Kevin

In 1941, a Spaniard walked into the British embassy in Madrid and offered to spy on the Nazis. The British turned him down. So he went to the Germans instead, pretended to be a loyal fascist, and got hired as a German spy. His plan was to lie to them for the rest of the war. It worked better than anyone could have imagined. His name was Juan Pujol García. Before the war he had tried his hand at running a chicken farm and a movie theater. He had no spy training. What he had was a deep hatred of both fascism and communism after the Spanish Civil War, and an incredible imagination. The Germans gave him a codename, invisible ink, money, and orders to go to Britain and recruit spies. He didn't go to Britain. He went to Lisbon, Portugal, and made everything up. Using a tourist guidebook, maps, magazines, newsreels, and a British railway timetable from the library, he wrote long, detailed reports about life in England. Military movements. Morale. Ports. He'd never been there. He made mistakes. He didn't understand British money. He once reported that dockworkers in Glasgow would do anything for a liter of wine. The Germans loved him anyway. Then British codebreakers reading German messages noticed something strange. The Germans were hunting for a convoy that didn't exist, based on a report from some agent in Britain they'd never heard of. The British went looking for this mystery spy. They found Pujol. In 1942 they finally took him on and brought him to London. Now he had real help. MI5 gave him the codename Garbo, after the actress, because they thought he was the greatest actor in the world. Together with his British handler, Pujol built a fake spy network for the Germans. It eventually had 27 imaginary agents. Each had a name, a personality, a job, and a backstory. A Welsh nationalist. A Venezuelan student. A Greek sailor. Some of them recruited their own imaginary sub-agents. When they needed to explain why one agent had gone quiet, they killed him off. They even put a fake obituary in a Liverpool newspaper. The Germans reportedly paid a pension to his widow. Who also didn't exist. Then came D-Day. Hours before the landings, the British let Pujol send a message warning the Germans that the invasion was coming in Normandy. It was timed so it would arrive too late to matter, but it made him look brilliant. Three days later he sent the most important message of his career. Normandy was a trick, he said. The real invasion was still coming, at Calais, led by a huge army under General Patton. That army was fake too. But the Germans believed him. German forces that could have been rushed to Normandy were held back near Calais for weeks, waiting for an attack that never came. The Germans were so grateful they awarded him the Iron Cross. A few months later, King George VI made him a Member of the Order of the British Empire. He's one of the only people known to have been decorated by both sides of the war. After the war, afraid of revenge from surviving Nazis, he faked his own death from malaria in Africa and disappeared to Venezuela, where he lived quietly running a shop. For decades the world thought he was dead. In 1984, a British writer tracked him down. Pujol came back to Normandy for the 40th anniversary of D-Day and met veterans who had landed on the beaches. Some of them thanked him.

you're hired

Real Madrid and Elche players wore shirts in support of Ceuta before their game on Tuesday night. Ibrahima Konate, Vinicius Jr and Kylian Mbappe appeared to roll up the t-shirts to obscure the message. Ceuta is a Spanish exclave on the north African coast. At least 72,000 migrants crossed from Morocco into Ceuta on 30 and 31 July and although most have returned, as many as 5,000 remain in makeshift camps. There have recently been protests in Spain about the government's handling of the situation.

After September 11, more than a million tons of the World Trade Center was loaded onto barges and shipped to a garbage dump on Staten Island. Then hundreds of men and women stood at conveyor belts for ten months and picked through every ounce of it by hand. They were looking for people. The place is called Fresh Kills. For fifty years it was the largest landfill in the world. It took its last barge of household trash on March 22, 2001, and shut down for good. New York was finally done with it. Five and a half months later, at two o'clock in the morning on September 12, the landfill's director got a phone call at home. He had just walked in the door. Two trucks were at the gate. They were carrying pieces of the World Trade Center. He drove back. The man who ran the dump would later say, without any drama, that if Fresh Kills had not been closed, this could never have happened. There would have been no room. The garbage would have been in the way. The site was empty. So that is where the towers went. Here is how it worked. At Ground Zero, cranes and grapplers lifted the debris into dump trucks. The trucks drove to a pier on the Hudson. There, the load went onto barges, six hundred tons at a time. The barges were towed down the harbor, past the Statue of Liberty, to Staten Island. More than fifteen hundred barges made the trip. At Fresh Kills, sanitation workers unloaded them onto a hill. And then the sorting began. The debris was mechanically screened into three sizes. Chunks bigger than eight inches. Two to eight inches. A quarter inch to two inches. Anything smaller than a quarter of an inch, the size of a fingernail, fell through the last sieve. Everything above that size went onto a conveyor belt. And along the belts stood the detectives. NYPD. FBI. Port Authority police. Medical examiners. Dressed head to toe in white Tyvek suits, in masks, in gloves, on a hill that stank of jet fuel and pulverized concrete and things nobody wanted to name. Looking down at the belt, hour after hour, as the towers rolled past them a fist-sized chunk at a time. When they saw something, they reached in and took it, and placed it in a white bucket at their feet. A wedding ring. A photo ID. A set of keys. A shoe. A piece of a person. The white buckets went to a tent that served as a morgue. The volume was beyond comprehension. In mid-September the operation was processing 1,750 tons of debris a day. By mid-October, 17,500 tons a day. Ten times more. Round the clock. The 200-acre hill was declared a federal crime scene and stayed one for ten months. A retired NYPD detective later wrote down what a shift looked like, because almost nobody outside knew it existed. You wake at 3 a.m. You get a giant coffee. You drive two hours in the dark from Orange County, through New Jersey, to Staten Island. You park at the bottom of a hill that looks like the end of the world. You put on the white suit. You go to your belt. You stand there. You look. Then you drive two hours home and do it again tomorrow. Sanitation workers pulled sixteen-hour shifts, seven days a week. One of them, a supervisor named Barry Asnes, said afterward what kept him there. We were attacked on our own soil, in the city where I was born. This was personal. The operation did not stop for weather. It did not stop for Christmas. It ran until July 2002. Ten months. By the end, the men and women on that hill had recovered thousands of human remains. Tens of thousands of personal effects. Wallets, badges, wedding bands, photographs, all cleaned and catalogued and returned to families who had nothing else to bury. When they were finished, the remaining material was placed in a 48-acre section of the landfill, a mound two hundred and twenty-five feet high, and covered. It is a park now. Many of the men and women who stood on that hill have lung disease. Asthma. Cancer. PTSD. The air they were breathing, eight and ten and sixteen hours a day, was full of the towers. Some of them have died of it. Almost nobody knows their names. Almost nobody knows the place. Mention Fresh Kills and 9/11 in the same sentence, the retired detective wrote, and most people will have no idea what you are talking about. Here is what you should know. Two thousand seven hundred and fifty-three people were murdered in those towers. Only about six in ten have ever been identified. Every one of those identifications came out of a white bucket. Every wedding ring returned to a widow. Every badge returned to a firehouse. Every fragment of bone matched to a name and buried with a headstone instead of a question mark. Somebody in a white suit, standing at a belt on a garbage dump at four in the morning, reached into the World Trade Center as it rolled past, and picked that person up, and put them in a bucket, and sent them home. They did that for ten months. Nobody applauded on the hill. There was nobody to watch. They did it anyway. 🇺🇸

Interesting. Thoughts?

Midwest Radio, the last two minutes of commentary before & after the final whistle. #Mayo #AllIreland

The match officials for @FIFAWorldCup match 97 have been appointed. 🤝

BREAKING: The English FA are considering an appeal against Jarrel Quansah's red card against Mexico 🚨 Tuchel said after the game he was furious at the officials who took charge of the game and the two VAR decisions which saw Quansah sent off and Mexico awarded a penalty.

Madame Celeste Amarilla, Vous êtes une femme méprisable et indigne de sa fonction. Vous ne représentez pas le Paraguay, ce pays qui a transpiré la passion et l’honneur tout au long de la compétition. Par votre inconscience et votre racisme décomplexé, le monde entier a déjà oublié le parcours et l’effort historique que vos joueurs ont réalisés durant cette coupe du monde pour laisser place à une dame incompétente donnant la pire image possible de son pays. Je ne laisserai jamais aux gens comme elle, la liberté de laisser propager leur haine et leur racisme à travers le monde.

🚨 𝗕𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗞𝗜𝗡𝗚: The Belgian federation has released a new statement: "After learning through media reports of FIFA’s decision to lift the automatic suspension of player Balogun, the RBFA sent a letter to FIFA requesting a copy of the decision, an explanation of the process that had been followed, and setting out its position regarding the applicable regulations." "As its only response, FIFA sent a letter to the RBFA stating that it considered this correspondence to constitute an appeal, that a judge had been appointed, and that the RBFA had only a few hours to complete that appeal. No information whatsoever was provided by FIFA." "All of this occurred while FIFA simultaneously refused to respond to the RBFA’s legitimate requests." "Furthermore, during the match coordination meeting, FIFA deliberately removed the section concerning the automatic suspension of players from its presentation. This topic had nonetheless been part of all such meetings before each of the previous four matches. The RBFA questioned FIFA, both orally and in writing, about the reasons for this change, yet once again received no response." "To be clear, as of this moment, the RBFA has still not received any decision or any explanation from FIFA regarding this matter. It therefore has no alternative but to challenge the player's eligibility for the upcoming match." "Regardless of the sporting outcome of this match, the RBFA is deeply saddened by the course of events and will continue to fight in the coming hours, days and months in defence of the fundamental principles of ethics, fair competition, and the interests of football as a whole."

People in a pub watching Pointless after the football got delayed last night celebrating a Pointless answer Makes you proud to be British 😂

UEFA statement on the Balogun case: ⬇️ uefa.com/news-media/news/02a…

He 100% got a touch on that. Look at the ball change direction. How did the VAR goons not see that? Why did they not show the referee that angle?

Belgian FA pulling no punches in a strongly worded statement. Say they are “astonished” by the decision and now “investigating all potential options” as they look to “safeguard the legitimate rights of all participating teams and to protect the fundamental principles of fair play in our sport, both at this FIFA World Cup and at future editions of the tournament” RBFA STATEMENT The Royal Belgian Football Association (RBFA) is astonished by FIFA's decision to declare suspended United States player Folarin Balogun eligible to play in the USA–Belgium match on Monday, 6 July at 5:00 p.m. (Seattle time). FIFA bases its decision on Article 27 of the FIFA Disciplinary Code. This provision states that the FIFA Disciplinary Committee may decide to suspend the enforcement of a previously imposed disciplinary sanction. However, Article 66.4 of the same FIFA Disciplinary Code clearly provides that a red card (sending-off) automatically results in a suspension for the team's next match, as has been the case for all previous red cards issued during this FIFA World Cup. Furthermore, and irrespective of the above, the decision is in direct contradiction with the provisions of the FIFA World Cup 2026 Competition Regulations, as set out in Article 10.5: "If a player or team official is sent off as a result of a direct or indirect red card (second caution), they will automatically be suspended from their team's subsequent match. In addition, further sanctions may be imposed." The automatic nature of such a suspension was also explicitly reaffirmed in FIFA World Cup 2026 Circular No. 16, which was distributed to all participating member associations on 12 May 2026. The same rule is reiterated at every FIFA World Cup 2026 Match Coordination Meeting prior to each match and is included in all FIFA World Cup 2026 workshop presentations. In order to safeguard the legitimate rights of all participating teams and to protect the fundamental principles of fair play in our sport, both at this FIFA World Cup and at future editions of the tournament, the RBFA is investigating all potential options.”