@CarlBovisNature Sitting in the back garden with a decent coffee one morning. Watching baby Starlings demanding doom off a parent and wham! Sparrow Hawk pins one to the ground and dismantles it in front of us. That’s nature.
🚨🗣️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.”
Jurgen Klopp on cooling breaks:
🗣️ "Football is being held hostage by executives in air-conditioned offices. These so-called 'cooling breaks' were sold to us as a shield for the players' well-being. It's nothing more than a gilded cage built for sponsors."
I must confess to being a bit emotional this morning at the news of a knighthood for Kevin Sinfield.
I’ve always called him ‘Sir Kev’ and it’s hard to think of a man more deserving. He showed us all what it is to be a friend. What it means to step up when people need you and he did it all for his mate ❤️
After he carried Rob across the line in the Leeds marathon someone sent me this poem anonymously and I kept it on my phone. They called it ‘Arise Sir Kev’…
When shadows gathered, and hearts would break
Kev knew it was time to take…
One step, another, through wind and rain,
Carrying hope, despite the pain.
He never stopped, mile after mile,
Driven by loyalty, strength… a smile.
For Rob, his friend, he aim was true
Showing us all, what friendship can do.
Not measured in trophies, applause, or fame…
But turning up, again and again.
And in every mile he chose to run,
He showed us how friendship is truly done.
Multi-millionaire Iceland boss wants to axe pension triple lock.
Full UK state pension (received by 35% of pensioners) is less than 50% of minimum wage.
Millions can't save for private pension
2m pensioners live in poverty. 110000 a year die in poverty.
https://t.co/r2o37mdzUI
The government is not only failing to fix the crisis in the water sector. They are lying about the only real solution to that crisis, public ownership.
WATCH @ashsmith43 of @WindrushWasp DEBUNK the lies about water nationalisation.
Sign the petition here: https://t.co/Ae9i0f25Py
Dear @KemiBadenoch
£100 Bn general waste by the Tories.
£148 Mn owed by Michelle Mone.
£1.6 Bn stop the boats barge
£21 Bn handed to covid fraudsters
£471 Mn in total paid to destroy PPE not needed/in storage too long.
=
£123,219,000,000
What have you to say about that?
Nigel Farage - the leader of Reform UK - is STILL under investigation for failing to declare a £5 million 'gift'.
Please RT this until this until he no longer is.
Thank you
🚨 Jürgen Klopp has launched a scathing attack on the cooling breaks being used during this World Cup. 👊
"Football is being held hostage by executives sitting in air-conditioned offices.
These breaks are being presented as a shield for player welfare, a noble weapon against the heat. In reality, they are nothing more than a golden cage built for sponsors.
When I saw players standing around during cooling breaks while television timeouts dictated the rhythm of the match, I couldn't help but ask myself: who is the World Cup really serving?
The supporters? The players? Or the advertisers?
A World Cup match should flow like a river. Instead, we are building dams in the middle of it so commercials can be shown.
It's dangerous for the spirit of the game. Football used to be the main event, but it now risks becoming background music for an advertising show."
He didn't hold back. 👏👏
November 1971. Chiswick, West London.
Erin Pizzey is 32 years old. She is not a lawyer. Not a politician. Not a doctor.
She is a woman who talked Hounslow Council into lending her a cold, rundown building on Belmont Road — a former community hall — for almost nothing. Her original plan was modest. A warm room. A cup of tea. Somewhere for mothers with young children to simply get out of the house.
Then the door opened.
A woman stood in the entrance. She was covered, head to foot, in bruises. She was holding two small children. She was shaking.
She didn't want tea.
She needed somewhere to hide.
Erin let her in. She didn't turn her away. She didn't tell her to call the police.
Because Erin had already called the police. They told her the same thing they told every woman in Britain at the time: they could not enter a private home over a "domestic dispute." That was the law. The home was private. What happened inside it was a family matter.
When Erin contacted a female civil servant to report what she was seeing, the response was astonishing. The woman told her flatly: "There wasn't a problem of battered wives until you made one."
Erin put down the phone. Then she went back to her residents and made sure they were fed.
Within weeks, 40 mothers and children were sleeping in four tiny rooms. No funding. No staff. No legal authority.
She didn't stop.
By 1973, word had spread through quiet whisper networks — one woman telling another, "There is a place. Go to Chiswick. She won't turn you away." That same year, Erin hosted the first National Women's Aid Conference in the UK. Women from across Britain arrived, and they all recognized the same thing at once: what she had built needed to exist everywhere.
In 1974, the council set a maximum of 36 residents. At peak times, 150 women and children were living inside those walls — sleeping on floors, on chairs, in hallways. The building smelled of cooking, fear, and something else entirely: relief.
Erin was taken to court for overcrowding. She appealed all the way to the House of Lords.
She kept the doors open the entire time.
That same year, she wrote a book. Scream Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear. It was the first published account of domestic violence in British history. It used real stories from real women inside the shelter. Overnight, a problem that had no official name was on front pages from London to New York.
The movement spread. Refuges opened across the UK. Then Australia. Then Canada. Then the United States. The pattern she created in four small rooms in West London — no blueprint, no permission, no funding — had been replicated in hundreds of shelters across the Western world.
MP Jack Ashley stood up in Parliament and said: "It was she who first identified the problem, who first recognised the seriousness of the situation and who first did something practical."
She was ranked 14th in a poll of the 100 women who shook the world. She was awarded the Italian Peace Prize. She received a CBE. The charity she founded — Chiswick Women's Aid, which became Refuge — grew into the largest domestic violence charity in the United Kingdom, with over 460 employees and an annual income of more than £33 million.
Erin Pizzey passed away on October 4, 2025, aged 86.
She never stopped.
It all began with one woman, one borrowed building, and an absolute refusal to say no.
Forty women and children showed up with nowhere to go.
She made room.
Share this if you believe one ordinary person, refusing to look away, can build a shelter that holds the whole world.
Follow us Lost in Yesterday
Street art, now gone, by the immensely talented @rocblackblock, based on an August 1936 photo of militia women on the Aragón front by Agustí Centelles and a Robert Capa photo of refugees fleeing Tarragona in January 1939. "Fascism never again" as it says.