Messages

Irish News.. "Brendan, we need an article"

Brendan " I'll ring Sambos house and interview whoever answers the phone"

It is farcical at this stage

Sir Keir Starmer wouldn't look out of place as a soap opera lothario character. Hard to take him serious as leader of the Labour Party but did well putting it to Boris yesterday.

I would take him a lot more seriously than his predecessor

Department for Health the second last pick, says it all, the old firm didn't fancy it

So the SF DUP carve up begins immediately, DUP will vote for Alex Maskey as speaker

A Boeing plane crashes shortly after leaving Tehran en route to Ukraine, killing all 170+ onboard.

Is that just an extraordinary awful coincidence?

And Iran wont hand over the black box.

Definitely coincidence 

Hand it over to?

Boeing

I think most countries would not trust Boeing to perform an independent assessment of why their own plane went down. An aviation authority should be doing the investigation, albeit allowing Boeing access to all the information, but not control of it.

For the Ethiopian Airlines crash, Boeing offered to do the investigation with the aid of US aviation authorities. The Ethiopians instead asked the French to lead the investigation.

Of course, the Iranians carrying out the investigation by themselves would not be satisfactory.

From reading accounts, the engine caught fire suddenly and the pilots did not radio/signal any emergencies. There could be a myriad of different reasons for the crash. My money would be on a rocket, accidentally fired by the Iranians. It would be some coincidence that a mechanical accident happened on this night of all nights (especially with no emergency broadcasts) and it doesn't make any sense that anyone would have taken this "target" out on purpose.

Allegedly the missile batteries that were firing on the US bases are near Tehran Airport.

Looking like that plane was in the flight path of a missile...

Looks like we will have to wait for the investigation to determine the cause of the crash.

Justin Bronk debunks the misslie theory. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1215226280943157249.html
no evidence to support the missile theory -  no missile plume and such a missile to do that damage would have to be quite a size.

Quite a debunking 

Seems awful convenient to me that Iran has shot down a passenger plane just days after becoming the focus of the world once more lads....

FFS!!

The Iranians were on high alert in case the yanks were going to retaliate for the bombing of the airbase in Iraq which had just happened. Someone fooked up and fired at the airplane. It was an accident. The Iranians ballsed up. They're not the first country to accidentally take out a passenger plane and even the yanks aren't going hard on them for the mistake as they've had countless 'friendly fire' incidents.

The Ukranians are rightly annoyed, losing 11 people and a plane, and presumably the Iranians will give them a bundle of cash in compo. The rest of the passengers were pretty much all Iranian born (although half of them had dual nationality), so I don't think the rest of the world will get too hung up about it, like the 50+ who got stampeded to death

I'm not crying conspiracy, but I am saying it's a bit iffy that the West has quickly rushed to say the Iranians are 100% definitely to blame for this. Offered no evidence and Iran has today actually asked them to provide evidence which is interesting.

These missiles don't just fire by malfunction, in a world of cyber attacks and the likes these things surely are harder to fire than simply hitting the wrong button on the xbox remote. On balance, yes your reasoning is more likely than my own but what better way to discredit the Iranians (moreso) to the world, it'll be interesting to see what the Americans present as evidence.

Iran 100% to blame, their words

I would say an Irish Language commissioner will have as much clout as I do, will be interesting to see how things go when they get back in, can they effectively govern. They have plenty to be getting on with

They're not back in yet. Stephen Nolan has cut short his holiday to stoke things up enough and gives the fringes enough oxygen to help try and kill the deal.

Dondaldson making life difficult for SF. How can they sell this as anything other than bowing the knee to the DUP.

Really ? Most commentators I have seen I've said SF have got the majority of what they wanted

I would say an Irish Language commissioner will have as much clout as I do, will be interesting to see how things go when they get back in, can they effectively govern. They have plenty to be getting on with

Split up with the wife I think

RIP. Personally I never liked her. I hated the way she kept interrupting people she was interviewing

Good post 

7 points off 4th place now

DVD time

SF and DUP can work quite well together when they are dishing out money to their pet projects and cronies at local government and council level, let's not fool ourselves

Interestingly the newest education powerhouse, Estonia, do not stream children

https://www.bbc.com/news/education-50590581

Nonsense and if Labour continue to move forward believing Brexit was the sole reason for their catastrophic defeat they will repeat their mistakes and rot in opposition. A JC anointed successor will be electoral poision from the get go as well.

Can you address the Angela Merkel point then.

She is a centre-right politician. Corbyn advocates lower taxes and lower rates of public ownership than a recognised centre right politician. Show me how that is hard left?

Lower taxes? Had he got in I'd have been taxed more!

Corbyn advocates lower taxes than Angela Merkel is what he said.

That seems to be the problem with Labour, lots of stuff didn't seem to add up

List them

The shadow chancellor listed them earlier on tv.

John McDonnell himself told Labour figures he didn't want to spend another day defending figures on public spending from the manifesto

"I don't want to spend another day fielding legitimate (alongside the usual illegitimate) questions about numbers I am not comfortable with and wouldn't have put out."

[Racism won seats for the Tories in working class areas. It's a culture war.]

Okay, is it just me or is nobody talking about the fact that the Tories did not win the popular vote? They got 43.6% of the vote. In a PR voting system the pro-Remain vote would have been even stronger and this would have been a hung parliament.

If your Granny had balls she'd be your grandad!

Labour lost and instead of changing the rules they need to figure out how they haven't won an election agains the worst incumbent Govt in history.

Exactly. I like Corbyn but if you can not oust what is probably the most unscrupulous of prime ministers in the history of prime ministers, and that is saying something, then you have no chance. Yes media smear etc etc but a leader needs conviction in his beliefs and he did not display this in his campaign.

Labour went all left wing

They needed to move to a centrist position with a very simple message.
People don't read manifestos
They will only remember slogans and dirt on the opponents

Labour should have been attacking the clearly racist Tories and what they have done with their 9 years in power
How many billions already wasted on brexit?

They didn't understand what was going on in the working class seats they lost in the North of England. The election was basically a transfer of 60 Labour seats to the Tories and some Tory losses.

Racism won seats for the Tories in working class areas. It's a culture war.

Not really true and if you have been paying attention about polling and evidence from Labour canvassers and journalists who were on the ground you probably know that but it's the type of attitude of ignoring the reasons for being obliterated will lead to Labour remaining out of power for the foreseeable