I just handed back the keys to my old flat to the council. After a week of cleaning up the detritus of 5 years of not being terribly tidy, I am overjoyed to see the back of it.
In the time I lived there I had to cope with crack-dealers and prostitutes using my stairwell as a meeting point, and constant screaming and yelling outside my flat. There were mysterious fires, including arson attempts on the chap who lived in the flat downstairs from me. There was also the famous time when someone took an almost impossibly large dump at the bottom of my stairs. Goodbye Magdalen Close. Ain’t missing you at all! I’m amazed I got away from you without being stabbed, shot, or burned alive.
Back in Christmastime 2006, East Anglia was terrorised by a serial killer. Not something that’s supposed to happen in our quiet little bit of the country. His final tally was 5 Ipswich prostitutes. Due to his choice of victims he was known as the Suffolk Ripper, though in fact the Suffolk Strangler would be a far more appropriate title for him, and I shall use that term. While all the crimes took place in Suffolk, the fear definitely spread the few miles north to Norwich. In early December it seemed that every day there was a new grisly discovery, or turn in the investigation.
The killings were spread over November and early December 2006, at an unusually high rate of activity for serial killings. They stopped when Steve Wright was arrested on the 21st of December, but at that point the case could no longer be reported, so as to not prejudice his trial. As a result we don’t actually know very much about what went on, or why the police think Steve Wright is responsible.
Steve Wright’s trial begins today with jury selection, and many of our questions will be answered. He has plead “Not Guilty”.
After the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, rioters took to the street across Pakistan. Shops, cars, and infrastructure were burned. At least 47 people died in the riots. Rioters destroyed 176 banks, 34 petrol stations, 72 train cars, 18 rail stations, and hundreds of cars and shops. That unrest has yet to run it’s course.
In 2007, a minibike carrying 2 French teenagers collided with a police vehicle, killing the riders. There are differing accounts of who was at fault for the collision, but the end result was once again mass civil uprising, echoing the French riots of 2005. Over 70 cars and buildings were burned, including a library, two schools, a police station, and several shops.
It makes no sense. How can it? When did burning your neighbour’s cars and homes become a legitimate way of showing your displeasure with the government? While it is safe to say that individuals didn’t burn down their own homes or cars, and I’m guessing the library burners weren’t big readers anyway, as a whole the rioters engaged in the systematic destruction of their very own community.
Now we have Kenya, a country which was until the past month considered one of the most stable nations in Africa, coming apart at the seams. I was just watching some footage of a BBC reporter, Karen Allen, flying to the town of Burnt Forest, as it is just too dangerous to travel there by road at the moment. Out of the window, she could see village after village, burned to the ground.
We travelled by helicopter and from the air could see the charred remains of villages, people’s homes razed to the ground.
More than 100 people died here in clashes last week.
In the hospital I saw patients with burns, gunshot wounds and gashes from machetes and arrows.
They had been targeted because of assumptions about which way they voted in Kenya’s controversial presidential contest.
Tribal divisions, long dormant, have been given the excuse they needed to needed to bubble up into genocide. The way you voted is not known, but is assumed from your tribal affiliation. Was this inevitable, or did circumstances simply come together in just the right combination?
Sifting through possessions we stumble across a woman who had escaped. She had sheltered in the church, along with her three children.
She spoke of the minutes before the blaze began. Attackers dragged in mattresses doused in petrol and set them alight. The door to the church was bolted to prevent people running out.
She told how she managed to scramble through an open window with her three-year-old daughter in her arms.
But when the little girl reached safety the attackers outside flung her back into the flames.
“We have never seen anything like this before, burning churches. These were friends of ours before the election, now they are trying to kill us like dogs,” she said.
17 people died in that inferno, 13 of them children, murdered by their neighbours. Neighbours with oh-so-slightly different genes, and names, and ancestors. I doubt a non-Kenyan would be able to tell the difference between them at all. It’s like Bosnia, like Rwanda, like Somalia, all over again. This time, the excuse is that some tribes voted one way, and some the other. Democracy, supposed to put an end to this sort of nonsense, has in this case become the justification to hate. People are so ready to lay down their neighbours homes, and lives for their blasted cause.
Neither of the two men, President Mwai Kibaki or his opponent Raila Odinga, who have brought their country to this point, deserve to rule. Their mutual stubbornness, and greed for power, and inability or unwillingness to control their followers, has lead Kenya to a dark place, and it will not be they who lead her back to the light.
Perhaps the President of Kenya did steal the election. He would not be the first politician to do so. Perhaps it is a fiction created by his political opponents. Either way, it is not worth the death of a nation. Kibaki and Odinga should both retreat into exile, and allow someone without Kenyan blood on their hands to step forward.
Sigh. Because apparently even Giuliani’s own adverts can’t stop playing with themselves, I’ve had to put it on it’s own page. It keeps repeating randomly. Not what you want when you’re trying to read happy stories about giant playmobil. Click below for the story.
Continue reading Santa should sue Rudi Giuliani for defamation of character
Russian RIA Novosti reports:
Vladimir Putin may be popular in Russia for saving the nation from the chaos of the 1990s, but a sect in the country has taken its devotion a step further by praying to ‘presidential icons.’
The Bolshaya Elnya village in the Nizhny Novgorod Region is home to the “Rus’ Resurrecting” sect, a group of local residents who believe that President Putin was both the Apostle Paul and King Solomon in previous lives.
Rus’ is the term used for the medieval East Slavic nation that gave its name to modern Russia.
“We didn’t choose Putin,” Mother Fontinya told the Moskovsky Komsomolets paper, expounding on the first time she laid eyes on the “holy one.”
“It was when Yeltsin was naming him as his successor [during a live New Year’s Eve TV broadcast in 1999]. My soul exploded with joy! ‘An ubermensch! God himself has chosen him!'” I cried.
“Yeltsin was the destroyer, and God replaced him with his creation,” claimed Fontinya.
The sect possesses a President Putin icon that Fontinya claims miraculously appeared one day.
“He has given us everything,” she said, pointing to the sky.
A special newspaper published by the sect – ‘The Temple of Light’ – features interviews with long-dead religious figures, including the Apostle Paul. The sect members are also convinced that President Putin knows about and supports the actions of their ‘Mother Superior.’
Russian Christian sects have long been known for their unusual choices of icons, some of them praying to portraits of such well-known ‘holy men’ as Stalin and Ivan the Terrible.
Another Russian sect is currently holed up in an underground shelter in the country’s central Penza Region and has threatened to commit mass suicide if any attempt is made to bring them to the surface.
Religion was tightly controlled in the U.S.S.R. and the collapse of the Soviet Union saw an explosion in sects and cults, as well as interest in New Age philosophies and beliefs. The back pages of many Russian tabloid newspapers are full of advertisements for ‘healers’ and ‘magicians’ who promise to bring happiness in love, success in business, as well as a range of other services.
This reminds me slightly of the cargo cults that have chosen Prince Philip as their unlikely saviour. Unlike Prince Philip, though, Vladimir Putin is the leader of a huge cult of personality. It’s not too surprising that a proportion of his followers have taken that extra step and decided he is their messiah.
With his term as President almost up, he has made it very clear that while he will obey the letter of the constitution and stand down, he fully intends to maintain a steel grip upon the governing of Russia for the foreseeable future. The unfortunately named Putin youth group, the Nashi, are numerous and skilled at intimidating anyone who dares to criticise him, and are impressively zealous and filled with love for Putin. For the time being it seems, Gary Kasparov notwithstanding, that Russia is a one-party state, and the depth of devotion to their dear leader only seems to be increasing with time. Until such time as someone within Russia is willing (And able to avoid dying or imprisonment, both of which are epidemic amongst Putin supporters.) to stand against his complete dismissal of criticism of himself, or the darkly comical way in which the political system of Russia is conducted, his powerbase will continue to grow.
By the way, calling him an “ubermensch” does absolutely nothing to make feel any better about all this. I don’t mind so much other people thinking he’s the messiah, just so long as he doesn’t start believing it himself…. Perhaps this is what George W Bush really saw when he famously looked into Putin’s soul…
Al Gore’s Nobel lecture, in full I hope.
More than ever, we need leaders who take climate change seriously. I’m not talking Kyoto serious, I’m talking “Oh crap oh crap, billions will die if we don’t do something now” serious. It is something of a blessing and a curse for me that I studied some environmental science at UEA, as it leaves me less able than most to blithely ignore the coming storm, and go about my business.
Seriously, as someone with a fair bit of ecologist training, I am shitting myself. Not for my own sake, I’ll get by, but for the sake of a world that I’m really quite fond of, and the sake my my entirely theoretical grandchildren. We need the world to wake up and engage in a bit of constructive panic, or our descendants are going to inherit a pretty bleak post-mass extinction world. The greatly reduced natural diversity might sound boring, but I’m sure the greatly increased occurrence of catastrophic weather events will keep things interesting. This sounds like hyperbole. I wish it was.
Global warming is by no means the only environmental issue we have to deal with. Our air, our water, our food; all have become tainted by novel manmade chemicals that have absolutely no business being in our bodies. Species are dying off at an ever increasing rate. Mostly due to destruction of habitat, or inability to cope with changing climate, but sometimes we’re not even sure why, except that they’re probably reacting badly to one of the cocktail of chemicals they’re being poisoned with.
We need leaders who will grasp all these literally existential threats, and take the massive and momentous steps necessary to address them. The nature of politics, sadly, is that very few are willing to take the pain in the short term that we need to ensure long term prosperity.
Al Gore still hasn’t ruled out running for US President, though he’s leaving it bloody late. Al Gore announcing his candidacy would be the best Christmas present I could get. I’d even pass up an iPhone for it. If we can’t have Gore, then in every state, in every nation, we need to ask our politicians what they’re going to do about the environment. If they don’t think that it is the number one issue for our times, find someone who does. If they’re not shitting themselves, they’re not paying attention.
John Darwin has to be one of the most stupid people ever to attempt to fake his own death. Indeed, the fact he’s still alive is the only thing precluding his receiving a Darwin award for lifetime achievement.
In 2002, after trouble with debt, his canoe was found empty, floating in the sea off Hartlepool. He was declared dead by a coroner in 2003, and his wife received his life-insurance payout. £25,000 and the paying off of their £130,000 mortgage.
His wife, Anne, claims she was not in on the scheme until he turned up on their doorstep, cunningly disguised with a shabby beard. He then moved back in with his wife for a time, before moving next-door into another property they owned. Amazingly, no-one seemed to notice. Perhaps because of further ingenious tactics: “When he went out he would disguise himself sometimes by taking a walking stick and walking with a limp. When it was cold, he would put on a wooly hat and pull his collar upwards.“.
It seems they had quite a lot of property. “The debt had been building up for some time. He kept applying for credit cards and he used to always get me to co-sign the applications but I never ever used the cards. It was our rented properties that caused us the problems. At that time we had about 12 houses scattered around County Durham. They were rental investments but people were slow in paying us.”. Strangely, the idea of selling one of their houses (at a time when house prices were soaring, no less) to cover what was only a few tens of thousands of debt does not seem to have occurred to them.
He created a new identity for himself, imaginatively called “John Jones”, and got his hands on a fake passport through the ruse of applying for one as normal, using his home address. From hereon, he would pop in and out of the country in a search to find a new place to live for he and his wife. Eventually he found such a place, and only 7 weeks ago his wife emigrated to Panama, to start a new life.
OK, your entire plan so far seems to have been calculated to get get yourself caught, and yet in spite of that you’ve managed to get away with it. You’ve got the money, and a new life. What to do next?
A week ago, John Darwin catches a flight back to England, walks into a police station, and claims he has amnesia and doesn’t remember anything of the last five years. He is promptly arrested. It turns out the police were never entirely happy about the whole vanishing thing, and had received some not particularly actionable, but intriguing rumours a few months earlier.
Then this lady, who saw the story on the news, typed “John Anne Panama” into Google, and came up with a picture of them there in 2006, all smiley and not dead, on the website of the “Move to Panama” website. (sadly it’s been taken down now. But wait, what is this in Google’s cache? Though it probably won’t be there for long.) She notified the police, who were dumbfounded.
Anne is contacted by the media, and goes through the routine of being amazed and overjoyed. Their children, who knew nothing about the whole business and thought their dad was dead, are genuinely amazed and overjoyed. And confused, one would imagine. The police have a few words with Anne’s neighbours in Panama, who identify John instantly. Perhaps not caring to discover what cells are like in Panama, Anne Darwin has returned to Britain to find out what they’re like here.
From the start, the whole business sounds utterly unnecessary. They owned twelve properties. Surely they were not so heavily leveraged that they couldn’t have paid their debts off by selling some, given that house prices were rising so fast? John Darwin. You and your wife are extremely stupid and greedy. Only the obliviousness of your neighbours, and the ineptness of the passport office ever let you pretend otherwise. You’re going to prison, and your children are disgusted with your antics.
The power that the internet, and Google in particular, has now for the finding of increasingly disparate information is incredible. Of course, in this case it helped that they were stupid enough to let themselves be photographed and gave their real names. When face recognition technology becomes commonplace, I wonder how many pictures of myself I’ll be able to google up at a moments notice?
It will make a fine TV movie. I wonder if Google would be wiiling to give me funding for it?
Afterthought: There is some suggestion that John Darwin chose to hand himself in in order to drop his wife into legal jeopardy, after she objected to his engaging in constant cybersex with a variety of internet acquaintances. If so, that just makes this entire business even more idiotic than I already thought it was.
The National Intelligence Estimate, available to read in full online, is not going to be a popular read in neocon circles. Lets have a look at it’s key findings in full:
Key Judgments
A. We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program; we also assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons. We judge with high confidence that the halt, and Tehran’s announcement of its decision to suspend its declared uranium enrichment program and sign an Additional Protocol to its Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Safeguards Agreement, was directed primarily in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure resulting from exposure of Iran’s previously undeclared nuclear work.
• We assess with high confidence that until fall 2003, Iranian military entities were working under government direction to develop nuclear weapons.
• We judge with high confidence that the halt lasted at least several years. (Because of intelligence gaps discussed elsewhere in this Estimate, however, DOE and the NIC assess with only moderate confidence that the halt to those activities represents a halt to Iran’s entire nuclear weapons program.)
• We assess with moderate confidence Tehran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007, but we do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons.
• We continue to assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Iran does not currently have a nuclear weapon.
• Tehran’s decision to halt its nuclear weapons program suggests it is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005. Our assessment that the program probably was halted primarily in response to international pressure suggests Iran may be more vulnerable to influence on the issue than we judged previously.
B. We continue to assess with low confidence that Iran probably has imported at least some weapons-usable fissile material, but still judge with moderate-to-high confidence it has not obtained enough for a nuclear weapon. We cannot rule out that Iran has acquired from abroad—or will acquire in the future—a nuclear weapon or enough fissile material for a weapon. Barring such acquisitions, if Iran wants to have nuclear weapons it would need to produce sufficient amounts of fissile material indigenously—which we judge with high confidence it has not yet done.
C. We assess centrifuge enrichment is how Iran probably could first produce enough fissile material for a weapon, if it decides to do so. Iran resumed its declared centrifuge enrichment activities in January 2006, despite the continued halt in the nuclear weapons program. Iran made significant progress in 2007 installing centrifuges at Natanz, but we judge with moderate confidence it still faces significant technical problems operating them.
• We judge with moderate confidence that the earliest possible date Iran would be technically capable of producing enough HEU for a weapon is late 2009, but that this is very unlikely.
• We judge with moderate confidence Iran probably would be technically capable of producing enough HEU for a weapon sometime during the 2010-2015 time frame. (INR judges Iran is unlikely to achieve this capability before 2013 because of foreseeable technical and programmatic problems.) All agencies recognize the possibility that this capability may not be attained until after 2015.
D. Iranian entities are continuing to develop a range of technical capabilities that could be applied to producing nuclear weapons, if a decision is made to do so. For example, Iran’s civilian uranium enrichment program is continuing. We also assess with high confidence that since fall 2003, Iran has been conducting research and development projects with commercial and conventional military applications—some of which would also be of limited use for nuclear weapons.
E. We do not have sufficient intelligence to judge confidently whether Tehran is willing to maintain the halt of its nuclear weapons program indefinitely while it weighs its options, or whether it will or already has set specific deadlines or criteria that will prompt it to restart the program.
• Our assessment that Iran halted the program in 2003 primarily in response to international pressure indicates Tehran’s decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic, and military costs. This, in turn, suggests that some combination of threats of intensified international scrutiny and pressures, along with opportunities for Iran to achieve its security, prestige, and goals for regional influence in other ways, might—if perceived by Iran’s leaders as credible—prompt Tehran to extend the current halt to its nuclear weapons program. It is difficult to specify what such a combination might be.
• We assess with moderate confidence that convincing the Iranian leadership to forgo the eventual development of nuclear weapons will be difficult given the linkage many within the leadership probably see between nuclear weapons development and Iran’s key national security and foreign policy objectives, and given Iran’s considerable effort from at least the late 1980s to 2003 to develop such weapons. In our judgement, only an Iranian political decision to abandon a nuclear weapons objective would plausibly keep Iran from eventually producing nuclear weapons—and such a decision is inherently reversible.
F. We assess with moderate confidence that Iran probably would use covert facilities— rather than its declared nuclear sites—for the production of highly enriched uranium for a weapon. A growing amount of intelligence indicates Iran was engaged in covert uranium conversion and uranium enrichment activity, but we judge that these efforts probably were halted in response to the fall 2003 halt, and that these efforts probably had not been restarted through at least mid-2007.
G. We judge with high confidence that Iran will not be technically capable of producing and reprocessing enough plutonium for a weapon before about 2015.
H. We assess with high confidence that Iran has the scientific, technical and industrial capacity eventually to produce nuclear weapons if it decides to do so.
So, the facts I take away from that are that Iran did put it’s nuclear weapon programme on hold in 2003, just like they said they did. It is true that they still have the capability to eventually develop a weapon if they choose to, but not until 2015 at the earliest, if they restarted their programme this year, which they show no sign of doing.
Thus, though there may be a long-term threat, there is certainly no imminent one. Almost certainly there will be a change of Government in Iran before then, and I would hope that this is going to result in a reduction of belligerent language from Bush, Sarkozy, Brown, and Merkel. The Iranian drive for nuclear weapons was always driven by a sense of vulnerability, rather than an intent to wage wars of aggression, and threats do nothing to assuage that.
As the report says, the Iranians are guided by a cost-benefit approach. We should offer non-aggression and defence pacts, aimed to reduce Tehran’s level of paranoia (Is it paranoia if they really are out to get you?), and try to increase trade and trust between our peoples. It appears we now have several years to try the friendly carrot approach, and please, let us make good use of them.
In a related incident, Iran has offered the GCC (The Gulf Co-operation Council, comprising Bahrain, the UAE ,Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia) a mutual defence and trade pact. I hope they agree, as this would also do a great deal to make Iran feel safer from random aggression, and help integrate them more positively into the local international community.
These developments leave me feeling fairly hopeful. We have a window now to pursue a peaceful path of diplomacy, and it would be a crime to waste it.
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