SPACE/COSMOS

SpaceX has quietly launched a spacecraft almost no one knew existed

Copyright  (AP Photo/David J. Phillip, File)

By Pascale Davies

Published on 25/06/2026 -EURONEWS

Rumours have circulated that it could be used to transport military hardware.

Called Starfall, the spacecraft quietly lifted off on a Falcon 9 rocket on Tuesday on a test mission.

Here is everything we know about the mission.

The launch caught many space enthusiasts off guard, with SpaceX revealing virtually nothing about Starfall beforehand, and that secrecy carried through to launch day when the company abruptly cut its webcast just ten minutes after liftoff.

The launch comes as news broke that SpaceX boss Elon Musk lost his trillionaire status on Wednesday after stocks in his companies, SpaceX and Tesla, dropped following an initially successful public offering.

What is its purpose?

In a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) filing, SpaceX says Starfall could offer "access to microgravity and vacuum" for companies interested in space manufacturing and "point-to-point delivery of critical cargo through space on rapid timelines," which could mean missiles or military hardware.

No official confirmation exists that Starfall is intended for military use, however, the muted launch has circulated rumours that it could be used precisely for that.

The US Defense Department has long pursued the idea of using rockets to deliver large loads anywhere on Earth at speed.

SpaceX also already holds multiple contracts with the Pentagon, including one called Project Cargo, which envisions Starship delivering supplies across the globe.

Related

• SpaceX sheds $600 billion in three days as it taps the bond market for the first time

Each Starfall capsule can carry 2,200 lbs or around 998 kilograms of payload, according to the FAA filings. They each have one extension for the payload and one for the heat shield.

The capsule can adjust its orientation mid-flight using inert gases, but it cannot deorbit on its own; it either follows a pre-programmed flight path or relies on another spacecraft to bring it down.

“Today's mission includes a demo of a new vehicle that will enable affordable, routine access to the microgravity environment for scientific research and in-space manufacturing," SpaceX posted on X Tuesday.

"After demonstrating controlled flight, the spacecraft will splash down in the Pacific Ocean," it added.

Each Starfall capsule is about 75 centimetres tall and 3.1 metres across and able to carry approximately 1,000 kilograms of payload, per the FAA filings.

Discovered ‘Super-Puff’ Planets Lighter Than Candy Floss

This illustration depicts the Sun-like star TOI-791 and two giant planets that NASA's TESS space telescope discovered in its orbit. These planets, designated TOI-791 b and TOI-791 c, are roughly the size of Jupiter but a tiny fraction of its mass, meaning they have an extraordinarily low density.

 Image credit: NASA/Daniel Rutter.

June 25, 2026
Eurasia Review

An international collaboration has discovered two of the lowest-density giant planets ever detected: rare ‘super-puff’ planets with densities lower than candy floss. The study -led by the University of Oxford, in collaboration with Université Côte d’Azur/Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur and the University of Birmingham – has been published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The two planets, named TOI-791 b and TOI-791 c, orbit an F7-type dwarf star located around 1,110 light years from Earth in the southern constellation Volans. Although both planets are roughly the size of Jupiter, they are extraordinarily diffuse: TOI-791 b has a density of just 0.038 grams per cubic centimetre, while TOI-791 c has a density of 0.047 grams per cubic centimetre. By comparison, Jupiter’s average density is 1.33 grams per cubic centimetre, around 28 to 35 times greater.

Their densities are even lower than candy floss, which typically has a density of about 0.05 grams per cubic centimetre. In contrast, Earth’s density is 5.5 grams per cubic centimetre.

The planets are “siblings”, believed to have formed together from the same disc of gas and dust surrounding their young star. They are also locked in a rare gravitational relationship known as a 5:3 mean-motion resonance, meaning that for every five orbits completed by the inner planet, the outer planet completes almost exactly three. This gravitational interaction causes the planets to repeatedly tug on one another, producing measurable shifts in the timing of their transits across the host star.


Only four other systems are known to contain multiple super-puff planets. This makes TOI-791 an exceptionally rare laboratory for studying how these planets form and evolve.

Lead author Dr George Dransfield (she/her) (Department of Physics, University of Oxford and a presenter for BBC Sky at Night) said: “Only a handful of these super-puffy planets are known, and it is even rarer to find two in the same system. Their extremely low densities make them fascinating targets for understanding how planetary systems form and evolve.”

TOI-791 b and TOI-791 c were first identified as candidate planets in 2019 and 2023 respectively, by volunteers participating in the Planet Hunters TESS citizen-science project. This searches data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) for possible new worlds. The researchers then measured the planets’ densities by combining observations of their sizes and masses using telescopes around the world.

When a planet passes in front of its host star – an event known as a ‘transit’ – it slightly dims the star’s light. The amount of dimming reveals the planet’s size. In this system, the researchers also detected subtle variations in the timing of the transits, caused by the two planets gravitationally tugging on one another as they orbit the star. By analysing these timing shifts, the team was able to estimate the planets’ masses and calculate their remarkably low densities.


The discovery relied on eight years of observations, including from the ASTEP (Antarctic Search for Transiting ExoPlanets) telescope at Concordia Station in Antarctica, jointly operated by researchers from Université Côte d’Azur/Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur and international collaborators. The Antarctic winter provided a unique advantage: months of continuous darkness enabled astronomers to capture the planets’ exceptionally long transits, each lasting more than 11 hours, in a single uninterrupted observation. These are the longest continuous planetary transits ever observed in their entirety from the ground.

Astronomers are still debating how super-puff planets form. One leading theory suggests that they possess enormous hydrogen- and helium-rich atmospheres that make up a significant fraction of their total mass. These giant gaseous envelopes may have accumulated when the planets formed far from their host star in cold regions of the protoplanetary disc, where gas could cool and gather rapidly around a solid core.

The researchers intend to carry out follow-up investigations to understand more about how these planets formed, and to rule out some of the leading super-puff explanations.

Professor Amaury Triaud (University of Birmingham), the UK Principal Investigator of ASTEP and co-author of the study, said: “This system offers a unique laboratory for understanding how super-puff planets form and evolve. We propose to carry out space-based observations using the James Webb Space Telescope to assess if the puffy atmosphere contains carbon-, nitrogen-, and oxygen-bearing species, revealing new insight into how these unusual planets formed.”

Professor Tristan Guillot (Université Côte d’Azur), Principal Investigator of ASTEP and co-author of the study, added: “These multi-planetary systems are complex, with gravitational interactions between the planets that evolve over very long periods, tens of years or more. This discovery highlights the importance of continued international collaboration in astronomy. Bringing together observations from Antarctica, space telescopes and observatories across several continents was essential to revealing the true nature of these extraordinary planets.”

Earth’s Ionosphere Supplied Vast Majority Of Ring Current Ions During May 2024 Super Geomagnetic Storm

Schematic image of ring current ions on the dusk side during the peak of the May 2024 super geomagnetic storm, viewed from the Sun's perspective. CREDIT: ERG Science Team

June 27, 2026
By Eurasia Review


In May 2024, auroras were observed at unusually low latitudes across the globe, lighting up skies that rarely see such displays. Inside Earth’s magnetosphere, the region of space surrounding our planet and dominated by its intrinsic magnetic field, something significant was finally being observed.

It started with a large sunspot firing a rapid series of powerful solar eruptions. Clouds of magnetized plasma merged as they traveled through space and impacted Earth’s magnetosphere. No geomagnetic storm this powerful had ever been measured in the Earth’s ring current region, a belt of charged particles in space near our planet.

Two sources of ring current ions are known: solar wind and Earth’s ionosphere, the electrically charged upper layer of the atmosphere. For decades, scientists have debated how much each source contributes to the ring current. During most storms, both contribute. However, during a storm driven by a dense solar wind, some scientists expected solar wind ions to continue to play a notable role. Yet the first direct measurements of ring current composition from a super geomagnetic storm revealed that solar wind ion contributions were minimal, and the level of Earth-origin ion dominance had never been observed before.

The findings, published in Science Advances, suggest that understanding how much Earth’s ionosphere contributes to the ring current may be essential to accurately predict the severity of super geomagnetic storms. The dominance of ionospheric ions, which are far heavier than solar wind particles, may have intensified the magnetic disturbance and concentrated the ring current peak unusually close to Earth. The researchers also make a case for a proposed Japanese multi-satellite mission to understand exactly how ion supply processes work.



Earth’s ring current

On May 10 and 11, 2024, giant clouds of charged particles from the Sun struck Earth’s magnetosphere. The resulting May 2024 super geomagnetic storm, also referred to as the “Gannon storm” or “Mother’s Day storm,” reached a minimum SYM-H index of −518 nanotesla, the second-largest value recorded since 1981. The last comparable geomagnetic storm was the November 2004 superstorm.

“Some super or extreme geomagnetic storms are not just impressive light shows—they pose radiation risks to spacecraft, disturb GPS signals and communications, and cause power outages. Understanding how a geomagnetic storm develops is not only a scientific question, but also one with real-world consequences,” said Naritoshi Kitamura, lead author and designated assistant professor from the Institute for Space-Earth Environmental Research (ISEE) at Nagoya University.

The magnetic disturbance of a geomagnetic storm is caused by the ring current. This is a huge belt of energized ions, mostly oxygen and hydrogen, that drift slowly around Earth thousands of kilometers above the equator. The energized ions carry current, and that current generates a magnetic field that partially cancels Earth’s own on the ground. This causes the disturbance that is observed by ground-based instruments.



Arase was ready: rare event, first of its kind observation

Japan’s Arase satellite was launched in 2016 and has been operated by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). The ERG (Arase) science center is jointly operated by Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS)/JAXA and Institute for Space-Earth Environmental Research/Nagoya University.

Arase orbits the region where the ring current develops. The satellite carries specialized instruments to identify mass and energy of detected ions. It crossed through the ring current just after the storm began, and again near its peak.

“This is the first simultaneous observation of ring current ions and solar wind during a storm this large, and the data was clear—approximately 85% of ions were oxygen from Earth’s own ionosphere,” Kitamura explained.

“Near the peak of the storm, Arase detected a 40% decrease in magnetic field intensity at roughly 16,000 kilometers above Earth, and much closer to Earth than similar large decreases previously documented.”

The same region also showed a simultaneous drop in high-energy electrons that normally orbit Earth in that zone. When a magnetic field weakens this severely, electrons drift out from their normal paths. Whether the magnetic field deformation caused the electron loss warrants further investigation.

The findings deepen our understanding of how super geomagnetic storms develop. Space weather forecasting models rely on solar wind conditions to predict storm severity, but this study suggests Earth’s atmospheric state, and not just conditions at the Sun, may partly determine how severe a storm becomes.


The study also supports FACTORS, a two-satellite mission concept being prepared for JAXA’s upcoming proposal opportunity, which would directly address this gap. FACTORS aims to improve our understanding of how Earth’s atmospheric ions escape into the magnetosphere and contribute to geomagnetic storm development. It may ultimately help scientists more accurately predict how severe these storms will get.

How the Media Aligned Themselves with

Israeli Propaganda

Nelson Pereira

June 22, 2026

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Dima Khatib, photograph by Nelson Pereira.

Journalistic coverage of the Israeli military campaign in Gaza after October 7, 2023, continues to draw sharp criticism. Syrian-Palestinian journalist Dima Khatib minces no words: “The media actively relayed Israeli propaganda.”

“Silence is already complicity. But it was worse. It was active engagement with Israeli propaganda,” said the Managing Director of Digital Projects at Al Jazeera, whose journalistic career spans more than three decades.

“And it was an active engagement against journalists themselves,” Dima added. “Not once, not twice, it was repeated. The justification Israel gave for the killings of journalists—obviously false and unacceptable, that is, every time they were terrorists, they were guilty, they deserved it, etc.—it was celebrated, it was lauded.”

Dima, who has reported from over 30 countries across 5 continents, interviewing presidents and people from all walks of life, points to a clear bias in the media in favor of Israel’s official narrative. “The media weren’t even doing their basic job of verifying this information, simply relaying lies against Gazan journalists. And this was proof of racism against journalists who don’t have the skin color required for journalists, at least in the mainstream media, to do their job. We’re not asking for more; we’re asking them to verify the information and publish it.”

Noting that when a journalist is killed elsewhere, it causes an uproar, she denounces the media’s indifference to the murder of Palestinian journalists. “It’s an unspeakable scandal. 262 journalists (*) have been killed in Gaza—a record, a real massacre. Just look at the major media outlets here in Europe, in the United States, and even in the Global South, and see how many times this information has been relayed, published, and reported correctly and ethically.”

Journalism That is No Longer Journalism

According to Dima Khatib, the “poor” media coverage of the killings of journalists in Gaza demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that Palestinians are not considered equal human beings. She admits that this experience was a huge disappointment and a source of great sadness for her.

The same pattern of disinformation has been applied to media coverage of the genocide in general, she adds. “The media continue to repeat Israel’s lies as if nothing had happened, after they have been debunked time and time again. They parrot the lies spewed by Israeli officials, repeating them like stock phrases in their articles.”

A method that transforms journalism into propaganda, Dima emphasizes. “Every time we say a certain word, we add a little phrase to define our position regarding that word, that person, that organization, that place. It’s unethical, it’s not journalism. It’s propaganda.”

“Just look at how media outlets like the New York Times headline and handle the news,” she explains. “They write that 400 Palestinians have died, but they don’t say how or who murdered them. We wonder if they died of heatstroke or indigestion. But as soon as it involves Israelis, the moment an Israeli dies, we’re immediately told that he was killed by a Palestinian. They publish a photo of him playing guitar. Even though he’s a soldier. A humanization that no Palestinian is entitled to, not even a child. This language has become standardized in newsrooms, and many journalists simply repeat it, thus avoiding upsetting their editors.”

Expressing her disappointment with the attitude of many colleagues in the profession, she adds that there are also those who have opposed and denounced editorial policies that lead to the dehumanization of Palestinians. “It’s a deliberate dehumanization of Palestinians, and it’s why I no longer have respect for the media, I no longer have respect for these fellow journalists. At the same time, I’ve seen courageous ones who said no. There are many newsrooms that have experienced this kind of pressure regarding coverage of Palestine, journalists who have lost their jobs, their livelihood, for themselves and their families, just for saying a word. I have great admiration for the journalists who haven’t given in to propaganda and the easy way out.”

Refusing to betray journalism, some journalists decided to embark on independent projects and launched their own media outlets. According to Dima Khatib, this independent journalism movement has everything it takes to replace “what journalism claims to be but no longer is, because selective journalism isn’t real journalism.” She adds that if we can’t do it for Palestine, we won’t be able to do it against fascism. “It’s a universal struggle for all of us.”

Regarding state media, the coverage of the 2003 war against Iraq revealed an alarming complicity with propaganda, notes Dima, who worked in Doha for Al Jazeera during the invasion of Iraq. “The lies were repeated, repeated, repeated, without any verification, from weapons of mass destruction to an association of Iraq with 9/11 that had no basis in reality. This is very problematic because it’s a public service. A journalist’s work is always a public service, with an ethical duty that is essential for democracy. But this is even more true when it’s funded with our taxes.”

Decolonizing Journalism

Dima Khatib joined Al Jazeera in 1997 as a young journalist in Qatar and later became the channel’s first female executive. She subsequently established Al Jazeera bureaus in China and Venezuela. Appointed director of AJ+ in August 2015, she held this position for ten years, overseeing AJ+’s English, Arabic, Spanish, and French channels.

Having encountered such diverse realities, she says she has come to understand that, within newsrooms, a constant process of decolonization is a priority. “I talk a lot about decolonizing journalism, newsrooms, and the journalists themselves. Even journalists from the Global South, who have been colonized, need to undertake this process. For example, in the minds of many Arab journalists, Latin America was discovered by Europeans. Yet, that’s exactly what the Israelis say about Palestine, which was supposedly a land without a people for a people without a land, as if it were empty. They arrive and there are no natives.”

At the root of these ingrained narratives are school curricula that have omitted historical facts. To such an extent that adults who were victims of colonialism are unable to recognize the harm they suffered when confronted with its remnants. “When you erase the existence of a civilization, several civilizations, ancient ones, and great, important ones, and the massacres that took place, so that this discovery—which is colonization—could happen, you are erasing history, you are erasing entire peoples. It’s the same thing that’s being done to us in Palestine, with this same propaganda,” Dima points out.

“By repeating colonial narratives, we perpetuate the dehumanization of the other,” she adds. “Because these narratives were created with the aim of dehumanizing.”

Besides efforts to decolonize and rehumanize history, it’s equally important to know which language to use, Dima emphasizes. And above all, to get rid of labels. “Who is a terrorist? Who isn’t? Who is good? Who is bad? It’s already predetermined by international agencies that have already defined who is bad, who is good.”

She insists that, faced with this imposition of a single truth, we must, first and foremost, listen to the people who come from there. “If you’re going to cover Bosnia and you don’t have a single Bosnian in your newsroom, well, you’re not going to know how to tell the Bosnian story. So, diversity in newsrooms is very important. In our AJ+ newsroom, we had Palestinians—not just any Palestinians, a Palestinian man or woman from Jerusalem, someone from the West Bank, someone from Gaza, someone from the refugee camps in Syria, Palestine, Jordan, a Palestinian Spaniard, a Palestinian American, a Palestinian Colombian—because without that diversity, we’re not going to be able to tell the stories.”

She adds that the much-vaunted objectivity of the media simply means seeing things from the perspective of someone sitting in Paris, London, or Washington. “That’s what objectivity is. It’s about making everything look the same and eliminating any distinction between one story and another. They’re all told under the same umbrella. Objectivity, in fact, is journalism that doesn’t disrupt the status quo of established norms. Always from a Western perspective. And the West has every right to its perspective, but not to erase other perspectives.”

Gaza Journalists

Since Israel did not allow foreign journalists into Gaza during the genocide—and even before, because there had been a blockade for 19 years—Gaza journalists took it upon themselves to tell the story directly. “There wasn’t the parachuted-in journalist, as is always the case, a journalist who arrives with a whole team, who also has access to a bathroom, a comfortable bed, food, etc., and who arrives with their vision of how the story should be told,” Dima emphasizes. “The task was left to the Palestinian journalists in Gaza. While they lacked food, warm beds, shelter, and protection—they had nothing—they were bombed like everyone else, they were hungry like everyone else, they were cold like everyone else, and they didn’t have access to a bathroom like everyone else.” And we saw that live on social media, and it rehumanized the Palestinian story.”

Young people around the world who followed the reports of these young Palestinian journalists on social media saw them in their tears, in their suffering. And that, Dima points out, contributed to the solidarity movement for Palestinians worldwide, but especially among young people, the university generation, Generation Z, who spearheaded the entire solidarity movement in American universities. “I happened to be in the United States when they set up the first camp. I was in Michigan, I arrived, and they asked me, ‘What media outlets are you from?’ Because here, the New York Times, Reuters, and all that, it’s forbidden. They don’t get through. I told them, ‘I’m from Al Jazeera,’ and they replied, ‘Oh, wow, of course, come on over.’ And I took a look around, and they had Al Jazeera English live on an iPad in the camp. And that really touched me. They weren’t Palestinians; they were people from all over the United States—immigrants, white, Black, and maybe a third were Jewish.”

* The number is higher at the time of publication. On June 21st, cameraman Ahmed Wishah was killed in an Israeli air attack on central Gaza’s Bureij refugee camp, less than three months after his brother Mohammed Samir, also an Al Jazeera journalist, was killed in a separate strike. Ahmed is the 12th Al Jazeera journalist killed by Israel in Gaza.

UK

“Have you noticed how we only win the World Cup under a Labour government?”

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JUNE 5, 2026

Politicians seldom get it right when they talk about football, argues Mark Perryman.

In March 1966 Harold Wilson’s Labour Party won a landslide victory and just four months later Harold was there to celebrate when England for the first, and to date last, time lifted the World Cup at Wembley. 

Never mind the (disgraced) Peter Mandelson, England’s victory spurred Harold to the greatest piece of Labour spin-doctoring ever. Of course, Harold had been at the Final; infamously Harold sent one of his advisers to the BBC matchday studio to suggest he join commentator Kenneth Wolstenholme for some half-time punditry – an invitation that was promptly turned down. Perhaps they lacked the silky charm of (disgraced)  Peter Mandelson?!

Four years later, most unwisely Labour risked their 1970 General Election chances by choosing a date slap-bang in the middle of England’s defence of their World Cup at Mexico 1970.  The quarter-final defeat to West Germany  was widely blamed for Labour’s defeat just four days later.

Yes, really. Wilson’s Minister of Sport, and former League referee, Denis Howell, was better-placed than most to justify the impact: “The moment goalkeeper Bonetti made his third and final hash of it on the Sunday, everything simultaneously began to go wrong for Labour for the following Thursday.”

Labour and football, eh? Be careful what you wish for. Still at least 1970 General Election victor Ted Heath and his sundry Tory Prime Minister successors have proved incapable of robbing Harold’s sound-bite of it’s enduring truth.

But any kind of relationship between politics and international football in the particular context of England has a broader purpose than simply, win lose or draw supposedly being dependent on the party in government at the time. 

There is one crucial word that Harold gets spectacularly wrong: ‘we’. Great Britain is unique in international football, represented by four – and for the purposes of football at least – independent nations: England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.  It doesn’t require either pedantry or nationalism to recognise this. It’s a fact perhaps lost on Harold, or Keir, who every time a summer football tournament comes around will promptly, and very publicly, choose an England shirt for his go-to leisure wear. This tells us, or at least it should, everything we need to know about Labour Unionism.

Gordon Brown might have thought he was being helpful travelling out to  support England at World Cup 2006 as the British Prime Minister. Precious few England fans were won over while in his native Scotland it went down like a lead proverbial. Of course, not all Scotland fans are nationalists. But when in 1992 Jim Sillars lost his Govan seat that he’d won in an infamous 1988 SNP by-election defeat of Labour and angrily described the Tartan Army as “90-minute nationalists,” it was a very different era to now. The SNP are no longer a minor party, but, via the Scottish Parliament, a governing party with a formidable number of MPs at Westminster. If Harold could have got away with ‘we’ in 1966, in Scotland, Wales and the North of Ireland, he certainly couldn’t today; yet Keir wears his `England shirt regardless.

Such confusion is both muti-faceted and deep-rooted in Englishness. World Cup Quiz question: which is the only team at this summer’s tournament to line up before kick-off without a National Anthem of their own for them and their fans to belt out? England! God Save the King is the National Anthem of the United Kingdom, not England and just try asking the Scotland team to dop Flower of Scotland to join in too!

This isn’t pedantry, it gets to the core of Englishness, a contradictory mix of nationalism and unionism. The most vivid example of this is the spate of hanging flags, Union Jacks and St George Crosses, from lamp posts in a movement to ‘Unite the Kingdom’. Much of this is wrapped up in a version of English patriotism which does little to distinguish itself from bad old-fashioned racism.

Contrast this to what Harold’s ‘we’ has become. The Wembley 1966 final was full of Union Jacks, the St George scarcely present. The tournament mascot  ‘World Cup Willy’ wore a Union Jack. Yes, the only time England has not only won, but hosted too a World Cup and the FA got our flag wrong! 

Few England fans this summer will make this mistake: the St George Cross is Universal, home and away. And in sheer numbers it will absolutely dwarf those of the lamp post hangers too.  And the purpose dwarves them too. A St George Cross celebrating a multicultural team managed by a German on its own doesn’t make for an anti-racist, Europeanised nation, but given the popular-political will is a very welcome first step in both directions.

In July 2024 Keir Starmer’s Labour Party won a landslide victory and just two years later Keir was there to celebrate when England for the second time lifted the World Cup at the New York New Jersey stadium. 

Well, that’s one Labour pledge all of England can get behind. 

Mark Perryman is the co-founder of the self-styled ‘ sporting outfitters of intellectual distinction’ aka Philosophy Football.

Special Offer The Philosophy Football Harold Wilson T-shirt is available to Labour Hub readers at 25% off and postage free. Quote coupon code LHWC26 at checkout. From here. 

Borders, Ballgames and Global Players

Daniel Warner

 June 5, 2026

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Victor Wembenyama at 2025 NBA Cup. Photograph Source: Daiei Onoguchi – CC BY 4.0

The upcoming June 14 vote on limiting Switzerland’s population to 10 million is a daily reminder here in Geneva that nativist populism remains a powerful political force. In France, Marine Le Pen continues to build support on anti-immigration politics. Nigel Farage pushes similar anxieties in Britain. The AfD does the same in Germany. Donald Trump’s version is familiar: build walls, tighten borders, send ICE into cities. Across much of the West, hostility toward foreigners has become ordinary politics.

Which is why the recent announcement of the National Basketball Association’s All-NBA First Team was so striking. At the very moment politics is warning against outsiders, American sports is celebrating them. Four of the five players selected to the NBA’s top team were born outside the United States. The city game has gone global. (The phrase city game for basketball was popularized in Pete Axthelm’s The City Game, his classic account of New York basketball in the late 1960s.)

Chosen by a panel of 100 sportswriters and broadcasters covering the league, the All-NBA First Team included: Shai Gilgeous-Alexander of the Oklahoma City Thunder, from Canada; Nikola Jokić of the Denver Nuggets, from Serbia; Victor Wembanyama of the San Antonio Spurs, from France; Luka Dončić of the Los Angeles Lakers, from Slovenia. Only Cade Cunningham of the Detroit Pistons was American. Four of the league’s five best players were born abroad, representing four countries and starring in four different American cities.

That is not symbolic. It reflects a broader reality. As of the 2025–26 season, 135 NBA players were born outside the United States, the highest number in league history. They come from 43 countries across six continents. Roughly one in four players in the NBA is now international.

Now, for those who are not basketball fans, allow me to briefly explain the importance of basketball in the United States. It is one of America’s defining sports: invented in Springfield, Massachusetts, and perfected on playground courts like Rucker Park in Harlem. As Vinson Cunningham observed, “Basketball is one of New York’s great public spectacles: you can’t walk far without passing a hoop.” It is American in origin and mythology, embedded in the streets of New York, Detroit, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Yet the league’s brightest stars increasingly arrive with accents, translators, and passports from elsewhere.

My beloved New York Knicks reflect the same global pattern: OG Anunoby was born in London, Pacôme Dadiet in France, Ariel Hukporti in Germany, and Karl-Anthony Towns represents the Dominican Republic in international competition.

Although New York’s Madison Square Garden (MSG) is considered the sport’s Mecca, the sport reaches far beyond cities. Even in Midwestern rural states like Indiana, basketball courts are woven into everyday life in countless driveways. “Mr. Indiana Basketball” is a major statewide honor—closer to a civic title than a routine sports award. (For anyone curious about Indiana basketball culture, Gene Hackman’s Hoosiers remains the reference point.)

Basketball is not a simple sports niche—it is a major entertainment industry. The NBA Finals regularly draw between 10 and 20 million U.S. viewers per game. The NBA generates billions in annual revenue; franchise valuations are among the highest in global sports, with a huge merchandising market (jerseys, sneakers, etc.).

Basketball is not alone in this globalization. The pattern of more and more foreign stars repeats in what has long been considered the American sport, baseball. On Major League Baseball’s opening day in 2026, 249 players—26.3 percent of the league—were born outside the United States. The Dominican Republic led with 93 players, Venezuela had 60, Cuba 20, Canada 19, and Japan 14. Others came from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Panama, Curaçao, Colombia, South Korea, Australia, Aruba, the Bahamas, Honduras, Nicaragua, Taiwan, and South Africa.

The reigning king of American baseball is a non-American. Shohei Ohtani, born in Japan, is now arguably the most extraordinary player the sport has ever seen. Both an elite pitcher and an elite hitter, Ohtani rightly challenges Babe Ruth as the sport’s greatest player. He is already a four-time Most Valuable Player winner. More and more postgame interviews now happen through translators because many of the game’s biggest stars, like Ohtani, are not native English speakers.

Politicians increasingly tell voters to fear foreigners. In Switzerland, we are told non-Swiss workers cause traffic jams and drive up housing costs. But Switzerland’s own national soccer team offers a similar picture of globalization. Several of its most prominent players have dual citizenship or family roots abroad. Yet the same anti-immigration voters will root for the entire team during the upcoming World Cup.

Like Swiss soccer fans, Americans cheer foreign-born athletes not despite where they come from but because of what they bring: talent, discipline, style, and victory. Tens of thousands of fans in Oklahoma City rise for a Canadian. Denver adores a Serbian. San Antonio chants for a Frenchman. Los Angeles embraces a Slovenian. Baseball stadiums roar for a Japanese superstar.

Sports does not erase xenophobia. It does not resolve the asylum debate or settle border politics despite the Olympic ideal. There is an important paradox. The rhetoric of exclusion collides every day with a simpler reality: people admire excellence wherever it comes from when it helps their team win. The crowds see winners before they see nationality, even as many of them vote for politicians running on xenophobia. U.S. sports crowds—many of whom voted for Trump and admire his hard line on immigration—seem perfectly happy cheering non-Americans.

The NBA’s first team may say something larger about the country. Politicians may still campaign on borders and walls. Donald Trump and Stephen Miller may continue to denigrate foreigners, but America’s sports fans keep rooting for the world.

To understand the importance of the Knicks to New York, see The New Yorker editor David Remnick’s recent description of the first time the Knicks won the NBA crown: “May 8, 1970, was the night of all sporting New York nights,” he wrote. “Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive! So proclaimed the voices of the Knicks: John F. X. Condon at the Garden, Marv Albert on the air.”

How I remember that night! “Bliss it was to be alive.” After decades of waiting to see the Knicks back in the Finals and more than half a century since we last won the title, I just want my team to win this year, no matter who hits the winning baskets, American or otherwise. Go Knicks!

Daniel Warner is the author of An Ethic of Responsibility in International Relations. (Lynne Rienner). He lives in Geneva.