From the Telegraph….

On Thursday night, officials had claimed the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel was safe but on Friday it became the centre of the conflict once again, with furious firefights between the terrorists and the military.

It is pretty bad when you say an area has been cleared and yet you turn around and have major gunfight 24 hours later. It leads credence to this grousing in from another Telegraph article….

A second British official said that, although the India’s Black Cat commandos have a fearsome reputation for efficient antiterrorist operations, their deployment was botched.

“They are supposed to set-up a command centre in complete control as their first priority,” the official said. “Instead they arrived and went in guns blazing.

“It was blind. They didn’t have maps of the hotels, yet there terrorists had done enough reconnaissance to use the service facilities to manoeuvre.”

There was also criticism of a midnight announcement on the first day of the crisis by a cabinet minister that 200 commandos were deployed in the area within two hours.

The British official said: “The terrorist were forewarned by the government itself.”

The whole article is riddled with tales of gross incompetence on the part of the Indian government. The Indian solders and police have demonstrated their bravery, but their leadership left a lot to be desired.

And on the subject of the terrorists being forewarned…..

A senior officer in the country’s elite Black Cat commando unit told the Telegraph, the gunmen were able to trawl the internet for information once they lost cable television feeds to the two luxury hotels and office block.

The men looked beyond the instant updates of the Indian media to find worldwide reaction to the events in Mumbai.

Their analysis of at least five BlackBerry mobile phones recovered suggested the terrorists had links to England.

“There was a lot of content from the English media, not just in London but the Urdu and Arabic sites that are very strong in the north of England,” the Commando leader said near the site of the city’s third siege at Nariman House. “We have some analysis started on this and we will pass it on to Scotland Yard, no doubt.”

The availability of news updates and live TV streams from Indian and foreign media is though to have given the hostage takers an advantage in the two day siege. By early yesterday army commanders had realised the extent of the problem.

Lieutenant-General Noble Thamburaj, head of India’s southern command, said: “I want to pay tribute to the brave army and Indian forces who have died but I will not put a figure on it because that will sustain the terrorists.”

As the above story seems to demonstrates, the killers seemed to have better command and control then the Indian government. According to Bill Roggio (h/t The Belmont Club) they had command and control rooms set up ahead of time. So that gave them an advantage that they exploited to the full.

Still, there does not seem to be any good excuse for the Indian’s sloppy command and control.

From the Times of Indian….

MUMBAI: Two NSG personnel, including an officer, were today martyred and six other commandos injured during operations against terrorists in Mumbai, the first casualties suffered by the elite force during the siege. ( Watch )

Major Sandeep Unnikrishnan, 31, was martyred while engaging terrorists this morning at the Taj hotel, an NSG spokesperson said.

This is just the latest in a long string of high ranking Indian police and army personal dying on the front lines. I am sure this is a great credit to their bravery but it strikes me as kind of odd. Don’t the Indian’s have any good NCOs? It seems like a major is a rather high rank to be leading from the front in a close quarters combat situation.

Also what is up with this? This is not the way i am use to seeing elite unites handle a gun. But this is not an isolated incident. I saw similar tactics being used on a video clip of the assault on Nariman House. Unfortunately, I can’t find that clip now.

From the Times of India…

The shootout on Wednesday found around 100 cops of the Railway Police Force (RPF) as well as Government Railway Police (GRP) ill-equipped to tackle two AK-47-wielding terrorists. Only six of those cops were armed with either Self-Loading Rifles (SLRs) or automatic weapons. The rest had lathis.

J N Lal, divisional railway manager of Central Railway, said no one imagined such fidayeen attacks at CST. “We were buying gadgets to tackle bomb blasts. Now we will surely think of modern weapons for our security personnel,” said Lal.

Click here to read what a Lathis is. Basically, it is not much more than a stick.

Kim is widely thought to have be incapacitated by a stroke. The question is, what does this mean for the future of North Korea? One possiblity is a Chinese invasion of North Korea. From Spiegel…..

It is quite possible that this regime will collapse without Kim. To prevent a wave of starving refugees from crossing into China, Beijing has increased its troop levels along the border with North Korea. One of the scenarios now being discussed in Tokyo, Seoul and Washington is an invasion by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. If North Korea were to descend into anarchy, China, as a “stabilizing force,” could attempt to gain control over Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons. Russia is believed to have approved of this plan.

My question is why wait for the regime to collapse? North Korea has got to be one of few places on earth where having Chinese overlords would be an improvement for just about everyone except for a privileged few.

From Alice the (British) Architect…..

These days, thanks to a draconian law brought about by people with beards wearing tweeds and sandals, lobbying the government on a day the government just wanted something to do, disturbing a single bat is a crime worthy of hanging. Well, not quite that bad, you understand, but a severe fine and a criminal record is more than enough to make someone think twice about waking the little critters from their daily slumber.

I notified English Nature, as the law dictates, and they sent a ‘bat worker’ round to spend the evening monitoring. The builders continued to work elsewhere, away from the roof, as quietly as possible (digging a foundation, if you must know). Despite charming assurances from the Bat People on the telephone, I received a horrible letter saying that all work must cease at once, and could not start again until the bat season was over, and how dare we even consider repairing the roof when the bats needed it. (There was no mention of the people who also happened to live there, and for whom the building was actually constructed).

From later on in the post….

We got off lightly. There are some kinds of bats that are so rare, that some buildings are simply not allowed to be worked on at all (according to a colleague who this happened to) even if it is listed and in danger of falling down. There are some people with colonies of 300 bats in their roof, all peeing and pooing into the insulation. Despite what the nicey nicey literature on English Nature’s website says about bat poo being ambrosia from heaven, it actually stinks. Many churches have bats, and whilst in some parts of the building they do not cause much of a problem (the belfry!) bat droppings all over the ancient furnishings are not particularly desirable. English Nature’s advice? Put cloths over everything.

Unlike most people, I like bats. I never had the problems with them that most people seem to have. There is something cool about seeing bats flying around and I always figured that anything eating bugs was a friend of mine. But if they had laws like this in America I would be killing every bat I could find. There are ways of killing the buggers without being caught.

But it is no surprise that England has laws like this on the book. If they let pirates go because they are afraid of violating their human rights, they ought to treat the bats at least as well.