Gavinsblog.com

Month: August 2004

  • French hostages plead for lives

    Two French journalists held hostage in Iraq have urged their government to lift a ban on Muslim headscarves in schools to save their lives. In a new video shown on Arabic TV station al-Jazeera, the men also called on French people to protest against the law, due to come into force this week. If this…

  • Danny Lewin

    Another curious Sep 11 story, I do not either fully believe or fully disbelieve these stories, but I find them interesting nonetheless. An FAA memo written on the evening of 9/11 suggests a man on Flight 11 was shot and killed by a gun before the plane crashed into the WTC. [See the leaked FAA…

  • China's growth as a regional power

    Dan Drezner links to an informative article in the New York Times. Drezner sings her praises, perhaps correctly, she notes: American military supremacy remains unquestioned, regional officials say. But the United States appears to be on the losing side of trade patterns. China is now South Korea’s biggest trade partner, and two years ago Japan’s…

  • Microsoft's War on Bugs

    Wired have an interview with Stephen Toulouse, Microsoft’s security program manager. He admits to using Mozilla Firefox. At least he has some balls I guess. Does anyone with sense use Internet Explorer anymore anyway?

  • New look and software

    I have taken the plunge and put my WordPress installation on my frontpage. I hope everyone likes it! Thanks to all that left comments after the post last week, I now have an idea how many regular readers there are. And it’s much more than I expected. 33 comments in 7 days, who would have…

  • Five photons linked

    Quantum computing another step closer: error correction. Researchers from the University of Science and Technology of China, the University of Innsbruck in Austria, and the University of Heidelberg in Germany have entangled five photons. “Our experiment demonstrated for the first time the ability to manipulate five-particle entanglement,” said Jianwei Pan, a physics professor at the…

  • Being clear about present dangers

    Philip Bobbitt wrote a very good criticism of the current system of terror warnings a couple of weeks back. Have a read.

  • PBS Frontline

    The PBS program Frontline has linked to my US-EU relations category archive. I am in there with the Dissident Frogman, Iberian Notes and Almost A Diary. I shall have to start adding more to that archive now.

  • Ten Mistakes Writers Don't See (But Can Easily Fix When They Do)

    This one via An Oasis. Some good tips on writing, on more of the creative side it seems. Worth a look.

  • Oil prices caught in a global storm of angst

    This one has been sitting around waiting to be blogged for a while now. Steve A. Yetiv, professor of political science at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, and author of the forthcoming book “Crude Awakenings: Global Oil Security and American Foreign Policy”, writes about the price of oil. He points out: All this brings…