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The bursting of the Cristiano Ronaldo bubble

2 October 2026 at 19:03

On December 6, 2022, hours before facing Switzerland in the last 16 of the Qatar World Cup, Portugal coach Fernando Santos summoned Cristiano Ronaldo to his room at the team hotel. “I explained to him that he would not start that night because he lacked match rhythm, and he took it badly,” the coach recalled. It was the trigger for a crisis that four years later still consumes time and energy at a federation that has failed to promote an extraordinary generation of talent without subordinating it to the contradiction of playing for a footballer who achieved greatness thanks to his dynamism but is now 41 and has long struggled to move around the field.

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© PATRICIA DE MELO MOREIRA (AFP)

Cristiano Ronaldo during the game against Wales on September 24.

The new lines of southern Lebanon

19 September 2026 at 20:00
French UNIFIL peacekeepers patrol beyond the "yellow line" — the boundary of occupying Israeli forces — through the flattened towns of Houla, Kfar Kila, and Odaisseh. Israel has established a restricted buffer zone beyond that line after a U.S.-brokered ceasefire this year.

The U.N. expanded the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon's mandate 20 years ago to include monitoring adherence to a ceasefire in fighting between Israel and Lebanon's Iran-backed Hezbollah — the militant group created in 1982 to counter a second Israeli invasion.

(Image credit: Diego Ibarra Sánchez for NPR)

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