Thought Id start this one going because its rather dead on this board at the moment and I suppose all my usual muckers are either at the Stella tennis event watching Dim Tim (lose again) or at Henly Regatta eating cucumber sandwiches (they wish,...NOT).

Anyway please feel free to just talk to yourself blast away and let it go on any company or subject you wish. Just wish Id thought of this one before.

cheers GF.

fred - sorry but i can't be bothered to respond in detail to your post from utopia, though one or two points are indeed valid

As said, in general.

now it's Transasia
first we had a malaysian airlines plane crashing (disappearing), then it was one from airasia and now transasia joins the sorry line

i'd better refrain from commenting as for sure it would upset someone

"i'd better refrain from commenting as for sure'... Funny you should say that -):

and now for a bit of frothy gossip .....

Lewis Hamilton and Nicole Scherzinger
News of the split comes just months after the pair were rumoured to be getting engaged but Nicole threw in the towel when the motor racing star wouldn’t commit to setting a date.


if that is the case, then she's absolutely right to bin him ..... my daughter was jerked around by a chap for 4 years, so she booted him into touch ..... i'm very happy to say that, having found another, they are now engaged after a year of walking out (such a nice, genteel turn of phrase)

Hamilton's a well known off shore tax dodger... so why would anyone expect any more from low life like him.

SNP to wipe out Labour vote in Scotland, Lord Ashcroft poll reveals

Danny Alexander and Douglas Alexander will both no longer be MPs after General Election, according to bombshell poll by former Tory donor Lord Ashcroft






By Ben Riley-Smith, Political Correspondent

8:18AM GMT 04 Feb 2015



Some of Labour and the Liberal Democrats' most senior Scottish MPs will be dumped from office by the SNP according to a bombshell new poll revealing the full extent of Ed Miliband's woes north of the border.


Danny Alexander, the Liberal Democrat Chief Secretary to the Treasury, and Douglas Alexander, Labour’s election campaign chief and shadow foreign secretary, will both no longer be MPs come May 8 according to the polls.


The SNP will take 15 of 16 crucial marginal seats in Scotland, constituency polling by former Tory donor Lord Ashcroft has found, providing a hammer blow to Mr Miliband’s hopes of entering Number 10.


Alex Salmond, the former SNP leader running in Gordon, is on course to comfortably win the seat while senior Scottish Labour figures including Margaret Curran, the shadow Scottish secretary, and Anas Sarwar, former deputy leader, are expected to go.


The long-awaited polling of more than 16,000 Scottish voters reveals that in Labour-held constituencies the overall swing to the SNP is a staggering 25.4 per cent.


If replicated on May 7, Labour would lose 35 of its 41 MPs and all but rob Mr Miliband of any chance of winning an overall majority.

Such dire predictions for Labour’s support base in Scotland from the most detailed polling to be held in the country since the independence referendum in September is likely to send shock waves through the party, coming just three months before election.


More: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/SNP/11388944/SNP-to-wipe-out-Labour-vote-in-Scotland-Lord-Ashcroft-poll-reveals.html

get a life you silly sod .... the one's nothing to do with the other

anyway, i hope she was given a REALLY REALLY expensive ring and kept it

I wonder what my life would have been if my wife booted me into touch.

She probably would have been selected for next weeks game.

On reflection, sometimes I think she is still thinking about it.

Oi Alf, watch yer language sunshine or your banned

certain people have been trying to get me into that position for some time :-)

Keeping an expensive engagement ring is nothing more than common prostitution.

Agreed, fellas?

but an uncommonly lucky and in this case, attractive prostitute :-)

No, a gift is a gift.

Poll tracker...clock the date


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/general-election-2015/11374181/General-Election-2015-latest-poll-tracker.html

Chilcot has made a mockery of the serious job he was given

Sir John Chilcot couldn't even finish his opening statement to the select committee in a timely fashion



By Dan Hodges

2:47PM GMT 04 Feb 2015

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/11389827/Chilcot-has-made-a-mockery-of-the-serious-job-he-was-given.html


Sir John Chilcot has just finished giving evidence before the Foreign Affairs select committee on his ongoing report into Iraq. It was a farce.


This man, so the accusations go, is taking so long over his inquiry that it’s starting to look like all the key participants in the decision to go to war will be dead before its published. Well, his opening statement began with the announcement that one of his committee members, the historian Sir Martin Gilbert, had indeed died.


He then began to explain why a report that had been scheduled to last a year, had not been completed after six. And he explained. And he explained some more. He would probably be explaining still if the committee chairman, Sir Richard Ottaway, hadn’t stepped in politely to ask him to conclude. Not only is he unable to publish his report on time, he can’t even complete an opening statement on time.


Things went downhill from there. Was the reason for the delay obstruction on the part of government? No, it wasn’t. Was the reason obstruction on the part of witnesses? No. Was the reason obstruction on the part of foreign governments? No.


The select committee tried to dig a little deeper. There were reports that the Maxwellisation process - whereby witnesses facing criticism are given the opportunity to respond to that criticism - was a major reason for the delay. Could he tell the committee how many people formed part of that process? No, he couldn’t. Could he confirm a report that one witness had been sent hundreds of pages of criticism? No, sorry, he couldn’t do that either. What he could say, though, was that the people facing criticism were all people who had appeared as witnesses at the inquiry. That revelation will have come as a relief to John, my local butcher - he’s been worried sick about whether the Chilcot report was going to criticise him.


The committee started to look slightly frustrated. Chilcot attempted to reassure them, by pledging he would try and avoid slipping into civil-service Mandarinese. Was the process of declassification of documents still ongoing, he was asked? No, he responded. Well, maybe a bit. Actually, this is how he would characterise it. There was “a tale of classification”.

He was asked if the evidence base, upon which the report’s conclusions would rest, was now broadly finalised. Yes, he said, essentially it was. So could that not be published? No. Sorry. It couldn’t. Because to publish the evidence without Chilcot and his committee providing the appropriate “context” would be unfair. People would be able to take the evidence and draw any old conclusion they liked. From the evidence.


For me, the most telling moment was when he explained how he had been unaware - when he took up the chairmanship - just how complex the inquiry would be. It had taken them off into all sorts of unexpected avenues, he said. This, remember, is an inquiry into the greatest single foreign policy blunder this country has made since the conclusion of Second World War. 100,000 dead. A region destabilised. Global consequences that we are feeling today, and will continue to feel for generations to come. Did he really think it was all going to roll out neatly in front of him, like an A level history primer?

If the chair of the inquiry into the war in Iraq was unprepared for the scope and scale of that inquiry, then by definition, he was the wrong man to chair it. But we knew that anyway.

Chilcot had one job. It wasn’t to produce a definitive report into Iraq. None is possible. It wasn’t to change perceptions of that war. Perceptions are locked in stone. It was to produce a report that at least demonstrated that the decisions taken in the run up to that catastrophic war would finally be the subject of open and transparent public scrutiny. And he’s failed. He’s failed because his inquiry is now tainted by the same suspicions of cover-up, politically motivated obfuscation and self-interested evasion as all the other Iraq inquiries.

Sir John claimed he didn’t want it to look he was “scamping the work”. Six years on, there is little danger of that.

i wonder what's happened to Hays?
he hasn't posted since 1st i think, so hope he isn't poorly

.

I am hopeful about Haze!

8-)