dsr-burnley

If VAR hadn't been there, it would have been a valid goal because the players were level. One of VAR's specific purposes is to disallow goals like that, and Coventry's in this year's semi-final, goals which would have been perfectly valid under the old (post 1990) rules and which are still valid at Championship level. The solution is easy. Stop drawing lines across the pitch. Accept that "level" is still a concept, and VAR reviews of offside last 5 seconds of looking at a still photo. If the VAR man can't see in 5 seconds that the linesman is wrong, then the linesman is right by definition. And they can stop faffing about with toes and heads and parts of the arm, too. In an Olympic Games final they don't assess whose fingernail or eyebrow crossed the line first, they just go off the torso. Linesmen where there is no VAR don't assess arms and toes and heads, they go off the torso. Let VAR apply the same rules.

The point of a testimonial is that it isn't run by the club. The club can give permission for it to be held and can provide basic facilities (eg. a football stadium!) but the running of the testimonial has to be done by a friend or friends of the player. That way it can be treated as donations, not salary, and is tax free. Assuming those conditions are met, of course, the player can take the testimonial cash tax free and then give an identical amount to charity and claim gift aid. Thus making the value to the charity so much more than the actual donations (and also saving him tax).

If it happens, the rules should be simple enough: 1. Not a 39th game, just a normal 38 games. 2. All 20 teams to play a foreign game. 3. 14+ teams would have had to vote for it; so the teams that lose a home game will be among those 14. That way the teams that lose a home game are the ones that wanted to. Teams that vote against, won't be forced to lose a home game. 4. Income to be shared equally around the league. Of course, none of those conditions would be put in place, because those conditions are designed to promote fairness, and fairness isn't what the PL is about.

Semi-related tale I was told in America. Ford had a problem with their transmission and a bright lad who worked for them did some tinkering, in his own time and in his own garage, and found a solution. He offered it to Ford for $10,000. They declined, said that his work belonged to Ford because he was a Ford employee, and put it into the cars but paid him nothing but his wage. He sued, and won,and Ford had to pay him many millions a year for donkeys' years. Serve them right. Two crucial points that differ from yours. One, it was in his own time; two, it was USA laws.

Last time I looked, I would have needed to live to 90 before an annuity would pay the full value of my pension pot. It's only past 90 that the decision would start to be profitable. It was 4.5% index linked rate. Add to that that if you choose drawdown then what's left in the pot goes to your nominated beneficiary but if you take an annuity the capital is probably gone even if you die the day after, it becomes an even easier decision.

If Clattenburg believes that refs are influenced, deliberately or otherwise, to favour their "own" team when refereeing rivals, then it can only be because he did so himself. Perhaps he ought to be investigated? Is there not an obvious problem with the idea that refs who support teams at the bottom can't referee matches involving teams at the bottom? Half the matches in the league involve teams at the bottom. You would be restricting the available ref pool far too much. (Especially if you take into account that any ref who supports Spurs, say, couldn't referee a match involving any team in the top 10.) Perhaps the answer is to appoint only those refs who have no interest in football and who have never attended a match?

The co-commentator summed it up pretty well. The first was a penalty because the defender made contact with the forward. (Though making contact with the forward isn't an offence under the laws.) The second was a penalty because he moved his arms towards the ball after it was kicked. (Human reflexes aren't able to do this. Not fast enough.) The third was a penalty because the defender didn't get the ball. (Again, failing to get the ball is not an offence under the laws.) And strangely enough, a little while later Young went down after a mild puch in the back, and Neville (if it was him) said that Young shouldn't have had a free kick because he exaggerated the contact? What happened to "there was contact so it was a foul"? I don't know if his mindset was that the ref must always be wrong or that Young deserves nothing, but as punditry, it was abysmal.

If this game had been played five years ago, the goal would have been given and it would have been correctly given because the players were level. Linesmen were specifically told that they weren't looking for toes and kneecaps. We would have gone away thinking what a wonderful game and a great climax. But then someone came along with a plan to disallow that goal. They would introduce delays of perhaps two minutes or perhaps as long as 5, they would make it impossible for the linesman to give the decision so play had to go on regardless, they would make it impossible for the crowd to know whether you had scored or not so as to kill the excitement, but they would find a way to disallow that sort of goal - what would the reaction be? Would it be "yes, all you have said would be a wonderful thing for football", or would it be "what are you on?"? All they needed to do for VAR and offside is to show the VAR man a photo. If from that photo he can't tell that the linesman was wrong, then the linesman was right. It could be done in 10 seconds. 15 at a pinch.

Well, my point really (which I may nbot have expressed clearly) was that people who can afford fast food are not buying unhealthy because they can't afford healthy. I don't really want to get into discussion about how much less people have today compared with our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents etc.

Food poverty isn't caused by lack of money. Roast Chicken, roast potatoes, boiled potatoes, Yorkshire pudding, cabbage, carrots, for Friday tea. Chicken sandwiches on Saturday. Broth on Sunday. It didn't come to £10 for the lot, 9 meals, and there is still broth left over. People aren't buying fast food because they can't afford a tenner for roast chicken. If people don't have the time, or more likely don't have the inclination or the knowledge, to make "proper" meals, that's a different story. Certainly the healthy unemployed have little excuse, though one useful public service would be to introduce free cookery classes for the helpless and hopeless. (Basic cookery, not the complicated celebrity chef stuff.) On an even more controversial note, perhaps, not everyone wants to eat healthily. Nursing homes are full of thin people who ate healthily, and now can't remember their children. Some people are more than happy to eat, drink and be merry, and take their chances.

They can build a 4 bedroom house and sell it at a profit for £250k (in our area), and that includes land purchase and road building. A 2-story extension shouldn't be anywhere near.

If you don't have any savings at present, then don't bother with stocks and shares. Let your pension do that. (I presume you have a pension? If not, that might be a good place for it.) If it's cash that you know you will need before retirement age, then an ISA is a good place. The best rates are on fixed rate accounts for perhaps a year or 18 months, and you can sometimes get very good rates on regular savings accounts with building societies or banks. (I prefer branch banking to online banking. I want someone to talk to when something goes wrong.)

It is the main metric, but it's of very dubious value. After all, a vaccine can do literally nothing to prevent people contracting an airborne disease. It isn't designed to. So measuring its effectiveness by how many times it stops someone contracting the disease, is (as I said) of limited value. A person who dies and a person who coughs a little will both count as having covid, and it may be (I don't say it is, but it may be) that a person who would have died has instead had two days off work - but it makes no difference to the score. The covid virus, as I understand it, takes about 5 days to manifest symptoms, and it takes about 5 days before a vaccinated person's antibodies get to work, but about a fortnight before an unvaccinated person's antibodies get to work. So after 5 or 6 days, when the symptoms start to appear, there will be little or no difference in the results of the vaccinated or unvaccinated person, hence the small 10% difference in symptomatic numbers. But what about a week later? The vaccinated person's antibodies are in full swing, the unvaccinated person's are just starting up. That's where, in theory at least, the vaccinated person has the advantage; not in the early stages. If there are statistics that show just a 10% benefit of less serious illness or 10% reduction in likelihood of death, then that would be a stat worth listening to. Does that stat exist?

So 10% reduction in people with observed symptoms, if I read it right. Isn't that a bit irrelevant? What's more important is how serious the symptoms are. What is the vaccine's efficiency at preventing death in the elderly? That's it's main purpose.

10% of what? Is it that vaccinated people who get flu average 90% of the symptoms of unvaccinated people who get flu? Or that 10% fewer vaccinated people get flu than unvaccinated people?

I think there is a suggestion that both flu and covid mutated after the vaccine was prepared, so the strain people are catching is not the strain the vaccine is prepared against. It doesn't make the vaccin useless, just less effective. I think me and my mother both had covid (we had it at the same time, so it would surely have been the same thing). I was no tmuch affected, but my mother had a fortnight in hospital with pneumonia. (She got over it.)

It's something to consider, but by no means definitive. A house near me was on the market for over 6 months - 4 bedrooms, big playroom/gym in the basement, small garden and drive, relatively new - they only wanted £140k for it but (presumably because it's town centre) it didn't sell for 6 months. Similar houses on the edge of town go for £200k-£250k. The eventual purchaser can't believe his luck.

Your arithmetic is a bit out. 1% of 60m+ people is 600,000+, not 320,000. Otherwise fine. I believe "household wealth" includes all assets, not just household assets, so the very rich will seriously distort the figures. Whether the relatively low figure for the UK is because we're a more equal society, or whether it's because more of the rich have left, I wouldn't know. The article has a bit of a strange sentence at the start, saying the majority of UK households have lower than the mean income. This is true of every country in the world, and of every statisitcal distribution that starts high at zero and tails off gradually.. It's as useful as saying that the majority of people in the country have more than the mean number of feet. Why do the spoil articles like this with facile statements that make them look a bit dim?

I can perfectly well comprehend the various significances of the headline, and one of those significances is that people will use it to decry and deny global warming. I'm just saying it's poor tactics. I wasn't commenting at all about the issue, just the tactics. As for the glacier thing, I don't quite see the point. Are you saying that glaciers don't retreat in summer and advance in winter? Don't assume I know everything, and if I'm wrong you could educate rather than put down.

I'm not saying it isn't amusing. But the point of 1913 is that the record temperature for Death Valley (where that photo was taken) is 57 degrees, in 1913. And if you tell people who are inclined to disbelieve in global warning that the high temperatures now are lower than they were 100 years ago, it will be something that they will hang their hat on for years. Similar thing in the Chicago Science Museum, where they really ought to know better. They have a climate change film that starts out with a presumed expert saying that he went to look at a glacier in Spring and he went again 6 months later and was amazed by how much it had retreated and it convinced him how serious climate change was When you start a film with a sentence saying, in effect, that summer is warmer than winter, you can't expect people to take you seriously for the rest of the film.

This sort of sensationalism damages the cause. If you try and persuade people of the dangers of global warming by posting evidence that Death Valley is nearly as hot as in 1913, they won't think anything of it, and it will give them reason to disregard any more sensible climate based statistics.

If that's what it was doing 12 billion years ago, what's it doing now?

It's not a flight of fancy. You have said that you support a mob surrounding an MP's home and stopping his family from getting home. I just want to know if that extends to all families in the UK, or just to MPs who you disagree with.

So to be explicit, if a mob wants to surround your or anyone else's house and prevent your or anyone else's children from coming home from school, there's no problem?

Is there a line to be drawn beyond which intimidation of children is to be seen as immoral? If, for example, your own children (if you have any) were to be prevented from coming home because of a threatening mob outside the house who disagreed with some aspect of your politics, would that be fair game? Or is only MP's children who deserve this treatment?