The earnings from the tournament in the US, Mexico and Canada will make it the most lucrative competition in the history of sport, even if some of the 48 competing countries say they are struggling to make ends meet

A World Cup that Fifa’s president, Gianni Infantino, billed at the draw last December as “the greatest event that humanity has ever seen” will certainly be the most lucrative competition in sporting history.

Fifa has spent the last few years upgrading its revenue projections, with the most recent financial report stating that the world governing body will make $13bn (£9.6bn) from the four-year cycle culminating in this summer’s tournament, almost $9bn of which will be brought in this year.

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John Terry’s journey into the internet pipeline is by no means an isolated case – what makes footballers so susceptible?

And so we ask ourselves: how did it come to this? Did we miss the signs? Were there red flags that went unheeded, cries for help that fell on closed ears, forks in the road not taken? Or ultimately, for all our best efforts, was it always going to end like this? Is it, in fact, possible that John Terry was a far-right sympathiser all along?

Yes, it’s been a chastening week for those who have been fighting Terry’s corner for more than a decade. Who steadfastly defended him against the racism charges, who accepted his explanation that he was simply repeating what Anton Ferdinand had been saying to him, who turned up at his trial in full kit, who lamented his failure to land the coaching jobs he so coveted, who right to the end just wanted to believe.

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There is no such thing as the Bond Dealers party, but there might as well be – the people who trade in UK debt exert a stranglehold over our politics

The days of two-party politics are over. When voters go to the polls in England next week, they will have five main contenders to choose from. In Scotland and Wales, the nationalists make it a six-strong race.

This fragmentation reflects the deep discontent with Labour and the Conservatives. One thing in common between the Greens and Reform UK is that they are each benefiting from a sense that radical parties are worth a punt because nothing could be worse than it is now.

Larry Elliott is a Guardian columnist

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Carol thinks Scandinavian-style sandwiches are unwieldy and messy, while Lucas wants to get the most from his fillings. You decide who’s the bread winner
• Find out how to get a disagreement settled or become a juror

Food should not fall out while you eat a sandwich, and your hands shouldn’t be sticky with sauce

Two slices of bread feels a bit excessive. It’s too much bread compared with the filling

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De onderhandelingen tussen Iran en de VS schieten voor geen meter op en daarom heeft Trump zich maar eens laten inlichten over nieuwe militaire opties in Iran om de zogenoemde 'deadlock' te breken. CENTCOM-commandant Brad Cooper heeft tijdens een Belangrijke Briefing een plan uiteengezet voor 'korte maar krachtige' aanvalsgolven op infrastruvtuur van Iran, zo schrijft Barak Ravid van Axios. Het belangrijkste is volgens Trump nog steeds Iran te bewegen tot het opgeven van de nuclaire ambities, iets wat voor het islamitische regime tot nog toe onbespreekbaar lijkt. En wat heb je aan onderhandelingen over het onbespreekbare? 

Van de brakke onderhandelingstafel is het maar een klein stukje vaart ter zee richting de Straat van Hormuz, die nog altijd dubbel geblokkeerd wordt. Toch lijkt er weer iets van beweging op komst, de Wall Street Journal schrijft: "Just weeks after President Trump declared the Strait of Hormuz “COMPLETELY OPEN AND READY FOR BUSINESS” only to see ship traffic stall, the administration is now asking other countries to join a new international coalition that would enable ships to navigate the waterway. The effort, called the “Maritime Freedom Construct,” was spelled out in an internal State Department cable sent to U.S. embassies on Tuesday that called on U.S. diplomats to press foreign governments into signing up." Ja zo gaat dat op z'n Trumpiaans: eerst doet hij alles wel even zelf, dan eist hij hulp, dan heeft-ie juist géén hulp nodig maar wordt er uiteindelijk toch weer hulp verwacht. Duidelijk als altijd! Gevolg van het uitblijven van die hulp is dat Trump om zich heen slaat. Gisteren al was de Duitse Bondskanselier Merz aan de beurt, nu heel Duitsland: "The United States is studying and reviewing the possible reduction of Troops in Germany, with a determination to be made over the next short period of time." Arm Duitsland.

En met zo'n heftig dreigement aan het adres van onze oosterburen is het natuurlijk hoog tijd om voor de 100e keer in dit conflict live te gaan.

Update 09:39 - Volgens Reuters is het plan voor een Hormuz-coalitie al goedgekeurd door MinBuz Marco Rubio. Nu nog door al die landen die op de een of andere manier moeten worden overgehaald deel te nemen aan de Maritime Freedom Construct.

Hoe moet de nieuwe Elvis dan zijn nieuwe Priscilla ontmoeten?

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CENTCOM houdt de moed er wel in

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Blokkade werkt uitstekend!

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Doneer hier

Can now use SANs for storage, and adds a local control plane and key management

Microsoft has given its Azure Local on-prem cloud a major makeover to make it fit for duty powering large-scale sovereign infrastructure.…

De natuurbrand op het militaire oefenterrein bij het Gelderse ’t Harde is de afgelopen nacht „helaas niet kleiner geworden”, meldt een woordvoerder van de veiligheidsregio…

"This WTF is in Matlab" almost feels like cheating. At one place I worked, somebody's job was struggling through a mountain of Matlab code and porting it into C. "This Matlab code looks like it was written by an alien," also doesn't really get much traction- all Matlab code looks like it was written by an alien. This falls into the realm of "Researchers use Matlab, researchers may be very smart about their domain, but generally don't know the first thing about writing maintainable code, because that's not their job."

But let's take a look at some MatLab Carl W found:

    try
        if (~isempty(fieldnames(bigStruct)) && isfield(bigStruct,'pathName'))
            [FileName, PathName] = uigetfile(bigStruct.pathName);
        else
            [FileName, PathName] = uigetfile(lastPath); %lastPath holds previous path
        end
    catch
        bigStruct = struct;
    end

The uigetfile function opens a file dialog box. When the user selects a file, FileName holds the filename, PathName holds the containing path. If the user doesn't select a valid file, or clicks "Cancel", both of those variables get set to 0. It's then up to the caller to check the return value and decide what happens next.

Which is not what happens here, obviously. The developer responsible seems to believe that it maybe throws an exception? And they can just catch it? Carl's best guess is that this is a "weird" way to catch the cancel button. But it does mean that FileName and PathName get set to 0, and those zeros propagate until something finally tries to open those files, at which point everything blows up and the user doesn't know why.