Latest news with #Pounds
Hans India
14-05-2025
- Business
- Hans India
Dan Ashworth rejoins FA as Chief Football Officer
London: The English Football Association (FA) have appointed Dan Ashworth as their chief football officer, becoming the first person to assume the role, and is being brought in to lead the high-performance strategy and new-look St. George's Park. Ashworth was previously the FA's director of elite development and then technical director for a six-year tenure between 2013 and 2019. More recently he spent five months as Manchester United sporting director before his abrupt departure in September. After holding key positions at three Premier League clubs, he returns to a newly created role with the FA, with strategic oversight across England men's and women's teams. He will also oversee the regeneration of St. George's Park, which will undergo a significant upgrade to its world-class performance facilities and pitches as England prepares to co-host UEFA Euro 2028. Reporting into FA CEO Mark Bullingham, Ashworth will work closely with men's technical director John McDermott and Kay Cossington's successor in the women's technical directorate. He will focus primarily on optimising the potential of the national football centre and building the long-term systems that underpin the FA's performance ambitions, from winning England teams to developing more homegrown coaches. "Dan is a hugely influential and respected figure in the game, who has a long-standing commitment to England Football. We are very happy to welcome him back in this new role," said Bullingham. Ashworth's removal as sporting director had come as a huge shock after Manchester United had put in a lot of effort to snatch him from the hands of Newcastle United. Ashworth was involved in an extravagant spending spree at Old Trafford during the summer that cost approximately 200 million Pounds (280 million USD) and brought in Leny Yoro, Manuel Ugarte, Matthijs De Ligt, Noussair Mazraoui, and Joshua Zirkzee.
NDTV
12-05-2025
- Politics
- NDTV
Indian-Origin Former UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak Congratulates Virat Kohli, Expresses Sadness For...
The former United Kingdom Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has expressed disappointment that fans would not be able to see Virat Kohli in action on the Test tour of England as the former India captain has announced his retirement. Congratulating Kohli on his illustrious career in red-ball cricket, Sunak wrote that the 36-year-old batter has been a legend of the game and will be missed by fans on India's upcoming tour of England. "Sad we won't get to see @imVkohli one last time this summer. He has been a legend of the game: a superb batsman, an astute captain, and a formidable competitor who always understood the true value of Test cricket," wrote Sunak, the first Prime Minister of Indian origin for the country who invented cricket, in a post on X, formerly Twitter. Sunak is a cricket enthusiast and has enjoyed his interactions with cricketers during his time as British Prime Minister. In March 2023, he hosted the T20 World Cup-winning England men's team at 10 Downing Street and also played an impromptu garden cricket game with them. Sad we won't get to see @imVkohli one last time this summer. He has been a legend of the game: a superb batsman, an astute captain and a formidable competitor who always understood the true value of Test cricket. — Rishi Sunak (@RishiSunak) May 12, 2025 During his tenure as British Prime Minister from October 25, 2022, to July 5, 2024, Sunak announced an investment of 35 million Pounds in grassroots cricket facilities and widening access to the sport within state schools as part of the British government's move to get one million more young people physically active by 2030. Virat Kohli announced his retirement from Test cricket on Monday, pulling the curtains on a 14-year-long tenure during which he played 123 Tests, scoring 9230 runs at a batting average of 46.85 and posting 30 centuries and 31 half-centuries. He had a top score of 254 not out. Kohli had led India in 68 Tests, winning 40 of them, which makes him the most successful captain of the Indian team.
Hans India
12-05-2025
- Sport
- Hans India
Rishi Sunak regrets not getting to see Kohli playing in England one last time
The former United Kingdom Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has expressed disappointment that fans would not be able to see Virat Kohli in action on the Test tour of England as the former India captain has announced his retirement. Congratulating Kohli on his illustrious career in red-ball cricket, Sunak wrote that the 36-year-old batter has been a legend of the game and will be missed by fans on India's upcoming tour of England. "Sad we won't get to see @imVkohli one last time this summer. He has been a legend of the game: a superb batsman, an astute captain, and a formidable competitor who always understood the true value of Test cricket," wrote Sunak, the first Prime Minister of Indian origin for the country who invented cricket, in a post on X, formerly Twitter. Sunak is a cricket enthusiast and has enjoyed his interactions with cricketers during his time as British Prime Minister. In March 2023, he hosted the T20 World Cup-winning England men's team at 10 Downing Street and also played an impromptu garden cricket game with them. During his tenure as British Prime Minister from October 25, 2022, to July 5, 2024, Sunak announced an investment of 35 million Pounds in grassroots cricket facilities and widening access to the sport within state schools as part of the British government's move to get one million more young people physically active by 2030. Virat Kohli announced his retirement from Test cricket on Monday, pulling the curtains on a 14-year-long tenure during which he played 123 Tests, scoring 9230 runs at a batting average of 46.85 and posting 30 centuries and 31 half-centuries. He had a top score of 254 not out. Kohli had led India in 68 Tests, winning 40 of them, which makes him the most successful captain of the Indian team.
New York Post
09-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Post
Meet DataRepublican, the deaf woman CEOs, bureaucrats and Hunter Biden fear — Elon Musk's DOGE secret weapon
SALT LAKE CITY — Jennica Pounds has become perhaps the most prominent personality — after its leader — behind an organization to which she has no direct or official ties: Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency. And no one even knew her name until about two months ago — by design. 'I've always been a recluse, a big introvert,' the 43-year-old mother of two tells The Post from her Utah home. 'Being thrust into fame in such a sudden manner, in a polarizing manner, was just shocking.' Known as DataRepublican on X, Pounds — petite in oversized black sunglasses and a beige cardigan, with a mysterious, slightly intimidating air, icy like a young Joan Didion — doesn't even work for DOGE. But her volunteer efforts for President Trump's government-slashing initiative have ruffled feathers anyway. 'I am helping out with this because if we don't cut spending, nobody has a future,' she says. 'The work itself, about discovering waste, should not be partisan. Cutting spending is not an ideological thing,' Pounds has been deaf since contracting spinal meningitis at age 2. She is on the autism spectrum and has expressive dysphasia, a neurological condition characterized by difficulty in producing language while comprehension remains intact. In an interview with The Post, she uses text-to-speech software to communicate in a robotic voice. 4 Jennica Pounds has been unmasked as DataRepublican. Justin Hackworth for NY Post Pounds cracks a wry smile when asked if she'd prefer a government run entirely by artificial intelligence. 'That's accelerationist talk,' she types into her laptop before deleting the line. But she's certainly no fan of Washington elites. 'I am converging more and more that the conspiracy theorists were right. That this was a brilliant systems hacking on the part of a very few people. And I feel like if a few people can pull this off, then a few people can stop them, too,' she says. By Pounds' estimation, what she calls an 'Ouroboros of Interest,' an 'infinite money hack,' is 'the reason why our deficit spending is so out of control,' and it got a foothold under President Ronald Reagan with US-led initiatives to combat communism globally. Instead of dissolving after the Soviet Union's collapse, many of those organizations expanded their power and influence, acting as a revolving door for former congresspeople and Fortune 500 CEOs to siphon taxpayer money in the name of US foreign-policy interests while producing little of value in return, she says. She points to one such NGO, the States United Democracy Center, that received $17 million in taxpayer money through USAID — but, she says, appears to have done nothing with the cash other than produce a Muppet video to 'promote democracy.' That's part of an endemic pattern — 'These groups almost always have the words 'Security' or 'Democracy' in their names,' Pounds says — of nonprofits sitting on taxpayer war chests and doing little but host the occasional conference or YouTube seminar that struggles to get 100 views online. Prime examples include the US Global Leadership Coalition, today a supergroup of the largest nongovernmental organizations funded by taxpayer money through USAID, and the National Endowment for Democracy, made up of the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute. 4 Elon Musk holds a chainsaw handed to him by Argentine President Javier Milei — another government-spending cutter. AP After Pounds shared a list of USGLC board members — which included executives from Pepsi, Disney, Pfizer, Google, Citigroup and Land O'Lakes butter — the organization deleted the page from its website. She also uncovered that Hunter Biden was on that board, where he played a pivotal role in allocating $16.5 million in USAID money to Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company whose board he also sat on. 'That right there is why Hunter Biden was worth the $50,000/month,' she says of his Burisma salary. A self-identified 'DOGE volunteer' and 'small-r republican,' Pounds comes from the world of Big Tech, where she worked in programming for Amazon, eBay and Snapchat — developing tracking software for sign-language-to-English translation at that last one. Of Big Tech's liberal lords recently cozying up to Trump, including her ex-boss Jeff Bezos, she says, 'I think these CEOs were always more on the libertarian side. Many of them want to focus on the technical side and don't want to really do the humanities side. For the lack of a better term, they got bullied into the woke agenda of 2020. I think without a moral core, they can get bullied back into a certain agenda again.' Her anonymous social-media account, @DataRepublican, gained a modest following after accurately predicting swing-state results in the 2016 and 2020 elections — but exploded this year when she began building AI models to survey government spending on NGOs. It got the attention of Elon Musk, who has shared her posts on his platform more than 30 times. She went from 10,000 followers to more than 740,000. Her website, acts as a whiteboard tracing government grants and the major players involved, creating an index she says wouldn't have been possible before AI, due to the complexity of information involved. After Pounds posted in January about a migrant nonprofit called Global Refuge receiving $229 million in taxpayer money, Musk responded, 'Noted.' Days later, he announced DOGE was shutting down payments to the group, and in March, Trump announced a freeze on such foreign aid. 4 X DataRepublican/ X All this has placed a target on DataRepublican's back. Rolling Stone doxed her — Pounds believes a member of the deaf community sussed out her identity and leaked it to the former music magazine. The left-leaning Salt Lake Tribune followed up by doxing her husband, Brent Pounds, a former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officer turned whiskey maker who runs the Utah distillery Spirits of the Wasatch. That's when the violent messages and death threats started rolling in. Soon, pizzas were being delivered to their house, a noted precursor to swatting, a vile recent trend of left-wing agitators phoning in fake police reports to send SWAT teams to conservative social-media personalities' homes. Fearing for her life, Pounds packed up her two young children and headed to Florida, where she stayed with her mother for six weeks until things calmed down. She was undergoing vetting to become a federal appointee — she declines to say where — but unaware of a tweeting moratorium she decided to withdraw, surmising she could be more influential in her outside role. 'They only come after you when you're a threat to the system. Keep going — you're doing incredible work,' Nicole Shanahan, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s 2024 running mate, tweeted after Pounds' doxing. Interim US Attorney for DC Ed Martin offered legal assistance. Pounds is equally unnerved by the liberal reaction to Musk and DOGE. Around the time left-wing terrorists were setting Tesla dealerships ablaze in protest, a website popped up with a picture of a Molotov cocktail over her husband's business. 'Why are you fighting for Pepsi and Coca-Cola and the oligarchs?' Pounds asks of the DOGE backlash. 'It's almost David and Goliath. You have a side that concentrates most of the political, most of the corporations, most of the power. And then you have everyone else who's just trying to get by.' 4 Jennica Pounds has an interesting reason for wanting to meet Elon Musk. Justin Hackworth for NY Post Brent and Jennica met in 2008 on and married shortly after. While less politicly engaged than his wife, Brent is an enthusiastic supporter of her mission. 'She basically won't let anything stand in her way. If you look at her life, it's pretty much constant obstacles. She just decides, 'Well, I've got to overcome that,'' he told The Post. 'She won't back down. If she believes strongly that what she's doing is right, she's not going to be bullied or pushed away.' While Pounds continues to build software to benefit deaf people, running DataRepublican is its own full-time job and has become something of a family affair. Pounds is so beloved in her mission to expose waste, even her mother has gained a popular X following, mirroring Musk's own mom, Maye. While Pounds admits she directly communicates with some DOGE workers, she's never met or privately interacted with Elon Musk — not that she wouldn't welcome a powwow with the world's richest man. 'But not for the reason others think,' she says. 'I want to make the case for him believing in Christ.' She can't be sure where all this is heading but believes we're in the midst of a second American revolution. 'These people are happy to go full throttle and let the whole country crash. Because they'll probably be fine no matter what. They hold all the power,' she says of America's NGO-funded shadow government. 'I can't predict where it goes. I think this direction, the DOGE direction, is the most peaceful outcome.'
Yahoo
12-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Doxxed by Rolling Stone, Utah's ‘DataRepublican' tells us what she's discovered
The Utah software engineer who is drawing nationwide attention from the White House, the media and the world's richest man will tell you the potential of artificial intelligence is best summed up by 1 Samuel Chapter 17. By her reading, AI is not an uncontrollable threat to humanity, it's the slingshot in the hands of David that defeats a government Goliath — and it's the gift that will save America. 'AI gives us the ability to take on massive, entrenched systems that would otherwise be impossible to untangle,' Jennica Pounds told the Deseret News. 'Without it, we'd be fighting blind.' Pounds, a Utah resident who up until two weeks ago was known only by her X account, 'DataRepublican,' burst onto the scene this year as the most viral pioneer of Elon Musk's AI-driven takeover of Washington, D.C. With the creation of a powerful government-spending database, and a pithy online personality, Pounds has taken conservative social media by storm and attracted her own fair share of critics in the process. As some have accused Pounds of copying Musk's unorthodox auditing practices — which recently yielded an 83% reduction of USAID, thousands of federal layoffs and a disputed $105 billion in savings — Musk, in turn, appears to have occasionally taken cues from Pounds. On Jan. 21, Pounds flagged Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, with 'a quick billion for you to cut!' that included $229 million to Global Refuge, a faith-based immigrant charity, that is 97% taxpayer funded. Musk, who has the world's largest following on X, of nearly 220 million, responded to her message with one word: 'Noted.' Less than two weeks later — after he encouraged users to follow DataRepublican — Musk announced that the DOGE team was 'rapidly shutting down' federal payments to Global Refuge. Pounds told the Deseret News that while Musk has not reached out privately, DOGE representatives have messaged her multiple times over the past two months. But since a Rolling Stone article revealed her identity, and other personal information, to the world on Feb. 26, Pounds' life as a Salt Lake City business owner, wife and mother of two has been turned on its head. The couple's local distillery has been targeted with bad reviews and the family has been forced to take their elementary-age sons out of school to stay in Florida until things calm down, Pound said. In her first official news interview since her identity became public, Pounds told the Deseret News that despite the stress of public life, she has redoubled her commitment to apply her big tech background to mapping out the web of government connections that she believes has led to unresponsive leadership and wasted taxpayer dollars. For someone who describes herself as deaf and nonverbal, Pounds says AI technology has transformed her relationship with her children by increasing their ability to communicate. Pounds also believes AI has the power to revolutionize the relationship between citizens and their government. 'AI has fundamentally changed the balance of power when it comes to government transparency and accountability,' Pounds wrote via email because she said her autism makes real-time sign language difficult in interviews. For too long, technology has been used by government authorities to surveil and regulate the public, according to Pounds. But with unregulated AI tools in public hands, she predicts that dynamic is about to flip 180 degrees. 'Now, everyday citizens can use AI to analyze government spending, track decisions, and uncover waste and corruption on a scale that was previously impossible,' Pounds said. And Pounds has exactly the skill set to pave the way. As a child without the ability to hear, Pounds felt like most career paths were 'cut off' from her until she discovered programming. From there, her career path became clear: she earned a graduate degree in computer science focused on 'big data' and quickly secured high profile positions at Amazon, eBay and Snap Inc. and Upstart, specializing in massive datasets and machine-learning optimization. These jobs kept Pounds in the Seattle area while her husband, Brent, served in the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Corps. But after discovering hypodermic needles used for drug injection scattered around the playground with her toddler, Pounds said she knew 'we needed a different environment.' The Pounds moved to Utah in 2019, looking for a more welcoming place to raise a family. Within a few years, Pounds found a remote job dealing directly with AI software, while she and her husband opened Spirits of the Wasatch Distillery and she began blending her knowledge of technology with her deepening interest in politics. What started in 2020 as election analysis, creating block-by-block voting breakdowns, quickly morphed into AI 'toolmaking,' creating interactive dashboards to track how political donations are made and who are the recipients. When President Donald Trump signed DOGE into existence in 2025, Pounds decided to switch directions yet again. Pounds learned that to cancel large portions of federal spending, DOGE would need specific ID numbers for grants awarded to nonprofit, nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs. But while the data was all ostensibly public information, Pounds found there was no effective way to search for it. 'Government spending data exists, but without tools to analyze and connect the dots, it's nearly impossible to see the full picture,' said Pounds, who has the motto, 'Data does not equal transparency.' So, Pounds created centered around a 'reverse index' tool that lets users search for organizations and easily find how much federal money they are receiving. It also has features that allow users to track PAC donations, NGO officer salaries and connections between influential policymakers. As the website went viral, Pounds said she realized there was a pattern of overlapping conflicts of interest between elected lawmakers and the private NGO boards they sit on, which she estimates are funded by upwards of $100 billion in taxpayer dollars. 'That's when the mission evolved from simply cutting waste to taking on something much larger: restoring accountability and transparency in our democracy,' Pounds said. In February, Pounds announced she had resigned from her job in order to devote herself 'full time' to 'DOGE-adjacent efforts,' while still remaining independent from the DOGE's White House office. But Pounds told the Deseret News that since media reports have made a return to big tech 'no longer an option," she has decided that 'working within the system is the right path' for her. Pounds said she is unable to 'discuss details about potential employers,' but she hinted at a future 'working within the government,' and previously said she is waiting on a federal 'background check.' While she doesn't always agree with Musk — and feels that pushback from Congress and the courts are necessary checks on executive power — Pounds said that Musk may be the only person who can take on the bloated bureaucracy because of his reputation of successfully disrupting the status quo in the fields of electric vehicles, space travel and neurotechnology. But the 'uncomfortable reality' behind DOGE, according to Pounds, is that as it seeks to trim down unnecessary spending, it will likely find a much deeper problem of ruling establishment misconduct that could be much more difficult to root out. 'It's not just about cutting government waste — it's about confronting the system that enables corruption and unchecked power,' Pounds told the Deseret News. 'If we want real, lasting change — if we want a government that's financially sustainable and accountable to the people — we have to take on the entire system that's choking progress. That's what makes DOGE's work so important." Pounds' ability to pull out datapoints that appear to support claims about a conspiracy among elites has made her a hero among some on the right — Musk, and one of his closest social media allies, Utah Sen. Mike Lee, have both shared or responded to her posts dozens of times over the past several weeks. Lee has repeatedly praised 'DataRepublican' on X, calling her a 'gift to America,' telling his followers to follow her to be 'enlightened' and coming to her defense after news outlets repeated the claims made in the Rolling Stone article. 'The concerned citizen known as Data Republican, whose research has helped root out waste, fraud, and abuse of taxpayer dollars, is experiencing the sad truth that leftist organizations will go after the families and livelihoods of Americans who dare to challenge the corrupt status quo,' Lee told the Deseret News. 'But, unlike the liberal media, she has millions of grateful Americans on her side — myself included.' The Rolling Stone article in question alleges that Pounds, acting under her social media moniker, DataRepublican, sometimes accuses political actors of malfeasance on shaky grounds. For example, last month, Pounds said that Bill Kristol, an anti-Trump conservative commentator, preferred 'the deep state,' because his advocacy organization, Defending Democracy Together, received money from a nonprofit, that had received money from another nonprofit that ultimately received funds from USAID. While Pounds has put her partisan leanings on display by arguing that 'MAGA voters' need to show up in primary elections to oust incumbents in Congress, and by lobbing attacks at Democratic mega donor George Soros, she says the 'Republican' in her social media handle is with a 'small r' because she carries no party loyalty. In fact, one of the biggest revelations from her deep dive into the federal bureaucracy has been just how bipartisan the conflicts of interest are, Pounds said. 'Yet, instead of equal outrage from both sides, the attacks on me have been overwhelmingly one-sided.' Pounds expressed frustration with the Rolling Stone article because it suggested she advised Musk directly and it insinuated that she was influenced by her prior company's pushback against federal regulation and the company's connection to Peter Thiel, a billionaire Republican donor. But Pounds readily admits that her newfound-fame has come as a result of the recently reelected president who has empowered DOGE in an unprecedented way. 'The sheer scale of government spending and federal programs is too vast for any person, or even a team of people, to fully grasp,' Pounds said. 'Now, with the right people in place and a renewed focus on accountability, we can finally expose what's been hidden for so long. As to whether her career will remain focused on government transparency beyond DOGE's 18-month lifespan, Pounds said her future 'is ultimately in the Lord God's hands.' For now, at least, Pounds hopes her family can return home to Utah to enjoy its 'strong sense of community,' 'emphasis on family,' 'high standards' — and 'widely available energy drinks' — in peace.
