1/2 My sunday thought Never Write Off a Man Whose Future You Cannot See Nicolas Jackson delivered a Man of the Match performance against Manchester City, scoring twice as Aston Villa handed the league leaders their first defeat of the season but this was more than a match. This was a message. Seven straight wins. A flawless start. Top of the table. A team that looked unbeatable and the man who brought it all crashing down was the very striker Enzo Maresca decided he could do without at Chelsea. Jackson was not let go quietly. He was loaned to Bayern Munich, then sold to Aston Villa. In football, that message is loud and clear you are not part of our future. Many players hear those words and shrink. They accept the label. They begin to believe that one manager's verdict is life's verdict Jackson refused. He went back to the man who first believed in him, Unai Emery, his old mentor from Villarreal. He put his head down. He trained when no one was watching. He scored in Europe. He scored in the league and then destiny handed him the biggest stage of all. The league leaders, unbeaten, with the man who doubted him standing on the opposite touchline. Then.....Sixth minute. Goal...then Sixtieth minute. Goal. Final whistle. Man of the Match. No press conference rant. No social media drama. No demand for an apology. The scoreboard said everything, and the award confirmed it. The Moral of the Story Rejection tells you where someone else's vision ends. It never tells you where yours begins. Jackson was not good enough for one manager's plan. He was good enough to be the best player on the pitch against that same manager's unbeaten side. Both are true. That is the lesson: one person's "no" is an opinion, not a final judgement on your worth. To Those Who Hold the Power to Reject Be careful how you treat people on your way up. The intern you ignore today may be the regulator you need tomorrow. The junior staffer you dismiss may be the investor you pitch to in ten years. The supplier you squeezed may one day own the business you depend on. You cannot see a person's ceiling from where they stand today. Nobody can. So treat everyone as if their best chapter has not yet been written. It probably hasn't. To Those Who Have Been Rejected. ✅️1. Separate the decision from your identity. Being turned down means you did not fit someone's needs at that moment. Fit is not the same as value. Chelsea did not need Jackson's style. Villa did. ✅️2. Feel the pain, then put a time limit on it. Disappointment is allowed a visit, never a permanent residence. ✅️3. Ask what you can learn, not who you can blame. Reflection turns rejection into a lesson. Bitterness turns it into a prison. ✅️4. Go back to the people who believe in you. Every one of us needs an Emery. When one door closes, walk toward those who held one open for you before. ✅️5. Work when nobody is watching. Saturday's Man of the Match display was built in months of unseen effort. Discipline in private produces victory in public.

1/2 Mr. President, @POTUS Somalia Is Not an Insult. It Is a Wound the World Helped Open. Mr. President, you have made Somalia your favourite punchline. You call it "barely a country," "filthy," "the worst country on Earth," and you wave it like a club every time Congresswoman Ilhan Omar says something you dislike. Let me offer you what your advisers clearly have not. Nobody flees paradise for fun. Somalis did not leave home on a whim. They left because their state collapsed around them. Siad Barre ruled for 21 years, using the army and security agencies to crush dissent and destroy independent civilian institutions. When his regime fell in January 1991, the country tore itself apart. Militias carved up cities, neighbours turned on neighbours, and drought turned war into famine. Your own State Department called it the world's greatest humanitarian disaster. Hundreds of thousands fled on foot, many arriving in Kenya starving, sick and traumatised. Ilhan Omar was one of those children. She lived in a Kenyan refugee camp before America gave her a home. Ask any Somali in Minneapolis, Nairobi, London or Mombasa given peace, they would have stayed. They would have raised their families in Mogadishu, Kismayo and Hargeisa, beside the sea their grandparents fished. Exile is not a choice. It is a sentence handed down by war. Guess what? America was not a bystander. During the Cold War, Washington armed and funded Siad Barre as a strategic ally in the Horn of Africa. When the Cold War ended, the money and the interest dried up together, and the state you now mock was left to rot. You do not get to help light the fire and then sneer at the people running from the smoke. Know the country before you insult it. Somalia has the longest coastline on the African mainland, about 3,330 kilometres, guarding one of the busiest shipping lanes on Earth, the gateway between the Indian Ocean, the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea. Every tanker and container ship that rounds the Horn passes Somalia. For centuries Somali ports traded with Arabia, Persia, India and China, long before America existed. Somalis traded frankincense and myrrh in the age of the Pharaohs, and today millions of camels, goats and sheep are still shipped every year from Berbera and Bosaso to the Gulf. This is not a wasteland. It is a productive nation interrupted. Somalia once fed Europe its bananas. Before the war, Somali bananas from the Shabelle valley were a premium fruit on Italian tables. Under the Somalita brand, the industry was once the largest in Africa, and by 1990 Somali banana exports was huge. Then the state collapsed, warlords fought over the plantations for hard currency, and war destroyed farms, infrastructure, storage and roads and displaced farmers and workers. A country does not lose Africa's biggest banana industry because its people are lazy. It loses it because war burns everything it touches. You talk about Somali piracy. Let us talk about who robbed whom first. Somalia's waters are among the richest in the Indian Ocean, with tuna, mackerel, sardines, sharks and lobsters. When the government fell and the navy vanished, foreign trawlers moved in, illegally catching large volumes of rock lobster and other warm water fish. In some years foreign boats caught more than 132,000 metric tons off Somalia while local fishermen landed only 40,000, with vessels from at least 21 countries joining the plunder. Even today, illegal fishing costs Somalia $300 million annually. Piracy was a crime and was rightly crushed. But the first thieves on that coastline did not speak Somali. They came in industrial trawlers flying foreign flags and stripped a starving nation's sea while the world looked away if anything the pirates stopped the pillage .