The Beeb’s managed to track down a couple of ex-Soviet troops who deserted to the Afghan side during the war in the eighties, survived the experience and are still living and working in Afghan territory. Back during the war, one of the crazier notions of hardliners in Washington was the recruitmen...

Charlie Brooker expands: Still, the most tragic aspect of the survey is the sheer number of people who lie about the same things. If you assume the respondents are at least vaguely representative of the nation as a whole, almost half of us have pretended to read Nineteen Eighty-Four, which means whe...

An interview with Peter Molloy, author and producer of Lost Worlds of Communism, appears below the fold. Originally published in this week's Big Issue in the North. Their eyes met across a crowded interrogation room. Actually, it wasn’t so crowded. It just contained East German dissident Regin...

Busy so a bit shorter this week: Essay on Chinese fake Western brands turns out to be written by a fake Westerner. Managing the information matrix: the state and Chinese internet culture considered here, here and here. Let’s make every day Lei Feng day! Nevertheless, 你们�真够宽容的 (you ...

An American tragedy: Ask the most hard-core baseball fan about John C. Odom and most likely you'll get a blank stare. Yet millions of people have heard of the slender right-hander. He was "Bat Man" or "Bat Guy" or "Bat Boy," the minor league baseball player traded f...

Your name screws up our surveillance technology. Therefore you must change your name. So far, the nearest equivalence we have to this is the banning of hooded tops in shopping centres in order to make CCTV more effective. So far....

And here we go again… China. Peru. And Guano. Taiwanese president’s gay encounter with disc jockey caught on DVD. Allegedly. Students forced into popup hell: So you entered the Band 4 and 6 English test in China, and the College English Test (CET) committee tells you that there is a free website...

There’s some flap about a chap Obama wants to oversee his eyes-only intelligence called Chas Freeman: too close to the Saudis, say Israel’s fans. He certainly seems to be almost as close to the House of Sordid as the Bush clan. Philip Weiss reproduces a chain e-mail from his opponents which cite...

Let's hope Graham Norton's equal to this: This year's Eurovision contest is in Moscow, and Georgia, which fought a losing war against Russia this past summer, has entered a tune that takes a direct swipe at Russia's Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. The song, "We Don't Wanna Pu...

The producer of a farting iPhone app is making a legal stink over another flatulence app in a looming trademark battle over the phrase, "pull my finger."  A trademark dispute over the rights to the phrase was bound to happen as dozens of iPhone apps provide a way to fart like the pro...