It has been a bad few weeks for Fifa and its president, Gianni Infantino, and therefore a good few weeks for football. ‘Having been re-elected unopposed in 2019 and 2023,’ I wrote in June, ‘Infantino has just announced his intention to stand again. His victory seems a formality.’ More and worse has happened since then than even Fifa’s most fatalistic observers would have thought possible.
Firefighters attend a wildfire between Saumos and Le Porge, Gironde, France, 23 July 2026 (MAXPPP / Guillaume Bonnaud / Alamy)
In the last week of July a guest in our house, an hour’s drive from Bordeaux, was called away to a fire emergency in the Gironde, where things were rapidly getting out of control. A firefighter attached to the French military, he had just lost two colleagues in the civilian service in a fire near the airport: their fire engine was trapped in a stand of blazing pine trees. Within days, it looked as if the western suburbs of Bordeaux were under threat, but by early August the situation in the Gironde was relatively stable, even if the destruction was immense and the prospect of further fires still looms.
It has never been easy to get asylum in the US, but during the last two years it has become almost impossible. The Trump administration has closed the border to asylum seekers, denied detainees access to a judge, cut off food benefits, added application fees and just last week announced a rule that will shunt affirmative asylum cases (those opened outside of deportation proceedings) to the immigration courts, where the process is quick, adversarial and even more likely to result in deportation.
Bev Craig, leader of Manchester City Council before she was comfortably elected last week to replace Andy Burnham as mayor, has promised to build fifty thousand affordable homes over the next thirteen years. This would be a doubling of the rate at which they were built between 2016 and 2023, an impressive feat in the abstract, but not enough to address the scale of the problem, especially if few are offered for social rent.
Ten days ago, Andy Burnham stood outside Number 10 and announced a ‘circuit breaker for Britain, bringing forward the biggest changes in the last forty years’. One thing that won’t change is the use of British bases by American military aircraft bombing Iran.
Narendra Modi has had his hand forced by a group of meme-making students and members of the Indian working class. It began with an insult. In May, the Chief Justice of India called the unemployed youth of the country ‘cockroaches’. Abhijeet Dipke, a Dalit university student finishing a master’s degree in Boston, responded: ‘What if all cockroaches come together?’
The current Ebola outbreak was first reported in Ituri on 5 May. Ten days later laboratory analysis confirmed the presence of Bundibugyo virus, one of the four orthoebolaviruses known to cause disease in humans (two others have also been identified). Since then there have been more than 2500 confirmed cases and over a thousand deaths. This is the third known outbreak of Bundibugyo virus disease, and by far the worst.