Dr. Gonzo

Some people don’t want to leave their homeland even when they have the means to and would be safer outside their country.

Usually they suggest thoughts AND prayers. This guy just suggesting prayers, with no accompanying thoughts. Budget cuts or a sign that GOP leadership is vocally anti-thought?

They were relegated for match fixing

Yeah look on your clubs website though brainiac, there’s more sponsors for a club than just the shirt sponsor

If 1 offense is -12 points. 115 offenses should be -1380 points. There's 114 points possible in a premier league season. 138 for the leagues below. I think that changes once you get down to the low enough on the football pyramid because at some point it stops being 24 teams. If City are found guilty, and Everton's alleged punishment set the precedent... demoting to the championship is literally just a slap on the wrist for them. I don't think it matters in the long run because I think it's more of a clickbait headline than anything, I doubt 12 points get deducted from Everton. But if it does and it comes to light that City are in fact guilty of even just half the 115 offenses... they'd need to be demoted down several leagues.

He's an absolute zealot, like Mike Pence. Good description of these types of politicians is: taliban in a suit. New speaker of the house has suggested the correct response to handling mass shootings is prayer.

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I think it's funny he's meant to go to gambling rehab while nobody in the governing bodies of football seems to have any issue with him playing for a club that is sponsored by and promotes Sportsbet.io, BET MGM, and Fun88 - and if you scroll all the way down on www.nufc.co.uk you'll see their logos nicely arranged in that order. Taking the integrity of the sport out of why players can't gamble - which is hard to do because that's a serious concern for sure - is it right we've got so much promotion of online gambling in football?

I agree. I think it's really just a load of clickbait going with the sensational "worst case scenario." And if they wanted to make an example for the big clubs to watch out for, I can think of 114 more reasons why City should be the club made an example of rather than Everton.

You're meant to use guanciale! Bacon's a shit guanciale substitute, pancetta's an alright substitute. Find yourself some guanciale though when you do a non-vegetarian one though and blow your tastebuds away!

They finally elected a speaker. Now to see if the new guy can avoid a shutdown. He seems fairly radical, so I doubt he's able to.

Tbf I have no idea if that’s the legal term. Its what the Georgia case is about let me look it up really quickly. It’s a criminal racketeering charge(!) - sounds worse in legal terms. And in other news in the GOP circus, they’ve put forward their 4th nominee as speaker of the house. One congressman called this “democracy in action” - but this has never happened in the US before. It’s a bit mental.

And trying to overturn an election because he lost and that made him sad

The party that's never been more in unity continues to demonstrate that unity by having another speaker candidate drop out over infighting in the party: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-house-republicans-try-again-pick-leader-2023-10-24/ Never before has the US had such competence and unity in their legislative branch.

That's not what the autopsy report says... In actual American politics news, the GOP still can't pick a speaker because of all the unity in their party. Pedo protector Jim Jordan ended his pursuit of being one of the most powerful men in America after he got less votes in the second vote than he did the first time around. Now there's a shortlist of 9 possible next speakers of the house, because there's so much unity within the party. They're totally fit to govern and aren't a massive joke trying to throw divisive stories like the George Floyd bullshit against the wall to see if it sticks in an attempt at further driving culture wars to distract from how much of a joke they are. Trump's also had 3 of his lawyers take plea deals in Georgia. But I'm sure that also has nothing to do with the right-wing's favourite culture warrior taking to twitter to try to reignite a culture war battle over paying attention to what's actually happening in American politics.

I don't live in the UK anymore, but honestly I prefer if governments don't use my homeland as a killing ground. It wasn't alright when the Russian did it, it's not going to be alright if anyone else does it. The UK has Hamas on their terror list, they know where he lives now. It's our government's job to arrest him, if that means turning him over to Israel after his arrest... fine. But Mossad shouldn't be doing any assassinations in the UK unless they're doing them in conjunction with our government.

One of the old women who they released yesterday still has her husband left behind. I think each hostage that's been released still has at least one family member still in captivity. I wouldn't be surprised if they're treading lightly with their public statements so as to not aggravate those who are still holding their loved ones. And even in treading pretty lightly, she did say that she has "gone through hell" in the ordeal. They're clearly holding onto hostages for leverage of some sort. Either as a threat to their safety when Israel begins the ground invasion or to try to use them as a chip to negotiate a ceasefire. I think they've weirdly (and badly) miscalculated how Israel would react to this attack - I think they're acting in a way that... tbh I would really expect Israel to react. They've never really been proportionate before, so I'm not really sure what Hamas was expecting. But I also think the status quo is out the window now - Israel's got little appetite for a ceasefire at the moment. I'm not quite sure why Hamas would expect Israel to treat this attack like the previous rocket launches or the Hezbollah kidnapping of IDF soldiers. I don't think Israel's going to stop until Hamas no longer has any influence. It's shit because Gaza will pay a heavy price. Israel's going to keep this bombing campaign going up until they go in, and they've said they're delaying when they go in. It's also shit for the hostages, who are hoping to not only survive captivity... but also survive the constant bombardment. The latest thing I've seen re: the IDF trying to get hostages back is they've been dropping leaflets over Gaza promising a cash reward to those who bring information about the whereabouts of hostages. I'm not sure how much good a cash reward would be in Gaza, but if Israel is able to get them out of Gaza and give them the money... that's probably quite a tempting deal for the Palestinians there. Although I'm sure Hamas would go after anyone they find cooperating with Israel. Saw this shocking bit of news today regarding a Hamas fugitive living in London now: https://www.jpost.com/international/islamic-terrorism/article-769592 - pretty disgraceful.

Only Man Utd player my grandad ever liked, RIP

Aren’t there over 100 hostages though? What about the rest of them?

Why would he have said anything to them though?

Iran's using this time of chaos to persecute the Baluchi minority in Zahedan province. They've kidnapped many people, some sources saying as many as 210. Meanwhile on their state media they're threatening for all of their proxies (Hezbollah, Houthis, Hamas, etc) to attack Israel on all sides.

The BBC and CBC have adopted this policy because they have to tread a careful line with other groups some call terrorists, but others don't. Hamas is the elected government of Gaza too, granted they haven't held any elections since and killed off most of their biggest political opponents - which is why Fatah has 0 power at all in Gaza. But there's also PKK, which Turkey claims is a terrorist group... but the US, UK and Canada have all worked with them in the past. Perhaps most controversially is Canada, the UK, and the EU refusing to designate the IRGC as a terrorist group while the US has. It's state media, they've got to reflect the language that the government has issued government employees to use while talking about these groups. I'd hardly call the BBC left-wing either, their political coverage of the UK seems to have them pretty firmly in bed with the Tories.

FFS can the IRI calm down. The Houthis have fired missles at a US warship. https://abcnews.go.com/amp/International/security-incident-involving-us-navy-destroyer-red-sea/story?id=104147141

Well that's idiotic, the US has stood by Israel for decades regardless of which party has control. I also don't really think the mainstream media is left of centre tbh. It makes no sense for anyone with actual left-wing views to support a very religious terrorist group masquerading as an oppressive government, tbh. Hamas aren't freedom fighters, they're oppressors of Israelis AND Palestinians that explicitly promote genocide in their charter. China's more left-wing than Hamas and China gets hounded by the media constantly. Iran backs Hamas in the fight and coverage of Iran in the west is basically: "these are backward people" - it's bizarre how Hamas get so much trust and credibility among the western media. I think they aren't going to begin the ground attack until they're confident that Hamas is devastated from the blockade and bombing campaign. So my assumption is the aid getting into Gaza (which, I think is a good thing - there's 2.1m people there with about 1m of them being children; it's criminal to punish a whole population that lives under oppression from their "government" tbh) slows that schedule down a bit. But they did say if there's any evidence Hamas seizes any aid, the aid will stop. Imo it's a 100% certainty that Hamas seizes the humanitarian aid, they need Gaza to have maximum suffering for their propaganda to have maximum effect. But I think that draws out the bombing campaign, which I think makes the situation for Gaza all the more bleak. Hospital beds are already scarce. The IDF, if they're smart, would use the ground invasion (and likely subsequent occupation) to demonstrate some humanity to Palestinians there. Field hospitals could be set up and that should reduce some pressure that's put on the already overburdened medical professionals of Gaza. But I do worry about what a prolonged occupation of Gaza might mean. Palestinians have already lost so much in the last 7 decades - are they going to lose further land and further sovereignty? Israel was insane to back Hamas when they first started - I can't see how their own history wouldn't have taught them that supporting Islamists wouldn't have been a massive security threat; even if the goal was to splinter PLO and Fatah. Israel needs to be doing all it can do to promote moderate voices in the Palestinian world; backing the ultra-devout was not a way to promote less aggression in the region. I also hope that for Israel this means Netanyahu's career is finally coming to a close. He should never have been anywhere near as powerful as he's been in the decades after Rabin's assassination, purely because of his role in getting the man killed for pursuing peace. And for decades he's done all he can to shit all over Rabin's legacy and move the region further from peace. I know their government won't change during this wartime, but I'm hopeful the fighting dies down in the coming months (which is probably optimistic because of the realities of urban warfare) and he finally becomes politically irrelevant.

I don't think we've gotten any clear answer to the casualties or the extent of the damage. We just know the hospital's car park was struck, many cars exploded. The images that can be verified of the aftermath of the explosion don't seem to have bodies, body parts, or even blood - so it's not really conclusive about the extent of human loss. Some of the videos that went around online that purported to be from the hospital are from a previous year when Israel struck a hospital and caused mass casualties. So it's easy to understand why Hamas was quick to make the claim. And I'm not surprised about Al Jazeera being heavily biased towards Hamas, considering Al Jazeera and Hamas are both funded by Qatar - but I am shocked at western media taking Hamas's word at face value. They're a terrorist group - terrorising Israelis and oppressing Palestinians with their rule. When it's the Kremlin, Russia is rightfully distrusted and viewed cynically by Western media. Why isn't that the same standard for Hamas? I understand the distrust of Israel public statements and the IDF, there's a history of them being misleading and openly hostile to the free press (they've got an awful track record of killing journalists reporting on their war crimes) - but why isn't Hamas held to the same standard? They've got a history of terrorism and human rights abuses. I think it is only right if both sides are given the same amount of distrust and the media takes more of an effort to present stories with more emphasis on what happened - even if that means we have to wait for more information to come. World media rushing to report on this without enough factual information to give an accurate picture enflamed tensions in the Middle East. Israel's embassy in Jordan was flocked to. The US embassy in Lebanon is evacuating non-essential staff and family of staff. We're seeing hate crimes against both Jews and Palestinians on the rise in western countries. All because the world news rushed to report Hamas's spin pissing off a lot of people. Is the IDF just working with the assumption that all the hostages are dead? I thought there would be more effort to recover hostages - it seems they are keen to sit back and keep the bombing campaign going. There's been no real update on the plan for what to do about the hostages. Last I heard about them was a Hamas spokesperson saying they have no way of knowing how many hostages are still alive or not.