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Arsenal left the London Stadium with a 1-0 win, after a real dog fight of a match. A smash and grab if you like, but also a controversial decision that will dominate the week. Leandro Trossard’s 83rd-minute finish proved decisive, but the real drama arrived in stoppage time when Callum Wilson’s late leveller was ruled out after a VAR review for a foul on goalkeeper David Raya.

Arsenal: cometh the hour, cometh the man

Trossard’s strike came after a period of pressure and a string of near-misses from Arsenal. The goal arrived from a tidy move involving Martin Ødegaard, who created the chance for Trossard to curl the ball in at the near post and send the travelling fans into life. David Raya had earlier produced a couple of crucial saves to keep Arsenal level before the breakthrough.

Arsenal’s lead in the title race widened as a result. Had Wilson’s stoppage-time finish stood, the gap at the top would have been cut and Manchester City could have moved back above Arsenal with a game in hand. Instead, the Gunners left with a five-point cushion and two matches remaining.

VAR in the spotlight

The disallowed goal unfolded like this, a West Ham corner was spilled by Raya, Wilson reacted quickest and bundled the ball home, but VAR intervened, the video assistant flagged contact, Pablo’s arm across Raya’s neck as the goalkeeper attempted to claim the ball, and referee Chris Kavanagh was sent to the monitor. After watching multiple replays, which for the fans in attendance felt like an age, the goal was chalked off. The whole process, from ball over the line to final decision, stretched over four minutes, unusually long for a decision of this nature.

That sequence will be dissected from every angle, supporters and pundits split along familiar lines, some saw a clear foul on the keeper, others argued the contact was part of normal aerial tussle. What’s indisputable is the scale of the moment, a decision that effectively shaped the title race and left West Ham still in relegation trouble.

Tactical snapshot

Mikel Arteta’s side started strongly but were unsettled by a series of substitutions that disrupted their rhythm. Ben White’s injury forced reshuffles, and Arteta’s mid-game changes, including bringing on Martin Zubimendi and later reversing that move, made for a stop-start afternoon. Still, Arsenal created the better chances and relied on Raya’s shot-stopping and Trossard’s composure to secure three points.

Nuno Espirito Santo’s team grew into the match and had their moments, notably when Mateus Fernandes broke through only to be denied by Raya. The late corner that produced Wilson’s disallowed goal showed West Ham’s persistence, but the result leaves them perilously close to the drop zone.

Fallout

Arsenal now sit with a comfortable lead and two fixtures left to close out a first Premier League title in 22 years. The margin is not yet decisive, but momentum and the psychological lift of surviving a late scare matter. West Ham, meanwhile, must regroup quickly; their survival hopes hinge on points that have to come fast.

If the VAR decision is the lasting image from this match, it is because it encapsulates modern football’s contradictions: razor-sharp technology applied to human moments, and the uneasy mix of relief and resentment that follows. For Arsenal, huge relief, but for West Ham, raw heartbreak. For everyone else, another chapter in the VAR story.

This could become the biggest VAR decision in Premier League history. With 60,000 people inside the stadium, and millions around the world, all holding their breath at once, truly extraordinary scenes.

Featured image via the Canary

By Faz Ali

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While it’s died down a bit, a wave of ‘flag mania’ struck Great Britain in 2025. The people responsible for it operated under the name ‘Raise the Colours’, with the group being made up of notorious racists from Britain’s far right.

One of the infamous shitbags in question is Ryan Bridge, who you can see here bullying an older man.

Ryan Bridge from Raise The Colours and his goons bullied an elderly man. pic.twitter.com/FoA42dNEPZ

— Mukhtar (@I_amMukhtar) May 10, 2026

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Full respect to him, the older man refused to back down despite Bridge having a team of goons with him.

Flag group members are disgusting

This is what Hope not Hate wrote about Operation Raise the Colours:

HOPE not hate can reveal that the co-founder and organiser of the group is longtime Stephen Lennon (AKA Tommy Robinson) ally Andrew Currien (AKA Andy Saxon). Formerly a key member of the English Defence League’s leadership bodyguard team, and now running security for the far-right party Britain First, Currien has previously been jailed for his part in a racist death. He was one of six men convicted in 2009 after a 59-year-old man was crushed to death by a car following a violent brawl.

Bridge is another key member of the operation and he’s also linked to a £40 million fraud scandal, the Mirror reported in 2018.

Ryan Bridge, the guy behind the Raise the Colours, faces eight years in prison if convicted. pic.twitter.com/mRmu8HwCmF

— Mukhtar (@I_amMukhtar) November 30, 2025

Hope not Hate additionally reported:

Across the country, many of the small groups that have come together to raise the flags are being organised by well-known far-right extremists.

The group added:

Similarly, the far-right group Britain First claims to have provided many of the flags in the North West. “Britain First has, so far, donated 75% of its flag stock to local teams in Manchester and the West Midlands for ‘Operation Raise The Colours’,” tweeted leader Paul Golding.

A Bridge too far

The video at the top begins with Bridge shouting:

Do you understand?

The man, who seems to be outside his own home, answers:

No, I don’t understand.

Bridge yells in response:

Because you’re thick, that’s why.

He then says:

So let me educate you, old man.

In response, the older man says:

No, you won’t educate me.

He then puts a hand up to Bridge’s face before holding his arms up like a gorilla in front of one of the goons. After this, he pokes then goon in the chest and gives him a telling off.

While this is going on, Bridge is repeating, “Listen, listen, listen”, over and over, becoming increasingly whiny as he does so. The older man doesn’t listen, though and walks off down the driveway.

In the end, the only colours raised were the flushes of red in Bridge’s cheeks.

Intimidation tactics

It’s unclear what Bridge wanted to educate the man on, but we can guess. Given that Bridge was wearing his Raise the Colours uniform, we can assume he was out and about shagging flags. Because he doesn’t have much in the way of common sense, he didn’t realise it’s a bad look to be shouting down local residents on the street.

Accordingly, we suggest that Bridge abandons the flag stuff and gets back to his day job (if he gets off with the alleged fraud, obviously).

Featured image via X/ Mukhtar

By Willem Moore

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Imagine a photograph of your child taken on sports day. They’re laughing, probably slightly out of breath, wearing their school kit.

It’s the kind of image that ends up in the school newsletter, on the website, shared with pride by staff who want to show what school life looks like.

Now imagine that same photograph being found by a criminal who lifts the face of the child in seconds and, using freely available AI tools, turns it into something so harmful I am not going to describe it in detail here.

That image is then sent to the school with a demand: pay up, or it goes online.

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This is not a hypothetical. The scale of child abuse imagery has grown from fewer than 10,000 images 25 years ago, to tens of millions today.

This has happened to schools in the UK, and most schools have no idea it is possible.

I know that’s uncomfortable to read. Though, as the mother of two teenage daughters, I strongly believe that all parents deserve to know the internet where their children’s photographs are being uploaded is not the same internet that schools developed their safeguarding policies for.

I didn’t come to this issue as a parent whose child was affected. I came to it as someone who has run branding agencies for the last two decades, sitting in a meeting with a school I had been working with on a rebrand – a school I knew well, whose team I respected.

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It was during that work it came to light that a number of the school’s pupil photographs had been stolen, turned into deepfake abuse material, and that the school had been sent a ransom demand.

I sat there and listened to what had happened to those children. And my first thought – before anything to do with technology, platforms, or solutions – was simple: I never want this to happen to my daughters.

I have spent my entire career working in branding, working with businesses, charities and organisations, of all sizes, to tell their stories through imagery. I understand better than most what those photographs mean and why they matter, not least for schools.

The school newsletter, sports day, the nativity play – these are not trivial things, they are how schools communicate joy, build community and celebrate the children in their care.

Schools should not have to stop celebrating their pupils or sharing moments with their communities, but they do need tools designed for the internet those images now live in.

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The consent form most parents sign at the start of each school year was written for a different world. It was designed to address whether your child’s image could be used – shared in a newsletter, published on a website, posted on social media.

It was not written to address what happens once that image is publicly accessible online. Because when those consent forms were first written, what is now possible simply wasn’t.

AI tools that can take a child’s face from a school website and generate abusive content from it are not hypothetical. They are freely available, require no technical expertise, and the safeguarding gap they have created is one that almost no school in the country has a policy to address.

New research that we commissioned found that while 85% of UK teachers are aware that AI criminals are targeting school photographs, fewer than one in three have any AI or deepfake-specific policies in place, and nearly a quarter said their school has already been targeted.

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This isn’t about stopping schools from sharing images. It’s about understanding what those images are exposed to once they’re online.

Before any parents sign that consent form, they should be asking their child’s school so many more questions – from what happens to images once they are online; whether their photography policy has been updated to reflect the risks of generative AI; to what protection they have in place for pupil images shared on public-facing channels.

These are not unreasonable questions and are simply the ones that every parent of a school-age child should now be asking, and that every school should be ready to answer.

But let’s be clear, schools are not to blame for this.

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They shared those photographs in good faith, as they always have. It’s just the world those images are being shared into has changed, and the frameworks most schools rely on have not yet caught up.

Consent forms, GDPR policies, online safety training: none of these protect a child from a criminal who takes their image without asking. AI criminals don’t need permission. They take images directly from school websites and social media without ever making contact.

What’s needed now isn’t less sharing, but safer sharing. That’s the problem I set out to solve when I built Aidos – a safeguarding platform that makes every pupil in a school photograph permanently unidentifiable before the image is shared online.

Not blurring, not pixelation, but a full replacement of every child’s face with a realistic AI-generated substitute, so that the image can never be traced back to a real child.

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Schools can keep sharing everything they have always shared. The difference is that those images can no longer be used to harm the children within them.

Protecting children’s digital identities is becoming one of the defining safeguarding challenges of the AI era. Schools shouldn’t have to face it alone, but as parents we have a role too and it starts with asking the question.

So, before you sign that consent form this September, ask your school what they have in place. They may not yet have the answer, but the fact that you’re asking means they’ll need to find one.

Carole Osborne is the founder and CEO of Aidos, an AI safeguarding platform that makes pupils in school photographs permanently unidentifiable before they are shared online.

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A Palestinian lawyer, who is an Israeli citizen, has been beaten to a pulp by police in Israel after they invaded his apartment in Be’er Sheva.

Saleh Khalil Faisal Na’ama‘s attack comes amid rampant and escalating Israeli violence and land theft perpetrated on Palestinians under the apartheid occupation.

Israel’s daily newspaper Haaretz got hold of body-worn camera footage from police during the illegal raid, which was triggered by a complaint from an off-duty cop about noise from the apartment.

The instigator of the complaint and two police officers forced their way into Na’ama’s apartment in southern Israel. They attacked him and his relatives, a doctor and nurse, it was reported.

Na’ama suffered serious injuries to his eyes, kidneys and nose, and underwent surgery.

Israel is a racist, terror state.

Featured image via Haaretz

By Skwawkbox

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The Times has continued its decline as a place with zero editorial standards by printing evidence-free anti-Irish shite that ought to have been thrown in the bin with a giant red ‘Citations Needed’ stamped across its face. The piece by Jon Ihle claims that the country is unique among European nations in its hostility towards Jewish people. He says:

…when I travel around Europe on my Irish passport, whether to Rome, Paris, Amsterdam or Cologne — every one of which was a site, within living memory, of Jewish persecution — I don’t worry at all.

Yet at home in Dublin, I do worry.

In fact, in deeply irresponsible fashion, Ihle goes on to engender fear in Ireland’s 2,000 member Jewish community by suggesting there are antisemitic child murderers waiting to strike at any moment:

I worry every time I attend a Jewish community event that this will be the time someone gets through the many layers of security to attack us. I worry that my partner, who is publicly visible as a Holocaust education activist and a Jewish business owner, will be targeted. I worry that when I bring my six-year-old son to places where other Jews are present, I’m putting him in danger.

The writer spends the best part of a dozen or so paragraphs providing precisely zero meaningful evidence to support this suggestion. His best attempt is – and you’ll be shocked – that strong pro-Palestine sentiment in Ireland is evidence of burning hatred of Jews. He pursues the smear beloved of those seeking to crush Palestine activism by conflating:

….a context of relentless protest against Israel and a boycott movement that is trying to isolate the country from the community of nations…

with “violence against diaspora Jews…around the world”. The latter is a real issue, and should be taken seriously. Notice, however, that Ihle is talking globally. There is no indication that Jewish people are under violent threat in Ireland.

We may have said this before – protesting ‘Israel’ isn’t antisemitic

Furthermore, the idea that it is linked in any way to the overwhelmingly peaceful Palestine solidarity demonstrations that often contain large Jewish contingents is a total fiction. Ihle goes on to claim an:

…atmosphere in Ireland [that] is almost febrile at times.

This is as he adds to his above comments by mentioning the campaign to stop the Ireland vs ‘Israel’ football match, and Ireland’s withdrawal from Eurovision.

It is entirely appropriate for so-called ‘Israel’ to be relentlessly protested and ostracised – this is the only meaningful way of holding the genocidal terror project to account. Especially in the absence of continued failure to act by governments across the world, including Ireland’s own complicit Taoiseach Micheál Martin.

Yet more egregiously, The Times’ own human reality distortion field generator proceeds to claim that “Irish Jews end up as collateral damage” through actions like the call for Herzog Park to be renamed.

Ihle says:

Before he was president of Israel, Chaim Herzog was an Irish Jew…

This is indeed correct. However, and significantly more pertinently, he was also a fucking war criminal piece of shit. As pointed out by the Canary, this brutish coloniser:

…served in the Zionist Haganah paramilitary group, which carried out atrocities in the years leading up to the Nakba, and during the mass ethnic cleansing process itself. Following this, he is described as having “built and led the establishment of IDF Military intelligence”. In 1967 he became military governor of occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and was integral in the ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem’s Mughrabi Quarter, calling the area a “toilet” that the Zionists “decided to remove”.

No one in Ireland is objecting in the least to the park being named after another Irish Jewish person. Jews for Palestine Ireland backed the campaign to get rid of the Herzog stain, and replace it with one of:

…many worthy names to choose from – Harry Kernoff, Estella Solomons, Con Leventhal, David Marcus, and Robert Briscoe, to name just a few options.

The Times printing racist clairvoyance masquerading as fact

Ihle continues his descent by engaging in mindreading, saying:

If “horror in Gaza” is the first thing that springs to mind when you hear “Jew in London”, you should ask yourself some hard questions about why.

You should indeed, but given this is a rather over-ambitious attempt to engage in telepathy, we don’t have any actual – here’s that word again – EVIDENCE, to suggest such thinking is occurring. Apparently Ihle the Celt Whisperer has established that it is, however. Perhaps he can get his calipers out and instruct us that it’s the unique structure of the Irish skull that allows his brain waves to penetrate our feeble defences.

Ihle proceeds, further sans citations, through more fictions about supposed widespread latent Irish antisemitism on social media. So widespread apparently that he can’t find a single example to substantiate his case.

We then get a telling paragraph on so-called ‘Israel’ and Palestine, in which Palestinians are merely the “perceived underdog”. You know the ones who have had the equivalent of over six nukes dropped on them by Zionist butchers over the past two and a half years? Yeah, our mate Jon’s still on the fence about who’s the underdog there. Meanwhile, the Zionist entity’s indisputable status as a “colonial occupier” gets scare quotes.

So yeah, several hundred words, and nothing of any substance, amounting only to an anti-Irish diatribe. File this as case #20,231,007 under “more rubbish intended to smear Palestine activism via conflation with antisemitism”.

Featured image via the Canary

By Robert Freeman

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The makers of the award-winning Gaza: Doctors Under Attack had some choice words for the BBC after the documentary was honoured at this year’s TV Baftas.

On Sunday night, Gaza: Doctors Under Attack picked up the Best Current Affairs title at the TV awards show.

Although the BBC commissioned the documentary in 2024, and had originally planned to air it in February 2025, the project was eventually shelved by the national broadcaster due to concerns about impartiality.

The BBC said in a statement at the time: “We have come to the conclusion that broadcasting this material risked creating a perception of partiality that would not meet the high standards that the public rightly expect of the BBC.”

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In the end, the documentary aired on Channel 4 instead, with Doctors Under Attack – which highlighted the plight faced by medical professionals in the Middle East – among the winners at the TV Baftas over the weekend.

Journalist Ramita Navai said on stage: “Israel has killed over 47,000 children and women in Gaza. So far, Israel has bombed and targeted every single one of Gaza’s hospitals. It’s killed over 1,700 Palestinian doctors and health care workers. It has imprisoned over 400 in what the UN now calls the medicide.

“These are the findings of our investigation that the BBC paid for but refused to show. But we refuse to be silenced and censored. We thank Channel 4 for showing this film.”

After she dedicated the award to the Palestinian doctors and medical workers currently being detained in the Middle East, producer Ben De Pear concluded: “Just a question for the BBC – given you dropped our film, will you drop us from the Bafta screening later tonight?”

The BBC aired coverage of the TV Baftas on a two-hour time delay, featuring De Pear’s closing comment in the broadcast, as well as an edited version of Navai’s speech, omitting the statistics she provided on stage, but including her criticism of the BBC and praise for Channel 4.

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Earlier this year, the BBC faced backlash for editing out pro-Palestine comments from acceptance speeches in its coverage of Bafta’s film awards.

A spokesperson said in February: “The live event is three hours and it has to be reduced to two hours for its on-air slot. The same happened to other speeches made during the night and all edits were made to ensure the programme was delivered to time.”

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Illustration by Tracy Worrall

4 min read22 min

Lessons in political science. This week: sleep

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There was a night, many years ago, when I was drifting off to sleep listening to the radio and the last thing I heard before the land of nod was Geoff Hoon, on The World Tonight, doing a good job defending the indefensible. When the radio woke me up in the morning, there he was again, this time on the Today programme, still on a sticky wicket but batting with gusto.

The more critical of you might say that both falling asleep and waking up to Geoff Hoon is Too Much Hoon, and the sort of thing that only Mrs Hoon should experience, but he was then one of the university’s local MPs, always very helpful with student requests and the like, so there will be no cheap gags like this here. See it, instead, as a small and perhaps unremarkable example of the reservoirs of energy required by frontline politicians.

Ditto for the last day of April, which marked 21 years since I first appeared as an election night anorak. Election all-nighters, fuelled only by coffee and adrenaline, may be great fun for commentators and journalists – it’s one of the highlights of my year – but they seem much less enjoyable for politicians, many of whom have been campaigning for weeks before and would much rather feel a pillow beneath their head. Those whose parties are on the up at least get to enjoy the bragging rights, but the ones I’m always most impressed by are those who have got a right kicking from the electorate – ‘well, it’s certainly been a difficult night for us’ – but who are still there at 4am, fighting the good fight. 

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Or take that bit in Doctor Who, when the Doctor manages to undermine Harriet Jones, the prime minister, by whispering the phrase “Doesn’t she look tired?” to one of her aides; those four words prove to be enough to cause her downfall. It’s much quoted, but implausible. Of course she looks tired! She’s the prime minister; they all look like that. Exhaustion is part of the job description. 

It’s less obvious that this is all a good thing. There are plenty of studies on how sleep deprivation lowers your cognitive abilities (although you don’t need an academic study to know this if you’ve been a parent). Bill Clinton once said that every important mistake he’d made in his life, he’d made because he was too tired – although he clearly wasn’t too tired for some of his mistakes. 

New research just published in Political Psychology has now also found a link between the quality of sleep and political participation. Based on European Social Survey data from 12 countries, including the UK, researchers found that individuals who report good sleep are more likely to vote, even after controlling for a range of other variables. Those who don’t are more likely to take part in non-electoral politics. The effects don’t appear consistently across countries, which implies something else might be going on, although they are found in the UK. 

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The paper might be thought to slightly oversell itself by claiming that “creating societies where high-quality sleep is accessible to the public is vital to the sustainability of democratic regimes”, given that the size of the effects is relatively small; even if all were suffering cheese-inspired nightmares on a regular basis, turnout wouldn’t be all that much lower. Increased levels of education, for example, drive up turnout by roughly four to five times as much as improved sleep quality does. That, however, is just the direct effect. Sleep quality will also be working as a background factor, affecting many of the other variables that drive turnout, including education, health, and so on. ‘Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care, The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath, And it makes you vote a bit more’. As Shakespeare could have written. 

Further reading: F Erol et al, Waking up to politics: How sleep quality relates to political participation, Political Psychology, 2026

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