(no subject)

Wahoo! Viktor Bout has been arrested

[ETA: people may not know that The Yorkshire Ranter has been tracking Bout's activities for years, and is the place for informed comment on him]

unexpected statistic of the day

"crimes in Britain have fallen from about 20m in 1995 to about 12m in 2006"
(from this article on prisons)

ETA: the figures are apparently from here, and the writer obviously cherry-picked to prove his point. But the actual figures are even more interesting - crime rising slowly over the 80s, quickly through the early 90s, peaking in '96 and dropping since. And no, I'm not quite naive enough to blame crime on the tories ;)

[And apologies to those of you to whom this is all old hat; I feel humbled by my total non-wonkiness, in having not the faintest idea about that trend]

The prize for 'least convincing answer' goes to...

From an old Panorama program on Russian crime boss Semyon Mogilevich...

INTERVIEWER:
Why did you set up companies in the Channel Islands?

MOGILEVICH:
The problem was that I didn't know any other islands.

Yes, I am posting a lot today. Yes, I am spending Friday night behind a computer. No, I don't have anything better to do. Shuttup.