🚨🗣️New: Thierry Henry reacts to the USA vs Paraguay stoppage for TV commercials:
“I’ve spent my entire life in this beautiful game — as a player at the highest level, as a fan, and now as someone who analyses it every week — and what unfolded during that USA versus Paraguay match left me deeply frustrated. The fourth official standing there on the touchline, arm raised high, instructing the referee to hold the restart… not for any injury, not for tactical reasons, and not even primarily for player hydration in that scorching heat. No. It was because the broadcast team hadn’t finished airing all their commercials. That’s not football. That’s a television show pretending to be a World Cup match.
The beautiful game is being strangled by greed. Players are out there in the heat, ready to restart, momentum building like a storm about to break — and we pause everything so the sponsors can cash in. It’s like stopping a symphony mid-crescendo because the advertisers want their jingle heard. Football didn’t conquer the world by turning into American sports with endless timeouts and ad breaks. We had rhythm, flow, emotion that flowed like a river. Now? It’s dammed up for dollars.
This isn’t about hydration or player welfare anymore — it’s a slippery slope where the soul of the game is sold piece by piece. Fans deserve better. Players deserve better. The referee on that pitch looked like a puppet on strings controlled from some broadcast truck. Enough is enough. We need to protect what made this sport the greatest on Earth before it disappears completely.”
The World Cup should be football’s cathedral. Instead, we’re turning it into a shopping mall with a pitch in the middle.
And here’s the question nobody wants to answer: if the fourth official is waiting for commercials, then who is really running the game? FIFA? The referee? Or the broadcasters?
Because the moment football starts asking advertisers for permission before asking the players, you’ve crossed a line.
The World Cup is supposed to be the showcase of football. Not the showcase of who paid the most for airtime.”
Dear Lush (cc Chelmsford City Council),
As a woman who had half a breast removed last year due to cancer, I am writing to raise my concerns about your “Proud of My Stripes” window display.
I am also, on behalf of other women who have experienced breast cancer, respectfully requesting its removal.
Because mastectomies are not a fashion statement, an identity marker or something to be celebrated.
They are something women undergo because they are ill, because they are frightened, because they are trying to stay alive.
Around 59,000 women are diagnosed with breast cancer in the UK every year. Many will undergo surgery - a mastectomy, lumpectomy or other procedure.
Others choose preventive mastectomies because they carry a high-risk BRCA gene mutation.
If a woman chooses to have her breasts removed to affirm a gender identity, that is her personal choice.
I honestly don’t know the number of women who have elective mastectomies for this reason.
What I do know is that it is a tiny number compared with those for whom breast surgery is medically necessary and not something to be celebrated.
I think I speak for many women who have experienced breast cancer - and for their families - when I say this:
Breast removal surgery is not something I regard as cute, playful or empowering.
Nor is it something I believe retailers should be celebrating.
For that reason, I am requesting that the display be removed and that @ChelmsCouncil apologise for promoting it on social media.
Yours sincerely,
Janet Murray
@BGatesIsaPyscho He’s an incompetent imbecile and wouldn’t hold down any responsible job in the private sector so hides away in the public sector waffling total nonsense.
'As far as I’m concerned, women are women who are born women, but women are also women who are trans women' -- Harriet Harman, 2002
You cannot defend what you're afraid to define. 2/2
Bravo, @Keir_Starmer, for getting in an Adviser on Women and Girls who thinks the definition of women and girls includes men and boys. That'll definitely win back people who believe Labour's a party for smug, lanyard-wearing, luxury-belief-espousing cultural elitists. 1/2
Too on point not to share, “Aussie reply to Trump rant about NATO not being there for us.
Mate. You run a country with 600,000 homeless people sleeping on the street tonight. A country where 40% of adults can't cover a $400 emergency without borrowing money. A country where insulin costs more than a car payment and people are rationing it to survive. A country where medical debt is the number 1 cause of bankruptcy. A country where women are dying in hospital car parks because doctors are too scared of abortion laws to treat a miscarriage.
You lock up more of your own citizens than any nation on earth. More than China. More than Russia. More than North Korea. The land of the free has 2 million people in cages, and a quarter of them haven't even been convicted of anything. They're just too poor to make bail.
Your life expectancy is going backwards. You're the only developed nation where that's happening. Your infant mortality rate is worse than Cuba's. Your kids do active shooter drills between maths and English while you sell the gunmaker's stock to your mates.
Your minimum wage hasn't moved in 15 years. You've got teachers working 2 jobs and veterans sleeping under bridges and you just spent a trillion dollars flattening a country that didn't attack you.
And you’ve got a convicted felon, adjudicating raping, paedophile protecting, porn star shagging insurrectionist running the biggest dumpster fire war campaign since the Taliban thanked you very much for losing again.
And you're calling Greenland poorly run?
Greenland has universal healthcare. Free education. One of the lowest incarceration rates in the world. Nobody goes bankrupt there because they got sick. Nobody dies in a waiting room because their insurance said no.
"NATO wasn't there when we needed them." When exactly was that, champ? September 11? Because NATO invoked Article 5 for the first and only time in history FOR YOU. Soldiers from dozens of countries deployed, fought, bled, and died in Afghanistan FOR YOU. Australia wasn't even in NATO and we still showed up. For 20 years.
And you pulled out at 2am without telling anyone and left them to deal with the mess.
So maybe before you start calling other countries poorly run, have a look at your own backyard, you spray-tanned aluminium siding salesman. The only thing poorly run in this picture is your fucking mouth. Credit (borrowed from) Jim Scroggins - original author 📷 unknown”
@sainsburys queue the length of the shop in Brentwood and only 3 tills open , is ridiculous. Any chance someone could get them to do something helpful ??!!!