“Senator Barack Obama took his first step into the Democratic presidential race today by opening an exploratory committee to raise money and begin building a campaign designed ‘to change our politics.’ He said he would make a formal declaration Feb. 10 in Illinois … He is the only African-American serving in the U.S. Senate and [...]

“Another terror suspect on a control order has absconded, Home Secretary John Reid has revealed in a written statement to MPs … Shadow home secretary David Davis … called for the absconder to be named … ‘Unless there are special circumstances, such as if it could prejudice another trial, this individual should now be named,’ [...]

“The two historians have differing views on why the treaty was voted through. Scott believes bribes - there was £20,000 sent to be distributed by Queensberry - and more subtle methods of financial inducement, such as promises of pensions and posts, were key … Fry, however, has his doubts … Whatever the reason, on January [...]

“United Nations and European Union leaders have condemned the executions in Baghdad of two of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein’s top aides. UN chief Ban Ki-moon said he regretted the move, while a top EU official said it had damaged Iraqi reconciliation … The US and UK also expressed concern about the conduct of the [...]

Just a short update to my previous post about partial feeds. For the moment, I’ll carry on using the full feeds. This means that Facebook users (along with those using feedreaders) will be able to view the whole post without coming to the site. I’ll make Facebook partial feeds only in the next few weeks. [...]

From What The Duck, here.

“A senior civil servant has been suspended over the Home Office’s failure to update police records of Britons convicted abroad … Some 27,000 case files, including 540 for serious or violent offences, were not put on the police computer … The Home Office said an official had volunteered evidence to an internal inquiry in the [...]

Some of the stuff on Google Labs is great, but every so often something so pointless appears that it just begs the question… why? I know it’s a pre-beta ideas forum and those ideas can develop (like Gmail did) but take Google Ride Finder, for example. It allows you to find a nearby taxi. Taxis [...]

“The European Union’s Competition Commission … has crippled HTML email in Microsoft Office … it’s a huge problem for email spammers — sorry, marketeers — who are currently agonising over the change.”
Jack Schofield’s post totally misses the point. First, HTML e-mails aren’t generally used by spammers. When, for example, was the last time you received [...]

Just a quick post which concerns anyone who reads my feed either in a feed aggregator or in Facebook. All of my posts from now on will be partial feeds, which means that you’ll get the first few words followed by [...]. If you use an RSS reader, you’ll have to click the link to [...]

Published by permission of MissedManners, here.

Reproduced by permission of Johan. Death Piglet here.

“[In the Microsoft anti-trust case] we pro-regulators were making an assumption that history has shown to be completely false: That something as complex as an OS has to be built by a commercial entity. Only crazies … worked on something called Linux … I think about this mistake whenever I think about the current Microsoft-like [...]

I recently posted a couple of Dilbert comics on my blog, linking to the Dilbert site. I assumed, as with the many other web comics I post, that bloggers were allowed to do this. However, having read the T&Cs I realised I was wrong and had to remove them. I respect copyright, but I reserve [...]

Reproduced by permission of Jessica from Indexed blog, here.

From Explosm, here.

“Two missing US teenage boys, one of whom was last seen in 2002, have been found at the home of a 41-year-old man … police out hunting for Ben Ownby were not expecting to find Shawn Hornbeck alongside him.”
The BBC News article is here.

“Human rights conditions in China deteriorated last year even as China sought to portray itself as an increasingly open, modern society ahead of the 2008 Olympics, Human Rights Watch said in a report on Friday … Beijing promised in its bid for the Games that it would work to improve its human rights record. It [...]

Reddit has a link to a Washington Post article on comments by Cully Stimson, who’s responsible for overseeing detainee policy at Guantanamo Bay. In an interview, he says it’s “shocking” that US law firms are “representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001.” He also hinted at some crackpot theory about [...]

Zeeshan Hasan has an interesting post on a recent Herald Tribune article, which claims that Iran needs nuclear power because of mismanagement of its oil industry. This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this - I remember reading it in a couple of British newspapers in the past. If this is the case, then it’s [...]