervention, and two entirely separate and mutually nonrecognising administrations appeared on each side of the green line, the sewers went on functioning despite. Until, that is, the tunnels began to suffer from age and wear. Who would repair them? Especially as depending on the stretch of sewer, one side might have to do work that would only benefit the other.

It sounds like an example from a university lecture on Locke or perhaps on functionalism, but it was reality.

In the end, after sewage began to leak into the streets, the two sewers boards had to co-operate discreetly on rehabilitating the system. Once they were doing that, other possibilities appeared... After all, everyone shits and drinks water, no?

West Bank settlers stage beauty contest

Story

This is about the most ridiculous thing I've heard in years. "The guards at the door packed M-16 rifles and the mid-show entertainment was a trio rapping about suicide bombers blowing up coffee shops.
But on the runway, 20 young women in sizzling swimsuits and high-heeled black boots strutted their blow-dried manes and lithe bellies with a single goal: to claim the rhinestone tiara of Miss Samaria 2004, the beauty who would be judged the embodiment of the women of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

"People think all settlers have horns and beards and guns," said Ron Nachman, mayor of Ariel, the 20,000-resident settlement that hosted the Saturday night beauty pageant before an overflow crowd at the local sports center. "This shows that we are normal people, we're like everyone else."

Vote ME for The Guardian Best Political Blog

Today is your last opportunity to vote for me in The Guardian's political blog awards. Follow this link and send them an email with Yorkshire Ranter in the subject line before the end of today.

Thanks in advance.

Alive But Dead - PRAVDA

Alive But Dead - PRAVDA

On the Russian theme, here's a report into a woman who suddenly discovered that she was legally dead:

Tatyana was so naïve when she believed she would be soon rehabilitated as living. Indeed, she was alive and still held her passport. However, as she realized later, once dead one can hardly revive. There was hardly an authority that knew how to get out of the unusual situation. Neither the bureau for civil status registration, neither the police or the funeral office agreed to shoulder the responsibility for the absurd incident. The pension service and the fiscal department considered Tatyana Rumyantseva as dead for a rather long period already. That was strange, but according to the records of the passport bureau, the woman was dead and alive at the same time. In April 2003, the housing board officially registered Tatyana was not living in her apartment as she was dead.

BBC NEWS | Russia election candidate missing

BBC NEWS | World | Europe | Russia election candidate missing

Ivan Rybkin, an opposition candidate in the Russian presidential elections, has disappeared a few days after his campaign ran a full-page ad in the Kommersant accusing Vladimir Putin of being in the pocket of big business. In a further attack, he gave an interview to the Moskovskyie Novosti in which he alleged that businessmen close to the Kremlin were benefiting from the Railways Ministry's revenues.

Obviously, one might suspect these facts to be connected.

But there is something odd about the story, as detailed here. After all, Rybkin is an associate of Boris Berezovsky, and when he was asked about Rybkin's fate he simply declared that he would re-appear today. You might have expected that the exiled financier, first of the oligarchs and diehard opponent of Putin, would have taken the opportunity to suggest he had been murdered by the same agents of the state who he, Berezovsky, believes are attempting to kill him even in London. And when things like this happen, who would be surprised? But no. According to Berezovsky, God was in his heaven and all was well with the world.

Mr. Rybkin has yet to make his advertised reappearance today.

FT.com - US plans for a "greater Middle Eastern settlement"

FT.com / World / Arab-Israel

"The Bush administration is trying to enlist European support for a grand plan to reform the Arab and Islamic world and integrate it within a western security umbrella.

American and European Union officials held a meeting in Washington last week on the so-called "greater Middle East" initiative, an evolving project that could involve countries from Morocco to as far east as Pakistan and is being billed as a priority for US foreign policy this year"

Sounds interesting if true. Wouldn't it be weird if the neocons were to take a leaf out of the European Union book on the Middle East? After all, after the second world war, Harry S. Truman was very concerned about re-establishing a rational pattern of economic relations through Europe. That led to his support for the pre-ECSC institutions like Benelux, the OEEC and the European Payments Union. The later push on to the ECSC, the EEC and beyond was motivated by the same principle. Now - and here comes a much belated Part II to my post on the Turkish-Israeli "water for guns" agreement - we have to consider the nature of these relations. The key materials of European industrial life in 1949 were coal and steel. Get the industrial bit right, and you got the strategic bit right, and the agricultural bit followed. What is the key economic resource in the Levant? You're probably there already - water.

Perhaps that final status agreement, when it happens, should include a Water Community? I can imagine something influenced by the Bretton Woods exchange rate system in part - each state would declare a portion of its annual water availability to a central control, and the surplus states would be obliged to sell their surplus. Equally, deficit states would have to have an incentive to economise and specialise - but the crucial point is that a surplus, that is to say not using the scarce resource or hoarding virtual-water goods, would be treated as seriously as a deficit. Therefore, the drier states would have access to water or virtual-water imports and the increased supply to the Middle Eastern water market would lower the price.

Del.icio.us - new Ranter feature

Discovered a new and interesting webthing! It is called Delicious and it is a device for keeping one's internet bookmarks - with the key feature that you give them search tags, so the whole thing becomes a searchable database of whatever its users find useful or interesting. Whatever you search out of it - for example, "politics" or "blog" - is available as an RSS feed. That's what you will now see at the bottom of the Ranter Coverage headlines - the 5 most active bookmarks on "politics" from Del. Apparently it's currently "not so much in beta as pre-alpha testing". How techy is that?

BTW, in the best blogging spirit of reciprocity, I've added the whole blogroll to my bookmark list with them.

Laugh? nearly bought my own beer...

Just reviewing the site statistics, and what do I find among the googlers? Someone has searched for "arrogant american blog uk" and hit the Ranter. Strange, because it doesn't appear in the first ten pages of results. Other amusing search strings include "Turkeyish money" and "Lord Brocket & the book he wrote in prison". I didn't know he knew how to write. Perhaps they were thinking of Jeffrey Archer. And who was the visitor who came from an old-style Arpanet address (.arpa)? Now that's deep tech.

Seriously, I always think looking into the stats is like peering round the door of a stinking pub full of random drunks..

Ryanair - what was that about subsidies for "pilot training"?

In the wake of the court case between Ryanair and the European Commission, one thing seems to have evaded public attention. Part of the controversial subsidy paid by the government of Wallonie to the much-loved Irish airline was supposedly to fund "pilot training". Funny that. Ryanair are infamous in the trade for a variety of amusing business practices involving trainees and new employees. Perhaps the most offensive is that of charging a £50 fee to examine job applications, although that was trumped when some of the unsuccessful applicants discovered they were being billed again later - ostensibly because their applications had been "reconsidered". Weirdly, only those who had paid by credit card were "reconsidered". Those who are recruited to Ryanair's "sponsorship" scheme to get their type ratings (the additional qualification needed to take command of a specific type of aircraft) are not sponsored in any sense known to the rest of the world - the sponsorship is described as a "self sponsorship", which means that you pay the £10,000 or so out of your own pocket. Had they decided to take the TR off their own bat, they could of course choose their course. Not so this way. That done, the new hires progress to line training - the period of partly on-the-job qualification in the company's own procedures normal in airlines. Although they are providing hours of work to the company, they are paid no salary. A full examination of Ryanair horror-stories would take a whole blog, as they are legion but often unreliable. But - what did they tell the burghers of Wallonia exactly?

Murder, rape, self-storage

In the case of a man who murdered a school teacher and stored her corpse in a unity he hired at a Big Yellow Self-Storage branch in Brighton, a court has handed down a sentence of life imprisonment. The victim's family are apparently demanding strict controls on porn sites after the revelation that the killer was obsessed by alleged snuff films and websites offering film of rape and strangulation. Without getting into the obvious cyber-freedom vs. censorship debate, I'll just say how weird it was back in 1999, when I moved to the south, to see for the first time these self storage firms. I had only read of this phenomenon before that, as a weird thing people did in Los Angeles. Since then, they have proliferated like weapons of mass destruction are meant to - huge robot sheds in Bright Friendly Colours next to motorways all over London and the South-East, with signs in insane sizes (We Sell Boxes, Tape and Bubble Wrap..). I always saw them as vaguely sinister, like blocks of flats for ghosts, and certainly fine places for crimes to be committed. Imagine my shock on seeing a Big Yellow shoot up in Leeds. Nowhere is safe, clearly.

Bush losing Republican supporters?

Ungodly Politics has an interesting post concerning George W. Bush and the problems of being the only candidate in the election - it's not as easy as you think!

According to updated figures from the New Hampshire Secretary of State's office, which only today posted a final figure on the total number of ballots cast, only 78 percent of New Hampshire voters who took Republican ballots marked them for Bush. (In one New Hampshire town, Milton, Bush received only 48 percent of the vote, while in a number of others he was held below 60 percent of the vote.)

Very poor. Surely an authoritarian bully in a one-candidate election, with more money than God for TV ads, ought to at least push Saddam's 99%?

Commons blocked by demo!

The Commons debate on Hutton has been halted by a group of protestors who call themselves Oxford Citizens for Truth. They moved into the public gallery and chanted "no more whitewash!" until the Speaker suspended parliament for 10 minutes. Hardly surprising on the same day the Independent made itself the first paper to go back to the Hutton evidence and dig up some of the nasties, quoting Dr Brian Jones, the head of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons in the MoD and David Kelly's boss, as saying that his team were overruled when the infamous dossier was prepared and that it was transformed by Alistair Campbell. Unfounded, eh?

I have to say I've been a little surprised - I never expected the total exoneration in the first place and then I didn't quite foresee the ferocity of the reaction and the continuing political crisis.

Dr. Khan's plea for mercy

Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, chief scientist of the Pakistani nuclear programme, has made a plea for mercy on national television after being accused of illegally supplying other countries, especially Libya, Iran and possibly even North Korea with advice and even detailed designs for nuclear equipment. AQK is a Pakistani hero, who worked in the 1970s in Europe for a group of British, Dutch and German firms called Urenco making uranium-enrichment machinery - until he levanted with the blueprints in the best James Bond style. It's probably worth pointing out here that the people responsible for exposing the existence of a black market in nuclear engineering technology are the UN's International Atomic Energy Authority - or in other words, the wimps who couldn't be relied upon in Iraq.

Although everyone, I think, will agree that trading in nuclear weapons - well, the means to make them - is something the world does not need, I can't help feeling a horror at the medieval side of this. Publicly begging for your life on live television - it's hardly the best example of democratic values in the Muslim world, is it? In fact, it's extremely reminiscent of the first Gulf War and various, viciously battered, allied aircrew being forced to make public statements of humiliation before TV cameras. Or Al-Jazeera showing those so terrible pictures of dead people. (that are quite all right when we show them, as long as they are on the other side...or have I missed something?) And it only sounds worse when you notice this:

According to sources in Washington, Mr Powell offered Gen Musharraf assistance for an inquiry into Mr Khan's activities. The Guardian has learned that money, equipment and lie detectors for interrogations would be made available. Gen Musharraf rejected the overture but the case against Mr Khan has been building up inexorably since.

"Equipment" for an interrogation. A grim prospect. And it also seems very convenient indeed that the Pakistani government had absolutely nothing to do with it! It was just those terrible scientist johnnies! (never know what they'll do next, what?) Who would think that a government that prepared operational plans to disperse nukes and aircraft into Taliban territory in the event of war as a kind of second strike capability on the cheap might do anything so outrageous?

Oddly enough, though, Musharraf has some unintended backing for his position, from President Bush. Bush took up the traditional Russian peasant view of power over the weekend with his "Ah wanna know the faycts" speech - it's not him! He is a Good Tsar! It's those evil, plotting courtiers that lead him astray with their foreign influences. The problem is, though, that although this idea served wonderfully well for many years to soak up popular fury, it allows no manoeuvre. The next stop was always to assume that he wasn't really the tsar - and that meant a cossack rebellion.

Some predictions for The Great Inquiry: The Second Wave

As we're all going to have another inquiry into the intelligence assessments about Iraq, I thought I'd record my feelings as they happened and make some predictions based (I hope) on reason. "The prime minister has announced that there will be a new inquiry into intelligence failures.." (Emotion: Relief/Schadenfreude) "The inquiry will consist of Privy Councillors from all political parties" (Silly grin) "..and will be chaired by Lord Butler of Stockwell, the former Cabinet Secretary" (Hmmmm) "who cleared the radical changes in No.10 Downing Street after the 1997 election" (Foreboding) "..and is said to be a strong supporter of top-up fees" (Mild despair, nausea) "The Liberal Democrats will not take part, as the inquiry will not touch on the political judgements based on that intelligence" (Oh God, here we go again).

Some predictions, then! The inquiry will successfully unearth various chunks of political plutonium - spooks will testify that it was all nonsense and their political masters were at fault, embarrassing documents will emerge unexpectedly - and will then retire to seclusion to prepare its conclusions. Finally, the report will be released and will just - just - avoid slamming the lumps together...

Especially when you see the make-up of this committee. Lord Inge, ex-Field Marshal, former Chief of the Defence Staff (fair enough), "former senior civil servant" Sir John Chilcott (no prizes for guessing what he'll decide, then), Labour MP Ann Taylor, chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee (yes, the one who missed Jack Straw's porky about chemical weapons, a former Chief Whip..), and the Conservative MP Michael Mates. Michael Mates? Michael Mates!
The bloke who sent Asil Nadir a watch inscribed "DON'T LET THE BUGGERS GET YOU DOWN" after he was caught ripping off hordes of small shareholders, a crime for which he has since escaped justice by skipping bail to Northern Cyprus? Yes, the very same! What a moral arbiter!

Rant switch to safe, please.

Oh yes, and the committee will meet in private. I'm sorry to bore, but does anyone else feel a distinct lack of confidence in this curious bunch? Especially after this little beaut from the Prime Minister...

"We can't end up having an inquiry into whether the war was right or wrong. That is something that we have got to decide. We are the politicians."

Mind you, others seem to doubt this messianic claim to infallibility. After all, there is already talk of a judicial review, or even of a Commons motion for the impeachment of the Prime Minister. Now I didn't know we could impeach people here, and doubtless it would be impossible to raise a majority to do him in, but it sounds fun, no?

Another day, another blog

We welcome Daniel's Corner to the exponentially growing blogroll

David Blunkett's Great Idea!

Apparently our Home Secretary now wants another Terrorism Act that would permit secret trials without juries and with a reduced standard of proof. Supposedly he'd even like to keep the evidence secret from the defence. So - exactly what has happened lately that requires this vast new power grab? Isn't it the case that the Home Office bureaucracy is simply trying to anchor the "temporary" post-11/9/01 extensions to its power into a permanent anti-terrorism empire?

You'd be especially worried if you were this bloke.

"Mike, who asked that his last name and hometown not be used (AVweb has verified his identity) says a dark tan, a black beard and the regular shipment of aviation-related merchandise to his home is all it took to have him branded (briefly) as a suspected terrorist."

Lord Brocket surfaces

I gather from the newspapers that Lord Brocket is one of the people currently taking part in "I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here!", as well as John Lydon - John Lydon? John Lydon? This reminds me of something. Now, my lord's only claim to celebrity is that he is a convict, having done time for insurance fraud, and that he was mentioned in the House of Commons by none other than Tony Blair. Years ago, during a debate on the original House of Lords Bill, a Conservative was waffling about the "wealth of experience and talent" the peers supposedly brought to the political process. Mr. Blair instantly retorted by giving the example of Brocket - the first Lord Brocket, it seems, was an American millionaire who gave Lloyd George a large sum of money in order to acquire a title. The second was detained during the second world war as a potential traitor because he was a Fascist and a member of "The Link", a group of pro-Nazi aristocrats. The third never managed to attend Parliament in his life, and the fourth went to prison for concealing his collection of Ferraris under an ornamental lake so as to claim their value from his insurers. This is the one who is now wandering about an Australian rainforest in the company of various freaks for the public's amusement.

Clearly, blood will out.

The only worthwhile content in this story is the strange reminder of those long-gone times, now as distant as the Pleistocene, when Tony Blair's government seemed to be a genuinely progressive force...

Thanks for the links

The Ranter has been nominated for the Guardian Best Political Blog award! This has caused a hits avalanche and a wave of comments - after all, our Technorati link cosmos page has gone from 10 inbound links to 15 since Saturday (inbound links) and the hit counter is giving off steam. After all, on the 24th of January we had 10 hits and 8 pageviews during the day - but 71 and 47 on the last day of the month, and this in a month when the highest day had been 36 and 19. So, thanks and links are due to:

Super Mum,
Media Dragon,
Dual Loyalty,
and Jade Farrington

Now, of course, I'll have to read you all..