A History of Fireworks: hear me on Talk Radio Europe, while stocks last!

Last Thursday, I was fortunate enough to be interviewed by Giles Brown on Talk Radio Europe about my new book A History of Fireworks from Their Origins to the Present Day (Reaktion Books).

We talked about their mysterious origins in ancient China, perhaps as a by-product of the search for eternal life, of their use in war, of how they came to Europe, and their first recorded appearance in England in 1487. Then there was Handel's music, and how the Shah of Persia liked the displays at London's Crystal Palace so much that he turned up incognito and paid at the door.

We talked about the famous brands - Standard, Brocks, Pains etc. Nor did we skate over firework disasters, and the challenges they now face from worries about pollution and their effects on animals.

You can catch the interview here https://www.talkradioeurope.com/on-demand/

At the bottom of the page, you can select the day, Thursday 8 August, and then the time 1000-1100. The interview starts at about 1035. It should be up until the end of tomorrow 14 August.

How I became a victim of piracy!

 

My book Assassins' Deeds. A history of assassination from ancient Egypt to the present day (Reaktion Books) has apparently been translated into Persian without the permission of the publisher or of me, and without, of course, any payment being made for the rights. I assume that is its cover pictured above.

I owe this interesting piece of information to the 'Iran's Book News Agency' which reports that the work has been translated by 'Abbas-Gholi Ghaffari-Fard' and published by 'Tehran-based Negah Publishing'. Apart from that, the 'story' just reproduces a Reaktion press release issued when the book was published in the UK.

https://www.ibna.ir/en/tolidi/336536/assassins-deeds-throughout-history-considered-in-a-book

I understand from Reaktion that Negah has form and has pirated other books, and that it ignores communications. I hear from other sources that Persian publishers also translate magazines without permission. Rogue-state Iran is not a signatory to the Berne Convention which protects the rights of authors.

Yet another Hajj tragedy

How strange that just as I was writing yesterday’s blog about the crane collapse that killed more than 100 pilgrims in Mecca, an even worse disaster was unfolding at the Hajj, with a stampede killing at least 717.

It happened at the last major rite, when pilgrims throw stones at pillars representing the devil. This event has caused major casualties before – at least 118 died in 1998, and about 250 in 2004.  After the latest accident, the Saudi Arabian king, Salman, has promised a safety review, but already countries who have lost people, such as Nigeria and Iran, are blaming the Saudis.

Iran has been particularly vocal, just as it was after the even more deadly Mecca stampede of 1990 in which more than 1,400 perished in a pedestrian tunnel. The then Saudi king, Fahd, said that those who died had been ‘martyrs’ and the accident ‘God’s will’, though he added that the pilgrims had disobeyed safety instructions. The Saudi health minister has made a similar claim this time.

The deadliest stampede in history may be the one that happened at a huge air raid shelter in the Chinese city of Chungking as Japanese aircraft attacked on 6 June 1941. The shelter’s ventilation system failed, and during an apparent lull in the bombing, hundreds rushed outside for a breath of air. Then the sirens sounded again, leading to a fatal crush that killed perhaps 4,000 as people still trying to get out collided with others frantic to return.

For more, see A Disastrous History of the World.

Civilian airliners shot down by the military

From their frantic attempts to conceal and remove evidence from the crash site, it now seems clear that it was pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine who shot down Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, killing all 298 people aboard the Boeing 777. What is not yet clear is how deep was the involvement of President Putin of Russia.

In 1983, a Korean Air Lines Boeing 747 en route from Alaska to Seoul in south Korea was shot down by a Soviet fighter close to Sakhalin Island. All 269 people on board died. The aircraft had been passing through forbidden Soviet air space around the time of a US reconnaissance mission.

At first the Soviet Union denied shooting down the aircraft, then later admitted it, claiming the jumbo was on a spying mission. It took many years and the collapse of the Soviet regime before the flight data recorders were released.

In 1988, a US warship shot down an Iran Air Airbus A-300 over the Straits of Hormuz, killing all 290 people on board, in the apparent belief that it was an Iranian warplane. The US denied responsibility for the act, but in 1996, it paid more than $130m in compensation after Iran took a case to the International Court of Justice.

Continuing disaster in Iraq - 9th anniversary bombings

As the US and UK governments gear up for their next Middle Eastern war - most favoured venue, Iran – a reminder of the continuing bloody disaster we unleashed on Iraq.   On the 9^th anniversary of the invasion, at least 30 people have been killed in a series of bombings in the country.

Two car bombs in the mainly Shia city of Karbala are said to have killed at least 13 people, while another in the northern city of Kirkuk caused the deaths of at least seven.   A pregnant woman died in Fallujah.

Bombings are now part of the daily pattern of life in Iraq.    In January, a suicide bomber killed 53 people in an attack on Shi’ite pilgrims in Basra in the south.   Then a few days later another suicide bomber killed 31 mourners at a Shi’ite funeral in Baghdad.

Nearly 5,000 soldiers in the invading armies were killed, but we have no real idea of the number of Iraqi civilians who have paid with their lives.    Few now contest that it is well over 100,000, but we will probably never know the true number because, as Nikita Khrushchev said of the authorities’ indifference to those who died in the great Soviet famine of 1932-3: ‘no one was counting.’

Shome mishtake shurely?

It's not often the Economist gets something wrong, but on the cover of its Nov 18 edition, it says: 'Nuclear Iran, anxious Israel'.   Surely that should be: 'Nuclear Israel, anxious Iran'?

*You can follow me now on Twitter @john_withington.

* Authoritative new newsletter on air defence from eminent defence consultant (and my son) Thomas Withington just out.   If you want to subscribe or comment, contact Thomas at ChainHomeHigh@gmail.com

You can also follow Thomas on Twitter at #ChainHomeHigh. 

Boat people

The deaths of at least 28 people, and possibly many more, in the shipwreck on Christmas Island is a reminder of the lengths to which people desperate to leave their country will go. A flimsy wooden boat carrying suspected asylum seekers from Iraq and Iran was dashed onto jagged rocks in very high seas.

More than forty people have been rescued, but it may be that the boat was carrying more than 100. It is believed it may have been on its way from Indonesia to Australia. The engines seem to have failed, and the craft was quickly smashed to pieces. It seems to have managed to evade detection and the alarm was raised only when local residents heard screams from the passengers.

Perhaps the biggest unofficial exodus by sea ever mounted was by the Vietnamese boat people. During the late 1970’s, an estimated 2 million fled South Vietnam as the Communists took over.

Apart from the usual hazards of taking to the ocean in small and often unseaworthy vessels, they had to run the gauntlet of pirates, and even if they made it to refugee camps, they were often ill-treated there too. An estimated half million died.

Afghanistan and Iraq - continuing carnage

As the sabre-rattling directed at Iran grows louder and louder, reminders arrive from both Iraq and Afghanistan about how big a mess we still have to clear up in those places.

A series of bombs across Iraq in the last two days have killed at least 13 people, including seven near a police station in the northern city of Ramadi. Last month saw 393 civilian deaths in the country – the highest total for more than a year.

Meanwhile, in southern Afghanistan, at least 30 people lost their lives when a bus hit a landmine as it travelled from Nimroz to Kandahar City. A UN report said that last month was the worst of the year for civilian deaths in Afghanistan too. Up to the end of August, 1,500 had been killed so far this year – an increase of more than 350 on the same period in 2008.

See also my blog of Sept 2.

Iran air crashes - a long arm

Another Iranian passenger aircraft has crashed – this time at Mashhad airport, where it skidded off the runway and burst into flames, killing 17 passengers. It comes just ten days after another Iranian flight came down in the north of the country, killing all 168 people on board.

The aircraft involved in today’s crash is reported to be a Russian-built Ilyushin, while the one that came to disaster last week was a Russian Tupolev. The causes of the two accidents are not yet known, but Iran has a poor air safety record, partly because of the trade sanctions imposed by the US which have left the country reliant on ageing fleets, and often unable to buy spare parts.

Bad blood between Iran and the USA and UK goes back a long way. In 1951, the highly popular Dr Mohammed Mossadegh was elected prime minister, but when he nationalised the country’s oil reserves, the US and the UK engineered his removal, and the installation of the Shah’s despotic regime.

After the Shah was deposed in the Iranian revolution of 1979, a group of radical students took 52 people hostage at the American embassy claiming that it was a “nest of spies” and the US was up to its old tricks again, plotting to overthrow the new regime. In response America imposed sanctions, and they have remained in place with varying degrees of severity ever since.

Amazing escape + air crashes over the ocean

A 14 year old Marseille girl plucked from the water appears to be the only survivor of yesterday’s air crash eight miles off the Comoros islands in the Indian Ocean. Rescuers spotted her swimming in rough waters among bodies and wreckage. They threw her a life buoy, but she could not grab it, then a man leapt into the water to save her. Altogether, there were about 153 people on board.

In the five deadliest aviation disasters over the world’s oceans, there were no survivors. The worst three were no accidents either. The worst of all involved the Air India 747 brought down by a terrorist bomb over the Atlantic in 1985, killing all 329 people on board.

Three years later, an American warship shot down an Iran Air Airbus over the Straits of Hormuz killing all 290 passengers and crew. The death toll was 269 – again everyone on board – when Soviet jets shot down Korean Air Lines flight 007 just west of Sakhalin island in 1983.

The worst ever accident involving a commercial airliner over the ocean came on July 17, 1996 when a TWA flight to Rome blew up in mid-air about 12 minutes after taking off from New York’s JFK airport. All 230 people on board were killed. At first, there was speculation that there might have been a bomb on the jumbo, but investigators concluded the most likely cause of the explosion was faulty wiring.

The secret disaster

Outside the dwindling circle of fanatical Blair- and Brownites, it is now virtually universally recognised that the bombing, invasion and occupation of Iraq was Britain’s greatest foreign policy disaster for at least half a century, possibly longer. Predictably, Jack “Man of” Straw – one of the leading conspirators behind the war – has banned the release of the cabinet papers that would reveal how ministers took their disastrous decision.

Labour’s line is that it would damage the quality of our government (!) if it was revealed who said what during this momentous debate. In fact, it seems what we would actually have learned would have been just the opposite. All the indications are that far from there being a ding-dong argument, ministers nodded through the war in an astonishingly supine and casual manner.

This was not a decision on whether to spend more on schools, or how we should organise hospitals – important though those things are. This was a decision to bomb, invade and occupy another country in the sure knowledge that it would result in the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people who had never done us any harm. The actions of some of those sitting around that cabinet table may well have been criminal. Six years later we still do not know what went wrong, nor how we would avoid the same things going wrong again if we were asked to, say, bomb Iran.

To put it in terms Mr Blair might understand, Labour lost its soul the day it decided to bomb Iraq. Perhaps even worse, though, is what has followed – the party’s cold-blooded determination, over weeks, months and years, to ensure that none of those responsible for the disaster is called to account. It beggars belief that the only people who ever lost their jobs over Iraq were the chairman and director-general of the BBC, and the BBC reporter who dared to tell the truth.

Wake up Labour! No good will come of you until you call the warmongers to account. The only way for a once-great political party to regain its self-respect is to release the cabinet and all other relevant papers forthwith and to have a full INDEPENDENT inquiry with witnesses testifying on oath.