From the Detroit News:

The State Department didn't revoke the visa of foiled terrorism suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab because federal counterterrorism officials had begged off revocation, a top State Department official revealed Wednesday.

Patrick F. Kennedy, an undersecretary for management at the State Department, said Abdulmutallab's visa wasn't taken away because intelligence officials asked his agency not to deny a visa to the suspected terrorist over concerns that a denial would've foiled a larger investigation into al-Qaida threats against the United States.

"Revocation action would've disclosed what they were doing," Kennedy said in testimony before the House Committee on Homeland Security. Allowing Adbulmutallab to keep the visa increased chances federal investigators would be able to get closer to apprehending the terror network he is accused of working with, "rather than simply knocking out one soldier in that effort."

This is really all that we need to know. But the evidence of the Haskells about how he was helped to get onto the flight by a smartly dressed man (which has not been widely reported) is also of interest:
http://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/index.ssf/2009/12/flight_253_passenger_says_at_l.html.

I used to think it possible that Dr David Kelly had been murdered.

I have changed my mind.

I now think it is very likely that Dr David Kelly was murdered.

Vital evidence which could solve the mystery of the death of Government weapons inspector Dr David Kelly will be kept under wraps for up to 70 years.

In a draconian -- and highly unusual -- order, Lord Hutton, the peer who chaired the controversial inquiry into the Dr Kelly scandal, has secretly barred the release of all medical records, including the results of the post mortem, and unpublished evidence.

See this report.

See also:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1245626/NORMAN-BAKER-Hutton-farcical-feeble-amateurish--MUST-told-truth-week.html.

Craig Murray comments:
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2010/01/david_kellys_mu.html.

Before Christmas we spent a few days in New York.

Photos.

I've been having fun playing with this netbook and installing multiple operating systems (currently 4) on it.

At the moment it looks like this:

 
Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes 
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders 
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes 
Disk identifier: 0x25db3a89 

 
Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System 
/dev/sda1   *           1        4864    39070048+  bf  Solaris 
/dev/sda2            4865        9728    39070080   a5  FreeBSD 
/dev/sda3            9729       14953    41969812+  83  Linux 
/dev/sda4           14954       19457    36178380    5  Extended 
/dev/sda5           14954       15196     1951866   82  Linux swap / Solaris 
/dev/sda6           15197       17012    14586988+  83  Linux 
/dev/sda7           17013       19457    19639431   83  Linux 

OpenSolaris 2009.06 in the first partition (installed from a USB stick from the LOSUG Christmas meeting) works fine except that the network card (11ab:4354) didn't work out of the box.

But the myk driver from here worked fine and the instructions included with it for compiling were perfect. Wireless and webcam work "out of the box".

FreeBSD 8.0 in the second partition works fine but a few things baffled me at first. In particular the need for hald_enable="YES" and dbus_enable="YES" as well as enabling kdm with

ttyv8 "/usr/local/kde4/bin/kdm -nodaemon" xterm on secure"

in /etc/ttys.

Wireless works with a static configuration but I haven't discovered a NetworkManager equivalent.

I installed openSUSE 11.2 into the extended partition and everything works (of course :)). (Though as with Ubuntu, the OpenSolaris partition got selected as swap on the basis of its partition ID, and I had to make sure that it was definitely de-selected).

I installed the Ubuntu Netbook Remix (from a USB stick made from the ISO using Unetbootin) in the third partition, and this messed up the booting of everything else, although I chose "Advanced" and chose to "install boot loader to /dev/sda3". I was trying to boot everything from the OpenSolaris GRUB installed in the active first partition, with generic boot code in the MBR. I haven't quite worked out what happened, and I'm not necessarily blaming the Ubuntu installer -- I need to test this again. But I had to restore the grub setup from the OpenSolaris media:

installgrub /boot/grub/stage1 /boot/grub/stage2 /dev/rdsk/c8d0s0

And I had to use the openSUSE "repair" system to re-setup its grub - odd.

Exactly ten years ago today (Tuesday 4th January 2000) was the first working day of 2000 and was the day that I started work at SuSE Linux Ltd at Borehamwood. A lot has happened since then...