Month: July 2026

Much discussion and debate continue to surround a video said to have been taken near Area 51 that went viral after it was released last month. The footage shows an exotic aircraft that still looks likely to be a progenitor of Boeing’s F-47 sixth-generation fighter for the U.S. Air Force. Its apparent design, with a long shovel-like nose, large canards, and rear-set swept wings, is much different from the tailless, modified delta-winged heavy fighter that many were expecting to come out of the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program. This, in turn, raises interesting questions about why certain design decisions may have been made and the broader implications of the resulting tradeoffs.

The Project Fear YouTube channel posted the footage of the aircraft in question online back on June 5. Readers can find our initial assessment of the aircraft and its features here.

The full video from Project Fear can be viewed below. The clip of the mysterious aircraft passing by starts at around 49:34 in the runtime, if it does not automatically start playing at that point.

​We Filmed a Top Secret Craft Flying at Area 51

TWZ talked at length with Darold Cummings to more deeply analyze features of the design that appear to be visible in the video and, by extension, what might be inferred about the F-47. Cummings is an aerospace engineer with decades of experience who played a key role in developing Northrop’s YF-23 Black Widow, which lost out to what became Lockheed’s F-22 Raptor.

A screen capture that Project Fear had posted as a teaser before the release of the full video had also prompted new interest in another advanced fighter concept that Cummings had crafted in the 1980s. TWZ previously explored this design, nicknamed the “Christmas Tree” because of its planform, in detail. Cummings has worked on a host of other projects over the years for other companies across the aerospace industry and is now president of his own firm, ForzAero. He has also previously shared his own notional concepts for what the F-47, as well as a navalized derivative, might look like.

We reached out to other experts and long-time observers to get their views on Project Fear’s footage and the F-47, as well. Olivier Vargas, a 3D artist who goes by the handle @ollysaerospace on X and Instagram, was also kind enough to share his artwork based on what could be seen in the Project Fear video, one of which is seen at the top of this story and others throughout it. These are just extrapolated artist impressions and should not be taken as literal.

There are also years’ worth of official artwork from Boeing and other U.S. companies, as well as the Air Force itself, depicting concepts for advanced fighters. These have largely revolved around tailless, modified delta-winged designs, a sampling of which is shown in the collage below.

A useful starting framework

Cummings offered a valuable general rubric for considering advanced combat aircraft designs in his interview with TWZ.

When it comes to designing any fighter, “you just have a team of people who bring in all their needs. It’s like I say, the weapons, the landing gear, the wing, structure, and all the doors, all that stuff comes together,” he explained. “And all those people have to say, ‘what is the best I can do to get the [radar] cross-sectional area down?’ How can I move the landing gear to get the cross-sectional area down? How can I make the weapons bay smaller to get the cross-sectional area down? And all that relates to fineness ratio, and all that relates to the Sears-Haack plot.”

Fineness ratio refers to the ratio of the length of a ‘body,’ such as an aircraft, to its maximum width. The ratio increases the longer and narrower the body is. The Concorde supersonic airliner, with its long, slender fuselage and relatively short wingspan, is a common example of a plane with a very high fineness ratio.

A Sears-Haack plot, or Sears-Haack body, is a shape offering the lowest theoretical drag while traveling at supersonic speed based on a set length and volume. In high-speed aircraft development, the goal then is to devise a planform that is as close to that plot as possible.

“We spent probably a whole year on the Sears-Haack plot on the YF-23,” Cummings recalled. “I remember the structures guy wanted to have me fired because I had to have such [a] thin structure there to get the area down. He wanted to have me tar-and-feathered [sic].”

As noted, the tailless design seen in Project Fear’s video appears to have rear-set swept wings, as well as rhombus-shaped canard foreplanes. From the teaser image that Project Fear released, it had initially appeared that the nose might also have something of a “double arrowhead” shape akin to Cummings’ Christmas Tree concept. However, the full video looks to show a more shovel-like forward fuselage more typically found on low-observable (stealthy) aircraft. Even without the double arrowhead nose, the planform is distinct and notable.

Wings

The wings on the aircraft seen in Project Fear’s footage look to have a significant dihedral, and possibly drooping tips. At the same time, the relative quality of the video, given how far away the subject was, as well as the fact that it was captured in infrared at night, makes it hard to say definitively.

The design has already evoked the memory of Boeing’s Bird of Prey advanced technology demonstrator aircraft, which is understood to have been tested at Area 51 in the 1990s, but was only revealed to the public in 2002. This wing shape would also be in line, broadly speaking, with the renderings of the F-47 that the Air Force has released to date, which also shows the wings have a positive dihedral, though those may not fully reflect the actual design for operational security reasons.

“Now, whether that has the gull wing, up/down, like the Bird of Prey, I can’t tell,” Cummings told us. “I would be surprised if they had the droop [sic] wingtips, like on the Bird of Prey.”

“They’re a little hard to do once you have landing gear in that, because the inboard section would have to have a lot of dihedral to it, and I don’t know what you’re gaining,” he explained.

“Now, that’s not saying that the Bird of Prey doesn’t work. It works. I’m just saying, for simplicity’s sake, and long straight edges,” using “a clipped delta wing with MANTA-type exhaust, to me would be the best solution,” he added, speaking broadly. “Long straight edges for LO [low observability; stealthiness] are the best, no matter what you do. The longer the edges, the better RCS [radar cross section] you have in terms of the types of radars that use – the shorter it is, kind of the worse it is. So, if you can have a nice long straight leading edge and a relatively long straight trailing edge, combined with 3D thrust vectoring, in my opinion, it just doesn’t get much better than that.”

MANTA here refers to the Multi-Axis No-Tail Aircraft (MANTA), a Lockheed design derived from the F-22, which is also known by the designation X-44A. The MANTA never came to be, at least that we know. The designation was later re-applied to a completely unrelated flying wing-type drone, the existence of which was first reported by TWZ.

Cummings also highlighted the stealth advantages, in general, of choosing a tailless planform.

“There’s no intersections. Every time you have an intersection, you have a chance for an RCS reflector. I mean, anytime you have an angle, you have a chance for a reflector. So, if you do [it] with a way without any tails, mostly vertical tails – you can use a horizontal tail like we did on a YF-23, a V-Tail, if you keep it ported, lined up with a wing,” he explained. “You can see that there’s no gap between the wing and the tail [on the YF-23], and if you look at the angles from above, they’re exactly the same. To me, that’s a really ideal configuration. But if you can eliminate the tails completely by using thrust factoring, even better.”

“Ported” in this case means keeping the control surface locked in the same geometric plane as the wing while cruising.

In terms of wing shaping, “ideally it would be the old Dorito chip,” Cummings said, speaking generally. “Remember the ‘Hopeless Diamond,’ the original [Lockheed’s Have Blue demonstrator that evolved into the F-117]? I mean, that would be the optimum shape, but that’s very poor aerodynamically, very poor – very hard to balance, very hard to control.”

“You have a very, very high sweep, very, very long edge, you know, followed up by an angular [sic] on the back, which is less of a threat area. With a nice angled cut off on the back. If you can make it fly,” he continued.

The overall planform does look well-suited to cruising at supersonic speeds. This would be in line with the F-47 being originally envisioned primarily as a replacement for the F-22 Raptor, though that view has since shifted, at least publicly. Supercruise is a signature capability of the F-22.

A combination of high dihedral and drooping tips can be potentially beneficial for supersonic flight, gaining performance from riding on the resulting compression wave. However, Cummings said he did not think this would be applicable in the discussion around the potential design of the F-47.

“You really, in my opinion, need to be going more like Mach 3 to really take advantage of that, and this airplane, I’d be surprised if it did more than Mach 2.2,” he said. “Like the Bird of Prey, it was subsonic. I mean, there was no reason at all, from an aero-lift standpoint, to do it that way, from an aero-lift standpoint. There might be some advantage from an RCS standpoint, but not from an aero-lift standpoint.”

Cummings used the XB-70 Valkyrie bomber, which had wingtips that could be canted down into a drooped position during flight, as an example of an aircraft that does benefit from this feature when it comes to aero-lift. The XB-70 was designed to fly at speeds above Mach 3.

There is the possibility that what looks like ‘droop’ in the wingtips of the design seen in the video Project Fear released could actually depict wingtips that articulate. We cannot say with certainty one way or the other at this time. China’s J-XDS heavy sixth-generation stealth fighter notably has swiveling wingtips, which could help provide critical stability at slower speeds and during hard maneuvering, which are especially sensitive areas of the flight envelope for tailless designs.

Fuel capacity will also be a major factor in the design of the wing. A tailless delta-winged aircraft could offer greater fuel capacity compared to what is seen in the Project Fear video. Significant unrefueled range has long been expected to be a major requirement for the F-47, which we will come back to later on.

For its part, in May 2025, the Air Force released a graphic with unclassified details about its current and future fighter fleets, which listed the F-47’s top speed as “Mach 2+” and put its combat radius at “1,000+” nautical miles. While this is greater than that of any other fighter in the USAF’s inventory by a relatively sizable margin, it is not what one would expect from a heavy tailless delta, so this makes some sense considering the F-47’s unique planform.

Canards

The presence of canards has been a hot topic of discussion surrounding the F-47, even before Project Fear released its video. Canards were a feature that was visible in one of the official renderings released back in March 2025, and that came as a surprise to many.

Canards do provide additional maneuverability and stability, especially for a delta-wing aircraft, and at high angles of attack. Traditional vertical tails also help with stabilization, so canards could offer further benefits when used in tailless designs. However, they have historically been less than ideal for low observable designs, especially from the frontal aspect, which is of critical importance for the survivability of tactical jets flying into harm’s way. TWZ explored all of this in detail at the time.

The presence of canards in the F-47 rendering, and now on the design in the Project Fear footage said to have been taken near Area 51, together with the rest of what can be seen of their planforms, has also recalled the design of the X-36 uncrewed demonstrator. Also known as the Tailless Fighter Agility Research Aircraft, this X-plane was developed by Boeing’s Phantom Works advanced projects division, and you can learn more about it here.

“I’ve always liked the X-36. I always thought that was a great place to start if you’re going to have a canard airplane,” Cummings told us. “The X-36 had yaw thrust vectoring, so they eliminated the vertical tails, which was really fantastic. So, yeah, I think X-36 would be a good place to start.”

“I suspect the wing would probably be either level or maybe minus two degrees, and the canard would probably be plus 10 degrees,” he added when asked about whether the F-47’s canards might have the same dihedral as the main wings.

“You need that type of separation to really have the canard be extremely effective throughout the envelope of the airplane. In fact, if you look at the Chinese J-20, I think that’s about exactly what the J-20 use[s],” he explained, noting that this kind of configuration is called a “close couple.”

“Now, if you’re widespread, you might be less than that, but if you’re close coupled, I would say, plus 10 on the canard, minus two to three on the wing, would be about optimum,” he added.

The degree to which the canards on the F-47 or the design seen in the Project Fear video might be able to articulate is not clear. The canards on the J-20 and many other existing designs have a wide range of motion up and down, and can deflect asymmetrically.

“The original LockMart [Lockheed Martin] design for CALF [the Common Affordable Lightweight Fighter], pre-JSF [Joint Strike Fighter], was a canard,” Bill Sweetman, a long-time aviation journalist, also told TWZ. “You might want to lock the foreplane in cruise to avoid gaps, but all very doable. The key is to maintain the edge alignments.”

CALF was merged with the Joint Advanced Strike Technology (JAST) effort in the early 1990s to create the JSF program, which led to the F-35. CALF had also evolved from earlier Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) efforts called Advanced Short Takeoff and Vertical Landing (ASTOVL) and STOVL Strike Fighter (SSF), which began in the 1980s.

“As for range – might be a toss-up. A delta [wing] gives you huge capacity but a lot of wetted area, and a canard might trim differently in the cruise,” Sweetman also noted, highlighting a potential link between decisions relating to the wing design and canards.

As mentioned earlier, the still image that Project Fear released had also raised the possibility of the design having not just canards, but a “double-arrowhead” configuration. This sparked new interest in Cummings’ “Christmas Tree” fighter concept, also known as the DP-21. From what is visible in the full video, it seems less likely now that the aircraft has this kind of configuration.

“The only advantage of the Christmas Tree design, the only advantage, is it’s a four-spike design,” Cummings said. “No one, to my knowledge, no one in the history of aerospace has made a four-spike fighter.”

It would be “pretty much invisible to radar, as a four-spike airplane,” he added. “In my opinion, it would be a true breakthrough, because it’s never been done.”

As TWZ has previously explained:

“A four-spike design like the B-2 critically has nothing from the head-on aspect, as well as from the rear, which helps immensely with survivability. These are the most critical signature areas, especially the front as the aircraft is heading into hostile territory. Also, because these are located along the path of flight, these spikes can stay consistent on a threat radar as the aircraft moves directly toward or away from the sensor, and are not fleeting in nature like those from the side. So a four-spike aircraft would be very attractive for a tactical fighter meant to persist in contested territory.”

As an aside, Cummings also talked about the value of a canard configuration for a carrier-based fighter, something we have also touched on in the past. Boeing is also in the running to build a sixth-generation fighter for the U.S. Navy, commonly referred to as F/A-XX. The company has released a rendering of its submission to that competition, which shows distinct similarities to the official concept art of the F-47 that has been released to date.

When it comes to a navalized design, canards would be beneficial “mostly for control in landing, and really good control at takeoff,” Cummings said. “If you do it right, you can use the canard in conjunction with thrust vectoring to get everything to do positive lift instead of the wing. You got a wing now that’s giving you pitch-down moment, and now you got a canard giving you pitch-up moment to counter it. So you get the kind of moments you need to get off quickly off the airplane [sic; aircraft carrier] and land in a very, very good aerodynamic situation.”

“Let’s put it this way, we did this same kind of layout on the YF-23, and it worked. Believe it or not, we had a canard version of YF-23. Most people don’t know that, but we actually did, and that was for the Navy, for the same exact reason,” he noted.

Weapons bays

Project Fear’s video does not offer any clues as to the configuration of any weapons bays on the design said to have been spotted near Area 51 or the F-47. However, Cummings spent considerable time in the interview highlighting how these internal bays influence the rest of any fighter design.

“Every fighter design is driven around the weapon bay, period. What weapons do you take? How big are they? How long are they? And you design from the inside out,” he told us. “So, then the question becomes, what can I do to wrap this in an airframe that’s really, really good aerodynamically, and really, really good from an RCS standpoint.”

“There’s really two separate issues there. The wing really has very little to do with the actual weapons bay itself. That weapons bay, the airplane’s laid out around the weapons bay, and then the area plot is laid out around the weapons bay and the wing integration,” he continued. “Those things together have to have a nice, beautiful, smooth, Sears-Haack plot. And that’s really hard to do, by the way, it’s really hard to do.”

“Everything wants to be in the CG [center of gravity],” Cummings added. “The wing[‘s] maximum thickness, the weapons bay, the inlet, and the landing gear, they all want to be in the same place where you want the least amount of cross-sectional area. And yet they’re all there, and nobody wants to give anything.”

“The thing that would work the best was [sic] if you had really small diameter weapons,” in Cummings’ opinion. “That would be good, because then you could really tighten everything, because you can’t do anything about landing gear size. It’s very difficult to do anything about inlet size. It’s very difficult to do anything about wing thickness.”

“About the only area where you can make any headway is if somehow you could get smaller diameter weapons, or like that new Peregrine weapon,” he added.

Peregrine is an air-to-air missile concept that Raytheon first unveiled back in 2019. It is a truncated derivative of the AIM-120 Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile (AMRAAM), as you can read more about here. Other companies have put forward compact air-to-air and air-to-surface munitions over the years, as well, for exactly the reasons Cummings highlighted. TWZ has also long called attention to the value smaller air-launched weapon designs could offer in terms of magazine depth, especially for internal carriage on stealthy aircraft.

There has been a particular surge in the development of more compact (and lower-cost) air-launched munitions recently, with designs that are increasingly blurring the line between traditional missiles and long-range kamikaze drones. Though the initial focus has been on air-to-surface applications, there is also explicit interest in extending these developments into the air-to-air realm.

“To me, the biggest improvement, the way to get the area down, is if you could put the Peregrine weapon in,” he said. “Then you could slim the weapons bay down. … That would be a home run.”

The new AIM-260 Joint Advanced Tactical Missile (JATM), a joint development effort by the U.S. Navy and Air Force, is also interesting to consider in the context of slimming weapons bays down. A core requirement for the AIM-260 was to have roughly the same form factor as the AIM-120. However, JATM’s only control surfaces are four small fins at the tail, making it narrower than the AMRAAM. The AIM-120 has fins around the middle of the body, as well as at the tail end of the missile. AMRAAM variants have also been developed with mid-body fins with clipped tips, a change originally driven by the constraints of the F-22’s internal bays.

Weaponry may be something of a wild card when it comes to the F-47 due to a new factor in the equation: Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) and other similar loyal wingman-type drones. Acting as quarterbacks for uncrewed aircraft will be a key role for the Air Force’s new sixth-generation fighters. The service’s future CCA fleets will be armed, at least for air-to-air combat, right from the start.

CCAs will open up new operational possibilities that might allow for the F-47’s organic weapons load to be kept more limited, with drones providing the additional magazine depth. It might be possible then to truncate the F-47’s overall design, or optimize it differently, including for higher performance and lower cost, by limiting its organic weapons carriage capacity.

TWZ previously touched on many of these points after the Air Force floated the idea of a new light fighter, potentially as an alternative to the combat jet component of the NGAD initiative, back in 2024. That came amid a deep review of the NGAD requirements, which called its future into question. The service ultimately decided to stick with its original plan, leading to the F-47.

At the same time, the F-47 is supposed to be a heavy-hitting, deep-penetrating fighter in an era where standoff weaponry, even for very stealthy aircraft, is also of increasing importance due to advancements in enemy air defenses. So we will have to wait and find out if weapons carriage capacity was exchanged for other advantages or if the F-47 will pack a major, outsized punch of its own.

Other design aspects

Project Fear’s video does not offer clear insights into a host of other features that would be important factors in the overall design of the plane seen therein, as well as the future F-47. For instance, the shaping and location of the inlets are absolutely critical for safe and reliable engine function, and blending them with other aspects of a stealthy aircraft can be especially complicated. As Cummings noted, other essential components like the landing gear also have to be squeezed into the available volume, and trade-offs have to be made to accommodate everything that is necessary.

There are still questions about what engines the F-47 will use, even just initially. The Air Force has been pursuing so-called adaptive cycle designs through an adjacent effort known as the Next Generation Adaptive Propulsion (NGAP) program. General Electric and Pratt & Whitney have been working on competing designs, known as the XA102 and XA103, under NGAP.

In very general terms, adaptive jet engines have bypass ratios that can be adjusted on demand while in flight between modes optimized for fuel efficiency or power. With this kind of propulsion, a tactical jet like the F-47 could switch between higher and lower bypass modes as appropriate for general cruising, including transits to and from operating areas, and actual combat. This would help conserve fuel, as well as extend the aircraft’s range and loiter time. As TWZ has noted in the past, this could be particularly valuable in a future high-end fight against China in the Pacific, where tankers would be in high demand and under threat, and available bases could be few and far between.

The General Electric video below offers a general overview of adaptive cycle technology in relation to that company’s XA100 engine, which preceded its XA102 design.

GE XA100: Tested and Ready for F-35

“General Electric’s advanced programs lead, Harvey Maclin, was at the time [of the X-36’s development] talking about fluidic thrust vectoring — injecting air into an engine’s exhaust on one side or the other — as a solution that did not involve stealth-defeating outside flaps,” Sweetman wrote in a piece for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (APSI), which was published on June 16. “Maclin was GE’s advocate for an engine design (the Controlled Overall Pressure-ratio Engine) that had evolved from the variable-bypass F120, the losing candidate for powering the ATF. This new design could switch from a configuration good for subsonic flight (as a turbofan) to a turbojet mode that could push a fighter through the air supersonically without afterburning – that is, it could cruise supersonically. The design was the direct ancestor of today’s adaptive engines and a perfect match for an X-36-like combat aircraft.”

Supercruise is a huge factor here. As mentioned earlier, this is a key capability for the F-22, with its two F119 turbofans. However, the Raptor also has a notoriously short combat radius. Its design is optimized for higher-speed flight, but it still consumes a lot of gas in supercruise. As such, F-22s typically only use their ability to cruise supersonically for relatively short dashes. The jets also regularly fly with underwing drop tanks to extend their range and on-station time, but this negatively impacts their radar signature. Stealthy drop tanks are now in development as part of a larger Raptor 2.0 upgrade package. TWZ has discussed much of this in the past in a detailed piece that explored what might be expected from the NGAD combat jet in terms of performance, which was published years before the F-47 selection.

Unrefueled combat radius and maximum range requirements are also key parts of this equation.

“My preference would be one of the newer types that are compound engines with variable flow, where they have [the] capability to operate both as what you call a turbofan and as a turbojet,” Cummings also told us. “They’re more complex, but I think in the end you would get the kind of range you’re going to need out of this airplane in the Indo-Pacific region. I think the range, just my estimations, I think the range is going to be double that of the F-22. I think it’s going to have to be double to get the range in the Indo-Pacific region.”

“It’s not, but I think it will be,” he added when asked if he felt this view was reflected in what has been seen on the F-47 design so far. “I think it will be part of the design. I think the engine will have to meet the needs of extremely long range. That’s my opinion.”

As noted earlier, the Air Force has said the F-47’s combat radius will be “1,000+” nautical miles, which is long, but not necessarily as long as many were expecting. The infographic that provided the specifications for the service’s forthcoming sixth-generation fighter also offered figures for the F-22 (590 nautical miles) and the F-35A (670 nautical miles). Based on the official data, the F-47 will offer at least a roughly 30 percent boost in combat radius over the F-35A. This is broadly similar to what the Navy has said it is aiming for with the F/A-XX in terms of range extension (a 25 percent increase) compared to existing types.

As mentioned in the discussion about the wings, the need to carry sufficient fuel to meet (or even exceed) unrefueled range targets will have impacts on various aspects of the design. This would notably be another potential trade-off when it comes to determining the size and configuration of the weapons bays.

There are other performance parameters to consider, as well, including operational ceiling. F-47’s capability in this regard is expected to be in line with that of the F-22, which is capable of regularly operating at over 60,000 feet. Flying at similar altitudes and being able to remain there longer would be advantageous for the F-47. A perch like this would extend the reach of its weapons and increase the field of view for its sensors. This would also be very beneficial for line-of-sight datalinks, including those used to control drones.

Another outstanding question is whether the F-47 might be a single- or two-seat design.

“I suspect it will be [a two-seat] one. There’s been a lot of talk about having a two-place [design] to operate the CCAs, but I don’t know – it would have to be in the requirements to start with,” Cummings said. “The way they would do it was, there would be, like the F-18 [F/A-18 Hornet], there would be a common fuselage that accommodated both a single and a two-place [configuration] from day one. You would do it from day one. You wouldn’t do it later.”

TWZ has long highlighted the value of two-seat designs, including the Air Force’s new F-15EX Eagle II, in the airborne drone controller role. Cumming said that if it were up to him, he would have a two-seat version available for this reason.

“I’m looking at what’s going on with the CCAs. I would at least have a two-place version on paper,” he said. “Because, and again, this is just my opinion, with all the information that’s coming in, especially like on F-35, all the information that’s coming in on all the other threats and everything else that’s going on, to do that, along with operating the CCAs, to me [it] would be a bit overwhelming. And if they’re really, really going to have that many CCAs in the air, again, just to me, it just seems reasonable and logical to have a second seat, at least in some versions.”

Advances in autonomy, helped by developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning, could help reduce the workload to a level that is more manageable by a single pilot. There would still be major tradeoffs to doing this, especially given the broader complexities of the missions that F-47s are expected to be tasked with.

Go with what you know

At the end of the day, one of the biggest factors for Boeing in designing the F-47, and that of its progenitors, may just be efforts to leverage past work on designs like the Bird of Prey and the X-36 to help burn-down risk. Broader institutional practices can also drive companies to lean toward particular designs as a rule.

“It’s been my expectation that Boeing would lean heavily on their experience with Bird of Prey and the X-36. It’s deeper than risk reduction in the traditional sense,” Steve Trimble, another long-time aviation journalist, Aviation Week‘s defense editor, and friend of TWZ, told us. “These companies have a system of design codes that they’ve built up over decades that they stray from at their peril. You build what you know, in other words.”

“Beyond that, it’s difficult for me to comment knowledgeably about why Boeing went this route versus a tailless delta. They obviously committed to that approach three decades ago for a reason,” he added. “Darold Cummings has spoken about how difficult it was to make his Christmas Tree design for Northrop controllable, but Boeing accepted a similar challenge. One would presume that their analysis showed it was worth it. But I don’t feel knowledgeable enough to speculate on their reasons.”

“I didn’t have any particular expectations. Western concept art is usually misleading and has no input from the high side,” Sweetman also told us. “I had seen what I thought was some X-36 legacy in the 2025 concept, but would not have gone there without the connection of Wiechman consulting for the RCO [Rapid Capabilities Office] (and presumably the APO [Aerospace Projects Office] too).”

The Wiechman mentioned here is Alan Wiechman. He “began his career at Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works, supporting the HAVE BLUE, Sea Shadow, and F-117 Nighthawk” and then later worked for McDonnell Douglas, where he “contributed to many efforts including the F-15, F-18E/F, F-23, X-45, X-36, the Boeing Bird of Prey, and other classified activities,” according to an obituary following his passing in 2023.

The Rapid Capabilities Office that Sweetman referred to is a U.S. Air Force organization that has led work on several cutting-edge, high-priority programs over the years, including the development of the B-21 Raider stealth bomber and the X-37B reusable spaceplane. The Aerospace Projects Office is part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). DARPA had a direct hand in the crafting of at least two classified X-plane demonstrators that fed into the Air Force’s Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program, which birthed the F-47.

“Wiechman’s obituary in 2023 noted that he had ‘most recently’ been an adviser on stealth to the USAF Rapid Capabilities Office,” Sweetman also wrote in his APSI piece. “And now there’s an X-36-like shape over Nevada.”

At several points during his interview with us, Cummings also reiterated his particular design preferences.

“If I were doing the airplane, and I’ve done it, I would use the longest straight edge possible,” Cummings told us. “Looking down from the top or the bottom, you really couldn’t see the inlet, it would be underneath the wing, and you would use the MANTA-type 3D thrust vectoring. To me, that would be the optimum.”

“The ‘Christmas Tree’ design, to me, is not a very maneuverable airplane. It’s not very maneuverable, because it really has difficulties at high-angle-of-attack maneuvering, like tight turns, because you have the way the surfaces are laid out,” he added. “For an overall airplane that’s not a four-spike, I would rather do the designs … like the MANTA type of a layout than what we’re seeing in the pictures of what they’re saying is the Boeing F-47.”

Lingering questions

Many questions still remain as to why the Air Force would pursue a sixth-generation fighter with rear-swept wings and canards rather than a more triangular, modified delta-wing planform. As noted, the design that looks to be emerging now could offer greater maneuverability, but also trade-offs in other capabilities as a result. This is all despite a steady trend in downplaying the importance of maneuverability in future aerial combat and focusing more on engaging threats beyond visual range, hopefully before friendly forces are even detected. This has been going on for decades now, and has been fueled further by the advancement of stealth technology and deeply networked ‘kill webs’ that incorporate assets from across air, land, sea, space, and even cyberspace domains.

“The other thing is, it’s really interesting when we did it with YF-23 – and this is, again, 43 years ago – the whole thing was first shot, first kill,” Cummings noted in speaking with us. “Before the enemy even saw, you killed them. You don’t really need to maneuver.”

As another point of comparison, despite its previous experience with fourth and fifth-generation canard fighters, China has notably gone in the opposite direction with its next-generation J-36 heavy tactical jet and, to a lesser extent, the aforementioned J-XDS. The J-36’s planform is clearly optimized for straight-line performance, combat radius, and payload over maneuverability and agility. The smaller J-XDS presents a more balanced design, but one that is still not likely to possess extreme agility. Much debate remains about the expected mission profiles of both of these aircraft, and how that influenced their design. TWZ explored all of this in far greater detail in a feature last year.

As highlighted at the start of this story, years of prior concept art from U.S. companies, including Boeing, had also largely pointed to a canard-less, tailless delta-wing design being in line to become the U.S. Air Force’s next-generation fighter. Canards have been present, on-and-off, in renderings of notional sixth-generation carrier-based designs for the U.S. Navy.

It’s worth pointing out here that we also have very little information on the designs that lost out to the F-47. In 2025, former Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall said that Boeing’s design was distinctly different from the competing entry from Lockheed Martin, but did not elaborate further. He also described both designs as viable. Kendall’s remarks came during an edition of the Defense & Aerospace Report‘s Air Power Podcast.

How the Air Force’s Agile Concept Employment (ACE) concepts of operations could have shaped the selection of the F-47, and the aircraft’s design, is something else worth considering. ACE is a set of concepts for distributed and disaggregated operations that puts heavy emphasis on deploying forces rapidly or in an otherwise irregular manner, to forward locations that may be remote, austere, or otherwise non-traditional in nature.

Visualizing ACE

ACE is seen as critical for enabling future operations and reducing the vulnerability of friendly forces, especially in a high-end fight, such as one against China in the Pacific. New logistics and other requirements are also now emerging, particularly when it comes to what will be necessary to push stealthy platforms with more specialized maintenance requirements far forward. The demands of ACE operations are already known to be deeply baked into the Air Force’s requirements for its future CCA drones. It could very well be that this unique canard and rear-set wing design was significantly better than a modified delta for operating from shorter fields, we just don’t know.

The first F-47 is in production now, and the Air Force has publicly said that it is targeting a first flight in 2028. Despite some speculation about what was seen in the Project Fear video, there is no hard evidence so far that it has already entered flight testing. The Air Force will eventually have to show the actual design to the public, at least in part, with the fighter set to be the service’s premier tactical aviation asset, starting hopefully in the early 2030s.

There is always the possibility that the actual F-47 looks quite different from what we have seen so far, and even does away with the canards. We have no indication that this is the case at this time. In fact, now with this demonstrator aircraft, everything points to that not being the case.

As progress continues on the F-47, more insights into what certain design decisions were and what benefits they offer, as well as more details about their origins, should emerge. For now, it is interesting to see a design continue to materialize that is distinctly different from what many were expecting the Air Force’s sixth-generation fighter to look like.

Special thanks again to Olivier Vargas for sharing his interpretation of the design seen in the Project Fear video.

Contact the author: joe@twz.com

A brand new famous face from Strictly makes their debut on Celebrity Gogglebox this week

Celebrity Gogglebox has signed up a Strictly Come Dancing favourite and her long-term partner for the new series.

The Channel 4 spin-off programme returned to screens last month for its eigth series, welcoming back firm favourites, such as Vernon Kay and Paddy McGuinness, Nick Grimshaw and niece Liv, and Denise Van Outen and Johnny Vaughan.

There are several new additions to the new series too, including Olivia Attwood and her mum Jennifer, Harry and Matt aka Nitro and Legend from Gladiators.

And now, it’s been confirmed that radio DJ and The Saturdays singer Mollie King will make an appearance on Friday’s episode (July 9) with her partner, former cricketer Stuart Broad.

Mollie is best known for being a member of chart-topping girl group The Saturdays. She also appeared on Strictly in 2017 and partnered with AJ Pritchard. Mollie was eliminated in the semi-final in December, finishing in fifth place.

As well as telly work, Mollie also has her own BBC Radio 1 alongside Matt Edmondson, in which they co-host from Mondays to Thursdays. Talking about her Gogglebox appearance, Mollie said: “Getting to do Celebrity Gogglebox with Stuart was such a lovely experience.

“Between juggling busy schedules, there’s nothing I enjoy more than switching off together in front of the TV, so it felt really special to share a little bit of that with viewers.”

Mollie added: “We had so many laughs filming it and, although I can’t promise we agreed on every programme, we had the best time.”

Meanwhile Stuart said about his appearance: “Celebrity Gogglebox was a genuinely enjoyable experience and a chance to show what Mollie and I are really like when the remote control is up for grabs. We had plenty of opinions, a few disagreements and a lot of laughs along the way.”

Other new faces on the latest series of Gogglebox include Strictly star George Clark and content creator Max Balegde comedian and actor, Julian Clary and actor and television presenter, Nigel Havers.

Talking about being on Celebrity Gogglebox Strictly 2025 finalist George Clarke also said: “I loved it, mainly because it gave me a full excuse to take the mick out of Max on national TV.

“He reacts to everything, so you’re never bored. It’s so easy to get into as well, you just sit there, say exactly what you’re thinking, and before you know it, we’ve gone completely off track!”

Coronation Street legend Nigel Havers also shared: “It’s a dream come true working with Julian on Gogglebox. I can’t think of a better way to spend an evening… (Julian wrote this).”

Celebrity Gogglebox airs every Friday at 9pm on Channel 4.

Beard will complete a long season after the final two Wales matches against Argentina and South Africa in Durban next weekend.

The former Ospreys lock had only just linked up with the Wales squad a couple of days before the Fiji game, following a mammoth first season with French club Montpellier, which included a Challenge Cup success and losing the Top 14 final to Toulouse.

“I have personally loved it and it was probably the best decision I’ve made rugby wise so far for myself and my family,” said Beard.

“It was a tough decision at first, leaving the Ospreys after being there since I was 14.

“But it was probably something, if I didn’t join Montpellier, I might have regretted at the end of my career.”

While playing in France is a tough challenge, it is also a rewarding one said Beard.

“It’s a physical league and you’ve got to play 30 games a season,” he added.

“But just the support and passion, everything they do out in the Top 14 is a different level to what I’ve experienced before.

“So it’s been an amazing move for myself and my family.”

July 10 (UPI) — The Justice Department filed a lawsuit against Maryland on Thursday challenging the state’s laws that limit local law enforcement’s cooperation with immigration agents, the latest legal salvo in the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration.

Federal lawyers with the Justice Department’s Civil Division have filed about 20 lawsuits against so-called sanctuary policies that the Trump administration argues violate the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause, under which federal law supersedes state policies.

“Federal immigration officers merely enforce the laws that our nation’s elected representatives in Congress passed, reflecting the will of ‘We the People,'” Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward said in a statement.

“When sanctuary jurisdictions enact laws to shield illegal aliens from federal law enforcement, it is not merely federal law that is violated, but the voices of everyday American voters silenced.”

The Community Trust Act, passed by Maryland’s General Assembly, took effect immediately on May 31, 2026, limiting local cooperation with federal immigration authorities amid the Trump administration’s aggressive crackdown.

Opponents criticize the law as permitting the harboring of undocumented migrants, while advocates argue such policies are needed to create safe communities by reducing barriers that hinder immigrants from communicating with law enforcement.

In the lawsuit, the Justice Department argues that by enforcing the Community Trust Act, Maryland was unlawfully interfering with the federal government’s enforcement of federal law, in violation of the Supremacy Clause.

“Maryland has no lawful interest in assisting removable aliens to evade federal law enforcement. The state’s prohibitions on cooperation with federal immigration agencies have endangered public safety, resulting in criminals being released into Maryland rather than turned over to immigration authorities for removal from the United States, as required by Congress,” the federal lawyers said in the complaint.

“The challenged laws are not a mere passive effort to avoid providing state or local resources to federal officials but rather are an active and deliberate effort to obstruct federal immigration enforcement.”

The Maryland Freedom Caucus, a group of Republican state delegates, celebrated the lawsuit’s announcement in a Thursday statement, saying it is challenging “Maryland’s dangerous penchant for favoring noncitizens over lawful Marylanders.”

From targeting sanctuary laws to seeking to end humanitarian protections for migrants from crisis-hit countries, the Trump administration has sought to remove obstacles to its mass deportation campaign, drawing staunch opposition from civil and human rights advocates.

Under a Trump executive order, the Justice Department has identified dozens of states, counties and cities, mostly Democratic-led, that have sanctuary laws.

US President Donald Trump gave his blessing earlier this week to domestic Ukrainian production of the missiles.

Ukraine must make every effort to start domestic production of desperately needed Patriot interceptor missiles as soon as possible, now that Washington has agreed to grant Kyiv the necessary licences, President Volodymyr ⁠Zelenskyy has said.

Speaking to reporters on Thursday after returning from this week’s NATO summit in Turkiye, Zelenskyy said that political approval had been obtained from US President Donald Trump when they met in Ankara and the challenge now was to quickly take the practical steps needed to begin production.

“We resolved this issue ‌politically,” he said. “It’s now very important that our technical teams, all our representatives from different ministries, representatives of the executive branch, start working on this without delay, so that we can get licences very quickly and start production in Ukraine as soon as possible.”

Although Kyiv has received regular donations of Patriot missiles from its allies for its defence against Russia’s invasion, global supplies are running low, and Ukraine is using the interceptors at a faster rate than they can be produced in the US.

Zelenskyy has been pressing the US to allow Ukraine to start producing the missiles itself to overcome the supply shortage.

At a joint news conference with Zelenskyy in Ankara on Wednesday, Trump told him: “We’re going to give a licence to you to make Patriots. This way, you can’t complain that we’re not giving them enough.”

The Patriot is a US-made air defence system. Its PAC-3 interceptor – short for Patriot Advanced Capability-3 – is one of the few Western weapons capable of shooting down the ballistic missiles Russia has ⁠increasingly fired at Ukrainian cities.

Zelenskyy said his meeting with Trump had been a success, and he had also reached agreements with European allies.

“I believe this was a productive summit for Ukraine. In the coming days, we’ll receive a package from the United States, and there were also some separate agreements,” he said, referring to securing more PAC-3 interceptors.

“President Trump has repeatedly emphasised that today, only two to three countries in the world can produce Patriots, because the others are not technologically ready. Ukraine is recognised by America as a country that is ready to do this,” Zelenskyy said.

“Now, after our agreement with the president, our teams, our diplomats, the foreign ministries and defence ministries need to agree on all the remaining technical details. The sooner we reach those agreements, the sooner we will be able to produce Patriots.”

Patriot production will take months

However, Serhii Beskrestnov, an adviser to Ukraine’s defence minister, warned that setting up domestic production of the mobile, surface-to-air systems will take many months.

On his Telegram channel, Beskrestnov said a production licence would typically come with technical process documentation, training for specialists, supplier contacts and foreign consultants to help launch manufacturing.

The main obstacle would be time, rather than Ukraine’s technical or organisational capacity, he said, due to bottlenecks, including the long production cycle for some subcontracted components, which could take 12 to 24 months.

During the NATO summit, Trump praised Zelenskyy for doing “an amazing job”, a sharp change in tone from past criticisms of the Ukrainian leader.

Trump insisted that he remained determined to facilitate a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine.

“It’s not the easiest; not the easiest thing,” the US president said of an eventual peace settlement. “There’s a lot of commitment, and there’s a lot of love of the countries and everything else. But I think we’ve made a lot of progress in the last couple of weeks.”

EastEnders have brought back two characters, whose return are set to shake things up for the rest of Walford as one threatens to kill his rival amid family troubles

EastEnders have welcomed back some iconic characters to the Square. Original character Sharon Watts (Letitia Dean) and killer Ravi Gulati (Aaron Thiara) returned in Thursday’s episode – and both of them have bad news for their fellow Walford residents.

Sharon’s return was revealed early on in the episode, when her brother, Zack Hudson (James Farrar), came home to see her in the hallway.

Zack was delighted to see his sister, as was her ex Phil Mitchell (Steve McFadden), who helped Sharon organise the surprise. But things soon turned sour between Sharon and Phil as she announced that she was selling her share of their boxing gym.

Shortly after, Ravi’s return was also aired. He was seen getting out of a car after almost running over his ex Priya Nandra-Hart (Sophie Levy). Ravi made it clear that he wanted to get back together with Priya and be a proper dad to their children again, but Priya wasn’t having it.

She stormed off and when he caught up to her, Priya berated him for leaving her. Ravi said that he was “ill”, having only recently left a mental health ward, but Priya fumed that she had stood by him and raged that he slept with her before breaking up with her when he left the hospital.

When Ravi insisted that Priya must care about him or she wouldn’t have sent him a picture with her new man in the background, she suggested that she’d moved on from him.

Unbeknownst to Ravi, his rival for Priya’s attention is Max Branning (Jake Wood). But that didn’t stop Ravi from issuing a threat. He told his stepmother, Suki Panesar-Unwin (Balvinder Sopal) that he wasn’t going to let anything get in between him and his family and if that man tried, he would kill him.

Following Ravi’s threats, some fans suggested that he might be the mysterious gunman who holds Max’s children hostage at New Year.

The gunman was first seen during the flashforward on 1 January 2026, holding Lauren (Jacqueline Jossa) and Oscar (Pierre Counihan-Moullier) at gunpoint before telling Max to choose one to save.

One fan wrote: “It’s either setting things up for NYD already (and my theory about Ravi being the gunman being correct) or the biggest red herring.”

A second said: “The nerve of wanting Priya back when he’s treated her like dirt! And issuing death threats… They are trying to sell him as the gunman.” A third asked: “So the gunman in the flash-forward is gonna be Ravi huh?”

The gunman’s identity is one of many mysteries ahead of New Year. Fans had also been wondering who Max would be marrying on that day, but that has since been confirmed as Cindy Beale (Michelle Collins) who is not only engaged to Max, but who booked their wedding venue for New Year’s Day in Thursday’s episode.

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ARLINGTON, Texas — Wyatt Langford lined a shot off the wall in left field to bring home Alejandro Osuna in the ninth inning, lifting Texas to a 7-6 victory over the Angels after the Rangers blew a five-run lead Thursday night.

Langford struck out three of his first four times up as the designated hitter after getting activated from the 10-day injured list in his return from a left hamstring strain.

Osuna led off the ninth with a single and went to second on pinch-hitter Nicky Lopez’s sacrifice bunt. Langford lined a 1-and-1 fastball from former Texas closer Kirby Yates (0-4) over Jose Siri’s head for the winning single.

Jo Adell had a tying, pinch-hit single to cap a five-run seventh a night after homering twice in the Angels’ 13-1 victory.

Cole Winn (4-2) got Adell on a sharp liner to center field to end the ninth with the potential go-ahead run at third after replacing All-Star closer Jacob Latz, who went 1⅔ innings in his first outing in nine days.

Nathan Eovaldi struck out a season-high 10 for Texas but failed to get his 10th win for the fifth consecutive start. He exited with no outs in the seventh after Dezner Guzman reached on catcher’s interference, Logan O’Hoppe walked and Wade Meckler’s single scored Guzman.

Peyton Gray replaced Eovaldi and gave up a two-run single to Nolan Schanuel, who had four hits, and an RBI single to Jorge Soler.

Brandon Nimmo, Ezequiel Duran and Justin Foscue homered for Texas in the first four innings against Reid Detmers. The left-hander hadn’t given up more than one long ball in any of his first 18 starts.

Up next: Neither team announced the rotation for its final series before the All-Star break. Indications are the Angels will go with RHP Grayson Rodriguez (2-2, 8.06 ERA) on Friday at Minnesota. He has been on the injured list since mid-June because of lower back tightness. Texas is home against Houston.

July 9 (Asia Today) — South Korea’s ruling Democratic Party introduced a revision to the Criminal Procedure Act on Thursday that would abolish prosecutors’ supplementary investigation power.

The bill would remove prosecutors as investigative agents while strengthening their authority to request supplementary investigations from police. The party said the measures are intended to reduce investigative gaps.

The Democratic Party’s task force on revising the Criminal Procedure Act submitted the bill to the National Assembly’s bill office. The proposal would completely separate investigation and indictment. It would abolish prosecutors’ supplementary investigation power while strengthening their authority to request further investigations and introducing the power to request the replacement of investigators, increasing oversight of investigative agencies.

Kim Han-kyu, the party’s senior deputy floor leader for policy, told reporters after submitting the bill that the revision is designed to adjust investigative authority, strengthen checks and supervision over investigative agencies and enhance protections for victims and complainants ahead of the planned Oct. 2 launch of new investigation and prosecution agencies.

The Democratic Party removed the legal basis for prosecutors’ direct investigations from the bill. But it added a one-month deadline for police to complete supplementary investigations requested by prosecutors. In cases in which the statute of limitations is about to expire, prosecutors would be allowed to set a shorter deadline. The bill also allows one extension.

If a judicial police officer assigned to a supplementary investigation is deemed inappropriate to handle the case, the head of the prosecution office would be allowed to request the replacement of the investigator. The bill also allows supplementary investigations to be assigned to another investigative agency.

Prosecutors’ authority to demand corrective measures would also be strengthened. Even before a case is referred to prosecutors, if a prosecutor confirms that an investigative agency conducted an improper investigation, the prosecutor would be allowed to receive the case from judicial police and transfer it to another investigative agency.

Police would also be required to submit investigative records and lists of materials to prosecutors in cases they decide not to refer for prosecution.

The bill strengthens victim protection provisions. If an improper investigation is suspected, suspects as well as complainants, victims and legal representatives would be allowed to file reports about the case. Prosecutors receiving such reports would be allowed to demand corrective measures from the investigative agency or transfer the case to another agency.

The Democratic Party plans to review the bill Friday at the National Assembly Legislation and Judiciary Committee together with previously submitted bills.

Rep. Kim Seung-won said the committee’s first bill review subcommittee plans to meet once or more than twice a week to conduct an intensive and swift review.

— Reported by Asia Today; translated by UPI

© Asia Today. Unauthorized reproduction or redistribution prohibited.

Original Korean report: https://www.asiatoday.co.kr/kn/view.php?key=20260709010003729

South Korean computer chip maker SK Hynix has raised $26.5bn (£19.8bn) in its New York share offering, marking the largest ever listing by a foreign firm in the US.

The company, a key supplier to artificial intelligence (AI) chip giant Nvidia, said on Thursday that it had sold 177.9 million American depositary shares for $149 each. The shares are set to begin trading on Friday on the Nasdaq.

In May, SK Hynix saw its market value top $1tn in its home country, lifted by the boom in demand for AI chips.

Its share price has more than tripled in South Korea this year, which along with Samsung Electronics has helped boost the benchmark Kospi index by more than 70% over the same period.

SK Hynix is one of the world’s leading memory chip makers. The industry has been given a major boost by the hundreds of billions being spent on AI.

Shares in rivals Samsung Electronics and Micron have more than doubled in recent months.

The US listing gives SK Hynix easier access to huge amounts of potential investment from the world’s biggest economy, which has fewer barriers than South Korea, said Seoul National University finance professor Jaewon Choi.

Traders are closely watching the listing as a “yardstick to test the water” for whether investor enthusiasm for memory chip makers will continue, Choi said.

The AI boom has triggered a rush of companies raising money on the the stock market.

In June, GrokAI owner SpaceX became the world’s biggest ever listing as it raised $85.7bn.

Meanwhile, AI developers Anthropic and OpenAI are preparing to go public, with valuations of more $1tn.

Demand for SK Hynix’s offering was reportedly over seven times more than the number of shares available, highlighting the strong investor appetite for a key company in the AI supply chain.

Each American depositary share is equivalent to a tenth of a Seoul-traded common share, SK Hynix said.

The offering gives US investors a way to buy SK Hynix shares without having to trade via an overseas stock exchange.

The company has pledged major investments to develop South Korea’s chip making and AI capabilities in the coming years.

The country’s government is likely to be counting on SK Hynix’s US listing to raise funds that can support the firm’s domestic investments, said Hanyang University business professor Yun Youngjin.

But the Nasdaq listing carries some risks, especially if investors move money towards the US and away from South Korea’s stock market, Yun added.

In June, the country’s government unveiled plans for more than $880bn of investments in partnership with SK Hynix and Samsung.

Both SK Hynix and Samsung have stock market valuations of more that $1tn, joining growing group of firms which includes tech giants Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft and Google-owner Alphabet.

Emmerdale stars Matthew Wolfenden and Roxy Shahidi suffered big losses on BBC’s Celebrity Antiques Road Trip

An Emmerdale icon suffered a massive financial loss during an episode of Celebrity Antiques Road Trip, leaving their co-star thoroughly unimpressed.

In a repeated episode of the BBC programme, originally broadcast in 2024, Matthew Wolfenden and Roxy Shahidi searched the Yorkshire Dales for antique treasures with the assistance of experts Hettie Jago and Steven Moore, hoping to turn a profit.

After spending money on various items, the auction arrived – but things went disastrously wrong for both Matthew, who portrayed Davide Metcalfe on the soap, and Leyla Harding actress Roxy. Matthew’s vintage stereoscope was first, which he’d purchased for £20, but disappointingly fetched just £7.

Next came Roxy, hoping her Derbyshire pietra dura paperweight – bought for £15 – would command an impressive sum. “If this doesn’t make a profit we were robbed because that’s worth at least £100,” Roxy’s expert Steven declared.

Sadly it sold for merely £14. A devastated Stephen confessed: “I need therapy,” while Roxy watched in disbelief.

Matters deteriorated further for the soap pair when bidding commenced on Matthew’s Art Deco rouge pot, purchased for £90. The opening bid was £10, prompting Matthew to gasp “oh no,” before it eventually sold for a paltry £16, reports the Express.

Matthew’s astonished teammate Hettie was left open-mouthed, while a stunned Matthew exclaimed: “I’m gobsmacked!” Meanwhile, Roxy’s final item was a magic lantern, which they had splashed out a whopping £236 on. Sadly, it failed to generate the interest she had anticipated.

The lantern fetched a mere £30 at auction. Upon hearing the outcome, Matthew couldn’t resist a cheeky dig at his former soap co-star Roxy, chuckling away as Hettie told her: “I’m so sorry.”

When the auction wrapped up, the final tallies revealed who had come out on top financially. Roxy and Steven ended up making a loss of £284.38, meaning Matthew and Hettie were crowned the victors, having incurred a smaller loss of £225.46.

Afterwards, a triumphant Matthew teased Roxy: “Can you see the smile on my face?” Roxy replied: “Yeah I can see it.”

Matthew added: “Why’s that?” With gritted teeth Roxy said: “That’s because you won…” as Matthew erupted in celebration.

Celebrity Antiques Road Trip airs on BBC Two.

Kylian Mbappe scores his eighth goal of this World Cup to make up for an earlier penalty miss with Ousmane Dembele adding a second as France prove too good for Morocco and move into the semi-finals.

MATCH REPORT: France 2-0 Morocco

Available to UK users only.

July 9 (UPI) — A federal Washington, D.C., planning agency advanced plans Thursday night for President Donald Trump‘s 250-foot triumphal arch, clearing a key procedural hurdle toward construction despite staunch opposition from historic preservation groups.

The National Capital Planning Commission approved preliminary site and building plans in an 8-1 vote, with three members voting present, during a meeting at its Washington headquarters.

The sole objector, Evan Cash, representing D.C. Council Chair Phil Mendelson on the panel, said he would not vote in its favor. He said the plans would “have the effect of upending decades of NCPC practice and thee century-old height framework.”

According to the proposed plans, the arch would be constructed across the Potomac River in Virginia. At 250 feet tall and 166 feet wide, it would be twice the height of the Lincoln Memorial.

Rob Nieweg, senior vice president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, also objected to the project.

Nieweg told the commission that the arch would “overwhelm” nearby historic landmarks, including the Lincoln Memorial, Arlington House and Memorial Bridge, while being inconsistent with “the solemn character of Arlington National Cemetery.”

“Each new rendering submitted for this proposal is totally inappropriate in its scale and location,” he said.

“The new images clearly show that the arch blocks the view of the Lincoln Memorial from vantage points on the Virginia side. It looms larger on the skyline than everything other than the Washington Monument. From the District side, placing the arch in the foreground completely overpowers the sacred rolling wooded hills and rows of white grave markers at Arlington National Cemetery.”

The vote comes after the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts approved a modified design of the arch in May. A final vote on the plan will take place at the September commission meeting, NCPC Chair Will Scharf said.

“It’s disappointing that the NCPC approved the preliminary site and building plans for the Monumental Arch today, and we remain strongly opposed to its scale and locations,” the National Trust for Historic Preservation told UPI in an emailed statement.

Trump proposed the arch as he has sought to remake the capital in his own image, including plans for a new White House ballroom and renaming the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to include his name, among others. Several of those efforts have been met with lawsuits.

The U.S. Navy’s Nimitz class aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln has been underway for 210 straight days – well over half a year – in support of Operation Epic Fury and the subsequent blockade of Iran. This looks to be a record-setting milestone. Lincoln, the flagship of Carrier Strike Group 3 (CSG-3), is currently operating in Middle Eastern waters.

Abraham Lincoln, the fifth Nimitz class supercarrier and self-styled “most capable CSG in the fleet,” departed Naval Base Guam on December 12, 2025, after a quick one-day port call. Port calls, or temporary visits to friendly countries, allow the crew to disembark for “liberty” – to step on solid ground – and break up the grueling, nonstop schedule experienced during deployments. However, the stop in Guam, a strategic U.S. territory in the Western Pacific, was so brief that much of the crew likely never went ashore.

Lincoln and CSG-3, made up of more than 5,000 Sailors and Marines, quietly left Naval Base San Diego three weeks earlier on November 21, 2025. At the time, the U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean was the focus of public attention, and Lincoln was expected to conduct a routine Pacific patrol. An Iran contingency was on the table following Operation Midnight Hammer, when B-2 bombers struck nuclear targets deep inside Iran, and Lincoln’s Composite Training Unit Exercise (COMPTUEX) included preparing for a fight in the Middle East. COMPTUEXs are weeks-long capstone training events for carrier strike groups that come right before they deploy.

After leaving Guam, Lincoln conducted operations in the South China Sea before entering the Indian Ocean and arriving in the northern Arabian Sea in late January. Aircraft from Carrier Air Wing (CVW) 9 launched sorties in the opening salvo of Operation Epic Fury, and the CSG was instrumental in enforcing the naval blockade that followed. Since the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) was signed on June 17, Lincoln has remained in the northern Arabian Sea, launching retaliatory strikes during the recent skirmishes.

The CSG has been deployed for more than seven months now and would likely be among the first naval assets to rotate out of the theater if an agreement is reached between the U.S. and Iran. The details and scale of the drawdown of forces in the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) AOR, as per the MOU agreed to by American and Iranian officials last month, are to be determined within 30 days if a final deal is reached before the deadline in mid-August. A new spate of tit-for-tat strikes just this week has created serious uncertainty around future talks between Washington and Tehran. More than 20 U.S. Navy surface combatants are still operating in the region.

“We’ve officially claimed the title for most consecutive days at sea for any modern aircraft carrier,” Lt. Commander Alexis Travis, an officer currently serving aboard Lincoln, wrote on Instagram on June 16.

We have reached out to the Navy to confirm whether this is indeed a record-breaking period at sea. However, we have not received a response as of the time of publication.

In June 2020, the U.S. Navy did announce that the Nimitz class carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Ticonderoga class cruiser USS San Jacinto had set a new record after spending 161 days consecutively operating at sea. Eisenhower did not make a stop in port until the next month, having been at sea for 206 consecutive days in the end. This was, in part, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, when port access was severely limited due to quarantine restrictions. The carrier had left Norfolk in January 2020 for a deployment to the Middle East and launched combat sorties during Operation Freedom’s Sentinel in Afghanistan, returning home nearly seven months later without a single stop. Prior to that, USS Theodore Roosevelt held the record in 2002, supporting the post-9/11 response. Roosevelt left Norfolk in September 2001 to participate in Operation Enduring Freedom and spent 160 days at sea before anchoring in Bahrain for a reprieve in February the following year.

In April, USS Gerald R. Ford, the newest American carrier and largest in the world, logged the longest deployment on record at 326 days. Ford, while deployed for nearly eleven months, was operating primarily in the U.S. European Command-6th Fleet area of responsibility (AOR) and U.S. Southern Command-4th Fleet AOR, which is relatively friendly territory, and made at least nine port calls in Marseille, Oslo, Palma de Mallorca, Split, St. Thomas Island, and Souda Bay. Between port calls and stops to refuel and make emergent repairs, Ford averaged a visit to port every 36 days.

The Lincoln CSG, which also includes guided-missile destroyers from Destroyer Squadron (DESRON) 21, served as the tip of the spear in Operation Epic Fury. DESRON 21 fired dozens of Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles (TLAMs) against Iran, and provided defensive measures for the CSG, using Standard Missiles and other armaments to intercept incoming threats. The embarked “air wing of the future,” CVW 9, launched thousands of sorties and pressured Iran’s southern axis during the 40-day war, successfully escorted commercial ships through the contested Strait of Hormuz, and hunted and disabled Iranian-affiliated vessels attempting to run the blockade. The carrier’s air wing notably includes F-35C Joint Strike Fighters assigned to Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 314 (VMFA 314), giving it better penetrating capabilities. The CSG has proven its ability to blend and interoperate high, medium, and low-end naval and joint capabilities, for offensive and defensive purposes, as well as integrate across platforms, including manned and unmanned systems, conventional and unconventional, surface and subsurface, overt and covert, and more, during nonstop combat operations.

The destroyers escorting Lincoln were able to make port calls before the war began, but some have been at sea for over four months. USS Frank E. Petersen Jr., the Integrated Air and Missile Defense (IAMD) Commander, moored at Navy Terminal in the Port of Duqm, Oman, for two days in mid-February. USS Michael Murphy, the last destroyer to leave the Persian Gulf before the first shots were fired, docked in Dubai, UAE, from February 25-27, and left the day before the city was targeted in the initial waves of Iran’s counterattack. Satellite imagery reviewed by TWZ at the time showed Murphy’s precise location the day prior was targeted. USS Spruance, the only San Diego-based destroyer operating with CSG-3, deployed on the same day as Lincoln, and has been at sea for just as long, with one port call in December in Guam. Spruance was spotted firing a black TLAM on the first day of Epic Fury.

“Literally no one signed up for this,” Lt. Commander Travis also wrote on Instagram. “And yet here we are, still doing it safely and successfully. Just a strong group doing tough stuff, breaking records and then waking up and doing it again.”

When the crew serving tirelessly aboard Lincoln will next set foot on land is unknown, and with the fate of the U.S.-Iran MOU similarly uncertain, it may be some time.

Contact the author: ian.ellis-jones@teamrecurrent.io

AFTER their star-studded wedding in New York last week, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s secret honeymoon location has finally been revealed.

Fans have of course been desperate to know where the newlyweds will be taking their post-wedding vacation.

The couple’s wedding was kept well under wraps and it seems the honeymoon has been no different.

In a bid to keep the location locked down, it’s been revealed that Taylor and Travis took different planes and airports to reach their destination.

NFL star Travis and pop queen Taylor are keen to enjoy their “newlywed bubble,” a source told the Mail.

They claim the A-listers hunkered for a few nights together before jetting off on their lavish getaway.

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Taylor and Travis were spotted at the ultra-exclusive Yellowstone Club in Big Sky, Montana, in the days following their nuptials at Madison Square Garden, according to the Mail’s source.

The smitten couple have been seen in the resort before and it’s quickly become somewhat of a quiet and private place for them to spend time.

Over the July 4 weekend, Taylor’s jet was loaned to family friends, who were spotted at her bougie $30 million holiday home in Rhode Island.

Flight paths show her plane then return through Nashville before it finally landed at Bozeman International Airport in Montana – a stones throw away from the Yellowstone Club.

To be granted a membership at the club, guests must own property on the site and pay the initial eye-popping membership fee of approximately $500,000, plus the yearly cost of $78,000.

Yellowstone Club features jaw-dropping mountain views, multiple pools including an infinity, rustic yet modern interiors and 15,200 acres of land.

Travis and 14-time Grammy Award winner Taylor have been to the luxury hideaway multiple times over the past few years with no snaps of the pair inside the gates ever surfacing online.

Last July, there was chatter they spent Independence Day weekend at the retreat and it was later confirmed by Travis himself as he donned a Yellowstone Club t-shirt in an episode of his podcast.

The resort is so exclusive that no one can enter without an invite.

Bill Gates, Tom Brady and Mark Zuckerberg are known members of the club.

Travis and Taylor tied the knot in front of 1000 of their closest family and celebrity pals on Friday July 3.

It was announced to the world at 7:30pm as the words “JUST&T MARRIED” flashed up on screens around MSG.

Whether or not France’s World Cup campaign ends with a third world title, few will remember Kylian Mbappe’s penalty miss in their quarter-final victory over Morocco.

The match in Foxborough was goalless when Mbappe was fouled by Noussair Mazraoui. The France captain stuttered in his run up, looked up at goalkeeper Yassine Bounou, and saw his tame penalty easily saved.

Mbappe made amends on the hour mark when his sensational curling effort broke a stubborn Morocco defence, before Ousmane Dembele doubled France’s lead six minutes later to secure a 2-0 win.

But his earlier blunder, uncharacteristic for the joint-top scorer in this tournament, begs the question: Is it time players stopped with the ‘stuttering’ penalty kicks?

In the list of things football traditionalists hate about the modern game, stuttering run ups are high up alongside players wearing gloves with short sleeve shirts, diving, and of course the video assistant referee (VAR).

There is no strict definition of a stutter, but under Fifa rules, a player is allowed to stop or feint during the run-up as long as they don’t do it directly before kicking the ball.

It’s nothing new – John Aldridge, Mexico legend Hugo Sanchez and Pele all used the stutter to gain an advantage – but it can backfire spectacularly if the goalkeeper doesn’t commit to diving early.

Mbappe joins Bruno Guimaraes, Jorgen Strand Larsen, Lionel Messi and Harry Kane (though he was able to retake his penalty against Croatia, which he scored without having a stutter in his approach) in missing penalties after stuttering in the run-up.

Of the 26 ‘stutter’ penalties taken during this World Cup – penalty shootouts included – 11 have not been scored, which leads to a conversion rate of 57%.

“This stuttering penalty seems to be the one. The goalkeepers seem to have got a march on it now,” said Ian Wright on ITV.

Marko Arnautovic, Raul Jimenez, Neymar, Mbappe, Cristiano Ronalo, Yoane Wissa and Kai Havertz have used the technique successfully.

Meanwhile, 24 of the 35 ‘non-stutter’ penalties taken have been scored, a conversion rate of 68%.

In general, this has been a poor World Cup for players looking to convert from 12 yards.

A total of 30% of non-shootout penalties have been missed this summer, the second most of any World Cup since records began in 1966.

When shootout penalties are added to the equation, then the miss rate rises to 35%, the highest of any World Cup since 1966.

“There is an arms race going on. It is definitely harder to score a penalty now. The reason being, the goalkeepers are bigger now, more athletic,” former Scotland winger Pat Nevin said on BBC Radio 5 Live.

“If your keeper goes the right way, you must hit the side netting with pace, even then it still might be saved.

“A very good penalty is no longer a certainty, so you have to re-think it. I need to make sure he goes the wrong way, hence the stutter, you try to send them the wrong way.

“Of course the goalkeepers have the data, they know what everybody does, there is no hiding what you prefer because it shows up. There is a constant running battle to figure out how you get the advantage.

“Mbappe knows what his advantage is: preparation. He has a set up [placing the ball before taking the penalty], he went through it twice today but problem is that he had to go through it three times, and the third time [he missed].”

This source provides a historical overview of State Rebellion Day, a significant civic holiday celebrated annually on July 9th in São Paulo, Brazil. The article details how the 1932 Constitutionalist Revolution emerged as a localized uprising against the administration of Getúlio Vargas following the tragic deaths of four student demonstrators. Although the federal government eventually suppressed the armed revolt, the text highlights that many of the protesters’ original objectives were ultimately met. Today, the event is remembered by Paulistasas a defining moment of regional pride and remains the final instance of large-scale internal warfare in the nation’s history. By documenting these events, the source con … 

Caracas, July 9, 2026 (venezuelanalysis.com) –  Venezuelan Acting President Delcy Rodríguez has called on UK King Charles III to release her country’s gold reserves held at the Bank of England in order to finance relief and reconstruction efforts following the devastating earthquakes that struck Venezuela on June 24.

“I have decided to send a letter, among others, to the King of England asking for the release of the gold being held at the Bank of England. That gold belongs to our people and should be used to address the terrible, tragic consequences of the twin earthquakes,” Rodríguez said in a televised broadcast on Wednesday.

The acting president also revealed that she held a phone conversation with International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva to discuss the release of Venezuelan resources that remain blocked by the institution.

Earlier on Wednesday, during a virtual meeting with the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Venezuelan Foreign Minister Yván Gil likewise urged countries holding Venezuelan assets abroad to “begin a process of releasing” those funds so they can be used for the country’s recovery.

Gil specifically referred to the gold reserves held by the Bank of England and Venezuelan funds blocked under US sanctions. Around 31 metric tons of gold, currently valued at approximately US $4.2 billion, remain frozen in London. In addition, nearly $5 billion in Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) allocated by the IMF in 2021 also remain inaccessible.

On Wednesday, Rodríguez and Georgieva reportedly discussed the use of Venezuela’s $350 million SDR reserve fund, which is different from the SDR allocation.

On June 25, the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) issued General License 60, authorizing earthquake relief-related transactions until October. However, OFAC’s waiver does not authorize the unblocking of assets subject to US sanctions regulations or “any other transaction or activity prohibited by another Executive Order.”

Meanwhile, 113 prominent economists, including Isabella Weber, Jeffrey Sachs, and James K. Galbraith, signed an open letter calling for immediate action to “unfetter Venezuela’s humanitarian response and reconstruction from ongoing economic and financial sanctions, asset freezes, and onerous debt burdens.”

“We urge governments, international financial institutions, and creditors to act now, on the principle that lives, public health, and economic recovery take precedence over coercion and collection,” the statement read. The economists suggested mechanisms including emergency liquidity, sanctions relief, and debt cancellation as a “minimum response […] to allow Venezuelans to rebuild with dignity.”

Along similar lines, UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Tom Fletcher warned that the earthquakes are likely to generate “a very difficult economic situation” that could reduce Venezuela’s GDP by “several percentage points,” arguing that sanctions “must be eased so they do not hinder the arrival of humanitarian assistance or recovery efforts.”

Fletcher added that during emergencies, access to financial resources, banking channels, and international cooperation mechanisms can determine how quickly aid, supplies, and reconstruction funding reach affected communities.

Preliminary assessments by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) estimate infrastructure and essential services losses at approximately US$6.7 billion. However, the final figure could reach $8.7 billion, depending on housing and asset losses, and the estimates do not include the full extent of infrastructure damage or the long-term reconstruction costs.

For its part, the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) estimates that rebuilding Venezuela will require approximately $37 billion. According to its assessment, $24 billion would be needed to replace damaged buildings—including homes, schools, businesses, and hospitals—while another $13 billion would be required to repair critical infrastructure such as telecommunications, highways, and electricity networks.

Different analyses have placed the recovery costs between $12 and $20 billion.

So far, however, the Trump administration has pledged $300 million in humanitarian assistance, whereas Venezuela’s US-based frozen assets are valued at $11-13 billion. The White House also retains control over Venezuela’s oil export revenues, returning a portion of the funds to Caracas at its discretion.

Rodríguez announced on Wednesday that countries offering humanitarian aid can monitor its distribution through a digital platform used to coordinate deliveries across the 87 temporary shelters established for displaced families throughout the country. The acting president has vowed to prioritize the well-being of families who lost their homes and to provide new housing solutions in the coming months.

The latest official update placed the death toll from the earthquakes at 3,889, while the number of injured remains at 16,740 and the number of displaced people stands at 17,907.

Edited by Ricardo Vaz in Caracas.

THE Prince and Princess Of Wales have paid tribute to singer Bonnie Tyler, describing her as a “proud Welsh icon” following her death aged 75.

Bonnie died on Wednesday night, months after being treated in intensive care and being placed in an induced coma following emergency intestinal surgery.

A post on William and Kate’s joint Kensington Palace account said: “We are deeply saddened by the passing of Bonnie Tyler.

“A proud Welsh icon, her extraordinary voice and unforgettable music touched millions around the world and will continue to inspire generations to come.

“Our thoughts are with her husband, family, friends and all who loved her. Diolch am y gerddoriaeth (thank you for the music).”

Bonnie was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) by the Prince Of Wales in 2023 for services to music.

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It comes after Chicago star Catherine Zeta-Jones said her “heart is broken” after the Total Eclipse Of The Heart singer’s death.

Catherine, 56, said Bonnie was a big part of her life after marrying her cousin Robert Sullivan and paid a heartfelt tribute to the Welsh singer, real name Gaynor Hopkins.

The actress shared a photograph of the pair together on Instagram which was taken the night before her wedding.

She said: “An extraordinary woman with vocals to match. A one of kind artist, who so easily could have been a comedian because she was one of the funniest people I ever met.

“Thank you Bonnie for the joy you brought so many. Sleep tight beautiful lady. We shall forever ‘Keep A Welcome In The Hillsides’ of Wales for you. Sending my love to Robert and the family.”

A statement on the singer’s official website said her family and team were “heartbroken” after she “unexpectedly passed away” on Wednesday night in a hospital in Portugal where she was being treated near her home in Faro.

Catherine was among the stars who paid tribute to the singer including Sir Cliff Richard, Sir Rod Stewart and rockstar Bryan Adams.

Sir Cliff, who sang a duet with Tyler on the 2019 song Taking Control, said she was a “wonderful friend gone too soon” in a post shared on Facebook.

He added: “Bonnie’s infectious zest for life entertained so many around the world, and to be a good friend to all, including me.

“It is shocking news to wake up to this morning and I send my love to her family at this very sad time.”

Bonnie was due to perform at the Sunshine Festival in Worcester this summer, along with a number of European dates, and was also booked to perform at Cardiff’s Utilita Arena on December 17.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer also paid tribute to the singer, who he described as “one of Britain’s greatest recording artists”.

The Prime Minister’s official spokesman said: “An iconic figure, she leaves behind a catalogue of music – from Total Eclipse Of The Heart to Holding Out For A Hero – which continues to touch lives, flood dance floors and fill karaoke booths.”

He added: “The Prime Minister’s thoughts are very much with her friends and family.”

The singer achieved international fame in the 1980s with the release of Total Eclipse Of The Heart, which shot to the top of the charts in the UK and the US.

Faster Than The Speed of Night, the album which featured the smash-hit track, was also a chart-topping success and landed the singer her only UK number one album.

Recognisable for her husky voice, Bonnie released many other hit songs over the years including Holding Out For A Hero, It’s A Heartache and If You Were A Woman (And I Was A Man).

Welsh First Minister Rhun ap Iorwerth led tributes on Thursday and said Wales had “lost a true icon”.

He posted: “I am deeply saddened to hear of the passing of Bonnie Tyler.

“Wales has lost a true icon, whose music brought joy to so many.

“I extend my heartfelt condolences to her family, friends and fans across the world.”

She represented the UK in the 2013 Eurovision Song Contest in Malmo, Sweden, with the song Believe In Me finishing in 19th place.

Welsh broadcaster Carol Vorderman also paid tribute, writing: “I’m so very sorry to hear this. As a Welsh woman Bonnie and her music represented so much to us, it was about fighting and power and living life without apology.

“May you rest in Musical Glory Bonnie.”

The star, who was born in Neath in South Wales, continued to make music and perform until her death, having released her 18th studio album The Best Is Yet To Come in 2021.

Despite being a widely acclaimed and globally-renowned star, Bonnie never received a Grammy Award during her decades-long career but did receive three nominations.

Bonnie’s official website appears to have crashed since the news of her death was announced.