Imagine a cold, clear Wednesday evening in late October, and instead of the usual floodlit monoliths of the Champions League, the camera pans across one of the most beautiful settings in European football. Lake Como is glowing under early evening lights, and the Stadio Giuseppe Sinigaglia is packed shoulder to shoulder, with the water practically lapping at the walls. This is Como against Manchester United, a fixture that sounds more like a holiday brochure than a European tie, but it is very much a competitive one. The game kicks off at 5:45pm UK time on Wednesday 21 October 2026, which…

There is a particular kind of satisfaction when a distant, abstract war suddenly produces something tangible, something you can point to and say: “Look, that was us. That mattered.” Last week, when Ukraine launched drone attacks against three data centres owned by the Russian tech giant Yandex, that feeling swept across the internet. Yandex, after all, is not simply a search engine; it is the backbone of much of Russia’s digital life, often described as “Russia’s Google,” but also so much more. Its cloud services carry everything from email to maps to the kind of behind-the-scenes infrastructure that ordinary people…