Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Israeli government pushes for Hamas to abandon weapons first and claims US deadline imminent
Progress in the Gaza peace plan has stalled over disagreements on how Hamas should be disarmed, with Israel threatening to go back to full-scale war if the condition is not carried out quickly.
The second phase of the US-brokered ceasefire, which Washington declared had begun in January, was meant to involve Hamas disarming, Israeli forces withdrawing, and a Palestinian interim administration moving into Gaza backed by a Palestinian police force and an international stabilisation force (ISF).
Continue reading...The sex offender could exploit these masters of the universe because, despite their privilege, they still felt short-changed by life
One of the things that has been frequently puzzled over as the effluent of the Epstein story flows on, is how a college dropout who thought it was cool to do typos managed to persuade the world’s most powerful into his lair. What, precisely, was the nature of his “genius”? Was it blackmail? Was it the social pyramid scheme of using one big name to reel in another? Nothing has come close to explaining it until, with the latest crop of details from the Epstein files, something has become suddenly clear: that it wasn’t the trafficked girls and women who Jeffrey Epstein groomed. The man’s real talent, if we want to call it that, was in the grooming of his cohort of associates.
This isn’t to say, of course, that the men and occasional woman who threw in their lot with a man we must straight-facedly refer to as “the dead paedophile” weren’t culpable. Nonetheless, if you study the huge amount of Epstein-related material, from the New York Times’s deep dive into his finances to the vast cache of correspondence contained in the files, a picture emerges of a man who did the kind of number on his peers that you would more commonly see directed at victims. While multiple survivor testimonies indicate that Epstein regarded the girls and women he trafficked as of such low consequence he didn’t even need to bother to groom them – per Virginia Giuffre’s account, Epstein raped her the first time they met – all of his resources, via a variety of tactics, went into capturing the allegiances of powerful men.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
Continue reading...Goalhanger’s Tony Pastor says Serie A has ‘disappeared’
‘You have to embrace this idea of fragmentation’
Football “has eaten almost every sport worldwide” thanks to its dominance of TV and digital markets, according to the head of the leading podcast production company Goalhanger.
Tony Pastor, CEO of the studio behind the Rest is Football among other podcasts, said that broadcasters were struggling to get value for money for sports rights and that competitions should “embrace fragmentation” to reach audiences where they are.
Continue reading...The leadership shown by four Premier League players in highlighting racism last weekend must be replicated, and addressing representation is part of that
Recent incidents involving Sir Jim Ratcliffe and Vinícius Júnior have offered a new layer to the question Kick It Out is often asked when discrimination occurs: is it getting worse or are more people reporting it?
The question has been posed again this week after four Premier League players highlighted racist abuse sent to them on social media after matches last weekend.
Continue reading...