Email Tony Blair

After months of hard graft Tim Ireland has finally succeeded in forcing Tony Blair to set up an email service. While some cynics out there might say that it was bound to happen sooner or later and the campaign made little difference here are a few points

The first questions asked in the house of commons about this were inspired by the campaign
Tim actually got hold of Cherie Blair at one point which allowed him to speak to the right people at Number 10
The thing pretty much matches the specification Tim suggested

All in all a stirling example of activism gone right.

Googlator

This is a very cool feature indeed.

Legal Insanity

Tony has gone mad in far shorter order on his law course than I did on my MBA course. It was a good week of classes before I was envisaging MBA themed movies. However on day one Tony came up with Freddy vs Jason, the verdict....

Those looking for academic themed blogs to read once I've finished up here could do worse than consider adding Tony to their regular readings. Watching my favourite Republican crack under the pressure of life on a liberal NY campus is going to be fun...

Catching up with the world

With the summer project almost done the team has voted itself a day or two off. I've just spent half an hour catching up on the baghdad blogs that sprang up after the war, things are getting wierder and wierder over there.

Salaam somehow made it to the funeral of Uday and Qusay, his role as translator / fixer for various journalists and armed forces seems to be sending him in all kinds of directions. I think he's taking his role as 'journalist' rather than diarist these days as well. Audiences will do that to you. Meanwhile he's losing patience with the extremists fighting over his country.

Someone who's probably lost all patience is Salaam's friend Gee who has just had a bag stuck over his head and been beaten up by the US army. Wonder how the hearts and minds campaign is going there. Salaam has promised us a full report. Gee's last entry is about an attempt to appoint a female judge in Baghdad - it didn't go well, but at least they tried.

The whole thing looks like one huge mess. Iraqi's don't believe the Americans are sincere about anything, Americans think they're going to get blown up by children with hand grenades and bandits are ambushing cars on the road to Baghdad. Meanwhile reconstruction is being sabotaged not by 'the resistance' but by the much less sinister but probably far harder to deal with 'criminals'.

This is the kind of situation that demands the USA swallow it's pride and hand the country over to UN peacekeepers until the Iraqi's can sort out a government. Iraq does not have so much oil that it can't join the world list of failed states, and if it does the world will be a far from safer place.