Park Life

Tom Hicks and George Gillett, Liverpool's unpopular co-owners, are expected to officially put the club up for sale this week but are unlikely to appease the manager, Rafael Benítez, or supporters opposed to their reign with an imminent departure from Anfield. The Americans have received an option to extend their refinancing deal this summer from the Royal Bank of Scotland, their lenders, in response to the struggle to bring new investment into the club. The pair have hired the mergers and acquisitions arm of Barclays Bank to help find a buyer and are expected to announce the appointment of Martin Broughton, the chairman of British Airways, as independent chairman early this week. Broughton's task will be to oversee the search for investment and secure the Americans' latest refinancing package at Liverpool in the meantime. Previously, and in a sign of their fractured business relationship, Hicks and Gillett appointed two separate banks, Rothschild and Merrill Lynch, to find an investor but have failed to receive an offer that meets their asking price of around £500m. The only official offer to emerge was The Rhône Group's proposal of £110m for a 40% stake in Liverpool, although its deadline for a response passed last Monday." This is going to get Messi.

American jihadi suspects 'set up' by police, say lawyers Lawyers for five Muslim men facing trial in Pakistan on terrorism charges claim that they can show that evidence was fabricated Police fabricated evidence to incriminate five Americans facing trial in Pakistan on terror charges, lawyers representing the men will argue in court this week. The men, all Muslims, were arrested in December in the central town of Sargodha, and have been charged with planning terrorist acts in Pakistan, Afghanistan and the US. While the men admit wanting to travel to Afghanistan, they deny involvement in any jihadist activities and say they were planning to carry out "community work" in the country. Defence lawyers will argue the men could not have made email contact with a Pakistani extremist linked to al-Qaida in the way the police claim. According to the police's own summary of the investigation submitted to the court, investigators discovered the email account which was allegedly used to make contact several days after police had briefed journalists on the messages. Similarly, the police report describes the discovery of maps of alleged target sites and other incriminating evidence more than two weeks after they had already told media about their existence. The defence will also call into question police claims about the date of the men's arrest, which is several days after their widely reported detention on 9 December last year. Umer Farooq, 24, Waqar Hussain Khan, 22, Ramy Zamzam, 22, Ahmed Minni, 20, and Aman Hassan Yemer, 18, were charged under anti-terrorism laws. Police say the group's intended target was Chashma Barrage, a complex located near nuclear power facilities in Punjab that includes a water reservoir and other structures. The men, who pleaded not guilty, face life sentences if convicted on the most serious of the charges. They all grew up in the suburbs of Washington DC, where they were a tight-knit, religious group of friends. The Farooqs are originally from Sargodha and the men claim they had travelled to the Pakistani town to attend Umer's arranged marriage. According to the police, the men were taken into custody on 9 December, but were allowed to go home each evening, and were only formally arrested five days later on 14 December. But there are no reported sightings of the men after 9 December. Farooq's father Khalid, who was held for nearly three weeks before he was released, said that all of them were in continuous police custody after 8 December. "I was with the boys, in the same cell," he said. "There's no question of them being allowed out." His son, Umer Farooq, 24, is on trial with Waqar Hussain Khan, 22, Ramy Zamzam, 22, Ahmed Minni, 20, and Aman Hassan Yemer, aged just 18. All of them grew up in the suburbs of Washington DC, where they were a tight-knit, religious, group of friends. The Farooqs are originally from Sargodha and the men claim they had travelled to the Pakistani town to attend Umer's arranged marriage to a local woman. In a letter to Zamzam's parents seen by the Guardian, the men, who allege they were beaten by police and deprived of sleep and food in custody, face life in prison if convicted on the most serious of the charges.Following the arrest of the men, on 10 and 11 December police gave on-the-record briefings to local and international media about a Yahoo email account used to communicate with a Pakistani extremist called Saifullah. They also said at the time that maps and jihadi literature were found with the men. But according to the police report lodged with the anti-terrorism court in Sargodha, where the men are being tried, it was only on 17 December that the suspects disclosed "their secret email address along with password" – allowing the investigators to find the communication with Saifullah.

Brave new world/ 1984.

There is the list this is it: Said no to the IMF when offerred cheap loans. Declined Euro Zone till 2015 Only country in Europe not to buy H1N1 vaccine. In talks with Usa to put missile shield in place. Was getting ready to devalue currency to increase trade. = Death to leadership. We have never been at war with Eurasia, we have always been at war with Eastasia.

you can't expect any manager to pull too many rabbits out of the hat if you don't supply him with the funds. FWIW, I think Guthrie is OK, not great, but shopping around the bargain basement when you are forced to do it........ Typical KK signing. Holds his head up, has a bit of ability on the ball and can see a pass. If only we had kept Bassong, Beye, Milner, Given, Zoggy to go with it......... In fairness I don't think Bassong has exactly been pulling up trees at Spurs. A full season has shown there is very little to choose between Given and Harper. Beye is tumbling down the wrong side of the hill. N'Zogbia wasn't exactly Mr Consistent and if you polled all 52k there wouldn't be too many felt 12m for Milner was not a deal worth doing. I didn't personally have a problem with getting 12m quid for Milner providing it was the managers decision and he was allowed to replace him with someone who also in his opinion was a better player. Having said that, Milner is playing better for Villa than he did with us, especially when he plays more centrally. Milner schmilner.

I'm thinking Routledge will do alright in the PL.

He's got a pinhole camera.

Never imagined Alex like that...Always thought he's be more dowdy..

The entire Polish leadership wiped out after telling the IMF to fuck off.....Hmmmm..

Villa lol.

The pud camera strikes again. Looks a bit like him.

You think? I think Bojan and Pedro will be somewhere like Getafe in 6 years time. Classic Jordi Cruyff's I think. Bojan needs to get a bit stronger aka the Maradonna route...

Kyle Naughton?

Malcolm McLaren: Blood, spit and tears as the punk provocateur dies Malcolm McLaren stirred up chaos all his life – and even in death, punk's most inspired interloper will cause controversy Malcolm McLaren, who has died of cancer aged 64 Photograph: Vincent Kessler/Reuters You can, if you so desired, make a strong argument for the importance and originality of the largely forgotten albums Malcolm McLaren released under his own name in the 80s. The first, Duck Rock, was a particularly innovative blending of hip hop and world music, while the video for the hit single Buffalo Gals offered most Britons their first glimpse of breakdancing. But it's as The Sex Pistols' manager that he will be remembered, which means the question of how successful he was in the role is likely to be debated for years to come. McLaren certainly had an acute grasp of what was wrong with British rock music before The Sex Pistols' arrival. He was a nonpareil orchestrator of outrage during their early career, but proved incapable of dealing with its consequences. McLaren knew exactly what buttons to press, but seemed to have no idea what to do once he'd pressed them: fatally so in the case of Sid Vicious, who was only too willing to play the monster role that McLaren wrote for him right up to a suitably grim conclusion. You could argue that Vicious' death from a heroin overdose while on bail for the murder of his girlfriend Nancy Spungen was the greatest disaster of McLaren's career, but it was a close-run thing. Even before that, he had seemed at best unable to protect the band's members from the unprecedented public antipathy he had stirred up, at worst he seemed actively disinterested in doing so. Perhaps he had his mind on higher concepts than the day-to-day reality of life in a band so reviled that the tabloids stopped just short of actively advocating violence against them: PUNISH THE PUNKS demanded the Sunday Mirror in 1977. Perhaps the whole situation had simply run out of his control. Either way, it wasn't much fun being a Sex Pistol in the summer of the Jubilee they so brilliantly mocked on God Save The Queen: Johnny Rotten was attacked by a knife-wielding mob outside a Stoke Newington pub; later the same day, drummer Paul Cook was beaten with a metal bar in west London; three days later, Rotten was attacked again. It wasn't until after the band split up that McLaren attempted to reassert his authority over the Sex Pistols: rewriting their story in the film The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle as a masterplan he had controlled all along, the band merely his stooges. It wasn't a terribly convincing argument, nor was it a terribly good film. Understandably outraged, Johnny Rotten has spent the subsequent years airbrushing McLaren from the Sex Pistols story, pointing out that the music had nothing to do with him, reinventing the band as autodidacts who would have been even more successful without his interference. But that seems reductive too: without McLaren's ideas, his art-school grounding in Situationism, without the clothes he and Vivienne Westwood designed for them, the Sex Pistols wouldn't have been the same band, nor would they have had the same impact. Neither party would ever admit it, but they needed each other. Still, if nothing else, the ongoing argument meant Malcolm McLaren remained a controversial figure up to his death, and will remain a controversial figure beyond it – which is presumably just what he wanted.

When you get older you realise nothing will ever beat those days.

Ha ha...2 week TV BAN FOR GRUNDY!!1

Tit. I'm the man everyone wished they could build an alliance with. Most just had to settle for basking in the reflected glow of my hilarity. Don't know if it's a case of the rose tinted, but you used to be much funnier back in the day.

Well put Alex.

Ideologically me and Cidmcpcarpark are closer than he realises or probs would admit to.

Meenzer wins the most underrated gay poster on a football foum award. People sometimes miss his dry wit.

Think Renton/Chez is more of one. Where Retnon worships at the feet of the 'oh so clever' Chesney..... Me and you have our secret anti-america pact.