Vesper

Rogers is a winger though, not a CF

Video Shows Aid Workers Killed in Gaza Under Gunfire Barrage, With Ambulance Lights On The U.N. has said Israel killed the workers. The video appears to contradict Israel’s version of events, which said the vehicles were “advancing suspiciously” without headlights or emergency signals. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/world/middleeast/gaza-israel-aid-workers-deaths-video.html A video, discovered on the cellphone of a paramedic who was found along with 14 other aid workers in a mass grave in Gaza in late March, shows that the ambulances and fire truck that they were traveling in were clearly marked and had their emergency signal lights on when Israeli troops hit them with a barrage of gunfire. Officials from the Palestine Red Crescent Society said in a news conference on Friday at the United Nations moderated by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies that they had presented the nearly seven-minute recording, which was obtained by The New York Times, to the U.N. Security Council. An Israeli military spokesman, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, said earlier this week that Israeli forces did not “randomly attack” an ambulance, but that several vehicles “were identified advancing suspiciously” without headlights or emergency signals toward Israeli troops, prompting them to shoot. Colonel Shoshani said earlier in the week that nine of those killed were Palestinian militants. Israel did not respond to a request for comment on the video in time for the first publication of this article, but on Saturday, it issued a statement to The Times saying that the episode was “under thorough examination.” “All claims, including the documentation circulating about the incident, will be thoroughly and deeply examined to understand the sequence of events and the handling of the situation,” it said. The Times obtained the video from a senior diplomat at the United Nations who asked not to be identified to be able to share sensitive information. The Times verified the location and timing of the video, which was taken in the southern city of Rafah early on March 23. Filmed from what appears to be the front interior of a moving vehicle, it shows a convoy of ambulances and a fire truck, clearly marked, with headlights and flashing lights turned on, driving south on a road to the north of Rafah in the early morning. The first rays of sun can be seen, and birds are chirping. The convoy stops when it encounters a vehicle that had veered onto the side of the road — one ambulance had been sent earlier to aid wounded civilians and had come under attack. The new rescue vehicles detour to the side of the road. Rescue workers, at least two of whom can be seen wearing uniforms, are seen exiting a fire truck and an ambulance marked with the emblem of the Red Crescent and approaching the ambulance derailed to the side. Then, sounds of intense gunfire break out. A barrage of gunshots is seen and heard in the video hitting the convoy. The camera shakes, the video goes dark. But the audio continues for five minutes, and the rat-a-tat of gunfire does not stop. A man says in Arabic that there are Israelis present. The paramedic filming is heard on the video reciting, over and over, the “shahada,” or a Muslim declaration of faith, which people recite when facing death. “There is no God but God, Muhammad is his messenger,” the paramedic is heard saying. He asks God for forgiveness and says he knows he is going to die. “Forgive me, mother. This is the path I chose — to help people,” he said. “Allahu akbar,” God is great, he says. In the backdrop, a commotion of voices from distraught aid workers and soldiers shouting commands in Hebrew can be heard. It is not clear what they are saying. The Palestine Red Crescent Society spokeswoman, Nebal Farsakh, said in an interview from the West Bank city of Ramallah that the paramedic who filmed the video was later found with a bullet in his head in the mass grave. His name has not been disclosed yet because he has relatives living in Gaza concerned about Israeli retaliation, the U.N. diplomat said. At the news conference, held at the U.N. headquarters, the president of the Palestine Red Crescent Society, Dr. Younis Al-Khatib, and his deputy, Marwan Jilani, told reporters that the evidence the society has collected — including the video and audio from the episode, and forensic examination of the bodies — contradicted Israel’s version of events. The deaths of the aid workers, who went missing on March 23, has drawn international scrutiny and condemnation in recent days. The U.N. and the Palestine Red Crescent said the aid workers were not carrying weapons and posed no threat. “Their bodies have been targeted from a very close range,” said Dr. Khatib, adding that Israel did not provide information on the missing medics’ whereabouts for days. “They knew exactly where they were because they killed them,” he said. “Their colleagues were in agony, their families were in agony. They kept us for eight days in the dark.” It took five days after the rescue vehicles came under attack and fell silent for the United Nations and Red Crescent to negotiate with the Israeli military for safe passage to search for the missing people. On Sunday, rescue teams found 15 bodies, most in a shallow mass grave along with their crushed ambulances and a vehicle marked with the U.N. logo. The area where the convoy stops in the video was captured in a satellite image a few hours later and analyzed by The Times. At that point, the five ambulances and the fire truck had been moved off the road and clustered together. Two days later, a new satellite image of the area showed the vehicles were apparently buried. Next to disturbed earth are three Israeli military bulldozers and an excavator. Additionally, bulldozers erected earthen barriers on the road in both directions from the mass grave. One member of the Palestinian Red Crescent is still missing, and Israel has not said whether he is detained or has been killed, Dr. Khatib said. Dr. Ahmad Dhair, a forensic doctor who examined some of the bodies in Gaza’s Nasser hospital, said four out of the five aid workers he examined were killed by multiple gunshots, including wounds to the head, torso and joints. One paramedic employee of the Red Crescent in the convoy was detained and then released by the Israeli military and provided a witness account of Israeli military shooting at the ambulances, the U.N. and Red Crescent Society said. Dylan Winder, the representative of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies to the U.N., called the incident an outrage and said it represented the single deadliest attack on Red Cross and Red Crescent Society workers anywhere in the world since 2017. Volker Türk, the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, told the council that an independent investigation must be conducted, and that the episode raises “further concerns over the commission of war crimes by the Israeli military.”

There Are No Adults in the Room A brief note on the inherent media problem with covering galactically stupid policies. https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/there-are-no-adults-in-the-room On Thursday, as the stock market nosedived from the Trump administration’s stupid, unthinking, destructive, error-ridden tariff policies, a respected reporter from a well-known media outlet pinged me for an interview. The journalist was interested in the roles that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick might have played in the formulation of Trump’s foreign economic policy. As we started talking, I realized that the reporter and I were starting from rather different premises. The reporter was thinking about the story as how one would cover a significant policy pronouncement in a normal administration: Who is the president listening to on policy? What are the possible faultlines within the administration? Who are the key power brokers? What was their decision-making process? And I was thinking: there was no process. There are no power brokers. On questions of trade, there’s Donald Trump’s whims, his collection of clown car enablers, and maybe an intern who plugs some things into ChatGPT. That’s pretty much it. I know why both of us were thinking the way we were. For reporters, looking for power brokers makes sense even when even when the policies themselves seem inexplicable. Bad policy outcomes can nonetheless be explained by rational actors pursuing their interests. Maybe it’s the result of powerful interest groups pushing their narrow interests. On occasion, bureaucratic politics are responsible. Sometimes bad policies are the result of powerful ideas that percolate within particular groups — you know, ideas like “risk assessment is bad” or “democracy is overrated.” This is slightly more unusual but it’s certainly conceivable. These narrative are familiar to any journalist, or anyone who has taken Political Science 101. And in their own way they are cognitively comforting. They suggest that even when the government enacts strange or counterproductive policies, there is an underlying logic and structure to what is going on. Furthermore, causal stories like interest group pressure or groupthink also suggest how bad decisions might get corrected. If, say, financial markets start to nosedive, then policymakers will react to such negative feedback with policy corrections. So I get where the reporter is coming from. It is soothing in its rationality. As someone who has studied Donald Trump’s decision-making style at great length, however, I come at questions about Trump’s second-term advisors from a different perspective. The key to understanding Trump’s second term is to understand three basic premises: Trump has eliminated all executive branch guardrails; Trump has appointed only sycophants to serve him this time around; Trump’s policy instincts are the most immature, retrograde opinions out there. Think this is an exaggeration? Let’s take a gander at Natalie Allison, Jeff Stein, Cat Zakrzewski and Michael Birnbaum’s Washington Post story, “Inside President Trump’s whirlwind decision to blow up global trade.” It’s pretty damning: The very existence of this story is due to some staffers covering their ass to reporters. But make no mistake, it is solid evidence of U.S. foreign economic policy being executed by presidential whim without any functional policymaking process. Paul Krugman explains why the stupidity matters: Does this mean Trump will not listen to anyone? No it does not. But he is listening to the Laura Loomers of the world far more than the Scott Bessents. Media rumors are now percolating that Bessent wants out, “because in the last few days he’s really hurting his own credibility and history in the markets.” The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World disagrees: Bessent hurt his own credibility by believing, against all evidence to the contrary, that he would have been able to guide Trump towards less counterproductive policy positions. This further confirms something that Drezner’s World has been articulating for quite some time: Wall Street types do not understand politics and can rationalize with the best of them. For those readers not on Wall Street, let me summarize the current state of affairs as best as possible. Donald Trump is president. There are no adults in the room to constrain him. We therefore live in uncertain times that will remain uncertain for an extended period of time.

Russell Brand's rape charges expose the devil's bargain between MAGA and "Christian" celebrities There's no depravity the religious right won't overlook — as long as a famous person validates their politics https://www.salon.com/2025/04/05/russell-brands-rape-charges-expose-the-devils-bargain-between-maga-and-christian-celebrities/ On Friday, just shy of a year since Russell Brand was showily baptized in the River Thames, the UK's Metropolitian Police charged the British comedian-turned-MAGA-influencer with one count of rape, one count of oral rape, two counts of sexual assault and one count of indecent exposure. At the time of his 2024 conversion, Brand declared that he had repented of his past and that he would "acknowledge that I am in a battle against myself." A few days before this week's charges, he told Sean Hannity of Fox News that he had "surrendered to a higher purpose." So, for people outside the MAGA bubble, it's a little strange to hear Brand react to the charges by rejecting accountability, instead denying the charges with conspiracy theories so outlandish it's hard to buy that he believes any of it. "We are very fortunate, in a way, to live in a time when there's so little trust in the British government," Brand asserted in a response video on X. "We know the law has become a kind of weapon to be used against people, institutions and sometimes entire nations that will not accept and tolerate levels of corruption that are unprecedented." Even while he insisted that he now lives in "the light of the Lord," Brand insinuated that he's the victim of a corrupt conspiracy to frame him. Christianity emphasizes redemption, making it an attractive framework for a celebrity needing to rehab a bad image. The likelier explanation for the charges is that there's just a lot of evidence against Brand. A collaboration between The Times, The Sunday Times, and Channel 4, conducted over years, produced exhaustively documented allegations of rape and other sexual abuses. They spoke with hundreds of sources, including four accusers. They collected medical records, texts, emails, and internal documents from employers, all showing a pattern of alleged sexual abuse that is often frightening in its violence. The report came out in September 2023. Shortly thereafter, Brand was kicked off YouTube. He then swiftly joined the MAGA-affiliated Rumble network. In the next few months, he moved to the U.S. and got baptized, fully rebranding himself as a right-wing Christian influencer. This timeline doesn't seem to have given Brand's new MAGA audience a single moment's doubt that he might have ulterior motives. On the contrary, his fans encouraged the conspiracy theory that paints him as a political prisoner and the charges as "a political prosecution," as Charlie Kirk complained. "We know you’re innocent, Russell and this is clearly all politically motivated," insisted one fan. "They're willing to sacrifice Russell though because it will make others stay silent," said another. My favorite, though, might be the guy who replied, " It wasn't until you decided to clean up your life and find faith and peace that they decided you must be removed." This, of course, gets the timeline backwards. The accusations have been surfacing since 2006, when Australian singer Dannii Minogue first spoke out about Brand being a "vile predator." The big Times exposé came out in late 2023, but Brand didn't "find faith" until the spring of 2024. Not like any of the other excuses for Brand make sense. The MAGA followers talk a lot about how "they" are doing this to Brand, but it's forever unclear who "they" are. The journalists? Police? Four alleged victims? Hundreds of witnesses? Crown prosecutors? But MAGA would rather believe that hundreds of "they" are conspiring to take down a has-been comedian than accept the likelier explanation: Brand found Jesus just in time to get a new income stream and source of attention and validation, one he would have never settled for when he still had access to mainstream audiences. Religion professor Bradley Onishi, host of the "Spirit and Power" podcast, pointed out to Salon that there is "a long history of the evangelical subculture and the conservative Christian subcultures wanting to find mainstream legitimacy" by grabbing onto any celebrities they can claim are one of them. In the 90s and early 2000s, Onishi noted, evangelicals hyped everyone from U2 and Creed to Jessica Simpson and Katy Perry as "crossover Christian figures" who could sell the larger world on the idea that Christianity is hip and cool. Brand, however, represents a disturbing twist to this saga: the willingness, in the era of Donald Trump, of right-wing Christians to scrape the absolute bottom of the barrel to get this validation. Not that many of them will engage with the actual allegations against Brand, lest their view of him as a godly man get disturbed, but frankly, the details are shocking even in the #MeToo era. One alleged victim said she was 16 when she first had a sexual relationship with the 31-year-old Brand. She says he orally raped her so violently that she started to choke, only escaping by punching him the stomach. Others report that Brand threatened them if they spoke out, a likelier explanation for the delayed reporting than a shadowy conspiracy by the all-powerful "they" against Brand. Brand belongs to a long line of celebrities who, because of scandal or simply falling out of fashion, have discovered the cash and ego-fluffing benefits of converting to the Church of MAGA. Roseanne Barr's TV comeback got derailed because of racist online ranting, so nowadays she spends her time on Tucker Carlson's show talking about her "conversation going with God." Carlson himself was a MAGA figurehead in good standing, but since losing his Fox News gig, he's taken to talking about demon possession and other topics that perform well in the social media feeds of the Christian right. Tattoo superstar Kat Von D got her Sephora makeup line canceled after anti-vaccination statements and marrying a dude with a swastika tattoo. Now she gets glowing write-ups in right-wing media about her conversion to Christianity. Mark Wahlberg got a whole lot louder about being a devout Catholic shortly after stories about his arrests for hate crimes resurfaced. Christianity emphasizes redemption, making it an attractive framework for a celebrity needing to rehab a bad image. In theory, however, there is supposed to be repentance before redemption. But this is the era of Trumpian Christianity, so skipping the part where you say you're sorry is optional. After all, Trump is treated not just as a fellow Christian, but something closer to a savior figure by the religious right. He has never said he's sorry to the victims of his fraud, or to the people he's lied about, or to E. Jean Carroll, who a civil jury found him liable for sexually assaulting. On the contrary, Trump's response to people he's harmed is to escalate the abuse if they speak out against him, which is why Carroll won a second defamation suit against him. Being a bully is admired in the MAGA movement. In MAGA Christianity, actual repentance would be dismissed as "woke." No wonder it was the perfect landing spot for Russell Brand.

every game today was a close run thing

I meant his injury record I can see why we bought him

most shocking of all the perma injured NO idea how or why insanely frustrating

NONE of these are good enough Levi Colwill Wesley Fofana Benoît Badiashile Axel Disasi Bashir Humphreys Alfie Gilchrist maybe ok (barely) as back-ups Tosin Adarabioyo Trevoh Chalobah

disasterclass buy I said it from day one as soon as he horrifically broke his leg with Leicester I permanently removed him from all my lists

he is not a 'conservative' he is a race-baiting, ultra grifting psychopathic narcissist with a god complex he is the least intellectually curious President the US has ever had, he hates deep, deliberative thought and knowledge he is staggering lazy, staggeringly short attention-spanned he is 100 per cent transactional (as long as he thinks the transaction will benefit him) in a carnival barker sort of way he has no core political philosophy, 'conservative' or otherwise, other than TRUMP FIRST, TRUMP LAST, TRUMP ALWAYS, and has chosen hate, division, pain, retribution, perpetual victimhood, grievance, and chaos as his chief tools of conduct

no that was basically all on us we stupidly loaned him three staright years to Atletico so he put down roots in Madrid and then the year before his transfer year Marina foolishly said he would renew with us, so we turned down insane (think it was like £90m or so) money from Real that window, so we were forced to sell him for shit money the next summer that lead to us meeting Oblak's crazy 90m plus release clause, but he told us to sod off, so we panic-bought shit Kepa

Forest have zero wins all 78 EPL matches in which they trailed by at least 2 goals at one point in the match

and unless Penders comes good have fuckall to show for it (maybe maybe Petro also comes good, at least as a back-up) and that figure doesnt even count the 10s of millions paid out in salaries

counting inflation adjusted prices for Kepa and the others we have now spent £217m on keepers in April 2025 quid, starting with Kepa and going onward insanity

massive tactical blunder by Nuno Emery teams often rip back 5's apart

it is madness, I had been screaming BUY HIM for years

Forest look a hot mess they barely have played a back 5 all season they are being ripped apart on the left (their right) where Morata is

2 nil Malen

Morato burnt like toast no clue why Forest are playing a back 5

1 nil Rogers

Matz Sels so far this season ; Most Clean Sheets in the English Premier League. Joint-most Clean Sheets in Europe's Top-5 Leagues. Joint-most Clean Sheets by a Nottingham Forest goalkeeper in a single Premier League campaign. If he wins the Golden Glove this season, he will be the first goalkeeper in 20 years to win this award outside the Big Six. Nottingham Forest qualified for the FA Cup semifinal. Sels was their hero in Round 2, Round 3, and the Quarterfinal, saving at least one penalty in each shootout.

great save by Sels on Maatsen

lol presenters singing the praises of Disasi, said he has been a rock since he joined Villa