FIFA Scrapped the $20 Billion World Cup Sale. Its Own COO Broke Ranks — and UEFA Says It's Lost Confidence in Infantino.
FIFA killed its own $20 billion World Cup stake-sale plan on July 31, one day after 143 national associations across three confederations came out against it. That didn't end the crisis: FIFA's own Chief Operating Officer publicly broke with Infantino the same day, a senior adviser resigned calling it "a bad deal for football," and UEFA says it has lost confidence in his leadership -- with Infantino reportedly told, privately, to resign or face a formal vote to remove him. He has not stepped down.
China Built a Payment System That Skips the Dollar. Saudi Arabia Joined It. The Bank Running It Just Walked Away.
Project mBridge lets central banks pay each other directly in their own digital currencies, with no dollar and no SWIFT in the middle. It's run by China, Hong Kong, Thailand, and the UAE — and, since 2024, Saudi Arabia, whose oil sales have priced almost entirely in dollars since 1974. The Bank for International Settlements built the technology, then walked away from the project in October 2024, about a week after Vladimir Putin publicly proposed a comparable BRICS payment concept as a tool to dodge Western sanctions. The bank says it simply graduated out of a project that had matured, not a political exit. Cumulative transactions have grown from $22 million in 2022 to roughly $69 billion (470 billion yuan) by mid-2026 — real activity, but still small next to the trillions that move through dollar-based systems every day.
Trump Is Suing the BBC for $10 Billion Over an Edited Speech. The BBC's Defense Strategy: Subpoena His Own Texts.
A BBC Panorama documentary spliced parts of Trump's January 6, 2021 speech together into what looked like one line telling the crowd to march on the Capitol and "fight like hell." The BBC apologized; two of its top executives resigned. Trump then sued for $10 billion. Now, to defend the case, BBC's lawyers are demanding Trump hand over his own personal texts, phone logs, calendars, and diaries from the day of the riot, plus financial details on roughly 400 companies in his family's revocable trust — a federal judge already ordered the financial records turned over. Trump's team is fighting the rest, citing executive privilege, a claim that's legally contested since privilege normally covers official government deliberations, not personal business records.
Gibraltar's Border Didn't Disappear. It Moved to the Airport, the Port, and the Camera Network.
Britain and the EU tore down the fence at Gibraltar's land border with Spain — a real win for the 15,000 people who cross it daily for work. But the checks didn't vanish. They moved to the airport and port, where Spanish officers now check you too. And the fence was replaced by 26 cameras, facial recognition, and plate readers.
Britain's New Law Can Punish What You Say About Iran's Revolutionary Guard. What Matters Is Why You Said It.
Britain didn't label Iran's Revolutionary Guard a terrorist group. It built a new kind of ban instead — one where saying you support the group can carry 14 years in prison, but only if you say it for a reason that hurts Britain. The government says that condition protects ordinary speech. No court has tested where the line falls.
Pakistan Didn’t Plan a Solar Revolution. Its People Built One Anyway — and It’s Quietly Breaking the Grid.
Worn down by daily blackouts and power bills that roughly tripled, millions of Pakistanis bolted cheap Chinese solar panels onto their roofs so fast that at the height of summer 2025 solar became the country’s single biggest electricity source — about a quarter of all power at peak (across a full year, hydro, coal and gas still rival it). No subsidy, no government plan. It’s the fastest grassroots solar boom anywhere — and it’s pushing the national grid toward a death spiral, with the people who can’t afford panels left holding the bill.
Criticizing Israel Isn’t Antisemitism. Real Antisemitism Sometimes Hides Right Next to It. Here’s the Documented Line — and Why a CNN Panel Just Exploded Over It.
A CNN panel blew up this weekend over a question tangling both left and right: where does criticism of Israel end and antisemitism begin? They’re different things — criticizing a government, including Israel’s, is ordinary politics; antisemitism is hostility or conspiracy aimed at Jews as Jews. The confusion gets exploited two opposite ways, and those failures aren’t mirror images. Here’s the line, the documented stakes, and the tests that tell them apart.
Megyn Kelly Told 350,000 Haitians to “Go Back to Haiti.” It Cost Her Nothing. Whether Hate Has a Price Depends on Who You Aim It At — and Which Country You’re In.
After the Supreme Court cleared the way to end legal status for ~350,000 Haitians, Megyn Kelly told them on a top show to “go back to f—ing Haiti” — and faced no penalty. Two rules explain the silence: in America, whether hate carries a cost turns on who it targets and whether the machinery to make it expensive was ever built for that group; and the same words are protected speech here but a regulated offence across most of the democratic world. Here’s how both work — and what you can do about either.
Thailand Has a Law That Lets Parents Take Back Gifts From an ‘Ungrateful’ Child. The Singha Beer Heir Is Testing It.
A 1908 Thai law — the “ungrateful child” provision — lets parents legally revoke gifts they’ve already given a child judged abusive, neglectful, or guilty of “serious reputational harm.” It rarely surfaces in public. Now the heir to the $1.75 billion Singha beer fortune is being sued under it by his own mother, after he went public alleging childhood abuse. He says the law exists to silence. They’re in court July 8.