August

Barbara Palvin and Dylan Sprouse are expecting their first child together.

The model debuted her baby bump Thursday at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, where she walked the red carpet for the premiere of “Parallel Tales” along with her husband.

The couple posed for photos at the event, drawing attention to their gestating bundle of joy by framing and caressing Palvin’s belly. According to TMZ, the baby is due around August or September.

Palvin and Sprouse also took to Instagram to share their happy news. Included in the slideshow they posted Thursday is what appears to be a sonogram image of a fetus in a womb, throwing a “rock on” hand signal.

“High School Musical” star Vanessa Hudgens, who appeared alongside Sprouse in “The Suite Life of Zack & Cody” in 2006, was among the couple’s well-wishers on social media.

“Rock on little family,” Hudgens wrote in her comment, which also included a heart emoji.

The former Disney Channel star and Victoria’s Secret model first met at a party in 2017. In a 2018 video for Vogue Australia, Palvin shared that Sprouse was her first boyfriend in six years and described him as a “perfect guy” who is “very kind and gentle.” The couple tied the knot in 2023.

In April, Sprouse tackled a trespasser at his Hollywood Hills home after Palvin spotted “the creepy” intruder. Palvin called the police, and Sprouse held the suspect down until they arrived.

Driven by a race to get ahead of quickly evolving enemy capabilities, the U.S. Navy is now aiming to enter the next step of contracting for its 6th-generation crewed fighter – known as F/A-XX – by August. Despite intervention from Congress, the next-generation carrier-based fighter has remained in limbo since the Pentagon moved to effectively shelve the program last year.

That’s according to Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Adm. Daryl Caudle, who spoke with reporters Monday at the Sea-Air-Space 2026 exposition near Washington, D.C. In response to a question from TWZ, Caudle acknowledged the uncertainty that has kept F/A-XX in a holding pattern, even as the Air Force’s future fighter, dubbed the F-47, has forged ahead. The current competitors for the F/A-XX are Boeing, which is also the F-47’s prime contractor, and Northrop Grumman.

“One of the challenges we’re seeing is, not only [are] our peer competitors improving their capability for anti-air, either air-to-air or surface-to-air, but the lower cost of entry of very capable weapons is also making more players on the field in which that level of stealth and technology is required,” Caudle, the Navy’s top officer, said. “So this is not about the need for a peer adversary. This is just having an aircraft that can operate with a level of uncertainty and with the acceptable level of risk.”

This is in line with arguments Caudle made in favor of moving ahead of F/A-XX in January, where he cited growing threats posed by smaller nation-state adversaries, including Iran, as well as non-state actors.

Today, Caudle again emphasized that he nevertheless had been “very vocal” on the need for a carrier-based next-generation fighter, and had expressed “many times” to Deputy Secretary of War Steve Feinberg that the service had to secure the aircraft. It’s important, Caudle said, for both the future carrier air wing and collaboration and planning with the MQ-25 Stingray, the Boeing-made carrier refueling drone set to reach initial operational capability later this year.

“It ties to our MQ-25 for stealth refueling. It ties to our reach. It ties to the work we’re doing for making the carrier air wing something that remains very effective into the future based on the range in which you can operate safely,” Caudle said. “So the need’s clearly there.”

MQ-25A Stingray first taxi test

While it was recently reported that the Navy, bolstered by funding from Congress for the new F/A-XX, planned to award a contract for the program by year end, Caudle said August was now the likely timeframe.

As noted, the Pentagon had moved to essentially shelve F/A-XX in its Fiscal Year 2026 budget request, with the Navy only requesting a relatively meager $74 million for the program. U.S. officials said at the time this decision had been driven largely by concerns about the ability of the U.S. industrial base to support work on two sixth-generation fighters, the other being the F-47, simultaneously.

Congress subsequently interceded, appropriating $1.69 billion for F/A-XX through a combination of regular spending bills and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. From a budgetary perspective, the Navy’s next-generation fighter program remains well behind the F-47, which has already received billions in funding and could be in line to get approximately $5 billion more in Fiscal Year 2027. The Navy only appears to be requesting an additional $140 million for its new carrier-based combat jet in the $1.5 trillion proposed defense budget for the next fiscal cycle.

“We’ve got a lot of airframes out there. We’ve got an F-35 program. We’ve got a F-47 program. You know, we’re still building the [F/A-18 Super Hornet] … there’s a lot of airplanes being built,” Adm. Caudle said today. “The Air Force has got a lot of demand on the system. The Navy’s got a lot of demand … One of the contractors who would make this plane for us is in a place where they really can’t deliver in the timeframe we need it. So there was, you know, a check twice, cut once, kind of mentality here on this decision. And now there, I think we’re all on the same page on the reason why the hard look needed to be done. I’m good with it.”

As noted, Boeing and Northrop Grumman are in competition to produce the F/A-XX, a program that first took shape as a Navy request for information in 2012. An earlier down-select reportedly eliminated Lockheed Martin in March 2025. Last August, Northrop Grumman released a rendering of its concept for the aircraft, showing a streamlined nose and landing gear on the front of a carrier with the tagline, “Project Power Anywhere.” Boeing’s concept, released the same month, drew visual comparisons to its F-47 Next-Generation Air Dominance fighter for the Air Force.

Citing classification, Adm. Caudle said today he couldn’t provide any information on design or payload details that give the Navy confidence in pursuing F/A-XX despite the adversary threats he mentioned. However, he suggested speed was increasingly essential to having a chance at maintaining overmatch.

“We monitor very closely, red-team that very hard, and assess that threat with a predicted trajectory of whether or not the existing designs we’ve seen will still overmatch that,” he said. “So I think we’re okay there, but we do know that our existing airframes could become vulnerable to some of those threats by the time [it’s fielded] … because it takes time to deliver that, that our existing airframes could be vulnerable to some of those threats, and we want to make sure the air wing of the future can still participate.”

Despite Caudle’s comments today, it should be remembered that this is not the first time that major progress on the Navy’s next-gen fighter has supposedly been imminent. Last October, Reuters reported the program had been greenlighted by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, with a contract expected to follow in short order. 

Aside from funding moves from Congress to ensure the survival of the F/A-XX program, no public steps have been taken to advance the program since.

Contact the editor: Tyler@twz.com

LIV Golf appears to be dying on the vine but doesn’t want to say so.

Amid several reports that the Saudi-backed Public Investment Fund will cease its abundant funding of LIV Golf after the 2026 season, officials with the four-year-old PGA Tour competitor chose to focus on the fact that the show will go on — at least through August.

During a broadcast interview from the LIV tournament in Mexico City, LIV Chief Executive Scott O’Neil would not say if the league has a funding commitment from the Public Investment Fund, or PIF, beyond this year.

O’Neil responded to a question about golfer Sergio Garcia saying this week that LIV Golf Chairman Yasir Al-Rumayyan “told us at the beginning of the year that he is behind us, that they have a project of many years.”

“It’s just not the way the world works,” O’Neil said. “We have commitments to have this … the reality is you’re funded through the season and then you work like crazy as a business to create a business and a business plan to keep us going.

“But that’s not different from any other private equity-funded business in the history of mankind.”

The interview was pulled from the internet shortly after it was posted.

PIF announced a new five-year strategy Wednesday that will reduce international investments from 30% to 18-20% of the portfolio and place greater emphasis on Saudi domestic initiatives to promote sports. LIV Golf does not fit into that category and was not mentioned.

“PIF will continue to support Saudi Vision 2030 objectives by delivering competitive domestic ecosystems,” Al-Rumayyan said in the announcement. “The 2026-2030 strategy is a natural next step in PIF’s growth journey.”

PIF approved more than $250 million in additional funding for LIV Golf this year, hiking the total investment to more than $5.3 billion since the league was launched four years ago. Documented losses are more than $1 billion from 2022 to 2024, according to Forbes.

LIV Golf executives were rushed from various corners of the planet to a meeting this week in New York where the future of the operation was discussed in private and decisions were made.

A few flew in from Mexico City, where this week’s tournament began Thursday at the Club de Golf Chapultepec. It is one of the highest-altitude golf courses in North America, and LIV golfers took deep breaths before answering press questions about reports that the organization was on the verge of collapse.

“For me, it didn’t make sense to think about it or waste time thinking about,” superstar golfer Jon Rahm said after shooting a first-round 65. “Since everything happened so suddenly and so quickly, I wasn’t very worried about it because normally, before the rumors start, we already know something — there’s always someone within the league who knows something.”

Communication at the tournament was spotty. A power outage at the course Tuesday caused interviews to be canceled, and streaming of the first round Thursday was down for about two hours because of what were described as technical difficulties.

Yet nothing could stop the speculation and growing unease about the future of LIV Golf. Money continues to hemorrhage, as does the roster of big-name golfers.

LIV Golf purses each week are $30 million — 50% more than PGA Tour purses. Enormous signing bonuses were doled out to secure the services of superstar golfers Phil Mickelson, Dustin Johnson, Cameron Smith, Bryson DeChambeau and Rahm. All received bonuses of at least $100 million to defect from the PGA Tour, and Rahm, a relative latecomer to LIV Golf, received a reported $300- to $500-million bonus.

Yet original LIV Golf members Brooks Koepka and Patrick Reed recently returned to the PGA Tour. Others are bound to follow.

Former PGA standout Greg Norman was the LIV Golf chief executive until resigning in August, citing exhaustion. His comments upon exiting might have foreshadowed the current difficulties.

“I knew there were going to be a lot of headwinds,” he told the Australian Golf Digest. “I didn’t anticipate the magnitude of those headwinds because … as time went by, those headwinds were created by misperceptions.”

Norman was replaced by O’Neil, whose internal message to the LIV staff Wednesday attempted to quiet concerns about PIF pulling the plug. He urged the golfers to focus on the season that is already underway.

“We are heading into the heart of our 2026 schedule with the full energy of an organization that is bigger, louder and more influential than ever before,” O’Neil wrote in the message obtained by Sports Illustrated. “The life of a startup movement is often defined by these moments of pressure. We signed up for this because we believe in disrupting the status quo.

“We have faced headwinds since the jump, and we’ve answered every time with resilience and grace. Now we answer by doing what we do best: putting on the most compelling show in sports.”

One of those headwinds is that “a compelling show” can be a relative term. LIV Golf has been popular in golf-starved locales such as Australia and South Africa, but TV ratings are low everywhere and interest in events held in the United States is tepid.

PIF — worth an estimated $1.15 trillion — launched LIV Golf as part of a strategy to transform Saudi Arabia into a global sports hub, using its vast oil revenue to drive economic diversification, create jobs and boost tourism. Initiatives include massive investments in soccer, tennis and esports in addition to golf.

The PGA Tour countered by increasing prize money and creating a series of limited-field “signature events” for top players. Rory McIlroy and Tiger Woods are among the sport’s top stars to steadfastly remain loyal to the PGA Tour, with Woods turning down an offer from LIV Golf of $800 million in 2022.

Mexico City is the sixth stop in the LIV Golf 14-tournament season that concludes in August. The Individual Championship finale is scheduled for Indianapolis from Aug 20–23.