Dear Colleagues,

My week started with wasting another 3 hours of my life, watching an incredibly boring Champions League final (I blame Arsenal). Do read Branko Milanovic’s take on football’s extreme commercialization. But it’s worse than that, actually, given the game’s multiple links with unsavory authoritarian regimes, a FIFA president “BFF” with Donald Trump (and a bunch of other thugs), and of course a World Cup about to begin in a country constantly in the news for all the wrong reasons. Nevertheless, I still fancy late-capitalist football once in a while, and with a Belgium team not half as bad as many might suspect, I’ll probably go for watching matches taking place in Mexico and Canada. Hope the stadiums will be mostly empty in the US – you’d have to be nuts to go there as a fan, for so many reasons.  

Over to the more usual ‘global health policy & governance’ news then.

In Ghana, “Ghana’s LGBTQ community is living in fear after the country’s parliament approved...