When referee Omar Artan, hailed as the best in Africa, was detained for 11 hours and refused entry to the United States ahead of the World Cup, FIFA officials and participating nations responded with deafening silence. This piece by Raymond O’Connell examines how Infantino’s cosying up to Trump, the punishment of Iran, and the collective cowardice of the football world reveal a sport that has been pear shaped for decades.

Last week’s Belfast conference on Irish Unity revealed more about the parties’ obsession with Reform UK and Brexit than any concrete plan for reunification, with Fine Gael, Fianna Fail, Sinn Fein and the SDLP all failing to explain what a united Ireland would actually look like. This sharp analysis examines the surprising economic data showing Brexit has boosted Irish trade with Britain to record levels, and asks why nationalist parties are suddenly competing over a cause that barely registers as a priority for voters.

Lynda Walker reports on how the Second Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress in Dublin brought together voices like Ilan Pappé, Francesca Albanese, and Medea Benjamin to confront the Gaza genocide and expose Zionism as a global political system. Read for a powerful account of how activists, scholars, and former statesmen are turning international solidarity into concrete action for Palestinian liberation.

In Ali Smith’s near future novel Gliff, truth tellers are branded “unverifiable” and erased by the state, while a whistleblower mother, two haunting parables, and a horse named Gliff carry the flickering hope of resistance. Jenny Farrell explores how Smith transforms surveillance, complicity, and redemption into one of the most urgent dystopian works of our decade, ending with a challenge that places the reader directly on the horse riding north.

Irish progressives cheered Keir Starmer’s resignation, but Eoin Ó Murchú writes for Unity that his successor Andy Burnham represents nothing more than continuity Starmerism dressed up in friendlier rhetoric. From his Blairite economic advisers and Labour Friends of Israel background to his promises of increased military spending and market reassurance, Burnham is a threat to Irish unity, neutrality, and working class interests in both Ireland and Britain.

Israel has transformed atrocity into spectacle, from paid binocular viewings of Gaza’s destruction to newly legislated public executions of Palestinians broadcast as state sanctioned entertainment. Dianne Kirby examines how this descent into dehumanisation exposes not only the collapse of Israeli democracy but the complicity of a western world that continues to grant impunity even as global opinion turns.

Raymond O’Connell dissects Jim Allister’s recent invocation of “alien culture,” tracing the phrase from its science fiction roots to its deployment by creationists and demagogues seeking to scapegoat migrants. Drawing on Voltaire, Hume, Kant and Fanon, the piece asks why the brutalities committed in the name of European civilization remain so conveniently forgotten by those who champion its values today.

When a local attack in Belfast sparks violence echoing the darkest chapters of 1938 Germany, one writer asks whether today’s instigators are any different from Hitler’s Brownshirts. Drawing on David Adams’s searing analysis, this piece dismantles the myths about immigrants, exposes the real sources of violence in Northern Ireland, and names exactly who deserves the blame.

Tony Blair is back with grand pronouncements, urging Britain to reorganise its entire government around artificial intelligence while cosying up to Trump and quietly dismissing net zero targets. But with his institute reportedly bankrolled by hundreds of millions from Oracle’s Larry Ellison and Saudi clients, is this really a vision for national renewal or just a sales pitch dressed up as statecraft?

While Western media insists Russia’s economy is crumbling and Ukraine is turning the tide, the facts on the ground in Kostiantynivka and the numbers in Moscow’s treasury tell a starkly different story. Eoin Ó Murchú dismantles the comfortable narratives sold to Irish readers, exposing the inconvenient truths about NATO expansion, inflated casualty figures, and why neither side is actually ready for peace.