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I was following the stories about the recent report into the recent London bombings and came across a name that I thought I remembered from a previous story some years ago.

Sure enough, I was right and caught up with a person that proves to be a very true survivor. You can read her first story here and then see what she has been doing to help others get over the London bombings here.

Download a PDF of the full London Assembly report here.

Tags: London Bombings, Rachel North, London Assembly, PDF

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Now let me see…

My brother was recently captured by an Western Government army active in Iraq. He will be treated according to the exact rules of the Geneva convention, excellent!

I, however, have been captured by the US military in Iraq and understand that I can expect less rights under the same Geneva convention!

My other bother, who was brought up in a western European country and was taught  to, and fully believes in the same conventions, recently captured a US soldier, I wonder what rights he will give him during his captivity?

Is it me or do I not fully understand what the USA administration is trying to do? Perhaps only they understand why they have to have a separate understanding of these conventions, which surely must only add to the anger that is already directed against the USA from various countries around the world.

I think the USA needs to listen and understand that making overt statements that will only be interrupted as an indication of the use of torture on its captives.

Some sources (1), (2), (3) with full details of the story.

Tags: Iraq, Geneva Convention, Torture

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From a story I found while writing the previous post, some 8,000 soldier have deserted their all volunteer US Army since the start of the Iraq conflict, however on a year by year count, 2006 figures are down on previous years (2,011 in 2005 versus 7,978 for 2001).

It seems that, according to official sources, the war in Iraq is not the number one reason for desertion. Not fitting into military life is the number one reason! Probably missing ‘Moms’ apple pie too much! See one source of the full story here.

In an associated story, the USA is stepping up its hunt for Vietnam war era deserters! Thirty years after then end of that conflict, it just goes to show that when a deserter, deserts, they had better stay hidden; as clearly, the long arm of the law is still out to get them, thought it would seem that Canada still seems to be the best ‘haven’ for USA deserters.

Tags: US Army, Deserters, USA, Iraq

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Over 1,000 soldiers have deserted from the UK Army since the invasion of Iraq, according to Ministry of Defence (MOD) figures this is increasing at a rapid rate as the conflict drags on – 186 soldier have currently absented themselves without leave (AWOL) so far this year.

I read one solider’s comments for going AWOL and totally disagree with his reasons “of not agreeing with the war in Iraq”. I speak with a vested interest in that I spent a number of years in the UK Royal Navy, but last time I looked, we did still have a volunteer Armed Forces here in the UK and surely when this ‘guy’ signed up on the dotted line, he must have realised that he would be going to have to fight someone, somewhere at some stage in his army career.

Perhaps he feels that he should have been asked by his superiors if it was okay for him (and all the others that have gone AWOL) to go to war before the conflict started!

I fully support all of our armed forces in the tough jobs that they have to do, both in Iraq and at other conflicts around the world. Going AWOL will serve no purpose whatever the deserters think about conflicts they have been told to fight in, it only puts extra strain on those that have to do the work after the deserter has gone and believe me, those that do remain will never forgive a deserter, ever.

Tags: UK Army, Royal Navy, Iraq, MOD

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Recent activity by our security services make me wonder about the ‘overkill’ factor. Why did it take ’78’ police to remove poor old Brian Haw from Parliament square, having had already had his ‘free speech’ severely curtailed by other ‘over the top’ actions.

I do wonder what is happening to our cherished freedom of speech, if the government cannot put up with ‘dissent’ by people that oppose their ‘rule’ and then introduce restrictions to curtail that freedom of speech, then we are further down the slippery slope of ‘Big Brother’ than I thought!

I was catching up on the news this afternoon and saw that the raid by 250 police on the ‘chemical bomb’ factory seems to have dropped off the news front pages. I fully support the work that has to be done to find and curtail terrorist activities, but come on; after 5 days, surely if there was a ‘bomb’ of any sorts that could cause a major incident I would have thought that even for the sake of good PR, someone would have wanted to say something about what they were looking for! I know the saying ‘no smoke without fire’, but what about ‘no evidence is no evidence’!

Tags: Brian Haw, Parliament, Big Brother, Chemical Bomb, Police

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Well it seems that I’ve been away from the blog for quite a while. Most of May was taken up with a nice long holiday in Spain to get some early summer sun. Split our trip over to locations, Marbella and Nerja, both the Costa Del Sol.

First week was taken up with Golf with another 9 people from various parts of the UK, including Consett, Hexham and Cheadle Hulme. We stayed at a very nice ‘Timeshare’ apartment, ate at some vary nice ‘eateries’ and had a very good time.

The second week was taken up away from the tourists traps and visiting some of the pretty Andalusian villages on the lower slopes of the south Sierra Nevada region.

I thought that I would ‘run’ a travel blog while I was away – looked a few and chose realtravel.com, why? I liked the way it worked and it seemed very easy to update. But as it happens on holiday with a big group, one thing leads to another, plus you can never find an Internet cafe when you want one, so did most of the updating in the second week and when I was back in the UK.

Read the Spain trip blog for more info.

Also have downloaded the 3.0 beta version of Qumana to see what that is like as an offline blog editor, more on that in another post.

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I spent quite a bit of time yesterday catching on a weeks worth of newspapers, its interesting catching up on news (or should I say history!) like this as it allows you to see the build up of a story and the many ‘tangents’ to the main theme that occur over a very short time.

I suppose the story that covered most of the ‘news’ papers was the debacle at the Home Office, there was also quite a bit about Prescotts ‘escapade’, personally I think this is just another repeat of similar stories of ‘idiots’ in high places getting caught out. Though there is some perverse satisfaction in the fact that its John Prescott; if ever there was a person who has had to eat his own words of past ‘tory sleeze’ rhetoric, then I can’t think of one.

But back to the Home Office fiasco. How can a government that has been in power for 2 plus terms end up creating such a mess over the release of foreign criminals? Considering how ‘controlling’ Labour seems on reducing the ‘civil liberties’ of the general public, they seem to be unable to manage the simple monitoring of prison inmates and when and where they are released and how they should be dealt with after release (i.e. deported).

When you look at the vasts amount of money that has been spent on the various Government IT projects including the many databases that ‘are’ said to being built to monitor ‘us’, its seem strange to me that no money has been spent on the Prison Service connecting up to the Probation Service connecting up to the Immigration Service connecting up to the Home Office connecting up to the… Clearly the money is not being well spent!

I may be a ‘simpleton’ here, but if there is in fact no money left in the ‘kitty’ surely a letter (do we remember these?) sent by normal post or even a courier could have informed the relevant authorities that ‘changes’ to inmates were happening.

It seems that like many previous government’s that have been in power for a long time, the scale of arrogance seems to increase with each ongoing disaster, The Child Support Agency, IR Tax Benefits, NHS Budget deficit to name a few.

Sadly I think that this is just the beginning of the end of Labour as the government of the UK, I certainly think they will not do very well in the local elections next week, the problem is, who do we want to govern us, are the Conservatives ready, could the Lib Dems do a good job. I was told by a friend last week that an “electorate gets the government it deserves”, but do we really deserve this one?

Articles that I read that relate to this post; read these and maybe you’ll feel the same as I did when I put them down.

The Independent Opinion

Philip Johnston in the Telegraph

Boris Johnson in the Telegraph

Iain Macwhirter in the Sunday Herald

Telegraph Opinion

Technorati Tags : Tangent, Prescott, Liberties, Agency, UK

Written remotely using RocketPost blog software. Seems that this program want to ‘crash’ a lot!

Following on from the recent petrol price rise here in the UK, I was interested to see recent BBC TV and online articles (1), (2) last night about the comparison of petrol prices in the USA. Looking to this further into this, I came across site ‘Gas Buddy’ (Technically a very interesting application) that covers USA national ‘Gas’ prices on a county by county basis.

Moving on from this I made a table that shows a comparison with the UK petrol prices which I took from PetrolPrices.com.

This just shows how expensive petrol has become in the UK.

Learnt something about ‘how’ tables work in Blogger with this post.

I’m trying out another Blog editor, seem better than the previous one.

This is RocketPost blog software.

When I was writing a previous post for today’s headline in the Daily Telegraph, I wanted a copy of the front page to add to the post, unusually I could not find one on the Daily Telegraph web site!

But when searching around the web I came across a great site, Newseum.org. It seems that they hold a daily PDF version of many of the worlds newspaper front pages.

So here are a few front pages for some of the people that I know sometimes glance at this blog.

Technorati Tags : Telegraph, PDF