Ted Cruz thanked Trump, in the Oval Office, for getting rid of that "ridiculous" red card: "There was a reason the FIFA trophy sat here for as long as it did!"
...and Trump seems to agree an like it.
This is now beyond repair, official "acknowledgment" of interference in sports.🙁 My way or the highway... MAGA's are nuts.
International football bodies expressed uproar and disagreement, Monday, after it was reported that... Donald Trump did in fact call FIFA Boss Gianni Infantino over Balogun's red card in the match vs Bosnia and automatic suspension for today's Team USA match vs Belgium. As a result, FIFA cancelled the suspension.🤷♂️
This was firstreported by Axios, Sunday night.
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"Trump spoke with Infantino because he wanted to understand why Balogun got the red card and why the automatic one-match suspension was imposed. FIFA then lifted/suspended the ban, which is highly unusual because red cards normally carry an automatic next-match suspension."
Europe's football governing body UEFA as well as several countries' federations have expressed disagreement at this "outrageous" intervention of politics in sports.
Besides the political and sports scandal, if Balogun plays and USMNT wins, this has potential to cloud and ruin USMNT performance...
Trump Asked FIFA to Review U.S. Player’s Suspension. Now He’s Eligible to Play. - The New York Times
AMALIA is Portugal’s new open LLM project focused specifically on European Portuguese / pt-PT, not generic “Portuguese” where Brazilian Portuguese usually dominates. It is a 9B parameter model, Apache-2.0 licensed on Hugging Face, with SFT and DPO variants, trained from EuroLLM plus Portuguese-specific corpora, especially Arquivo.pt, Portugal’s web archive.
Portugal joins Europe’s sovereign AI club with AMALIA, after France’s Mistral and Germany’s Aleph Alpha.
Other adjacent examples: Italy has Minerva / EngGPT-style Italian models, Switzerland has Apertus / Swiss AI-style open sovereign models, Poland has been pushing domestic Polish LLM work, and then there’s the broader OpenEuroLLM project for multilingual EU-wide open models.
https://portugal.gov.pt/en/gc25/communication/news/llm-amalia-shows-portugals-potential
Against an unprecedented French heat wave, a discount Lidl fan sale became less a promotion than a small social panic: people were fighting for cooling devices as if they were emergency supplies.
At one Lidl in Paris’s 14th arrondissement, customers reportedly began waiting from midnight, the crowd reached 300–400 people by opening time, and the entire stock sold out in under an hour, possibly 30 minutes.
The couple who climbed to the top of the Empire State Building yesterday and unfurled a banner reading "When the power of love beats the love of power, the world knows peace" walked hand-in-hand after their court appearance.
Ivan Beerkus (Kuznetsov) and Angelina Nikolau from New Jersey were seen smiling at times throughout the walk, even Ivan saying the police are “very nice.”
The pair now face a long list of charges, including burglary, reckless endangerment, criminal mischief, and more according to the NYPD.
The third-weekend read is brutal because it shows Disclosure Day did not stabilize after the second-weekend drop. Vulture had already pegged the problem: roughly $195M combined production/marketing cost and an estimated ~$300M worldwide break-even zone; after the collapse, it was sitting far below that trajectory.
Disclosure Day made only $8.1M domestic in weekend 3, down another 54% from weekend 2, and fell to #5. Domestic total is now about $94.4M, worldwide about $193.7M.
And with Minions & Monsters, opening Wednesday, July 1, positioned to own the Fourth of July frame, DD will be crushed by Minions... which is expected to be the clear commercial event of the weekend: Boxoffice Pro projects $75M–$85M for the 3-day weekend and $95M–$115M over the 5-day holiday window. That makes it the movie most likely to bury everything else, including whatever legs Disclosure Day had left.
Next, with Nolan's upcoming "Odyssey" shadow thereafter (July 17th)... chances are Disclosure's days are numbered.
Major/trade language is still cautious.
Variety, Deadline, THR, Guardian/EW-style coverage framed the opening as strong/solid: $44M domestic, ~$93M worldwide opening, best original Spielberg debut territory. Deadline called it the best-ever start for a Spielberg original, and THR described the $115M-budgeted film as having a “solid start.”
The harshest serious piece is Vulture, but even it mostly says “trouble,” (not “flop.”)
Vulture says the second-weekend 62% drop exposed a generational problem, notes the combined production/marketing cost around $195M, and says it likely needs about $300M worldwide to break even. That is effectively a “flop trajectory” argument, but the article does not seem to headline it as a flop.
Spielberg’s problem: original adult sci-fi, boomer-coded UFO disclosure premise, weak youth urgency, got eaten by modern franchise/viral/Gen-Z box office behavior.🤷♂️
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Disclosure Day’s Box Office Reveals a New Generation Gap
What’s in the photo:
Members of the Axe Gang and graceful ladies at Shanghai Romance Park.
It’s a Songcheng-style immersive performance/theme park built around “old Shanghai” / Bund / Republican-era aesthetics, with a main large-scale stage show plus smaller street/NPC performances.