🇨🇦Cyn 🇺🇦

“well behaved women seldom make history”

[Johanna Nyman @JohannaNyman5]

It is frankly embarrassing that a sitting U.S. Vice President is unaware of one of the most elementary facts of World War II. Nazi Germany did not negotiate an end to World War II. The war in Europe ended with Germany’s unconditional surrender after total military defeat and the collapse of the regime in May 1945.

[CP24 @CP24]

A look at thousands of fans leaving Toronto Stadium after the match https://t.co/fqszSz2kGD

[Chris McKee @mrmckee]

I’m Toronto born & raised & grew up playing & now broadcasting soccer (my parents are from Liverpool) + my son plays university soccer. These scenes have me strangely emotional. This is the Canada I remember & love, not what we’ve been become post 2020.🇨🇦

[MuchMusic @Much]

Nora Fatehi, Vegedream and Sanjoy take the stage to perform "Siir Siir" at the #FIFAWorldCup Opening Ceremony in Toronto 🙌

[Lucas Meyer 🎙️ @meyer_lucas]

Oooooh this is 🔥⚽️🇨🇦

Go @CanadaSoccerEN Go

[Ozoon @Ozoon_CA]

Canadian National Anthems don’t get much bigger than this

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

“So it begins…”

Brother, I don’t know what you did to deserve this, but I hope it was worth it.

Scottish football fans. Full kit. Bagpipes at 6:30am. And they haven’t even had breakfast yet.

You have my deepest sympathies. And my complete envy.

[Voices of WW2 @VoicesofWW2]

Everyone knows Dunkirk. 338,000 men rescued from the beaches, the "miracle" that saved Britain.

Almost nobody knows what happened 8 days later, 100 miles down the coast. This story was buried for years, and once you hear it you will understand why.

While Dunkirk was being evacuated, the 51st Highland Division was deliberately kept in France. Churchill wanted to prove to the French that Britain would not abandon them. So 10,000 Scotsmen kept fighting along the Somme while everyone else went home.

They fought well. Too well to retreat in time.

By June 10, Rommel's 7th Panzer Division, moving so fast the Germans called it the Ghost Division, had cut them off from every port. The Highlanders fell back to a tiny fishing town called Saint-Valery-en-Caux, with cliffs at their backs and the Royal Navy on the way.

A second Dunkirk. That was the plan. Operation Cycle, ships waiting offshore.

Then the fog rolled in.

The ships could not reach the beaches in the dark and mist. And by morning, Rommel had artillery on the cliffs above the town, firing down on anything that floated. Men climbed down cliff faces on ropes made of rifle slings trying to reach boats. Some fell. The rescue never came.

On June 12, 1940, Major General Victor Fortune surrendered the 51st Highland Division to Rommel. There is a famous photo of the two men standing together, Rommel grinning, Fortune staring into the distance like he is somewhere else.

10,000 men marched east into 5 years of captivity. In parts of the Highlands, nearly every family knew someone in the bag. They called it the lost division, and for decades many Scots quietly believed they had been sacrificed.

Two details worth knowing.

Fortune was offered better treatment as a general. He refused privileges and stayed with his men for the entire war, organizing care for the sick and keeping discipline in the camps. He was knighted from a hospital bed after liberation.

And in September 1944, the rebuilt 51st Highland Division was given one specific assignment, at the request of its commander. They liberated Saint-Valery-en-Caux. The pipers played in the same square where their brothers had surrendered four years earlier.

Dunkirk got the movie. These men got the long war.

Worth remembering them today.

[Devin Heroux @Devin_Heroux]

This really is beautiful.

The moose, polar bear, whale.

Indigenous Nations of Canada welcoming the world to the World Cup in Toronto.

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

This is so cool. Go Canada 🇨🇦

[Dr Helen Fry | WWII Historian @DrHelenFry]

‘In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be protected by a bodyguard of lies.’

- Sir Winston Churchill

[🇨🇦Cyn 🇺🇦 @sunflowercyn]

@impression_ists When you stand in front of a Turner, it feels like you are witnessing the unofficial birth of Impressionism. So surreal. He really chased the light.

[Hunter Biden @HunterBiden]

To everyone so eager to cancel someone for a tattoo they got at age 22, a drunk text, a selfie they took in the middle of a mental health crisis:

Show us your laptop.
Show us your iCloud.
Open your entire digital life to your worst enemy. No context. No filter. No explanation.

You won’t.

You won’t because you know what I know. Any one of us, frozen at our worst moment, photographed in our lowest hour, looks like a monster. Looks like a stranger. Looks like someone who deserves to be cast out.

That is not who we are.

My mom and baby sister were killed in a car accident when I was just a kid. Cancer took my brother Beau, my best friend and my rock. I battled alcoholism. I battled addiction. I chose the coward’s way out more times than I can count.

For years I believed the defining chapters of my life were written by tragedy, loss, and shame.

I no longer believe that.

Pain can shape us. Loss can humble us. Failures can leave scars that never fully fade. But none of them have the authority to define us.

And it sure as hell ain’t the critic that counts.

That authority belongs to us alone-the person in the arena.

Every setback presents a choice. Play the victim, or cut the bullshit and take ownership for who we become next.

Life does not determine our character. It reveals it.

Again and again we are asked the same question. When shit happens, what next?

We are not defined by what happened to us. We are not defined by the worst photo, the worst text, the worst tattoo, the worst night. We are defined by the person we choose to become. And by the courage to choose that person, every single day.

So before you reach for the gavel - show us your laptop.

You won’t.

The whole world saw mine. And I am still here. Still becoming. Still choosing. Still standing.

That is the only definition that matters.

[Angelo Zarra @pazzapicks]

The line that gets me the most “Neighbours chant different songs over short fences, but we all stand up for the same anthem” .. deep stuff, #FIFAWorldCup #CANMNT 🇨🇦

[Juno Industries Inc. @junoindustries]

Before the D-Day invasion on Juno Beach, Canadian soldiers trained on the shores of Kits Beach in Vancouver, BC — charging out of landing craft, working the artillery, cutting through the wire. The home-front beach that prepared them for the most important morning of their lives.

[Voices of WW2 @VoicesofWW2]

Rommel gave them one chance to surrender. They said no.

3,600 Free French soldiers held a desert fortress called Bir Hakeim against the full weight of Rommel's Afrika Korps for 16 days. They were surrounded, outnumbered, and running out of everything.

On the night of June 10-11, with the position finally collapsing, General Koenig ordered a breakout into the open desert in total darkness.

The Germans discovered the movement. The retreat became a brutal close-quarters fight. Men broke into small groups. Some crawled for miles. Most of them made it out.

What they bought with those 16 days: enough time for the British Eighth Army to withdraw to El Alamein, where the tide of the entire North African war would eventually turn.

Rommel later said the Free French fought magnificently. It meant something, coming from him.

France had been occupied for two years. These men had no country. They held anyway.

[Voices of WW2 @VoicesofWW2]

On June 11, 1944, a Canadian tank regiment climbed into their Shermans and drove into a village in Normandy.

Only two tanks came back.

The 6th Armoured Regiment, the 1st Hussars, attacked Le Mesnil-Patry alongside the Queen's Own Rifles. The plan assumed the village was lightly defended.

It was not.

German tanks were waiting. The Canadians were outflanked almost immediately. The colonel, forward with the lead tanks, watched his regiment being destroyed around him and ordered a retreat.

51 tanks destroyed. 55 soldiers killed. 33 wounded. 11 taken prisoner.

Of the prisoners, 7 were taken to an improvised German headquarters for interrogation. 4 were executed by firing squad. The remaining 3 were shot in the head at close range.

It was D-Day plus five. The Allies had been ashore less than a week. And a Canadian cavalry regiment that had existed for decades was essentially wiped out in an afternoon in a village most people have never heard of.

Their name for the battle became an official regimental honour.

[Jennifer Keesmaat @jen_keesmaat]

I am a signatory to this letter.

Open, fully informed and unbiased public hearings are required, supported by due diligence and meaningful analysis.

The public cannot be expected to provide informed feedback when neither the proposal nor its impacts have been properly presented.

Forgive us for being suspicious, but all we have so far is a process the Province deliberately rushed into place to cut Torontonians out, and a federal consultation process built around a survey that reflects neither the complexity of the issue nor the information needed to properly evaluate it.

[Craig Baird - Canadian History Ehx @CraigBaird]

This summer I am driving from France to Iran, then to Spain and back to France.

[TSN @TSN_Sports]

The World Lives Here.

Canada is all together different. Truly unique. And so is our relationship to the beautiful game. This is our opening to the 2026 World Cup. Narrated by Kiefer Sutherland. #FIFAWorldCup