UEFA Declares It Has Lost Confidence in FIFA’s Leadership.
European football’s governing body has broken with Gianni Infantino. Meeting in emergency session, UEFA and its 55 member associations unanimously rejected FIFA’s plan to sell minority stakes in the World Cup to private investors through a vehicle called FIFA Forward Enterprise. UEFA called it indefensible that a proposal of such magnitude was drawn up in secret and pushed to the brink of approval without meaningful consultation.
The threat that followed is the heaviest UEFA has ever issued. No European national team will play in any FIFA competition while the proposal remains alive, and UEFA wants binding assurances that FIFA will never again open its competitions to private ownership.
CONCACAF and the Asian Football Confederation have rejected the plan too, and Infantino’s senior adviser Carlos Cordeiro resigned in protest. FIFA insists nobody is selling football. Ask a cartoonist to draw the archetype of the corrupt football executive and nine times out of ten you would get Infantino, which is rather the point.
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BREAKING: Donald Trump’s midterm strategy is reportedly to bank on his supporters being too stupid to realize that his policies have made all their problems in life worse.
No Moral Genes
Trump shows it again every time he opens his mouth. There is nothing in that cholesterol brain that can register the difference between the two men he says he gets along with. He would like Zelenskyy to end the war. It is very simple. He gets along with both. And 25,000 people died last month, delivered in the same tone as a golf score.
One of them is a war criminal. He pushes political opponents out of windows, he pushes journalists out of windows, and he has poison delivered to critics in cities all over the world. The other is fighting for his country’s freedom, the way many countries have fought for theirs before him. The United States did exactly that, and finished celebrating the 250th anniversary of it a few weeks ago while the man in the White House stood there without the faintest idea what he was commemorating.
That is the part worth sitting with. This is the country that grew a president who does not have the brain capacity to feel the depth of freedom, or of democracy. Not the vocabulary, the depth. The words are on his hats and in his speeches, and behind them there is nobody home.
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America Alone! Again!!
Last Friday the UN General Assembly gave Volker Türk a second four-year term as High Commissioner for Human Rights. One hundred and forty-four countries voted yes. Ten voted no, and the United States found itself in that column beside Russia, North Korea, Nicaragua and Mali. France’s mission in Geneva pointed out the obvious, writing that Washington used to be a beacon on human rights and now simply stands isolated among the worst company available.
The American answer was not an argument but a performance. On Monday, as France’s ambassador took the floor at a Security Council session on Ukraine, the US delegation stood up and left the room, and an alternate representative announced they would keep walking out until Paris renounced its disrespectful rhetoric. Jérôme Bonnafont declined to take the bait, and instead reminded the chamber that France had joined the celebration of America’s 250th birthday this month.
There is a particular irony worth naming. In 2018 this president reportedly dismissed a whole category of nations with a word most newspapers refused to print.
His government has now voted in the same column as one of them, and walked out on the ally that funded the revolution.
Details drawn from Al Jazeera, ABC News and The Hill: 144 in favour, 10 against, 13 abstentions; the French mission’s post and Bartos’s remarks; Negrea’s statement and Bonnafont’s response.
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Netanyahu:
“First, I’m going to New York. I’m going to speak the truth in front of this hate spewing elected official. He’s putting one group of New Yorkers against the other.
He’s turning them against New York Jews. I mean, what are we in the 1930’s? So much hate. So many lies.”
BiBi you are a genocidal, baby killing, war criminal. The entire world, including your own people, loathe you. The only people that don’t are US politicians that you pay off.