🥵☀️ Looks like England are already struggling with the climate in Florida in their training sessions. Expecting the heat to be a huge topic of conversation among pundits and analysts throughout this World Cup.

ENGLAND IS CHARGING £384,020 A YEAR TO LOOK AFTER A VULNERABLE CHILD. PRIVATE EQUITY IS POCKETING THE DIFFERENCE. The @FT just reported that providers charge the state an average of £384,020 per child per year in residential care. That is multiple times the cost of sending a child to Eton. It is more than the cost of a young offenders institution. Local authority spending on children in residential care nearly doubled from £1.6 billion in 2020 to £3.1 billion in 2024. The number of children in those settings rose by only 10%. So no, this is not a demand story. The National Audit Office called it a "market failure." Private equity owners pocket the difference because the incentive is to extract as much profit as possible from state payments, and that often comes at the expense of quality. The 15 biggest private providers make an average 23% profit margin. 83% of children's homes are now owned by companies including private equity groups. MPs are calling it "outrageous profiteering." Councils are being slowly bankrupted. Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson (@bphillipsonMP) promised she will "go further and harder" on profit caps if providers don't stop. That was November 2024. The changes have not materialized. Meanwhile the kids are still there. Still vulnerable. Still worth £384,020 a year to someone's portfolio. Britain managed to build a welfare state after a world war. It cannot apparently stop hedge funds charging £15,000 a week to house a traumatised child. Sources: @FT | @NAOorguk | @BBCNews | Local Government Association | Institute for Government |

Some notes on my work ethic: -I last voted in Parliament on 18 March, so I haven’t done my job for ten weeks. -I’ve never held any face-to-face constituency surgeries, despite apparently having £5 million to spend on security. -I refuse to do interviews or face press scrutiny of any sort. -when I was in the European Parliament I had the 4th worst attendance record out of 748 MEPs. -although I did manage to turn up to vote AGAINST plans to tackle Russian misinformation. -I was on the Fisheries Committee but I only turned up to ONE out of 42 meetings. -but I will of course be taking my £73,000 EU pension. Vote Reform, get lazy, grifting, self-serving sacks of shit.

Farage, in business: Metal Trader : Sacked for losing client money and repeated drunkenness. Farage Limited: Commodities Firm liquidated leaving £80,00 unpaid tax. Baxter Laois Ltd / Farage Gin: In massive debt, shutting down. .. and he wants to run the UK Economy, does he? .

The United States is causing a terrible humanitarian crisis in Cuba and no one here seems to care. The blockade has left the national grid with zero reserves. The consequences are severe: 1) More than 96,000 surgeries have been postponed nationwide, including over 11,000 procedures for children. Critical therapies, including radiotherapy for 16,000 cancer patients and essential dialysis, are severely disrupted by the blackouts. 2) Rolling blackouts knock out life-support machines and incubators. Doctors have been forced to manually operate ventilators for patients during prolonged outages when backup generators fail or run out of diesel. 3) Cuba's once-vaunted infant mortality rate rose to 10 deaths per 1,000 live births by 2025, and public health experts from Stanford University warn that the 2026 oil blockade is making the crisis "exponentially more severe". Malnourishment among pregnant women has led to a surge in dangerously underweight newborns. 4) Domestic pharmaceutical manufacturing has largely halted because production plants lack diesel to operate. Pharmacies are empty, leaving patients without basic antibiotics, painkillers, or chronic disease medications. 5) Roughly 1 million people now rely on water trucks for drinking water. However, fuel shortages mean these trucks can rarely run. Food supplies are rotting due to a complete lack of refrigeration during 20-hour daily blackouts. 6) Mounds of garbage are piling up in the streets of Havana because waste collection vehicles lack fuel. Inhabitants have begun burning trash piles, creating an acrid, hazardous smog across urban areas. 7) The combination of intense Caribbean heat, a total lack of fans or air conditioning, and dark, hot living conditions is causing severe mental health deterioration and physical exhaustion across the population. The US is overseeing the Gazafication of Cuba. People are dying and suffering through no fault of their own. Meanwhile, Cuba does not present a threat of any kind to the US. This is a crime and we must oppose it. People are dying for no reason in our name.

🚨🎙️ Thierry Henry on FIFA turning the World Cup Final into a Super Bowl circus: “Football is losing its soul little by little. A World Cup Final is supposed to be the purest form of football, pressure, intensity, emotion, tactics, suffering, history. Not a halftime concert made for social media clips and celebrities in vip seats. When you play at the highest level, your body is programmed around rhythm. Fifteen minutes. That’s what every footballer in the world has known since childhood. Your muscles stay warm, your concentration stays locked in, your emotions stay alive. Now imagine players sitting there for 25 minutes during the biggest game of their lives because FIFA wants a bigger TV spectacle. People think footballers are robots. They are not. Momentum is real. If one team is dominating before halftime, that long break can completely kill the intensity of the game. It changes everything tactically and mentally. You cool down physically, you lose adrenaline, and then people expect players to immediately return playing at 100 miles per hour. And let’s be honest here, this is not about football, it’s about money and entertainment. They want football to become the Super Bowl. More commercials, more performances, more headlines, more celebrities. But football became the biggest sport in the world without all of that. The game itself was enough. The dangerous part is that if the final quality drops or players get injured because of these changes, fans will attack the players first. They will say certain stars disappeared in the second half or failed under pressure, without understanding the conditions were completely changed for a television show. For me, the World Cup Final should feel sacred. Ninety minutes of war between the best players on earth. Not a pause long enough for the world to forget the match is even happening.”

Tory MP James Cleverly suggesting 2 years isn’t long enough to turn the Tory Party around but the exact same duration *is* more than enough for Labour to turn around a country crippled by 14 years of a government he played a role in #bbclaurak

Given the frequency with which interviewers quiz Zack Polanski about his boob enlargement hypnotherapy episode, I expect they will soon start grilling Kemi Badenoch about the time she illegally hacked a Labour MP's website

Latest data on small boat arrivals from Home Office as of 1 May, 2026 1 January 2026 to 30 April 2026 = 6,416 people That’s 42% down on same period in 2025 gov.uk/government/publicatio…

US troops are not in Germany to protect Germany. They’re there because the US needs bases to conduct operations beyond the North American continent. If Trump withdraws them, he will harm the United States, not Germany. It’s absurd how many Americans fail to grasp this.

I remember when Trump tried to strong arm Zelenskyy to investigate Joe Biden for what his sons are doing in Kazakhstan.

Suella is literally making up numbers for the vibes. The 250,000 foreign students she is talking about are actually EU nationals with Pre-Settled status who were already living here before Brexit. They have a legal right to loans.  Actual international students from the rest of the world get ZERO taxpayer funding. They pay triple fees and an NHS surcharge upfront just to be here. Reform is banning a group that is already disqualified. Total rage-bait. #FactCheck #UKPolitics

I know Facebook probably has the data that says it's working for them, but their boosting of AI slop and engagement accounts to the degree that it's almost entirely destroyed the site's original purpose of keeping in touch with friends & family is making the whole place unusable.

Do you remember when Elon Musk and Trump fired thousands of employees to save money for the government, and then Trump wasted two billion dollars every day on the war in Iran

You probably won't see this BBC correction unless a lot of people amplify it. Nick Robinson allowed Farage to claim net migration under Labour had only come down because of "an exodus of people leaving" (implying British people fleeing). In fact, it was due to fewer immigrants.

Absolutely horrific night in Ukraine last night - 44 ballistic missiles and 659 drones fired from Russia. Deaths in Kyiv, Odessa and Dnipro. Not even bothering to hide the fact that it is residential areas under attack. Barely on the news outside Ukraine. And @JDVance says he is proud that USA has pulled its support so the aggressor can keep aggressing. Disgusting. But Europe has to do even more now

🔴 EXPOSED: How Viktor Orbán Bankrolled the Network Around Reform UK As Hungary’s Prime Minister suffers a historic electoral defeat, Byline Times maps out how his government’s funding arm channelled hundreds of thousands of pounds into organisations at the heart of Britain’s hard right. bylinetimes.com/2026/04/14/e…

Argentina IMF debt grows 36% in one year. cnnchile.com/mundo/deuda-de-…

I have not seen a single mainstream media outlet give this the attention it deserves. Israel blew up an entire Lebanese town, an ancient place. It should be headline news. There’s footage of it happening. Imagine this was your town, and you saw every building blown up by a terrorist army to prevent you from ever returning. You would at the very least expect wall to wall coverage. Instead it passes without a word. It’s not the only town Israel has blown up. And sadly it probably won’t be the last.