“What would Howard say?” This question, which Dave Zirin reports being “asked repeatedly” while he was working on his new biography of Howard Zinn, underscores how unusual a figure his subject cut in contemporary American life. Most historians live and die in relative obscurity. But 16 years after Zinn’s death, many people still look to him, not just as a scholar but as a kind of sage.

Zinn first became famous—and, in some circles, infamous—after the 1980 publication of his best-selling work A People’s History of the United States. The book advanced an ambitious and unrepentantly radical reimagining of the nation’s past. Zinn rejected the conventional organization of history around “the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders” and declared, “I prefer to try to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees.” What emerged was a new grand narrative, one that promised to reveal what mainstream history had long concealed and to offer a new moral framework for the past. In Zinn’s telling, the powerful were almost always up to no good, and ordinary people were the heroes of the American story. They courageously built movements for justice and sometimes even won, though it never took long for the oppressors to regroup. The fight was never over.  

Unlike most best sellers, A People’s History never stopped selling. Each year during its first three decades in print, it sold more copies than the last. The book’s fans applauded its bottom-up, justice-minded approach to history, while its detractors dismissed it as a leftist morality play masquerading as a story about the past. No one could doubt that it changed the conversation about American history, not to mention the trajectory of Zinn’s life. By the time he died in 2010, he was an archvillain for the right and a secular saint for the left.

Zirin’s fast-paced biography, The People’s Historian, is an answer to the most interesting version of “What would Howard say?” One hardly needs to squint to imagine what Zinn would have thought of the current regime in Washington, and readers curious only about that can put this book down after page 4, where Zirin declares, “Fascist movements taking orders from billionaire insurrectionists were the kinds of struggles that Howard Zinn demonstrated a willingness to fight and, if necessary, die to oppose.” But Zirin himself is after something more. He knew Zinn personally and collaborated with him on projects; he admires him deeply. Zirin believes we need more than Zinn’s opinions today; he argues that we need the deeper wisdom that emanates from his life and work.

Zinn’s many gifts developed in the course of what was, by any estimation, a remarkable journey. He was born in 1922 to working-class Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn. In his early 20s he rushed to enlist in the fight against fascism, serving in the Air Forces during World War II. He would long regret his short tenure as a bombardier who dropped artillery shells on behalf of a compromised colonial power—as he would later come to see the United States—from such heights that he could not be sure where exactly they landed. Zinn’s willingness to admit he was gravely wrong is part of what Zirin loves about him. The people’s historian was a radical, but he was also a “happy warrior” who believed that people could change, and so could societies.

[Read: The new history wars]

As a participant in the civil-rights and anti-war movements, Zinn witnessed such transformations firsthand. He organized alongside his students at Spelman College as well as with famous activists, including Ella Baker and Daniel Berrigan. Together, in the 1960s and ’70s, they fought to change a country whose past and present were steeped in violence and white supremacy. The going was never easy, because, as Zirin tells it—very much in Zinnian fashion—they bumped up against so many villains in power. Sometimes it was the director of the FBI; other times, a reactionary university administrator. But the people could be powerful too. Any given campaign might be stymied, but the march went on. However dreary the news, the hope persisted for a better day.

Zirin argues convincingly that Zinn’s life story vindicates one of his deepest convictions: that ordinary people and “small acts” can change the world. Zinn was right about this, and Zirin concludes the book with a quote from him that draws out the optimistic implications of his faith in bottom-up movements: “We have been surprised before in history. We can be surprised again. Indeed, we can do the surprising.” This is a compelling message for the current moment—and any other. Yet one can agree with Zinn on the power of the people to make change and still wonder whether recent history has revealed the limits of his wisdom.

“Was he wrong to have faith in the people?” Zirin relates that some of Zinn’s devotees—“those politically raised on his ideas”—have asked him this question, in addition to the one about what he might say in any given situation. Zirin takes up the second query but answers it far less satisfactorily than the first. He acknowledges that “in 2024, 77 million voters checked the box for an authoritarian to take power once again,” and moreover that Trump “won masses of white working-class people and, according to political pundits, a not-insignificant number of Black and Latino men.” But Zirin does not wrestle with the meaning of these developments. Rather, he waves them away with invocations of the “tech oligarchs” and “autocrats” who are driving “our global descent into authoritarianism.” This is an homage in a way, a vintage Zinn move—evading tough questions about who “the people” are and what they really want.

A People’s History of the United States appeared the same year Ronald Reagan was first elected president. In later editions of the book, Zinn would cast Reagan—like Jimmy Carter before him and George H. W. Bush after—as a creature of “the Establishment,” elected by a majority of voters but by a minority of the voting population and, hence, hardly the people’s choice. Zinn wrote something similar in 2003 amid the travails of the early War on Terror: “I wake up in the morning, read the newspaper, and feel that we are an occupied country, that some alien group has taken over.” The following year, of course, George W. Bush won the popular vote.  

[Read: What if our ancestors didn’t feel anything like we do?]

Zinn was hardly the only academic to be thrown by this turn of events. The 2004 election left no doubt that the Reagan Revolution had been more than a blip; in its aftermath, American historians redoubled their efforts to understand the sources of the right’s surprising resurgence. What they have uncovered in the past two decades flies in the face of a central tenet of Zinnian orthodoxy. The sustained success of the modern conservative movement cannot be explained away as the outcome of establishment machinations or a top-down takeover. Its energy and vitality came in no small part from the grassroots: from stay-at-home moms and car mechanics, from the suburbs and the Sun Belt, from evangelicals and Catholics and more. The revival of the Republican Party’s national fortunes at various moments, going all the way back to Richard Nixon, confirms Zinn’s faith in the power of bottom-up movements, even as it confounds his almost mythic sense of “the people” as inevitably on the right side of history (that is, the left side of the political spectrum).

And if ordinary folks are more complicated than Zinn and Zirin recognize, perhaps those who wield power can be too. What made the right’s political comeback so surprising, after all, was that in the mid-1960s the liberal-left coalition was winning not only in the streets but also on Capitol Hill. In those years, progressives leveraged grassroots energy into breakthrough policy change. The leaders of major civic and political institutions were rarely out in front of progressive activists, but at least some of them chose to pull levers that made the United States more equal and just. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed with sweeping bipartisan majorities.

After an outrageous assault by law enforcement on peaceful demonstrators in Selma, Alabama, President Lyndon B. Johnson memorably proclaimed—before a joint session of Congress, Cabinet officers, Supreme Court justices, and more than 70 million Americans watching on television—that “it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And—we—shall—overcome.” His invocation of a beloved civil-rights anthem brought a tear to Martin Luther King Jr.’s eye. None of this impressed Zinn. In A People’s History, he framed both the speech and the landmark civil-rights legislation of the 1960s as “concessions.”

Then and now, such unrelenting suspicion springs from genuine patterns of institutional failure and betrayal. Villains are, alas, not just a figment of our collective imagination. And yet, in 2026, with the Democrats on the outside of power looking in, progressives might nevertheless ask whether the Zinnian propensity to demonize anyone and everyone wielding authority has served their cause well. Dismissing landmark legislation as mere concessions can miss the fact that there is no path forward from righteous protest to lasting change that does not run through better—if imperfect—public policy. However “exhilarating” Zinn’s counternarrative can be, it may have encouraged millions of well-meaning readers to be skeptical of the possibility that any good could come through the slow, messy institutional work that is central to pluralistic democracy. Coincidental or not, this much is true: During the same period when Zinn’s influence was rising meteorically on the left, the right became much more adept at channeling populist enthusiasm into deliberate campaigns to reshape the major institutions of American life.  

“I wanted to change the world, and I thought history might be helpful,” Zinn liked to say, lightheartedly. His biographer is right to argue that Zinn, an ordinary person, did change the world—though perhaps he didn’t do it only in the ways that either of them hoped he would.

Compared with Donald Trump’s chaotic, divided, and violent America, China is a bastion of steady progress and serene order. This, at least, is the story that Beijing’s propagandists have been eager to spread. The Global Times, a Communist Party–run news outlet, proclaimed earlier this year that “the world’s peace and development increasingly rely on China’s stability.” The state news agency Xinhua chimed in that “in today’s uncertain world, China’s stability and predictability provide a rare and valuable anchor, which is set to benefit other countries.”

This message appears to be resonating around the world. A Pew Research Center survey of three dozen countries recently found that China is now seen more positively than the United States. Respondents expressed more confidence in Chinese President Xi Jinping to “do the right thing” in world affairs than Trump.

China’s stability may appear desirable to a world in turmoil. But inside China, this “stability” looks a lot like policy paralysis, economic stagnation, and intensified political repression. What all the handwringing over China’s growing influence and surging exports fails to recognize is that the country is flatlining politically and economically. The evidence is in plain sight.

Policy makers around the world are understandably fixating on China’s abundant and cheap electric cars and competitive AI models, which present a serious threat to national industries. But these advances are one small part of a broader economy with pernicious and deep-rooted problems. The country’s property-market downturn, triggered by the 2021 meltdown of the real-estate developer Evergrande, has not hit bottom. Home prices continue to fall, eating away at the wealth of many middle-class households.

Trump’s war with Iran has pushed up oil prices, raising the cost of production for Chinese companies and ending three years of deflation. But the underlying problems of oversupply and weak demand remain entrenched. Youth unemployment, which emerged as a major social issue in 2023, has become chronic. The jobless rate among workers aged 16 to 24 stood at 18 percent last month.

[Matteo Wong: What really happens if China wins the AI race?]

These pressures have left Chinese consumers reluctant to spend. Retail sales grew a paltry 0.6 percent in July. Domestic sales of EVs have been falling. China’s economic problems have become so dire that some economists suspect that the official government statistics are overstating the country’s true performance. Although China’s economy has been growing a respectable 5 percent annually for the past three years, the research firm Rhodium Group estimates that China’s actual growth rate was probably near 2 percent in 2023 and closer to 3 percent over the past two years.

Any hope that China’s leaders will tackle these problems is almost certainly misplaced. Xi has stubbornly resisted the difficult and politically sensitive reforms necessary to fix the country’s economic model during his nearly 14 years in charge, and he is unlikely to change his approach anytime soon. He remains as myopically focused as ever on state-led programs to advance Chinese technology and industry, and particularly AI, and is apparently convinced that they will boost the entire economy. Perhaps this strategy will one day pay off, but the signs aren’t good. China’s debt has exploded on Xi’s watch—at three times the size of the economy, it surpasses even America’s debt burden. Growth in the second quarter of 2026 was the slowest since 2022, when China was still battling the coronavirus pandemic.

The Communist Party could theoretically change its leadership team at a major congress next year, but in the absence of any clear alternatives or successors, Xi is likely to secure yet another five-year term as general secretary. Xi’s ruthlessness in office has been marked by regular purges of possible rivals, generals, and members of other party factions. His latest victim appears to be Fang Xinghai, a former top securities regulator well-respected by international business leaders, against whom the party recently launched an investigation for unnamed disciplinary violations. With Fang’s fall, the government is sidelining yet another economic reformer with valuable expertise who might have helped fix the economy’s woes but whose market-oriented philosophy has fallen out of favor with a regime that prefers a top-down approach to national development.

Xi maintains social order through this never-ending malaise by controlling information and repressing alternative views. A sweeping new law took effect last month that mandates Mandarin as the primary language in education and orders  parents to guide children to “love the Chinese Communist Party.” In prizing national unity over ethnic autonomy, this policy seems designed to force the country’s various ethnic minorities, including Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Mongolians, to assimilate into the majority Han Chinese culture. Even humor must follow the party line. Local authorities are reportedly investigating Guo Degang, a popular comedian who made the mistake of altering the lyrics of a patriotic song cherished by Communist cadres during a performance in the city of Wuhan last month.

[Vivian Salama and Jack Rodriquez-Vars: The danger of Trump’s anti-communist rhetoric]

Despite global surveys that report a growing fondness for China, the country’s “stability” comes at a steep cost to other countries. China may not be dropping bombs, but Beijing is arguably helping other countries drop theirs. By economically supporting Iran and Russia, Xi is essentially fighting proxy wars in both Europe and the Middle East.

In the absence of domestic demand, China’s subsidized and bloated manufacturing industries are exporting their problems and threatening the survival of competitors around the world. Given weak sales at home, Chinese automakers are shipping twice as much of their production overseas as they had a year ago. European Union officials are seeking greater powers and enhanced cooperation among its members to protect the continent’s industries from an onslaught of cheap Chinese imports, which have not only cost the region jobs but have run up a trade deficit with China topping $1 billion a day.

As Trump’s unpredictable and self-obsessed decision making saps America’s economic competitiveness and military might, China’s rise on the world stage is destined to continue, if only by default. But Xi’s insistence on preserving stability instead of addressing China’s serious structural problems threatens this ascent. Perhaps, then, the competition between China and the U.S. is less a contest for supremacy than a race to see which country hits bottom first.

In 2020 my wife, Sara Joe Wolansky, helped to convince me to give up my job as a reporter at Bloomberg to start this newsletter.

Two years later, I had her back when she decided to quit her full-time job making documentary shorts for the New Yorker to pursue a yet-to-be-identified first feature documentary.

NYC Tickets

I’m proud to share that her film, The Big Cheese, a feature-length documentary about American cheesemongers, is having its theatrical premiere starting tonight at the IFC Center in New York City.

In a wonderful review this week, the New York Times called The Big Cheese a “satisfyingly tender story,” writing, “This is ultimately a tale of resilience, and Wolansky focuses on a kind of nourishment that transcends food: the power of community.”

Other early reviews have called it “bright, tangy, and bold,” and “thrilling and intense.”

From my point of view, The Big Cheese is a gripping, energetic, and loving film that will have you laughing, crying, and hankering for Challerhocker.

I played a small role as an associate producer of the film, which mostly means that I was a supportive husband.

I’ll be at tonight’s screening at the IFC Center at 7:35 p.m. I’m giving away five tickets to the first requests that I receive. Reply to the newsletter if you’d like a ticket.

There will be a Q&A with Sara Joe and the film’s star, Adam Moskowitz, moderated by the one-and-only David Zabar of Zabar’s.

The Big Cheese is going to run all week at the IFC Center and then start screening in Los Angeles on Aug. 14.

(I know many of you will want to know when the film is in San Francisco. I’ll try to drop a line in the newsletter when that happens.)

I hosted a party last night with Joe Marchese at Human Ventures in New York City for friends of the newsletter to celebrate the film’s release. Thanks, Joe, for helping me to support Sara Joe.

Thanks to O’Shaughnessy Ventures for helping to fund the film and make this whole thing possible.

Both as an independent creator and as someone who writes about startups, I know how hard it is to build something out of nothing. Making an independent film requires true tenacity, and I’m so proud and excited that Sara Joe’s project is coming to theaters near you.

If you love cheese, the movies, and air conditioning — or just want to have a good time meeting a plucky new subculture — go check it out!

On the first Saturday of every August, the Saint Jerome Catholic Church in the tiny town of Fancy Farm, Kentucky, hosts a picnic renowned for its mutton-and-pork barbecue. Since 1880, the scent of smoked meat has attracted people; the whiff of votes then attracted politicians. The picnic long ago morphed into the premier event in the state’s campaign season, attracting its most famous officeholders. As attendees eat sandwiches, browse for We love Jesus and BBQ too T-shirts, or try to win a hunting blind at bingo, they also encounter candidates of all parties, who share one outdoor stage and are given only a few minutes to address a rowdy, heckling crowd.

This year, however, Fancy Farm was most remarkable for who did not show up: Mitch McConnell. Now in his 42nd and final year as a senator, the Republican has been a fixture of the event, attending 30 times. As GOP leader in the Senate for 18 years, McConnell became famous for his bare-knuckled, Machiavellian approach to politics—a method grounded in gradually amassing control through unflashy strategy and exploiting leverage for partisan ends. No man has so thoroughly thwarted Democratic ambitions, which he did both by championing the filibuster and by securing a conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court. Despite the longtime Senate leader’s absence from Fancy Farm, the specter of McConnellism hung over the event. And it will hang over America for years, too.

On June 14, McConnell, who is not running for reelection, was hospitalized, taken by ambulance after he was found unconscious at his home in Washington, D.C. The 84-year-old has not been seen in public, let alone Congress, since. The two proof-of-life photos that his staff released have only provoked feverish speculation. Onstage at Fancy Farm, Charles Booker, the Democratic nominee to replace the senator, invoked Carmen Sandiego. “Where in the world is Mitch McConnell?” Booker asked. “What is going on with Mitch McConnell?” Supportive Democrats broke out in sporadic chants of “Where’s Mitch?”

[Mark Leibovich: Mitch McConnell and the president he calls ‘despicable’]

Kentucky’s Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, a potential presidential contender, has not shied away from stirring up suspicion. Late last month, he sent a letter urging McConnell “to directly and verbally address the people of Kentucky and provide proof of your capacity to serve, or resign.” The implication has been that the master Republican tactician may be incapacitated, perhaps even deceased, but left instructions to hide this fact until after August 3—at which point Beshear would have severe difficulties installing a replacement. (Beshear has insisted that this deadline, now passed, has “no legal impact.”) Even in the twilight of McConnell’s influence, Democrats feared that he was capable of one last great trick.

On Thursday, however, McConnell announced that he had been discharged from a rehabilitation center and would be working from home. The explanation for his absence turned out not to involve any convoluted conspiracy. McConnell had suffered a serious fall, just as he has in the past, and contracted pneumonia. In 2023, a similar incident resulted in a concussion and a fractured rib. Then, too, his office released only sparse and cryptic details about his condition. Eventually, McConnell returned to work and to doing what he did best: stymying the Democrats.

Recently I asked the reporter Al Cross, considered the dean of Kentucky journalism, whether McConnell had anything that could be called an ideology, or whether he was merely interested in amassing power. Without hesitating, Cross answered, “The second.” He noted that McConnell and his first wife, a feminist scholar, had had a pet named Rocky, after Nelson Rockefeller—a hero of the GOP’s now-extinct liberal wing. “He was a Rockefeller Republican,” Cross told me. “And only when the party began moving to the right did he move to the right, because he wanted to be a leader in the party. You know, this is a guy who never wanted to be anything but a politician.” McConnell’s greatest personal policy commitment seems to have been to deregulate campaign finance, which the Supreme Court eventually delivered. What most earned him both his power and the disdain of Democrats was his devotion to party above all else.

The GOP for which McConnell tirelessly worked is now firmly in the hands of Donald Trump, a man whom McConnell deeply detests and yet whose ascent he has repeatedly enabled. Had McConnell not held open a Supreme Court seat after the 2016 death of Antonin Scalia, perhaps Trump would not have gained enough support from anti-abortion voters to win that year’s presidential election. Had McConnell tried to whip votes in favor of Trump’s conviction after his supporters attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021, perhaps the party could have exorcised him. McConnell got what he wished for—the first line of his obituary will note that he was the longest-serving party leader in Senate history—but at what cost?

He and the president are intertwined in history, Scott Jennings, a former McConnell strategist turned prominent Trump defender, told me. “Twenty, 50, or 100 years from now, what will be remembered most about the era and their time together is that McConnell and his political decisions enabled Trump to win the presidency, change the Supreme Court, cut taxes, and, frankly, take a pretty firm hand on international matters,” Jennings said. McConnell did not just shatter political norms by depriving Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee of a hearing in 2016. He also pushed through Trump’s nominees and, more than any other person, influenced the selection of appellate judges who will shape America for decades.

His influence over the political system will persist in other, subtler ways. “McConnell’s people were superb at taking young Republicans under their wings and nurturing them,” Stephen Voss, a political scientist at the University of Kentucky, told me. “And those folks are spread out all over the state and also Washington, D.C.”

In his home state, McConnell commands respect. He routed huge sums of federal money to Kentucky—$65 billion, by some estimates. He personally remade state politics. McConnell also regularly intervened in local elections, from the state legislature all the way down to county clerks. Democrats dominated the state when he started his career; today, they are largely shut out of power. Beshear won the governorship only to have his vetoes routinely overturned by a Republican supermajority in the state legislature. “It’s a Mitch McConnell–constructed party, even if some of the people at the grassroots don’t like him. It’s impossible to deny that he is the architect of it,” Tres Watson, a Republican strategist, told me. That is why the state GOP headquarters, in Frankfort, carries his name.

One week after the November 2024 election, which returned Trump to the White House, I watched McConnell receive the Irving Kristol Award from the American Enterprise Institute. Robert Doar, AEI’s president, asked McConnell if he had any regrets. “Yeah, but I’m not going to tell you,” he replied.

Despite stating in 2021 that Trump was “practically and morally responsible” for his supporters’ attack on the Capitol, McConnell said that he could not vote to convict the president in an impeachment trial, because Trump’s term had expired. Cross told me that, during that period, McConnell was convinced that Trump was doomed in the party. McConnell told Michael Tackett, his biographer, that his position differed from that of Liz Cheney—who sacrificed a promising career leading Republicans in the House of Representatives—because “I didn’t see how blowing yourself up and taking yourself off the playing field was helpful to getting the party back to where she and I probably both think it ought to be.” After the trial, McConnell and Trump did not speak again for almost four years.

McConnell gave up his leadership role right as Trump returned to power. In his final Senate term, in which he returned to being a legislative backbencher, McConnell lodged his protests against Trump by voting against several of his nominees (Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.) and strongly supporting Ukraine and free trade.

[David A. Graham: Mike Johnson would prefer not to]

At Fancy Farm, McConnell’s fellow Republicans largely papered over the schism between the biggest figure in national politics and the biggest figure in state politics. In a mark of how important McConnell has been in fostering Republicans in the state, the primary race to succeed him was between three Republicans who had all worked for him previously. Nate Morris, a man who once interned for him and then made his fortune by founding a trash-and-recycling company, tried to win by repudiating him. He released an ad showing himself riding a garbage truck saying that he was a “Trump ‘America First’ conservative” who was here “to take out the trash” by dumping McConnell. This strategy did not succeed; before the primary could occur, Morris was whisked away by Trump for the prestigious post of ambassador to Colombia. Instead the victory went to Andy Barr, a McConnellite congressman from Lexington. When I asked him what McConnell’s legacy would be, he cited three things: building up the GOP in Kentucky, “opposing unconstitutional restrictions on political speech,” and “working with President Trump to deliver a conservative supermajority on the U.S. Supreme Court and a conservative, originalist federal judiciary.”

For the country as a whole, though, what McConnell’s many political victories leave behind is more dismal. His lasting contribution to the Senate is its calcification. Few people understood leverage and Senate procedure as well as McConnell; the routine use of the filibuster (which Democrats are also guilty of) has now set a precedent in which the party in power can confirm judges and pass tax bills but struggles to accomplish much else. The lack of a functional Congress has hastened the executive branch’s arrogation of the legislature’s previous responsibilities. This diminishes the separation of powers that McConnell (and his strictly constitutionalist judges) claim to be upholding.

The negative consequences for Republicans may become apparent only when Democrats have a turn at power in McConnell’s beloved chamber. Because of his specific decisions—to hold open a Supreme Court seat on the theory that it was too close to an election in 2016, before doing the exact opposite in 2020—it is now inconceivable that a Democratic-led Senate would confirm another Trump justice if a vacancy arose. McConnell’s political career is ending, but his legacy will last much longer. Unfortunately, it has left America much harder to govern.

All Gianni Infantino needed was patience. Memory for scandal is short, even in a sport as massive as soccer, and whatever controversies the FIFA president willingly courted during the 2026 World Cup would have soon faded into the background as he won what was going to be an unopposed re-election next March. He could have ridden off into the sunset in 2031 and made millions off the connections built during his tenure at the head of FIFA. That wasn't enough for him, though, and so now, the walls are instead closing in, a self-inflicted error caused by greed and a plan to turn the World Cup into a private equity playground. The post-tournament afterglow was short, and now Infantino faces opposition from most (but, crucially, not all) corners of the soccer world, his ending looming on a quickly approaching horizon.

UEFA's threat to boycott the World Cup if Infantino went ahead with his investor sell-off was the first domino in a process that ended with Infantino retracting the proposal himself. Since then, it was only a matter of time before the question became what sort of fallout would be in store for Infantino due to his enormous failure. It wasn't surprising that the gears of his potential ousting began turning in Europe once more. First, UEFA responded to Infantino's retraction by saying its leaders had "lost confidence" in him. That phrase served as both a statement of UEFA's enduring disapproval and a further threat, hinting at the possibility of a formal vote of no confidence, which would be the first step in ejecting Infantino from FIFA. Soccer's national and continental associations then followed suit. Wales first made that move on Wednesday, withdrawing its letter of support for Infantino's re-election. England's Football Association soon followed, and the ball kept on rolling from there. Serbia, Sweden, and Finland (which first broached the topic last week) have all officially withdrawn their support. The message, at least from certain parts of the soccer world, is clear: Infantino must go.

Infantino isn't on an island all alone, however. His work in courting smaller associations around the world has built for him a base of support that has held up even in this period of blunder. As of now, Infantino has reportedly received reiterations of support from about 15 nations, including Qatar and Morocco, two World Cup hosts (the former hosted in 2022, and the latter will be one of the co-hosts in 2030). Egypt, Sri Lanka, Lebanon, and Kuwait round out the group of seven nations that have already gone public with their support, with eight others reportedly doing so in private. The big domino yet to fall in either direction is Saudi Arabia, which will host the 2034 World Cup. The awarding of that tournament to Saudi Arabia was one of the bigger controversies of Infantino's tenure.

The government is prosecuting US citizen Sam Tunick for allegedly providing authorities with a "duress password" that wiped his phone when they tried to seize it at Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson airport on January 24th, 2025. Federal agents detained Tunick at the airport, allegedly questioning him about child exploitation images. However, a motion filed by Tunick's lawyers argues this was simply "a pretext for a fishing expedition into Mr Tunick's connections" to the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta.

The government is turning to a little-known and rarely-used statute that makes it illegal to destroy or damage property to stop authorities fr …

Read the full story at The Verge.