Hamas took responsibility for launching the first major barrage of rockets targeting Tel Aviv and central Israel since January.

How can this happen?
Where are they coming from?
Maybe all of those aid truck are carrying something other the halal burgers?

“I have the feeling the whole thing was a setup”.

Funny you should say that Kevin.

Ms Palmer has 20 years of experience in broadcasting including working as a weather forecaster for the BBC

That would be Rosie’s mum, and there goes any question about how this went from nothing to existential crisis in no time. Why a scoop like that could even pay for a family holiday in Turkey…

“When this was explained to the passenger, he did exhibit aggressive behaviour towards our crew members, and tried to gain access to the cockpit”
I don’t think hubby was quite as polite as mumma makes out.

Arky, you are a kiwi, eat your heart out.

A couple of takeaways for me from Toibin’s book.
I get the impression that accepting EU apron strings in the 70s and 80s brought great economic benefits to Ireland. One old man Toibin spoke to said he received £9300 (pre euro) for home improvements and others marvelled at the opportunity for proper heating, kitchens with electric stoves and washing machines that was paid for by government grants.
As late as the 1940s poor Catholic children as young as twelve were taken off to hiring fairs, to work for six months for Protestant farmers to paid £5 or £6 at the end, one women in her sixties said she’d be sent at age 12, no abuse but they made her eat off a bag on the table, and she worked long and hard, starting with the hand milking at 6 am, another girl had been sent home pregnant with twins, though another old timer claimed some of the hirees had ended up inheriting farms.
Most people wouldn’t talk to Toibin about it, they were ashamed at being reduced to hiring out.
Protestants wouldn’t sell their farms to Catholics, nor the other way round.
There was talk of ‘plantations’ and something else that still rankled with Catholics. Certain people on the right side in 1641 got extraordinary grants of land and natives were driven off.
I don’t know because he didn’t go into detail but that might have been the genesis of the Irish Traveller.
One family I mentioned got twenty seven thousand acres, another the Leslie’s, eighty thousand, and the then incumbent Leslie, interviewed in the book, was scathing of the bungalows popping up in the Irish countryside, gombeen houses with picture windows he called them, and the ones that mimicked Tara were dubbed high gombeen. I suppose he though two roomed thatched cottages should still be good enough
One wealthy family, the Maddens, avoided IRA retribution in the 70s and 80s because it was known they bought their land, in 1732!
The troubles in the 70s were as bad as you could imagine, no membership of Ira, or ruc etc was necessary, you could be murdered for simply being the wrong religion and the IRA blew up anything linked to the RUC or the army, police stations shops pubs, hotels.
There was enormous historical prejudice against Irish Catholics who were mostly poor, uneducated and well, Catholic, and it was clear they were regarding by many ‘British’ as invincibly inferior, a prejudice that no doubt carried through to the colony of Australia.

“We have spent the last 12 years trying to teach people about the allergy and to use epi-pens. It’s a volatile allergen and even if Rosie didn’t come into direct contact with a peanut, if somebody was eating one on board she could die.”

Whatever the actual situation here, it is certainly true that allergic conditions have exploded as the vax schedule has exploded. There is a plausible causal mechanism for this:

After the switch away from ‘live vaccines’ to dead ones, or subunits, it was necessary to fool the body into thinking the dead material injected was actually a real infection risk (otherwise it wont raise an immunological response to it). This was done by adding ‘adjuvants’ like aluminium. The problem was that the body doesnt know what threat it is being fooled into responding to -so it may equally raise an immunological response to some other allergen in the environment, eg peanut protein, grass pollen etc etc etc.

Tired tyres.

Electric car drivers face astronomical costs to replace tyres (26 May)

Electric car buyers should be aware of the “astronomical” costs required to regularly replace short-lived tyres, owners have warned.

Car lover Jim Bassett managed just 7,500 miles in his brand new Volkswagen ID.3 before being quoted more than £300 to replace the rear rubber.

The 80-year-old stumped up the cash after being told it was common practice for tyres on his rear-wheel model to degrade rapidly due to the weight of the vehicle .

Due to its heavy battery, the £35,000 hatchback weighs around 1,800kg – the same as a Jeep Wrangler 4×4.

Fellow ID.3 owners have taken to online forums to also complain of short tyre life, blaming degradation on the hefty weight and instant torque of the car.

The torque is one of the nice things about EVs, they accelerate like a cat with its tail on fire. But the wear and tear on tyres, and on roads, is bigly. So far EV owners have been avoiding paying for the cost of road maintenance. Skint governments won’t let this situation go on much longer.