Trueblood

Most of those people have got nothing to do with the conflict. Assad is responsible for a significant part of the mess.

Half the population of the country have been forced from their homes, most of those people just want to live in a civilised democracy.

An estimated 465,000 killed, 1 million injured, 12 million displaced. Assad has to take some responsibility for that, he's the country's leader. ISIL are just one, decreasing, part of the problem.

And many of them have chosen to leave, hence the refugee crisis.

Bollocks

It's not news, it's history. The elections in 2000 and 2007 were uncontested. The protests in March 2011 in Damascus had very little, if anything, to do with ISIL. The Free Syrian Army are not ISIL.

nobody has a choice where they were born

Assad succeeded his father, his first two elections were uncontested, nobody gets 99% of the vote fairly. He has committed war crimes against his own people, including the use of sarin gas. By far the largest opposition to the Assad regime are the SDF which is mostly Kurds and who control 27% of the country, ISIL, by contrast, only control 2%. The uprising was started by the Free Syrian Army, formed by defected Syrian army officers, in July 2011. ISIL didn't become a significant player until two years later.

It's pretty difficult to live anything like a normal life in places likes Aleppo and Gaza. I would suggest anywhere else would be preferable right now.

I reported 3 of the comments on IOM Today which were all removed they were that bad

The Bowery

I thought last nights episode was brilliant, getting the republican congressman to bare his arse shouting the N-word was hysterical, getting Dick Cheney to sign his waterboarding kit, brilliant! Satire at its best. The highlight though has to be the proposing of a huge mosque to townsfolk in Arizona, their reaction tells you alot about why Trump is president.

I'll be there, last gig in PSM was brilliant

What gets me is the percentages of final salary that they eligible too. A firefighter can get 67% of their final salary as a pension, that's nuts because there's no way during their employment that they would have contributed enough from their salaries, as over say a 30 year period, for the most part, they would have been earning nowhere near their final salary and their contributions would be in line with what they were earning at the time, not what they were going to earn in the future.

The books are brilliant better than the tv series as you get more depth of character and plot, also the style is different as each chapter is based on one main characters perspective, which wouldn't work for tv. The casting for the tv show is very good using a mostly british cast and in particular Peter Dinklage is fantastic as Tyrion Lannister. The production is amazing for a tv show and set new standards for tv drama, it's arguably a landmark tv show as fantasy is notoriously difficult to translate to the screen, LOTR being the obvious exception.