Bulgaria has won Eurovision for the first time, pushing Israel into second place amid boycotts and protests over Israel’s wars in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran. The result reignited debate over the apparent double standard with Russia banned for invading Ukraine.
Published On 17 May 202617 May 2026
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MUSIC fans were divided after Oli Sykes slammed them for leaving his band’s gig early.
Oli, 39, fronts the massive band Bring Me The Horizon and went on the rant at their recent gig in Nashville, USA.
Kneeling on the stage wearing a large cowboy hat with a pink feather hem, Oli angrily pointed in the direction of the crowd in a video posted to TikTok by user @professionalconcertgoer.
“Now I start seeing t***s leaving early to beat the traffic… I can see one there, that c***t and he’s a VIP one too,” Oli said looking into the audience.
“Why did you pay all that money for?”
Fans of the band explained their reasons for needing to leave gigs before they finished and also slammed Oli’s attitude.
“I always think it’s wild when artists talk about the fans that lined their pockets like this. I thought better of Oli,” wrote one person in the comment section of the TikTok.
Another added: “Oli my brother in Christ the last bus / train home is like 10:45 we have to leave early or we’re sleeping on the street.”
But a third commented: “I’ll never understand why people leave early. I’ve done it a couple of times and have regretted it every time.”
While a fourth posted: “He said this in toronto too, i felt bad but he’s gotta take it up with go transit 😭 if i miss my train i’m stranded in the city, i don’t have money or a credit card to get a hotel for the night.”
Bring Me The Horizon formed in 2004 and have released six studio albums.
They have been nominated for two Grammys and this year won a Brit for Best Rock/Alternative Act. They’ve also scooped seven Kerrang! gongs in a career that dates back 20 years.
There was no greater sign of a mainstream breakthrough than when they collaborated with Ed Sheeran for a souped-up version of his hit Bad Habits at the Brit Awards in 2022.
Adding rocky riffs and synths to the catchy pop tune, the heavier element clearly thrilled Ed who performed the collab with a big grin.
Last year, Oli officialy became a dad after his Brazilian model wife Victoria Alissa Salles Silva announced she had given birth to twins.
In an Instagram post, she shared an image of the tots – writing, “amor infinito,” which translates to “infinite love”, adding, “grey & zélia.”
Ticket prices are just the start of the soaring expenses many fans will face while trying to watch World Cup games this summer.
NJ Transit is charging $150 for round-trip tickets from Manhattan to the Meadowlands (the regular price is $12.60) for the World Cup final, while host committee shuttle buses will cost $80.
The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority is demanding $80 to ride one of the 14 express trains on the 30-mile trip from downtown Boston to Foxborough for games at Gillette Stadium. That’s more than three times the normal price.
Parking in Kansas City, meanwhile, will set you back by as much as $900, depending on the game and lot.
In Southern California, however, it will cost $1.75 to get to SoFi Stadium on a combination of buses or trains from as far away as Claremont and Simi Valley. That’s also what it costs to get to the Inglewood venue on any other day of the year; only two of the 11 World Cup cities in the U.S. are offering less expensive public transportation.
“We’re trying to make things convenient,” said Conan Cheung, the chief operations officer for the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, or LA Metro, the second-largest transit agency in the country, servicing more than 305 million riders in 2025.
That’s a marked departure from the experience fans have reported ahead of this summer’s World Cup, which was marked by complaints over difficulty getting access to buy tickets, high ticket prices, shifts in seat locations after they were purchased, high fees and expensive game-day transportation.
“There’s no standardized fare set across the board,” Cheung said of World Cup transportation. “We’ve made a commitment to keep our system accessible. The way we’re planning the entire program is to ensure that we support people from the minute they decide to come to L.A. for the World Cup.
Workers are getting SoFi Stadium ready to host World Cup matches this summer.
(Eduard Cauich / Los Angeles Times )
“We also want to make sure that your excitement and your experience for the World Cup starts and ends on Metro.”
LA Metro has been able to hold costs down in part because it received $9.6 million in funding from the $100 million Congress gave the Federal Transit Administration to support transportation to and from World Cup stadiums. LA Metro is adding about 300 buses to its regular fleet to handle the additional demand, with shuttles servicing nine direct routes to SoFi and various fan zones.
Roughly 200 of those buses will lent to LA Metro from 11 regional transit agencies. Additional security officers also will be added.
“I feel prepared,” Cheung said, “but you never know what’s going to happen. We’ve done enough major special events to know that you can do all the planning in the world, but you need to make sure that you have contingencies in place and you’re prepared to pivot at a moment’s notice.”
A case in point: when Game 3 of last fall’s World Series went into extra innings, LA Metro immediately extended the operating hours for Metro buses and trains, ensuring people had rides home when the game ended just shy of midnight.
“Part of our preparedness is going through tabletop exercises,” he said. “The point is to ensure that the flow from the parking, from the transit connection and walking up made sense and was intuitive and easy to follow.”
Since Metro trains don’t run directly to SoFi, Cheung has added shuttle buses to take fans from the stations to the stadium. Portable restrooms and hydration stations will be available. And nine park-and-ride sites will be set up around L.A. and Orange counties. Reserve and pay for a parking space and everyone in your car can ride to the stadium for free. (Be sure to bring a lot of friends since the parking fees range from $59 to $102 for the June 12 opening match.)
A pair of visitors from Japan rush to catch a Metro bus in March.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Cheung said LA Metro has been preparing for the World Cup almost as long as some of the players. When Taylor Swift brought her Eras tour to SoFi in the summer of 2023, LA Metro used that as something of a dress rehearsal for the World Cup, expanding late service and adding free shuttles from nearby train stations.
That increased ridership by 25%, which meant less traffic on the roads and freeways leading to the stadium. A repeat of that could be crucial during the World Cup since five of the eight games played at SoFi are scheduled to start at noon local time.
And just as the Taylor Swift concerts prepared LA Metro for the World Cup, now the World Cup will help inform preparations for the 2028 Olympics.
“A lot of the strategies that we’re doing now — the process for working with not only local jurisdictions, state and federal agencies, as well as the other transit agencies in the regions — we’re setting up ways that are going to help not only for the Olympics and Paralympics, but anytime we need to pull together to support our communities for special events [or] natural disasters.”
For more information on LA Metro services in and around the World Cup, go to www.metro.net/riding/world-cup
⚽ You have read the latest installment of On Soccer with Kevin Baxter. The weekly column takes you behind the scenes and shines a spotlight on unique stories. Listen to Baxter on this week’s episode of the “Corner of the Galaxy” podcast.
WASHINGTON — Amid the din of battle over the federal budget, President Clinton summoned Democratic congressional leaders to the White House last week and gave them an unexpectedly upbeat message: With a little discipline and a little luck, they might win this fight yet.
“The Republicans are very disciplined and very good,” Clinton warned his war council around the Cabinet Room’s long mahogany table, according to people who were present. “But we’re making headway.”
Congress’ drive to cut the budget this spring was launched by triumphant GOP leaders, confident that they had a mandate from voters to slash government programs and shrink the federal budget deficit to zero.
But after three months of rhetorical battle, Clinton believes that he has begun to turn the Republicans’ issue around–into a major political opportunity for himself.
The budget battle is “the centerpiece” of Clinton’s work this year, said White House Chief of Staff Leon E. Panetta. “It will determine a lot about the priorities of the country; it will determine a lot about our economy in the future; it will determine a lot about the role of government.”
It will also determine a lot about how voters view Clinton as the election year of 1996 approaches. “It . . . will better define who the President of the United States is, and I think that’s helpful,” Panetta said in an interview.
Transforming budget-cutting from a liability into an asset would be a startling turnaround for a President whom Republicans succeeded in painting as a “tax-and-spend Democrat” only last year. But public opinion polls read raptly by White House aides suggest that the voters are moving Clinton’s way: An ABC News-Washington Post poll last week found that while respondents by a wide margin once trusted Congress over Clinton to deal with the deficit, the President has nearly closed the gap.
Clinton’s biting attacks on GOP plans to shrink Medicare, education and veterans programs have helped lift his approval rating in the poll to 51%, its highest level in a year.
White House strategists said they were not worried that the House Republicans passed their GOP budget plan last week, as was long expected. More important, they said, was that Clinton apparently succeeded with his threat to veto a GOP spending-cut bill, since the GOP leadership acknowledged that they probably wouldn’t have the votes to override a veto. It showed that the President can still make himself relevant.
Clinton is betting that House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and other GOP leaders overestimated the public’s desire for cutting government–especially once the public realizes that the savings would come not only from unpopular programs, such as welfare and foreign aid, but also from middle-class benefits.
Political strategists note that Clinton’s argument may attract some swing voters–especially white women older than 35, one of the President’s critical demographic targets. Making up more than one-fourth of the electorate, they largely voted for Clinton in 1992, abandoned the Democrats in 1994–and could be key to his prospects in 1996.
At the same time, Clinton and his aides believe that they must eventually seek a budget compromise with the Republicans–if only to avoid the charge that the President has become irrelevant to the process of shrinking the government, a goal most voters still want.
“Preserver of the Big Government status quo is not a place you can end up in a fight this big,” one presidential adviser said.
So Clinton, Panetta and other aides have devised a two-part strategy to try to stop the GOP juggernaut and turn the budget battle to their advantage.
The first phase has been to shift the topic away from the deficit, force the public to confront the kind of cuts the Republicans want and paint the GOP as heartless vandals who would loot Medicare and student loans to give tax cuts to the wealthy.
“Less government? That’s not the issue. The issue is: Do you want your kids to go to college?” Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich said.
If that tactic works, and Republicans retreat from their proposed spending and tax cuts, then the Administration wants to sit down and try to negotiate a compromise, a budget “that might be nobody’s first choice but that is really quite a good budget,” said Alice Rivlin, director of the Office of Management and Budget.
But Clinton doesn’t want to begin those negotiations until “his leverage is at a peak,” Panetta said, meaning the President wants to continue whipping up public opposition to GOP budget cuts and threatening to veto a budget he doesn’t like, at least for a while.
“The Republicans are beginning the budget triage, amputations and decapitations, and for the moment the Democrats are happy to sit in the surgical theater and watch the blood flow,” said Ross K. Baker, an expert on Congress at Rutgers University.
Already, however, Panetta and other Administration officials have begun sending signals to Capitol Hill about the kind of deal Clinton might eventually want to make.
“Yes, we want additional deficit reduction,” Panetta said. “But in order to engage, the Republicans have to back off these huge tax cuts, they have to recognize that any Medicare or Medicaid savings have to be done in the context of [health care] reform, and they have to be willing to protect education as a key investment.” Almost everything else is “on the table,” he said.
One key concession the White House has quietly offered: Clinton is willing to drop most or all of his proposed $500-per-child tax credit–the core of his long-promised “middle-class tax cut”–if Congress agrees to make college tuition tax-deductible.
Those early signals suggest to some members of Congress, including some worried liberal Democrats, that Clinton may be willing to give up quite a lot–except for his major concerns on Medicare, Medicaid and education–for the chance to claim a victory.
When bargaining can begin in earnest depends mostly on the GOP’s tolerance for pain. Aides say Clinton will stay on the attack for at least three weeks as Republicans pass their budget resolutions and begin making decisions on the discretionary portion of the budget.
But White House officials hope that the solid Republican line will begin to fracture as members of Congress read the mood of their constituents. Some in Congress predict a turning point could come as early as the Memorial Day recess, which begins Saturday, but others warn that it might be September before negotiations start.
The White House strategy is not assured of success, of course. At least three problems loom:
First, Clinton has succeeded only partially in changing the focus of the debate from deficits to middle-class benefits. By a wide margin, the public still says it wants a balanced federal budget, with no deficit. The President’s dirty little secret is that he doesn’t think a balanced budget can be achieved in the foreseeable future at reasonable cost.
In fact, the public is inconsistent on these issues. Large majorities say they want to balance the budget, but equally large majorities say they are opposed to significant cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, student loans and other education programs.
Second, Democrats aren’t entirely unified behind Clinton’s strategy, which is why the President spent much of his meeting in the Cabinet Room last week appealing for more discipline.
Some strains were already evident in the closed-door session, participants said. House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) urged Clinton to give the Republicans no quarter, but Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) said: “It’s not enough to complain; we need to say where we go from here.”
Third, and most important, the Republicans may not cooperate. “Democrats have no standing to say anything about what we are doing in the House and the Senate,” House Budget Committee Chairman John R. Kasich (R-Ohio) said last week. Gingrich and Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) often disagree with each other, but they agree on one point: They don’t want Clinton to win credit for their hard work in fashioning a leaner federal budget. So they may be tempted to pass a budget bill of their own design and dare Clinton to veto it this fall.
That would lead to a messy confrontation that could require the federal government to halt routine operations until a solution is found.
“I don’t think anyone comes out a winner” in an impasse like that, Panetta said. “I don’t think the President wins; I don’t think Republicans or Democrats win.”
