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Old lady #KHive

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@TitoToro_ I knew both the US and FIFA were. I didn’t know refs were that corruptible

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@goodreads The World Cup has taken a huge bite out of my reading time 🤨

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@RR_Tweetss @grok Something he caught in the Oval Office

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@CoryBooker Something very similar is happening in NJ right now. A State employee with an axe to grind ran to the AG’s office with a false narrative. AG’s office has done no due diligence before prosecuting case against mother

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@dexter_doggie He has Vicks on his fingers doesn’t he?

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@senatorvitale cut Vineland Developmental Center from the budget. Find $88 million right there

[Caleb | fund SEPTA 🚰 🚎 🔔🗽 @IWantAnXcelsior]

Bring back the Pennsylvania Reading Seashore Lines

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@KeithOlbermann What war? He doesn’t remember any war

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⚽️⚽️ Thanks @comcast for fixing yourself in time for France 🇫🇷 vs. Iraq 🇮🇶⚽️⚽️

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How widespread is the @comcast outage? Nothing in South Jersey

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How am I supposed to watch the World Cup when there is a cable outage? @comcast? TV and app both broken ⚽️🤬

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@TheAnfieldLaker It was always Slot. Should have been fired by January

[Cult Ballers | World Cup @thecultballers]

Mohamed Salah.
The greatest Egyptian footballer of all times.

But in Egypt, he is much more than just a footballer.

A man who forgave a burglar who robbed his own family and gave him money to start again. A man who built his village a school, a hospital, an ambulance service and a post office. A man for whom millions of Egyptians voted in a presidential election.

This is the story of a footballer who became something closer to a national conscience.

In March 2018, Egypt held a presidential election. There was only one real candidate. The outcome was never in doubt.

More than a million Egyptians spoiled their ballots anyway. They all wrote the same name. Mohamed Salah.

He wasn't running. He couldn't have been president even if he wanted to be. It didn't matter. In a country where one man had effectively run unopposed, a footballer from a village of 15,000 people received more genuine, voluntary support than the actual opposition candidate.

That says everything about what he means to Egypt. Not a hero because he scores goals. A hero because, for a lot of people, he is the only thing left that feels honest.

Born in Nagrig, a small village in the Nile Delta three hours north of Cairo. Jasmine fields, watermelon farms, dusty roads, a population that for decades had nothing close to the infrastructure most of the world takes for granted.

He never really left.

While he was still playing in Egypt, years before Liverpool, his family's home in Alexandria was robbed. The thief was caught two days later. Salah's father wanted to press charges, a case that could have put the man away for years.

Salah asked him not to.
He gave the man money instead.

Tried to help him find work. Tried to give him a way out of the life that had led him there in the first place.

"Everyone deserves a second chance and a better life," he said, when asked about it.

That instinct never went away. As his wages rose into the hundreds of thousands per week, the money kept flowing back to Nagrig. A school. A youth centre with a professional-grade pitch. An ambulance unit. A health clinic that's now expanding into a hospital. Funding toward a sewage treatment system most rural Egyptian villages still don't have.

In April 2025, the village's tiny post office was at risk of being shut down entirely and moved outside Nagrig. A relative of Salah's donated the land. Salah and his family paid for everything else and handed the finished building straight to Egypt's national postal service.

A footballer worth hundreds of millions of pounds, personally making sure his village still had somewhere to send a letter.

When Cairo's National Cancer Institute was hit by a car bombing in 2019 that killed at least 20 people, Salah donated three million dollars toward rebuilding it. One of the largest individual charitable gifts in Egyptian history, from a man who grew up without running water reliably reaching his own house.

In Nagrig, an elderly vegetable seller named Rashida put it simply: "Mohamed is a good man. Respectful and kind, like a brother to us."

Tonight he leads Egypt out at the World Cup again.

Whatever happens on the pitch, that part of the story was already written a long time ago, back in a village most of the world will never visit, by a man who the streets of Egypt will never forget. 🇪🇬

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@TheAnfieldLaker Luis Diaz

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@Corballyred Yes it is!

[Andrea Junker @Strandjunker]

This Juneteenth, we should remind ourselves of two facts:

1. Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
2. Those who prevent history from being taught are plotting to repeat it.

It’s as simple as that.

[Vfynn_🥷🏼 𐙚 @Vfynn_]

🚨🗣️NEW: Thierry Henry on FIFA’s new mouth-covering red card rule: as Almiron was given a red card for covering his mouth in the game between Paraguay and Turkey:

“I understand why football wants to fight discrimination. Nobody disagrees with that. But when you start handing out straight red cards because a player covered his mouth while speaking, you’ve crossed into dangerous territory.

“This is exactly what I feared football was becoming, a game played by robots, policed by suits who’ve never felt the heat of a tackle or the fire of a 50-50. Miguel Almirón gets sent off for covering his mouth? In a World Cup? FIFA calls it progress. I call it the slow death of the sport we love.

Football was built on emotion, confrontation, mind games, personality. Now we’re acting as if every private word exchanged on a pitch is a matter for a courtroom investigation. The game is starting to feel less like football and more like a surveillance project.

The Miguel Almirón incident is exactly why people are uncomfortable. We don’t even know what was said, yet the punishment arrives before the evidence. Since when did covering your mouth become a crime worthy of expulsion? If that’s the standard, we’re no longer judging actions—we’re judging suspicion.

What worries me most is the precedent. Today it’s covering your mouth. Tomorrow what is it? A sarcastic comment? A heated argument? Football has always been a pressure cooker. If you remove every ounce of fire, don’t be surprised when the sport loses part of its soul.

And let’s be honest, would the legends of previous generations survive in this environment? Maradona, Keane, Pepe, half the icons people celebrate today would spend more time explaining themselves to officials than actually playing. The game that once rewarded personality now seems obsessed with policing it.

The irony is that football claims to want authenticity, yet it keeps creating rules that encourage players to become robots. Fans don’t fall in love with robots. They fall in love with characters, rivalries, passion and drama.

This rule may have been created with good intentions, but good intentions don’t automatically make good rules. Right now, it feels like football is trying to put a lid on a boiling pot instead of understanding why it boils in the first place.”

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@OnsOranje 🍀⚽️🍀

[Vfynn_🥷🏼 𐙚 @Vfynn_]

🚨🗣️NEW: Zlatan Ibrahimović on FIFA’s new mouth-covering red card rule: as Almiron was given a red card for covering his mouth in the game between Paraguay and Turkey

“I have seen football at its highest level, the real football. Not this watered-down version they are serving us now. What happened with Almirón? A straight red card for covering his mouth? This is not football anymore. This is a circus run by bureaucrats in suits who have never felt the fire of the pitch.”

“Covering your mouth is now a red card? What is this, Big Brother on the field? FIFA wants to read lips, punish thoughts before they even become words. Next they will put muzzles on players like dogs. Players cannot even talk, cannot even breathe passion without some VAR robot or referee deciding your emotions are illegal. This is dystopian. Football is dying.”

“This rule was born because some players cry every week. One incident in the Champions League and suddenly the whole world must change. But elbow a man, break his leg, or spit — sometimes you get a yellow and a pat on the back. Two-tier football. Protect the protected, punish the rest. I have played in every league and I have seen it.”

On the softness of the modern game:
“Maradona would be sent off in the tunnel. Roy Keane? He would laugh at the referee and walk off with a smile while the stands burn. Pepe would have collected five reds before half-time. Today? Players are becoming actors, not warriors. They fall, they cry, they hide behind rules. Where is the masculinity? Where is the character? Football is not ballet. It is war. And they are turning it into a polite conversation with red cards as punctuation.”

“I, Zlatan, have scored goals that made stadiums shake and said things that made opponents tremble — without hiding. This generation is being raised soft. If you cannot handle words on the pitch, how will you handle life? FIFA is not protecting football. They are burying it. And one day, the real fans will rise and say: enough. Bring back the game.”

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The blame rests at the top @GovSherrillNJ her human services commissioner (who thinks his only job is to grin at photo ops) and the head of DDD who has had the job TOO LONG https://t.co/teZa5tupub Assemblyman Vitali could do something