This post locked for obvious reasons.

Ire

Some bloke called Marios Evriviadis, an assistant lecturer in international politics at a college in Athens which I have not heard of, has written a long screed about evil foreign pseudo-NGOs meddling with the Cyprus situation (can’t find the original but here is one of the places). As sometimes happens, my name is mentioned, which is what triggered my google-fu; I was surprised on running it through the online translator to discover that I apparently was forced out of my last job due to pressure from the Turkish government. Nothing could be farther from the truth, and I wonder if Mr Evridiadis has actually been misinformed by someone claiming to know the facts, or (more likely) if he has simply invented it in the expectation that nobody cold challenge his good story. I posted a brief statement in response, on those sites where it was actually possible to do so, and emailed Mr Evriviadis directly demanding a retraction, though I don’t expect to hear back.

Glee

I was also a little alarmed to receive from Chambré Public Affairs their election guide to the Northern Ireland Assembly election on 5 May. In general I like their work and approach, and I go back a long way with Will Chambré, the boss, who I played with when we were about seven. But this seemed to me to be treading a bit on my own territory, presenting a guide to each of the 18 electoral districts and speculating on the results. I was worried either that they might have copied my own material or, worse, that they might have done their own work and done it better.

But I was reassured on looking through their guide over lunch. Not only is it not ripped off from my own site, it is definitely not as good, with confusing statistics provided and some significant inaccuracies in the non-mathematical information. I note that it’s not downloadable from their own website (I was sent it by email), and wonder if Will has retrospectively pulled the plug on it. (It’s very bad of me to feel glee at someone else’s project not working out well, but sometimes I am a bad person.)