During one of his son’s hockey games, Nick Paumgarten watches as his eight-year-old is hit from behind, only to rise to his feet and use his stick to hit the side of his opponent’s head. Alongside his concern for his son’s head and neck, Paumgarten, who has written about his own hockey-related concussions, rapidly processes the outcomes of the exchange: a game-deciding penalty, his own reflexive rationalization, and the evaluation of other parents who “held me in some way responsible, as both father and coach, for the violence and loss of self-control.” Paumgarten’s essay is rich with such moments of parent-coach double-consciousness, and sensitive to the numerous ways, some of them awful, in which those two identities intrude upon each other.

That Sunday, it wasn’t yet 8 A.M. when a Rye player shoved James from behind into the boards. James went down awkwardly and stayed prone a moment, then leaped up and, with an implausible ferocity, cross-checked the other kid in the ear. The Rye boy collapsed to the ice, and the other kids poured in and began grappling with one another, while parents shouted and pointed. Soon there was a pile of mites, with the two referees pulling players off and flinging them aside like puppies. Through the windows, you could see that the sun had risen over the Long Island Sound. I thought of my son’s fellow second graders back in the city, likely still asleep or watching cartoons in their pajamas or getting dressed for church or whatever the unrinked got up to on weekend mornings, but here at Playland my boy had instigated a munchkin brawl.

TOKYO — Anyone betting that inflation risks are fading should look at the US Treasury market. The sharp selloff in Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS) suggests the world’s biggest bond market is growing less convinced that price pressures are contained. Investors are rethinking the inflation outlook, with implications for Federal Reserve policy, real rates and stock […]

The post Bond markets aren’t buying the inflation-is-tamed fairy tale appeared first on Asia Times.

The European Investment Bank and BNP Paribas have agreed a €700 million guarantee programme designed to expand financing for European companies producing equipment for electricity grids.

The agreement targets a growing bottleneck in Europe’s energy system: manufacturers of transformers, cables, switchgear and other components are being asked to increase production while utilities and governments accelerate investment in transmission and distribution networks.

Under the deal, the EIB will provide up to €350 million in counter-guarantees, while BNP Paribas will commit an equivalent amount. The resulting €700 million portfolio of bank guarantees is expected to support companies investing in additional production capacity and supply contracts.

The European Investment Bank said the arrangement could stimulate as much as €2.8 billion in investment in the real economy.

The initiative is backed by the EU’s InvestEU programme and forms part of the EIB’s €1.5 billion Pan-EU Power Grid package. Guarantees are particularly important for infrastructure suppliers because large electricity projects often require manufacturers to provide financial guarantees before receiving contracts.

Those commitments can consume bank credit lines that companies might otherwise use to build factories, purchase machinery or finance working capital.

By sharing the risk with BNP Paribas, the EIB intends to increase the volume of guarantees available without requiring manufacturers to commit equivalent amounts of their own financing capacity.

The programme arrives as grid investment becomes one of the central constraints on European energy policy.

The EU is simultaneously attempting to expand renewable generation, electrify transport and industry, increase cross-border electricity trading and reduce dependence on imported fossil fuels.

All require additional transmission and distribution capacity. EU Today reported earlier this year that the EIB had approved almost €2 billion for clean energy and grid projects as part of a broader €10 billion financing package.

The latest BNP Paribas agreement concentrates specifically on the industrial supply chain needed to build those networks.

Grid investment is increasingly influenced by security concerns as well as electricity demand.

EU Today reported last week that Lithuania is designing part of the Harmony Link infrastructure to withstand drones, sabotage and vehicle attacks near the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. Such requirements increase the cost and complexity of new electricity infrastructure while demand for conventional grid equipment is already rising.

European manufacturers face lengthy order books for some high-voltage equipment, particularly large transformers and specialised cables. Supply constraints can delay renewable projects and interconnectors even when planning permission and financing are available.

The EIB says its guarantee programme is intended to give manufacturers greater financial capacity to respond. The arrangement follows a similar partnership between the bank and BNP Paribas covering wind-energy manufacturing.

In February 2025, the two institutions agreed a €1 billion guarantee portfolio intended to support investment in the European wind industry. The EIB has subsequently expanded its focus from generation equipment to the networks required to transport electricity.

In 2025, the EIB Group invested €33 billion in energy projects worldwide, including €11.6 billion in grids and storage, according to the institution.

European energy policy has increasingly recognised that adding generating capacity without expanding grids can create congestion, delays and periods in which renewable electricity cannot reach consumers.

Political disagreements remain over how new infrastructure should be planned and financed.

In June, EU Today reported that member states had pushed back against stronger Brussels control over cross-border grid planning, preferring to preserve a significant role for national authorities.

Financing institutions are meanwhile moving ahead with programmes intended to expand the underlying industrial capacity.

For manufacturers, the EIB–BNP Paribas scheme does not provide €2.8 billion of direct public spending. Instead, public guarantees are being used to increase the volume of private financing available, with the EIB assuming part of the risk.

The distinction is central to InvestEU, which uses EU budget guarantees and EIB financing to attract additional private capital.

Europe’s electricity transition is increasingly dependent on this less visible part of the energy system. New wind farms, solar installations, nuclear reactors and industrial electrification projects ultimately require the same infrastructure: sufficient cables, substations, transformers and transmission capacity to move electricity from producers to users.

Rafael Grossi has turned a UN technical body into Washington’s political weapon, and the visa scandal in Vienna has laid bare the cynicism of the Western bloc. From Technical Body to Political Weapon The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was created as an impartial technical body meant to guarantee the peaceful use of atomic energy. […]

Durante o Portugal Football Summit foi divulgado o novo livro do algarvio Tiago Guadalupe, funcionário da Câmara Municipal de Loulé e colonista no jornal A Bola.

“Capitão João Matos – Liderar, vencer e inspirar” é a mais recente obra de Tiago Guadalupe e será apresentada a 9 de outubro, na Cidade do Futebol, numa iniciativa da Federação Portuguesa de Futebol. 

Com a chancela Portugal Legends, a obra nasce de um projeto desenvolvido pela editora 21Books e pela agência whynote.pt, em parceria oficial com a Decathlon e a União das Freguesias de Carnaxide e Queijas.

Mais do que uma biografia desportiva, o livro parte do percurso de João Matos para propor uma reflexão sobre liderança pelo exemplo, disciplina, consistência, resiliência, comunicação, gestão de equipas, egos e conflitos, tomada de decisão, capacidade de adaptação, inovação, equilíbrio pessoal e legado, procurando transportar as experiências e aprendizagens construídas no desporto de alto rendimento para outros contextos da vida pessoal e profissional.

Ao longo de mais de duas décadas ao mais alto nível, João Matos construiu uma carreira marcada pela longevidade, consistência e liderança. Mais de 40 títulos, mais de 200 internacionalizações, um Campeonato do Mundo e dois Campeonatos da Europa ao serviço de Portugal, além de três títulos europeus pelo Sporting CP, fazem parte de um percurso que o tornou uma referência do futsal português e internacional.

Contudo, são sobretudo as experiências e aprendizagens construídas ao longo desse caminho que constituem o centro da obra. O objetivo passa por transportar princípios provenientes do desporto de alto rendimento para outros contextos, tornando o livro relevante para atletas e treinadores, mas também para gestores, professores, estudantes, empreendedores, dirigentes e líderes de equipas.

“Capitão João Matos – Liderar, vencer e inspirar” reúne ainda diferentes perspetivas sobre o jogador e capitão. Pedro Proença assina a introdução, Frederico Varandas o prefácio e Jorge Braz o posfácio, juntando-se ao livro contributos e reflexões de personalidades como Nuno Dias, Sebastián Coates, Nani, Rui Miguel Nabeiro e Pedro Dias, entre outras.

Frederico Varandas resume uma das ideias centrais da obra ao afirmar que «o seu legado não se mede apenas no que conquistou, mas sobretudo no que inspirou». Pedro Proença considera que João Matos deixa «o Futsal muito melhor do que aquele que encontrou», enquanto Jorge Braz reconhece: «O João ajudou-me a ser melhor treinador.»

O livro inclui igualmente o capítulo “Cocriar para inspirar”, com Tiago Valadas, Diretor de Marketing da Decathlon Portugal, dedicado à relação entre João Matos e a marca e à evolução dessa ligação para um processo de cocriação.

As reflexões reunidas na obra procuram mostrar que muitas das questões enfrentadas no desporto são comuns a organizações e equipas de diferentes áreas: como construir uma cultura vencedora, liderar sem depender de um cargo, reagir ao erro, gerir conflitos, manter a exigência depois do sucesso e preparar o final de um ciclo.

Para Tiago Guadalupe, é precisamente na influência exercida sobre os outros que se encontra uma das principais mensagens do livro:

«Os grandes atletas deixam resultados. Os grandes capitães deixam uma cultura. Os grandes líderes deixam pessoas melhores.»

“Capitão João Matos – Liderar, vencer e inspirar” já está disponível para venda através da editora 21Books: https://www.21books.pt/livros-1/p/capito-joo-matos 

Some 2,500 years ago, Babylon trained the sons of its wealthiest families without a single weekly hour devoted to the gods. There was no textbook that worked as a Bible either. Religion was everywhere and in no particular subject, spread through sign lists, writing exercises and arithmetic drills. A study published in the journal Iraq […]

Thousands gathered at Baiturrahman Grand Mosque in Banda Aceh on August 15, 2026, to commemorate 21 years of peace between Indonesia and the separatist Free Aceh Movement, or GAM. Some participants raised GAM’s red, black and white crescent-star flag and chanted “Free Aceh,” while others lowered Indonesia’s national flag and replaced it with the former […]

The post Floods, fury and new calls for independence in Aceh appeared first on Asia Times.

Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities has announced the discovery of a Roman-period tomb whose architecture, according to the country’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, has no exact parallel elsewhere in the cemetery where it was found. The tomb sits at Bir al-Shaghala, a site in the Dakhla Oasis, about 750 kilometers (roughly 465 miles) southwest […]

An 18-year-old woman has been gang raped and beaten by up to ten different men, many of them with a Syrian background, in the Dutch city of Dordrecht. Although the rape occurred in May 2025, the suspects are only now being arrested. In response to the rape, political leader Geert Wilders wrote that the Netherlands also has Islamic grooming gangs and called for all the perpetrators to be removed from the country along with their families.

Six suspects have now been arrested, aged 20 to 23. During the incident, the girl, who lived in a residential group home, was driven to two different parking lots and raped by several men, some of whom filmed the assault and shared it on Snapchat. Police say the woman was humiliated and beaten. 

“A bruise on the cheek, a tooth through the lip and a swelling on the knee,” described one source. “It is a very serious criminal offense where all boundaries have been crossed and the victim has been treated very disrespectfully. As if she were an object that everyone could use.”

‘The worst nightmare’ – Somali migrant Mohammed H. on trial for raping and nearly strangling Dutch woman to death in Amsterdam

The incident has already attracted attention from politicians in the Netherlands, including PVV leader Geert Wilders.

“Teen victim of gang rape by Syrians. Raped by ten boys at different parking lots. The Netherlands also has Islamic grooming gangs. The Netherlands needs an unprecedented cleanup. All that scum out. With their families. No mercy,” he wrote on X.

Tiener slachtoffer groepsverkrachting Syriërs. Verkracht door tien jongens op verschillende parkeerplaatsen.

Ook Nederland heeft islamitische grooming gangs.
Nederland heeft een ongekend grote schoonmaak nodig. Al dat tuig eruit. Met hun familie.

Geen genade. #PVV #Wilders https://t.co/qNVmRZHmcF

— Geert Wilders (@geertwilderspvv) September 24, 2026

The first introductory court hearing took place on Sept. 23, 2026. Only 23-year-old S.S., described by the prosecutor as having played a leading role, and identified in court reporting as Syrian-born, was required to appear. Of the other five suspects, two of them are S.S.’s brother and cousin, who were arrested that Wednesday morning. 

Moroccan asylum seeker arrested for brutal assault and attempted rape of 19-year-old Dutch woman in Rotterdam, mayor describes ‘terrible crime’

The investigation by the Rotterdam police Sexual Offences Team is still open, and prosecutors believe as many as ten men were involved.

According to the prosecution, the young woman accepted a lift to a train station from three strangers but they never brought her there. She was taken first to one parking lot, where S.S. raped her, and then to a second parking lot where, prosecutors say other men also raped her.

The Public Prosecution Service also told the court that the suspects “discussed and coordinated their statements in detail.” Even so, the accounts given by S.S. diverge from those of the others. His lawyer said that was because he did not want to inform against his brother and cousin.

‘I was strangled, very long and very hard!’ — Dutch victim storms out of court after Somali migrant escapes attempted murder charge

S.S. himself told the judges the girl got into the car of her own accord. 

“We didn’t force her to do anything,” he told police.

He is requesting to be released while his court trial is pending.

“I don’t want to ruin my future. If I stay stuck, all I’m going to be in debt,” he said.

The court refused. Judges said the images, the statements, and conversations overheard by police were enough to keep him in custody for now. He is due back for another introductory hearing in early December. 

Remarkably, there was already a case in 2025 involving gang rape in the Netherlands involving ten suspects and a 15-year-old girl, mostly Syrians. Geert Wilders had also called attention to the case, writing: “50 percent of all suspects of sexual offenses are of foreign origin. Only the PVV will throw that criminal scum out of the country and immediately implement an asylum stop.”

‘I felt like it’ — Syrian asylum seekers accused of gang-raping student and assaulting 15-year-old girl in Maastricht

The post ‘The Netherlands also has Islamic grooming gangs’ – 10 men gang raped and beat 18-year-old girl, mostly Syrians arrested appeared first on Remix News.

Roughly 315,000 years ago, a group of early humans lived in what is now Morocco. Their remains, unearthed at a site called Jebel Irhoud, are the oldest fossils ever attributed to our species, Homo sapiens. Now, an international team of researchers has digitally reconstructed the face of one of these individuals, building a composite skull […]

L’Europa è un’area di trasformazione industriale con scarse risorse energetiche e minerarie proprie. Senza un approvvigionamento esterno è condannata a diventare terzo mondo.

Ma questa strada suicida è esattamente quella presa. Perché?

Due interpretazioni possibili.

La prima è l’integrale asservimento agli USA. Una compagine di venduti ai vertici UE+UK avrebbe accondisceso alle provocazioni sul fronte russo sfociate nella guerra, all’incendio americano del Medio Oriente, all’appropriazione brigantesca delle risorse petrolifere del Venezuela, sacrificando il vecchio continente.

I media a gettone avrebbero indorato la pillola canticchiando il solito tormentone sulla “difesa dei diritti umani” per giustificare qualunque barbarie.

La seconda è che la guerra sul fronte russo sia stata non tollerata, ma proprio pianificata, con la prospettiva di dare una spallata alla Russia, destabilizzarne il regime, ricondurla al periodo Eltsin, a stazione di rifornimento e terra di conquista per imprenditori senza scrupoli. Un rapido collasso economico, via sanzioni, avrebbe trasformato i ricchi giacimenti russi in disponibilità perenni e incondizionate.

Ma quale che sia l’interpretazione giusta, entrambi gli scenari portano allo stesso esito. Quanto più grave la situazione, quanto più pesante l’indebitamento, quanto più stretto il vicolo cieco in cui ci si è cacciati, tanto più ai dirigenti europei un ritorno sui propri passi appare impossibile. Come il giocatore d’azzardo che oramai si è giocato la macchina, la casa e un rene, uscire dal gioco sancirebbe semplicemente la rovina e dunque non gli resta che giocarsi anche l’altro rene e con ciò la vita in un’ultima scommessa del tutto per tutto. E la scommessa è la guerra, e il suo azzardo è che essa resti guerra di logoramento, un po’ ibrida, un po’ per procura, comunque convenzionale. In una guerra convenzionale a basso voltaggio e lunga durata l’UE+UK sperano di contare su maggiori risorse di uomini e denari.

Così, quel quadro che sembra folle, controintuitivo e perciò ancora implausibile a molti, il quadro di una guerra diretta con la Russia, sembra essere oramai l’unica direzione cui le oligarchie UE possono condurci.

Andrea Zhok
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L'articolo Il suicidio energetico della UE proviene da Blondet & Friends.

TOKYO — The bond vigilantes are back — and now they’re patrolling every major debt market at once. As deficits balloon, spending runs unchecked and oil prices spike, investors are reasserting control over markets that once seemed shielded from shocks and sending yields skyrocketing. The revolt spans the US, Japan, Europe and beyond as a […]

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Duncan is a longtime friend of Max Daly, and a drug addict caught up in “cuckooing,” where dealers take over people’s homes as drug bases in exchange for product. Daly offers a sympathetic portrait of Duncan’s spiralling life, while opening a window onto a bizarre world where the most vulnerable exploit each other—and sometimes even form bonds.

Over the 2000s and 2010s, wave after wave of gangs fanned out from Britain’s drug supply hubs – London, Liverpool and Birmingham – to set up shop in smaller towns and cities across the country. They took over the homes of drug users and young women who had been groomed by older male gang members. As early as 2008 Suffolk constabulary reported that more than a third of Class A drug dealers arrested in Suffolk were under 21, and the majority were from London. (Before this period, most crack and heroin dealers in towns and smaller cities were “user-dealers”, addicted heroin users in their 30s or older, who were not as “professionalised” as the big city drug gangs.) Gangs often used sex workers, who targeted male tenants and moved in, bringing the young dealers with them. Community safety teams, who rescued 80 tenants in London in 2005, were the first to call the tactic “cuckooing”.

For a brief time, Sacha Jafri was both the creator of the world’s largest painting and one of the world’s most expensive living artists, after his 17,000‑square‑foot work The Journey of Humanity was theatrically “sold” for $62 million at a Dubai charity auction. The buyer, French “crypto billionaire” André Abdoune, never paid a cent and, given his history as a serial fraudster, almost certainly never will—meaning no money ever reached the charities that were promised the proceeds. So what was the real story: a giant painting, or a giant scam?

Many of Jafri’s other claims do not stand up to scrutiny. He is often touted as an artist whose work sells in the millions, but publicly available commercial auction records are more modest. His most expensive painting before The Journey Of Humanity was a piece called Dance of the Midnight Samurai, which sold in 2019 for approximately $70,000. The previous year, another work, Dreamscape II, went unsold at two auctions, before eventually being acquired for $893. Newspaper articles document purchases by Kevin Spacey and Guy Ritchie, but there are no reports of sales to Bill Gates, Leonardo DiCaprio, Barack Obama or Bill Clinton. No pictures exist of their red-printed hands.

I had never heard of the delightfully named Hudsonian godwit before this piece—yet, given their achievements, they deserve global fame. These slight, mudflat-loving shorebirds hold the record for the longest nonstop flight, clocking journeys of seven thousand miles or more that one scientist deems “technically impossible.” Rivka Galchen follows researchers from Patagonian mudflats to Alaskan bogs as they try to understand the biology behind these incredible flights. Along the way, she even gets to hold one of our little celebrities, an “otherworldly and wondrous” experience.

Migratory shorebirds are usually not a person’s first bird crush. They lack the supernatural aura of the resplendent quetzal, and they don’t go in for outlandish mating displays like that of the prairie chicken. As the Princeton University biology professor and shorebird-lover David Wilcove put it, migratory shorebirds can give an impression of being “little brown guys, buzzing around in the mud, not too big and not too small, and, whether one is a stint or a phalarope or a knot or a godwit, they’re just kind of there.” And yet, Wilcove told me, they are a birder’s kind of bird. Once people get to know them, they tend to fall in love.

Some discoveries impress because of their size or value, while others do so because of the exact place where they appear. The one announced by Sapienza University of Rome belongs to the second group. At the Pyrgi archaeological site, on the coast of Lazio, archaeologists have found a fragment of an antefix bearing the face […]

I’m not a fan of improv. I’ve even walked out of a class before—being told to pretend to give birth just wasn’t for me. But its popularity was once never in doubt: people were all too willing to shell out hard‑earned cash to watch performers fumble through impromptu sketches. Nowadays, the form has lost its shine, and Dennis M. Hogan traces whether it still has a place in today’s culture. The inspired title alone means this is a read you should say “yes” to.

During the boom years of the late 2000s and 2010s, improv persuaded many people that it was not just a wacky gimmick but, as I believed, an art in itself. The rise of stars like the improv-trained Steve Carell, Tina Fey, and Amy Poehler convinced casting directors and network executives that improvisers had graduated from sideshows to being bankable talents in their own rights. Performances were packed with newbies and aficionados alike. Major theaters added classes and facilities to meet growing demand, allowing many improvisers who never made it big to eke out livings as teachers and theater staff. The gospel of improv spread to those far outside the comedy world, from self-improvement seekers hoping to level up their interpersonal abilities to corporate suits eager to take advantage of the latest team-building and soft skill-optimization fad.

This story moves chronologically through a marriage that begins to unravel—with fatal consequences. The victim is Dan Markel, the ex-husband of Wendi Adelson, but it’s the involvement of Wendi’s domineering mother, Donna, and her brother, Charlie, that leads to his tragic end. Katherine Laidlaw shows how there were far more than two people in this marriage—and far more than two lives destroyed when it fell apart.

Harvey was nominally the breadwinner, but Donna ruled the family. She had strict ideas about how her children should live, pushing them to earn advanced degrees and build prestigious careers. Rob became a doctor, and Charlie became a periodontist, eventually buying his father’s dental practice. Donna obsessed, too, about her children’s love lives, scrolling through online dating profiles and sending them lists of promising candidates. When Rob started seeing a woman who wasn’t Jewish, Donna interfered so aggressively that he eventually broke it off and briefly married someone else. (He has since married his original non-Jewish girlfriend.) At first, Donna was thrilled that her daughter was seeing Dan, then a lawyer at a boutique firm. She was less thrilled when he left to pursue academia, a path that she felt paid poorly and lacked cachet.

Daniel Shailer embeds with the tiny separatist group “Shetland First,” whose members believe the Shetland Islands were never legitimately ceded to Scotland. Its 83‑year‑old leader, Stuart Hill—shipwreck survivor, serial litigant, self‑proclaimed weather‑controller—is such a compelling eccentric that Shailer ends up as absorbed in Hill’s own story as in the broader currents of populism on these remote isles.

Previously, Hill has focused on relatively esoteric points of history and legalese. Now, on the advice of his chief campaign advisor, ChatGPT, he is meeting people where they are: should council tax go up while official salaries get bumped? Is it fair to live in fuel poverty at the footsteps of Britain’s largest onshore wind farm?

‘There are all these injustices, and once you read the history, you can see a basic injustice,’ Hill says. ‘Everybody seems to be kind of comfortable with it, but at the same time there’s a basic undercurrent of dissatisfaction.’

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