The 2026 FIFA World Cup has produced a striking contrast between two of Asian and European football’s most recognizable attacking stars, with England captain Harry Kane thriving on the tournament’s biggest stage while South Korea captain Son Heung-min endures one of the most difficult chapters of his international career.

Kane has been central to England’s run to the quarterfinals, scoring five goals through the Round of 16 and cementing his place among the tournament’s most productive forwards. His tally includes a brace in England’s dramatic 3-2 win over co-host Mexico at Estadio Azteca and a decisive two-goal performance in a comeback victory over DR Congo. Along the way, Kane surpassed Gary Lineker to become England’s all-time leading World Cup scorer, adding to a resume that already includes the Golden Boot he won at the 2018 tournament in Russia. Teammates and observers have continued to praise his form throughout the competition. Barcelona forward Anthony Gordon, speaking about his England teammate, described Kane in glowing terms as a player capable of contending for the sport’s top individual honor.

Statistical comparisons between Kane and Son this season have also tended to favor the England captain across several measures, including aerial duel success, shots on target and overall attacking output, reflecting Kane’s continued prolific scoring form for both club and country. Kane’s underlying numbers, including his expected threat and involvement in scoring chances, have remained among the strongest of any forward at Bayern Munich and with the England national team over the past year.

Son’s tournament, by contrast, unfolded very differently. South Korea entered the World Cup hoping to advance deep into the newly expanded 48-team format, but the team finished third in Group A with a single win in three matches, missing out on the knockout stage entirely. The result marked South Korea’s worst-ever World Cup finish, placing the team 34th overall, two spots below the lowest possible finish under the tournament’s previous 32-team format.

Son’s individual form struggled alongside the team’s broader difficulties. He was substituted in the second half of matches against both Czechia and Mexico after missing scoring opportunities, and then, in a move that stunned South Korean fans, head coach Hong Myung-bo dropped Son entirely from the starting lineup for the team’s decisive final group match against South Africa, the first time Son had not started a World Cup match for South Korea since before his international debut in 2010. South Korea lost that match 1-0, eliminating the team from contention. Hong later explained his rationale for repeatedly substituting or benching his captain, pointing to a prior instance in which a substitute scored the winning goal after Son was withdrawn. He acknowledged that the same gamble did not work a second time.

The fallout from South Korea’s early exit extended well beyond the pitch. South Korean President Lee Jae Myung ordered an investigation into the team’s performance, citing the significant public funding invested in the World Cup campaign and expressing regret over what he described as the disappointment felt by the public. Hong Myung-bo announced his resignation shortly after the tournament concluded, taking responsibility for the team’s performance despite having a contract that extended through the 2027 AFC Asian Cup.

Son took to social media to address the team’s supporters directly, writing that he felt he could not adequately convey his sorrow with a simple apology. He described the disappointment as difficult to put into words, saying the dream stage he had long spoken about had collapsed and that accepting the outcome remained difficult. In a separate public statement following renewed scrutiny from South Korea’s government, Son also asked fans to direct their support toward his teammates rather than continued criticism, saying he felt a deep sense of responsibility for not repaying the support the team had received. He added that he would work to earn back the trust of supporters and vowed to keep fighting to bring joy back to South Korean fans.

Despite the disappointing tournament, Son received a notably warm reception from fans upon his return to South Korea, a contrast to the jeers directed at Hong Myung-bo the day before. Supporters gathered at Incheon International Airport wearing jerseys and holding signs of encouragement for Son and his teammates, signaling continued public affection for the longtime captain even amid the team’s historic underperformance.

Comparing Kane and Son directly raises a familiar challenge in evaluating any two players from different eras, leagues and international contexts. Kane’s role as England’s talisman has been reinforced by his continued scoring prowess at a major tournament where his team remains alive in the competition, while Son’s legacy has long been built on a decade of individual brilliance for both Tottenham Hotspur and South Korea, including guiding his country to the Asian Cup final in previous years and winning the Premier League Golden Boot in 2022 as a joint winner. Whether one is definitively “better” than the other ultimately depends on the criteria used, whether that involves current tournament form, career achievements, leadership under pressure or long-term impact on the sport in their respective countries.

What is clear is that the 2026 World Cup has, for now, sharpened the contrast between the two forwards’ current trajectories. Kane continues to push for a deep run with England and remains in contention for the tournament’s Golden Boot, sitting just two goals behind the current three-way leaders. Son, meanwhile, has returned home to a period of reflection and rebuilding for South Korean football following the nation’s most disappointing World Cup showing to date. As the tournament progresses toward its quarterfinal and semifinal stages, Kane’s continued performances are likely to keep shaping the conversation around his standing among the game’s elite forwards, even as debate over comparisons to players like Son remains, as with most such discussions in football, a matter of perspective rather than settled fact.

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Chinese companies are expanding globally, and fast. Their biggest commercial competitors are in the US.

Waymo, Alphabet’s robotaxi business, remains the commercial leader, operating paid driverless services in several US cities. Amazon-owned Zoox and Tesla are expanding more cautiously, while Uber has abandoned the development of its own autonomous vehicles, which had been marred by a fatal accident in 2018.

Uber, and its ride-hailing rival Lyft, are now partnering with Chinese firms.

That gives them automatic “access to millions of customers that they wouldn’t have if they created their own app,” says Tu Le, founder of consultancy Sino Auto Insights.

“Through these partnerships, they’re able to commercialise and broaden their scope.”

Although Chinese companies are able to manufacture cheaply, Waymo has spent years building expertise in customer service and the app technology.

“Having experienced Waymo and the WeRides and the Ponys… I would have to say the user experience for Waymo is much better than all the other competitors. I feel like Waymo is really becoming a standard mode of transportation for California,” says Tu Le.

Perceptions also differ across markets.

In the US, unions have warned robotaxis could displace taxi, delivery and freight drivers.

China’s policymakers present automation as a remedy for its shrinking workforce but government censorship of dissenting voices makes it difficult to gauge opinions in the wider population.

President Xi Jinping has promoted AI and robotics as part of China’s drive to develop “new quality productive forces” – that will create jobs and boost economic growth.

And so there are incentives and impetus for companies to invest in the technology and expand.

One of the industry’s arguments is that autonomous vehicles could improve mobility for people who cannot easily drive themselves.

“If we can bring the cost down for a robotaxi ride so that it’s as cheap – or maybe even cheaper – than hailing an Uber with a normal driver, then it really helps broaden mobility,” Le says. “Elderly folks, folks that are disabled – these robotaxis really allow them a lot more ability to travel.”

Comparing student loan repayments to phone contracts or cinema tickets “amounted to mis-selling” by government, a group of MPs has said.

In a new report, the Treasury Committee also said students were not told clearly enough loan terms could change retrospectively, and called for a U-turn on the decision to freeze the income threshold at which some graduates start repaying their loans.

Last year, Chancellor Rachel Reeves said the repayment threshold for students with Plan 2 loans would be frozen at £29,385 between 2027 and 2030, instead of rising with inflation.

Both the government and Student Loans Company said the committee had made “an important contribution” to the student finance debate.

A spokesperson for the Student Loans Company said they “recognise the importance of ensuring that students and borrowers across all repayment plans have access to clear, accurate and timely information about student finance”.

A government spokesperson said ministers were “already taking decisive action” and would “continue to look for ways to make the system fairer for students, graduates and taxpayers in a financially sustainable way”.

Plan 2 loans were taken out by students in England between September 2012 and July 2023, and are still issued in Wales. Graduates automatically pay back what they earn above the repayment threshold at a rate of 9%.

Freezing that threshold means graduates start repaying their loans sooner, or pay more as their salaries increase with inflation while the threshold remains the same.

The committee’s report referenced a BBC investigation which found the government compared student loan repayments to £30-a-month phone contracts in promotional presentations to teenagers a decade ago.

As this was “inaccurate for higher earners”, that “amounted to mis-selling”, the report said.

The committee noted that while the government’s student loan policies were exempt from consumer protection laws, it expected the government “to comply with not only the law, but basic fairness and common decency”.

Some of the UK’s biggest banks have been failing their most vulnerable customers, according to the financial regulator.

Banks have been pushing homeless people or those in financial hardship towards unsuitable online applications and away from basic bank accounts.

These accounts are free, do not include an overdraft facility, and provide essential banking for those unable to open a mainstream account.

Now, the nine UK banks and building societies which operate basic bank accounts have agreed to demands from the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) to make access more straightforward.

Basic bank accounts have many of the same functions as a regular current account, but are designed for those who might otherwise be excluded from the banking system. More than four million people in the UK have these accounts.

They are offered by Barclays, The Co-operative Bank, HSBC, Lloyds Banking Group (including the Halifax and Bank of Scotland brands), Nationwide Building Society, NatWest (including the RBS and Ulster Bank brands), Santander, TSB and Virgin Money.

Features include:

But a mystery shopping exercise by the FCA rated a third of experiences with basic bank accounts as poor or very poor.

The exercise covered 298 interactions across branches and by telephone, and rated 28% of cases as good or very good, 38% as fair, 20% as poor and 14% as very poor.

Problems included failing to offer these accounts to people who needed them, particularly those with no fixed address.

Some pushed customers in vulnerable circumstances towards online applications to open an account unsuitable for their needs.

Shimmering on Deb Marino’s finger are diamonds set in an eye-catching gold ring.

“Of course it’s a middle finger ring, because, why not?” the Florida-based blogger says on her Tiktok feed.

Getting rid of her engagement ring would have suggested a regret the 34-year-old doesn’t feel – after all, her marriage brought her daughter. Even just not wearing it would have felt like a waste.

“I didn’t want it locked away in a box,” she says. “Diamonds are precious.”

Plus she does sometimes feel like sticking one finger up after the break-up of her marriage.

Deb is part of a rising trend promoted by jewellers around the world of women marking a new chapter in their life with a new statement piece: the divorce ring.

Deb had the diamond from her engagement ring set at one end of an open circle and added a new sapphire to represent her daughter to the other end. It cost $3,000 (£2,245).

It’s a sizeable sum to part with when divorces can be expensive.

Ring resale values tend to be only around 30% of the original price so for many the trend of giving their old jewellery a new life feels a better investment.

And Deb’s middle finger statement fits right in with what the fashion pages are calling this year’s “hot divorcee summer” – a celebration of liberated glamour and a “don’t care energy”.

Divorce rings can also be a way of marking a kind of financial liberation, says Kate Daly, co-founder of Amicable, a UK company offering mediated divorce services.

“Your whole life gets thrown up in the air,” she says. “Your finances are under extreme pressure.”

If at that point a woman decides to buy a new ring it’s a sign that she is making her own financial decisions and “not needing to ask permission from anyone,” says Daly.

“It’s very easy to trivialise, but maybe that’s the first big spending decision you’ve made in a very long time, and certainly perhaps the biggest one you’ve made solo for a long time.”

WASHINGTON — Obtaining a green card through marriage to a U.S. citizen has become a far more demanding and unpredictable process in 2026, as the Trump administration has rolled out a series of policy changes that immigration attorneys say have transformed what was once described as a relatively straightforward path into an extensive, high-stakes legal undertaking.

Marriage-based immigration has long been one of the most common routes to permanent residency in the United States. More than 250,000 marriage-based immigrant visas were issued in fiscal year 2024 alone, and spouses, children and parents of U.S. citizens accounted for roughly 53 percent of the 783,000 people who obtained green cards from within the country between October 2023 and September 2024. But this year, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has implemented a series of policy shifts that attorneys and advocacy groups say have significantly raised the bar for approval.

Among the most consequential changes is the reinstatement of mandatory in-person interviews for all marriage-based green card applicants, eliminating waiver provisions that had previously allowed certain lower-risk cases, including couples married for several years with children together, to bypass the interview requirement. Both the U.S. citizen sponsor and the foreign national spouse must now appear before a USCIS officer, who may ask detailed questions about the couple’s daily life, how they met, their finances and their future plans. Attorneys say even minor inconsistencies between spouses’ answers can trigger a finding of marriage fraud, a determination that carries severe and often permanent consequences for future immigration benefits.

USCIS has also expanded its use of cross-referenced government databases and enhanced vetting protocols, meaning discrepancies as small as a mismatched address, a missing tax filing or a social media post that contradicts a stated timeline can now trigger a formal Request for Evidence or a Notice of Intent to Deny. Under an internal policy memorandum issued this year, officers have additionally been directed to place benefit decisions on hold for applicants from countries listed under a renewed travel-ban proclamation, a group that reportedly spans dozens of nations.

Perhaps the most sweeping change came on May 21, when USCIS issued a policy memorandum stating that adjustment of status, the process that allows eligible immigrants already inside the United States to apply for a green card without leaving the country, should be treated as a matter of discretion and “administrative grace” rather than a routine alternative to consular processing abroad. The following day, the agency publicly announced it would grant adjustment of status only in what it described as “extraordinary circumstances,” a shift that immigration attorneys say could affect not only marriage-based applicants but also work visa holders, individuals with Temporary Protected Status and others seeking permanent residency from within the country.

USCIS has defended the changes as a return to the statute’s original intent. In a statement, USCIS spokesman Zach Kahler said the agency’s approach reflects a broader mandate to verify identities and personal histories through “a rigorous process,” one intended to prioritize thoroughly screening and vetting all noncitizens seeking immigration benefits. Kahler also emphasized that beginning the marriage-based petition process does not, by itself, protect an applicant from removal, noting that a pending or approved Form I-130 petition “does not confer any immigration status.”

Immigration attorneys and advocacy organizations have pushed back forcefully against the changes. Shev Dalal-Dheini, senior director of government relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said the new discretionary standard represents an attempt to reshape decades of established practice, telling reporters that USCIS is “trying to upend decades of processing of adjustment of status” and that the shift applies broadly to virtually anyone seeking a green card, including spouses of U.S. citizens.

David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, has been similarly critical, characterizing the broader trend as part of the administration’s ongoing effort to reduce legal immigration levels. Bier noted that green card approvals from within the United States have fallen sharply over the past year according to USCIS data, and he has argued that the shift toward mandatory consular processing “ignores the reality of life,” pointing out that circumstances such as marriage proposals or new job offers often arise naturally after someone has already entered the country under a different visa category.

The practical impact of the changes has already been significant for couples navigating the system. Processing times for Form I-130 petitions filed by U.S. citizen spouses, classified as immediate relative cases, are now running approximately 59.5 months at some field offices, according to published USCIS data, though cases handled through national service centers may move somewhat faster. For spouses of green card holders filing under a different visa category, the underlying I-130 petition alone is taking two to three years to process at many locations. Applicants filing for adjustment of status concurrently from inside the United States are currently waiting an average of eight to nine months for a decision, though the reinstated interview requirement is expected to add further delays on top of that estimate.

The expanded scrutiny extends beyond interviews and paperwork. USCIS has broadened its application of the “public charge” doctrine, directing officers to more closely examine applicants’ financial stability, credit history, English language proficiency, employment history and overall self-sufficiency, factors that attorneys say were not previously emphasized to the same degree in marriage-based cases. Officers have also been encouraged, under internal guidance issued this year, to consider whether an applicant could have returned to their home country to complete the process rather than remaining in the United States, with those who stay potentially facing longer and more intrusive review.

For applicants from certain countries, the consequences can be especially severe. One case highlighted in recent reporting involved a green-card holder married to a U.S. citizen who was born in one of dozens of countries subject to the current travel ban; despite having lived in the United States for three decades, her citizenship application filed the previous year has remained frozen, with no exception available even for spouses of U.S. military service members.

Attorneys are advising couples to prepare far more extensive documentation than in previous years, including joint financial records, lease agreements, communication histories and third-party affidavits attesting to the authenticity of the relationship, in anticipation of interviews that now carry substantially higher stakes than they did just a few years ago. With litigation over several of the new policies still developing and no clear indication of when processing backlogs might ease, immigration lawyers say the marriage-based path to a green card, while still legally available, now demands a level of preparation and legal caution that was rarely necessary under prior administrations.

Some foreign policy failures don’t make headlines or appear in casualty counts or ceasefire agreements. They surface months later, buried in a consultancy report no one in the White House was eager to read.

Last week, the geopolitical research firm Asia Group confirmed what should have been clear from the beginning: the biggest winner of Donald Trump’s Middle East war isn’t the United States, Israel, or even Iran—it’s China.

The bare facts are stark enough to make the point on their own. After the US and Israel launched joint strikes on Iran on 28 February, killing Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, in the process, Tehran responded by effectively shutting down the Strait of Hormuz. 

That single act of retaliation choked off a waterway carrying roughly 80% of the region’s oil exports and nearly 90% of its liquefied natural gas, almost all of it bound for Asia. Prices spiked. Economies that depend on that energy, India, Japan, South Korea, and the smaller economies of Southeast Asia, took the hit exactly as you’d expect.

China, alone among them, barely flinched.

That is not an accident, and it is not luck. It is the result of years of deliberate planning that Washington chose to treat as a rival’s eccentricity rather than a strategic threat worth answering. Beijing spent the past several years building up enormous strategic oil reserves, buying aggressively whenever prices dipped. 

According to the analysis cited in the report, China’s crude imports rose from 11.1 million barrels a day to 11.6 million in 2025 alone, with more than 80% of that increase going straight into storage rather than consumption. While other nations ran their economies on just-in-time energy logistics, China was quietly building a buffer for exactly this kind of shock. When the shock came, the buffer held.

Layer on top of that China’s renewables build-out, a program so large it has reshaped global manufacturing in solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles, and you get a country that was simply less exposed to a Middle Eastern energy crisis than its neighbors, and structurally positioned to gain from the global scramble toward clean energy that such crises accelerate. 

This is the unglamorous secret of strategic advantage: it is rarely won in the moment of crisis. It is won in the years of preparation beforehand, when nobody is paying attention, and there’s no credit to claim.

This ought to sting, because containing China’s rise has been the one constant, bipartisan thread running through American foreign policy for over a decade. Yet here is a war launched under a president who has made “America First” and great-power competition with Beijing central to his political identity, and its most concrete geopolitical dividend has flowed to Beijing. Not because China plotted this outcome, but because Washington created the conditions for it and then handed China the opportunity on a plate.

It would be a mistake, though, to read this as a simple story of Chinese triumph. The report’s own analysts are careful to note the limits of Beijing’s gain. 

Drew Thompson of Singapore’s Rajaratnam School of International Studies makes the sharper point: any erosion of American credibility in the region is not automatically a win for China, which has shown no appetite to become the Middle East’s security guarantor in Washington’s place. Beijing wants the economic upside of stability without the burden of providing it, a free-rider position that works only as long as someone else, however reluctantly, keeps the sea lanes open.

There’s also a more unsettling lesson buried in here for anyone watching the Taiwan Strait. As the Atlantic Council’s Wen-Ti Sung observes, the paralysis a single closed waterway inflicted on the world economy is a preview, in miniature, of what a contested Taiwan Strait would do to China’s own ambitions. 

If Beijing’s planners are as rational as this report suggests, the chaos in Hormuz may be less an argument for aggression than a cautionary tale against it. Blocking a strait is easy. Living with the consequences, even as the ostensible winner, is not.

None of this should be read as an argument that Trump’s Middle East strikes were somehow a secretly good strategy in disguise; this is not the case, Beijing itself would need to make. 

The Asia Group’s own framing is more sobering: China doesn’t view the turbulence as an existential threat, but as a set of pain points to be managed, and opportunities to be exploited where possible.

 That is a country adapting well to a mess it did not create. It is not a country that has been checked, weakened, or contained. If the goal of American Middle East policy was ever to leave China worse off, the ledger, for now, reads the opposite way.

Other People are Reading

Mumbai: Rich investors eyeing a debt-oriented portfolio with higher returns and better tax efficiency are considering niche plans offered by mutual funds and the newly created specialised investment funds. These structures bundle together high-yielding debt, equity arbitrage, REITs (Real Estate Investment Trusts) and InvITs (Infrastructure Investment Trusts) among other securities that boost returns while minimising the tax outgo.

For instance, the UNIFI Dynamic Asset Allocation Fund (UDAAF) allocates roughly one-third of its portfolio each to arbitrage, high-rated debt papers and credit. While the scheme does not hold unhedged equity positions, it may participate in special situations such as buybacks, open offers and IPOs to generate additional returns. The fund has delivered a return of 8.05% over the past year, compared with the Value Research category average of 2.24% and 1.28% for the CRISIL Hybrid 50+50 – Moderate Index.

Meanwhile, the Redhex Hybrid Long Short Fund, (RHLSF) a Specialised Investment Fund (SIF) launched in June, allocates 25-35% to arbitrage strategies, up to 10% to REITs, up to 15% to InvITs, 15-25% to high-yielding non-convertible debentures (NCDs), 10-15% to liquid fixed-income instruments and 5-15% to retail loan securitisation.

Buoyed by the response to these products, some smaller fund houses are evaluating similar offerings in the SIF space.

“Using mutual funds and specialized investment funds as vehicles, there are products that add credit to portfolios to boost returns. Due to high returns and tax efficiency these funds are finding favour with HNIs,” says Arihant Bardia, CIO and Founder, Valtrust

High networth individuals (HNIS) are increasingly drawn to these schemes for their combination of relatively stable returns and tax efficiency. The presence of high-yielding credit partly serves as an alternative to equities, which are going through a rough phase currently.
As hybrid products, they are eligible for long-term capital gains (LTCG) taxation at 12.5% depending on their holding period. For instance, investors in the UNIFI Dynamic Asset Allocation Fund must hold their units for at least two years to qualify for the concessional tax rate, while those investing in the Redhex Hybrid Long Short Fund, a lSIF strategy, need to hold for just one year.Investors exiting UNIFI Dynamic Asset Allocation before completing two years will be taxed according to their applicable income tax slab. In the case of RHLSF, gains realised within one year will attract a short-term capital gains (STCG) tax of 20%.

By comparison, a fixed deposit yielding 6.5% delivers a post-tax return of about 4.5% for investors in the highest tax bracket. An arbitrage-heavy hybrid SIF or mutual fund generating an 8% return, however, can deliver a post-tax return of around 7%, translating into a 200-250 basis point advantage over fixed deposits or debt mutual funds.

Managing risk remains the key to success in such a strategy, said fund officials. “We calibrate high yield allocation dynamically with the economic cycle and tap special situations offering favourable risk-reward,” says Premal Damania, National Head Sales, Unifi Mutual Fund.

However, these products are not meant for every investor. While conventional mutual funds typically credit redemption proceeds within two working days, regulations allow SIFs to take longer, reducing their liquidity.

“In a mutual fund, you can get money back in two working days, but in this SIF, redemption happens only once a week, and subsequently redemption takes 10 days, so investors have to budget 15 days for their money,” says Anup Bhaiya, MD and CEO, Money Honey Financial Services.