Yum, yum.

Japanese whalers raise stakes by targeting vulnerable humpbacks

“Although we are subjected to vicious blocking tactics by environmental groups we have to continue this into the future,” said the fleet’s captain, Hajima Ishikawa, at a ceremony to mark its departure. Other officials urged Japan’s people to fight for their whale-eating culture. But Japanese tastes have changed, and whale-eating is in decline. Previous catches have been held in storage, creating a “blubber mountain” of many thousands of tonnes. Schoolchildren have been given lectures on the delights of grilled whale flesh, and unsold whalemeat has ended up on the menus of old people’s homes.

Close Encounters of the Portugese kind

Sunday 18th November - Missing Madeleine: "We are very close. I am not saying maybe, no no no...we are very very close to finding the kidnappers."

Madeleine McCann was seen in a car two days after her disappearance from a Portuguese holiday resort, a Spanish private detective has said. Francisco Marco said the sighting was north of Praia da Luz, the resort where the McCann family was staying.  'Very close' Mr Marco, whose agency Metodo 3 is investigating the case on behalf of the McCanns, said a witness saw Madeleine in a car, on a small road, being handed over to another person. He said he believed the witness was reliable. "We are very close. I am not saying maybe, no no no... we are very very close to finding the kidnappers."

Saturday 3rd November - Missing Madeleine: "We are confident we are near to finding Madeleine alive...we're on our way to get her."

Detectives are closing in on the secret hideaway where they are convinced Madeleine McCann is being held. The Daily Express can reveal that the private investigators are concentrating their search on a remote region in the north of Morocco. A highly placed source close to the team said last night: "We are confident we are near to finding Madeleine alive _ we're on our way to get her." The agents are combing villages in the Rif Mountains for the four-year-old, who disappeared six months ago.

Body 'guards'?!

Did Afghan bodyguards massacre civilians? UN report says gunfire from panicking security detail hit most of 180 bombing victims after bomb went off

Up to two-thirds of the 77 people killed and 100 wounded in a suicide bombing last week were hit by bullets from visiting lawmakers' panicked bodyguards, who fired on a crowd of mostly schoolchildren for up to five minutes, a preliminary UN report says. Afghanistan's Interior Ministry says only a "small number" of the victims were hit by gunfire, but an Afghan official in Baghlan province told The Associated Press that bodyguards were "raining bullets" on the crowd.

The suicide bomb contained ball bearings, the Interior Ministry said, which may have caused wounds that look like bullet holes. An Afghan doctor who treated patients after the Nov. 6 blast, meanwhile, told the AP that a high-ranking government official told him not to publicly reveal the number of gunfire victims, suggesting a possible government cover-up. Separate teams of UN investigators have uncovered conflicting information about the number of people hit by gunfire and are trying to reconcile the differences, according to two Western officials who have seen the internal reports.

The two spoke to the AP on condition they not be identified talking about preliminary findings. But at least one of those reports – based on interviews with witnesses and medical authorities and a reconstruction of the bomb scene – says that of the roughly 77 people killed and 100 wounded, up to two-thirds were hit by the three to five minutes of gunfire the bodyguards fired into the crowd, one official said. "A large number of people – and quite probably a majority – were killed and wounded as a result of gunfire after the blast,'' said the second official, a UN employee. The official said one internal report is highly critical of the bodyguards' reaction.

Among the dead were 61 students and five teachers, said Education Ministry adviser Hamid Almi. Six members of parliament and five bodyguards also died.

Wonkosphere?

Gracchi:

The thing about it is to get people moving between blogs- in the states the wonkosphere and the blogosphere seem much more integrated. I think part of this might be the slow maturing of the British blogosphere- at the moment the British blogs play very much to the lowest market, but as audiences increase it could be that different audiences come online and slowly a wonkosphere grows up.

Is that a misspelling?

Going to sleep

Dennis The Peasant: Forgotten, But Not Gone...

What better measure of Pajamas Media's failure than to observe that it is simply no longer a matter of interest, much less consequence, to anyone? In exactly two years, and with no less than $7 million, Raj, The Poodle and Glenn Harlan have taken Pajamas from the Idea That Was Gonna Change Everything to just another half-assed web site. I love it. The appropriate epitaph? Why not this: Forgotten, but not gone!

PaperRound w/e 17/18 -11-2007

Don't forget the Weekend PaperRound !

Fall guy

A playground tumble can do you good | spiked

This week, Tom Mullarkey, chief executive of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA), warned against wrapping children in cotton wool. The head of a charity that normally raises the red flag about children having accidents made a very sensible comment: ‘A skinned knee or a twisted ankle in a challenging and exciting play environment is not only acceptable, it is a positive necessity to educate our children and to prepare them for a complex, dangerous world.’

This has a particular resonance for me this evening as I am, myself, nursing the first skinned knee for fifty years. Yes, after just one glass of Merlot (sorry Miles) my foot got caught in one of Aberdeen's poxy pavement holes (almost as numerous as the potholes in Aberdeen's shitty roads) and I went over like a culled walrus, all 16 fucking stone of me, onto the road and into the path of oncoming traffic. Fortunately it wasn't late enough in the evening for any of the drivers to be too pissed to avoid me and I survived without getting my head flattened under the weels of a souped up Subaru. Not that any passers by bothered to delay themselves long enough to offer any assistance. This is Aberdeen, after all, and it's just not the done thing up here to actually help anyone. Jeezus, it's an uphill battle to get any of these miserable bastards to even talk to you.  (Unless they're asking if you've got any spare change, that is). Bah!

Beyond our Ken

London’s PC despot | spiked

What kind of leader launches an open assault on the press, accusing it of jeopardising public safety and demanding that it put its ‘house in order’? What sort of ruler proposes ‘guidelines’ to the press on what stories it should cover, and even worse, what kind of language it should use to cover them, what kind of people it should employ, and what kind of values it should uphold and communicate to the mass of the population? Kim Jong-il, perhaps? Saddam Hussein, before he was chased into his hole in the ground and later executed? How about Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London?

Sp!ked goes visual

Welcome to spiked on Friction.tv

Something you don't see much of any more

Chicken Yoghurt: 509 Bandwidth Limit Exceeded



Either Justin is getting hammered, there's a glitch or his hosting company is tight with its allowances. Used to see a lot of this sort of thing years ago but it's becoming extremely rare these days, especially with burstable limits. It'll take a lot of hammering to exceed my bandwidth allowance which stands at 5.5 Terabytes a month (increasing by 40 Gigs a week) and all for 16 pence a day!

Get thee to Dreamhost.

Daily McCann

McCanns to face neglect charges

Well, not really. Some silly old duffer is attempting to bring a private prosecution for neglect against the McCanns. Retired solicitor and former prospective UKIP candidate, (nuff said) Anthony Bennett, said he hoped the case would now be taken up by the Attorney General or the Crown Prosecution Service. Mr Bennett alleges the McCanns were guilty of neglect under Section 1 of the Children and Young Persons Act 1933. I can tell you now, with utter certainty, he doesn't stand a cat in hell's chance of getting anywhere with this. And he's wrong. There is nothing in the act to suggest that what they did was illegal.

But what I really want to know is why he's doing this. He claims that it's to deter parents from leaving their children unattended but let's just examine what's happened. A middle-class professional couple on holiday in a safe, child-friendly holiday resort have had their young daughter abducted and very likely raped and murdered. What do you think will be uppermost in the minds of any other parents thinking about popping down the local tapas bar and leaving their little ones tucked up in bed one evening, the prospect of a repeat of what happened to Madelaine McCann or the possibility of a private prosecution from an attention seeking old twat like Anthony Bennett?

And if you really want to depress yourself, read some of the comments.

Oh, and of course that despicable cunt John Hirst (the only UK blogger to have battered a woman to death and the darling of several left-wing bloggers) is jumping up and down with delight as he adds this story to the collection of sickening posts he has already published about the McCanns. (If he had killed my mother the little shit would be writing his blog posts by blowing and sucking through a plastic tube.)

Political plateau

Dennis The Peasant: Such A Difference...

Spending lots of time and energy on grappling with complex real-world issues can be an unrewarding business, as many bloggers have discovered. That's because very often serious blogging about weighty issues is every bit as much work for the reader as it was for the blogger. Let's face it, for a lot of folks who consider themselves thought leaders or whatnot, that sort of thing is a no-no. They're under the impression they're thought leaders because they dick around at political blogs. Reality seems to be somewhat different, however, to the adults in the room...

So for all the hoo-ha about the superiority of the political blogger and his readership, it appears that neither seems to have actually demonstrated said superiority in practice. You really don't have to put in all that much time at any of the most popular political blogs - either Conservative or Liberal - before the simple-minded partisanship of both blogger and reader becomes obvious...It is worth noting that the real growth in the political blogosphere appears to be over. Despite whatever hucksters like Roger Simon might say about growth of readership, it is apparent that the political blogosphere's share of internet traffic is either static or contracting.

Dennis is talking about the USA here but much of what he says is equally applicable to the UK. He seems to be right about the reach of political blogs as well. Page views may be up but then so is the overall size of the potential readership. The best known UK political blogs are managing to reach about 0.001% of global users and their share is declining. One reason for that is their readership is around 80% UK based so they are not going to be picking up many extra readers from an expanding South American, say, or  Far Eastern user group.