Politics
Republican wins Alabama state House special election
Republican Norman Crow is projected to defeat Democrat Judith Taylor in the special election for Alabama State House District 63, according to Decision Desk HQ. Crow, a Tuscaloosa City Council member, defeated Judith Taylor, a retired college professor and chair of the Tuscaloosa County Democratic Executive Committee…
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Scotland is now officially out of the World Cup after being stuck in limbo awaiting other results for three days following defeat to Brazil. While the players and management underperformed in America, Scottish fans — the Tartan Army — were one of the stories of the first week of the tournament. Politicians of all stripes, from Massachusetts Democratic Governor Maura Healey to Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, were effusive in their praise of kilted supporters who spent big on the local entertainment and celebrated exuberantly — despite lackluster showings on the field.
Uzbekistan’s team will head home after its final group-stage match today, against the Democratic Republic of Congo. But the country has worked to use its début World Cup performance — the first ever by a Central Asian nation — to help Washington policymakers put a face to a geographical name once recognizable.
Before the team’s match against Portugal this week, a group of ambassadors, policymakers and government officials met in Houston to discuss the United States’ burgeoning reliance on the “Central Five” nations — Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan — for critical minerals. The only one of those so-called C5 countries to qualify for the World Cup is Uzbekistan.
“This emergence of Uzbekistan on the soccer scene as a world-class team playing in the World Cup is sort of a microcosm for what’s happening for the entire C5 region,” Assistant Secretary of Commerce David Fogel said at the panel, which was hosted by the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition and the State Department. “The C5 region is front and center in everyone’s mind.”
Trump is scaling up America’s footprint in Central Asia in hopes of reducing American reliance on Chinese supply chains, as Beijing grows increasingly dominant in the critical minerals sphere. In November, he hosted Uzbekistan’s President Shavkat Mirziyoyev at the White House to discuss the nations’ growing economic ties — and Mirziyoyev walked away agreeing to a $400 million investment in American companies’ critical minerals and rare earths supply chains.
That commitment is “good not just for our economy, but also for our national security,” said Richard Parker, the leadership coalition’s senior policy adviser, “when you consider that China really has the market on the processing of critical minerals globally.”
Mirziyoyev has praised his country’s soccer team as representatives of a “New Uzbekistan,” finally emerging from its Soviet era as a geopolitical force on its own terms, but after defeats in its first two matches, it can’t progress further in the World Cup.
Soccer is so much more than just a sport — especially in the UK.
That was the central message from playwright James Graham — creator of the hit play and TV drama Dear England about the psychology of the England men’s football team — when he joined Blue Light News’s Westminster Insider podcast to discuss the powerful relationship between politics and the national game.
For Graham, soccer’s importance runs far deeper than results on the pitch. He recalled the hours after Gareth Southgate missed his penalty in the semifinal against Germany at Euro ‘96: “I remember … not being able to explain in the car home with my parents why I was crying, but the tears were falling out of me.”
“Sport is never just about sport,” he said. “It is about storytelling and national storytelling.”
As the self-styled home of soccer, England has long tied its sense of national confidence to performances in major tournaments. Graham argued that the euphoria, despite eventual defeat to Germany, around Euro ‘96 helped give voters the confidence “to choose a different path” and back a more youthful, confident-seeming leader the following year in Labour’s Tony Blair.
At a time of declining social cohesion, hollowed-out high streets and growing political division, he sees soccer as one of the few institutions still capable of bringing communities together in person, week after week.
And Graham believes politicians could learn from soccer leaders such as Southgate — the man who led England to the World Cup semifinal in 2018 and back-to-back European Championship finals in 2021 and 2024 — who communicated with fans “as adults” in a way that was “very human” and “very emotionally intelligent.”
At its best, Graham argues the beautiful game offers a language of identity, emotion and togetherness that politics often struggles to speak.
Politics and soccer: How to play the game. Listen to the full interview with James Graham on Westminster Insider next Friday, July 3.
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