proud British European, diversity is good; live & let-live, we're all only "passing through"! SCFC and Saracens....a strange but compelling combinationโบ๏ธ
Now exploring out West!
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Itโs not even subtle -Donny doesnโt do subtle! ๐ณ The sooner the US population wakes up & ends this madness the safer weโll all be!
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Richard Adams ๐ฌ๐ง๐ซ๐ท๐จ๐ญ๐บ๐ฆ retweeted
In this powerful monologue, Joe Scarborough proves that Trump and his cronies acting as cheerleaders for putin are no different from the Nazi sympathisers of the 1930s. Itโs a chilling, crystal-clear wake-up call about what happens when leaders trade American democracy for a dictator's favour.
Joe Scarborough:
โโฆ just peeling what putin has had a collection of useful idiots across America do now for the past five years.
I really I really don't say this often in American politics. but when you're defending vladimir putin, an ex KGB agent who is committing war crimes by the day, I'm not sure how you sleep at night.
And this phenomenon though, has historical parallels. It was 89 years ago this month in October 1937, that the former king of England walked up the steps of Adolf Hitler's mountain retreat in Bavaria. The Duke of Windsor had given up the throne less than a year earlier, but he toured German factories, inspected the SS and was photographed greeting the Fรผhrer. Time Magazine reported that Hitler gave the Duke a Nazi salute as they parted and Edward returned that Nazi salute. Later he told friends that Britain shouldn't fight Hitler, the war should not start. Winston Churchill had to actually send him to the Bahamas to keep him away from his new friend in Berlin. But the Duke wasn't alone, just like Donald Trump isn't alone. Here at home, Charles Lindbergh, an American hero who accepted the medal of freedom from Hermann Goering in 1938, went on to lead America First. And in a 1941 speech in Des Moines, he blamed Jews and the British for pushing America toward war. Even FDR's US Ambassador to Britain, Joseph Kennedy, predicted democracy is finished in England. His appeasement and his lack of moral alarm cost Kennedy his job. In Britain, aristocrats like the Astors and Lord Halifax thought Hitler was a man they could do business with.
Does that sound familiar?
Sounded so respectable, trade, stability, money, peace in our time.
History remembers them now as morally vacuous opportunists who looked at a tyrant who was devouring his neighbours, the only thing they saw, a business partner.
The parallels with Trump are too on point. Now on Friday, Donald Trump got on the phone with vladimir putin who always plays him when they get on the phone and what happened? He lifted sanctions on the Russian diesel deal, he did it three weeks after Republicans had forced him to sign a Russia sanctions bill in honour of Lindsey Graham. The White House says his gift to putin will lower prices at the pump, but it won't. The first shipment is only about 2.2 million barrels and America burns through more than that every day. It's not going to lower gas prices in America. But it will help putin kill innocence in Ukraine, a country Trump has always hated. Trump's four billion dollar gift to the man he kowtows to every day will buy missiles, drones, and glide bombs that will keep terrorising and killing Ukrainians who are fighting for their country's freedom and their children's lives and yes, our freedom.
A bipartisan group of senators including Susan Collins wrote in a statement Sunday that the United States should not provide putin with a financial lifeline while Russia continues to kill Ukrainian civilians. But Trump's aping of putinโs talking points, they just keep getting worse. With this weak president attacking Ukrainian freedom fighters and perversely calling for new leadership in Kyiv. We do need new leadership, Mr. President, but not in Ukraine. Donald, I've known you a long time and I know you don't read history, so let me tell you how this story ends. The Duke of Windsor ended up a footnote, a cautionary tale in a fancy suit forever assigned to the dustbin of British history. And your time to finally do the right thing in Ukraine, Mr. President, it's running out. Stop bowing down to putin. And start doing your job.
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Richard Adams ๐ฌ๐ง๐ซ๐ท๐จ๐ญ๐บ๐ฆ retweeted
Iโm going to make this as clear as I can.
Britain did not invent slavery.
That foul practice has existed on every inhabited continent for recorded history.
What Britain did was decide to abolish it, then spend a century and a fortune forcing everyone else to comply against their will, motivated by Christian piety.
Youโre welcome.
That is why this shameless modern trend to demand reparations from Britain, rather than the African countries that took the slaves, is not only a slap in the face for our ancestors but a gesture of enmity.
That is how we should view those Caribbean nations trying to force slavery reparations onto to the agenda of the forthcoming Commonwealth summit attended by the King.
And this is how we should respond...
New post. Link in first reply
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True hero & humanitarian, the best of us!
Twenty five years ago today, a 62 year old man with cancer in his bones walked 2,687 people out of the South Tower, and then he went back inside.
Rick Rescorla was born in Hayle, Cornwall in 1939. British Parachute Regiment in Cyprus at 18. Colonial police in Northern Rhodesia. Then he came to America, enlisted in the US Army in 1963, and in November 1965 he went into the Ia Drang Valley as a platoon leader with the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry.
Hal Moore called him the best platoon leader he ever saw. His men called him Hard Core. He sang to them in the dark, Wild Colonial Boy in an Australian accent, because he had worked out that men who are singing are not men who are panicking. That is Rescorla on the cover of We Were Soldiers Once and Young, bayonet fixed.
Thirty five years later he was head of security for Dean Witter, later Morgan Stanley, in the South Tower of the World Trade Center.
In 1990 he brought in his old friend Dan Hill and the two of them walked the basement. He warned the Port Authority that the parking garage was wide open, that somebody could drive in a truck full of explosives, walk out and light it off. Nothing was done. Three years later the 1993 bomb went off about thirty feet from the spot he had flagged.
After that he told Morgan Stanley the towers were still a target and the next attack would come out of the sky. He wanted the firm to leave Manhattan. The lease ran to 2006, so they stayed. Twenty two floors of the South Tower, roughly 2,700 people.
So he drilled them. Every three months, everyone, no exceptions, down the stairwells two abreast while he stood there with a stopwatch. Traders pulling seven figures resented being marched down concrete stairs by a Cornishman with a clipboard. He kept doing it anyway.
8:46 a.m. The North Tower is hit. Port Authority comes over the South Tower loudspeakers and tells everyone the building is secure and to go back to their desks. Rescorla picks up a bullhorn and tells his people to get out.
He phones Dan Hill. "The dumb sons of bitches told me not to evacuate. They said it's just Building One. I told them I'm getting my people out of here."
9:03 a.m. The second plane hits the South Tower, floors 77 through 85. His people are already in the stairwells, moving exactly the way they had been drilled, and Rescorla is on the bullhorn singing to them. Cornish songs. A version of Men of Harlech he had rewritten for Cornwall. Men of Cornwall stop your dreaming, can't you see their spearpoints gleaming.
He called his wife Susan from the stairs. They had been married two and a half years, met jogging in New Jersey. He told her to stop crying, that he had to get these people out safely, and that if something happened to him he wanted her to know he had never been happier, that she made his life.
Someone told him to get out. He said, as soon as I make sure everyone else is out.
2,687 Morgan Stanley employees went home that day. Thirteen did not, and four of those were Rescorla and the men who stayed in the building with him: Wesley Mercer, Jorge Velazquez, Godwin Forde.
He was last seen on the 10th floor, walking up.
The South Tower fell at 9:59. They never found him.
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We seriously need to get back to this being the โdefaultโ!
Buy British. Eat whatโs grown here.
That Kenyan bean or Peruvian asparagus didnโt just travel thousands of miles - it often flew.
Meanwhile a British apple, carrot or strawberry can go from field to shop in days, picked ripe instead of green so it survives a long haul. Better flavour. Better nutrition. Less waste.
We import around 80% of our fruit and nearly half our veg. Thatโs not choice - itโs vulnerability. One heatwave, drought or shipping snarl overseas and shelves empty.
Growing more here means jobs in our countryside, money staying in the UK, and a food system that isnโt at the mercy of someone elseโs weather.
Local and seasonal isnโt nostalgia. Itโs fresher food, shorter supply chains, and farmers who can actually plan a future. Supermarkets will keep stacking cheap imports if we keep buying them.
Look at the label. Choose British when itโs in season. Thatโs how you vote with your trolley.โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ
๐ฌ๐ง
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Richard Adams ๐ฌ๐ง๐ซ๐ท๐จ๐ญ๐บ๐ฆ retweeted
This Australian's reply to Trump's rant about โNATO not being there for Americaโ is perfect.
"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 youโve 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 f----- mouth."
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Great post! True for so many areas in the UK too ๐ณ
The whole country seems to have had an opinion on Middlesbrough this week. Most of it from people who have never set foot here.
So let me tell you about the Teesside I actually know.
Iโm an adopted Teessider. I live in Stockton. I run a care company and an accessible taxi firm across the Tees Valley, and I was the parliamentary candidate for Middlesbrough and Thornaby East. I see this place at six in the morning and at midnight. I see the people behind the headlines.
Some of the people I care for still receive pensions from ICI. Thatโs how recent our industrial past is. This was a place that made things. A place that powered Britain. At its peak, ICI employed around 25,000 people at Wilton alone. Then the steelworks closed in 2015 and thousands more livelihoods disappeared with it.
And for four decades, government after government failed to answer the most basic question: what comes next?
That is the part the pile-on misses.
Half of Middlesbroughโs neighbourhoods are now among the most deprived 10% in England the highest proportion of any council area in the country. That did not happen because Teessiders suddenly became bad people.
It happened because industries disappeared, communities lost secure work, too few people were retrained, and generations were too often parked on benefits and handed slogans instead of opportunity.
Then we wonder why things went wrong.
Middlesbrough Council has had to go cap in hand to government just to keep basic services running. Redcar and Cleveland has faced the same pressures. Hartlepool is burning through its reserves.
Three councils are being asked to repair the damage of forty years of economic decline with one hand tied behind their backs.
And yes, there is crime. Cleveland has one of the highest recorded crime rates in England and Wales. I wonโt pretend otherwise. I believe criminals should be caught, punished and, where necessary, locked up. I will always back the police in doing that job.
But a town of 140,000 people is not defined by the minority who wreck things.
It is defined by the care worker finishing a double shift.
By the apprentice learning a trade on land where the steelworks once stood.
By the small business owner opening the shutters every morning and refusing to give up.
By families on estates who might not have much, but would still give you their last quid if you needed it.
That is the Middlesbrough I know.
Slagging Boro off is easy. Turning poverty into a punchline is easy. What is harder is asking why successive governments allowed one of Britainโs great industrial areas to decline and then blamed the people left behind for the consequences.
So here is my challenge to everyone in Westminster who has discovered an opinion on Middlesbrough this week:
Come here.
Bring serious investment. Bring skilled jobs. Bring industry back to the Tees Valley. Give our councils the resources to rebuild communities rather than simply manage decline.
Then come back in ten years and tell me what you think of Middlesbrough.
Because this place does not need your pity.
It needs a fair chance.
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Richard Adams ๐ฌ๐ง๐ซ๐ท๐จ๐ญ๐บ๐ฆ retweeted
๐ฅ What a disaster of US foreign policy under Trump. ๐คก
๐บ๐ธ Trump has chosen North Korea over South Korea.
๐บ๐ธ Trump has chosen Russia over Ukraine.
๐บ๐ธ Trump has chosen China over Taiwan.
๐บ๐ธ Trump has chosen Putin over NATO.
๐บ๐ธ Trump has chosen dictators over democratic allies.
๐บ๐ธ Trump has chosen personal loyalty over American interests.
Trump has betrayed US allies to side with, suck up to, and bow down to dictators, war criminals, and despots. ๐คก
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Petition to stop the early release from jail of PC Andrew Harper's killers - Sign the Petition! c.org/HWtxKc7sGD via @UKChange
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Petition to stop the early release from jail of PC Andrew Harper's killers - Sign the Petition! c.org/F42MBD6nyz via @UKChange
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Richard Adams ๐ฌ๐ง๐ซ๐ท๐จ๐ญ๐บ๐ฆ retweeted
Zlatan Ibrahimovic on to Gianni Infantinoโs plan to sell stakes in the FIFA World Cup:
๐ฃ๏ธ โListen to me carefully, because most of these people in suits have never understood the game and never will.
They create a subsidiary. Call it FIFA Forward Enterprise. Keep majority control on paper. Sell 20% to investors who have never smelled grass. Then wave $20 million in front of every federation and pretend itโs democracy.
That is not structure. That is a magic trick for lawyers. FIFA keeps the majority. FIFA keeps the board. FIFA keeps โexclusive authorityโ over governance, the calendar, the rules, everything that sounds important on paper. The investors get no operational role. They are only buying a slice of the cash machine. FIFA even says the investors are buying into the subsidiary, not into FIFA itself, so โnothing changes.โ
I have seen this movie before. Nothing changesโฆ until the numbers start talking. Once private money owns a permanent piece of the World Cupโs revenue, the pressure never stops. More tournaments. Bigger formats. Different calendar. Different priorities. Because investors do not care about the soul of the game. They care about return. And when the federations are already bought with the $20 million โgiftโ and the bigger Forward payments, who exactly is going to say no?
This is the same FIFA that spent decades selling the World Cup under the table. I remember the 2015 arrests. Swiss police walking into the hotel in Zurich and taking officials out in the early morning. Racketeering. Bribes. Money laundering. Hundreds of millions paid for television rights, for marketing rights, for World Cup votes. South Africa 2010. Qatar. The whole circus under Blatter. Jack Warner. Chuck Blazer singing to the Americans. Blatter and Platini banned for that $2 million โgentlemenโs agreementโ that suddenly appeared when it was convenient. The Ethics Committee, the indictments, the years of โwe are cleaning the house.โ
And now the house is cleaner, they say. Now instead of brown envelopes and secret payments, we have subsidiaries, minority non-controlling stakes, permanent capital vehicles, JPMorgan valuations, and carefully selected long-term partners. Same hunger for money. Same system of buying loyalty from the 211 associations. Only the language got more expensive.
Infantino stands there and talks about democracy and opportunity. I am Zlatan. I do not need the $20 million and I do not need the speech. Most of these federations do need the money. That is exactly why this structure is dangerous. You are not offering development. You are offering a transaction: take the cash, vote yes by September, and stay quiet while pieces of the World Cup become private equity assets.
Football does not belong to FIFA. FIFA belongs to football. The moment you put shareholders inside the commercial heart of the World Cup and call it progress, you have already admitted the game is for sale. They just found a prettier way to write the contract this time.
I played at the highest level. I saw real power and real money. This is neither. This is bureaucracy protecting itself while selling the one thing that still belongs to the people who actually love the game.
Keep your structure. Keep your valuations. Keep your minority non-controlling stakes. The World Cup was never meant to have owners in suits. It was meant to be bigger than all of you.
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Richard Adams ๐ฌ๐ง๐ซ๐ท๐จ๐ญ๐บ๐ฆ retweeted
Elon Musk claims there are far more unsafe places in Europe than there are in America. But the data doesnโt bear this out. Sonny Loughran, our Britain correspondent, compares homicide- and knife-violence rates in the two continents.
Watch The Economistโs interview with Elon Musk: bit.ly/4wqjvot
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Richard Adams ๐ฌ๐ง๐ซ๐ท๐จ๐ญ๐บ๐ฆ retweeted
A woman put a $29 Apple AirTag in her checked luggage at JFK Airport.
The airline lost her bag. The customer service desk said: "We'll locate it and deliver it within 48 hours."
She opened Find My on her iPhone. The bag wasn't at the destination airport. It was at a cargo facility in a different state. Moving. Toward a residential address.
She showed the airline the live GPS location on her phone. They dispatched recovery. The bag with $3,200 in contents was returned 6 hours later.
Without the AirTag: she files a claim, waits 3-8 weeks, and receives $1,500-3,800 in airline liability (the maximum under federal regulation). Probably never sees the bag again.
With the AirTag: she tracked it in real time, forced the airline to act, and got everything back.
$29. One coin-sized device. The difference between losing $3,200 and losing nothing.
Apple has sold hundreds of millions of AirTags. Most owners use them for one thing: finding keys. That's a $29 global tracking network being used like a $5 keychain beeper.
Here are 11 AirTag uses and hidden features most owners have never tried ๐งต
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Brilliant analysis & discussion from the Debrief #rugbydebriefITV with Dan & ROG, excellently mediated by Claire Thomas. Insightful analysis & debate - DB has certainly upped his game to compete with the rugby brain that is ROG! ๐๐
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Well said Pep, a true great of the wonderful game!
๐ฃ๏ธPep Guardiola: I had the privilege of coaching Leo Messi during his time at Barcelona, and I can say he is one of the greatest footballers Iโve ever worked with.
However, what Iโve witnessed in recent times has left me deeply disappointed. From my perspective, the controversies surrounding FIFA and Argentina have made it difficult for me to celebrate the game the way I once did. Football should be decided by fairness, transparency, and meritโnot by anything that creates the perception of favoritism.
For me, Cristiano Ronaldoโs achievements stand as an example of success built on hard work, consistency, and determination. Whether people agree or not, I admire a career earned through relentless effort without relying on controversy.
As a coach, I will never support anything that undermines the integrity of football. I would rather lose with dignity than win under a cloud of controversy. FIFA must continue striving to ensure that every team and every player competes on a level playing field, because the credibility of the sport depends on it.
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Richard Adams ๐ฌ๐ง๐ซ๐ท๐จ๐ญ๐บ๐ฆ retweeted
Out next week not spzl be humble
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Richard Adams ๐ฌ๐ง๐ซ๐ท๐จ๐ญ๐บ๐ฆ retweeted
as an unbiased American who's been closely folllowing the world cup, I don't think I've ever witnessed another sporting event that has felt this corrupt.
I have nothing against Messi or Argentina, but looking at the decisions that have been made by officials in Argentina's games, I find it really hard to believe that there is not some form of corruption going on behind the scenes.
Specifically with VAR, it seems so inconsistent when it is used and when it isn't, and so far in this world cup it seems like Argentina has benefited more than any other country from the use/neglect of VAR.
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