Jim

Ballymena United have confirmed they have parted ways with manager Jim Ervin.

Ervin took over at the Showgrounds in 2023 and in his first season, kept the club in the Premiership by way of a playoff.

Last season, they finished in the bottom half but it was enough to see Ervin sign a new contract until 2028.

Currently, the Sky Blues sit in eighth position in the table, but on Saturday they suffered a 3-1 defeat to bottom club Glenavon.

In midweek, they were also knocked out of the Count Antrim Shield, going down 4-1 at home to Cliftonville which ended a three-game unbeaten run.

“Ballymena United Football Club can confirm that the club has parted company with first team manager Jim Ervin, this morning,” the club confirmed in a statement.

“The board would like to put on record their upmost thanks to Jim and his staff for their efforts and support during his two and a half years at the Showgrounds.

“Jim will always be remembered as a legendary player for the club, and as manager for successfully guiding Ballymena United through one of the most challenging periods of our recent history.

“The club will now commence the recruitment process for the next first team manager.”

Current U20 manager Ciaran Caldwell will step in as interim boss with Patrick McEleney and Sean O’Neill assisting him for Tuesday’s BetMcLean Cup quarter-final against Larne.

\o7 WASHINGTON\f7 —  Here is a chronology of major events that led up to Wednesday’s resignation of House Speaker Jim Wright (D-Tex.). May 18, 1988–Common Cause, a citizens lobbying group, calls for a formal House ethics investigation of Wright, citing possible improprieties in the publication and sale of his 1986 book, “Reflections of a Public Man.”

May 26, 1988–Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) files a formal complaint with the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, or Ethics Committee as it is known, requesting a probe of the Speaker’s financial dealings.

June 9, 1988–The Ethics Committee, after an eight-hour session lasting late into the evening, votes unanimously to conduct a broad investigation of Wright.

Sept. 14, 1988–Wright testifies before the committee in closed session.

Feb. 22, 1989–After more than six months of investigation and statements from 73 witnesses, committee special counsel Richard J. Phelan submits a 279-page report to the panel on his findings.

April 13, 1989–Wright, in an impassioned House speech, denies that he wrongfully accepted gifts from a business associate or sought to evade House limits on outside income through sales of his book.

April 17, 1989–The Ethics Committee announces it has found “probable cause” to charge Wright with 69 violations of House rules, including acceptance of $145,000 in improper gifts from Ft. Worth developer George A. Mallick Jr. and attempts to evade House limits on honorariums by selling copies of his book to trade associations and other groups in lieu of accepting speaking fees.

May 2, 1989–Wright, denying he knowingly violated any rules, publicly appeals for an early hearing on misconduct charges to “present my side,” but committee members say they first must complete their investigation into other allegations.

May 9, 1989–Wright and a team of attorneys launch his defense against misconduct charges by criticizing the fairness of Phelan’s investigation, charging that it distorted the evidence to place Wright in the harshest light.

May 10, 1989–Ethics Committee votes to expand its inquiry to look into a Texas oil well deal that gave Wright a quick profit of $340,000 last year.

May 23, 1989–At a formal committee hearing, Wright’s attorney, Stephen D. Susman of Houston, asks panel members to drop the major charges against Wright on grounds his actions did not constitute violations of House rules of conduct.

May 24, 1989–Congressional supporters of Wright, working behind the scenes, fail to win agreement from committee members to reduce charges against the Speaker in return for his promise to resign office. Wright later disavows any interest in a “deal” on the charges.

May 31, 1989–In an impassioned one-hour address on the House floor, Wright offers to resign his House seat and his speakership and calls on his colleagues to halt the ethics attacks on opposing party members.

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — The Chargers didn’t have to worry about another historic comeback.

This time, the Jacksonville Jaguars left no room for doubt.

Unable to handle Jacksonville’s ground game or its pass rush, the Chargers offered little resistance in a 35-6 defeat under blue skies at EverBank Stadium.

It was the worst loss of Jim Harbaugh’s 1½ seasons with the Chargers, and the club’s worst loss since a 63-21 thrashing by the Raiders on Dec. 14, 2023.

The Chargers proved as mild as the balmy weather, mustering a pair of field goals and making the Jaguars look like playoff contenders, even though Jacksonville had lost three of its previous four games.

The Jaguars ran for 192 yards — the Chargers got 42 in that department — and won the time-of-possession battle by almost 16 minutes.

Justin Herbert took a beating, spending some time in the blue medical tent, as the Chargers’ offensive line woes came home to roost in a big way. He was under heavy pressure on most of his drop-backs even though Jacksonville entered the game tied for last in sacks.

Three starters missing from the Jacksonville secondary? That didn’t seem to bother the Jaguars a bit, as Herbert was limited to 81 yards passing with an interception, and was sacked three times. He oversaw a Chargers offense that gained a total of five yards in its first three second-half possessions.

Herbert mercifully was replaced in the fourth quarter by backup Trey Lance, with the game long since decided. In fact, the Chargers pulled most of their starters with 11 minutes remaining.

Jacksonville was the scene of the crime where three years ago the Chargers blew a 27-point lead in a first-round playoff loss to the Jaguars.

Chargers wide receiver Ladd McConkey is tackled by Jaguars safety Andrew Wingard in the first half Sunday.

(Mike Carlson / Getty Images)

The first half Sunday was a forgettable one for the Chargers, who made their way to the locker room in a 14-6 hole.

Their biggest concern was Herbert, who was slammed to the turf on a fourth-down drop-back with 29 seconds to play.

The play had been whistled dead — left tackle Trevor Penning was lined up wrong — but that didn’t stop Jaguars defensive end B.J. Green from racing around the edge and obliterating the star quarterback. The Chargers didn’t even get the benefit of the roughing-the-passer call, as the penalties were offsetting.

Herbert headed to the blue medical tent and Lance began warming up.

Chargers coach Jim Harbaugh looks down on the sideline during a 35-6 loss to the Jaguars on Sunday.

(Doug Murray / Associated Press)

Chargers running back Kimani Vidal, promoted from the practice squad earlier this season after the team’s top two backs were injured, spent much of the first half on the sideline with a leg injury. The Chargers had promoted two more practice-squad running backs to play behind him.

In shambles is the Chargers’ offensive line. Penning, acquired in a trade with New Orleans two weeks ago, made his debut as the starting left tackle. Like his team, he struggled mightily all day.

Behind the scenes the changes have been seismic.

The motivation was twofold.

As they assessed the inner workings of the club, senior figures around the ownership concluded it was “over-dimensioned”, according to one observer close to the process.

In other words, there were too many people and too many jobs.

They found a structure which they felt required United to be playing in the Champions League every season and competing to win the Premier League. Failure put a strain on finances.

Having reached such a view and with losses so high, slashing staff numbers was a harsh but inevitable reality.

An initial cull of 250 staff within months of Ratcliffe’s arrival was carried out to get the numbers down.

It is accepted internally that the pain created was extensive, the shock huge.

It was the second round of 200 redundancies this year that allowed the hierarchy to pursue a different staffing model, so finance could be used in what was felt to be a more efficient way.

Nowhere is the impact of that more evident than in United’s data operation.

In an interview with the popular United We Stand fanzine in December 2024, Ratcliffe described the club’s approach to data analysis as being in the “last century”.

It was felt that Formula 1 was the sport at the cutting edge of data and AI use. The performance of every single component is monitored in fine detail, and success and failure can be measured in hundredths of a second.

As a result, Michael Sansoni’s arrival from the Mercedes F1 team as director of data in April was one of the least surprising moves.

Sansoni has completely revamped United’s data capabilities, which are now being used extensively across performance, recruitment and training.

Precise details of the work Sansoni has implemented are a closely guarded secret, but one source said the work of United’s data and analytics team has accelerated to such a degree it is now “among the top four teams”.

Following the second set of job cuts there was a strategic focus to bring in what have been described as “versatile people who are multi-faceted and multi-skilled to help in multiple areas”.

It is the senior appointments that really catch the eye, though.

A quick list of new arrivals among senior staff at the Old Trafford club unearths 19 names.

Not all the exits were forced and, as at any big organisation, a change in ownership can lead to movement further down – but the scale of change has been significant.

Two notable figures remain: Collette Roche and Martin Mosley.

Chief operating officer Roche is leading United’s representation around their proposed 100,000-capacity new stadium and the wider Old Trafford regeneration.

Mosley joined United in 2007 and took over as general counsel in the summer of 2024 following the departure of Patrick Stewart, who is now chief executive at Rangers.

Roche and Mosley’s presence is regarded as a crucial link to the pre-Ratcliffe era while those running the club get a full understanding of the scale of United, which can come as a shock, even for those – like chief executive Omar Berrada (Barcelona/Manchester City), chief business officer Marc Armstrong (Paris St Germain), performance director Sam Erith (Manchester City/Tottenham/FA) and director of recruitment Christopher Vivell (Chelsea/Red Bull) – with experience of working at big clubs.

Trusted Ineos figure Roger Bell has become United’s chief finance officer and Kirstin Furber has arrived from Channel 4 as people director.

But it goes much further. A head of sports medicine and, for the first team, a new doctor, a new physio and a new performance chef. Experts in nutrition and soft tissue treatment. Academy director. Media director. All part of the nuts and bolts at a leading Premier League club in 2025.

So many significant figures from the previous era, who negotiated key deals, treated players and presented the public face of the club, have gone.

No-one can be sure if the future will be better.

As with every other club, external judgement of the success or failure of off-field change can be swift and it is almost always connected to results of the first team, which by their nature can hinge on arbitrary moments.

There is an acceptance internally at United of an unquantifiable lag time between inception of new processes and their outcome.

Sometimes, though, it becomes obvious a certain move has failed.

Dan Ashworth clearly falls into that category. Highly respected in the game, Ashworth’s willingness to leave Newcastle to take up the job of sporting director is still felt at Old Trafford to be a positive and reflected well on the changes being made and future direction anticipated.

However, after United paid Newcastle £3m in compensation, within five months he was gone.

Sources deny that a split occurred around the choice of Ten Hag’s replacement.

But there was a difference of opinion, the respective views of how Ashworth’s job should work did not fit and a parting of the ways – with another compensation payment, in the region of £4m – was viewed as the inevitable outcome.

There’s no shortage of bands commemorating their glory days as decade anniversaries of albums fly by. Yet few landmark releases feel not only fresh but forward-thinking 20 years after they were recorded. My Morning Jacket stumbled onto this kind of brilliance in October 2004 when it released its fourth studio album “Z.” Across 10 tracks of lush, euphoria-driven rock ‘n’ roll, the band captured a notable tone shift in its sound that melded Southern rock, haunting folk, psychedelic soul laced with jam band energy. It’s a set of songs that still make up a huge chunk of the bands live show. In September the band performed the album in its entirety to a sold-out Hollywood Palladium for its 20th anniversary.

“We still play these songs all the time,” said frontman and principal songwriter Jim James in a recent conversation. “So it’s not like we broke up after we released ‘Z’ and then we got back together 20 years later to play these songs, and it’s such a trip. We’ve been playing them nonstop for 20 years.”

Shortly after the release of its 10th studio album “is,” the band put out a deluxe reissue of “Z” that includes four B-sides and a whole album’s worth of demo versions of songs like “Wordless Chorus,” “Off the Record” and Dodante. Recently James spoke to The Times about the enduring power of “Z” and the joy of going back to the beginning of the album’s origins to give himself and his fans a new appreciation for the groundbreaking sound the band created.

The rerelease of “Z” was prefaced earlier this year with a full-album show at the Palladium. What was it like revisiting the album on stage first before it came out (again) on vinyl and streaming?

This is our fourth album now to hit the 20-year mark. So we’ve got some experience now doing these album shows. And it’s funny because some of the earlier albums we don’t play all the songs from them so we had to go back and relearn a lot of songs. But the songs from “Z” we pretty much play all the songs all the time. So it’s pretty hilarious how it involved no effort. It just involved playing them in that order of the sequence of the album. But we kind of laughed about that. We’re like, man, we don’t really even have to do any research or anything. We were all kind of reflecting just on how grateful we are that we like playing all the songs still. It’s such a great feeling to play songs for 20 years and never really get tired of them. People still want to hear them and there’s still excitement there, and they still feel fresh. It’s really a beautiful thing.

This was your first album using an outside producer. What was that like for you as the songwriter to step in the studio with John Leckie to help you realize your vision with “Z”?

It was so great, because I really needed somebody who could work with me and not let our egos clash too much. John was just really great about coming in and respecting what I wanted to do, but also voicing his opinion and what he liked and what he didn’t like and when he thought we could do better. And it was just really so refreshing and so good for us to have him there. I mean, his track record speaks for itself, he’s somebody who you can trust right off the bat, just because of all the things they’ve done in the past. He’s such a soft-spoken gentleman but he also has this hilarious, brutal honesty about him, which was always really great.

Your lineup had also changed between the previous album “It Still Moves” and “Z” — adding keyboard player Bo Koster and guitarist Carl Broemel who are still in the band today. So was that like stepping in the studio with the “new guys” for the first time?

It was really nerve-racking and really exciting all at once. We had some touring experience under our belt with Bo and Carl, so we kind of knew that it was working out on that level, but we’d never really recorded before, so it was a real test for all of us. And I think we all knew that. So everybody brought their A game to the session and we took it really seriously, but we also had a lot of fun and just really kind of got to know each other. That was good to do that out in the middle of nowhere, out there in the Catskills, up at the studio. It gave us some time to really bond without a lot of the real-world stuff coming in or other people coming in. So I think that was really important, that we did it that way.

Do you remember what song came out of the sessions first?

“It Beats 4 U” was the first one, because that was one we had already played live before we started recording. So I think that was the first song that we started messing with. But I think they all were kind of coming to life around the same time. So by the time we got in there to start unpacking them, I had already written them and kind of made the demos of them and stuff.

It’s great that you included so many demo versions of your songs on this rerelease. What was the process like of locating these, sifting through and sequencing which ones you wanted to put on the album?

Well, I love demos for a lot of my favorite bands — I love it when I get to hear the demos from the albums. So I’m always saving all that stuff; with my own stuff I’m always compiling all the demos, because that’s half the fun to me. Because sometimes you get this just like a beautiful glimpse into the song. Quite often, I end up liking the demo more than I like the actual album, song because you get a whole, whole new view of it. It’s also interesting when you’re sequencing for vinyl, because you don’t have unlimited time so you kind of got to pick and choose, and that kind of forces you to just choose the best. There’s a whole other round of band demos and then there were my demos, so there were a lot of things to choose from. But it kind of helps me to look at it in vinyl format. There’s still something about the vinyl time limit that helps with quality control. Just kind of pick the ones that I feel are most effective and then try and make a fun sequence so that hopefully, if somebody’s into them, it’s kind of like you get a bonus album that you can listen to.

We had four true songs, B-sides, that we really love too, that weren’t demos. So that was really nice to finally get those out, because those had been on different soundtracks. And then one wasn’t even released. So I don’t think that those weren’t even on streaming or anything for years and years. So it’s really cool to have those out kind of everywhere now, because I’ve always liked all those songs and been proud of those songs too. And I think most bands know the feeling of you know when you make a record. Sometimes songs just don’t fit the record, even if you still love the songs.

MMJ during the “Z” era.

(Sam Erickson)

Were you playing any of those live at the point where you released the album the first round, or did you shelve them for later?

We’ve always played “Where to Begin” live — off and on. We’ve also tried “Chills” a couple times, and I think we did “How Could I Know” a couple times. We’ve never played “The Devil’s Peanut Butter,” we kinda forgot that one existed until this whole [album rerelease] process started, and I found that song again. So we’ll probably play that one somewhere out on the next leg.

Was this process something that you enjoy doing, like, in terms of your how to, sort of like, reexamine an album?

I really love it because I just feel so grateful that anybody even gives a s–, you know? I mean, so there’s that part of me that’s just so grateful to even still be in the game, talking about this. But beyond that, it’s really cool for me because it’s like jumping in a time machine and going back and looking at that point in my life and getting perspective on where I am now, and seeing how I’ve grown and asking “where have I changed? Where have I not changed?” I look back and with all of these albums as they come up to this 20-year mark, and I see I’ve always been really mean and hard on myself, on Jim, but I know that Jim was doing the best he could at each time. That’s the one thing I’ve always kind of been able to see, to get myself through, to not be too hard on myself. I know I was giving it everything I had, so whether I would change things about it as I am today or not — we all look back on the past, and maybe there’s things we’d do differently, but it gives me a lot of comfort to know that I was trying as hard as I could, and all the guys in the band were trying as hard as they could. It really makes me feel proud of us for just putting in the time and effort.

JENNIFER Aniston has confirmed her relationship with Jim Curtis in an adorable Instagram post.

The Friends actress, 56, took to her social media grid to upload a snap showing her hugging her wellness coach boyfriend from behind.

The sultry black and white image showed the pair with beaming smiles, with Jennifer seen peeking over his shoulder.

In her caption, she simply wrote: “Happy Birthday my love.

“Cherished.”

She finished off her super-sweet upload with a red Emoji love heart.

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Real Housewives star Kyle Richards posted two love hearts in reply, while model Poppy Delevingne added the word: “Heaven.”

The relationship reveal came just weeks after the Marley and Me star flashed her rock hard abs in a glam new photoshoot.

The chick flick actress has been rumoured to be in a relationship with Jim Curtis, a hypnotist and wellness expert, since earlier this summer.

At the time, the pair were pictured on a yacht in Mallorca in July.

Recently, the loved-up couple were snapped on a double date at Nobu restaurant in Malibu, California.

The couple were set up by mutual friends.

This is the first time Jennifer has gone public with a boyfriend since her split from husband Justin Theroux in 2017.

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The pair’s relationship has been put under the spotlight of late.

“They are being super private but have been spending a lot of time together,” an unnamed source told Us Weekly.

“They are happy and really into each other.”

The source added: “They’ve been hanging out a lot, but very much on the DL at her home in L.A… it’s very Zen, and she has always been very much into that. They’re a good match.”

Jennifer has been dropping hints that the pair are an item, including ‘liking’ many of Jim’s Instagram posts since May, including one about “a divorce, breakup or difficult romance.”

Jim then returned the favour on her May 25 post of a photo dump that included an image of his book, Shift: Quantum Manifestation Guide.

The wellness guru has described his journey to becoming a hypnotist, saying it started with healing himself.

“After battling with a chronic illness for over 30 years, I learned how to heal and recover from the mental and physical pain it left me with,” Jim writes on his website.

“Through doing the inner work, I not only changed my life, but I’ve helped thousands of others break free from their past to create an entirely new, empowered reality.”

Jennifer, 56, first met ex-husband and fellow actor, Justin in 2007, before beginning their relationship in 2011.

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They married in 2015, announcing their split two years later and their subsequent divorce.

Recently, the screen star bravely opened up on her attempts to have a baby for 20 years.