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Our man in Mexico and the fake bomb detectors 21 Aug 2013 | 09:50 am
Excellent work by the British government on helping end the scam in which a British businessman sold novelty golf ball detectors to the developing world as bomb spotters. Press release arrives from Ju...
Hand drawn maps and me 20 Aug 2013 | 04:56 pm
I’ve been enjoying From Here to There, a collection of hand drawn maps from the Hand Drawn Map Association. Some are exquisite artworks, always intended for show. Others are quick sketches drawn for ...
Red or dead 19 Aug 2013 | 01:52 pm
The obvious risk of Red or Dead is that it contains too much football for most fans of hardcore modernist fiction and too much hardcore modernist fiction for most fans of football. Not as far as this...
A season the Nile 18 Aug 2013 | 09:01 pm
On Wednesday morning I arrived at The Telegraph newsroom at 7am. I spent the next 10 hours or so liveblogging the slaughter under way in Cairo. The number of dead went up all day. First 20, then 50 or...
Foreign aid is increasingly used for political ends 12 Aug 2013 | 06:42 pm
Interesting defence of Britain’s foreign aid budget in The Times today (behind the paywall, I’m afraid). Essentially he’s responding to a slew of stories pointing out some of the problems with aid (su...
Greece or Pakistan? 11 Aug 2013 | 03:37 pm
I’d always been a bit sceptical about the Kalash people’s claim to be descended from the invading armies of Alexander the Great. The famous Macedonian leader passed through what is now northern Pakist...
The ice man cometh etc 31 Jul 2013 | 12:39 pm
Driving through Chitral on Monday at about 5pm, each town and village was just coming to life. It was only two hours to go before iftar. Vats of hot oil bubbled at the side of the road as young boys b...
Does anyone else still use the phone? 30 Jul 2013 | 04:45 pm
Had a rather excruciating telephone conversation today with a press officer of a, well, let’s call it a major organisation. I’ve already had plenty of those 10min conversations setting out my question...
The TTP, IMF and Pakistan 24 Jul 2013 | 03:44 pm
Pakistan’s troubles with extremism start not with the Islamic constitution adopted in the 1970s and the banning of alcohol by a government that needed the hardliners to shore up its feeble position; n...
