Asylum & RefugeeJun 19, 2026·3 min read

Life in Hollywood bubble plays second fiddle to US need for World Cup success | Max Rushden

The Guardian – US News

20h ago

Life in Hollywood bubble plays second fiddle to US need for World Cup success | Max Rushden

Summary

Working at a tournament brings its own demands but nothing like the pressure on home players for a good showing G reetings from Los Angeles – from your own podcasting correspondent. England aside, it’s been 20 years since I was in the host country for a major tournament. Professional commitments make this a marginally different experience from driving around Germany with Ian, Matt and Oli in 2006 just wondering when the next stein was going to be thrust into my hands – dancing with Trinidad and Tobago fans, feeling lucky to miss out on Brazil v Australia tickets because my hangover was too much for the sun. The question you are asked most by people back home is along the lines of: “Is there World Cup fever in the States?” I am reminded of a local TV crew who walked around central Cambridge on the eve of our FA Cup quarter-final with Crystal Palace in 1990 asking people how they felt about the game, and being rewarded with lots of nice middle-class people who didn’t even know there was a football team in Cambridge. Or when the Ashes arrives in Melbourne: “What’s the atmosphere down there, Max?” “Well if I’m honest, I’m mainly in my house with two under-fives who aren’t across the deficiencies of Bazball. I’m just on my hands and knees trying to clear up rice with a wet wipe.” On that note, to the partners of the journalists, players and officials at home dealing with real life and children while we gad about North America – you are owed an enormous debt. If my 18-month-old, Willie Rushden, ever reads this, now was not the time to get hand, foot and mouth. It may have been pointed out, or you just knew it, but the US is impossibly big. For Nestory Irankunda, a refugee, to take that touch, and score that goal , was glorious. In this time of rising populism and nationalism, there is a beauty in someone whose family have fled conflict representing Australia, a country built on immigration, much like the US.

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World Refugee Day 2026 in numbers: UNHCR reports decline in global refugee numbers amid escalating crisis

Subscribed with another email? A French Red Cross volunteer welcomes refugees coming from Saint-Nazaire in January 1945 in Nantes, during the Second World War. | Photo Credit: AFP In 1951, when the Refugee Convention was adopted, the focus of the signatory governments was on rebuilding a fragile European continent. It thus went on limit the definition of a refugee to those displaced by the “events occurring in Europe before 1951”. The 1951 Refugee Convention will complete 75 years, this year. On World Refugee Day 2026, have a look at the trends that are shaping the current crisis: As per UNHCR’s G lobal Compact on Refugees 2025, and the agency’s latest G lobal Trends report, the growth in the number of refugees has slowed down since 2022, and has in fact stabilised. A Rohingya refugee looks on at a roadside market inside a refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, on April 17, 2026. | Photo Credit: Reuters The decline in the number of refugees cannot be understood in isolation as a positive indicator. A Sudanese refugee father from Al-Fashir rides on a motorized cart with his family travelling between Chad and Sudan amid the ongoing conflict between the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese army, at the Tine border post in eastern Chad, on November 22, 2025. | Photo Credit: Reuters The UNHCR in 2025 also reported about 4.5 million ‘stateless’ people, with Rohingyas forming the largest group among them. A family shelters in a tent mounted on a car in a field in the desert countryside of Deir al-Zor, Syria, on May 8, 2026. | Photo Credit: Reuters In its report, the UNHCR also pointed to the fact that while children make up only about 29% of the world population, the add up to about 39% of the refugee population. A migrant carries a child as she along with others continue their journey to the U.S. border, in Acandi, Colombia, on July 9, 2023. | Photo Credit: Reuters Low and middle-income countries end up hosting a bulk (68%) of the refugees, despite having a significantly less share of the global GDP. Afghan refugee children play next to trucks loaded with their family's belongings as they wait to return Afghanistan along a highway in Landi Kotal, Pakistan, on April 9, 2025. | Photo Credit: AP About 4.4 million such people returned back to their countries of origin, thereby removing their refugee status.

The UK will scan asylum-seekers’ faces for age checks—despite knowing the tech is flawed

Age verification is consuming the Internet . Starting next year, the British government is planning to introduce facial age estimation—where AI scans your face and suggests how old you are —to help determine the age of asylum seekers arriving at the United Kingdom’s border. Many asylum seekers arriving in the UK will not have documents proving their age, and if children are incorrectly classed as adults, they can be stripped of some legal protections and placed in adult-only detention centers. The investigation also found that the Home Office, which oversees UK immigration and policing, disbanded a scientific committee designed to advise it on broader age estimation methods while it was exploring the introduction of AI. “We were keen to highlight the inadequacies of facial age estimation, but this opportunity was not presented to us, and then the committee was shut down,” says Tim Cole, an emeritus professor of medical statistics at University College London’s Institute of Child Health and former committee member. The spokesperson adds that the committee was disbanded due to requiring “different fields of expertise.” While the Home Office says face scanning is designed to be an “additional” tool for border officers and won’t “replace or overrule human judgment,” it did not answer questions about how it plans to use the technology in real-world environments. “In cases of uncertainty,” the spokesperson says, “individuals will always be treated as children until a further assessment is conducted.” The UK government first announced its plans to use face age estimation alongside border staff judgments to assess migrants in July 2025. Tens of thousands of people make asylum claims in the UK each year, with many arriving in the country after dangerous , physically demanding journeys in small boats crossing the English Channel. Currently, border staff who doubt the age of someone claiming to be under 18 can assess their physical appearance, answers to interview questions, and general demeanor, to make an initial decision about their age. The Home Office has indicated that FAE technology would help immigration officers who are making age assessments while working at the point of first encounter. The photo quality was apparently so bad that the report was unable to determine if that or the physical condition of asylum seekers at arrival had more of an impact on the algorithms’ age estimation results. The internal report concluded that more needed to be done to study the impacts of stress that asylum seekers endure before arriving at their destination. “Children seeking asylum have often suffered unimaginable trauma,” says Martha Dark, the co-executive director of rights group Foxglove.

Life in Hollywood bubble plays second fiddle to US need for World Cup success | Max Rushden

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