Cheney and Iraq - 1994

Save us from these people:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BEsZMvrq-I

Partick Thistle 3-0 Livingston

The first victory of the new season, as reported by BBC Online:

Livingston are still searching for their first points of the season after two goals from Adam Strachan eased Partick Thistle to victory. A well-timed pass from Ryan McStay found Strachan in the box and the midfielder kept his composure to beat Marius Liberda after 18 minutes. Strachan added the second from an acute angle six minutes later. Liam Buchanan added the third on 55 minutes after the Livingston defence failed to deal with a McStay corner.

Partick: Tuffey, Storey, Harkins, Archibald, Twaddle, Strachan, McStay, Rowson, Murray, Donnelly (Buchanan 7), Roberts (Chaplain 36). Subs Not Used: Boyd, Lennon, Hinchcliffe.

Booked: Rowson, Archibald.

Goals: Strachan 18, 24, Buchanan 55.

Livingston: Liberda, MacKay, McPake, Tinkler, James (Weir 72), Kennedy, A Trialist, Noubissie, McCaffrey, Craig, Snodgrass (Pesir 56). Subs Not Used: Fox, Mitchell, Stewart.

Att: 2,481

Ref: E Smith

Lions, buffalo herd and crocs in the Kruger game park

Some events are almost impossible to believe unless you watch them unfold before your eyes. I stumbled on this astonishing video on You Tube. (by the way, the baby buffalo escapes!)

Nagasaki: the second bomb

According to some estimates, about 70,000 of Nagasaki's 240,000 residents were killed instantly,[45] and up to 60,000 were injured. The radius of total destruction was about 1.6 km (1 mile), followed by fires across the northern portion of the city to 3.2 km (2 miles) south of the bomb.[46] The total number of residents killed may have been as many as 80,000, including the few who died from radiation poisoning in the following months.[47]

I remember my dad gave me two books to read linked to the subject: We Of Nagasaki by T. Nagai (memoirs of survivors) and a novel based on the death railway in Burma, And All The Trumpets by Donald Smith. He believed in peace, forgiveness and complexity. I owe him.

90 years ago today

The Battle of Amiens, which began on 8 August 1918, was the opening phase of the Allied offensive later known as the Hundred Days Offensive that ultimately led to the end of World War I. Allied forces advanced over seven miles on the first day, one of the greatest advances of the war. The battle is also notable for its effects on both sides' morale and the large number of surrendering German forces. This led Erich Ludendorff to famously describe the first day of the battle as "the black day of the German Army." Amiens was one of the first major battles involving armoured warfare and marked the end of trench warfare on the Western Front; fighting becoming mobile once again until the armistice was signed on 11 November 1918.

Amiens today:

Visit

When in doubt ... invoke greatness

The Second Coming

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

William Butler Yeats

Hiroshima Day

62 years since the day the first atomic bomb was dropped. 45,000 people died on the day of the explosion. The same number perished within the next two months and by the end of 1945 an estimated 140,000 people had died out of a city population totalling 350,000 (source official Hiroshima Peace Site). One bomb.

Read this for more.