• Document shows Fifa staff were involved in project

• Fifa was prepared to sideline member associations

Gianni Infantino held talks about rebranding the ill-fated European breakaway competition the “Fifa Super League”, with negotiations going as far as the term sheet for an agreement that would have changed the face of European football.

The term sheet, whose full contents can be revealed for the first time, is dated October 2020 and proposes renaming any new competition under Fifa’s branding. It outlines the extent to which Infantino’s administration were implicated in a scheme that caused widespread revulsion among fans and excluded clubs in April 2021. It also reveals that Fifa was prepared to sideline its member associations in pushing plans to cut back the number of international windows and outlines how global football’s governing body would have been given special governance and political rights with a “golden share”.

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• Forward becomes most expensive African player

• Club are in positive talks with Vinícius Júnior

Real Madrid have agreed a club-record fee of €135m (£115.7m) with RB Leipzig for Yan Diomande and are confident of warding off Arsenal’s interest in Vinícius Júnior after offering an improved contract to the Brazil forward.

After several weeks of negotiations that saw Paris Saint-Germain pull out of the race, the deal for Diomande – the 19-year-old who joined the German side from Leganés last summer and starred for Côte d’Ivoire at the World Cup – was finally struck on Wednesday afternoon. It is understood that Madrid will pay an initial €125m plus another €10m in add-ons, a total that would eclipse the fee the Spanish side paid Borussia Dortmund to sign Jude Bellingham in 2023, believed to have been worth up to €134m including add-ons.

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Federation leaders are massing forces at the gates, but years after the first proposed selling off of its commercial legacy and the Qatar World Cup

In recent decades the city of Salé, just across the river from Rabat on Morocco’s Atlantic coast, has undergone a remarkable transformation. At the start of this century it was a gritty working-class area, whose old town was still weathered enough to serve as a body double for the Somali capital Mogadishu in the film Black Hawk Down. But in recent decades, under the country’s autocratic government, the area has been transformed beyond measure, and largely beyond control.

The population has trebled in the space of 40 years. Slums have been cleared, often forcibly, to make way for grand megaprojects: a new tram system, luxury tourist spaces, a sparkling marina, a blue-chip business park called Technopolis, and – since last July – the African headquarters of Fifa. And in a way, this hub of disruption and avarice, unshakeable volition and rampant capitalism, feels like the perfect location from which a besieged warlord might choose to make his desperate last stand.

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Obama-appointed judge seemed unmoved by Trump attorneys’ arguments in case also naming Murdoch

A federal judge in Florida seemed skeptical of arguments from Donald Trump’s legal team on Wednesday over whether the court should allow a $10bn defamation lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal to move forward.

Trump sued the Journal and the News Corp founder Rupert Murdoch over a July 2025 article about a “bawdy” letter reportedly from Trump that was included in a 2003 birthday book for disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. Trump has denied authoring or signing the letter, and his attorneys have argued that the Journal published the story despite having been told it was false.

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Renascent is the 28th album by the English post-punk band the Durutti Column, released on 31 July 2026. In 2010, Vini Reilly suffered the first of three strokes that left him unable to play guitar. The slow process of learning to master his instrument again has culminated in The Durutti Column's first original studio album since A Paean to Wilson 16 years prior.

The Durutti Column's Factory years To trace the roots of The Durutti Column, who return with their first studio album in 16 years, you have to go back to the mid-'70s, when Manchester's punk scene first coalesced... Pitchfork Review The rebirth of the Durutti Column suggests Reilly's catastrophic imagination is just as potent as his world-building one. The band's cult, long celebrated by Johnny Marr and John Frusciante, has recently ballooned to the point it can soundtrack fashion shows and, apparently, inspire a Harry Styles album. Amigos Em Portugal A collaboration between Manchester's Durutti Column and Portuguese writer and journalist Miguel Esteves Cardoso resulted in this 1983 instrumental. Ian Curtis didn't have a chance': the Durutti Column on departed friends, Factory Records and fun with Morrissey Legend has it that Joy Division helped cut and glue the sandpaper sheets on to the famous original cover of The Return of the Durutti Column. Were you involved? VR: I walked into Factory Records to find Joy Division gluing them all. It was mortifying, so I escaped as quickly as I could. BM: Vini denies this, but Hooky [Peter Hook] always says that Vini quickly stopped gluing them so he didn't damage his nails. Joy Division had no cash, so they were paid to do it, which they did while watching porno movies

3:45 song by Iris Dement with an important message for our times. I just love this song and its message, and I thought I'd share it with you, my MF friends <3

Cloudflare has open-sourced Cloudflare OS, an Apache 2.0-licensed platform that lets organizations build AI agents, apps, and workflows using curated company data and tools within isolated, governed environments. Despite the name, it is not a traditional operating system but a framework for securely managing organizational AI workloads. Phoronix reports: Cloudflare OS is already used internally at Cloudflare and is described in today's announcement as:
"Cloudflare OS starts with a conversation in your browser, like many other AI tools. What makes it different is that each conversation is grounded in the context and skills your organization has curated. Give your workspace a goal, and it can draw on that knowledge and work with the tools and data your organization already uses to achieve it.

Cloudflare OS combines three parts:
- An agent workspace grounded in context and skills your company curates, with an isolated runtime where agents can write and run code.
- A new security and governance framework for safe access to internal data and services.
- A platform for personal, modifiable apps that people can build, share, and continue changing.

What begins as a conversation can become a doc, an app, or a workflow that continues doing the work." You can learn more at os.cloudflare.app.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Een trieste rel in Bulgarije, wat natuurlijk sowieso al een behoorlijk trieste plek is. Een groep Joodse tieners (afkomstig uit Italië, Israël en Nederland) was er op groepsreis als onderdeel van een 'internationaal trainingsprogramma voor jeugdleiders' (volgens het AD) en kwam daar dit tegen. Een groep siegheilende neonazi's die het hotel urenlang omsingelde. Het avondprogramma ging niet door, de kiddo's moesten binnen blijven, zover mogelijk bij de ramen vandaan. De politie werd ingeschakeld en stuurde de groep weg, de politie vertrok weer en de nazi's kwamen terug. Misschien moet de organisatie in kwestie voortaan maar op zomerkamp in Amsterdam gaan, daar is het tenminste veilig. TOCH?!

Het is historisch droog in Nederland, de rivieren staan laag. Waterschappen, die regionaal maatregelen treffen voor de eerlijke verdeling van water, willen afspraken op Europees niveau over de eerlijkere verdeling van schaars rivierwater. NRC reist de Rijn af op zoek naar antwoord op de vraag: wat gebeurt er allemaal met het rivierwater voor het in Nederland komt?