LondonLax

tahts fair enough trent but why did he book yaya toure for doing it once and ballack was doing ite very time and didnt get booked? why wasn't he sent off?

like i said was very negative i think an away goal would have been crucial could cost them now. barce defesnively were poor yesterday they should have taken advantage

Barca will be struggling for centre backs in the return leg so Chelsea might have some opportunities to score goals at home.

Chelsea Man Utd final again then.

I fancy Arsenal actually. They are in much better form than Man U right now.

I've quite enjoyed it. It's been a tactical tussle. Lacking a bit of magic but certainly better than NUFC vs Portsmouth last night!

I agree, good games don't have to be the ones with the most goals. A really good battle IMO.

i disagree about if they cant score they dont deserve it, as a judge in a fight would you give it to the aggressor or the one with the great defence?

I'd give it to the one who delivered the knock out blow.

How can you criticise Chelsea for playing negatively at the Nou Camp?

do you think barca will play any different next week?

Barcalona wont have to try and contain Eto, Messi, Henry and Iniesta next week.

It's called playing to your strenghts.

which is why i dont want chelsea or anyone else other than barca to win the CL this year!

Well if Barca are good enough they should win over two legs.

How can you criticise Chelsea for playing negatively at the Nou Camp?

do you think barca will play any different next week?

Barcalona wont have to try and contain Eto, Messi, Henry and Iniesta next week.

It's called playing to your strenghts.

C'mon Chelsea! Put a stop to the Barca hype!

Continuing in the vein of travelling the world to be humiliated by foreign leaders, Gordon gets another lecture on debt, this time from Poland.

Brown left red-faced by debt lecture from Polish Prime Minister

Gordon Brown's attempt to put the economic misery of Britain behind him on a whistle-stop world tour were stymied today when Poland's Prime Minister embarrassed him with a lecture on the perils of excessive public borrowing and culture of debt.

Speaking after a breakfast meeting between the two leaders in Warsaw, Donald Tusk, the Polish premier said that while he did not want to comment on any other economy, the Poles had fared so well because they behaved with "full responsibility in terms of their deficit".

While Britain is struggling to cope with the effect of three quarters of economic contraction, Poland is basking in 12 years of consecutive, uninterrupted growth.

With Mr Brown standing next to him, Mr Tusk said that one of the main reasons Poland has so far managed to avoid the ravages of the credit crisis was because Warsaw had "efficient supervision to banks and sticking to the rules.... not exaggerating with living on credit. These are the most certain ways of avoiding [the consequences] of financial crisis."

First Chile and now the mighty Poland. It's getting quite embarassing!

When you are starting from the position Poland’s economy was in 12 years ago achieving continuous economic growth is not so tough.

I want Arsenal to win it.

I would feel a lot better about missing out on 4th if they won it and got the spot anyway.

It's our best season for many years. We broke the club record for away wins in a row. If this is a "wasted season" we have been wasting seasons for the last dozon years.

Yes for some reason it doesn't round up the ones over a half.

Buy gold!

Economic crashes and wars are businesses opportunities for these people !

They are opportunities for everyone if you are savvy enough.

Making opportunistic gain from other people's suffering and misery is fundamentally wrong.

Buy stocks when they are down, sell them during a boom.

How long before we are allowed to buy stocks again during this crisis in your world? (and perhaps more importantly, how will they recover again if no one wants to buy out of some sort of misguided 'respect' for the failed finacial industry)

Economic crashes and wars are businesses opportunities for these people !

They are opportunities for everyone if you are savvy enough.

I blame the Rothschild's

Indeed.

Why do conspiracy theories always end up blaming the Jews. I never understood it.

I wonder what he's saying at the moment?

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Hey, when your right you can afford to sell your advice....

No.

Wait...yes!

Wait...What was the question?

Everton would be **** if they sold Lescott and Arteta.

I don't think it will happen.

I agree with snowychap.

The whole idea of nations is totally abitary and abstract from a human rights perspective. Why are lines drawn on maps and people within one set of lines are able to be sent aid or their leaders held acountable if they commit atocities and human rights abuses but other groups of people on the wrong side of those lines are afforded no such securities.

We are all human beings. We all deserve human rights. The idea that we should allow one group of women (to take a common example) in one section of the world to be abused because it's not our country is something I am not going to support.

You can't force a population to choose liberalism but you can give them the oppostunity to do so.

Why? Liberalism is a very western concept. invading a country to bring them what you or I would regard as democracy "because we know best" is a bit like invading a country to bring them Christianity because its "the one true faith" and done for largely the same condescending "civilising" reasons.

I think you are confusing the will of the people with the will of their rulers.

The option to chose a brutal dictatorship is always is better than no choice at all.

Invading a country to "bring them christianity" is not about giving the people a free will to chose. It is about replacing one set of rules with another, so your example is flawed.

Overthrowing a dictatorship who are killing its people and then giving the people the choice to decide if they want to go back to that way or choose another is a different thing again and I can't see how you could argue with the principle.

The population might like being oppressed, fine you would be right and the option is there for them to go back to that. But what if they don't? The uprisings in Burma suggest they don't. The riots in Zimbabwe suggest they don't. Even the protests of the women in the artical above suggest they don't, in that example there are now female MP's who get a say and can amend the bill to help protect their elected representatives.

Human rights should be just that. Rights for all humans, not just the ones lucky enough to have been born in places with tolerant rulers. It is a cop out to say "Those people are beyond our help even if they want it because thats just the way things are".

Joking aside, I actually think Tony Blair did believe what he was saying. I think his intelligence was poor but he actually believed it in good faith that Saddam was a threat and if the war would remove a brutal dictator as well then all the better.

You really do have a low opinion of Tony Blair's intelligence if you think that.

Well I was obviously refering to his millitary intellegence. I think he believed what he was being told. Perhaps we will one day find out the details of who knew what and when but I doubt it to be honest.

so lies, deceipt and incompetence justify the end result?

For me it did.

Lies, deceit and incompetence are a very small price to pay compared to the hope the Kurdish and Shi'ite people of Iraq now have of a proper life where they had no hope before.

They now have the same rights we do to elect a government who can lie to them and act incompetantly on their behalf. We do take it for granted how good we have it compaired to the majority of the people on this planet.

Joking aside, I actually think Tony Blair did believe what he was saying. I think his intelligence was poor but he actually believed it in good faith that Saddam was a threat and if the war would remove a brutal dictator as well then all the better.

History has shown the first side was incorrect but the secondary side effect still applied.

In conclusion, it didn't help us because Saddam turnd out to not be a threat to us but it still helped the people of that country so the net result is still a positive one for me.

Are people really still under the impression this war was about Saddam Hussain? How bizarre.

It might not be what the war was about but that doesn't change the fact that he and his party was removed as a result of this war.

For that reason it was worth it.

Believing the Afghans will become democrats is like believing lions will become vegetarians.

And, at the end of the day, why should we expect them to? Or the Iraqis? Or any of the "non democratic nations"?

Maybe there is more to politics than liberalism. Sure, it works for us more or less, but we have a long liberal tradition, going back 200 years or more. Even so, for most of those 200 years we excluded one group or another from our "democracy". Maybe expecting cultures where they dont have that liberal tradition to suddenly just accept that philosophy overnight and understand how to implement it effectively is being just a tad condescending?

Who gave us the right to decide what's right and wrong?

You can't force a population to choose liberalism but you can give them the oppostunity to do so.

Currently many people do not have the choice, their government system is physically forced on them.

If we leave Iraq, it settles down and they vote back in a dictatorial form of government then fair enough.

I think the next generation of Iraqis will grow up in a country where there is equal representation in parliament of people standing up for their own rights instead of living under a dictatorship representing a minority group but staying in power through force. When Saddam died he was meant to have his son take over who was even more brutal than he was by all accounts.

For that reason I think the war was worth it.

I think we should look at taking a more active part in Zimbabwe and Burma against their brutal governments. The idea that the people dieing there are not British so they are not our problem doesn't wash with me.