Politics

The Americans who want to see Australia do well

Published

2 hours ago

June 19, 2026

SEATTLE — Some American fans walking toward Lumen Field on Friday morning were playfully jeering their Australian peers whenever they spotted a telltale yellow jersey. But a major driver of the local economy offered a kinder greeting to the visiting team.

Cranes in view of the stadium gates have been outfitted with the Australian flag and a WELCOME message from the Northwest Seaport Alliance, which manages the ports of Seattle and Tacoma, along with dockworkers’ union ILWU Local 19.

The seaport alliance and the labor union representing its workforce are mounting a similar display throughout the World Cup, rotating flags out to reflect the pair of teams that will face off next in Seattle. But keeping the Australians happy is a more urgent cause for Seattle harbor interests than, say, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Qatar.

Australia is one of the ports’ top trading partners, with the 14th largest source of container volume at the Port of Seattle, but ranks much higher when it comes to the dollar value of goods that come from there. (New Zealand, for example, sends more volume to Seattle than Australia but it’s worth only half as much.)

Meat, including beef and lamb, and minerals comprise the biggest categories of goods that Australia ships to the United States, although some of the most valuable exports — gold and pharmaceuticals — are more likely to land at Sea-Tac airport than via the harbor.

The U.S. and Australia have had a free-trade pact since 2005, although President Donald Trump’s tariff regime threatens to disrupt some trade flows. Australia is currently pushing back on its inclusion on an American list of countries alleged to use forced labor in its supply chains, which the U.S. Trade Representative is using as the basis to impose a 12.5 percent tariff.

Politics

The politician who kicked his way to power

Published

20 minutes ago

June 19, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Britain wouldn’t have its latest likely next prime minister if not for soccer.

Andy Burnham, the former Greater Manchester mayor elected to the U.K. Parliament in a closely-watched by-election on Thursday, is expected to oust Prime Minister Keir Starmer as Labour Party leader in a matter of weeks. The sport propelled his political rise.

The pivotal moment of Burnham’s long political career came in 2009, when he was the Cabinet minister for culture, media and sport under then-PM Gordon Brown. Burnham was asked to return to his native Liverpool for a memorial commemorating the Hillsborough Disaster.

The 1989 event remains Britain’s worst-ever sporting catastrophe. Almost 100 Liverpool fans were crushed to death at a cup game in South Yorkshire, following a series of disastrous crowd control errors by police chiefs and stadium staff.

The horror of the day was compounded in the immediate aftermath, when police sought to cover up their mistakes by falsely blaming drunken Liverpool fans for the crush. The lies were amplified by a willing national media and allowed to linger for years; the city grieved and demanded justice. Bereaved families campaigned for years. But no one listened, and no one was held accountable.

Born in Liverpool and steeped in soccer culture, Burnham knew all this as he headed to the memorial at Liverpool’s Anfield stadium 20 years later. He was well aware how a young government envoy would be greeted by the crowd, still raging at the injustice two decades on. But to his credit, he went anyway — and was met with a wall of heckles, chants and protest songs from the part of Anfield, known as the Kop, where the team’s loudest supporters congregate. (The video of his halting, shattered-looking appearance is well worth watching.)

Burnham — until then a typical career politician in Westminster — has described the day as a seminal moment. He returned to Cabinet and demanded a new inquiry into Hillsborough. Three years later its report revealed every claim made by the justice campaigners — of police failures and a scandalous cover-up — had been true. The government was forced to apologize.

Burnham was widely praised for his role in exposing the truth about Hillsborough. But more significant in his ultimate rise to power would be the shift in his own psyche. “I always say that I took my first steps out of Westminster on 15 April 2009 when I walked out to face the Kop,” he wrote in his memoir, “Head North,” penned with close friend (and Hillsborough survivor) Steve Rotheram. “Things were never the same after that day.”

Burnham says his experiences dealing with the Hillsborough justice campaign shaped his view of the Westminster political machine, as an arrogant and failing institution which ignores English regions outside of London. Eight years later he would quit Westminster altogether to become a mayor in his native northwest.

Fast-forward to 2026, and Burnham finds himself in an enviable position — an experienced politician able to cast himself as a political outsider ready to take on the Westminster elites. (While Starmer supports the North London-based champions Arsenal, Burnham is a season ticket holder at his beloved Everton F.C., and is regularly photographed jogging in a vintage Everton jersey.) It’s a familiar narrative which chimes with disgruntled voters everywhere.

Read Jack’s Blue Light News Magazine profile of Andy Burnham here and Blue Light News’s full coverage of the Makerfield by-election and its unfolding fallout here.

Politics

The US-Australia face-off that isn’t happening

Published

51 minutes ago

June 19, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Who’s not here at Seattle’s Lumen Field for the Pacific Rim face-off between the United States and Australia?

If they’re following the match, the two countries’ elected heads — President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese — are doing so from afar.

Politics

The soccer boss in Mark Carney’s ear

Published

1 hour ago

June 19, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

VANCOUVER — Major League Soccer commissioner Don Garber joined Prime Minister Mark Carney on Friday to watch Canada’s thrashing of Qatar. Garber probably did not want Carney to enjoy the stadium experience too much.

BC Place is Major League Soccer’s most troublesome facility. The arena is old, was not designed with soccer in mind, and is owned by a government agency — the BC Pavilion Corporation, which also controls the Vancouver Convention Center — that forces the Vancouver Whitecaps to fight for dates on the calendar against concerts and other events.

“We want to be the ones that control our destiny, like every sports team does,” Garber told reporters Friday in Seattle.

The Whitecaps are now up for sale, and Garber is actively pushing British Columbia’s political establishment — including Premier David Eby and Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim — to find a solution can keep the team from decamping to Las Vegas. While the government has been willing to renegotiate its financial relationship with the team, a proposed new stadium would take “four-plus years” in construction, which Garber said was untenable.

“It unimaginable how long we’re going to be out of the stadium,” he told reporters Friday in Seattle. “They are very relevant club that doesn’t have a good business model, and you can’t be sustainable.”

Garber recounted he met with Eby while in Vancouver, and sat with Carney and Victor Montagliani — the head of regional soccer confederation CONCACAF and a close ally of the prime minister — during the match itself. Garber said he has placed a league official in Vancouver full-time to manage the negotiations with local officials over the Whitecaps’s future.

“We want to be the ones that control our destiny, like every sports team does,” said Garber. “It’s easier for business people to make decisions, a little harder for politicians.”