Spring lodge

  Is it really the wind? Do you seriously believe that's it? Yes, I hear the whistle of it blowing past my ears; Throwing back my hair from my face. I see it moving the trees, their branches violently tossing back and forth. I sense their struggle, holding tight, refusing to let go. But is it really the wind? Is the invisible force just a swiftly moving chilled air? Maybe there's more. Maybe it's alive; Alive with spirit, restless, angered, and revenge seeking. They're the ones screaming in your ear from their painful suffering, Telling you their stories. Times they've failed, times they've been led astray, times they've been abandoned, these things of the past that torture them deepest. Maybe it's them who knock on your window. They move the branches; they pull them, push them, with taps, clicks, slaps, and chilling screeches as they slide against the glass. Trying everything to find their way in to slither across the floor and hide in corners, beneath

  FIFA and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) concluded its first-ever international integrity education programme, designed to support all 211 member associations in their efforts to tackle match manipulation in football. Launched  last year  by FIFA in collaboration with UNODC, the FIFA Global Integrity Programme aimed to educate and build integrity capacity within 211 member associations, and to share knowledge and resources with integrity officers in football. Since its launch in March 2021, some 400-plus representatives from governments and football associations across the globe took part in 29 workshops which covered several key topics, including establishing an integrity initiative, reporting mechanisms, competition protection, cooperation between and among member associations and law enforcement. "Corruption and cheating have no place in our societies, and certainly no place in the world’s most popular sport. Through the Global Integrity Programme, FIFA a

  Spring: the first morning when that one true block of sweet, laminar,                complex scent arrives from somewhere west and I keep coming to lean on the sill, glorying in                the end of the wretched winter. The scabby-barked sycamores ringing the empty lot across the way are                budded —I hadn't noticed — and the thick spikes of the unlikely urban crocuses have already broken               the gritty soil. Up the street, some surveyors with tripods are waving each other left and               right the way they do. A girl in a gym suit jogged by a while ago, some kids passed, playing               hooky, I imagine, and now the paraplegic Vietnam vet who lives in a half-converted ware-               house down the block and the friend who stays with him and seems to help him out come               weaving towards me, their battered wheelchair lurching uncertainly from one edge of the               sidewalk to the other. I know where they're going—t

Such present joys therein I find, That it excels all other bliss That earth affords or grows by kind: Though much I want that most would have, Yet still my mind forbids to crave … This poem has been popular with readers ever since it was first published in 1588 in William Byrd’s  Psalmes, Sonets, & Songs . Yet the authorship of ‘My mind to me a kingdom is’ is by no means certain, and some anthologists now prefer to credit Edward de Vere, the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, with authorship rather than Dyer. Whoever wrote it, it’s an inspiring Renaissance poem about the power of ‘mind over matter’ and the wonders of the human imagination.