LST should consider it a social experiment with a poll at the end. It could result in all of us actually getting to know each other better

Watched 'Make Bradford Britsh' last night. Brilliant show loved the northern accents

Back from the expo. It was nice and more detailed than I anticipated. Enjoyed the short video. Ngonge, you mean when I'm old and grey? Time for a nap Val, the politics section should stopped for a week. Some would pull their hair out

NGONGE;806917 wrote: Norf, I've been there a few weeks ago. You've been to Cumra, right? I doubt this one is going to interest you that much. But it's still worth a visit, I say. I know. I have been to Hajj too

Morning all. Going to the Hajj Expo at the British Museum

^have you read the Quran?

Archdemos;806475 wrote: why out of place mate Yes good afternoon fellow SOL'er and Londoners. Got the old sunglasses out today. I hear foreign languages. Everything but English! Being the most English of non English people I take offence!

NGONGE;806457 wrote: Spearing is a good player but he's not even a tenth of what Lucas is. War Lucas is world class and Spearing is just a squad player. Plus, Lucas is a proper holding midfielder and Spearing is just a bad version of Mascherano. In fact, and I told you this a million times before, Lucas is a better reader of the game than both (miles better). What kills me about you is that you claim to have done some FA coaching courses. Have they not taught you anything about football warya? So Lucas is better than Mascherano? One doesn't need any footballing qualifications to see that as utter nonsense I said Spearing is a better passer of the ball. Do you want proof? Do you? Do you?

Morning from a sunny Landan. I feel out of place....

Where is South Sudan?

General Duke;804907 wrote: How is not the issue. In today's world one will be able to find engineers for hire and consultants to implant a plan. What we want to do is the key issue. We don't want or need a UAE model. Puntland is far larger and has more natural resources and people than the Emirates. We need to develop our education system. I like the Cuban model. That's what we need to implement back home. The fact that Cuba is resource poor and yet achieved remarkable goals is the key. When you have agreed on what is required (well its obvious already - schools, hospitals, infrastructure etc) then the question of how comes in. After the planning comes implementation. How will the roads be built if there isn't a bitumen plant in the country? Planning is one thing but implementing by far the weightier.

How and not what. Nothing will come to fruition if there isn't a clear strategy on the way ahead. At local municipal level as well as national. The UAE is a successful blue print in terms how local governance, planning and legislature can be conducted. If Puntland needs village and city master plans doing let me know

^

In WH Auden's poem Musee des Beaux Arts, ordinary life continues unimpeded by the miraculous and dreadful, "the torturer's horse" scratching "its innocent behind". What Auden did not describe, but could have done, is the banalities of the life of the torturer himself. The leaked emails, purportedly written by Syria's president Bashar al-Assad and his wife Asma, are shocking not because they conform to a cliched journalistic stock narrative of the human rights-abusing dictator as a grandiose figure, but because how they show how ordinary are so many of their preoccupations. There is no cunning plan revealed to smuggle in weapons of mass destruction, only evidence of how Assad got round the US sanctions imposed on him to buy items from iTunes. He swaps amusing links found on the internet, while his wife, a former investment banker with a millionaire surgeon father, buys costly candlesticks. All extravagant, but there is no evidence of the purchase of big cats – as once owned by members of the Ben Ali, Gaddafi and Hussein families; no evidence of the importation of gold-plated guns. Paradoxically, it is precisely because of this that the emails seem both more chilling and unsettling, reminding us that it is ordinary men who commit and order atrocities. All of which reflects the contradictions of Assad's personality. When I had the chance to sit and talk to him, now almost a decade ago, he seemed both intelligent and capable of charm. At the beginning of the US "war on terror", he only once hinted at a more ruthless side, speaking of how his father had dealt with his own "terrorist" problem and acidly remarking how he had been criticised for it. The Syrian opposition will inevitably seize on the emails as evidence of the special callousness of the Assad family, shopping online while the country's people are being shelled by Assad's army. And, perhaps, they are right. But for the opposition there are other dangers in the emails – not least the revelation of a cosier relationship until very recently with Qatar and some members of its ruling family than the Qataris have liked to present in public, not least in its recent demands that the opposition be armed. Even as recently as this year, Mayassa al Thani, the daughter of the emir of Qatar, Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, was advising Asma Assad that the family should leave Syria, suggesting Doha might offer them exile. It was an email – intriguingly enough – that appealed not to the "dictator" and his family, but the other Assad family, the one that for so long tried to present itself as normal and lacking in pretension. "I honestly think," she wrote, "that this is a good opportunity to leave and re-start a normal life – it can't be easy on the children, it can't be easy on you!" Another danger for the opposition, not least in the light of calls from some quarters for an arms embargo on all sides, is that the emails also appear to reveal the source of some of the smuggled weapons to Syria's opposition – shipped from Libya – a route that has been independently confirmed to the Guardian in recent weeks by other sources. But perhaps most dangerous for both the opposition and for Assad himself in these emails is the intimacy that they reveal, making him seem not more dangerous, but more human and frail with his frustrated outbursts, his paranoia, the revelation of his taste in music and evidence of his devotion to his wife in his "love u"s. If the opposition had hoped to make Bashar al-Assad seem more monstrous, then they have failed. Instead, the emails they have leaked have made a man responsible for terrible crimes seem less distant and oddly more human if not less culpable. For that reason, it is entirely possible that the Syrian opposition – so keen to push out these emails even as their military campaign on the ground has faltered and their political alliance become ever more split and fractious – may come to regret the way in which this material has been released. It has shown the torturer-in-chief playing with his iPad and listening to New Order, put flesh on the bones of a man who – until now – was nothing but a caricature. The dynamic of conflict, and the propaganda effort that inevitably supports it, requires not more, but less detail and dimension. guardian.co.uk

^WCSWRTWB Jimce wanaagsan Juxa, can you still get footy tickets?

^My last comment wasn't about believing it or not. It was about the propaganda you mentioned. It could back fire and make him look like a normal person if the propaganda was supposed to make him look bad. Wax fahan

BOB;803859 wrote: The midget in the midfield and Spearing is a good player when he gets a run in the team. His passing is better than Lucas' but Ngonge won't admit that Peace, Love & Unity.

Glad no one was serious injured. Reminds me of Michael Douglas in Falling Down.

Nin-Yaaban;804349 wrote: Yea right....like he would be s.t.u.p.i.d enuff to use that. Just a western propaganda. I'm not sure. If it was propaganda it has the danger of making him look like a normal person and not a mass murderer (musical tastes, sense of humour and a slight suggestion he wishes he had other options).

Itunes downloads of Chris Brown? Right Said Fred? http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/14/assad-itunes-emails-chris-brown

Traore is a legend saxib He did well against skillful players believe it or not. But he struggled against typical English players.

"It started in Sheffield 150 years ago" Yep!

Not the same Napoli. They had Dossena in their team

Where are Tuujiye and OZ?

Great game. Reminds me of LFC a couple of years ago. Ngonge, SG against Napoli was in the Europa League. Chaw!