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They have been falling like ninepins at one of the most unpredictable World Cups in generations.  Even before the kick-off in the tournament, Italy’s absence was conspicuous.  By the time the first phase of matches had been concluded, Germany, whose teams have made it to the elimination phase for eighty years, found itself in exit mode, a victim of exhaustion, desperation and South Korean determination.  Die Welt deemed the performance an embarrassment of perfection, the team’s performance “harmless, unimaginative, listless”.

The UK government is likely to have to eat a lot of crow this year. Despite all the fiery rhetoric about Russian “aggression” and secret spies deployed by Vladimir Putin all around the world, and especially in England, some British citizens came to Russia anyway. The FIFA World Cup is being played here, after all, and football is very important for these people.
As the result of this, the people from one of the most stalwart Western powers are getting a completely different and first-hand, view of Russia.

Imagine if before each match of the World Cup that the FIFA World Soccer Federation made an appeal over the loudspeaker asking all the fans in the name of the future of soccer to tell officials of their government to demand Americans stop threatening the future of the World Cup with nuclear war.

Senior Guardian sports writer Barney Ronay indicated the basic tone of early corporate coverage of the Russia 2018 World Cup:
Moscow is like a giant scale version of Lewisham
Journalist Peter Oborne responded:

Saudi Arabia has much at stake when its national soccer team enters the pitch for the opening match of the 2018 World Cup in Moscow. With politics a permanent fixture, Saudi Arabia is playing in the World Cup finals for the first time in more than a decade at a moment that the kingdom is vying for enhanced influence in[Read More...]

This week US President Donald Trump finally met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore for their much anticipated peace summit which, despite being panned by the US corporate media, is still being hailed by others as a success. The historic meeting has resulted in an memorandum of understanding that put Pyongyang on the path toward ‘denuclearization’, as well as promises from the US to halt joint military exercises with South Korea.

Originally appeared at RussiaFeed

Another American celebrity has joined the likes of actor Steven Seagal and basketball player Jamierra Faulkner in becoming a Russian citizen.
Jeffrey Monson, a legendary mixed martial arts and Brazilian jiu-jitsu champion hailing from St. Paul, Minnesota, was granted Russian citizenship by decree of President Vladimir Putin yesterday, TASS reports.

May 14th was quite a day for the empire, the shit show on full display exhibiting lots of swagger in its death throes. The people on the inside are the last to know. They don’t see it but everyone else does. The rest of the world can see the toxic death culture, they see the rationalizations for idiocy and how silly they seem. The US empire has no clothes but wears only a paper thin emotional veneer resembling a child who attempts to lie for the first time after murdering the family dog. This is the modern American mind of empire.

For the first time since its inception in 1909, the legendary Italian cycling race, Giro d’Italia kicked off outside Europe and, strangely enough, from the city of Jerusalem on May 4.
The inherent contradictions in that decision are inescapable. Italy is a country that has experienced a ruthless forging occupation and was ravaged by fascism and war. To be a party in Israel’s constant attempts at whitewashing or, in this case, “sport-washing’ its military occupation and daily violence against the Palestinian people is appalling.

There was an audacity about it, carried out with amateurish callowness.  As it turned out Australian batsman Cameron Bancroft, besieged and vulnerable, had been egged on by Australian cricket captain Steve Smith and the Australian leadership to do the insufferable: tamper with the ball.