The Australia team link arms on the halfway line as the minute’s silence begins. The Saudi team stood at their respective positions on the field, not participating in honoring the victims.

The Telegraph explains what happened.

The Saudi Arabian football team were booed by Australian supporters after they failed to properly line up for a minute’s silence in honour of the victims of the London Bridge terror attacks.

Saudi Arabia were preparing to play Australia in a World Cup qualifier at the Adelaide Oval when the stadium announcer called for a minute’s silence to begin.

The Australia team linked arms in a line on the centre circle while the Saudi Arabia team stood in random formation as the silence began.

According to Adam Peacock, who works as a presenter for Fox Sports in Australia, the Asian Football Confederation approved the minute’s silence against the wishes of Saudi Arabia.

The Football Federation of Australia were then unable to persuade Saudi Arabian officials to agree to participate in the tribute.

A number of Saudi Arabian players stood still with their arms behind their back while others appeared to continue their warm up.

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The Wall Street Journal reports that an official apology was quickly forthcoming.

Saudi Arabia’s Football Federation apologized on behalf of the country’s national soccer team for failing to observe a minute’s silence for victims of a recent London terrorist attack ahead of a World Cup qualifying match against Australia.

The incident prompted a furious response in Australia, with the crowd jeering the Saudi team, which instead of lining up moved into positions for the coming match on Thursday as Australia’s players linked arms to pay silent respects to victims. While many of the Saudi players stood still, others including the team captain, Osama Hawsawi, continued warm-ups and stretches.

Eight people died in Saturday’s attack in London, among them two Australians.

The Saudi Federation said Friday it condemned “all acts of terrorism,” adding that it “deeply regrets and unreservedly apologies for any offense caused by the failure of some members of the representative team of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to formally observe the one minute’s silence in memory of the victims of the London terrorist attack.”

“The players did not intend any disrespect to the memories of the victims or to cause upset to their families, friends or any individual affected by the atrocity.”

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Mrs. Kistler finds life in the modern megalopalis lacking in warmth.

Let me tell you about my Southern California neighborhood. I have lived in this one for 22 years. I don’t know anyone, but it’s not for lack of trying. Each time a new neighbor moves in I bake a loaf of bread and take it to them. They thank me at the door and then close it. That is the last I see of them other than when they go to their cars.

One neighbor was pregnant and her husband was employed, so I gave her my phone number just in case she needed anything. She thanked me and didn’t give me her number. We spoke over the fence occasionally, but not in any way that would turn us into buddies or even casual friends. They moved.

Our newest neighbors dropped a card on our front porch before their bread was baked to tell us their names and gave us their phone number. I still have it four years later. I baked the bread and the mister thanked me at the door. I have never met the Mrs. in person.

I hosted a coffee klatch and made up fliers and put them on the 12 nearest homes. I got donuts, cut up fruit, and made coffee and tea. Six people came, drank the tea, and no one touched the donuts or fruit. They chatted about who all used to live here in this neighborhood over the years, said thank you and left. No one asked a single question of me. I have never been to their homes or had a conversation with any of them since.
We Don’t Even Know One Another’s Names

I wouldn’t consider asking to borrow a cup of sugar or if a neighbor’s electricity is still working when mine isn’t. I just figure out what I will do for my own household. No one needs me, and I don’t need anyone. I don’t need a government handout. We will take care of ourselves.

In this neighborhood I have been very lonely. I wish I had stayed in the tract I lived in prior, but we moved when the kids moved away from home. I had made friends in the previous neighborhood. We had bowling teams, BBQs, went to school functions, belonged to the Parent Teacher Association, and basically enjoyed a full life. We came here with no kids, and most in the neighborhood were also empty nesters and appeared to have no desire for meeting new people.

The younger lady next door has two adult kids and she waves. It’s something, as no one else waves, often leaving me feeling invisible. Maybe I am. I am in my 70s and unless I go to the senior center I might very well be invisible. I have friends, but they all require a bit of a drive to see so we usually meet somewhere in the middle. I stay busy but the busyness is outside of the actual community in which I reside.

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It was certainly like that in the Fairfield County, Connecticut town where my wife and I lived most of our adult lives. I recommend rural Virginia. The driver of every passing car waves hello.

French Serving Knife, c. late XVIth century. Designed to joint, slice, and serve venison.

At The Game in 2004, Yalies tricked Harvard fans into holding up signs creating this message.”

The Crimson reports:

Harvard College rescinded admissions offers to at least ten prospective members of the Class of 2021 after the students traded sexually explicit memes and messages that sometimes targeted minority groups [i.e., Jokes] in a private Facebook group chat.

A handful of admitted students formed the messaging group—titled, at one point, “Harvard memes for horny bourgeois teens”—on Facebook in late December, according to two incoming freshmen.

In the group, students sent each other memes and other images mocking sexual assault, the Holocaust, and the deaths of children, according to screenshots of the chat obtained by The Crimson. Some of the messages joked that abusing children was sexually arousing, while others had punchlines directed at specific ethnic or racial groups. One called the hypothetical hanging of a Mexican child “piñata time.”

After discovering the existence and contents of the chat, Harvard administrators revoked admissions offers to at least ten participants in mid-April, according to several members of the group. University officials have previously said that Harvard’s decision to rescind a student’s offer is final. …

The chat grew out of a roughly 100-member messaging group that members of the Class of 2021 set up in early December to share memes about popular culture. Admitted students found and contacted each other using the official Harvard College Class of 2021 Facebook group.

“A lot of students were excited about forming group chats with people who shared similar interests,” Jessica Zhang ’21, an incoming freshman who joined both chats, wrote in an email. “Someone posted about starting a chat for people who liked memes.”

Messages shared in the original group were mostly “lighthearted,” wrote Zhang, who said she did not post in the splitoff meme group and that her admission offer was not rescinded. But some members soon suggested forming “a more R-rated” meme chat, according to Cassandra Luca ’21, who joined the first meme group but not the second, and who also said her offer was not revoked.

Luca said the founders of the “dark” group chat demanded that students post provocative memes in the larger messaging group before allowing them to join the splinter group.

“They were like, ‘Oh, you have to send a meme to the original group to prove that you could get into the new one,’” Luca said. “This was a just-because-we-got-into-Harvard-doesn’t-mean-we-can’t-have-fun kind of thing.”

Employees in the Admissions Office emailed students who posted offensive memes in mid-April asking them to disclose every picture they sent over the group, according to one member of the chat whose admission offer was revoked. The student spoke only on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to be publicly identified with the messages.

“The Admissions Committee was disappointed to learn that several students in a private group chat for the Class of 2021 were sending messages that contained offensive messages and graphics,” reads a copy of the Admissions Office’s email obtained by The Crimson. “As we understand you were among the members contributing such material to this chat, we are asking that you submit a statement by tomorrow at noon to explain your contributions and actions for discussion with the Admissions Committee.”

“It is unfortunate that I have to reach out about this situation,” the email reads.

The anonymous student also said that administrators informed implicated students that their admissions status was under review and instructed them not to come to Visitas, Harvard’s annual weekend of programming for prospective freshmen held at the end of April. Roughly a week later, at least ten members of the group chat received letters informing them that their offers of admission had been withdrawn.

The description for the official Facebook group for the Class of 2021, set up and maintained by the Admissions Office, disclaims all administrative responsibility for “unofficial groups” and warns members their admissions offers can be rescinded under specific circumstances.

“As a reminder, Harvard College reserves the right to withdraw an offer of admission under various conditions including if an admitted student engages in behavior that brings into question his or her honesty, maturity, or moral character,” the description reads.

Luca said she had mixed feelings about the administration’s move to revoke admissions offers. She said she was “going back and forth” on the matter.

“On the one hand, I think people can post whatever they want because they have the right to do that,” Luca said. “I don’t think the school should have gone in and rescinded some offers because it wasn’t Harvard-affiliated, it was people doing stupid stuff.”

She added, though, that if memes sent over the chat posed any kind of threat to members’ lives or well-being, then she believed administrators’ actions were justified.

Other members of the Class of 2021 said they strongly supported the Admissions Office’s decision. Zhang wrote that she thought the students’ actions were indefensible, and that the administration was correct in choosing to penalize those who posted obscene images.

“I appreciate humor, but there are so many topics that just should not be joked about,” Zhang wrote. “I respect the decision of the admissions officers to rescind the offers because those actions really spoke about the students’ true characters.”

“I do not know how those offensive images could be defended,” she added.

Wyatt Hurt ’21, who said he did not participate in either meme chat, agreed and said he was glad administrators took action.

“I haven’t seen any of the stuff firsthand, but I definitely think that the administration made the right choice and I think that as an incoming student—we all have our group chats and everything like that going on—we all pretty much universally agree it was the right decision,” he said.

Hurt added that he recently attended several scholarship conferences and that students he met at those events—many of whom he said planned to matriculate at Ivy League schools—also agreed that “rescinding was definitely the way to go.”

This incident marks the second time in two years that Harvard has dealt with a situation where incoming freshmen exchanged offensive messages online. Last spring, some admitted members of the Class of 2020 traded jokes about race and mocked feminists in an unofficial class GroupMe chat, prompting Dean of the College Rakesh Khurana and Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid William R. Fitzsimmons ’67 to issue a joint statement condemning the students’ actions.

“Harvard College and the Office of Admissions and Financial Aid were troubled and disappointed to see a conversation that included graphics with offensive themes,” Khurana and Fitzsimmons wrote in their statement, which they posted on the Class of 2020’s Facebook page.

But administrators chose not to discipline members of the Class of 2020 who authored the messages. Then-Interim Dean of Student Life Thomas A. Dingman ’67 said in an interview at the time that the individuals in question were “not matriculated students at this point.

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Where does Harvard get off investigating the content of teenage admittees’ jokes in a private group on social media?

This country needs a federal law absolutely protecting the privacy of all electronic communication, including both email and social media. Beyond that, email services and social media companies ought to be held liable when private communications are intruded upon with resulting injury to their owners.

One is inclined to advise those wronged ten students that they ought to consider themselves lucky that Fate has saved them from becoming members of that community of prigs and Pharisees in Cambridge. In a properly-run world, the president of Yale would respond by ordering letters of admission sent to each of those ten kids.

Theunis Wessels mows his lawn at his home in Three Hills, Alta, Alberta, Canada, as a tornado is seen in the background on Friday, June 2, 2017.

The Telegraph:

One eyewitness, named only as Gerard, told the BBC: “I saw a geezer lying on the floor saying he’d been stabbed

“I saw these three Muslim guys run up and started stabbing this girl. They attacked her and stabbed another guy.

“They started running up the road, stabbed the bouncer at the Tavern.

“I was throwing bottles at them, pint glasses, stools, chairs, but I was defenceless.

“They were running up saying ‘this is for Allah’.

“They stabbed this girl maybe ten, 15 times. She was saying ‘help me, help me’.”

He claimed he had hit one of the attackers on the back of the head by throwing things at him, and was chased, but escaped unharmed.

Sundance explains that the Paris Climate Treaty was only ever pretending to be about the climate.

The Paris Treaty was/is always about distribution of economic wealth; and the convenient use of “climate phrases” as branding instruments used to create political policy favorable to multinational corporate interests who control the shifting of economic wealth.

Listen to the responses from participating EU corporate comptrollers discussing climate and the entire purpose of the Paris Treaty becomes self-evident. Example:

“The preservation of our competitive position is the precondition for successful climate protection. This correlation is often underestimated.”

~ Matthias Wissmann, President of German Auto Industry Group VDA

The preservation of Germany’s competitive auto manufacturing position is contingent upon the U.S. exporting it’s wealth and handcuffing itself to a faux-climate treaty. Do not take my word for it, read Wissmann’s own interview. The Paris Treaty is nothing about climate, and everything about economics and multinational corporate interests.
…

To understand the larger objectives of the global and financial elite it is important to understand the three-decade global financial construct they now seek to protect. Global financial exploitation of national markets:

♦Multinational corporations purchase controlling interests in various national elements of developed industrial western nations.

♦The Multinational Corporations making the purchases are underwritten by massive global financial institutions, multinational banks.

♦The Multinational Banks and the Multinational Corporations then utilize lobbying interests to manipulate the internal political policy of the targeted nation state(s).

♦With control over the targeted national industry or interest, the multinationals then leverage export of the national asset (exfiltration) through trade agreements structured to the benefit of lesser developed nation states – where they have previously established a proactive financial footprint.

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Ed Straker collects classic examples of liberal explanations for, and solutions to, the problem of jihadist attacks on unarmed civilians in London.

When Muslims kill people “in the name of Allah,” how do liberals react? We know they don’t equate the terrorist act with the Islamic religion. So what do they say? Because it is important to know how liberals think, I have donned a hazmat suit and dived deeply into the comments section of the HuffPo and the WaPo to enlighten you.

Pat Dayton Neff • Knightdale, North Carolina

Another sad chapter in our current world history. What will it take for all of us to realize all life is important

All of us? We can see the creeping moral equivalence here. Are there also Christians and Buddhists going around running people down in cars and stabbing them?

Stephen Haydel • Senior Software Engineer at Self Employed – Independent Contractor

Hate breads Violence.

Is it hate that really “breads” violence? Or is it more specifically Islamic terrorism? It is curious how Mr. Haydel generalizes the causes of violence while relying on pastries to explain the issue.

Zanna T Laws • City of London Polytechnic

I suspect it is not even terrorism anymore – simply unevolved males leaping at the chance to be randomly violent.

It’s not Islam, it’s men’s fault! Do you think Zanna is an “evolved” female? If so, does that mean she pays for her own abortions?

Sharon Perkins

Joblessness leads to dispair anger and fatalism….the economic imbalances – pervasive world wide – are boiling over into the lives of the everyday person. Until the elite 1-percent) and their heirs are also targetted global economics will be managed without regard to our everyday lives.

The unemployed are doing the killing! Except they are not unemployed. But Sharon Perkins prefers to blame the “one percent” when Muslims come a knockin.’

Yuseff Hilton

Simple put, anywhere there is a heavy flow of pedestrian traffic needs to havw barrier erected between the road and the sidewalk, it will mitigate this sort of attack, and reduce Jay-walking.

I think Yuseff is onto something. All we need are concrete barriers on every road in London, and such attacks will never occur again. Except outside of London. And excluding knife and bomb attacks. I guess it’s a lot easier to put barriers on every road than to consider the source of these attacks, isn’t it?

Pilar Navarro

And how many people die from gun violence in America every day? Oops! Thats not terrorism, its gun rights for a few privileged

Ooops! I think Pilar went a little off topic. Guns didn’t kill anyone. Muslims did. How Pilar makes the jump from Muslims killing people with knives, to the right to own a firearm is unknown.

Brian Dodge • Michigan State University

I wonder if the xenophobic Brexit vote has increased the antipathy felt by terrorists leaning nuts – more people feel they have nothing to lose?

When the British voted to leave the EU, they only made Muslims madder!

Dennis Umphrey

Criminals will always commit crimes, the ISIS criminals just use Islam as a excuse to carry out those crimes, true Muslims would not take another life, but then again they have become to terror rock stars because of the Islamophobia to scare the Republican voters into voting for Republican candidates to keep them safe

1) Islamists kill British people. Therefore,

2) Liberals blame Islamophobia.

Rick Shaw • Sydney, Australia

It’s time England banned Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and any other social media used by terrorists to radicalise young muslims.

Rick is right; the problem is Facebook and Twitter, not Islam.

sdc512

No nation is more responsible for the export of the type of fundamentalism that underlies Islamist extremism than Saudi Arabia. If all of us who decry radical Islamist terrorism would lessen our dependency on oil, we could accomplish more to end that fundamentalist regime, and thereby terrorism, than anything else we could do.

I knew somehow, somewhere, someone would find a way to blame us for terrorism. It’s because we buy oil from Arab countries! That justifies terrorism, in this person’s “mind.”

AdrianMole

Trump wastes no time trying to exploit this in order to push his disgusting travel ban. A real president would have confined himself, for now, to expressing concern for the victims.

Trump is to blame! I knew it!

RTWT

Andrew Roberts finds that the forces of Political Correctness have completed their long march right through the British National Army Museum.

Today’s huge new £24 million refurbished National Army Museum looks imposing inside, but instead of chronologically taking you through the history of the Army it is now broken down thematically into spaces such as ‘Society’, which ‘explores the Army as a cultural and military force that impacts on our customs, technologies and values’, and ‘Army’, which ‘explores the Army’s major role in the political development of the country’. Instead of seeing artefacts in a historical context, as part of a chronological narrative, the visitor is forced to explore themes, and as ever this has provided an opening for guilt, apology and political correctness.

In the old museum they just showed vast collections of uniforms, weaponry, regimental silver, medals and vast paintings of the battle of Omdurman; in today’s you are invited to press buttons to vote on whether ‘The money spent on the Army should be spent elsewhere’, and asked to decide ‘What issue should the Army focus on in the coming decade?’, giving you the choice of ‘Fighting international terrorism’, ‘Training other countries’ armed forces only’, ‘Cyber warfare’ or ‘Peacekeeping’. There is no choice available to vote for the job it has now done for four centuries, that is, ‘Defending Britain by fighting other countries’ armies’. …

[M]edals are thought of as old-fashioned and boring by the new right-on Museum, we are not told in very many cases what they are or even who they were awarded to. The wonderful pictures are still there, but in the Art Room there is now a big sign saying ‘Political Statement’ in red letters, which tells us that ‘Art became a means to legitimise territorial expansion’, and ‘Today, few artists are commissioned to celebrate military victories and triumphalism is seen as distasteful.’ For the iconic picture of the relief of Ladysmith we aren’t told the title or the name of the artist or what is happening in it, but just: ‘This was known as the Bovril War picture.’

‘The National Army Museum,’ it boasts, ‘challenges you to think again about what an army museum is.’

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(title from Vanderleun) It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at Kathy Griffin complaining.

Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman,1970s

Maureen Callahan objects to the de-Americanization of Wonder Woman.

The long-awaited “Wonder Woman” has generated more buzz than any movie this year, and rightly so. She’s the most beloved and iconic female superhero ever, yet it’s taken decades — the film’s been in development since 1996 — for a Wonder Woman movie. It’s the first to pair a female director with a big-budget, comic-book film meant to be a franchise. In Gal Gadot, it has a star who served in the Israeli army and brings authority to her fight scenes.

“She is the ultimate symbol of strength,” Gadot said in 2015. “Never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d grow up to be in a movie playing someone who influenced as many women as she has.”

What’s curious about this version, coddled and crafted over decades, is the near-total absence of America. Wonder Woman was born during World War II, created by American psychologist William Moulton Marston, and her debut on the cover of DC’s Sensation Comics in 1942 depicted her in red, white and blue, storming into battle. She’d left her home, Paradise Island, to fight the Nazis in “America, the last citadel of democracy and of equal rights for women!”

This new Wonder Woman, however, has almost nothing to do with America. The film is set during World War I, in London. Steve Trevor, the pilot Wonder Woman rescues and falls for, is American in name only — here, he’s working for British intelligence.

Most tellingly, Wonder Woman’s iconic costume has been leached of all color. The bald eagle on her chest, the white stars on her blue bottom, the red-and-white striped boots — all have disappeared. She’s no longer vibrant and strong; she’s sad, a pacifist whose armor resembles mourning attire.

Wonder Woman’s global box-office appeal, it seems, depends on no longer being American. According to a piece in the L.A. Times last year, 70 percent of box office revenue is generated overseas, and those markets now take precedence, no matter how closely your superhero is identified with the United States. In 2010, director Joe Johnson said that his Captain America “would not be a flag waver . . . just a good person.”

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Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman, 2017