Scotland Yard assures me that the codenames they use to describe operations are randomly selected these days Bumblebee, for instance, didnt have any obvious connections to burglary but the one for President Barack Obamas first state visit this month has still raised eyebrows.
It is, Mandrake hears, Chalaque. In Punjabi, the word is used to describe someone who is cheeky, sharp, crafty and too clever for his or her own good.
One Punjabi speaker tells me that it carries mildly disrespectful connotations and adds it hardly helps matters that it sounds so much like macaque, which she had initially thought I had said.
America cant reasonably take umbrage, however. The codename that the Secret Service chose for Ronald Reagan during his period in the White House was, after all, hardly reverential: Rawhide.
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The codename that the Secret Service chose for Ronald Reagan during his period in the White House was, after all, hardly reverential: Rawhide. I am sure there is some potential umbrage-taker who would object to a codename like *gtfsk.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
