blazes

Good to see Diane Abbott adding her customary intellectual depth to the debate....

"childish babies" is an excellent example of a tautology....

Who's GD when he's at home?

So much for the "coalition of the willing"!!! Also, a reminder of why the UK needed to brexit...

I've noticed that many American hospital websites insert the phrase "sex assigned at birth". Who are the woke administrators who meekly toe this ideological line..... But Trump's male/female declaration on this issue should eradicate this travesty of science.

Excellent news. Sue them till the pips squeak....

Tough vetting by sleepy joe Biden??? or by his Border Czar, the thicko who lost the election for the Democrats!! 10 million illegals! All toughly "vetted"!!!

Their envelopes were not fat enough.....

That was Spike Milligan's joke epitaph. Own up...

Do rocks swim? Something to do with being down under?

I wonder what "proper officiating" is. Being a referee, especially in all the leagues below a country's top one, is no picnic. Referees are as fallible as everyone else, and their "officiating" may be badly affected by something as trivial as an argument with the missis as he left for the game....

Air Canada have been flying YVR to BKK direct these last two winters. 15 hours west and 12/13 east. However, I prefer Eva Air for the welcome break-up of this loooong journey.

Depends what you mean by "quality". I have never seen (out of the home) a Thai person reading a book. That small difference between Thailand and most Western towns and cities is a mark (imo) of how further advanced the latter are in obtaining (and using) a broad education.

Canada????

ILLEGAL, please. Call a spade a spade...

Hunted down? That'll be the day. The police are too busy looking for signs of islamophobia in people's communications (including thoughts perceived to be in your head and ready to be loosed upon the world).

What utter b*llsh!t. Just another grab for your wallet in the name of the climate "science" cult.

No way the debt-ridden West could risk war with China. Those in Taiwan who favour government from Beijing will yield up the country and, like the West, preserve their own economy. It will be just like the takeover of one corporation by another. Some takeovers are hostile, some friendly. Eva Air will be taken over by Air China (perhaps not even with a change of name.) Not a drop of blood spilt....

In what way precisely?

This review appeared in this week's Spectator. The tv series (Drops of God) is available in the usual places, but I have not yet watched it, so if anyone has, please react: Apple TV+ Drops of God is one of those gems of purest ray serene that cable TV prefers to keep hidden in its deep unfathomed caves because it thinks you want something more lowbrow. Try finding it by accident: you won’t. When I looked for it on Apple – which doesn’t have all that many shows – I had laboriously to type in its name. It wasn’t offered to me in the recommendations. If I hadn’t been tipped off by my friends Candy and Diarmuid, I would never have seen it. I had been lamenting, as I often do, the dearth of stuff to watch on TV that doesn’t put you through the emotional wringer. When I settle down for an evening on the sofa after a hard day’s not working, I want to be taken to a happy place rather than be overstimulated by some torture-porn atrocity about a small-town detective investigating grisly murders by an occult-inspired serial killer. Nor do I want sex; nor, particularly, yet more dystopian sci-fi; nor something self-consciously wry and quirky about a psychoanalyst featuring a rehabilitated Hollywood megastar. I want something more European in sensibility: oblique, meditative, art-house, intelligent, gentle. Drops of God does the job just perfectly. The premise is enticing. A French connoisseur of fine wines has just died and, being a tricksy, demanding, obsessive fellow he has left the potential heirs to his stupendous fortune – a magnificent Toyko apartment and the world’s best private cellar, worth gazillions – a challenge. They must blind taste and correctly identify a series of his most treasured and obscure vintages. Winner takes all. There are two contestants. One is his estranged daughter, Camille (Fleur Geffrier), whom he trained up when she was very young to identify every conceivable aroma, from lychee to moss, using first a Nez du Vin kit and then his private stock. The other is his former star student, a taciturn, handsome, otherwordly Japanese lad Issei Tomine (Tomohisa Yama<deleted>a), so meticulous in his quest for perfect knowledge that he even gets soil samples from all the world’s greatest terroirs sent to his home so that he can inhale their mineral complexity. Your sympathies waver between the rivals as you learn more about them. Like the fine wines they swirl, sniff and spit they are multi-layered, mysterious, the product of peculiar circumstance. Issei, though a bit of a cold fish with his immaculate, monochrome wardrobe and diffident manner, becomes much more likeable when you understand his background. His unloving mother is in thrall to the family patriarch, her unbending, fierce billionaire father (who refuses to give Issei a single sen of his diamond fortune unless he abandons all this wine-tasting with gaijin nonsense). Issei’s dad, the one who loves him, is treated as a second-class citizen. Camille, meanwhile, is attractive but bolshy and a bit of a home-wrecker. I’m not sure I approve of the way she muscles in on handsome childhood friend Thomas Chassangre (Tom Wozniczka), who is on the verge of marrying a nice girl on his idyllic Rhône estate. But as the father’s daughter she is surely the more deserving candidate. Also, she suffers from a pretty major underdog drawback: every time the tiniest amount of alcohol goes down her throat she develops a nose bleed, which makes accurate wine-tasting a near impossibility. If only they could both win! Obviously I’m not going to tell you how the show resolves this conundrum, but what I can say is that the various plot threads – the romances, the family disputes and estrangements, the competition – are eventually tied together in a way that leaves you with a warm glow. Yes, there’s going to be a second season. But unlike so many of these series, you’re not left with an irksome cliffhanger. Directed by Oded Ruskin, and adapted by Quoc Dang Tran from a manga series, Drops of God could have been quite dull: how, after all, do you make a gripping, attractive drama about taste and smell? But Ruskin has found a clever way of making the invisible visible (explosions of colour; journeys through labyrinthine mental libraries), the locations (from Paris and southern France to Trento in Italy, and Tokyo) are sumptuous, and even the minor characters so well developed and rounded that they start to feel like real friends (and enemies). It has been many years since I was an obsessive oenophile (not since I bought a couple of cases of en primeur 1990 Burgundy, in fact). And though I barely touch a drop of wine nowadays, this endlessly beguiling, inventive series has made me seriously reconsider the error of my ways.

Just came across this title: The Righteous Gemstones season 4. Anyone know it and can offer an opinion? Thanks.

Surely, the first mistake they made (apart from not having sufficient insurance) was spending time in India, the filthiest place in the world.

That's an old Soviet joke, the words attributed to Brezhnev.

Taxpayer money being poured down the drain for purposes a million miles away from a university's proper function of producing well-educated graduates - well-educated as in brains free of suffocating ideological nonsense. The deafening silence of academics is shameful as they consent to work within a system that strongly resembles the old Soviet Union.

I wouldn't like to be a fly anywhere near that creep.