The allegations that Craig Murray made against Alisher Usmanov (see here for backstory) have been repeated in the European Parliament by Tom Wise MEP. This means they are now covered by parliamentary privilege and can be repeated by anyone. Way to go, Schillings.
You can hear the allegations on blip.tv, or download the MP3 file.
Alternately, here [...]

Between 2003 and 2006 I had a blog called “Cabalamat Journal”. That blog is now defunct, but I have a new one: Amused Cynicism.

Hearty congratulations to Troubled Diva, Mike Atkinson, who’s managed to put together ‘Shaggy Blog Stories’ in seven days in aid of Comic Relief.
The book collects amusing pieces from 100 bloggers. I’m in it but you shouldn’t let that put you off.
You can read more about the book here.
The book’s published via Lulu and [...]

Merrick wrote here yesterday in defence of the Citizen’s Basic Income. What I find interesting about the non-debate surrounding it is how a policy so close to the mainstream among polbloggers, could be so far from the shores of ordinary politics. Now, it’s easy to psychoanalyse the bloggers, to see what they see in the [...]

Simon Heffer is not a columnist for whom I usually have much time - although his biography of Enoch Powell was relatively interesting, that was more down to the subject than the author. If anything, the writing style put me off reading the thing more so than did old Enoch’s politics.
Still, Heffer has a piece [...]

Right, I’ve taken my time with this one, but finally here it is - the long-awaited latest addition to the “Now That’s What I Call New Blogging” series. A varied selection of British(ish) blogs started in 2006 (give or take a few weeks), ranging from the big boys and girls of the proper press to [...]

Late Friday trivial post. Good stuff on Chris Muir from the redoubtable Hilzoy of Obsidian Wings. You may not think much of cartoon pages of US newspapers, but however desperate they are for material, not one so far runs Day by Day (tagline: as funny as the title is original, a take-off of Doonesbury with far fewer characters, no intelligence to speak of, poor repetitive draughtsmanship, and homeless puppy’s eagerness to please aimed unashamedly at wingnut bloggers).

Back in November, our man Justin had an idea to find new British blogs that we might have missed. Although m’colleague Tim Worstall’s Britblog Roundups bring us a weekly dose of the best individual posts, we wanted to find the best new blogs as well. It is, after all, so very easy to stick to [...]

What is the point of The Sharpener? I don’t ask the question rhetorically but rather as an exercise in some early navel-gazing. It has been just over a month since we re-launched and with the meetup coming up, this seems an opportune time to ask.
Blogs need a ‘reason’ to succeed and do well. You may [...]

The danger in writing a relaunch post like this is that it will slip into pretentiousness – and in places it almost certainly does.

Yes, I know there haven’t been many posts here recently - things will hopefully change soon, if we ever get around to implementing some of the changes that have been loosely in the planning stages for months. Anyway, The Sharpener is up for various awards in A Fistful of Euros‘ 2nd European Weblog Awards, along [...]

As promised, here’s a roundup of some of the blogs that have appeared in the last few months. And a fair crop it is too. The list represents all the blogs submitted and there is no political bias from me.
To be fair I’ve ranked them in alphabetical order and no qualititive judgements should be inferred [...]

Yep - yet another article about blogging by some blogger. What do you expect?
There has, however, been a noticable shift in the Britblogging world over the last few months, and one which could yet spell big changes for the way the place operates. Noticable, but at first almost imperceptible and quite hard to put your [...]

Washington, DC is abuzz today with the fallout of a momentous week’s news. Harriet Miers is toast. Lewis Libby suddenly finds he has a lot of time on his hands. And Karl Rove is still left sweating.
And who frames this debate? Who to a large extent drives it, shapes it, boosts it? The blogs. Blogging [...]