BBC director-general Tim Davie has refused to say whether the corporation will take part in next year’s Eurovision, as the national broadcasters of Ireland, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Iceland and Spain all threaten to boycott the song contest if Israel is allowed to participate. The European Broadcasting Union is consulting with members on how to “manage participation and geopolitical tensions” around the 2026 event.

‘Hypocrisy and division’
It would be impossible to overlook the “double standards” if the European Broadcasting Union allowed Israel to compete after throwing out Russia in 2022 over the Ukraine invasion, said Pablo O’Hana in The Independent. Unless the EBU “rediscovers its backbone”, Eurovision risks becoming a “stage for selective storytelling, hypocrisy and division” at a time when our continent “most needs unity”.

Azerbaijan was not suspended during its war in Nagorno-Karabakh, nor “Turkey during its incursions into northern Syria”, said Jack Simony in The Jerusalem Post, even though “both countries initiated the wars they fought, while Israel was attacked”. For Eurovision to single out Israel would be “undermining its own ethos” as a “festival of inclusion”.

“A nation that is perpetrating genocide cannot continue to sing,” said Gideon Levy in Israeli daily Ha’aretz. The justification for Russia’s 2022 suspension “was considered self-evident”, and Israel’s conduct in Gaza has been “far crueller and more genocidal than Russia’s invasion of Ukraine”.

‘Awkward intersection’
Boycotts and bans are “almost as old as the contest itself”, historian Tess Megginson told Vox. In the 1970s, Greece and Turkey boycotted Eurovision over Turkey’s invasion of northern Cyprus. And while there were songs about “peace and unity and breaking down walls” as Eastern European countries started joining in the 1990s, Yugoslavia was banned from the contest following the siege of Sarajevo.

More recently, the suspension of Russia symbolised the “awkward intersection of politics and culture at which Eurovision sits”, said Politico. This latest row is part of a wider European debate over “whether cultural bans on Israeli artists and athletes” are “proportionate responses to the war in Gaza” or risk “crossing into antisemitism”.

South Korea’s spy agency has confirmed that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s daughter, Kim Ju Ae, is likely to be his “recognised heir”. The report comes two weeks after Ju Ae, who is thought to be 12 or 13 years old, made her first public international appearance, accompanying her father to Beijing, where he met Chinese and Russian leaders.

What do we know about Ju Ae?
Born in 2012 or 2013, Ju Ae is the daughter of Kim and his wife, Ri Sol-ju. South Korea’s spy agency has previously said Ju Ae has an older brother and a younger sibling, although these reports are not confirmed.
Kim first “introduced his daughter to the world” in 2022, “holding her hand in front of an intercontinental ballistic missile”, said The New York Times.

Since then, she has appeared alongside him at many events within North Korea, and some analysts say she has effectively “replaced her mother” in the position of first lady. Although there has yet to be any formal recognition of Ju Ae as a potential heir, she is a likely candidate to be the country’s next leader – especially following her international debut in China.

How does North Korea handle succession?
Kim Jong Un’s sister, Yo Jong, has also held positions of power in the country, serving in government and publicly criticising South Korea. But the choice of her or Ju Ae to replace him would raise the question of whether North Korea, “a heavily chauvinistic society”, would accept a female leader, said The Washington Post.

The North Korean constitution does not set out a defined succession process, but the last two transitions of power have passed from parent to child, although not always through the rule of primogeniture; Kim Jong Un was the youngest of three sons of Kim Jong Il.

In the lead-up to his accession, Kim was called “Brilliant Comrade” in state media and had songs written about him. Ju Ae’s similar nicknames – “the beloved child” and “great person of guidance” – are another clue that she might be on the same path.

A protester lights a flare in Marseille as hundreds of thousands of people join in a nationwide strike and mass demonstrations today against France’s draft budget. The government says cuts are needed to tackle the ballooning national debt, but unions condemned the “horror show” proposals.

Miguel Medina / AFP / Getty Images

Buying up to four pairs of shoes a week while her subjects were starving, France’s final queen is viewed today as both a “vacuous profligate” and a “style icon for a consumerist cult”, said Laura Cumming in The Observer.

Married at just 14 to Louis XVI, the young Austrian went on to spearhead the royal family’s extravagance, which devoured a “grotesque 13% of the state budget”. The V&A’s exhibition brings together iconic pieces worn, and inspired, by Marie Antoinette: a character of haute-culture adorned with controversies.

The collection presents a number of exceptional loans never seen outside Versailles, including “silk slippers, jewels from her private collection” and, remarkably, “the final letter she wrote” before her execution in 1793, said Anna Murphy in The Times. But perhaps the most elucidating item is the “single be-bowed beige shoe” she lost while fleeing the Tuileries, pursued “by a revolutionary mob”.

Her life – in a time associated with failed foreign wars,  financial decline and political discontent on home soil – was full of excess: she ordered “300 hyacinth bulbs” to perfume her bedchamber in the winter of 1778, and “bespoke scents” straight from Montpellier, said Matthew Dennison in Country Life.

Counterintuitively, though, these acts may reveal her desire to escape, as “she embraced items and styles that reminded her of the freedom she had forfeited through marriage”. A tour-de-force, the exhibition shows that “she, not her husband, was responsible for the evolution of the Louis XVI style”, creating an unrivalled “world of beauty”.

Time for Lib Dems to raise their game on the big stage
Edward Lucas in The Times
Lib Dems may “loathe” Nigel Farage, writes Edward Lucas, but the “political upheaval” he’s wrought “heralds a momentous chance” for their party, because “polarisation makes moderates more conspicuous”. The Libs could “overtake the Tories”, but they must “compete seriously”, by outlining a “full-blown critique” of the government and “leading the charge” against Reform. With the next election still four years away, “most Lib Dems are in no great hurry”, but “the pace of events makes that riskier than it seems”.

Royal fanatics and Trump fanatics – the perfect Venn diagram of lunacy
Tim Stanley in The Telegraph
Most of the schedule for “day one” of Donald Trump’s “right royal visit” to the UK “took place behind the walls of Windsor Castle”, writes Tim Stanley. But on display in the crowd outside “was a meeting of worlds: royal fanatics and Trump fanatics, with a Venn crossover of complete lunatics”. Meanwhile, “lefties” ask “what the point of such pomp and circumstance is, but the alternative, if we had a republic, would be foreign dignitaries being taken to President Danny Dyer’s favourite pub”.

Lucy Powell’s new radicalism seems opportunist, not idealistic
The Times’ editorial board
Labour deputy leader contender Lucy Powell “has been unsparing in her criticism of the government in which, until recently, she served”, writes The Times. She argues that Keir Starmer’s administration is “estranged from ordinary people and their concerns”, accusing the PM of “assuming a ‘defensive crouch’ on scrapping the two-child benefit cap”. Yet “as leader of the house, and a cabinet member, she supported the cap, and everything else”. It took her recent dismissal to “fire her conscience”.