The Rusty Wire Service

Harry Wales...don't you just love/hate him (delete as appropriate)? Certainly, it's been fun watching the mainstream British media trying to gauge public opinion as they trotted out their ' Glenda Slagg '-style op-ed pieces on the merry japes of the turd (pardon me, third) in line for the throne. Self-righteous fulmination was the general mood (at least initially) with even The Guardian demanding that the young prince be stripped of his royal title á la Sarah Ferguson.  What utter foolishness. The British public apparently want to have it both ways. On the one hand, they want their Royals to be less distant and more down-to-earth and yet when they get their wish and the Queen's grandson behaves like many young of men of twenty on a week in Ayia Napa, the collective dummy is duly spat. Of course, it's a little more nuanced than that: the average blue collar response has largely been one of indifference; if the prince wants to play saucy party ...

Early this morning, the Irish Army's Bomb Disposal Team rolled out of barracks to deal with their 130th call-out of the year so far. The team arrived on scene at 2.35am at Cushlawn Park, Tallaght in Dublin following a request from the Gardaí. The Improvised Explosive Device (IED) in question was  made safe at the scene before being taken to a secure military location for further examination  where it was declared to be viable; the 64th such device that the Irish Army's bomb squad made safe this year so far. This seems a worryingly high figure for a jurisdiction comprising  of approximately 4.4 million people. That sense of unease is only compounded by comparison with figures for British Army EOD (Explosive Ordance Disposal) call-outs for England, Scotland and Wales (a region comprising of 60 million plus people). When I called this afternoon, the British Ministry of Defence press office -- while very helpful --was unable to give me up-to-the minute figure...

Dwell on the past and you’ll lose an eye, counsels an old Russian proverb. Forget the past however and you’ll lose both, concludes the homespun wisdom of the steppes. It's long been a favoured intellectual parlour trick of academics and commentators to draw analogies between our turbulent present and some period in the past that best supports whatever Cassandra-like prognostications they wish to prop up. Many people will tell you that the early 21st century bears striking similarities to the period of decline and fall that characterised the end of the Western Roman Empire and heralded the beginning of the so-called Dark Ages. By all accounts, we are living through a period like that when Pax Romana still bumbled along; just before the administrative collapse of the empire removed the fig leaf of the rule of law. For Pax Romana, substitute Pax Americana, take your pick of barbarians at the gates and before you know it, the 21st century looks a lot like Rome, just...

The vexatious and unholy nexus between institutional racism and the issue of deaths in police custody has been dealt with before here on TRWS . Most recently in April, readers were asked to reflect on these matters following the vacillation and disingenuousness of the English Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) in its reluctance to reach a decision to prosecute a Metropolitan Police officer recorded taunting and racially abusing an arrested black suspect. In that article, we also touched on the tragic story of Sean Rigg, a 40-year Brixton resident who died in police custody in 2008. An inquest into Mr Rigg's death concluded yesterday that police officers used unsuitable and unnecessary force, failing to uphold the detained man's basic rights as he collapsed after being pinned down for eight minutes. The language used by the court is typically understated and circumspect; characterising the laundry list of procedural infringements as being "more than minima...