BBC News reports that Phorm is legit… sort of. The (rather significant) rider mentioned on the BBC is that any future deployments of the system must be done with consent and make it easy for people to opt out. Just for the record, I’ll be opting out. I’d rather it was an opt-in system, but [...]

The 2014 Winter Olympics will be held in Sochi, Russia. Sochi is 34km from the border with Abkhazia, one of the breakaway provinces of Georgia. Here’s a map of the area; Sochi is in the north-west/top-left corner. Read into it what you will; however, it seems likely that there will be problems. Czech Foreign Minister [...]

The 507 (Wikipedia, TfL) and 521 (Wikipedia, TfL) are going to be the first London bus routes to have the bendy bus removed. This is going to make my commute into work longer. Bendy buses have attracted a lot of opprobrium; read on to find out why they’re actually a really good idea. The 507 [...]

Sorry, I couldn’t resist. A headline in a British newspaper, perhaps apocryphal, in the 1940s about a severe fog that made it impossible to cross the Channel ran “Fog in Channel: Continent cut off”. Unfortunately, none of the papers saw fit to run this classic headline. xD.

Yes, they’re very representative of Britain today. Half went to Oxford or Cambridge, eight went to university. Six grew up in London or the Home Counties. Four of the eight PPCs are standing for London seats and the other four are standing in the southern half of England. They are the Tatler Ten. Tatler (via [...]

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been taken into ‘conservatorship’. I’m no expert, but the issuing of new, common stock to the federal government and the drop in value of existing stock means that, effectively, Fannie and Freddie have been nationalised, albeit on a temporary basis. The Congressional Budget Office has apparently said that the [...]

According to the BBC, Corporal Tomos Stringer, of the Royal Logistics Corps, was refused a room in a hotel when, on leave to recover from an injury sustained in Afghanistan, he was visiting a fellow soldier who had been injured. The hotel in question, the Metro, apparently has had problems with rowdy soldiers in the [...]

I have a strange relationship with Maggie. I don’t really remember the Thatcher days for two good reasons. One, I was born in the early eighties and was far too young to have any cognisance of politics and, two, I spent the first few years of my life in Brazil. Nevertheless, it seems she has [...]