“What a difference a year makes,” said Michael Froman, president of the Council on Foreign Relations. Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy have gone from a public bust-up in the Oval Office in February 2025 to a “lovefest” at the Nato summit in Ankara last week. Ukraine has managed to change its direction in the war and, “very importantly, the narrative”.  Zelenskyy is now perceived as winning against Russia, and “Trump likes a winner”.

What did the commentators say?
Trump “heaped praise” on Zelenskyy and Ukraine during the Nato summit, said The Washington Post. He spoke in “unusually positive terms” about Kyiv’s strikes deep into Russian territory, and offered “dramatic new assistance” for Ukraine’s wartime efforts. It was a “dramatic departure from his tone during his first year in office”. Zelenskyy, meanwhile, showed “swagger and a hint of his pre-presidential vocation as a popular Ukrainian comedian”. 

The new-found “bonhomie” signalled a “significant thaw in relations”, said The Hill. Trump gave the green light for the US to buy Ukrainian drones, and for Kyiv to “co-produce Patriot interceptors, a move that could significantly improve its air defences in the years ahead”.

Zelenskyy “looked like he almost couldn’t believe his luck”, said CNN, especially as the “flare-up in the war in Iran appeared to have put Trump into a foul mood” ahead of the meeting. But in a break from past acrimonious encounters, Trump praised Zelenskyy’s “willingness to reach a deal”, said NPR. “We’ve developed a good relationship – it’s even hard to believe – from the Oval Office until now,” said Trump at the summit. “This will be the beginning, maybe, just the beginning.”

What next?
The US president has “zigged and zagged” so often “when it comes to Ukraine” that his offer of a Patriot licence was “cheered” with a “heavy dose of caution” in Kyiv, said The New York Times. The language Trump used was “rather vague”, said CNN, and he “admitted that he had not yet discussed the issue” with the arms manufacturers who make the missile batteries domestically.

Trump also appeared open to visiting Ukraine but said he would rather the “war be over” first.

Video assistant referee technology was introduced to correct clear and obvious refereeing errors but it has since “morphed into something far greater”, said Kevin Baxter in the Los Angeles Times. 

At this year’s Fifa World Cup, there were more than 100 VAR interventions in matches up to the round of 16. Most were technically correct but the infractions were both “imperceptible” and “consequential” – raising the criticism that “allowing a game to be decided by electronic evidence” only detectable by “Nasa-level technology” is “violating the spirit of the game”.

‘Joy-denial device’
The tournament’s most influential figure has not been a star player, or even Donald Trump, but the VAR official, said Roey Hadar on MS Now. Technology in football is a “great idea on paper” but “the perfect has become the enemy of the good”.

Take Croatia’s last-gasp equaliser against Portugal, disallowed as offside after a microchip in the ball detected a slight touch by a Croatia player in the build-up to the goal. Or the sending off of Switzerland’s Breel Embolo (pictured above) after a “mistaken identity” VAR check. Or Egypt’s goal against Argentina, disallowed for a perceived earlier foul, leading sobbing scorer Mostafa Ziko to declare the match had been “rigged”.

VAR “doesn’t feel like a backstop” it’s meant to be, said Jason Gay in The Wall Street Journal. This “baffling, deeply unpopular replay doohickey” has become a “joy-denial device”, designed by “evil robots” to “suck the soul out of a beautiful game based on constant flow”.

‘Toenail offsides’
Fifa must now draw a “line in the sand, ending once and for all the unfair and disfiguring use of slow-motion and freeze-frames”, said Adam Crafton on The Athletic. I would introduce a rule that VAR reviews must “conclude in a set short amount of time”, said Hadar on MS Now. “If the error is visible in that time,” it’s clear and obvious; “if not, then it’s too inconclusive to change. Just keep the game moving.”

Former Fifa referee Christina Unkel told the LA Times that a majority of officials would prefer referees to have discretion to ignore VAR. Most decision-making on the pitch is “very subjective” and there is agreement that some kinds of VAR decision shouldn’t be part of the game. They are, ultimately, “toenail offsides, hair follicle arguments”.

Yilki horses stream across a dusty plateau in Cappadocia, Turkey, in “Thunder of Hooves”, a shot taken by Kah-Wai Lin that’s earned him third place in The International Aerial Photograph of the Year 2026. “Witnessing them galloping from above was an unforgettable experience,” Lin said on social media.

Kah-Wai Lin / The International Aerial Photographer of the Year

Getting to Traena in Norway’s Arctic Circle is “a bit of a schlep”, said James Stewart in The Times. From Oslo, you can catch a flight to Bodo and then take a passenger ferry to Onoy, “a small island transit hub on the Helgeland coast”.

The “first indication” that it’s going to be “worth it” comes as the ferry “weaves south where north Norway shatters into 20,000 islands”. But it’s confirmed on the final leg of the journey as a “fist of peaks nears in the open sea” during the hour-long crossing from Onoy to Husoy island.

Here you’ll find Ytri: a new luxury hotel “billed as ‘Norway’s most remote island retreat’”. At first glance, it seems more like an “elongated village of small barns, their wooden cladding silvering nicely or painted rust-red, black and the green of oxidised copper”.

This is a place made for “edge of the map escapism”, said Chloe Frost-Smith in Vogue. Ytri has been built like a “contemporary coastal hamlet” with 38 rooms and suites, a boathouse, a restaurant serving “traditional open sandwiches”, and a yoga and wellness area with saunas. Days are easy to fill with “hikes to ancient caves” and “candlelit dinners of seafood pulled from the water just metres from the hotel”.

Consider taking a shuttle boat to the nearby island of Sanna, which “boasts three peaks”, said Worldcrunch. To reach the top of one of them, adventurous travellers must go through “what locals call ‘the tunnel of love’, an 800m-stretch dug inside the mountain”. The reward is the view: on your right stretches the “endless sea”, and on your left “the impressive contour of the continent dotted by white glaciers”.

Count Binface represents the Silly Sausage Britain I know and love
Sofie Jenkinson in The Guardian
The “pointless” Clacton by-election has “pitted two versions of Britain against one another”, writes Sofie Jenkinson. In the Reform UK corner, we have a “divided, cynical and jaded” country; in Count Binface’s, one “that has a laugh and doesn’t take itself too seriously” – the land of “Victoria Wood”, “2p arcade machines” and “the Liz Truss lettuce”. This is the “kind and funny” country that “I want to live in”; we must not “cede” it “to those who want to drive division”.

An incomplete list of falling objects in India
Leo Mirani in The Economist
“India is the land of death from above,” writes Ashoka columnist Leo Mirani. Some of the things to have “fallen on people” recently include “slabs of concrete”, “a 40,000kg block of iron”, “a crane’s trolley”, “school roofs” and “airport-terminal canopies”. The “response is usually to suspend some officials”, make an “ex gratia” payment “and move on”. It’s “laudable” that the government is finally investing in “much-needed infrastructure”; if only “it could do so without killing passers-by”.

There is nothing worse than a bad radio advert
Jonathan Maitland in The Spectator
Hell “may not be other people, but repeated, everlasting exposure to 30-second radio adverts”, writes Jonathan Maitland. The worst have an “annoying” voiceover that “creates a Pavlovian” loathing of the product, a “moronically simplistic earworm jingle” and an epic “terms and conditions bit” that’s spoken so fast, it “sounds like a chipmunk on speed”. I know “commercial radio can’t survive without advertising” but surely “there are less irritating ways to butter the bread” than subjecting us to these “soulless, pass-the-cyanide” half-minutes.