Tuesday Night. Pub. Back From.

It's Tuesday night and I'm back from the pub. The whole thing was so mellow and uneventful I've pretty much already forgotten I was there. The only thing of note is because they'd run out of beefburgers I tried one of their new on the menu hot-dogs. They've gone with boiled I prefer grilled.

Annoyingly I really do need to catch up on Egypt so have largely been ignoring the news of the day. It seems like a safe thing to do because the big story is that the US has announced that Israel and Fatah will be resuming peace talks. As I mentioned at the time the Washington meeting was agreed this is just the US trying to exert pressure on both parties in order to find out what is going on in a region where the US hasn't really been relevant since the so-called 'Arab Spring.' Rather proving while they're always broke in exchange for all this pressure from the US Fatah have accepted the release of 104 prisoners. Israel are more relaxed because they've sent Zippy, George and Bungle.

The main way that the US has attempted to exert pressure on Fatah and Israel is through the announcement of the verdict of Bradley Manning over the information he passed to Wikileaks. This is a story that can be interpreted in a number of ways. For example many people have suggested that the US diplomatic cables that Manning leaked played a significant role in triggering the 'Arab Spring' although along with Rihanna I think Wikileaks role has been significantly overstated. Then there is also the theory that while Manning and Wikileaks weren't aware of it US intelligence planned and allowed the leak to take place in order to build up Wikileaks anti-US credentials. The idea being that by portraying Wikileaks as anti-US the US' enemies would trust Wikileaks and provide it with lots sensitive information about their nations. This theory holds rather more credibility because the US' recent wave of prosecutions against banks such as Barclays, Standard & Chartered and HSBC were certainly aided by information leaked to Wikileaks.

Also some people have tried using Manning as a metaphor for me but this is weak at best. However the fact that Manning has not been convicted of the charge of aiding the enemy could certainly be interpreted as the US announcing that even it won't be supporting Croydon's claim that it's criminal activity towards me was done in order to prevent terrorism.

19:15 on 30/7/13.