Merry err, Septemberval

September 10th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink

Can I be the first to wish everyone a very merry Christmas, courtesy of Tesco Abingdon.

(Posted using my phone so, please, excuse the spelling)

A Daily Mail tweet that caught my eye..

September 10th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink

Do you notice anything a little out of place in the following Twitter timeline?

A timeline full of links to the Daily Mail itself, since it started on Twitter and then, *pop*, a tweet to somewhere else.

Ooh, curious, I thought. It didn’t sit right. News outlets, the BBC, Guardian, Telegraph, the Sun etc, all use twitter as a broadcast medium, as variation on the RSS ‘thingy’. They are simply there to give a link to a news item. They don’t retweet, they don’t #ff and they don’t direct you to anywhere except their news pages.

There are exceptions to this, for example Guardians Comment is Free Twitterfeed has an actual person manning it that replies to you and everything, but that isn’t the main feed for it’s news items. The feed for the news item is always just a broadcast.

So when a link to somewhere not the Daily Mail appeared it made me think wonder what’s going on. Had the Mails’ feed been hacked cracked compromised? Has a Mail employee got his own site to promote and thought he’d get a few hits from the Mails followers?

Nothing quite so exciting, I’m afraid.

thisismoney.co.uk is the website for the Mails’ City & Finance section of the paper and they’re running a competition, obviously, to win an iPad.

To enter you’ve got to fill in a load of details about money stuff and search for an independent financial advisor. Once you’ve found the advisor nearest to you, you can enter the competition. Presumably you’ll also get a call from said advisor in the very near future as well (as the whole thing is in the ‘advertising-feature’ section of the site, as indicated by the URL).

So, it may be nothing dodgy going on but what does it say about the Mail when the only thing it can tweet about that isn’t sending you to it’s main website is not how to reduce your mortgage or how to play the stock market but a competition.

I hope whichever Mail reader wins the iPad isn’t stupid enough to use it to preen themselves on cancer-giving Facebook.

Tim Ireland: Still getting shafted by Conservatives

September 8th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink

Since Tim Ireland uncovered that the source for a front page Sun story about a muslim hit-list was the very same chap who posted the idea on a muslim forum, whilst pretending to be a muslim, Tim has had his name dragged through the mud with despicable smears, had personal information published all over the place on the net, been threatened with physical violence and had any plea for help from the very people able to put a stop to it fall on deaf ears. All by Conservatives, or associates of Conservatives.

Well, it’s just got worse

Recently, someone involved in this ongoing campaign of harassment began publishing material targeting my wife, my children, and other members of my extended family.

This has included false accusations aimed at my kids, making specific allegations of criminal behaviour that are not only entirely untrue, but extremely damaging (and, it must be said, upsetting).

His bloody kids.

One of those involved is Iain Dale, who just tweeted

Hurrah. Am connected to the internet on my iPad. Praise be to Allah. Wonder what to do now….

How much of a fucking clue do you need, Iain?

If it moves, shoot it. If it doesn’t move, shoot it till it does

September 3rd, 2010 § 4 comments § permalink

For fucks sake

An Israeli army officer who fired the entire magazine of his automatic rifle into a 13-year-old Palestinian girl and then said he would have done the same even if she had been three years old was acquitted on all charges by a military court yesterday.
[…]
The military court cleared the soldier of illegal use of his weapon, conduct unbecoming an officer and perverting the course of justice by asking soldiers under his command to alter their accounts of the incident.

Capt R’s lawyers argued that the “confirmation of the kill” after a suspect is shot was a standard Israeli military practice to eliminate terrorist threats.

The officer always followed standard practice, you see…

A recording of radio exchanges between Capt R and his troops obtained by Israeli television revealed that from the beginning soldiers identified Iman as a child.

In the recording, many people buy 5.56 ammo online to keep themselves protect themselves, a soldier in a watchtower radioed a colleague in the army post’s operations room and describes Iman as “a little girl” who was “scared to death”. After soldiers first opened fire, she dropped her schoolbag which was then hit by several bullets establishing that it did not contain explosive. At that point she was no longer carrying the bag and, the tape revealed, was heading away from the army post when she was shot.

Is that also standard practice? Shooting into a suspected bomb to see whether it actually is a bomb or not?

Although the military speculated that Iman might have been trying to “lure” the soldiers out of their base so they could be attacked by accomplices, Capt R made the decision to lead some of his troops into the open. Shortly afterwards he can be heard on the recording saying that he has shot the girl and, believing her dead, then “confirmed the kill”.

Even though the girl could be a lure, the captain still move some of his men into the open. Is that standard practice, too?

Capt R claimed that he had not fired the shots at the girl but near her. However, Dr Mohammed al-Hams, who inspected the child’s body at Rafah hospital, counted numerous wounds. “She has at least 17 bullets in several parts of the body, all along the chest, hands, arms, legs,” he told the Guardian shortly afterwards. “The bullets were large and shot from a close distance. The most serious injuries were to her head. She had three bullets in the head. One bullet was shot from the right side of the face beside the ear. It had a big impact on the whole face.”

He fired shots near, not at the girl? And she was shot 17 times? This man should be prosecuted for incompetence as well as murder.

Lost for words, I really am.

Via MsMaryViola

Wanted: ‘Gifted’ constituency secretary

September 2nd, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink

I know I shouldn’t blog anything anything to do with work, and I normally don’t, but this appeared in my rss this morning (click to enlarge)…

Naturally I clicked the links to see the full advert, and got this…

I just want to get home on to an unfiltered computer and see what exactly being a parliamentary secretary involves.

a nationalist or religious conflict?

September 2nd, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink

I just heard Jeremy Bowen on Radio 4 talking about the Palestinian/Isreali peace talks…

There is a religious war developing in what has been essentially a nationalist conflict. You can make a deal with nationalists, it’s much harder to deal with people that believe they’re doing gods will.

Oh? As opposed to people that believe god gave them some land?

Come on Jeremy, the Palestinians have been fighting against a religious justification for the occupation of their land for generations.

(Posted using my phone so, please, excuse the spelling)

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