Politics

Iran’s foreign minister: If Trump ‘seeks escalation’ that’s ‘what he will get’

Published

4 months ago

March 8, 2026

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi on Saturday reupped his warning about retaliation against the U.S. as conflict in the Middle East persists after last week’s strikes. “If [President Trump] seeks escalation, it is precisely what our Powerful Armed Forces have long been prepared for, and what he will get,” Aragchi said in a statement shared…
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Politics

Iran’s fans, pro and con

Published

14 minutes ago

June 21, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

LOS ANGELES — Moments after Iran and Belgium battled to a scoreless draw at SoFi Stadium, the Belgian players beat a hasty retreat to the locker room.

Not the Iranian World Cup team.

The players on Team Melli lingered on the field, doing a slow lap to cheers from supporters who’d dominated stands with chants of “Iran!” The Iranian players held their hands aloft and clapped for the spectators, some of whom waved Iran’s pre-revolution lion and sun flag, which is seen as a symbol of resistance against the Islamic Republic and is banned by FIFA.

One Iranian American fan, who gave his name as Majid, said he came from Seattle for the game. “The team, even though there is controversy … the team is here, they want to win … and we support them,” he said.

The scene made for a striking juxtaposition: Iranian players representing the Islamic Republic applauding a crowd in which some fans waved a flag symbolic of opposition to the very theocracy whose colors they wore.

Iran plays its final group stage match against Egypt in Seattle on June 26 — during the city’s monthlong LGBTQ+ Pride celebration, drawing formal complaints from both Middle Eastern countries.

Politics

Vancouver learned to stop worrying and love mega-events

Published

44 minutes ago

June 21, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

VANCOUVER — On the opening day of the 2010 Winter Olympics, protesters marched to BC Place, the culmination of a decade-long tug-of-war over whether Vancouver had room for a global sports mega-event. Activists first tried to block the Olympics from coming to town, then tried to use it to extract social commitments from organizers, and finally to shame anyone involved.

On Thursday, when Canada was preparing to play the most important match in the country’s soccer history, the streets around BC Place appeared to be free of protesters, filled only with gleeful fans swathed in patriotic red and the occasional dishdasha preferred by the Qatar Football Association’s traveling contingent.

“It’s kind of a nothing-burger,” observed Am Johal, who as the chair of the Impact on Communities Coalition had been a leader of the city’s anti-Olympics movement, hours before kickoff on the World Cup’s second match day.

Johal was walking through the Downtown Eastside, a scruffy neighborhood that had been the site of the greatest pre-Olympic friction, along the lines of conflict that define the modern North American city — between new transplants and existing residents, tourists and locals, police and civil-rights activists, global capital and local resistance.

Now, however, Johal was carrying a fiscal conservative’s laments rather than those of the community organizer. Canada’s governments were projected to spend over $1 billion to host World Cup matches in Vancouver and Toronto, with a roughly even split between funds coming from the federal budget as opposed to provincial and local ones. More than 70 percent of voters in both cities told pollster Angus Reid that it was not worth the public cost.

“I think if the government is looking to spend a billion of public funding related to economic and social benefit, it should really do a proper opportunity cost,” said Johal. “If there’s a massive public subsidy being done to groups that are unaccountable to the broader city — if these things are going to go ahead — why is public money going into them?”

Those were arguments Johal made when Vancouver voters were asked in November 2002 to weigh in on the merits of an Olympic bid. Almost two-thirds of those casting ballots in the municipal plebiscite voted to proceed. But over the course of the decade, as the games grew near, the coalition of skeptics appeared to grow. (The Vancouver Sun dismissed them as “whiners and grumble-bunnies.”)

There were anti-gentrification activists who feared that an Olympic Village and other new developments would price out renters and displace property owners. Anti-consumerist radicals, many with ties to the Vancouver-based magazine Adbusters, saw it as a corporate spectacle. Civil libertarians anticipated heavy-handed police measures to clear streets of the homeless and drug users. (Vancouver is home to North America’s first supervised injection facility.) Environmental activists and tribal groups, who hold disproportionate sway in British Columbia’s politics, sought to protect what they said was unceded aboriginal land.

As the anti-Olympic coalition grew, it split along the lines that often fracture protest moments. Johal’s community coalition sought to extract 37 specific policy commitments to ensure what one City Council resolution described as a “transparent, inclusive and socially sustainable” games.

The Anti-Poverty Committee took a more militant approach, threatening to “evict” members of the local Olympics organizing committee from their homes, attacking branches of games sponsor Royal Bank of Canada with rocks, and vandalizing the office of British Columbia Premier Gordon Campbell, a leading Olympic booster. The militants also took aim at those on their own side, even if more playfully: David Eby, who as executive director of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association had been the anti-Olympics’ movement most prominent spokesman, received a pie to the face after arguing for non-violence at a community meeting.

Despite the irreconcilable “diversity of tactics,” as activists politely described it, the rebellion attracted notice beyond Vancouver, inspiring a new era of local resistance to global mega-events. Veterans of the Vancouver campaign shared lessons with activists in Boston, who in 2015 forced then-Mayor Tom Menino to withdraw plans to bid for the 2024 Summer Games due to civic opposition. Two European cities, Hamburg and Budapest, subsequently killed their bids once voters expressed their disapproval in referenda. The NOlympics LA movement, currently attempting to rally political opposition to the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles, draws from the lessons of Vancouver.

Evidence of that legacy has been scarce on the streets of Vancouver this month, even after the city enacted “FIFA Bylaws” designed to give police specific tools to use against street vendors and buskers and remove advertising that interferes with the World Cup sponsorship deals. The Pivot Legal Society deployed crews of “legal observers” who chased law-enforcement officials through the Downtown Eastside, and activists shared Vancouver Police Department press releases boasting of new drone surveillance capacities.

“These are always moments where policing gets new tactics and technologies,” observed Johal, “and they oftentimes get deployed during mega events as a way of moving forward.”

But the Downtown Eastside did not feel like a neighborhood under siege, as it had in 2010. Even if it competes with the Olympics in cultural and geopolitical salience, the World Cup is a more logistically diffuse experience. Rather than being consolidated within a single metropolitan area for two jam-packed weeks, this year’s World Cup lasts for more than five weeks and is spread across 16 cities in three countries.

In 2022, the same year that Vancouver offered itself up to host World Cup matches, Eby was elected British Columbia’s premier. Now instead of using his words to inspire the activists who massed outside BC Place, he was inside. Inside a luxury box, Eby greeted sports executives who lobbied him to make a new commitment to the Vancouver Whitecaps franchise that joined Major League Soccer the year after the Olympics. (Eby’s office did not make him available for an interview.)

“We’re so excited to be hosting,” Eby said in one social-media video. “And we’re so excited to have a win under our belts.”

Politics

Sports is the Gulf’s favorite soft power play. The World Cup is a hard test.

Published

44 minutes ago

June 21, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

ATLANTA — Gulf countries have plowed billions of dollars into domestic soccer, led by a multi-year Saudi spending extravaganza that has brought global superstars and new attention to its domestic league. But it is doing little to improve their showing at the World Cup.

The United Arab Emirates failed to qualify. Qatar has been on the losing end of one of the tournament’s most lopsided scorelines. Saudi Arabia now needs a win in its next match to have any chance of progressing. The results, and the performances behind them mark a disappointment for the monied Gulf petromonarchies’ hope of wielding power through sports.

“The Saudis are using football to speed up soft power that would normally take decades to build: reputation, tourism, investment and global relevance,” said one business consultant who has worked with Riyadh on commercial strategy and was granted anonymity to protect relationships.

Saudi Arabia’s heavy defeat to Spain on Sunday may have been the most glaring moment of all. The country began its spending extravaganza in 2022, and has brought players who left their mark in Spain’s domestic league — including Cristiano Ronaldo, Neymar and Karim Benzema — but the Saudis couldn’t keep up in global competition.

“When we have these stars in the Arabian League, I think that the more competitive the competition, the better our players will be. But it’s different when we’re playing for the national team because in the national team — these experiences — there needs to be a certain mentality,” Saudi team manager Georgios Donis said at a post-match press conference on Sunday, in response to a question from Blue Light News.

“I’m always a realist in what I see,” Donis continued, “and I believe that over time we’re going to put together an excellent, national team and we will come back to the level that we can with the opponents in the next team where we’ll be very competitive.”

The 2022 host nation Qatar, which owns European champion club Paris Saint-Germain and leading global broadcaster beIN Sports, was humiliated by Canada last week. The United Arab Emirates, which counts English giant Manchester City and Major League Soccer’s New York City FC in its soccer portfolio, has qualified for the World Cup only once, in 1990. The biggest name to join one of the Gulf domestic leagues, Cristiano Ronaldo of Riyadh’s Al-Nassr, has been ridiculed in international media for his detrimental impact on the Portuguese squad.

Those familiar with the thinking of Saudi soccer officials say they are trying to avoid the example of China, which found that signing big stars to its domestic league was economically unsustainable while doing little to improve the national team’s fortunes.

“That also showed the limits of buying attention without building lasting credibility, although the Chinese did it mostly for national prestige,” said the business consultant. “The Saudi approach feels more strategic. They are already getting attention and access. The bigger question is whether that becomes long-term credibility, and they seem pragmatic enough to change course if parts of the project don’t work.”

Authorities in Riyadh are realistic and regard the impact on elite level as being long term, said another industry figure who has worked on soccer with the Saudis. There is only so much time for patience, however: Saudi Arabia will hope for a stronger performance by the time it hosts the men’s World Cup in 2034.