Saturday, July 04, 2026

Futbol - To Watch like an Egyptian . .. Antipodean fans are on the Bender

Where to Watch 🇦🇺 


The match finished 1-1 after 120 minutes and Egypt won 4-2 on penalties.


EGYPT ARE THROUGH 🇪🇬


Loss to Socceroos in penalty shootout Tears all around, especially from the coaching staff. Egypt, a football-mad nation, who have long been a regional power house have finally made some noise at a World Cup. The Pharaohs advance in the knockout stage for the first time ever


Socceroo fans chant whilst walking to the stadium, “Aussie boys, we’re on a bender, Donald Trump is a sex offender,” became a regular fixture throughout the march. At one point, fans followed it up with another jab, singing “We’re all getting deported”


World Cup facts: In the US, they call Deliveroo Socceroo, but in Australia, to avoid confusion with the national association rules football team, they call it Australian Rules DoorDash.


Why the World Cup has us waking up early to party with strangers They were just supposed to be somewhere to watch the match. World Cup viewing parties have ended up becoming so much more.


Destiny DownUnder


Socceroos success reflects modern Australia


The Socceroos’ World Cup dream continues, as an improved performance delivers plenty of confidence


Five years ago, Australia’s Olympic medal dream was dashed by Egypt. Socceroo Connor Metcalfe was there – and now he wants revenge.


Mohamed Salah recovers from hamstring for Egypt-Australia


Dallas Stadium will play host to Australia against Egypt, who are both searching for their first-ever FIFA World Cup knockout win in this last 32 clash.

Match News and Current Form

A drab 0-0 draw against Paraguay on matchday three was enough for Australia to reach the knockout phase as Group D runners-up (W1, D1, L1). The Socceroos will now play their third-ever World Cup knockout game, having been beaten in their two previous such appearances against the eventual champions in 2006 and 2022. Australia must improve offensively to break that winning duck though, having scored just two goals at this World Cup - their joint-lowest group-stage tally at the tournament since the 1974 edition. They have therefore unsurprisingly failed to find the net in their last two matches, but with only two goals conceded, Tony Popovic's men boasted one of the better defensive units in the group phase.

Egypt’s place in the last 32 was confirmed before kick-off on matchday three against Iran, but they then failed to clinch top spot in Group G, only drawing 1-1 despite taking a fifth-minute lead. This is the first time that the Pharaohs have advanced to the knockout phase after playing in a World Cup group stage, with their unbeaten run (W1, D2) their longest in the tournament’s history. Egypt netted five goals in their group, as many as they had scored in seven previous games at the finals. Turning that attacking improvement into wins has proved to be somewhat challenging though, with Hossam Hassan’s men having endured indifferent recent form (W3, D3, L3) leading into this encounter.

Head-to-Head History

These sides have one win each from two H2Hs, while Australia are unbeaten in their two previous World Cup matches against African opposition (W1, D1).


Hot Stats and Streaks

Only two of Australia’s last nine matches saw both teams score.

Australia kept a clean sheet in four of their last six World Cup games.

Egypt’s last five World Cup matches saw both teams score.

Five of Egypt’s last seven opening goals during normal time came inside 20 minutes.

Key Players to Watch and Missing Players

Harry Souttar’s last four international goals have all come in wins, but the last of those was in January 2024. Trézéguet has registered two goal contributions at this World Cup (G1, A1), with his header serving as the last goal of the game in Egypt’s victory over New Zealand.

Australian duo Jacob Italiano and Mathew Leckiehave been ruled out of the tournament. Egypt captain Mohamed Salah is a doubt, while Mohamed Abdelmonem and Ahmed Fatouh are also injury concerns. Mohanad Lasheen is serving a one-match suspension.



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Friday, July 03, 2026

Fear is the path to dark side

 “Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”  

~ Yoda


After 18 years, more than 900 episodes and countless dissections of topical cultural miscellany — be it a Taylor Swift album or “Middlemarch” — Slate’s “Culture Gabfest” will gab no more.

The pioneering weekly chat podcast, which premiered in February 2008 and helped define one of the then-nascent medium’s most durable formats, released its last episode on Wednesday. Stephen Metcalf, Julia Turner and Dana Stevens, the hosts for the entire run, had announced in June that they would end the show to focus on other projects.

Slate’s ‘Culture Gabfest’ Signs Off After 18 Years



On decision fatigue: "Why are you so tired? The answer has to do with how many times you’ve had to make a decision throughout the day.”...


Playwright Georgica Pettus has written a play called Truck, which is based on the excellent documentary Hands on a Hardbody. "I thought,...


What Online Platforms Can and Must Do to Help Mitigate Escalating Political Violence

Tech Policy: “Political violence is on the rise in the United States. 

According to a summary of key trends from the Princeton University Bridging Divides Initiative, this rise is reflected across a range of different statistics, from an increase in targeted violence and assassination attempts to an increase in the overall volume of threats and harassment against political figures at the local and national level. Unprecedented levels of threats against public officials, including federal judges, both on- and offline have coincided with a bout of assassination attempts and acts of targeted violence in the United States. 


A growing number of violent acts over the past decade have demonstrated a clear nexus to the perpetrators’ social media use, including the September assassination attempt against President Donald Trump, Charlie Kirk’s murder, and the arson attack against Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro. We are now entering the midterm election cycle with more serious threats emanating from the online systems than ever before, and with fewer protections than we’ve had in a decade..”


How Local News Reduces Loneliness

Washington Monthly – “One more reason rebuilding local news is vital. Academic research suggests that whether it’s an obituary, a puff piece, or news of a sale on tuna at the grocery, local news makes us feel less alone.  “When thinking about the harms caused by the collapse of local news, our minds might first turn to the practical: Less local news means more corruption, more government waste, and meager knowledge of candidates for local office. More recent research has also found that the local news crisis exacerbates polarization and misinformation. When community news contracts, the vacuum is filled by national media (more partisan) and social media (optimized for anger, misinformation-friendly).  That got Danny Hayes, a professor of political science at The George Washington University, wondering: If local news influences communal feelings, could it also influence personal feelings?

His recent study is stunning. He and researcher Anusha Trivedi compared levels of individual loneliness in comparable communities, some with robust local news and others without. They found that those with less community news had higher levels of loneliness, especially in rural areas. In a state that is half rural, a 10-point increase in the share of the state’s low-news counties leads to a 1.4-point increase in loneliness…”


 


I TOLD YOU SO, YOU F***KING FOOLS: ‘In the End I Was Right:’ How a Harvard Historian Helped Reagan Topple Soviet Communism.

Fortunately for America and for those under the jackboot of Soviet Communism, there were some who saw past the propaganda to the cruel truth. Among them was [Richard] Pipes, a historian of Russia who also served the U.S. government during the Ford and Reagan administrations.

After Pipes first visited the Soviet Union, in 1957, he wrote a colleague: “All the buildings on the streets were in a state of disrepair, the gateways crumbling, the façades patched up, the courtyards invisible for the mud which covered them. … Everything made the impression of being decayed or dead, even the people walking on the streets, somberly and paying no attention to each other. … I found it difficult to suppress the tears as I viewed about me the effects of 40 years of Soviet rule which had exacted such suffering from the population.”

Pipes later recalled it: “in Leningrad everyone looked gloomy and did not look at each other but seemed deep in their own thoughts. Because one could be executed under Stalin merely for an association with someone deemed guilty of counterrevolution, the only reasonable defense was to have nothing to do with other people.”

Daly quotes Pipes in 1996 summing up his own contribution: “Whereas the profession as a whole regarded the Soviet Union as an essentially popular and stable regime, I saw it as an unpopular and weak regime, which we ought to press very hard. That was very much a minority view, but I think that in the end I was right. Sound, stable popular regimes don’t collapse suddenly, as the Soviet Union did.”

The preference cascaded rather spectacularly back then, much to the chagrin of the DNC-MSM.

(Classical reference in headline.)

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Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax

 “All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, and that the purpose of government is to serve the nation—not to enrich an oligarchic clan.” 

~Anne Applebaum


Jacqui Lambie, Pauline Hanson and David Pocock have joined a push for the government to stop a legal threat against Rex Patrick, after bureaucrats unexpectedly escalated a transparency case to the federal court.


KPMG appoints chair who claimed leak allegations were ‘completely false’ and called senator’s actions ‘inappropriate’

Greens senator says appointment of Michael Ebeid ‘risks entrenching the very culture and leadership that need to change’


Trump and Vance Are Trying to Ruin the Fourth of July

Celebrating the ideals of the Declaration of Independence is hard if you don’t believe in them.



How Andy Burnham could raise £15bn – without a tax rise


There's one catch. He'd need to solve the UK’s biggest and least-discussed tax problem. Almost half of all small business corporation tax isn't being paid - and nobody knows why.


It’s the UK’s biggest and least discussed tax problem. There’s between £30bn and £48bn missing from each year’s small business tax bills. It’s been getting worse – and nobody knows why.

There’s no other issue where so much money is at stake but so little time is spent discussing it. It’s almost never mentioned by politicians, and HMRC devotes very limited resources to it. HMRC’s random audit programme checks only 330 small companies each year.

HMRC made spectacular progress on the large business corporation tax gap in the 2000s. If they made the same progress on the small business corporation tax gap, it would raise around £15bn. That revenue could be used to reduce the main rate of corporation tax down to 21%, benefiting all businesses. Or it could cover, for example, a major expansion in defence spending. And corporation tax is only part of the small business tax gap.

We shouldn’t just focus on numbers – there’s a fairness problem too. I receive emails every week from honest businesspeople furious that they’re undercut by competitors who don’t pay their tax. It’s an unfair playing field, tilted against the people doing the right thing.

This should be a cause tailor-made for a politician looking to show they stand for both fairness and business. It’s pro-enterprise and pro-fairness at the same time – and would be applauded by all the small businesses currently being ripped off by their less scrupulous competitors.

The first step is easy, uncontroversial and cheap. Push HMRC to properly resource and expand its random audit programme. Until we know what’s going on, we can’t fix it. And tens of billions of pounds will continue to vanish every year.


Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax

ProPublica – The Secret IRS Files: “In 2007, Jeff Bezos, then a multibillionaire and now the world’s richest man, did not pay a penny in federal income taxes. He achieved the feat again in 2011. In 2018, Tesla founder Elon Musk, the second-richest person in the world, also paid no federal income taxes. 

Michael Bloomberg managed to do the same in recent years. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn did it twice. George Soros paid no federal income tax three years in a row. ProPublica has obtained a vast trove of Internal Revenue Service data on the tax returns of thousands of the nation’s wealthiest people, covering more than 15 years. 

The data provides an unprecedented look inside the financial lives of America’s titans, including Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch and Mark Zuckerberg. It shows not just their income and taxes, but also their investments, stock trades, gambling winnings and even the results of audits. 

Taken together, it demolishes the cornerstone myth of the American tax system: that everyone pays their fair share and the richest Americans pay the most. 

The IRS records show that the wealthiest can — perfectly legally — pay income taxes that are only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions, if not billions, their fortunes grow each year. Many Americans live paycheck to paycheck, amassing little wealth and paying the federal government a percentage of their income that rises if they earn more. 

In recent years, the median American household earned about $70,000 annually and paid 14% in federal taxes. The highest income tax rate, 37%, kicked in this year, for couples, on earnings above $628,300. The confidential tax records obtained by ProPublica show that the ultrarich effectively sidestep this system…”



Don’t Let Trump’s Lawyers Bury Jack Smith’s Report

Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University via LinkedIn – “Three years ago this month, the Justice Department indicted Donald Trump under the Espionage Act for concealing and refusing to return classified documents—the first time a president had been charged with a crime, let alone one so grave. But President Trump hasn’t had to face trial, and he hasn’t had to fully account to the public for his actions, either.  There are a few reasons for this. 

The Justice Department abandoned the criminal case against Trump after he returned to the White House in 2025, citing a long-standing policy against the prosecution of sitting presidents. Trump’s personal lawyers have worked closely with the Justice Department, now staffed by Trump’s former personal lawyers, to bury the official report about the criminal investigation into Trump’s conduct.

 Meanwhile, Judge Aileen Cannon in Florida has effectively prohibited Jack Smith, the special counsel who wrote the report, from talking about the report or even testifying about it to Congress. In The New York Times this morning, I explain why the suppression of Smith’s report is so disturbing and why the report’s disclosure is so essential:

[I]f presidents are to be immune from prosecution while in office, it’s all the more important that Congress and the public have access to the information that would empower them to hold the president accountable in other ways…Mr. Smith investigated Mr. Trump for conduct that appears to have entailed an astonishing betrayal of the public’s trust as well as the nation’s security. 

Legislators and ordinary citizens should have the opportunity to read the report for themselves. It is incoherent to immunize the president from prosecution on the theory that he can be held accountable through the political process—and then to deny Congress and the public information that would help them do so.

As I explain in the essay, which you can read here [Note – beSpacific provided free access], the Knight Institute is suing for the release of Smith’s report, asserting that the public has a right of access to the report under the First Amendment and the common law. Judge Cannon rejected our arguments, but we’ve challenged her ruling and a federal appeals court in Miami will hear oral argument in the case in the fall…”


Opinion | In an alarming move, the White House tried to force journalists to reveal sources



White House Secretly Swayed Board Meant to Stop Civil Service Politicization

The New York Times – no paywall: “Behind the scenes, the Trump White House went to extensive lengths to advance its theory of executive power, potentially giving the president remarkable leeway to install loyalists at nearly every echelon of government. 

In the tiny corner of the legal world that follows such things, the March ruling crashed down like a thunderbolt. It was issued by an obscure government agency called the Merit Systems Protection Board, whose purpose is to protect federal workers from unfair firings. But the decision backed President Trump’s assertion that he has broad authority to reshape the executive branch as he wants. 

The ruling broke with decades of precedent, accepting the White House’s argument that Article II of the Constitution gives Mr. Trump the power to dismiss officials without due process. By that theory, he can essentially erase civil service protections, even for public servants — in this case, immigration judges — whose engagement with the law often puts them at odds with Mr. Trump’s political aims. 

The board’s decision has no direct bearing on cases that the Supreme Court is expected to rule on this week, which could establish how far the president’s power over the civil service extends. But it defanged the most effective method for federal workers to challenge their dismissals, and if upheld on appeal could undercut protections for broad swaths of the civil service. And it came after the Trump administration leveled a concerted pressure campaign on the board in public and private, according to people with knowledge of the process. The private push — little different from calling a federal judge and telling him how to rule — was led by a White House aide who for years has been intently focused on making it easier to quickly fire federal workers. 

The story of how the ruling came about illustrates the intense effort by the Trump White House to advance its theory of the unitary executive, the belief among many conservatives that the president has sweeping authority over the entire executive branch, and can direct the actions of employees, including federal prosecutors and immigration judges, who handle sensitive matters of law.

 “Knowing that it was made with influence from the White House means the decision was not based on positions of law,” said Nicholas Bednar, a professor of law at the University of Minnesota who studies the federal civil service. The decision, he said, “reflects the same ideological considerations that is driving the evisceration of the federal civil service.”

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