See you Jimmy

During last week’s heavily moderated (i.e. no hard questions) webchat with Home Office ball-breaker-in-chief, Louise Casey, on the Respect Agenda, several bloggers, including Nosemonkey, noticed what looked to be a fair blatant bit of astroturfing going on involving a ‘Jimmy Devlin’, who posted this… Jimmy Devlin: Louise, empowering […]

Another Fine Mess

Another Day. Another Home Office Bill. Another example of badly drafted legislation: The New Police and Justice Bill includes this gem of an amendment to Computer Misuse Act, which is intended to criminalise the development, distribution or possession of ‘hacker tools’: 3A Making, supplying or obtaining articles for […]

The Iraqi National Lottery

A new audit of American financial practices in Iraq has uncovered irregularities including millions of reconstruction dollars stuffed casually into footlockers and filing cabinets, an American soldier in the Philippines who gambled away cash belonging to Iraq, and three Iraqis who plunged to their deaths in a rebuilt […]

On Common Sense or the lack thereof

Back in my own university days, pretty much the only attention that the Student Union paid to its various clubs and societies was to use them as a means of exercising their slightly perverse sense of humour during Fresher’s week. Fresher’s week, of course, meant the obligatory ‘Fresher’s […]

Rendition Memo in Full

What follows is the full and unexpurgated text of the Foreign Office memo relating to renditions through UK territory and airspace that was leaked to, and published by, the New Statesman last week – now in a usable format, the scanned PDF having been put through OCR software […]