new video loaded: Displaced Palestinians in Egypt Await Reopening of Gaza Border
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Displaced Palestinians in Egypt Await Reopening of Gaza Border
Tens of thousands of Palestinians in Egypt face an uncertain future as they navigate obstacles to staying in the country and returning home to Gaza. The New York Times spoke to a family that remains separated despite a truce in the territory.
This is 9-year-old Islam Al Farany. Two years ago, Islam’s life changed when his relative’s home was hit in an Israeli strike. With the help of a nonprofit, Islam and his mother, Tahrir, were evacuated to the United States via Egypt, so Islam could be fitted with a prosthetic. The strike left Islam with other physical and emotional scars. Tahrir and Islam came back to Egypt, planning to return to Gaza and reunite with the rest of the family. The father of the family died in another strike while Tahrir and Islam were away. But Islam and his mother are unable to return despite an agreed upon cease-fire. The only border crossing from Egypt remains closed for Palestinians trying to get in or out of Gaza. Tahrir’s six other children are in Gaza. They’ve been separated for nearly a year. To speak to their mother and brother, they go to a nearby barbershop, which has better internet. five of Islam’s six siblings were also injured in the same strike. Eight-year-old Ahmed broke both his hips. Six-year-old Aya lost her sight in one eye. Seventeen-year-old Mohammed is the oldest. There are tens of thousands of Palestinians currently in Egypt who were able to leave Gaza soon after the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. The Rafah border crossing has been mostly closed since Israel seized it in May 2024. As part of the latest truce, Israel agreed to reopen it, but has more recently said it would allow Palestinians to return only after Hamas hands over all the remains of the captives held in Gaza. While many Palestinians say they still want to go back, some wonder what is left to return to. Haneen Farhat fled over a year ago and began selling Palestinian food from her small home kitchen to make ends meet. She’s now organizing Gazan cooking classes, which are proving popular with both locals and tourists, and have been providing a steadier income. But life in Egypt is difficult for Palestinians. Their temporary Egyptian visas have expired, and they now find themselves without official legal status. This means they can’t officially work, buy property or attend Egyptian schools. Egypt says allowing a mass influx of Palestinian refugees could lead to their permanent displacement. The restrictions on residency have meant that some are looking to migrate elsewhere. But for those separated from their loved ones, all that’s left to do is wait.
Tens of thousands of Palestinians in Egypt face an uncertain future as they navigate obstacles to staying in the country and returning home to Gaza. The New York Times spoke to a family that remains separated despite a truce in the territory.
By Alex Pena, Saher Alghorra, Monika Cvorak and Jon Hazell
These are the key developments from day 1,414 of Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Published On 8 Jan 20268 Jan 2026
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Here is where things stand on Thursday, January 8:
Fighting
One person was killed and five people were injured in a Russian attack on two ports in Ukraine’s Odesa region, Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister Oleksii Kuleba said in a post on Facebook. “The attack damaged port facilities, administrative buildings, and oil containers,” Kuleba said.
A Russian attack on Kryvyi Rih, in Ukraine’s Dnipro region, injured eight people, including two seriously, the head of the Kryvyi Rih defence council, Oleksandr Vilkul, wrote on Telegram.
Russian attacks left Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhia regions in southeastern Ukraine “almost completely without electricity”, Ukraine’s Ministry of Energy said in a statement on Telegram. “Critical infrastructure is operating on reserve power,” the ministry added.
Firefighters put out a blaze that broke out at an oil depot in Russia’s southern Belgorod region following an overnight Ukrainian drone attack, the Vesti state TV channel reported on Wednesday, citing the regional governor.
Politics and diplomacy
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said that any deployment of UK forces under a declaration signed with France and Ukraine would be subject to a parliamentary vote. “I will keep the house updated as the situation develops, and were troops to be deployed under the declaration signed, I would put that matter to the house for a vote,” Starmer told parliament on Wednesday.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told reporters on WhatsApp that he hopes to meet with United States President Donald Trump soon to gauge his openness to a Ukrainian proposal that Washington ensure security for Kyiv for more than 15 years in the event of a ceasefire, according to the Reuters news agency. “The Americans, in my view, are being productive right now; we have good results … They need to put pressure on Russia. They have the tools, and they know how to use them,” Zelenskyy said.
Zelenskyy also said during a visit to Cyprus on Wednesday that Ukraine is “doing everything required on our side in the negotiation process. And we expect that no additional or excessive demands will be placed on Ukraine.”
Zelenskyy was in Cyprus as it assumed the rotating presidency of the European Union, as he continued a push for his country to join the bloc. “We are working to make as much progress as possible during this period on opening negotiating clusters and on Ukraine’s accession to the European Union,” Zelenskyy said after a meeting with Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides in Nicosia, in a statement posted on X.
Spain’s Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Albares said on Wednesday that negotiations are still “far from a peace plan” for Ukraine. “There is an outline of ideas,” Albares said, according to Reuters.
Sanctions
The US seized two Venezuela-linked oil tankers in the Atlantic Ocean on Wednesday, including the Marinera crude oil tanker sailing under Russia’s flag.
US Vice President JD Vance said that the tanker “was a fake Russian oil tanker,” in an interview set to air on Fox News, excerpts of which were provided in advance. “They basically tried to pretend to be a Russian oil tanker in an effort to avoid the sanctions regime,” Vance said, referring to sanctions imposed by the Trump administration on Venezuelan oil. The Trump administration has separately imposed sanctions on some Russian oil companies.
Ukraine’s foreign minister said on Wednesday that Kyiv welcomed the move. “The apprehension of a Russian-flagged ship in the North Atlantic underscores the United States’ and President Trump’s resolute leadership,” Andrii Sybiha wrote on X. “We welcome such an approach to dealing with Russia: act, not fear. This is also relevant to the peace process and bringing a lasting peace closer.”
Russia’s Ministry of Transport protested the seizure, saying in a statement that “in accordance with the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, freedom of navigation applies in the high seas, and no state has the right to use force against vessels duly registered in the jurisdictions of other states”.
US Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said that President Trump has “greenlit” a long-awaited bipartisan bill imposing sanctions on Russia after the pair met on Wednesday. “I look forward to a strong bipartisan vote, hopefully as early as next week,” Graham said in a statement.
For the first time in modern history, the United States is on the brink of losing its most basic engine of growth: more births than deaths.
According to the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) Demographic Outlook, released Tuesday, the year 2030 marks a tipping point that will fundamentally reshape the economy and social fabric. That’s the year the “natural” U.S. population—the balance of births over deaths—is projected to vanish.
“Net immigration (the number of people who migrate to the United States minus the number who leave) is projected to become an increasingly important source of population growth in the coming years, as declining fertility rates cause the annual number of deaths to exceed the annual number of births starting in 2030,” the CBO writes. “Without immigration, the population would begin to shrink in 2030.”
From that point on, every additional person added to the U.S. population will come from immigration, a demographic milestone once associated with aging countries like Italy and Japan.
The shift is striking not only for what it says about America’s rapidly aging society, but also for how soon it is expected to arrive. Just a year ago, many demographic forecasts—including the CBO’s own forecast—placed this crossover well into the late 2030s or even the 2040s. The updated outlook from CBO moves the timeline forward by nearly a decade.
This rapid acceleration, the CBO said, is driven by the “double squeeze” of declining fertility and an aging populace, combined with recent policy shifts on immigration. CBO analysts have drastically lowered their expectations for the total fertiility rate, now projecting it to settle at just 1.53 births per woman — well below the 2.1 “replacement rate” needed for a stable population. At the same time, the massive “Baby Boomer” generation is reaching ages with higher mortality rates, causing annual deaths to climb.
The timeline further compressed following the passage of the 2025 Reconciliation Act, which increased funding for more ICE agents and immigration judges to process cases faster, resulting in approximately 50,000 immigrants in detention daily through 2029, CBO said. The office calculated that these provisions will result in roughly 320,000 fewer people in the U.S. population by 2035 than previously estimated.
The new projections show that U.S. population growth will steadily decelerate over the next three decades until it finally hits zero in 2056. For most of the 20th century, the population grew at close to 1% a year: a flat population would represent a historic break from that norm.
The economic consequences of this shift are hard to overstate. While the number of retirees swells, the pool of workers funding the social safety net — and caring for the aging population — is narrowing. Americans aged 65 and older are the fastest-growing segment of the population, pushing the “old-age dependency ratio” sharply higher. In 1960, there were about five workers for every retiree. Today, that ratio is closer to three-to-one. By the mid-2050s, the CBO projects it will fall to roughly two workers per retiree. The contraction will have “significant implications” on the federal budget, including outsized effects on Social Security and Medicare, placing pressure on those trust funds which rely on a robust base of payroll taxes that a stagnant population cannot easily provide.
Further, because national GDP is essentially the product of the number of workers multiplied by their individual productivity, the loss of labor force growth means the American economy will have to rely almost entirely on technological breakthroughs and AI to drive future gains. This may be happening ahead of schedule, as continued weak employment growth in December showed a “jobless expansion,” in the words of KPMG chief economist Diane Swonk, as Fortune previously reported.
Mia Chemnitz says “the people of Greenland do not want to become American”
“The people of Greenland do not want to become American,” Mia Chemnitz tells the BBC. “We are not for sale.”
The 32-year-old business owner in the Greenlandic capital Nuuk reflects the sentiments of many who spoke to the BBC about how they felt about recent rhetoric from the Trump administration.
The White House has said it was “actively” discussing an offer to buy the territory that has for centuries belonged to Denmark. US President Donald Trump and his officials had earlier intimated a willingness to take it by force if necessary.
This has been met with nervousness and opprobrium among Greenlanders – both on the world’s largest island and elsewhere.
This nervousness has only grown since the US took Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro from his residence in Caracas to New York on drug-trafficking and narco-terrorism charges in an unprecedented military move.
Almost immediately after, the wife of a senior White House staffer indicated that Greenland was next.
“That’s when it stopped feeling abstract,” says Tupaarnaq Kopeck, 40, who moved to Canada – another place Trump has threatened to annex – for family and work.
“For the first time, I contacted my sister in Greenland and told her that if the unthinkable ever became reality, they would have a place to stay with us.”
Aaja Chemnitz, one of two MPs in the Danish parliament representing Greenland, says the comments from the Trump administration are “a clear threat” that she was “appalled” by.
“It’s completely disrespectful from the US side to not rule out annexing our country and to annex another Nato ally,” she says.
Tupaarnaq Kopeck
Tupaarnaq Kopeck says the military intervention in Venezuela made the abstract feel real
Greenland is the world’s most sparsely populated territory. With much of the Arctic island covered by ice, most of the population lives in Nuuk and the surrounding south-western coastline.
But it is strategically significant to the US – which is why it has had a military presence there since World War 2.
Greenland’s location between North America and the Arctic makes it well placed for early warning systems in the event of missile attacks.
More recently, there has also been increased interest in Greenland’s natural resources, including rare earth minerals, which are becoming easier to access as its ice melts due to climate change.
“It’s not fun being 56,000 people and having these threats – if you can call them that – from a giant like the US,” says Masaana Egede, Editor in Chief from Greenlandic newspaper Sermitsiaq.
“The citizens of Greenland are nervous about this, because this is not something that we take lightly.”
Experts generally agree that a military takeover of Greenland would be an easy undertaking for the US – but that the geopolitical fallout would effectively end the Nato alliance.
After the issue of Greenland’s ownership was raised anew by the White House, six European allies issued a statement saying Greenland’s future should be decided by its people – something Mia says she is grateful for.
But she worries this will matter little to the US “if it’s not backed with consequences and actions”.
“As a Greenlander, I can’t help but wonder: what are we worth to these allies? To what lengths are they willing to go to protect us?”
Tupaarnaq says: “Respect is about more than alliances on paper. When powerful nations talk about you instead of with you, that respect disappears very quickly.”
Aleqatsiaq Peary
Aleqatsiaq Peary, a 42-year-old Inuit hunter says a US takeover would just “replace one occupier with another”
The Trump administration has stressed its intention was to buy Greenland from Denmark – despite Copenhagen reiterating the territory was not for sale – while retaining a military intervention as an option.
Aaja sees annexation by force as unlikely – instead, “what we are going to see is that they will put pressure on us in order to make sure that they will take over Greenland over time”.
Polling consistently shows that Greenlanders generally favour eventual independence from Denmark but oppose being owned by the US. The territory is largely self-governing, with control of foreign affairs and defence retained by Copenhagen.
This is perhaps why Aleqatsiaq Peary, a 42-year-old Inuit hunter living in the remote northerly town of Qaanaaq, seemed unfazed by the prospect of US ownership.
“It would be switching from one master to another, from one occupier to another,” he says. “We are a colony under Denmark. We are already losing a lot from being under the Danish government.”
But he says: “I don’t have time for Trump. Our people are in need,” explaining hunters like him hunt with dogs on the sea ice and fish, “but the sea ice is melting and hunters cannot make a living anymore”.
For Sermitsiaq editor Masaana, the rhetoric from the US is pushing a fallacious binary choice.
“We really have to try to avoid getting the story going to a place where it’s Greenland that has to decide between the US and Denmark, because that is not the choice that the Greenlandic people want.”
Christian Keldsen
Christian Keldsen says “people in Greenland are getting really irritated with this”
For others, who see the strong relationship Greenland already has with the US being soured, there is a clear sense of indignation.
“People in Greenland are getting really irritated with this,” says Christian Keldsen of the Greenland Business Association.
“Greenlanders are welcoming and open-hearted, it’s the best thing about the country. But now with this, some people are scared.”
Greenland is open for business with the US, Christian stresses, noting that there are new direct flights from Greenland to New York – a sure sign “they don’t need to take us over”.
“We are a well-functioning democracy and our government has a strong mandate,” Mia says. “We are a Nato ally and the US has had military bases in Greenland for over 70 years and still has the right to establish and run new and more.
“As it has been stated from Greenland before: we are not for sale, but we’re open for business.”
The amount of money spent on music subscriptions by UK consumers grew modestly last year, up 3.2% YoY.
That’s according to new preliminary stats from the UK’s Entertainment Retailers’ Association (ERA), whose members include Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, and SoundCloud.a
According to ERA’s data, some GBP £2.045 billion (USD $2.69bn) was spent on music streaming subscriptions in 2025, up from GBP £1.982 billion in 2024.
In monetary terms, that represented a YoY increase of GBP £63.0 million.
(ERA’s figures are retail amounts – i.e. what consumers spent on subscriptions, rather than the wholesale figure paid to music rightsholders. They don’t include revenue from ad-supported tiers.)
The 3.2%growth rate reported for 2025 marked the slowest annual increase in UK streaming subscription revenues over the past five years, and represents a deceleration from 2024’s 5.9% growth and 2023’s 10.2% growth.
Crucially, the 3.2% YoY growth rate in 2025 matched the UK Office for National Statistics’ inflation rate of 3.2% for the 12 months to November 2025. (The full annual rate will be in this ballpark, but officially determined when December’s figures are confirmed later this month.)
This represents a stark contrast to the market’s performance earlier in the decade: UK streaming subscription revenues grew by double-digits in 2020 and 2021, posting YoY increases of £199.4 million and £191.3 million respectively.
Note: ERA has revised its annual streaming subscription revenue figure for 2024 down by £36 million from the number it initially reported, resulting in a 5.9% YoY increase for 2024 vs 2023.
The slowdown is particularly notable given that the UK subscription market benefited from yet another Spotify price increase in 2025, albeit towards the end of the year.
In October 2025, Spotify announced it was increasing prices for multiple subscription tiers in the UK for the third time in just over two years.
Spotify’s Premium Individual tier increased by GBP £1 per month to £12.99, marking an 8.3% increase. Its Duo and Family plans rose to £17.99 per month and £21.99 per month, respectively.
That followed UK price rises in July 2023 (when Spotify moved from its long-held £9.99 price point to £10.99) and April 2024 (when it increased to £11.99). The Premium Individual tier has therefore risen 30% in less than two and a half years.
As MBW has previously reported, data captured by the UK’s Competitions and Markets Authority (CMA) showed that in December 2021, Spotify’s market share of all music streaming’s monthly active users (‘free’ plus ‘premium’) in the UK stood at over 50%.
In addition to streaming revenues, ERA’s latest numbers also cover physical music sales and downloads. (ERA’s members include UK physical music retailers such as HMV, plus a network of independent retailers).
Annual UK physical music revenues (across CD and vinyl sales) surged 11.5% YoY in 2025 – totaling £368.1 million (USD $484.2m).
The strong physical performance was driven by vinyl, which grew 18.5%to £238.5 million, while CD revenues remained essentially flat, down just 1% to £125.0 million. Other physical formats – predominantly cassette – nearly doubled, up 95% to £4.6 million.
Physical formats increased their share of music revenues to 15%, their highest share since 2021.
Download sales continued their decline, down 3.5% YoY, to GBP £39.9 million (USD $52.5m).
Total UK 2025 recorded music sales – including subscription streaming, physical music, and downloads – stood at GBP £2.453 billion (USD $3.23bn), up 4.2% YoY.
That GBP £2.453 billion figure, said ERA, was the UK recorded music industry’s highest annual revenue tally of all time.
ERA CEO Kim Bayley said: “Streaming services in the UK fund around 60 different programmes supporting music, with a third of them focussing on new and emerging UK talent. Record shops too are playing their part, promoting more than 4,000 instore and outstore performances a year, the majority of them featuring UK artists.
“Streaming services and retailers are committed to supporting new UK music and the emergence of a new wave of UK artists is vindicating their approach.”
The combined UK music, video and games markets surveyed by ERA reached £13.257 billion in 2025, up 7.1% YoY and marking their 13th consecutive year of growth.
ERA noted that entertainment sales grew more than four times faster than the 1.5% GDP growth predicted for the UK economy by the Office for Budget Responsibility.
2025’s total in UK entertainment sales was more than 66% larger than the total in 2019, the last pre-pandemic year.
Bayley added: “This result vindicates the transformational role of streaming services and retailers in driving the entertainment sector to new heights, thanks to a potent combination of technology, investment and innovation. While conditions may be tough in the wider economy, streaming services and retailers are winning a greater share of consumer spending and proving their central role in the UK’s creative economy.”
All GBP to USD conversions in this story have been made at the average annual exchange rate for 2025.
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Several people have been killed in fighting between Syrian government forces and a Kurdish-led militia, the Syrian Democratic Forces, in Aleppo, Syria, after two days of clashes. Efforts to integrate the S.D.F. into the national military appear to have stalled.
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The killing of 14-year-old Yosef Eisenthal, who was run over by a bus during an anti-recruitment protest in an Orthodox district of West Jerusalem on Tuesday night, has brought renewed attention to one of the most contentious issues in Israeli politics: the exemption of ultra-Orthodox Jews from military service.
According to numerous analysts, the scale of the fissure is such that it poses an existential threat to the right-wing coalition led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which has so far weathered multiple accusations of genocide in Gaza and criticism over unilateral attacks on regional neighbours.
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Eisenthal was among tens of thousands of ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, protesters when he was hit by the bus at an intersection in the Romema neighbourhood. Three other protesters, all reported to be teenagers, were injured in the incident. Israeli media reports say the bus driver had previously been attacked by demonstrators before driving into the crowd.
Netanyahu issued a statement on Wednesday morning, pledging that the incident would be thoroughly investigated and urging “restraint to prevent the mood from becoming further inflamed so that, heaven forbid, we do not have additional tragedies”.
Anger over the exemption of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox students dates back to early attempts in 1999 to formalise what had previously been a de facto arrangement, with Haredi leaders arguing that young men should be allowed to focus on full-time religious study to preserve Jewish law and tradition, rather than be conscripted to join the army, as other Israeli Jews are.
However, legal challenges to the exemption, most recently from the Supreme Court late last year demanding that Haredi recruitment be enforced, combined with reports of manpower shortages linked to Israel’s military conflicts in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran, have pushed the issue back into the spotlight.
Polls show broad public support for the ending of the exemption, a notion publicly backed by Netanyahu. But two of the prime minister’s key coalition partners, United Torah Judaism (UTJ) and Shas, have repeatedly threatened to withdraw from the government or vote against the state budget, triggering new elections, unless legislation is passed preserving Haredi exemptions or limiting conscription for students at Israel’s ultra-Orthodox schools, known as yeshivas.
“You need to remember, these aren’t political parties in the conventional sense,” Yossi Mekelberg, a senior consulting fellow at Chatham House, said, characterising UTJ and Shas as operating to the benefit of their community and not wider society. “They are elected as parties to operate as pressure groups inside the Knesset [parliament]. They know that no one outside of their own ultra-Orthodox community will vote for them, and they really have no interest in persuading them to do so.”
“All they have is their own religious base, with a proportion in society that is constantly increasing,” added Mekelberg. “Preserving that base, for the large part, is about keeping them out of the army where they might encounter different types of approaches to religion, including secularism, which their rabbis are afraid would tempt and corrupt them.”
Bitter debate
Despite the limited deaths, the Israeli army has incurred compared to the tens of thousands of Palestinians killed during its genocidal war on Gaza, anger over the Haredi communities’ apparent exemption from the draft has grown among a society fractured from two years of unrelenting conflict.
An autumn poll last year showed an overwhelming number of Israeli respondents saw the societal schism between secular and ultra-Orthodox Israelis as one of the most divisive issues facing contemporary Israel.
Responding to the death of Eisenthal, UTJ’s Meir Porush told reporters, “It is impossible to ignore the fact that more than once during demonstrations by the ultra-Orthodox public, there is a public atmosphere that it is permissible to harm the demonstrators.”
“The situation in which incitement is rampant against the ultra-Orthodox public is causing Jews to fear for their safety in the Land of Israel,” Porush continued. “I call on all public leaders to call for an end to the harm and incitement against the ultra-Orthodox public.”
Police clash with ultra-orthodox protesters during a previous protest over compulsory enlistment in West Jerusalem [Ammar Awad/Reuters]
“There’s very little sympathy for the ultra-Orthodox among much of Israeli society,” Ori Goldberg, an Israeli political analyst, said. “They’ve gone to great lengths to distance themselves from the rest of the population, so most people don’t really care … Israeli society is broken.”
Divisive
From Israel’s creation in 1948, a handful of highly skilled ultra-Orthodox scholars were granted exemptions from Israel’s mandatory military service, which applies to most Jewish citizens. However, over the years, the influence of influential religious parties, such as Shas and UTJ, has led to a significant increase in the number of military exemptions, currently estimated at about 90 percent of the 13,000 ultra-Orthodox men who reach conscription age each year.
While Shas and UTJ only hold 18 seats in the parliament, the fractured nature of Israeli politics and Netanyahu’s reliance upon the right have given the ultra-Orthodox a disproportionate level of influence.
“It’s true that they don’t have many seats, but Netanyahu absolutely needs their support to maintain his coalition and remain prime minister,” Mitchell Barak, an Israeli pollster and former political aide to several senior Israeli political figures, including Netanyahu, told Al Jazeera. “It’s true that the ultra-Orthodox parties also need Netanyahu and his government to have any power and relevance in their own communities. But the draft issue is everything. To them, if they lose this: they have nothing.”
An ultra-Orthodox Jewish man stands in front of a burning fire during a protest against Israeli army conscription in Kfar Yona [John Wessels/AFP]
Increasing influence
Across Israel, the Haredi are a growing social and political constituency, with both their political heft and the influence of religion across society increasing as their numbers do.
In 2009, the Haredi made up 9.9 percent of Israel’s population. By 2065, they are forecast to make up more than 30 percent. Alongside this growth, ultra-Orthodox parties are making sure their members’ interests are served and that they remain loyal: all of which could spell problems for Israel’s future.
“Parties like Shas and UTJ rely on keeping its younger members religious and reliant upon benefits,” Mekelberg said.
“This is a serious problem, because their numbers are growing,” he added. “An ultra-Orthodox family will typically have six to seven children. It’s unlikely that any of the boys will ever study core subjects like maths or science. Instead, they’ll go to the yeshiva and live off benefits. This is a real demographic problem. And this isn’t a future problem. It’s one that’s happening now.”
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Nation’s Capital Swim Club’s Joey Coleman has committed to Queens University Charlotte for the fall of 2026.
I am beyond excited to announce my official commitment to continue my academic and athletic career at Queens University! I’d like to thank my family and friends for supporting and encouraging me, and I’d like to thank my coaches for helping me every step of the way. Lastly I would like to thank the coaching staff at Queens University for believing in me and giving me this amazing opportunity! Go Royals!!👑
Coleman, the Sterling, Va., native, closed out his most recent summer campaign at the USA Swimming Futures Championships in Greensboro (LCM). There, he earned finals swims in the 100 breaststroke (1:04.98) and 200 breaststroke (2:23.24), touching lifetime-best times in both. He also swam his fastest time in every other event on the meet, including the 50 breast (30.14), 50 butterfly (26.40), 100 free (52.80), and 200 free (1:54.26).
Coleman recently partook in the inaugural Katie Ledecky Invitational (SCY), where he set seven best times in all seven of his events en route to one of the most productive outings of his career. His top finishes came in the 100 breast (2nd, 54.41), 200 IM (3rd, 1:49.35), and 200 free (4th, 1:38.20). His other four best times came in the form of the 100 free (45.48), 100 fly (50.24), 200 breast (1:59.27), and 500 free (4:29.69). In his 200 breast, Coleman swam a best time in prelims in 2:03.80. At finals, he dropped over four seconds from that newly minted time to crack the 2:00 barrier and finish 9th in 1:59.27.
Last March, Coleman competed at the Virginia High School Class 5 State Championship. As a junior representing Potomac Falls High School, Coleman finished 5th overall in the 200 free, touching in 1:41.31. He added a 10th-place finish in the 100 breast, clocking 58.61.
Best Times SCY:
100 Breast: 54.41
200 Breast: 1:59.27
100 Free: 45.48
200 Free: 1:38.20
500 Free: 4:29.65
200 IM: 1:49.35
400 IM: 4:05.49
100 Fly: 50.24
The Royal men won the 2025 ASUN Swimming and Diving Championship title last season.
Comparing Coleman’s best times to those championships, he would have finished 4th in the 200 breast, 5th in the 100 breast, and 7th in the 200 free.
Coleman is already very competitive within the ASUN. His recent success and progression back up that narrative. He would have been competing for conference titles in three events last season and still has over a year until he actually races at the ASUN championships.
The breast/middle-distance free mix is very useful for devising different lineups for invites/duals/ and even a potential championship meet. His 500 free would have also finished 7th last season at the ASUN championships.
The top three from last season’s ASUN championships in the 100 fly were all seniors, with the winner, Conner Wang (46.17), and the 3rd place fisher, Matej Dusa (47.34), both representing the Royals.
The 200 fly steered a bit younger, with the top two finishers both freshmen (sophomores for the 2025-2026 season) and no seniors in the top eight.
Coleman is in a prime position to make an immediate impact with the ASUN and be a threat in numerous events for the entirety of his career.
Coleman joins Reilly Eagan, Inland Fernandes Perna, and Ivan Kiselev in Queens’ 2026 recruiting class.
If you have a commitment to report, please send an email with a photo (landscape, or horizontal, looks best) and a quote to [email protected].
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