Jawad Iqbal is a broadcaster and ex-television news executive. Jawad is a former Visiting Senior Fellow in the Institute of Global Affairs at the LSE
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When England play Brazil in a friendly at Wembley tonight they will go into the game as firm favourites to win. It is hard to imagine writing that sentence at any other time in the last fifty years, which is a measure of how much the tables have turned. How so? Today’s Brazil side are
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Vaughan Gething, the victor in the Welsh Labour leadership contest, will now become Wales’s first black First Minister. It is both a historic moment and a huge personal achievement. Gething, born in Zambia and raised in Dorset, was also the first black person to become a cabinet minister in one of the UK’s devolved governments, and
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The contest to be the next leader of the Welsh Labour Party, and more importantly First Minister of Wales, has been something of a snooze fest. The race kicked off in December, when Mark Drakeford, first minister since 2018, announced that he was stepping down. There are two candidates – Vaughan Gething and Jeremy Miles
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Ten years ago today, on 8 March 2014, Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur, en-route to Beijing – only to veer wildly off course and vanish, never to be seen or heard from again. There were 239 people on board. How can an aircraft simply disappear without a trace? Even now, no
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Mr and Mrs Sunak of Downing Street have given a joint interview to Grazia magazine in which they give answers to the most pressing questions facing the country. They don’t bother sweating the small stuff like the state of the economy, the upcoming Budget, or the election prospects of the beleaguered Tories, but instead share
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The record low turnout for parliamentary elections in Iran, which took place on Friday, is another blow to the regime’s attempts to pretend that all is well in the country. Early reports suggest a turnout of just under 41 per cent nationwide. Iranians in their millions have rejected the regime by choosing to stay at
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Why would the producers of a new West End play think it a good idea to put on select performances for all-black audiences, effectively telling white theatregoers they’re not welcome on those nights? The idea of Black Out nights (as they have become known) amounts to segregation by race and skin colour. Yet this is
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Bayern Munich’s decision to part ways with their coach Thomas Tuchel is a rather bizarre form of managerial sacking. Tuchel is leaving the job but will be allowed to stay in charge until the end of the season. This can only make a team that is in free fall more unstable. In a statement on
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A senior official in Pakistan has publicly confessed to vote-rigging in the country’s general election earlier this month. It is an unprecedented admission of malpractice that raises fresh questions about the legitimacy of the electoral process and whether the final results were manipulated by the country’s all-powerful military. Commissioner Liaqat Ali Chattha claimed that authorities
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The latest American drone strike in Iraq, which killed the commander of a powerful Iranian-backed militia group, is one more dangerous escalation in the increasingly unpredictable Middle East conflict. The US strike in the Iraqi capital Baghdad targeted Wisam ‘Abu Baqer’ al-Saadi – a senior leader of Kataib Hezbollah, which the Pentagon blames for the
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The levels of cynicism and disillusionment surrounding the upcoming parliamentary elections in Pakistan – due to take place tomorrow – are remarkable, even for a country with a chequered democratic tradition. Few people believe the vote will be free or fair, with widespread speculation that the country’s all-powerful military has already decided the result and will
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The Labour party has a problem with Muslims. A new poll suggests that British Muslim voters, who have traditionally supported Labour in huge numbers, are deserting the party over its handling of the Israel-Gaza war. Backing for Labour from the Muslim community has fallen massively since the 2019 general election from 86 per cent to
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What a week it’s been for Marcus Rashford, who divides opinion like almost no one else in football. The Manchester United striker has been making headlines of the non-footballing kind after pictures emerged of him in a Belfast nightclub last week, a night out that apparently consisted of drinking tequila non-stop. When he returned home to Manchester,
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It didn’t take long for the US military to retaliate to the drone strike in Jordan that killed three American soldiers. It was always a question of how hard and when, not if, America would strike back. ‘Our response began today. It will continue at times and places of our choosing,’ President Joe Biden said
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The drone attack on a US base in Jordan that killed three American troops and injured dozens risks bringing one more country into the orbit of the war between Israel and Hamas. US president Joe Biden has blamed ‘Tehran-backed militants’ operating in Syria and Iraq for the strike on Tower 22, a US base on Jordan’s border
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Butter chicken, one of India’s best-known dishes and a favourite all over the world, is at the centre of an extraordinary curry war in India. Two rival restaurant chains have asked the courts to rule over who invented the recipe for the signature dish, made with tender pieces of chicken in a tandoor oven, mixed in
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The news that the Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp is to quit his job at the end of the season is a bombshell. No one expected it, not right now, nor anytime soon. The questions will come thick and fast, with all kinds of daft conspiracy theories about what is really behind his departure not too
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Saudi Arabia, an Islamic nation where drinking alcohol is strictly forbidden, is to get its first official liquor store. There’s just one catch: only foreign diplomats will be able to buy booze there. The store in the capital Riyadh’s Diplomatic Quarter will remain off-limits to Muslims and, needless to say, ordinary Saudis. For a handful of
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The religious and political symbolism was unmistakable, as the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi led the consecration of a controversial new Hindu temple in Ayodhya, in Uttar Pradesh state, built on the ruins of a 16th century mosque. The Babri Masjid was torn down by Hindu nationalist mobs in 1992, sparking riots across the country that
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Pakistan’s retaliatory military strike on suspected militant bases in Iran – in response to Iranian attacks in Pakistani territory – can only escalate tensions between the two countries. It will also ring alarm bells elsewhere across an increasingly jittery Middle East but also further afield in India and China. The Chinese have friendly relations with both
