Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Friday, November 13, 2009

Foreign Diplomats Tease Pakistani Police With Fake Bombs

By Steve Hynd


Stories like this encourage my view that diplomatic ranks tend to be drawn from over-privileged frat boys with only a tenuous hold on reality.



The interior ministry said an 'unidentified object' found recently in the vehicle of Danish embassy security advisor Chris John turned out to be a fake bomb, the Daily Times newspaper reported. John told police he was conducting a 'mock exercise' to determine the efficiency and alertness of the police, the paper said. The Danish embassy was bombed in June 2008.


An interior ministry letter obtained by the daily quoted Islamabad police as saying that some other foreign missions were also 'caught' during the similar exercise. 'When the suspected objects are traced or recovered by police from the diplomatic vehicles, they (diplomats) simply say that this is a mock exercise,' the letter said.


Nicely diplomatic, proving how divorced they are from the horrors common people around them are enduring. The Pakistani police should should shoot one - just a flesh wound - pour encourage les autres.



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