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Mourinho’s unexpected availability is potentially a game-changer. We all know what we think will happen at Manchester City this summer, yet if Pep Guardiola dramatically left Bayern Munich during the transfer window and announced his availability for work from January, would it be wise to see how the rest of the season panned out under Manuel Pellegrini before making a move?
The elite clubs in the Premier League know they have a problem with player recruitment. Luis Suarez and Lionel Messi were busy winning the Club World Cup for Barcelona on Sunday, with Neymar by their side.
Real Madrid have Cristiano Ronaldo and Gareth Bale and recruited James Rodriguez, the breakout star of the last World Cup; Thomas Muller has now signed a new contract with Bayern Munich, disappointing English clubs just as Robert Lewandowski did.
The Premier League no longer attracts the cream of world football. Yet the great managers are global draws, too. Mourinho, Guardiola, Jurgen Klopp, they have fans and followings and generate commercial interest just the same. Don’t think that is not present in discussions in boardrooms.
Pellegrini’s understated style was considered the perfect antidote to high-maintenance Roberto Mancini, but Manchester City are also trying to establish a strong global brand. They need a public face with charisma.
Manchester United have got that in Van Gaal, too, and he may turn their season around from here.
It is not as if a huge shift is required, after all. They are nine points behind leaders Leicester and, with the resources at their disposal, the climb is not insurmountable.
Yet this is a United team that makes few chances, scores fewer goals and relies on defensive resilience. A few injuries at the back and they have slumped to three straight defeats and leaked seven goals, to Wolfsburg, Bournemouth and Norwich.
Stoke City are up next, away on Boxing Day. They are a useful lot and Manchester United haven’t won since November 21. In this form, despite the hundreds of millions invested, they may even be the underdogs.
And then, on December 28, Chelsea. We already know what a section of the support is thinking and it may seem a knee-jerk solution.
But if the club are going to do it in the summer anyway, it is equally fair to ask, what’s the hold-up?
So here we go again. Roy Hodgson is to use England’s three-game warm-up for Euro 2016 to replicate the travel schedules of group stage competition.
England will play two matches at Wembley, one on the road, and be based at St George’s Park, the training camp conveniently located in the middle of nowhere.
For that’s what went wrong in Brazil: the logistics. Not failing to cope with Luis Suarez or Mario Balotelli; not giving the ball away or sending out an XI for the first game that had never started together. It was the details. Hotels, travelling, training routines.
Maybe they should ditch the manager and get in a bloke from Thomas Cook.
‘Roy has been very smart with the idea of recreating the physical experience of playing in France,’ said Martin Glenn, the Football Association chief executive. ‘So you play in a city, you get on a bus, you go to another city.’ Yes, cosmic.
That was definitely the bother, those bus rides. When Gary Cahill fell asleep and allowed Suarez to score to knock England out of the World Cup, he was probably trying to work out whether the number 14 stopped at Sao Paulo airport.
Continuing with his theme of being easily pleased, Glenn also said Hodgson would be kept on for the 2018 World Cup if England showed progress in France. Considering England failed to make it out of the group stage at the last tournament, it is hard to see how they can fail to improve.
There are 24 teams at this competition and 16 initially progress, making it harder to get knocked out than to qualify. England have drawn Wales, Slovakia and Russia, a very tame introduction — so, surely, nothing less than first place will do? Win Group B and England will face the third-placed team from Groups A, C or D — on current form, Romania, Poland or the Czech Republic.
This means that it is not until the quarter-finals that England will play a nation of significant pedigree — probably one of Italy, Belgium or Portugal. And is it progress, after two tournaments, for Hodgson to lose to the first good team England play?
He did that in 2012, against Italy in the quarter-finals, and in 2014, against Italy and Uruguay in the group stages. So where is the progress in losing to Italy again? Or Portugal, who knocked England out of major tournament quarter-finals in 2004 and 2006?
Progress would be defeating either of those countries, or Belgium — the best team in Europe according to the dubious FIFA rankings — and reaching the semi-finals.
Yet Glenn is already preparing to blind us with data to justify the FA’s conservatism.
What about the buses? He forgot the buses. Surely there must be some form of bus evaluation factored into any appraisal of England under Hodgson. Otherwise we’re just left looking at results again, like a bunch of amateurs.
And this would be true, had Russia’s anti-doping laboratory not destroyed 1,400 samples making it impossible to tell who was cheating, and who was not: hence the indiscriminate nature of the ban.
Alternatively, Sam can take his traditional route, field a half-strength team in the FA Cup, get banjoed in the third round and then shoot off to Dubai for a week or two in February.
Everyone’s a winner. Well, not Sunderland, obviously.
Set aside, for a moment, that Chelsea’s players let down Jose Mourinho. Set aside the piffling respect they showed for the club and even the fans who proved such perceptive critics on Saturday. What does Kurt Zouma think, privately, about his more experienced team-mates? And what will he have learnt from their example this season?
Zouma is 21. He has been at Chelsea a little under two years. Mourinho was giving him first-team experience, gradually – 26 appearances last season, 23 so far in this campaign.
On March 1, shorn of Nemanja Matic, he awarded Zouma the role of defensive midfielder in the Capital One Cup final against Tottenham and was rewarded with close to a man-of-the-match display.
After an early fright when Christian Eriksen ran off him, Zouma recovered and shut down the Tottenham playmaker, drawing comparisons with Marcel Desailly.
Premature, plainly, but at the same age Desailly had just become a first-team regular at Nantes. He had never been trusted as Zouma was that day.
And this season? Well, it’s been difficult. What could have been a breakthrough campaign for Zouma, flourishing and perhaps earning a regular starting place, has been marred by Chelsea’s dismal form.
Zouma has won just nine matches with Chelsea this season. The defence has looked exposed in a way they were not last year — or on Saturday. At one stage against Sunderland, Cesc Fabregas could be seen ferociously closing down deep in the opposition half. Others, like Oscar, seemed equally revitalised. So it wasn’t just Mourinho they sold out this season. They sold out the kid at centre half as well, who needed their help and guidance.
Fabregas was first on to social media broadcasting his sadness at Mourinho’s departure — those of you who have seen The Godfather may choose to factor in Don Corleone’s advice about the Barzini meeting at this juncture — but a more intriguing message was placed on Instagram by Zouma’s wife Sandra, thanking the manager for all he had done.
The post was swiftly deleted — perhaps because fond sentiments about Mourinho would not have found favour with her husband’s team-mates.
What an appealing bunch they are.
Brazilian footballer Fred has been banned for three years after testing positive for the banned diuretic hydrochlorothiazide. This is Fred, the midfielder who also plays for Shakhtar Donetsk, not Fred, the big lump up front for Brazil at the 2014 World Cup. Remember him?
In similar circumstances, what a face of anti-doping he would have been. Play like Fred? Just say no, kids.
Another money-making enterprise from Nancy Dell’Olio. She is trying to raise £50,000 for her own drink, a sugar-free Limoncello. As she is currently £44,350 short of that target, and first announced plans for the launch in October last year, one feels there is a way to go.
So for £2,000, Nancy will provide a cookery lesson, for £1,500 a day out with her in London and for £3,500 she will be your guest at a party.
And, again, sorry to keep going on about this — but wasn’t she supposed to be a lawyer?
Jazz means different things to different people, but to Ralph Rasmussen, it means elation.
Rasmusson, better known as “Razz,” was trying to come up with a name and he and a few other members were throwing around words, and as an homage to Jamestown, Pear City Jazz was born.
While different genres of jazz are played, big band swing music is what drives the band. With drums, bass, guitar, keyboards, five trombones, five saxophones, four trumpets, and two vocalists, it truly is a big band experience.
With two vocalists in the band, “Razz” said, there is a different dimension.
“It’s something you haven’t seen since the 1940s or 1950s,” he said.
Big Band has not lost a beat, no pun intended, since its inception. When students choose to study music in college, there is most likely a jazz component included. And it’s not because it’s just another course to fill out a requirement, but rather a course or several courses designed to give students a sturdy background in theory and performance. Even though there are not many new Big Band songs being written, Big Band music keeps progressing because it’s instantly recognizable, and easy to remember. The Big Band standards stand the test of time.
“It has this life in it,” he said of Big Band Music. “These guys are (playing) live and enjoying sharing it (the music). Swing dance was often coupled with Big Band music, he said.
Hearing Benny Goodman play is what drew “Razz” into music. “I had a two-sided record by Benny Goodman that I used to listen to him play ‘Honeysuckle Rose’ and thought that I always wanted to that.
Aside from playing saxophone in the band, “Razz” is just a wealth of information when it comes to jazz history. And listening to him speak, you see the smile on his face, and you can tell he enjoys listening as well as researching current and older trends in music.
According to “Razz” the band is structured like the Count Basie Band, the Glenn Miller Band, and many others of this style.
Trumpet — Todd Jacobson, Bob Lewis, Peter Weinrich, and Brandon Carouso.
The Pearl City Jazz performance is part of the InSpire Holiday Pop-Up Market as part of the continuation of the Raise the Roof Capital Campaign. Both events are happening Saturday at The Spire Theater in Jamestown.
The holiday market will run from noon-6 p.m. in The Odyssey Banquet Hall featuring over 20 local vendors with artisan, handmade and seasonal items, food and drinks, prize drawings and fun festivities for kids and adults. The concert will begin at the culmination of the market at 6 p.m. Also to perform will be Dem Bones trombone ensemble. Dem Bones is the opening act of the concert at 6 p.m. Pearl City Jazz will follow after a brief intermission.
President Donald Trump suffered another defeat in trying to put a ban in place for certain nations to be able to travel to the United States of America. The travel ban block stands after the 4th Circuit Courts of Appeals of the United States ruled against a ban to restrict or ban travel to the US for citizens of some Muslim-majority countries. This was the second time US President Trump was attempting to put such a ban in place.
The court decision was not unanimous and partly was based on matters other than the issue. The majority of the appeals court judges agreed the ban is targeting Muslim travelers and is not necessarily based on a security concern.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit (in case citations, 4th Cir.) is a federal court located in Richmond, Virginia, with appellate jurisdiction over the district courts in the following districts: District of Maryland, Eastern District of North Carolina, and Middle District of North Carolina.
It upholds the suspension of a revised version of the executive order that the Trump administration crafted to better hold up to legal scrutiny than an earlier version.
Trump has insisted that the measure is necessary to prevent possible terrorist attacks. But courts in previous rulings blocking its enforcement have cited past statements from Trump and his advisors signaling that it may be to single out Muslims.
John Sheridan of Integrity Restoration works on a piece of wood that will be used to build a new barn at Appleton Farms in Ipswich. The wood is made of dessimated hemlock that was attacked by wolly adelgid. The attack however has improved the building quality of the wood. Photo by Deborah Parker/July 11, 2009.
The wheat growing on the Konya plain is parched and barely 20cm high. Some farmers on the central Anatolian plateau will not even be bringing in the harvest. "This year's wheat crop will be at least 40% down on last year," says Hasan Huseyin Motuk, the head of the farming engineers' syndicate in Konya. "And it might be twice that bad. The situation is really serious because Konya is the granary of Turkey."
And this year the granary is empty, and Turkey will have to import wheat to cover domestic consumption. The root of the problem is the drop in rainfall since 2000. The past two years have seen only half the usual amount and a heatwave has been roasting southeast Europe since mid-June. Turkey's centre is enduring average temperatures above 40C. Underground water reserves for irrigation are dwindling.
"Every year we have to bore five metres deeper to find water," says Ismail Uluagaç, mayor of Karkin, a village 40km from Konya. "There may not be any drinking water for our children and grandchildren when they grow up." The wells reach fossil groundwater thousands of years old.
Another sign something is wrong is the level of Anatolia's lakes. Some have disappeared altogether. "At the weekend in the 1980s we used to take a boat out on Lake Hotamis," says Hasan, a farmer. The lake has been replaced by sugar beet fields, sustained by constant irrigation. The village of Sazlik, whose people used to live by fishing, is on the main road east. Fields surround it now and there is no water in sight.
The great saltwater lake to the north is also under threat. Dozens of species of migratory birds used to stop here, but now they have gone.
The Konya basin is drying up. According to a UN Environment Programme report on global desertification, it is one of the areas at greatest risk. Some analysts maintain that the shortages are due to mismanagement of water resources. The problem is only just dawning on local authorities, now trying to raise public awareness. The head of the publicly owned water board (DSI) in Cumra, a small town in the centre of the Konya basin, admits that half the region's 60,000 irrigation wells are unauthorised and that "farmers waste water because they are poorly educated".
Outside his office the lawn and flower beds are blooming, watered from dawn to dusk. "It is high time we invested in droplet sprinklers," he says. The central government has recently started subsidising half the necessary investment and farmers qualify for interest-free loans at their bank.
But the main issue is choice of crop. At Kalkin the sugar beet crop sustains the village, but it absorbs huge amounts of water. The local economy depends on sugar cooperatives. Corn, which depletes the soil, qualifies for a bigger subsidy than wheat. "If it doesn't rain we can no longer grow wheat. So we grow beet, but that demands more water," says Mr Motuk.
The farmers pin their hopes on this summer's opening of the Blue Tunnel, a canal diverting the waters of the river Goksu to irrigate 650,000 hectares. But this may cause coastal erosion and dry up the delta. The priority should be a "complete rethink of agricultural policy", says Cagrideniz Eryilmaz, a World Wildlife Fund expert.
This summer, the International Sustainable Campus Network (ISCN) honored Stanford’s My Cardinal Green program with a 2018 Sustainable Campus Excellence Award. Presented at this year’s ISCN conference in Stockholm, Sweden, the award recognized My Cardinal Green in the Campus Planning and Management Systems category for its efforts to motivate and quantify campus engagement in sustainability.
At the next stop in a busy conference season, the California Higher Education Sustainability Conference (CHESC) recognized Stanford with three best practice awards. Residential & Dining Enterprises (R&DE) received an award for its innovative Green Cleaning initiative, which uses a chemical-free ozone-based solution created by infusing cold tap water with electricity. The cleaning system is currently used in 32 campus residences.
The My Cardinal Green program was also recognized with an award at CHESC, as well as the Sustainable IT program, which offers virtualization and relocation options for energy-intensive servers that can consume up to 41 percent of a building’s electricity usage.
Learn more about the My Cardinal Green program on the Sustainable Stanford website.
There's an uneasy calm in Honiara this morning after overnight unrest which followed the election of the Solomon Islands prime minister.
A combination of tepid tourism numbers and record-low taxes from the lone casino operator on Saipan has placed the Northern Marianas in a financial crunch.
The trial of a Polish man charged with treason for allegedly supplying arms to Papuan rebel fighters continues today.
New Zealand's parliamentary under-secretary for Foreign Affairs, Fletcher Tabuteau, has opened the new chancery of the New Zealand High Commission in Niue.
This year's annual Pacific Islands Forum summit is to be held in Tuvalu in mid-August, earlier than the scheduled September meeting.
Anti-immunisation sentiments that exist in parts of developed countries like New Zealand are being spread to more vulnerable Pacific nations, UNICEF says.
A total of 25 lists of candidates have been submitted to contest New Caledonia's provincial elections on 12th May.
Solomon Islands police have arrested more than 30 people for offences following disturbances in Honiara in the wake of the election of Manasseh Sogavare as prime minister.
Follow our liveblog for up-to-date coverage of events happening around the country.
Fiji made a winning return to international netball beating Singapore 65-57 in last night's first test.
Fiji's Prime Minister, Frank Bainimarama, says storms in the country are becoming more deadly because of climate change.
The sacked police commissioner in Vanuatu, Albert Nalpini, is still waiting for his termination letter.
Fiji maritime authorities are investigating a ferry which last week sparked panic when it ran into trouble hours away from its destination.
The President of the Samoa Land and Titles Court, Fepulea'i Attila Ropati, has resigned.
New research has found that taro was part of the early mix of agricultural production by Māori in New Zealand.
The project to rebuild Vanuatu's main airport, Bauerfield, in Port Vila, is set to be completed by the end of June.
Manasseh Sogavare has been voted in as the prime minister of Solomon Islands for the fourth time. However, it was shrouded in controversy as 15 MPs abstained from voting.
Papua New Guinea's prime minister Peter O'Neill says the opposition has been deceived by misinformation about the PNG Sustainable Development Program or SDP.
Police in Solomon Islands are calling for calm after rioting broke out in the capital over the election of Manasseh Sogavare as the new prime minister.
A top Vanuatu official says the country's food production cannot match demand and needs imports, including meat.
The Cook Islands Ministry of Transport, along with shipping and port operators and stakeholders, want to see more effort in the sector to cut greenhouse gases.
Dozens of Bangladeshi human trafficking victims stuck in Vanuatu have told diplomats from Bangladesh they don't want to go back to their country.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have given the Northern Marianas an additional $US8.2 million in funding for the current fiscal year.
The trial of three West Papuans charged with treason has been adjourned until tomorrow.
Samoa's Pacific Games Office says criticism over the awarding of its broadcasting contract is wrong.
Indonesia's military says elections held last week in Papua went smoothly, despite threats of more violence from rebels.