Le Journal

The opportunity for this tournament’s legacy is in the fan fests, camps and tune-ups accessible to more than the lucky fewIn Germany, fans watched the games on screens in crowded town squares, their roars careening off ancient buildings, or from the banks of rivers, peering at floating, double-sided big screens on barges. At the next World Cup, in South Africa in 2010, people gathered in parks and open-air markets and hotel lobbies and unlicensed, makeshift bars in people’s garages. In Brazil, four years hence, fans spilled from the bars on the Copacabana or watched in restaurants or in streets closed for the occasion – not as if anybody was driving during the Seleção’s games anyway.During the 2018 World Cup, Russia surprised visitors – and its own citizens – with its friendliness as spontaneous parties broke out all over the country. The reason the 2022 World Cup in Qatar didn’t entirely feel like a real World Cup is that those sorts of spontaneous soccer gatherings just didn’t seem to be happening, or not at the same scale, at any rate. The absence of hordes of supporters just milling about everywhere contributed to the feeling of being at a Potemkin World Cup. Continue reading...

Makina’s recent $4.2 million exploit has added to a growing list of DeFi security incidents recorded in early 2026, with over $34 million already recorded.

It’s a simple way to keep homes fresh and mould-free, and has caught on in the US. But there are a few potential downsides ...Name: House burping.Age: New to America, ancient in Germany. Continue reading...

The global economic system doesn’t even benefit its US and European creators any more – let alone indebted nations or emerging giantsDonald Trump represents everything that the Davos crowd hates – and it is unlikely they are any more well-disposed towards him after being forced to listen to more than an hour of the president’s rambling speech today. He is a protectionist, not a free trader. He thinks the climate crisis is a hoax and is suspicious of multilateral organisations. He prefers power plays to dialogue and he doesn’t have any time for the “woke” capitalism that Davos has been keen to promote, with its focus on gender equality and ethical investment. The shindig’s organisers, the World Economic Forum (WEF), had to agree to sideline those issues in order to secure Trump’s appearance.For decades, anti-globalisation protesters have sought to shut down the WEF. Thanks to Trump’s threat to take over Greenland, their prayers may soon be answered. In today’s world, Davos is an irrelevance and it seems fitting that Trump should be on hand this week to deliver the coup de grace to the liberal international rules-based order that the WEF prides itself on upholding. Continue reading...

In this week’s newsletter: how mass exodus is bringing Cuba closer to collapse, Iran protests, and the new motorway dividing MumbaiIn a world where geopolitical flashpoints push global media to focus on a narrow group of countries, turning vast regions into virtual news deserts, Cuba is a remarkable exception. For decades, it was scrutinised intensively; now it has slipped into obscurity as an undercovered Caribbean island.Rather than adopting the ideological biases that shaped 20th-century debates about Cuba under Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, I recently sought to show the Guardian’s global audience the challenging circumstances faced by the Cuban people, which were evident when I visited Havana. Continue reading...