Verbal

More than that, KL would have been foolish to get into such specifics ahead of her key boardroom and other appointments. You don't try to recruit people to take decisions on signings, etc., and then preempt all those decisions.

Mea Culpa. I spend so little time on the main board that I don't have a sense of whose information I can trust. I'll move you over into 'reliable ITK' along with Thevman. In any case, if these are KL's appointees and indicate that she's settling in for the long haul, all the better. It would be a far happier outcome than having the club flatpacked into a Chinese state-capitalist conglomerate (I know how excited people get at the prospect of all that cash, but...) So can you say if we're getting our stripes back?

Considering the banal quality of owners of some other Prem and Championship clubs, I'm more happy my club remains in the hands of a family who have paid not just for its return to the top flight, but with the sort of investment we could only have dreamed of. Compare us with the club down the road from me, Fulham - a distant, uncommunicative owner with what seems like an unbroken history for sporting failure, staggering along from one crisis appointment to another, absent of any clear vision of how to get out of a downward spiral that now looks fatal. There by the grace of god... Even without that context, I'm honestly staggered by some of the attention-seeking sneering on here by, especially someone who's plainly a halfwit for thinking that barking out "salad dodger" ad nauseum is somehow clever or funny.

It was for your benefit - I certainly don't want anyone to think there's presently more than one simpleton on here. Tan is by ethnicity and family background Chinese of course - again, for your benefit. Well done. though, on addressing the actual content of the post - that the Chinese takeover is a wishfully-thought mirage. I wonder why people make up this guff? Perhaps with your insight on the general subject you could tell us.

I don't need convincing about the 'soft power' of football. The evidence for the Chinese buying into the Prem (as opposed to football in general) is another matter. In fact, given the colossal size of the Chinese economy and its international reach, what's remarkable is how little Chinese money there is anywhere in the Prem. Swansea have a small deal with a Chinese exchange company, and Tottenham have this weird arrangement where they have two sponsors, one for league and one for cup competitions, and the smaller of those deals is for another HK financial company. Man U, for all its persistent efforts in trying to crack the Chinese market, has just a couple of small side sponsorships, one for a drinks company no one's heard of. And that is it! Saints have the lowest income from shirt sponsorship in the Prem so perhaps they could tap up some Chinese sponsor. But as for a Chinese buyer to stand alongside the Man City potentate, the Tan dynasty, the Tiger man, the repeat loser from Florida and the Chelsea oligarch (add serial flakes to taste), anything can happen but I wouldn't bet on it.

I must have missed all the Chinese nationals and mainland Chinese companies that have already piled in to own Premier League of Championship clubs. You'll find Americans, Arabs, Russians and Brits all well represented, but curiously not a single owner (Tan is Malaysian) from the world's fastest growing and second largest economy. I wonder why. And if you need an explanation as to how AMC or other Chinese 'soft power' investments are different from the crazy, profligate money pit of the Prem, I give up.

Step away from the rank stupidity of conspiracy theorists trousers - it's beneath you. "Too categoric" is in any case a meaningless phrase. The denials are entirely consistent with a company responding to a national newspaper's speculative, unsourced reporting. I'd suggest that the fact that the company is Chinese, which Paul Allen (the last time I checked) is not, has something to do with it. State capitalism in China is going through something of a purge at the moment, at least in PR terms, in response to the Chinese Communist Party's own PR campaign against "corruption" (ie conspicuous displays of wealth by party officials and others). I doubt therefore that a Chinese company made rich on its contacts within the Party is going to want to be seen dabbling in what might be seen as the classic "corrupt" plutocrats' plaything, a Premier League club. So keen away to your heart's content about this 'takeover' - just keep in mind it's a figment of your imagination.

Or possibly characters from popular American sitcoms. Good grief, this is getting silly.

Or: it's all utter tosh.

So what started as the figment of one poster's imagination is now the figment of many posters' imagination. Outside this magic circle, there are no quotes, no evidence, nada - just some unsourced newspaper gossip, possibly pilfered from here. Even the Paul Allen fantasy had more going for it than this.

Exactly right, Lord D has this wrong, but his underlying point is a good one. The worst benefits scroungers in this country, by some distance, are companies that declare huge profits while paying workers below the threshold at which tax credits are paid. Some of these companies, like Tesco, have recently gone one step further in gross exploitation of its workforce by paying them nothing so that virtually the entire cost of employing them falls on the taxpayer. THIS is benefits scrounging with a (particularly nasty) vengeance. http://www.theguardian.com/society/2011/nov/16/young-jobseekers-work-pay-unemployment

The best one closest to the ground is the Crabtree, which is nearer the Hammersmith Bridge than Putney Bridge. It does fill up with home fans (arriving by speedboat) but it's not a 'football' pub - and there's a great take-away pizza place just opposite. Parking is also free in the streets around it if you get there early enough.

I know the producer of the films, and he's quite old-school documentary, with a distinguished track record. Any documentary or series on this subject is bound to cause a reaction, and then cause the participants themselves to wonder whether they've really done themselves any favours. My criticism of the films is that they don't really add some important context. Although not as bad, Birmingham is Britain's Detroit. It has been heavily deindustrialised since the 1970s and has been plagued by appalling local government for decades which has failed, among other things, even to develop a public transport system of any worth (almost all of it is buses). It also has some severe demographic problems. Far fewer women have jobs in Birmingham than Manchester or even such sloughs of despond as Liverpool. About two fifths of the city's population are in the 10% most deprived areas of the UK. And the place is disproportionately young, which puts heavy pressure on public services. So Benefits Street is really a microcosm of the mess that is Birmingham. When people think of Britain's Second City, they think of Manchester, which has managed industrial change far more successfully. Birmingham was left behind years ago, and the neglect, decay and mismanagement is at least partly reflected in what's been filmed for C4. As local government is set to take the brunt of the next round of government spending cuts, Birmingham will just get worse and there will be more Benefits Streets.

Large swathes of my extended family were killed in WW1, by a combination of Germans and the incompetent recklessness of the so-called officer class. In that, my family are far from unusual - you go back into the genealogies of so many British families and you'll find the same sorry tale of lives snuffed out for the territorial gain of three and a half feet. Gove is adopted - if he's ever heard these stories, they presumably have had no weight because he cannot connect them to his own family history. This, I suspect, is why he has such an appalling tin ear for the collective meaning of WW1, which looms like a distant dark ghost for many people with a sense of their own lineage.

Quite easily, as it's by some way not the most dangerous job you could have. The most dangerous job is, and has been for a long time, a merchant seafarer, particularly in trawler fishing. A job in the military is quite dangerous too, although not as dangerous as painting and decorating. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/4183312/Fishing-more-risky-than-joining-Army.html

I don't think you'll find many scientists quibbling with the term "trashed" in the context of the destruction of primary rainforest habitats worldwide. And if you were to travel just a little bit and seen some of it for yourself, as I have in Borneo for example, you might also wonder at your uselessly complacent attitude. As I say, I doubt your scientific credentials, or ability, but it seems I must also doubt your ability even to follow an argument. I was not suggesting replacing forests "may affect global CO2 levels" - didn't say it, didn't imply it, didn't even think it. I was merely responding to your frankly bizarre implication that rainforests were "unhealthy" before the recent rise in global CO2 levels - and that their (that is, rainforests', for your benefit) ability to act as carbon sinks is diminished by their widespread destruction. So do be careful to read - although I expect your irrational explosions are in some way cathartic for you.

Aside from anything else, where is the evidence, or even the idea, that primary rainforests were "unhealthy" before the recent rise in CO2 levels? Primary rainforests are less able to function as carbon sinks for the simple reason that they have been comprehensively trashed in a remarkably short time. There is just less of them. Do you really have a scientific background? It seems to me you'd qualify for a post-school diploma in anger management (although clearly not graduate from it) but little else.

We clearly have different perspectives. Yours is to play a game in which you desperately seek popularity. Mine is to make some evidence-based observations about where, if anywhere, the majority of this inflow of people will go. For the record, I have a far deeper family connection to Saints than you, and Southampton the city is indeed crap. It may have the excuse that Hitler and the local council made it that way, but its crapness is inescapable. One of its saving graces, however, is its immigrant population. This is where it gets really depressing. Such is your narcissistic desire of the adoration from others that you start threads like this one, the one of Diuedonne, and the one on the Muslim shopworker (to name a few) in bad faith. That is, you start them not because you have a particular view, but to reassure yourself that with a “popular” thread, you are by extension popular. You do the same with your numbnuts use of faux-chav – “old bill” “defo”, ad nauseum. Actually I spend almost all of my time living and working in a northern city, over 200 miles way from London. And so finally to return to my question – and for the third time of asking – what EVIDENCE do you have to back up your claim that The main issue here – “here” meaning presumably the impending arrival of millions of Bulgarians and Romanians - is that we're pouring more people and cultures onto a country that doesn't have fit-for-purpose infrastructure as it is. This is where your hoist by your own petard. Despite your specious claim that you weren’t endorsing the Mail in the OP, you go and post a statement like this, which is straight out of the Mail’s playbook for the morally panicked. So again, what is your EVIDENCE for this happening? Whatt EVIDENCE do you have to counter John Salt’s comments?

Your ignorance is not a sufficient answer, as much as (per usual) you seem to think it is. Of course there are immigrant communities outside of London - you'd have to be beyond stupid to think I was suggesting otherwise. But what I said stands. So again, what is the evidence to back up your morally-panicked position? Please come up with counter-evidence to John Salt's comment that the invasion simply isn't happening. And please, for once, concentrate! That is, try and grasp the point of an argument rather than venting uselessly and with stupifying irrelevance about the presence of immigrant communities outside London.

What's your evidence for this? Professor John Salt of the Migration Research Unit at UCL was talking on the BBC at lunchtime about how the only evidence he can find of numbers travelling from Bulgaria for example is that plane and ground transport bookings to the UK are DOWN on this time last year. The airlines are also reporting plenty of seat availability from Romania and Bulgaria, contrary to the Daily Mail. Besides, any that do arrive will, if following earlier patterns, choose to live in London, and will opt out of the dubious pleasures of Liverpool, et al. And actually the present population of London is STILL lower than it was in 1939, before the war emptied the city and before the Nazis reduced large swathes of it to rubble. If you travel the world a bit - go on, try it! - you'll find that London is by no means a crowded city on anywhere near the scale of, say, Tokyo, Delhi or even New York, and I can certainly travel around it much easier than a few northern British cities I could mention. On weekends it's practically deserted. London's infrastructure can be a challenge, but in the larger scheme of things, it's not bad. You do seem awfully prone to moral panic.

Hitler was rather taken with the Palestinian leading cleric of the time, Haj Amin Al-Husseini. After several fawning attempts by Al-Husseini to elicit Hitler's in wiping out Jews in Palestine, a record of their last conversation states: Germany stood for uncompromising war against the Jews. That naturally included active opposition to the Jewish national home in Palestine....Germany would furnish positive and practical aid to the Arabs involved in the same struggle....Germany's objective [is]...solely the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere....In that hour the Mufti would be the most authoritative spokesman for the Arab world. The Mufti thanked Hitler profusely. Husseini was a depressing fanatic - all the more depressing for his assistance in recruiting Muslims to the Waffen-SS. He knew specifically about the Final Solution by 1943 at the latest, and was a flag-waver for it, saying: It is the duty of Muhammadans in general and Arabs in particular to … drive all Jews from Arab and Muhammadan countries….Germany is also struggling against the common foe who oppressed Arabs and Muhammadans in their different countries. It has very clearly recognized the Jews for what they are and resolved to find a definitive solution for the Jewish danger that will eliminate the scourge that Jews represent in the world. In the Ottoman Empire, Jews had established themselves in refuge from the pogroms in a much more virulently anti-Semitic Europe. Relatively speaking, the Empire was something of a haven of tolerance. Husseini's views represented something of a sea-change, and the vicious Jew-hating found among many of today's Islamist fanatics has its roots in Husseini's rhetoric and actions. So yes, there's an ideological antecedence in the kind of Islamo-fascisim advocated by Anelka's friend and Hitler's hatred of Jews.

*Highlighted for entertainment value* (In other words, please excuse me while I laugh my head off.)

Yes, that's true Inspector. I'm like your boss.

Detective Inspector Turkish of the Internet solves another crime with his clever opinions?

It's a good place to do it. Just avoid the front rows (bad when it rains or snows) and the damned pillars. Otherwise, it'll be fun. 'Neutral' is a bit of a misnomer, by the way. It's an unregulated mix of home and away fans. And contrary to what's evidently been said to someone, it's perfectly fine to wear away colours - in fact, you'd look a bit out of place if you didn't, as 'neutrals' are mostly away fans anyway.