With the win, the Matildas clinched the top spot in Group B and a place in the round of 16.

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/539965

> This policy of sacrificing girls’ and women’s well-being for men’s eligibility preferences is unethical and perilous

This is what you get for attracting stalkers by becoming an Instagram butt model.

British Formula 1 driver Lando Norris of the McLaren team accidentally broke winner Max Verstappen’s €40,000 porcelain trophy at the award ceremony of Sunday’s Hungaroring race.

After Verstappen received the trophy from Defense Minister Kristóf Szalay-Bobrovniczky, he placed it on the podium for the customary F1 champagne spraying. Norris, who placed second, reproduced his trademark celebration of banging his bottle of champagne off the top step of the podium, only for the reverberations to cause the trophy awarded to the winner to fall and break.

Every year, the Hungaroring trophy presented to the winner is made by 197-year-old porcelain manufacturer Herend, which takes six months of manual labor to complete at an estimated cost of €40,000.

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/371807

> Looks like we can cross the Y off our donation list.

When your players call people racists and insist grown men should be able go change in your daughters changing room - pardon us for not buying tickets.

Go woke. Go broke.

The Rams gave Stafford a four-year, $160 million contract in 2022 after winning the Super Bowl. The team traded Ramsey in March after they knew that it wouldn’t be possible to give him the guarantees that he wanted added to his deal, contract moves that the Miami Dolphins were willing and able to do at this time. L.A. has been almost completely out of the free agent market this year, lost an inordinate amount of free agents, cut players like Bobby Wagner, and only completed signing their rookie draft class as of Friday.

To be clear, the Rams did not ask to “restructure” Stafford’s contract. They wouldn’t even need to get his permission to do that. A restructure is pushing salary cap commitments into the future by turning base salary into bonus money. Even if they wanted to, Stafford’s deal creates no 2023 cap space because of a restructure. According to Cowherd, they asked Stafford to “re-do” his deal, which could mean a number of things including taking a pay cut.

Stafford has a relatively cheap $20 million salary cap hit in 2023 because of how his deal is structured, but his contract also makes it impossible to release him either this year or next year. Trading Stafford before the deadline, which Breer says is not impossible depending on the circumstances by then, would save a small amount of money now but eat into L.A.’s salary cap for 2024. Stafford’s salary cap hit goes up to $49.5 million next season and $50.5 million in 2025.

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/200594

> “I am not honored. I am not proud of myself at all. I believe other transgender athletes would feel the same way. They may not want to admit it, but they’re being selfish. There is no honor as an athlete in that,” she said, referring to international transgender athletes who have sparked heated debate about the fairness of their competing against biological women after transitioning. > > Na advocates for the creation of a “third gender” category in sports competitions, alongside male and female categories, to make sports more inclusive and fair.

The proverbial torch might have just been passed.

It took over four hours across five grueling sets, but Carlos Alcaraz is the men's Wimbledon champion for the first time. Alcaraz prevailed 1-6, 7-6(6), 6-1, 3-6, 6-4 in Sunday's memorable clash against Novak Djokovic, which could be an early chapter in a series of meetings in Grand Slam finals over the next couple of years.

The storylines were obvious, as Djokovic is the 36-year-old legend who was going for his 24th Grand Slam title after already setting the record on the men's side with 23. He won the 2022, 2021, 2019 and 2018 Wimbledon titles since his last loss in 2017.

Then there was the top-seeded Alcaraz at 20 years old looking for both his first Wimbledon title of his early career and his second Grand Slam after winning the 2022 US Open. He missed his first passing of the torch moment when he lost to Djokovic in the semifinals of this year's French Open, but this gave him another chance on the sport's grandest stage.

A spectator taking a selfie caused a crash of about 20 riders on stage 15 of the Tour de France.

The stage was won by Dutchman Wout Poels as defending champion Jonas Vingegaard maintained his 10-second lead on Tadej Pogacar.

Sepp Kuss, Vingegaard's Team Jumbo-Visma team-mate, had his handlebars knocked by a fan holding out a phone.

Kuss went down with team-mate Nathan van Hooydonck and brought down a large group in the peloton.

"There was a narrowing in the town and a spectator in the road, and I guess he just clipped my handlebars," said Kuss.

"Luckily I'm OK and hopefully the other guys in the crash are all right. It's not ideal.

"I think it's fatigue. It's been such a hard race and everybody is a bit tired. You lose a bit of alertness and there's always things out of your control as well."

The hearing occurs as one of the NBA’s top basketball players, champion Giannis Antetokounmpo, and his family continue an ongoing trip to China that began last week, where the Milwaukee Bucks star has been repeatedly mobbed by fans and offered regal treatment by the Communist Party. The Chinese state-run propaganda newspaper Global Times celebrated Antetokounmpo’s travels as an opportunity to remind NBA players of the “significant commercial opportunities” available to them if they cooperate with the Communist Party.

The Saudi government has long denied that it provided any support for the attacks. But, over the past few years, evidence has emerged that Saudi officials may have had more significant dealings with some of the plotters than U.S. investigations had previously shown.

Since 2017, the 9/11 families and some insurance companies have been suing the Saudi government in a Manhattan federal court, claiming that Saudi officials helped some of those involved in the Qaida plot.

The Saudi royal family was a declared enemy of al-Qaida. In the early 1990s, it expelled Osama bin Laden, the son of a construction magnate, and stripped him of his citizenship. At the same time, the kingdom funded an ambitious effort to propagate its radical Wahhabi brand of Islam around the world and tolerated a religious bureaucracy that was layered with clerics sympathetic to al-Qaida and other militant Islamists.

From the start of the FBI’s investigation into a possible support network for the 9/11 plot, one of its primary suspects was a supposed Saudi graduate student who helped settle the first two hijackers to arrive in the United States after they flew into Los Angeles in January 2000.

The middle-aged student, Omar al-Bayoumi, told U.S. investigators that he met the operatives by chance at a halal cafe near the Saudi Consulate in Culver City, California. The two men, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, were trained as terrorists but spoke virtually no English and were poorly prepared to operate on their own in Southern California.

Bayoumi insisted he was just being hospitable when he found Hazmi and Mihdhar an apartment in San Diego, set them up with a bank account and introduced them to a coterie of Muslim men who helped them for months with other tasks — from buying a car and taking English classes to their repeated but unsuccessful attempts to learn to fly.

As ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine detailed in an in-depth report on the FBI’s secret investigation of the Saudi connection in 2020, agents on the case suspected that Bayoumi might be a spy. He seemed to spend most of his time hanging around San Diego mosques, donating money to various causes and obtrusively filming worshippers with a video camera.

Yet both the FBI and the bipartisan 9/11 Commission accepted Bayoumi’s account almost at face value. In a carefully worded joint report in 2005, the CIA and FBI asserted that they had found no information to indicate that Bayoumi was a knowing accomplice of the hijackers or that he was a Saudi government “intelligence officer.”

But FBI documents that were just made public last year sharply revised that assessment.

While living in San Diego, one FBI document concludes, Bayoumi was paid a regular stipend as a “cooptee,” or part-time agent, of the General Intelligence Presidency, the Saudi intelligence service. The report adds that his information was forwarded to the powerful Saudi ambassador in Washington, D.C., Prince Bandar bin Sultan, a close friend to both presidents Bush and their family. The Saudi Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to questions about Bandar’s alleged relationship with Bayoumi.

As Bayoumi was helping the hijackers, FBI documents show, he was also in close contact with members of a Saudi religious network that operated across the United States. He also dealt extensively with Anwar al-Awlaki, a Yemeni American cleric who the documents suggest was more closely involved with the hijackers than was previously known. Awlaki later became a leader of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula and was killed in a 2011 drone strike ordered by President Barack Obama.

One of the Saudi officials with whom Bayoumi appeared to work, Musaed al-Jarrah, was both a key figure in the Saudi religious apparatus in Washington and a senior intelligence officer. After being expelled from the United States, Jarrah returned to Riyadh and worked for years as an aide to Prince Bandar on the Saudi national security council.

Another Saudi cleric with whom Bayoumi worked, Fahad al-Thumairy, was posted to Los Angeles as both a diplomat at the Saudi Consulate and a senior imam at the nearby King Fahad Mosque — a pillar of the global effort to spread Wahhabi Islam that had opened in mid-1998.

According to another newly declassified FBI document from 2017, an unnamed source told investigators that Thumairy received a phone call shortly before the two hijackers arrived in Los Angeles from “an individual in Malaysia” who wanted to alert him to the imminent arrival of “two brothers … who needed their assistance.”

In mid-December 1999, according to the 9/11 Commission report, a key Saudi operative in the plot, Walid bin Attash, flew to Malaysia to meet with Hazmi and Mihdhar. Although the men were kept under surveillance by Malaysian security agents, they were allowed to fly on to Bangkok and then Los Angeles, using Saudi passports with their real names. The FBI source said that Thumairy arranged for Mihdhar and Hazmi to be picked up at the Los Angeles International Airport and brought to the King Fahad Mosque, where they met with him. Thumairy and Jarrah have both denied helping the hijackers.

The FBI revelations were especially stinging for the 9/11 families because previous administrations made extraordinary efforts to keep them under wraps. President Donald Trump, who promised to help the families gain access to FBI and CIA documents, instead fought to shield them as state secrets. (Trump has been a vocal supporter of LIV Golf, hosting several of its tournaments at his golf courses and saying after the merger, “The Saudis have been fantastic for golf.”)

He means business.

Anthony Edwards sent a PSA to women interested in him after agreeing to a five-year, $260 million max contract extension with the Minnesota Timberwolves.

While in bed with his girlfriend, Jeanine Robel, the All-Star guard said she’s the “only one” who will be reaping the benefits of his massive payday.

“All you females who think you gonna come up off a n—- from signing a contract, she the only one,” Edwards said, before panning the camera to his Robel.

The 21-year-old then put the camera on his dog, and joked, “No, her.”

That’s when Robel said, “Boy, don’t lie.”

“She the only one that’s coming up,” Edwards continued. “[She’s] new to the table, so I’m a little green for her.

“Everybody else, the light is the same color as my damn jacket [red]… Feel me?”

... Slightly click baity title.