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Influencer Ayzia J Dead at 22 In Fatal Car Crash Published July 7, 2026 3:01 PM PDT Influencer Ayzia J. Toledo -- who went by Ayzia J on social media -- is dead after crashing
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Croatia coach Zlatko Dalic applauds their fans after the FIFA World Cup 2026 Group L match against Ghana in Philadelphia on June 27, 2026. (Reuters) Croatia's most successful football coach, Zlatko Dalic, resigned on Wednesday, ending a tenure that included taking the team to the 2018 World Cup final."As much as I still feel the ambition and desire to achieve new successes with Croatia, I feel that this is the right moment to bring this incredible era to a close," he said in a statement."I am leaving with a full heart and proud that I have made my contribution to the greatest achievements in the history of Croatian football," the 59-year-old added.Dalic took over as coach in October 2017.Apart from their final defeat in Russia, where Croatia, led by Luka Modric, lost to France, Dalic guided the nation to the 2022 Qatar World Cup semi-finals and the Euro 2020 last 16."Zlatko's name will remain forever written in golden letters in the history of Croatian football," Croatian Football Federation (HSN) head Marijan Kustic said.Croatia failed to move into the last 16 of this year's World Cup, losing 2-1 in a gripping match against Portugal earlier this month.Local media are tipping former national coach Slaven Bilic as Dalic's likely successor.Bilic, 57, led Croatia from 2006-12. He recorded a higher winning percentage than Dalic, with 42 victories, 15 draws and eight defeats in 65 matches but his best performance in a major tournament was to reach the quarterfinals of the 2008 Euros where Croatia lost on penalties to Turkey.Bilic was a defender who played 44 times for Croatia. He has coached several clubs, including West Ham United, where he played in the mid-1990s.The former defender's last coaching position was at Saudi Arabia's Al-Fateh, during the 2023-2024 season.Dalic has repeatedly said he considered his job the "biggest privilege and pleasure a coach can have".His most notable previous coaching spells came outside Europe -- he was in charge of top Saudi Arabian clubs Al-Faisaly and Al-Hilal.In 2014, the former defensive midfielder took over Al Ain in the United Arab Emirates, where he was named coach of the year twice, leading the club to the 2016 Asian Champions League final. Related Story
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Switzerland coach Murat Yakin and his players celebrate after Switzerland qualified for the quarter-finals of the World Cup beating Colombia in Vancouver on July 7, 2026. (Reuters) Shorn of one of the tournament's breakout talents, Switzerland boss Murat Yakin reshuffled his deck and performed a tactical overhaul before reaching the World Cup quarter-finals via a 4-3 penalty shootout victory over Colombia having ground out a 0-0 draw.Yakin's World Cup has been full of tactical tweaks, turns and twists, but on Tuesday he had no choice but to tear up the script after Manzambi suffered a knee injury in training the day before the game, and the coach was not found wanting.Despite starting the opening game against Qatar on the bench, the 20-year-old Manzambi made the most of his chance when it came, scoring twice against Bosnia and going on to notch a total of three goals and two assists heading into Tuesday's clash.More importantly, he made himself indispensable to Yakin's tactical plans, allowing the Swiss to sit deep and offering them a dangerous outlet for counter-attacks, as well as the ability to hold the ball up when needed.The injury forced Yakin to tear up his original game plan and once the game started it quickly became apparent that the Swiss would be happy with a stalemate, sitting back and controlling the tempo and seldom throwing players forward in attack. With Switzerland's Ruben Vargas also benched due to injury worries, Breel Embolo was left to forage on his own for much of the game against Colombia's miserly defence - unit that had conceded just one goal coming into the match."I think it's natural that it kind of goes that way in the way the game played out," Swiss goalkeeper Gregor Kobel told reporters."We knew they were very physical, we knew they were a very good team, and they had the crowd on their side, obviously, so it was a tough game for us."TARGET MANThe Colombians had their chances but they lacked an Embolo-like figure up front, a target man who could keep a defence busy and attract defenders to open up spaces for others, and though the game statistics showed they created 15 chances, only three were on target."We knew we probably had some stretches in the game where we had to defend and stay strong mentally, and I think we did a really good job with that. And yeah, obviously we had a few players who were missing so it was a big challenge, but I think everybody did a really good job and yeah, we executed it very well," Kobel said.Switzerland's progress means that Colombia and their noisy, colourful, passionate fans leave the tournament after playing some superb football."Fortunately, God, football and life have brought us this far, and I simply want to thank the whole country and everyone who filled the stadium here," forward Luis Suarez said."Let's hope this is a major turning point, because what this team showed at this World Cup has to be viewed in a positive light." Related Story
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Egypt's Hamdy Fathy is shown a yellow card by referee Francois Letexier during their World Cup match against Argentina in Atlanta. (Reuters) The Egyptian Football Association (EFA) said on Wednesday it had asked for the officiating team who handled the Pharoahs loss 3-2 last-16 to Argentina to be thrown out of the World Cup."Hany Aburida, President of the EFA filed a complaint with FIFA, demanding an investigation into the French referee Francois Letexier... after the serious refereeing mistakes committed by the team of referees and double standards, which caused the Egypt team to lose the match and leave the World Cup," said a statement from the federation.On Tuesday evening, Letexes ruled out a Mostafa Ziko goal ruled out when they were leading 1-0 after VAR intervened to spot a foul on Lisandro Martinez much earlier in the move.A few minutes later, Ziko did put Egyptian 2-0 up and on the brink of a place in the last eight for the first time but there was further controversy in added time, after Cristian Romero and Lionel Messi had brought the champions level.In the build-up to Argentina's winner scored by Enzo Fernandez, Egypt believe they should have instead been awarded a penalty for a pull by Alexis Mac Allister on Hamdy Fathy."Aburida demanded the investigation of the entire team of referees, including the video technology referees, because of the blatant errors and insisting on not reviewing some of the footage that we believe are in favour of the Egyptian national team, and we see in it the Pharaohs' right to a correct goal and a penalty," said the Egyptian statement.It added that the president had also "demanded the exclusion of the referee and the entire crew from the World Cup after investigating these mistakes and proving the crime of discrimination against the Egyptian national team".The statement echoed remarks by Egypt coach Hossam Hassan immediately after the game."I do not want to put it nicely and talk about hard luck. We have been cheated unfairly today, we have suffered injustice," Hassan told journalists."We haven't seen respect or fair play. There has not been respect or fair play."Hassan told BeIN: "Perhaps they wanted to keep the world champions in the competition. Perhaps they wanted Messi to stay in the running."In football, there are sometimes external factors that go beyond the technical aspects. The world champions received support at every level." Related Story
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Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte is insisting that member states are keeping their promise to boost defence spending. Yet progress has been uneven and the push is already stretching some national budgets. Under pressure from US President Donald Trump, members of the 32-country military pact agreed at last year’s summit to boost defence spending to 5% of GDP by 2035 — just over double the overall level for European states and Canada in 2025. But since then, two camps have emerged: one is led by Germany and the mostly Nordic and eastern European nations which have found the fiscal space to raise spending; in the other are several big players struggling to do the same. “The UK isn’t managing, for example. France isn’t and Italy isn’t either,” Guntram Wolff, senior fellow at the Bruegel economics think tank, said of the three largest economies in Europe behind Germany. Nato says its European members plus Canada spent an extra $90bn on defence in real terms last year compared to 2024 as they seek to raise core military spending to 3.5% of GDP by 2035 with a further 1.5% GDP on security-related items. Before the summit, Rutte has stressed that last year’s new spend amounts to a bigger $139bn tally in nominal terms and that there is a “strong commitment” to hit the combined 5% target on time. Germany will use a rule change exempting defence items from strict borrowing limits to double its spending to over €200bn ($228.38bn) between now and 2030, according to a budget draft seen by Reuters ahead of a cabinet review on Monday. Poland, Lithuania and Estonia — countries where the perception of the threat posed by Russia is at its sharpest — are already well on their way to making the new targets, with Warsaw notably having devoted 4.3% of GDP to defence last year. Elsewhere the push faces political and fiscal roadblocks. Britain last week announced plans for an extra £15bn ($20.01bn) of defence spending, partly funded by cuts elsewhere. But it emerged that one-third was still unfunded, creating an early budget challenge for the likely new prime minister Andy Burnham. More fundamentally, the plan was criticised by opposition politicians and former military chiefs for failing to set out when defence spending would reach 3% of GDP, on the way to meeting Britain’s Nato commitment to spend 3.5% of GDP by 2035. “Defence spending will likely remain one of the biggest fiscal pressures facing the UK in the medium term,” said Max Warner, senior research economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a think tank. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is due to tell the summit that Rome, despite one of Europe’s largest debt burdens, will lift core and non-core defence spending to 2.8% of GDP in 2026, roughly 0.71 percentage point higher than last year. But with higher military spending unpopular with many voters ahead of next year’s national elections, most of the increase will come from domestic security spending such as police duties. Plans detailed by France in April would lift its defence spending to 2.5% of GDP by the end of the decade from about 2% now, even as it attempts to bring its overall deficit into line with euro area rules - a tough budget goal as it heads towards next year’s presidential elections. Spain’s Socialist government meanwhile is not seen budging from its refusal to spend more than 2.1% of GDP on defence, with new resources set to be heavily skewed towards technologies with civil applications. Elsewhere, NATO officials have queried the assertion of three countries — Czech Republic, Slovenia and Albania — that they had met the old alliance target of 2% of GDP and asked them to review and re-submit their spending figures. “For us, the challenge is to ensure that Allies remain on the credible path towards that 3.5% commitment, if you keep on bumping along at 2%, then you’re not on the credible path,” a senior Nato official said. Bruegel’s Wolff noted that, unlike at last year’s summit in the Hague, European leaders can look Trump in the eye and argue they have stepped up to shoulder the burden of a Ukrainian war effort that has shown it is able to resist Russian advances. Still, even if European publics may be starting to accept that more money should go on the military, some observers argue that arms suppliers will need to be convinced that government defence spending will remain high before they make the investment needed to increase their capacity. “There has been a before Trump, and there will be an after Trump, so this 5% target can change any time,” said Ana Boata, head of economic research at Allianz Trade. “So I think there is a bit of scepticism from European defence companies to actually ramp up investments in order to ramp up production,” she said. — Reuters
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Britain’s prime minister-in-waiting, Andy Burnham, promises radical change while sticking to the country’s fiscal rules, a strategy that needs discipline, luck, and maybe an old trick: kicking the pain points into the long grass. Last week, Burnham committed to existing fiscal rules that require the government to match day-to-day spending against revenue — a balanced current budget — a feat achieved only fleetingly in the last 25 years. So far, Britain’s £2.9tn ($3.87tn) government bond market has shown little sign of concern, helped by falling oil prices since the de-escalation of the Iran war, but also Burnham’s efforts to burnish an image of fiscal responsibility. But he has yet to set out how he will square demands for spending and borrowing against his commitments to the fiscal rules and the Labour Party’s 2024 manifesto, which ruled out raising taxes on working people. In March, Britain’s Office for Budget Responsibility estimated that finance minister Rachel Reeves’ plans would meet the rules with a current budget surplus of £24bn by 2029/30. But that outlook was based on the economy before the outbreak of war in the Middle East, and above-consensus growth forecasts for the years ahead. Economists at Bank of America last week estimated that margin had shrunk to £19bn. That combination — shrinking headroom and a manifesto that rules out broad tax rises — increases the temptation to do what governments have done before: defer the reckoning. “The idea that this government might promise fiscal consolidation in the future, while topping up spending plans in the near term, seems quite plausible to me,” said Bee Boileau, senior researcher at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a think tank. Reeves’ reforms to the fiscal framework, including comprehensive spending reviews every two years, have made gaming the fiscal rules harder, but not impossible. Her Conservative Party predecessor Jeremy Hunt set the modern template: his March 2024 Budget contained pre-election tax cuts to be paid for by large, unspecified real-terms cuts to government departments in later years. Here’s how a similar ploy could look for Burnham. Once in power, the new prime minister could publish an initial Budget this year that mostly sticks with current plans, meeting the rule to balance the current budget in the 2029/30 financial year while teeing up his defining Budget in 2027. From April 2027, the three-year target to balance the budget will shift to 2030/31, which will give Burnham the chance to shift fiscal consolidation past the next election, due in mid-2029 at the latest, while potentially increasing near-term spending. A biennial review of government spending due next year represents a potential complication. Burnham will be required to set government department budgets for the post-election 2030/31 financial year, and cuts would look politically difficult. But for a pre-election Budget 2028, Burnham could again postpone fiscal consolidation to 2031/32, this time without specifying where the axe will fall, because that year will fall outside the scope of the Spending Review 2027 for departmental budgets. The trouble is, the gilt market’s tolerance for these strategies may now be limited, said Emma Moriarty, portfolio manager at CG Asset Management, which specialises in fixed income. “Meeting the fiscal rules is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the bond markets,” Moriarty said, adding that gilts had to be viewed in the context of a crowded sovereign debt market, where competition for buyers is strong. Some argue there is still room to borrow more. Jim O’Neill, a former British government minister who was chief economist of Goldman Sachs and has recently advised Burnham, has argued that Britain should borrow more to boost infrastructure - something the fiscal rules would allow for. But Moriarty said the market would still be focused on the bottom line, whatever the stated purpose of the borrowing. “For gilt investors, the purpose of borrowing matters less than the volume — what moves markets on Budget day is the Debt Management Office’s issuance remit, not the Chancellor’s justification for it,” she said. — Reuters
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The Big Tech professes to have the loftier aim of building a more equitable global society. However, governments, business leaders and the general public are coming to view its overarching power and influence with caution and suspicion. Consequently, the European Union’s regulatory crackdown is intensifying across multiple legal frameworks with over 60 active antitrust and regulatory probes targeting US technology giants. The EU has put in place two laws: the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act, both better known by their initials, DMA and DSA. Europe’s top court on July 2 dismissed Google’s challenge against a €4.1bn ($4.8bn) EU antitrust fine over Android, largely upholding regulators’ findings that the company used its mobile operating system to shut out rivals. The European Commission originally imposed a €4.3bn penalty in 2018, which a lower tribunal reduced in 2022. Google has accumulated almost €11bn in EU antitrust fines over the past decade. Italy’s privacy watchdog in February ordered an Amazon.com unit to stop using personal data from more than 1,800 warehouse workers near Rome. Germany’s cartel office in the same month barred Amazon from imposing price caps on retailers selling through its German marketplace and sought recovery of profits it said were generated through anti-competitive conduct. Italy’s competition authority fined Apple and two subsidiaries €98.6mn last December over alleged abuse of a dominant position in the mobile apps market. The European Commission fined Apple €500mn in April 2025 under the DMA, while Germany’s Federal Court of Justice upheld a regulatory designation subjecting the company to tighter competition controls. Meta said in March it would allow AI rivals access to WhatsApp for a fee after the Commission threatened interim measures during an abuse-of-dominance investigation. The EU ordered Meta yesterday to give rival AI chatbots access to its WhatsApp platform for free within five working days as it carries out an antitrust probe, or risk a heavy fine. Meta said it would appeal the order, which follows the launch in December of an EU investigation into the US firm. Britain’s competition regulator said in March it would investigate Microsoft’s business software ecosystem, including software licensing practices in cloud computing. Microsoft avoided a potentially hefty EU antitrust fine by promising in September reduced prices for Office products excluding its Teams app after the European Commission had charged the US company with illegally bundling the app with its Office software suite. EU regulators charged TikTok in February with breaching online content rules through what they described as addictive platform features. The European Commission said in January it would investigate X’s AI chatbot Grok over concerns it may disseminate illegal content, including manipulated images. Ireland’s Data Protection Commission also opened a formal investigation into Grok in February, while French police raided X’s offices later as part of a separate probe. The Big Tech, despite its overarching global reach, has for long been facing a widening trust deficit, both from the users and regulators. For sure, technology has become an inseparable part of everyday life across the world. But the business model of social media, with its stifling data monopoly, may be undermining the well-being of its users. Fundamentally, social media users are driven by the same ancient desire: Human Connection. But that has for long been crowded out by addictive technology, amazing products and invasive corporate branding.
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Mackenzie Shirilla Poses For Prison Photo Shoot Back On The 'Gram Published July 7, 2026 2:00 PM PDT Mackenzie Shirilla is sharing a new photo from behind bars ... along with a positive message after
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A K2 Airways cargo plane with five crew on board lost contact with air traffic control on Tuesday night after reporting a navigational system problem while en route from Sharjah to Karachi, prompting search and
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Chris Richards of the United States is consoled by Mauricio Pochettino, Head Coach of the United States, after the team's 1-4 defeat in the FIFA World Cup 2026 Round of 16 match against Belgium at
