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A high-ranking Russian lawmaker claims his government recently sent Venezuela air defense systems and could provide ballistic and cruise missiles in the future. The comments, to an official Russian media outlet, are a response to the ongoing buildup of U.S. forces in the region aimed at narco-traffickers and Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro. Meanwhile, the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford is now in the Atlantic, heading for the Caribbean, which you can read more about later in this story. You can catch up with our latest coverage of the Caribbean situation in our story here.

“Russian Pantsir-S1 and Buk-M2E systems were just recently delivered to Caracas by Il-76 transport aircraft,” Alexei Zhuravlev, First Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Defense Committee, told Gazeta.Ru earlier this week.

“Russia is actually one of Venezuela’s key military-technical partners; we supply the country with virtually the entire range of weapons, from small arms to aircraft,” Zhuravlev added. “Russian Su-30MK2 fighters are the backbone of the Venezuelan Air Force, making it one of the most powerful air powers in the region. The delivery of several S-300VM (Antey-2500) battalions has significantly strengthened the country’s ability to protect important installations from air attacks.”

The delivery of Pantsir-S1 systems would appear to be a new development; however, without visual proof, we cannot independently verify Zhuravlev’s claim. An Ilyushin Il-76 airlifter, owned by the Russian Aviacon Zitotrans air transport company, did arrive in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas on Oct. 26 after a circuitous route from Naberezhnye Chelny in Russia, according to FlightRadar24. It is not publicly known what, if any, cargo was delivered. Defense News was the first to report the flight. It’s unclear is other flights have occurred, as well.

Russia has previously provided Venezuela with Buks and S-300VMs. It has also received 21 Su-30MK2 Flanker fighters that are capable of air defense missions, but they can also sling supersonic anti-ship missiles, as well as flying other types of missions.

Just how Maduro’s air defenses could affect any U.S. military strike on Venezuela is something we examined in our deep dive on the topic.

“Venezuela has an unusually varied collection of air defense assets, including smaller numbers of more capable systems. However, even most of the older surface-to-air missile systems have been upgraded and, as stated earlier, are generally highly mobile, meaning they can appear virtually anywhere, disrupting carefully laid mission plans. They could still pose a threat that would have to be taken seriously during any kind of offensive U.S. air operation directed against Venezuela.”

In addition to military aid already given to Venezuela, Zhuravlev suggested that Moscow, which recently ratified a mutual aid agreement with Caracas, could also provide long-range strike weapons.

“Information about the volumes and exact types of what is being imported from Russia is classified, so the Americans could be in for some surprises,” the Russian parliamentarian proferred. “I also see no obstacles to supplying a friendly country with new developments like the Oreshnik or, say, the proven Kalibr missiles; at least, no international obligations restrict Russia from doing so.”

The Oreshnik, a large, intermediate-range ballistic missile system, has been used against Ukraine by Russia. In August, Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed that production had started on the Oreshniks and reaffirmed his plans to deploy them to ally Belarus later this year. The Kalibr cruise missile, which can be launched from surface combatants and submarines, has been frequently used by Russia in its full-on war against Ukraine. 

With a reported maximum range of about 3,400 miles and a minimum effective range of about 400 miles, the Oreshnik could theoretically threaten much of the continental United States as well as Puerto Rico, which is being used as a staging base for the Caribbean operations. The Kalibr is thought to have a range of between 930 and 1,550 miles, which could possibly threaten the southern continental U.S., as well as facilities throughout the Caribbean.

Whether Russia can actually deliver any meaningful supply of these weapons remains unclear. The country is facing a shortage of air defenses after waves of attacks by Ukraine. Meanwhile, though Russia is still making them, it is unknown how many Kalibrs it still has after nearly four years of hitting Ukrainian targets. International sanctions have stymied advanced standoff weapon production in Russia. The rate at which new Kalibrs are being delivered isn’t known. Regardless, these standoff weapons are far more precious than they once were. The Oreshnik is an experimental weapon in very limited supply. That could change if Russia can produce them in meaningful quantities, but they are also larger and more complex to deploy. They would also be far more threatening to the United States than cruise missiles if they were perched in Venezuela, but that seems more like a questionable possibility in the future, not today.

While the exact extent of Moscow’s supply of new arms to Venezuela is also unknown, Putin has threatened in the past that Russia could provide standoff weapons to America’s enemies. As debate swirled last year about whether Ukraine’s allies would deliver long-range weapons to Kyiv, Putin said Russia could supply similar “regions” around the world where they could be used for strikes against Western targets. Venezuela came up as a possibility for where these weapons could go at the time.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s Caribbean buildup could give Putin a pretext to carry out his threat, and in America’s backyard. Trump has also been mulling giving Tomahawk Land Attack cruise missiles (TLAMs) to Ukraine, which would also fit into a potential narrative from Moscow to justify standoff weapons transfers. Clearly, some would draw direct parallels to the Cuban Missile Crisis just on the thought of such a notion. While there are clear similarities to that historic series of events, there are major differences too. It’s also possible Russia could give lower-end, but still long-range ‘deterrence’ weapons to Venezuela in the form of Shahed-136 one-way attack drones, which it has an increasingly large supply of.

We reached out to the White House and Pentagon for further context about the Russian lawmaker’s claims and will update this story with any pertinent details shared. The Pentagon referred us to the White House, which did not directly answer our questions.

Meanwhile, the Ford and one of its escorts, Arleigh Burke class guided missile destroyer USS Bainbridge, have passed through the Strait of Gibraltar and are now in the North Atlantic, a Navy official confirmed to The War Zone Tuesday morning. As we have previously reported, the Ford has been dispatched by Trump to take part in the ongoing operations in the Caribbean.

The rest of the carrier strike group’s Arleigh Burke class ships, however, are not with the Ford, according to the Navy. 

The USS Winston S. Churchill is the closest to the carrier, currently in the North Atlantic above Morocco, the Navy official told us. The USS Forrest Sherman and USS Mitscher are in the Red Sea while the USS Mahan is in Rota, Spain.

In addition, the San Antonio class amphibious transport dock ship USS Fort Lauderdale is now north of Cuba, the Navy official added. A U.S. official told us the ship is headed south to the Caribbean to rejoin the rest of the Iwo Jima Amphibious Ready Group (ARG)/22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) operating as part of the enhanced counter-narcotics operation. There are now eight surface warships, a nuclear-powered fast attack submarine, and the MV Ocean Trader – a roll-on/roll-off cargo ship modified to carry special operators and their gear – assembled in the region. There is also an array of aviation assets, among them F-35B stealth fighters, AC-130 gunships, airlifters and MQ-9 Reaper drones, deployed for this operation.

Amid all this signaling by the U.S. and Russia, the Trump administration has “developed a range of options for military action in Venezuela, including direct attacks on military units that protect Maduro and moves to seize control of the country’s oil fields,” The New York Times reported on Tuesday, citing multiple U.S. officials.

Trump “has yet to make a decision about how or even whether to proceed,” the newspaper noted. “Officials said he was reluctant to approve operations that may place American troops at risk or could turn into an embarrassing failure. But many of his senior advisers are pressing for one of the most aggressive options: ousting Mr. Maduro from power.”

The president’s aides “have asked the Justice Department for additional guidance that could provide a legal basis for any military action beyond the current campaign of striking boats that the administration says are trafficking narcotics, without providing evidence,” the publication added. “Such guidance could include a legal rationale for targeting Mr. Maduro without creating the need for congressional authorization for the use of military force, much less a declaration of war.”

Trump is also directing staff to brief more members of Congress on the aggressive anti-narcotics tactics in the Caribbean and Pacific, Axios reported on Tuesday.

“The unprecedented military maneuvers off Venezuela and the continual extra-judicial killings of unarmed suspects —at least 64 of whom have died in 15 boat sinkings— have sparked bipartisan calls for more intel on the White House’s decision making,” the news outlet posited.

While the U.S. is blowing up alleged drug boats in the Caribbean, it is also seizing them in the Pacific.

“MORE WINNING,” Trump posted on Truth Social Monday. “U.S. military captures another drug speedboat and seizes over 5,000 lbs of drugs and apprehends nearly 60 narco terrorists as part of its Operation Pacific Viper.”

In addition to operations against Venezuela’s drug trafficking organizations, NBC News on Monday reported that the U.S. was planning kinetic actions against cartels in Mexico. On Tuesday, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum pushed back on that possibility.

“It’s not going to happen,” Sheinbaum said during her daily morning news conference on Tuesday. “We do not agree with any process of interference or interventionism.”

It remains unknown at the moment if or when Trump will order an attack on Venezuela. He has previously suggested strikes on ports and other facilities associated with narcotraffickers. However, he has also delivered mixed messages, saying he doubts there will be an attack but that Maduro must go.

Contact the author: [email protected]

We paid half of what we were going to – and it was a nice way to end the holiday

Screaming kids and a four-hour delay. That’s what my boyfriend and I were faced with when we set foot in the airport last week – and after we decided to escape to the airport lounge no matter the cost, we were shocked that we were entitled to a discount, cutting the price in half.

Flying from Tenerife, we were due to land back home in Scotland at 11pm and instead arrived home at 4am – so it’s safe to say it was a heck of a delay. Thankfully, though, as my partner is a member of Monzo Premium, he got us a discount, and we had no idea it was a perk he was entitled to.

We were told the Montaña Roja VIP Lounge was €44 each, and whilst paying €88 seemed a lot, it was worth it. The last thing we needed was to end our holiday with parents ignoring their screaming kids, letting them run wild and screaming in people’s faces (I wish I was making that part up).

On top of that, airport chairs are not comfy enough for a three-hour wait – and that doesn’t even include waiting to board once we’re called to our gate. So how do you get the discount and how much did we end up paying?

How to get an airport lounge discount worldwide

We ended up paying a total of around £48, which brought it down to £24 each. Saving us half the price, we were delighted. We were given free WI-FI, access to showers (towels provided) as well as all-you-can-eat food and drink – including alcohol.

Explained on the Monzo Help page, the online-based bank revealed they have teamed up with LoungeKey to give anyone with Monzo Premium or Monzo Max discounted access to airport lounges worldwide.

It explained: “You and guests can access 1,100 airport lounges around the world for a flat fee of £24 per person, per visit. This rate includes Max Family, and you will need to pay per person, per visit.

“You are required to complete strong customer authentication (SCA) before visiting a lounge for the first time. You will only need to go through this process once, as subsequent transactions will be processed from your stored card on file.

“If you replace your card you will need to re-register the payment method and complete SCA again, this includes physically presenting your new card at the lounge the first time you intend to use it.”

Do you have to pre-book?

We didn’t book and instead just turned up, as it was never our plan to go to the lounge until we were faced with loud kids and a massive wait. Monzo explained that some lounges will allow you to pre-book before your visit.

Howeve,r if you go for this option, you will be charged at least £6 on top of your discounted price. It states this price is determined by the airport lounge and has nothing to do with Monzo.

It added: “If you visit on the day without pre-booking, you will just pay the discounted price of £24 per person, but this is dependent on whether the lounge has space.”

It is worth noting that Monzo says that customers will need to have their physical Monzo card with them for their first visit. We had ours with us, but were also able to give the staff the number on our card to get the benefit too.

So where are you planning on holidaying next – and will you be getting comfy in an airport lounge? Let us know in the comments.

Hebron, occupied West Bank – Among the more than 67,190 Palestinians killed in Israel’s war on Gaza, there has been a particularly heavy toll on journalists and media workers. More than 184 journalists have been killed by Israel in the war, including 10 Al Jazeera staff members, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Palestinian journalists in the occupied West Bank were only able to look on at their colleagues’ sacrifice in Gaza from afar. But they have also faced their own challenges, as Israel continues its near-daily practice of raids throughout the Palestinian territory.

As Palestinians in Gaza expressed relief at the news of the ceasefire deal, journalists in Hebron, in the southern West Bank, were documenting how Palestinians were being restricted from moving around large parts of the city because of the influx of Jewish Israelis as a result of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot.

Among the areas where Palestinians’ movement has been restricted is the Ibrahimi Mosque, also known as the Cave of the Patriarchs, in central Hebron.

As the journalists navigated the Israeli road closures, they sent their own messages to their colleagues in Gaza – who were forced to endure two years of war marked by displacement, hunger, and loss.

Mamoun Wazwaz, photojournalist

“A thousand blessings to all of you – those who work with the international agencies, TV channels, websites, radio stations, and in the field. You gave everything and sacrificed immensely. I pray that your suffering ends after two years of hell, and that you never live through another war. Your message was the most sacred and powerful in history. You shook the world – because you conveyed the truth. No one could have done what you did.

“The psychological and emotional impact of those who died will never fade. [I remember when Al Jazeera Gaza bureau chief] Wael Dahdouh stood over his son’s body and said, ‘They took revenge on us through our children,’ – I felt those words cut deep into my heart. I saw the footage on television and broke down crying. Imagine how his colleagues, who live it with him, must have felt.

“We live here in Hebron in constant contact with the Israeli occupation forces – there are frequent incursions and military checkpoints. After the war began, following October 7, 2023, the confrontations and clashes were intense.

“They treated us as part of the war, not as neutral observers, and used every possible means to fight us. Many times, I would say goodbye to my family as if it were the last time.”

“You journalists in Gaza sacrificed your lives for your people and homeland. You risked everything to convey the truth, the suffering, and the crimes against Gaza’s people. Whenever one of you is killed, I feel as it I’ve lost someone myself – as if I were the one wounded or arrested.

“You carried the message until your last breath, and you never stopped. You inspire us to continue the path you and the generations before you began. Thank you for every photo, every shot, every moment you captured for the world to see the many, many faces of war.

“War meant displacement. War meant famine. War meant being targeted by the military. War meant stopping education. Through your work, you made the world see it all.”

Raed al-Sharif, journalist

“My feelings are conflicted today after the ceasefire was announced. We in the West Bank followed everything happening in Gaza, where hundreds of journalists were killed or wounded, some losing limbs. What happened was a real crime, a genocide. Journalists [were especially targeted] because the occupation doesn’t want reports to come out of Gaza.

“Honestly, I feel ashamed as a Palestinian journalist. Despite our sacrifices in the West Bank, they don’t amount to even a drop in the sea of what our colleagues in Gaza experienced. They offered their lives and bodies – the most precious sacrifice of all.

“It’s our duty as Palestinian journalists to carry the voice of our oppressed people and continue the journey. The ones who affected me most are our martyred colleagues – like the al-Ghad cameraman Yazan al-Zuweidi, and Al Jazeera’s Anas al-Sharif and Mohammed Qreiqeh. As for Nidal al-Wahidi, he’s been missing since October 7 [2023] – we don’t know if he’s detained, martyred or wounded. That absence hurts deeply – he vanished from existence.

RONNIE O’SULLIVAN says he is loving his new life in Dubai – and loving the fact he now has a wife.

Snooker’s greatest ever player made two significant lifestyle changes this year and both of them have given him major contentment in his personal life.

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In June, the Rocket got married to long-term partner Laila Rouass, an actress and former Strictly Come Dancing contestant, in a low key ceremony in East London.

Few people knew about it until he announced the news on his Instagram page with a photo from the big day and the caption: “We finally made it official!! Mr & Mrs O’Sullivan.”

And then the couple packed up their belongings and moved to the UAE, which is an easier commute to events in China and his Saudi Arabia snooker academy.

On the benefits of heading to sunnier climes, O’Sullivan, 49, told SunSport: “It’s really good. I’ve got a great practice facility there, which was one of the main reasons for going.

“I was struggling to find somewhere to play. It was either get a train up to Sheffield or try to move to Sheffield.

“But my wife wasn’t too keen on Sheffield. So she said we either go Spain or Dubai.

“And I thought, well, Dubai is nearer China. Obviously it’s in the Middle East.

“All the tournaments that I play and all the work that I do is there. It just made sense to go to Dubai.

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“Really enjoying it out there. Great gyms. I’m enjoying that side of it.

“I had some friends over there before that played snooker and they’ve helped me get into Dubai life.

“I’ve met some really nice friends and fitted in really well. So yeah, it’s great.

“I’m not a sunbather, but I’d much rather the heat than cold, if that makes sense. Spring and autumn are my favourite times.”

Like most newly-married men, using the word ‘wife’ instead of girlfriend or fiancée in conversation has taken some getting used to.

O’Sullivan – who has three children from previous relationships – said: “Everyone just knows where they are a bit more.

“It probably feels a bit more mature, I suppose. It does take a while.

“At first I was like, oh, to say that word (wife), but now it feels pretty normal. It’s nice. Everything’s good. Everyone’s happy, which is the main thing.”

O’Sullivan has pulled out of three consecutive tournaments on medical grounds but his next appearance on the baize will be at the Xi’an Grand Prix, which starts on October 7.

In the meantime, he has thrown his support behind the launch of Pluto Snooker 900, the world’s first 24/7 dedicated snooker channel, which will stream free and on demand on Pluto TV.

The Snooker 900 format consists of 900 seconds (15 minutes) on the table, a 20-second shot clock, ball in hand for fouls and a sudden-death blue-ball deadlock shootout to settle ties.

The channel – which will initially broadcast 18 hours a week of live snooker from Monday to Wednesday – launches on Monday (October 6) with a Legends Week.

This will star golden oldies Jimmy White, Ken Doherty, John Parrott, Tony Drago, Joe Johnson and Tony Knowles.

Over the next 12 months, there is more than £600,000 in prize money pledged for amateur players.

And episodes of O’Sullivan’s acclaimed coaching series, The Rocket Method, will also be screened.

O’Sullivan, the seven-time world champion, said: “I remember filming the masterclass and after day three, having been on my feet for 12-13 hours a day, I couldn’t even walk.

“That was probably the hardest work we’ve ever done because we really had to crash it out.

“You’ll see every bit of advice from beginner to the real advanced stuff.

“I put it all on the table there. It’ll be great for any snooker or pool player or any cue sports player that wants to improve their game. I’ve really gone into big detail.

“Hopefully this new channel launches some snooker ambition in young players. It’s going to be like a bit of talent spotting.

“The 900 format, which sharpens the mind, is going to give people a chance to feel what it’s like to play on TV. Feel what the pressure and that nerve is like.”

As Dodgers players packed in for Clayton Kershaw’s retirement news conference last Thursday, Freddie Freeman waved the Kershaw family to a row of seats at the front of the room.

He wanted Kershaw’s wife, Ellen, and their four kids in front of the pitcher right when he sat down at the dais at Dodger Stadium.

How else, Freeman joked, could they get the future Hall of Famer to cry?

Turned out, in a 14-minute address announcing his retirement from baseball at the end of this season, Kershaw did get choked up from behind the mic. But, it happened first when he addressed his teammates. They, he told him, were who he was going to miss most.

“The hardest one is the teammates, so I’m not even going to look at you guys in the eye,” Kershaw said, his eyes quickly turning red. “Just you guys sitting in this room, you mean so much to me. We have so much fun. I’m going to miss it.”

“The game in and of itself, I’m going to miss a lot, but I’ll be OK without that,” he later added. “I think the hard part is the feeling after a win, celebrating with you guys. That’s pretty special.”

Days later, that message continues to reverberate.

For the Dodgers, it served as a reminder and a reset.

Ever since early July, the team had lived in a world blanketed by frustration and wracked with repeated misery. Many players were hurt or uncharacteristically slumping. The team as a whole endured an extended sub-.500 skid. Behind inconsistent offense and unreliable bullpen pitching, a big division lead dwindled. Visions of 120-win grandeur were meekly dashed.

Amid that slump, the club’s focus drifted. From team production to individual mechanics. From collective urgency to internal dissatisfaction.

“Everyone on this team has been so busy this year trying to perfect their craft,” third baseman Max Muncy said, “that sometimes we forget about that moment of just hanging out and enjoying what we’re going through. “

Or, as Kershaw put it after his final regular-season Dodger Stadium start on Friday, “the collective effort to do something hard together.”

“All that stuff is just so impactful, so meaningful,” Kershaw explained.

And if it had gone missing during the depths of mostly difficult summer months, Kershaw’s retirement has thrust it back to the forefront.

“I do think it helps reset,” Muncy said. “Over the course of seven, eight months, you see each other every day and sometimes you take that a little bit for granted … It’s not something that anyone forgot. But sometimes you need a refresher. I think that was a good moment for it.”

Don’t mistake this as a “Win one for Kersh!” attitude. The Dodgers insisted they needed no extra motivation to defend their title, even after what’s been a turbulent repeat campaign.

Dodgers pitcher Clayton Kershaw announces he will retire at the end of the season during a news conference at Dodger Stadium.

But, both players and coaches have noted recently, their efforts this year have sometimes felt misplaced. The togetherness they lauded during last year’s championship march hadn’t always been replicated. A pall was cast over much of the second half.

“When you’re not winning games, it’s not fun,” veteran infielder Miguel Rojas said earlier this month. “But at the end of the day, we gotta put all that aside. … We have to come here and enjoy ourselves around the clubhouse, regardless of the situation.”

The Dodgers did that and more this past weekend, when a celebration of Kershaw — which included nearly team-wide attendance at his Thursday news conference, several on-field ovations Friday, and Kershaw’s address to Dodger Stadium on Sunday — was accompanied by three wins out of four against the San Francisco Giants.

“Watching him get choked up when he started talking about the teammates — it was just a crazy feeling in that room,” pitcher Tyler Glasnow recounted from Thursday’s announcement.

Added Muncy: “You hear when he talks about the stuff he’s gonna miss the most, the stuff that he enjoys the most: It’s being a part of the team. It’s being with the guys. It’s being in the clubhouse.

“To hear a guy like him just reinforce that, I think it’s a good message for a lot of people to hear.”

In Muncy’s estimation, the Dodgers have “seen a reflection of that out on the field” of late, having moved to the verge of a division title (their magic number entering play Monday was three with a 10-4 record over the last two weeks.

“There’s been more of an effort to try and enjoy the moments,” Muncy said. “Make sure we’re still getting our work in, but try to enjoy the moments.”

The Dodgers made a similar transformation last October, when they used their first-round bye week to build the kind of cohesion they had lacked in previous postseason failures — one the team credited constantly in its eventual run to the World Series.

Kershaw’s retirement might’ve provided a similar spark, highlighting the significance of such intangible dynamics while lifting the gloom that had clouded the team’s last two months.

“There’s obviously been a lot of things to point [to this season], as far as adversities, which all teams go through,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “But I think that as we’ve gotten to the other side of it … guys have stuck together and they’ve come out of it stronger, which a lot of the times, that’s what adversity does.”

More adversity, of course, figures to lie ahead.

The Dodgers ended the weekend on a sour note, with Blake Treinen suffering the latest bullpen implosion in a 3-1 loss on Sunday. They’ll still enter the playoffs in a somewhat unsettled place, needing to navigate around a struggling relief corps and overcome a hand injury to catcher Will Smith.

It means, like last year, their path through October is unlikely to be smooth.

That, after a second half full of frustrations, they’ll have to lean on a culture Kershaw emphasized, and praised, repeatedly over the weekend.

“To have a group of guys in it together, and kind of understanding that and being together, being able to have a ton of fun all the time, is really important,” Kershaw said. “The older I’ve gotten, the more important [I’ve realized] it is. Like, you can’t just go through your day every day and go through the emotions. You just can’t. It’s too hard, too long to do that.”

“You gotta have Miggy doing the mic on the bus. You gotta have Kiké. You gotta have all these guys that are able to keep us having fun and energized every single day. That’s what this group is, and it’s been a blast.”

For the first time since artificial intelligence (AI) captured Wall Street’s imagination, investors are beginning to broaden their scope beyond the “Magnificent Seven.” Two names that have attracted growing attention this year are Oracle and CoreWeave.

Unlike the tech titans that dominate headlines, Oracle and CoreWeave are carving out their niche at the infrastructure layer of the AI ecosystem. The opportunity they’ve identified is straightforward but also mission-critical: providing cloud-based access to GPUs. These chips — designed primarily by Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices — remain supply constrained as they are largely absorbed by the world’s largest companies.

This supply imbalance has created an opportunity to enable AI model development by offering GPUs as a service — a business model that allows companies to rent chip capacity through cloud infrastructure. For businesses that cannot secure GPUs directly, infrastructure services are both time-saving and cost-efficient.

In the background, however, a small, albeit capable, company has been competing with Oracle and CoreWeave in the GPU-as-a-service landscape. Let’s explore how Nebius Group (NBIS 5.54%) is disrupting incumbents and why now is an interesting time to take a look at the stock for your portfolio.

17.4 billion reasons to pay close attention to Nebius

Last week, Nebius announced a five-year, $17.4 billion infrastructure agreement with Microsoft. For reference, up until this point, Nebius’ management had been guiding for $1.1 billion in run rate annual recurring revenue (ARR) by December. I point this out to underscore just how transformative this contract is in terms of scale and duration.

The Microsoft deal not only places Nebius firmly alongside peers like Oracle and CoreWeave in the AI infrastructure conversation, but it also serves as validation that its technology is robust enough to meet the standards of a hyperscaler.

For Microsoft, the partnership is equally strategic. With GPUs in chronically short supply and long lead times to expand data center capacity, this agreement allows Microsoft to secure adequate compute resources without stretching internal infrastructure or assuming the upfront capital expenditure (capex) budget and execution risks that come with it.

Image source: Getty Images.

Why this deal matters for investors

AI investment is not a cyclical trend — it’s a structural shift. Enterprises are deploying applications into production at unprecedented speed, workloads are scaling rapidly, and new use cases in areas like robotics and autonomous systems are emerging.

For companies that supply the compute underpinning this increasingly complex ecosystem, these dynamics create durable secular tailwinds. By securing Microsoft as a flagship customer, Nebius has established itself within this foundational layer of the AI infrastructure economy.

Is Nebius stock a buy right now?

Since announcing its partnership with Microsoft, Nebius shares have surged roughly 39% as of this writing (Sept. 16). With that kind of momentum, it’s natural to wonder whether the stock has become expensive. To answer that, it helps to put its valuation in context.

Prior to the Microsoft deal, Nebius was guiding for $1.1 billion in ARR by year-end. If I assume Microsoft’s $17.4 billion commitment is evenly spread across five years (2026 to 2031), that adds about $3.5 billion annually — bringing Nebius’ pro forma ARR closer to $4.6 billion.

Against its current market cap of $21.3 billion, Nebius stock trades at an implied forward price-to-sales (P/S) ratio of 4.6. On the surface, that looks meaningfully discounted to peers like Oracle and CoreWeave.

ORCL PS Ratio data by YCharts

That said, there are important caveats to consider. My analysis assumes no customer attrition over the next several years — this is unrealistic due to competitive pressures. While Nebius may continue winning large-scale contracts, it’s also reasonable to expect some customer churn.

Moreover, comparing Nebius’ future ARR to Oracle’s and CoreWeave’s current revenue base is not an apples-to-apples match. Oracle, for example, has reportedly inked a $300 billion cloud deal with OpenAI. Meanwhile, CoreWeave also has multiyear, multibillion-dollar commitments tied to OpenAI. The catch is that OpenAI itself doesn’t have the cash on its balance sheet to fully fund these agreements — leaving questions about their viability.

In short, Nebius appears attractively valued relative to its peers — but the landscape is evolving quickly and riddled with moving parts. The more important takeaway is that Nebius is now winning significant business alongside its brand-name peers.

In my eyes, this validation in combination with ongoing structural demand tailwinds makes Nebius a compelling buy and hold opportunity as the AI infrastructure narrative continues to unfold.

Like many young men these days, Kamaldeep Dhanoa, a lanky 17-year-old, knew he wanted to do something with his life, be a part of something, but didn’t quite know what that meant.

Coming up with a career was important. But even more, it was finding the right friends — discovering what he wanted to be a part of.

He did both when he joined Improve Your Tomorrow, a mentorship organization for teenage boys and young men — that vulnerable, chronically online demographic from which Charlie Kirk drew many of his most ardent supporters, and where so much of our societal angst is focused in the wake of his death.

Now a senior at Florin High School in a suburb outside Sacramento, Dhanoa has a plan to become a paramedic, and more importantly, has those friendships that help him feel not just connected, but included and valued.

His something.

“I just know I have brothers around me,” he told me Tuesday. “We’re always with each other. It gives you, like, a sense of security. So if you’re feeling down, you could always, always rely on them.”

Dhanoa was hanging out in his school’s gym with Gov. Gavin Newsom, who dropped by to announce the California Men’s Service Challenge, an effort to recruit 10,000 Golden State males to serve as mentors to boys such as Dhanoa, so more boys can find their something.

It’s a worthy effort and before you jump to thinking it’s a reaction to Kirk, I’ll point out that 10 years ago, California’s first partner, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, made a documentary about the crisis of connection and identity facing young men, “The Mask You Live In.”

Recently, her husband caught up.

To be fair, a lot of us have been slow on the uptake when it comes to understanding why so many young men seem drawn to the obvious loneliness and disconnection of chronically online lives.

Kamaldeep Dhanoa, 17, and Michael Lynch helped Gov. Gavin Newsom announce his new statewide initiative to engage more men in volunteer and mentorship work.

(Anita Chabria/Los Angeles Times)

“Touch grass” has become a generation’s cultural shorthand to describe both the isolation and cure for people who seem so deep into a virtual world that the real one has lost meaning. It’s a dismissive way of looking at a problem that doesn’t begin and end with boys.

But, if we didn’t see it earlier, Kirk’s killing has made it clear that there are too many boys that need to be pulled back from the brink of a very bad something. One that is less about left or right and more about exactly who and what those boys stumble upon inside those ethereal spaces that most parents can’t even find, much less understand.

“We’ve got to get these kids back,” Newsom said. “They’re very susceptible young men. They’re very vulnerable online.”

Even more concerning, when the nihilism of the darkest corners of the internet catches up to their psyches, “young people weaponize those grievances,” Newsom said — whether that anger turns inward or outward.

Suicide among young men has increased. In 2023, the male suicide rate was about 23 deaths per 100,000 men, nearly four times higher than for women, a number that has been climbing for years (albeit with some slight dips). Sadly, women attempt suicide more often, but men have a higher rate of completion, often because they use more deadly means such as guns.

But lonely boys are also more prone to commit violence on others, maybe especially when they mix their anger with politics. Once recent study by social epidemiologist Julia Schleimer at the University of Washington School of Public Health found that individuals who reported having few social connections were, “more likely than others to support political violence or be personally willing to engage in it in one form or another.”

For reference, about 15% of men have no close friendships, according to a recent poll by the Survey Center on American Life. Newsom puts that figure even higher for young men, with “one in four men under 30 years old reporting that they have no close friends, a five-fold increase since 1990.”

Kirk stepped into that gap, providing meaning and belonging not just through his podcasts, where he was best known, but through the grassroots Turning Point USA organization that gave thousands of young people (of both sexes) both an ideology and, equally as important, real-world connections and events.

“Obviously Charlie Kirk was a master at not only the work he did online, but offline, and his capacity to organize and engage,” Newsom said.

Whether you agreed with Kirk’s views or not (and I did not agree on many points, including matters of race, sexual orientation, immigration or the meaning of patriotism), he created that something that is missing for so many young people. He created a vision of an America that needed to be saved, and could be saved, through a dedication to a certain kind of family and a certain kind of faith. As Newsom described it of his own effort, young people don’t just want a cause. They want to feel invested, they want to feel an “obligation to give back.”

If Newsom’s recent foray into Trump-esque social media proves anything, it’s that he’s willing to learn, even emulate, success — wherever he finds it. Newsom is trying to offer the belonging that Kirk supplied, seeped not in the exclusion and rigidity that Kirk embodied, but in California values.

“It’s about building an inclusive community of all different kinds of voices,” Michael Lynch told me of the California Challenge. He’s the co-founder and chief executive of Improve Your Tomorrow, the organization Dhanoa belongs to.

Lynch said kids get all kinds of benefits from mentors, but when he asks what those are, the sentence usually starts, “Now that I have friends…. “

The outcome of the effort to bring boys out of the virtual world is all about who those friends are, who pulls them out.

Our boys don’t just need to touch grass, they need to be around men who don’t seek to impose values, but teach them how to craft their own, how to believe in themselves before they believe in something someone is selling.

“What the world needs is your authenticity,” Newsom told a teenage journalist who covered the event for the school newspaper. “And so I just hope we take a deep breath and discover the most important, powerful thing in the world, and that’s who you are.”

If Newsom’s effort inspires just one good man to step up and help a kid figure that out — who they are, and how to believe in themselves first and forever — it will be something.

Sept. 13 (UPI) — Officials at the University of California-Berkeley have shared personal information on 160 students, faculty and staff with the federal government amid an anti-Semitism investigation.

The Department of Education and Office of Civil Rights is investigating claims of anti-Semitism at the university and requested the information, which the U.C. Office of the President ordered staff to provide, The Daily Californian reported this week.

The Daily Californian is an independent student publication at the university and reported that the university shared the information in August and informed those affected in an email from the university’s Office of Legal Affairs on Sept. 4.

“As part of its investigation, OCR required production of comprehensive documents, including files and reports related to alleged anti-Semitic incidents,” the email read, as reported by The Daily Californian.

The email told respective individuals that the university included their names in reports provided by the University of California system’s Office of General Counsel, as required by law.

Those whose names were provided are among some who have been accused of anti-Semitic activities at the university, affected by such activities or complained about them, SFGate, The New York Times and The Guardian reported.

Many of those accused of anti-Semitism at the university are Muslims and Palestinians, but an unnamed graduate student said such claims often arise from classroom discussions regarding Israel and the Middle East, according to The Daily Californian.

Faculty member Judith Butler is among those named and is described by The Guardian as a “feminist philosopher and queer theorist.”

Butler also is a Jewish scholar who has criticized Israel’s actions in its war against Hamas and asked university administrators about the information disclosed.

“We have a right to know the charges against us, to know who has made the charges and to review them and defend ourselves,” Butler told The Guardian.

“But none of that has happened, which is why we’re in Kafka-land,” she said, while referencing German writer Franz Kafka and his published works.

“It is an enormous breach of trust,” Butler added.

The Trump administration has targeted many elite universities for alleged anti-Semitism, including encampments, protests and building takeovers, and has withheld federal funding from those accused of enabling campus anti-Semitism.

The Education Department began investigating U.C.-Berkeley in February, and Republican lawmakers in July accused university Chancellor Rich Lyons those at two other universities of not effectively stopping anti-Semitism on their respective campuses, according to The New York Times.

Such determination has been a constant throughout Wissa’s career.

He was playing in front of crowds of fewer than 3,000 supporters away at Chambly in the French second division back in 2019.

Now he in line to feature against Barcelona in the Champions League next week after completing a protracted £55m move from Brentford to Newcastle United.

His rise has not necessarily come as a shock to Pierre-Yves Hamel, who played alongside Wissa at Lorient.

“After the attack, he never complained,” he said. “He immediately wanted to move forward and to blossom today is a just reward for his efforts.

“Once Yoane has an idea in mind, he will do his utmost to make it happen – no matter how long it takes.”

Those words now carry added meaning.

Wissa was so set on joining Newcastle that he removed all association with Brentford from his Instagram account a few weeks ago.

In a statement last month, Wissa urged Brentford to “keep their word” to let him leave and accused the club of “unduly standing in my way”.

Parallels were drawn with another striker looking to leave their club – Wissa, like Alexander Isak, did not feature in any of his team’s opening three games of the season.

And just as Newcastle fans were upset with the manner in which Isak pushed to join Liverpool, following his own explosive social media post, Brentford supporters were dismayed with Wissa’s conduct as he looked to force a move through to St James’ Park.

Ian Westbrook, who is the Brentford fan writer with BBC Sport, stressed supporters are “not vindictive” towards those who “leave in the right way” because they know that their side “sell players to bigger clubs at the right time”.

The season-ticket holder suggested former players Bryan Mbeumo and Christian Norgaard and ex-manager Thomas Frank will all receive good receptions as a result when they return to Gtech Community Stadium following their summer moves.

But it will be different for Wissa.

“His legacy has been soured,” he said. “There’s not many players who have done this to Brentford.”

When he first started spreading the word about Waymond Jordan, Mike Bennett figured the film would speak for itself. The Escambia High coach had been in the South Florida preps scene long enough to know what he was seeing from his new running back.

“Just watching him run the football for the first time, he was amazing,” Bennett said. He figured scholarship offers would roll in soon enough.

Jordan had similar expectations. Since he first picked up football, at 4 years old, he’d always told himself that he’d play at a big school, on the biggest stage. He’d come to Escambia as a senior with that in mind.

But in 2021, four years before Lincoln Riley and USC would see that same star potential, other college coaches, for whatever reason, weren’t paying much mind.

USC running back Waymond Jordan carries the ball during a win over Georgia Southern at the Coliseum on Saturday. Overlooked earlier in his career, Jordan has become a key piece of the Trojans’ offense.

(Carlin Stiehl/Los Angeles Times)

Given where Jordan stands today — the top running back on one of the nation’s top rushing offenses through two weeks of the college football season — plenty of them probably regret that now.

“Every coach in the country, I sent stuff to,” Bennett said. “I mean, everybody. I sent it out to everybody.”

Some smaller schools monitored Jordans’ senior year at Escambia, keeping a close eye as he rushed for 1,225 yards and 12 touchdowns. A few schools said he could walk-on. But none of them extended a scholarship offer. Jordan couldn’t understand why.

Hutchinson Community College, a junior college in Hutchinson, Kan., was one of the only places to give him an opportunity. Hutchinson was a thousand miles from his hometown of Pensacola, and a world away from the major college football he thought he’d be playing. But the staff there knew Escambia well, and they believed in what they saw in Jordan’s tape.

If all went well with junior college, he could still get the Power Four offers he was looking for.

“He believed in himself. And he bet on himself,” said Greg Cross, the Hutchinson running backs coach. “And I would say he bet right.”

Cross figured it was a worthy bet then, before most anyone else. He could see on film that Jordan had a rare instinct for making defenders miss. In the open field, not many people could bring Jordan down on their own either. In some ways, his skillset reminded Cross a little bit of Alvin Kamara, who played the 2014 season at Hutchinson.

“But that wasn’t going to happen for him overnight,” Cross said.

USC’s Waymond Jordan stretches out to score a touchdown against Georgia Southern at the Coliseum on Saturday.

(Sean M. Haffey / Getty Images)

Jordan was by no means a finished product on arrival at Hutchinson. He hadn’t really learned yet how to take care of his body. He was out of shape. He needed to add muscle and change his diet. Plus, he struggled early on with pass protection.

Then his hamstrings started bothering him.

“I knew it was in the best interest for him to redshirt,” Cross said.

Hutchinson could afford to be patient with him. But it was a tough pill to swallow for Jordan.

“He went through a phase where he was kind of down,” Cross said. “We had a lot of talks. We would talk every day. I just wanted to keep him focused, keep him locked in, keep him motivated.

“So, me and him had a talk about it, and I said, ‘You can either let it get the best of you, or you can stay motivated and work 10 times as hard.’”

It was a formative chat for Jordan. Cross implored him to get serious about taking care of his body. He wanted him in the training room every day. They started tracking his meals. He began using the head coach’s YMCA membership.

From then on, Cross says, “I was grilling him, 24/7.”

He came back that second season looking like an entirely different player. He lost weight. He was stronger and more explosive. He had a full recovery routine.

But his hamstring was still acting up. Then, after appearing in two games as a redshirt freshman, Jordan suffered a minor fracture in his foot.

“It felt, to him, like he couldn’t catch a break,” Cross said.

He wore a boot for a couple of weeks. When he came back, he had to play through pain.

Even still, there were glimpses of what Jordan could be. Late in the season, in a game against No. 2 ranked Iowa Western Community College, Jordan broke out with two fourth-quarter rushing scores, one from 47 yards out, the other from 16, that helped put Iowa Western away. He finished with four carries for 99 yards and two touchdowns.

Hutchinson lost its next game to East Mississippi Community College and fell short of an NJCAA national title in 2023. But for Jordan, everything was trending upward that offseason.

“You really saw him take that next step,” said Drew Dallas, Hutchinson’s head coach. “It was just how quickly he was hitting the hole, how fast and confident he was playing. He’d trimmed down his body fat to hardly any at all. He was just this rocked-up ball of muscle who could see the field really well.”

That spring, as word got around, some smaller schools like Florida Atlantic and Florida International started asking about him.

By the end of that spring, Jordan had the scholarship offers he’d been waiting for.

Cross figured he would take the opportunity and run with it. And he wouldn’t have blamed him for doing so. In fact, he couldn’t remember anyone in his time at Hutchinson turning down an FBS opportunity to return to junior college.

But in Jordan’s case, he believed bigger offers could come.

“He told me that if I stayed, I would be able to come to places like [USC,]” Jordan recalls. “That it would all pay out in the end.”

USC running back Waymond Jordan cuts and changes direction while carrying the ball against Georgia Southern at the Coliseum on Saturday.

(Carlin Stiehl/Los Angeles Times)

Jordan called Cross back with a decision just a few minutes after their conversation.

“When you leaving?” Cross remembers asking him.

“He says no, ‘Coach, I’m gonna stay. I know what I can be.’”

Cross was stunned at the time. Thinking back on that conversation, he laughs.

“He put it all on red, I guess,” he said.

But it took all of one week that season for Jordan’s bet to be vindicated. He rushed for 179 yards and two touchdowns during Hutchinson’s season opener on just 14 carries. That Sunday, Cross got a call from a coach at Michigan State. Was Jordan for real? Because, he said, they were watching closely.

It was “one phone call after another, every week after that,” Cross said. Jordan rushed for 174 yards the following week, then 175 yards and four touchdowns on just nine carries in Week 4. Over a two-week stretch in November, Jordan exploded for 348 yards and four touchdowns, prompting Missouri and Central Florida, two Power Four schools, to offer him scholarships.

He finally had the opportunity he’d been waiting for. So in December, just before the NJCAA playoffs, Jordan committed to Central Florida.

USC didn’t come into the picture until later that month, just as Jordan was named the junior college national player of the year. Other Power Four schools, like North Carolina and Mississippi, were already making their cases to Jordan. But USC had a connection to Cross through Doug Belk, the Trojans’ secondary coach.

USC didn’t necessarily have a need at running back, having already added explosive New Mexico transfer Eli Sanders to its class. But when Anthony Jones, USC’s running backs coach, spoke to Jordan on the phone, he came away convinced that “USC needed this young man.”

“Waymond checked all the boxes that we were looking for,” Jones said.

Hutchinson beat Iowa Western to win the NJCAA national title in spite of Iowa Western’s all-out efforts to bottle up the Blue Dragons’ star running back. Two weeks later, he was on USC’s campus.

As soon as Jordan called him during his visit to L.A., Cross knew he was committing to USC.

Nine months later, the same running back who didn’t have a single Division I offer as a high school senior was bursting out of the USC backfield, weaving through a crowd of defenders on his way into the Coliseum end zone, just like Reggie Bush, Marcus Allen and O.J. Simpson once did.

As he scored his first touchdown as a Trojan, Jordan looked up into the stands and saw his family.

He’d waited four sometimes-frustrating years for that moment.

“His patience, his perseverance really built him into something a lot bigger and better,” Dallas said.

“I think that’s as big of a part of his journey as anything.”

A Philadelphia Phillies fan secured a home run ball hit by Harrison Bader and proudly placed it in the glove of his 9-year-old son Lincoln.

Moments later, the same fan removed the ball from his son’s glove and gave it to a woman who claimed that it rightfully belonged to her.

Days after the now-viral incident occurred during the fourth inning of the Phillies’ 9-3 win over the Marlins on Friday in Miami, Drew Feltwell explained to NBC-10 in Philadelphia that he decided in the moment to “be Dad and show him how to de-escalate the situation” — something he determined was more important than providing Lincoln with a really cool game souvenir.

“We were there to get a home run ball,” said Feltwell, a Florida resident whose wife and daughter were also at the game. “So I thought I had accomplished this great thing. And putting it in his glove meant a lot. She was just so adamant and loud and yelling and persistent, and I just didn’t want to deal with it anymore.

“There was hundreds of people just staring. And like I said, she was very, very, very close, and I’m Dad of the family, so I didn’t want to do something I’d regret. And that was the choice I made, just hand the ball back and tell her go away.”

Feltwell said he was the first to get to the ball after it landed in an empty seat “down a couple seats” to his right. He said he was starting to walk away with the ball when other people, including the woman who eventually confronted him, started grabbing for it.

“I guess she just thought that that was her ball, because it was in front of her,” Feltwell said. “That’s fine, but she was too slow.”

Lincoln didn’t leave the game empty-handed though. A Marlins representative visited the family at their seats and presented the boy with a bag full of souvenirs. Then a Phillies representative invited the family to meet Bader outside the team clubhouse after the game. There, the nine-year veteran who was acquired from the Minnesota Twins at the trade deadline signed a bat for Lincoln and posed for pictures with the group.

Lincoln told NBC-10 that although he was unhappy to have to give away the home run ball, “I’m happy that I got to get something else.”

And, he added, “it was very, very fun getting to meet Bader.”

Feltwell said he holds no ill will toward the so-called Phillies Karen who ended up with the home run ball.

“I don’t wish any harm to her. I would love to have that particular ball to put on the wall next to his bat, and got about 500 promises that they’re going to get the ball.”

Even so, he said, “I hope nobody does anything stupid to get it.”

More details are emerging about a company that allegedly paid Los Angeles Clippers star Kawhi Leonard millions to circumvent the NBA’s salary cap, including that the team came close in 2021 to granting naming rights for its Inglewood arena to Aspiration Partners.

Clippers owner Steve Ballmer nearly granted naming rights to the company, but ended up choosing financial services firm Intuit to grace the $2-billion venue, a source familiar with the matter said. Intuit, which has a $186-billion net worth and developed TurboTax, Credit Karma and QuickBooks, ended up paying a reported $500 million over 23 years for the naming rights.

Four years later, Aspiration, a sustainability firm that also generated and sold carbon credits, is out of business. Co-founder Joseph Sanberg has agreed to plead guilty to defrauding multiple investors and lenders. Listed among creditors in Aspiration’s bankruptcy documents is Leonard, raising questions about whether his $28-million endorsement deal with the company skirted NBA salary cap rules.

One of the investors Sanberg defrauded was Ballmer, listed by Fortune magazine as the sixth-richest person in the world, with a net worth of $157 billion. The Clippers owner invested $50 million in Aspiration, which in turn entered into a $330-million sponsorship agreement with the team.

This week, the Athletic reported allegations that Aspiration agreed to pay Leonard $28 million for a job with no responsibilities, in an effort to circumvent the NBA salary cap. Ballmer was interviewed Thursday night by ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne and denied involvement in Leonard’s deal with Aspiration, but the NBA has launched an investigation.

Ballmer said he was “conned” by the company and that the Clippers did not circumvent NBA salary cap rules, which the team was accused of doing in a podcast report by Pablo Torre of the Athletic.

A plane flies over the Intuit Dome in Inglewood.

(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)

Ballmer told Shelburne that Aspiration offered more than Intuit for dome naming rights, and a Clippers spokesman confirmed that account. However, Ballmer insisted that the Clippers did not violate NBA rules against skirting the salary cap, and the team had agreed to a contract extension with Leonard and the sponsorship deal with Aspiration before the player and the company met.

“We were done with Kawhi, we were done with Aspiration,” Ballmer said. “The deals were all locked and loaded. Then, they did request to be introduced to Kawhi, and under the rules, we can introduce our sponsors to our athletes. We just can’t be involved.”

The Clippers signed Leonard to a four-year, $176-million contract in August 2021 even though he was recovering from a partially torn ACL in his right knee that kept him sidelined the entire 2021-22 season. Ballmer said the sponsorship deal with Aspiration was completed in September 2021 and that the Clippers introduced Leonard to Aspiration two months later.

“As part of our cooperation with the Department of Justice and Securities and Exchange Commission, we produced texts and emails,” Ballmer said. “It was part of the document production in their investigation. We even found the email that made the first introduction [between Aspiration and Leonard]. It was early in November.

“Where could any of this circumvention happened? It couldn’t have, it didn’t. The introduction got made and they were off to the races on their own. We weren’t involved.”

The Boston Sports Journal reported that Leonard did not appear in promotional material as other endorsers did because Aspiration executives “saw no brand synergy with Leonard and chose not to use his services. They instead preferred to partner with climate-focused influencers.”

Ballmer couldn’t explain why Leonard did no marketing or endorsement work for Aspiration, telling Shelburne that he never spoke with the player about his deal with the company.

“I don’t know why they did what they did and I don’t know how different it is, I really don’t,” he said. “And, frankly, any speculation would be crazy. These were guys who committed fraud. Look, they conned me. I made an investment in these guys thinking it was on the up-and-up and they conned me. At this stage, I have no ability to predict why they did anything they did.”

The salary cap is a dollar amount that limits what teams can spend on player payroll. The purpose of the cap is to ensure parity, preventing the wealthiest teams from outspending smaller markets to acquire the best players.

Circumventing the cap by paying a player outside of his contract is strictly prohibited. Teams that exceed the cap must pay luxury tax penalties that grow increasingly severe. Revenues from the tax penalties are then distributed in part to smaller-market teams and in part to teams that do not exceed the salary cap.

The NBA said it will investigate the allegations laid out by Torre. Ballmer said he welcomes the probe. If allegations were made against a team other than the Clippers, “I’d want the league to investigate, to take it seriously,” he said.

“We know the rules, and if anything is not clear, we remind ourselves what the rules are. And we make it absolutely clear we will abide by those rules.”

The cap was implemented before the 1984-85 season at a mere $3.6 million. Ten years later, it was $15.9 million, and 10 years after that it had risen to $43.9 million. By the 2014-15 season it was $63.1 million.

The biggest spike came before the 2016-2017 season when it jumped to $94 million because of an influx of revenue from a new nine-year, $24-billion media rights deal with ESPN and TNT.

Salary cap rules negotiated between the NBA and the players’ union are spelled out in the Collective Bargaining Agreement. Proven incidents of teams circumventing the cap are few, with a violation by the Minnesota Timberwolves in 2000 serving as the most egregious.

The Timberwolves made a secret agreement with free agent and former No. 1 overall draft pick Joe Smith, signing him to a succession of below-market one-year deals in order to enable the team to go over the cap with a huge contract ahead of the 2001-02 season.

The NBA voided his contract, fined the Timberwolves $3.5 million, and stripped them of five first-round draft picks — two of which were later returned. Also, owner Glen Taylor and general manager Kevin McHale were suspended.

Then-NBA commissioner David Stern told the Minnesota Star Tribune at the time: “What was done here was a fraud of major proportions. There were no fewer than five undisclosed contracts tightly tucked away, in the hope that they would never see the light of day. … The magnitude of this offense was shocking.”

According to Article 13 of the CBA, if the Clippers were found to have circumvented the cap, it would be a first offense punishable by a $4.5-million fine, the loss of one first-round draft pick, and voiding of Leonard’s contract. However, the Clippers don’t have a first-round pick until 2027.

A RUSSIAN oligarch’s estranged wife has won a six-year fight to drag her divorce battle into the English courts.

Natalia Potanina secured a landmark Court of Appeal ruling on Thursday to sue her billionaire ex-husband Vladimir Potanin, who is said to be worth around £15.7billion.

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Potanin is described as Russia’s second richest man and a pal of Vladimir Putin through their shared love of ice hockey.

Potanin is the chief executive of Norilsk Nickel, the world’s largest palladium producer and a global nickel giant.

But he was sanctioned by the UK and US in 2022 after Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine.

The former couple wed in Russia in 1983, where they lived for their entire married life and raised three children.

They split in acrimonious fashion, with Potanin claiming the marriage ended in 2007.

Potanina insists they only separated in 2013, with a Russian court finalising the divorce a year later.

He has previously claimed their marriage ended when her husband calmly told her over tea that he was leaving her for a younger employee.

She said at first she thought it was a “badly-worded joke” but was later told she “didn’t need money” when the subject of a financial settlement arose.

The pair first met as penniless students in the 1970s, when Russia was still under communism.

Potanina argues that her husband only built his fortune after their marriage, and that she supported him throughout his rise.

Despite his £15billion fortune, Potanina was awarded just £30.9million in the Russian courts – less than one per cent of the family wealth.

Lawyers for Potanin argue she actually received around £63m, but she insists the sum barely scratched the surface of their assets.

Now, after years of legal wrangling, Potanina has been cleared to bring a claim in London for financial relief – setting the stage for what could become the world’s biggest-ever marital split.

She is seeking half of her ex-husband’s beneficial interest in shares in Norilsk Nickel, along with half of the dividends paid on those shares since 2014.

She also wants half the value of a lavish Moscow mansion known as The Autumn House, on which the couple splashed out around £111million.

She is thought to be seeking around £5billion in total.

At the heart of earlier disputes was the couple’s palatial family home in Nemchinovo, 17 miles west of Moscow, where they lived with their three children – daughter Anastasia, and sons Ivan and Vasily.

Also up for grabs were two superyachts, including “The Anastasia,” named after their daughter, and “The Nirvana.”

Potanina’s legal team told the court she had earned her share of the fortune through years of marriage and by being the “main carer” of their children.

Her barrister, Charles Howard KC, branded the earlier dismissal of her case “inconsistent and illogical,” accusing the judge of falling into Potanin’s trap of repeatedly labelling her a “divorce tourist.”

Potanin’s lawyers, led by Lord Faulks KC, countered that the couple had “no connection with this jurisdiction during the marriage” and that Potanina only had “recent and modest connections” to England when she applied.

London’s High Court originally threw out her claim in 2019, warning that allowing it would mean “no limit to divorce tourism.”

That decision was overturned in 2021 by the Court of Appeal, only for Potanin to win a narrow 3-2 victory in the Supreme Court last year, which sent the case back to be reconsidered.

Now, judges Lord Justice Moylan, Lady Justice Falk and Lord Justice Cobb have sided with Potanina once again, ruling she had “substantial grounds” to pursue her claim in England.

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They said there was evidence she had “very largely severed her ties with Russia” and that her connection to the country was “increasingly tenuous.”

The ruling added: “The discrepancy between her award of the marital assets and the husband’s retained share was significant.

“The discrepancy between what she had recovered in Russia compared with what she would have recovered had the case been heard in this jurisdiction was equally significant.”

The Sun reported in 2016 that Potanina was living “in exile” in central London, near Westminster Abbey.

She said at the time to be fearing that if she returned to Russia her passport could be seized, preventing her from visiting her son studying in New York.

She also accused her husband of offering her only medical insurance, a driver, and maintenance for their youngest child, rather than a fair settlement.

The blockbuster ruling reignites fears that London will become the “divorce capital of the world.”

Jennifer Headon, head of international family law at Birketts LLP, said the High Court had already warned such a move could open the floodgates to “limitless” divorce tourism.

Sarah Jane Lenihan, partner at Dawson Cornwell, said few had expected such an outcome, asking: “The question now is whether it will open the door for others who have divorced overseas to seek a second bite at the cherry in England.”

Sital Fontenelle, head of family law at Kingsley Napley LLP, said the ruling reinforced the UK’s status as the “divorce capital of the world” and left the “door still open” for future claims.

Peter Burgess, partner at Burgess Mee, added that aspiring “divorce tourists” might now wait to demonstrate their links to England at a full hearing rather than being knocked back early.

She has previously said her situation reflects the discrimination faced by many women in Russia, where “the law is male, the ideology is male,” adding that she had been “deprived of money and driven out of the house.”

Potanina’s solicitor, Frances Hughes of Hughes Fowler Carruthers, hailed the ruling as a “second vindication” of her client’s case, saying Potanina was delighted and now hoped the matter could be “resolved without further delay.”

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A WOMAN busted her bigamist husband’s secret marriage after the second wife gave birth at the hospital where she worked.

Vaithialingam Muthukumar from India married his Singaporean wife in 2007 – only to cheat on her 15 years on.

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He then moved to Singapore and got into a relationship with Salmah Bee Abdul Razak, a younger work colleague.

She reportedly knew about his marriage.

In 2022, Muthukumar married Salmah in a secret wedding, promising he would divorce his first wife.

The sick liar managed to juggle both wives until last year, when Salmah got pregnant.

She was rushed to a hospital for delivery, which also happened to be Muthukumar’s first wife’s workplace, according to CNA.

To his nightmare, Muthukumar was caught emerging from the hospital’s delivery suite – where no guests were allowed – by his first wife.

When confronted, Muthukumar revealed he was secretly married to Salmahn in a bigamy, which is a criminal offence in almost all countries.

Salmah later reported to the Ministry of Manpower that he was still married to another woman, leading to a police probe.

Investigations revealed that Vaithialingam had also lied in immigration documents when applying for permanent residency as the spouse of a Singapore citizen.

He falsely declared he had no other marriages, though his application was rejected.

Muthukumar pleaded guilty to one charge of conspiring to commit bigamy and another for making a false declaration in his permanent residency application.

A Singaporean court jailed him for three months and three weeks.

Bigamy carries a maximum penalty of seven years in jail and a fine of up to Singaporean $7,800 (£5,800).

It comes after a Brit bigamist married his 16-year-old stepdaughter while wed to her mum – then had children with both of them.

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John Ingram, 69, changed his name so he could tie the knot with the schoolgirl in a 1988 ceremony in Kent attended by his wife.

The sick liar then went on to father several children with the mum and daughter, although many of the kids were unaware who their dad was.

Ingram’s vile web of deceit was only discovered in February 2020 – a staggering 32 years after he committed bigamy.

He was facing a seven-year sentence after pleading guilty to the offence, but was spared jail.

Ingram was instead handed a two-year community order and told to pay £450 in total.

ROCHELLE Humes gave Myleene Klass’s ex-husband a place to stay after their bitter split, pals have revealed.

The Saturdays singer, 36, lent a helping hand to showbiz security manager Graham Quinn, 51, in 2013.

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Their continued friendship is said to have caused a rift between Rochelle and ex-Hear’Say star Myleene — who believes she took Graham’s side.

It comes after Myleene, 47, claimed she saw Graham and an unnamed celebrity “unzipping” each other at her birthday party.

Last week, we told how Myleene was locked in a feud with Rochelle and Saturdays’ bandmate Frankie Bridge, who were both clients of Graham.

Rochelle and her JLS pop star husband Marvin were also pictured with Graham in Ibiza.

A source last night told The Sun: “Rochelle was doing what she saw as looking out for a friend in a time of need.

“Rochelle and Marvin are still clearly very much friends with Graham.

“Myleene is of the view that Rochelle took sides from the beginning of her marriage breakdown.

“The fact Rochelle and Graham’s friendship is still there after all these years has put an everlasting rift between Myleene and Rochelle.

“They both do everything in their power to avoid each other.”

Rochelle and Frankie, 36, previously enjoyed a close friendship with Classic FM host Myleene.

In 2012, Myleene and Frankie, both hosts on Loose Women, attended Rochelle’s hen do.

But they have not appeared together on the ITV show since an awkward episode last year.

The alleged unzipping incident is said to have happened before Myleene and Graham married.

The couple — who share daughters Ava, 17, and 13-year-old Hero — wed in 2011 and divorced two years later, with Myleene citing “unreasonable behaviour”.

The Sun on Sunday reported yesterday that Graham said he had been stopped from seeing his children since 2014 and had suffered from depression.

Representatives for Rochelle and Myleene did not reply to a request for comment yesterday.

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A WOMAN who was left with a “turkey neck” after losing three stone on weight loss jabs is finally comfortable in her own skin after getting a £10,000 ‘mummy makeover’ abroad.

Victoria Vigors decided to have a tummy tuck, liposuction, breast lift, face lift and neck lift after using Mounjaro – a prescription injection used to treat type 2 diabetes and obesity – to slim down.

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The 40-year-old initially felt “misshapen” after losing so much weight.

But now she’s never been happier – and says she looks better today than she did aged 20.

“I was very self-conscious about my fupa,” the mum, who is a content creator with 270,000 followers, revealed.

“My tummy overhung because I had a caesarean with my daughter, so it left a scar that my stomach would fall over.

“It was really obvious – I would wear tight-fitting clothing, and you could just see I had a really unnatural-looking belly. I hated it.

“My boobs felt misshapen, and one was much bigger than the other.

“And where I had lost weight on Mounjaro – the skin around my neck was like a turkey.

“It was all saggy, and I hated my jowls.

“I just felt old and unattractive.”

Victoria, from Kent, said people used to stare at her stomach and even make comments.

She said: “I’ve been called ‘flabby belly’ online.

“People would say I looked more like 50.

“My side profile would show my sagging neck, and people would point it out.

“As much as my daughter would joke, she would also call me ‘jelly belly’ and poke my stomach.

“I’d been on Mounjaro for ages and eating really healthily, so I felt fantastic on the inside.

“But on the outside, my confidence was at an all-time low.”

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After speaking to friends and getting recommendations, Victoria found Revitalize in Turkey.

She spoke to the clinic and was told about a £10,000 ‘mummy makeover’.

The mum booked in for surgery and flew out just 10 days later.

She said: “Weirdly enough, I didn’t feel anxious at all about going in.

“I was just so excited.

“I was already staying at the villa with loads of people who’d already had surgery and were recovering.

“They were all looking great already, so I wasn’t nervous.

“I was a bit more stressed going into having my face done because obviously that’s my face, and if that goes wrong, then I’m stuck with it.

“But I’d seen other people’s results, which looked great.”

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DAY OF THE SURGERY

Victoria’s first surgery was for her tummy tuck, liposuction and breast lift.

She said: “I woke up feeling very groggy, and the pain in my stomach was unreal.

“It’d hurt even more when I moved or coughed.

“I was in and out of sleep for a while, so I was a bit confused at times, but the next day they encouraged me to get up and see if I could start walking.

“I didn’t feel any pain in my boobs whatsoever – it was all in my belly.

“I had drains in to collect any blood that was still coming out, and then they showed me a bit of my stomach that they cut away.

“It looked like a slab of fatty pork – I asked them to bin it!”

Five days later, she was taken in for the second surgery for her face and neck lift.

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She said: “Waking up, my face felt really painful and tight.

“I had massive quilting stitches all over my face and neck, which looked like bicycle tyre tracks.

“I was told they were to help direct the blood flow and drain any excess, but they were really uncomfortable and itchy.

“The first 24 hours were really painful, but then after that it eased off and just felt tight and numb.”

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SURGERY RECOVERY

Victoria had a check-up two days later and was allowed to go home five days later.

She said: “I was really nervous to see the results of my facelift as I had to keep the support on for four weeks, as well as the compression garments on my abdomen.

“I also had to keep my boobs strapped for six weeks.

“But once I could take them off, I was over the moon.

“My tummy had gone down and was so flat.

“My boobs looked great, and my face even better.

“I was like, wow, this is my body now!”

The mummy makeover would have cost £10,000 – but Tracy paid a discounted rate.

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BOOSTED CONFIDENCE

She is overjoyed with her new look, and her friends and family have been “super supportive”.

Victoria said: “They just can’t believe how great I look.

“I went to a baby shower a couple of weeks ago, where I hadn’t seen some of the girls there for a long time.

“And one of them walked straight past me, didn’t even realise it was me, and then she was like, ‘Oh my god, look at you now – the glow-up is real.’

“Now I can wear little belly tops, cocktail dresses, tight clothing, and not feel self-conscious anymore.

“I’m super happy.

“There is a lot of pressure for you to be perfect.

“Of course, nobody can be, but this is my idea of perfect to me.”

In May, Victoria re-visited the clinic to have laser eye surgery and turkey teeth fitted.

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She said: “I had 20 porcelain crowns and my eyes done.

“My vision is incredible, and my teeth are perfect.

“My face looks lovely.”

MORE SURGERY

Victoria plans on visiting for the final time in September to have breast implants and a labiaplasty.

She said: “I was supposed to have breast implants when I was there in March, but they said doing that, as well as a lift, was a no-go.

“My blood count was too low when I went for blood tests, so the surgeon said he couldn’t do my implants at the same time.

Now I can wear little belly tops, cocktail dresses, tight clothing, and not feel self-conscious anymore

Victoria Vigors

“Now I’ve given my boobs some time to rest – then I’ll be going back.

“I’m super excited for my labiaplasty.

“After having two children, one of my labia appears bigger than the other one.

“I want it to be more levelled out and neat.

“Now, my face is done, my body looks great, it is just those final things.”

A BELOVED grandmother choked to death after being fed the wrong food in a care home.

Joan Whitworth died at the Oaks Care Home in Northumberland after staff prepared her meal in a way which “did not comply with her diet plan”.

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An inquest heard the 88-year-old had lived with her daughter Gillian but moved into the facility when her dementia progressed.

When eating a meal on March 3, 2023, Joan began to display signs of choking.

But the inquest heard how a care assistant did not intervene and had to ask another staff member for help to deliver back slaps and abdominal thrusts.

And, CPR was not performed due to the “inaccurate understanding of a registered nurse”.

Following the hearing, Northumberland’s senior coroner Andrew Hetherington has written a “prevention of future deaths” report.

The care home and NHS trust have 56 days to respond.

The coroner concluded Joan died “in a care home as a result of choking”.

And in his written report, he outlined a total of six “matters of concern”.

Of these, one was regarding the NHS trust and five were directed to the care home’s operator Hillcare.

The first issue was found with the speech and language team.

Joan’s assessment had not been written down in a formal report, meaning observations of her eating had only been passed on verbally.

The coroner also concluded that a nurse and care assistant at the home “were not in date with their training in Basic Life Support and First Aid at Work”.

The coroner added: “I am concerned that a chef in evidence at the inquest was not aware that breaded fish was not a suitable food stuff in the diet identified for the deceased.

“I am concerned that other residents could be fed inappropriate food stuffs that are not in line with their identified diet plans.”

Bryan Smith, Joan’s son-in-law, told ChronicleLive: “Right from the start, we knew what had happened – that they hadn’t given her the right food.

“We knew she hadn’t been looked after.

“The reason we have pursued this is that we knew what had happened.”

Bryan added how the family had been “shocked and astounded by the quantity and severity of the mistakes” that were highlighted in the inquest.

He told how many families have shared similar “painful and shocking experiences”.

In a statement on behalf of the family read in court, they paid tribute: “Joan was a well loved character in Blyth. She was manager of Robson’s shoe shop and then moved to the Water Board.

“When we used to go shopping with Joan, it would take you an hour to get past the car park – as she knew everyone in Blyth with a tap or a pair of shoes!”

A Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust spokesperson said: “All referrals to our speech and language therapy service are robustly triaged using a risk and evidence-based approach to inform the most appropriate care for that individual. This includes information on the referral form and discussion with the patient and / or those who care for them daily to gather the most up-to-date information.

“We cannot comment further on this case due to patient confidentiality, but would like to offer our sincere condolences to Mrs Whitworth’s family and loved ones.”

A spokesperson for The Oaks Care Home said: “We acknowledge the Coroner’s report relating to the death of Joan Whitworth at our home in March 2023. Our thoughts remain with her family and loved ones.

“Following the incident, we carried out a full review and made all necessary changes to our practices and procedures. These have been in place for some time and will be reflected in our formal response to the Coroner’s report. The safety, dignity, and wellbeing of those in our care remain our highest priorities.”

Sayfollah Musallet was a brother, a son and an ambitious young man who was just at the beginning of his life.

That is the message his family has repeated since July 11, when the 20-year-old United States citizen was beaten to death by Israeli settlers in the village of Sinjil in the occupied West Bank.

That message, they hope, will prevent the Florida-born Sayfollah from becoming “just another number” in the growing list of Palestinian Americans whose killings never find justice.

That’s why his cousin, Fatmah Muhammad, took a moment amid her grief on Wednesday to remember the things she loved about Sayfollah.

The two united over a passion for food, and Muhammad, a professional baker, remembers how carefully Sayfollah would serve the delicate knafeh pastry she sold through the ice cream shop he ran in Tampa.

“Just in the way he plated my dessert, he made it look so good,” Muhammad, 43, recalled. “I even told him he did a better job than me.”

“That really showed the type of person he was,” she added. “He wanted to do things with excellence.”

‘The love he gave all of us’

Born and raised in Port Charlotte, a coastal community in south central Florida, Sayfollah – nicknamed Saif – maintained a deep connection to his ancestral roots abroad.

He spent a large portion of his teenage years in the occupied West Bank, where his two brothers and sister also lived. There, his parents, who own a home near Sinjil, hoped he could better connect with his culture and language.

But after finishing high school, Sayfollah was eager to return to the US to try his hand at entrepreneurship. Last year, he, his father and his cousins opened the dessert shop in Tampa, Florida, playfully named Ice Screamin.

But the ice cream shop was just the beginning. Sayfollah’s ambition left a deep impression on Muhammad.

“He had his vision to expand the business, to multiply it by many,” she said, her voice at times shaking with grief. “This at 20, when most kids are playing video games.”

“And the crazy thing is, any goal that he set his mind to, he always did it,” she added. “He always exceeded everyone’s expectations, especially with the love he gave all of us.”

Sayfollah’s aunt, 58-year-old Samera Musallet, also remembers his dedication to his family. She described Sayfollah as a loving young man who never let his aunts pay for anything in his presence – and who always insisted on bringing dessert when he came for dinner.

At the same time, Samera said he was still youthful and fun-loving: He liked to watch comedy movies, shop for clothes and make late-night trips to the WaWa convenience store.

One of her fondest memories came when Sayfollah was only 14, and they went together to a baseball game featuring the Kansas City Royals.

“When we got there, he could smell the popcorn and all the hot dogs. He bought everything he could see and said, ‘We’re going to share!’” she told Al Jazeera.

“After he ate all that junk food, we turned around, and he was sleeping. I woke him up when the game was over, and he goes: ‘Who won?’”

‘I really want to get married’

Another one of his aunts, 52-year-old Katie Salameh, remembers that Sayfollah’s mind had turned to marriage in the final months of his young life

As the Florida spring gave way to summer, Sayfollah had announced plans to return to the West Bank to see his mother and siblings. But he confided to Salameh that he had another reason for returning.

“The last time I saw him was we had a family wedding, and that was the weekend of Memorial Day [in May],” Salameh told Al Jazeera.

“I asked him: ‘Are you so excited to see your siblings and your mom?’ He said, ‘Oh my god, I’m so excited.’ Then he goes, ‘I really want to get married. I’m going to look for a bride when I’m there.’”

To keep the ice cream shop running smoothly, Sayfollah had arranged a switch with his father: He would return to the West Bank while his father would travel to Tampa to mind the business.

But that decision would unwittingly put Sayfollah’s father more than 10,000 kilometres away from his son when violent Israeli settlers surrounded him, as witnesses and his family would later recount.

Israeli authorities said the attack in Sinjil began with rock-throwing and “violent clashes … between Palestinians and Israeli civilians”, a claim Sayfollah’s family and witnesses have rejected.

Instead, they said Sayfollah was trying to protect his family’s land when he was encircled by a “mob of settlers” who beat him.

Even when an ambulance was called, Sayfollah’s family said the settlers blocked the paramedics from reaching his broken body. Sayfollah’s younger brother would ultimately help carry his dying brother to emergency responders.

The settlers also fatally shot Mohammed al-Shalabi, a 23-year-old Palestinian man, who witnesses said was left bleeding for hours.

“His phone was on, and he wasn’t responding,” his mother, Joumana al-Shalabi, told reporters. “He was missing for six hours. They found him martyred under the tree. They beat him and shot him with bullets.”

Palestinians cannot legally possess firearms in the occupied West Bank, but Israeli settlers can. The Israeli government itself has encouraged the settlers to bear arms, including through the distribution of rifles to civilians.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has recorded the killings of at least 964 Palestinians at the hands of Israeli forces and settlers in the occupied West Bank since October 7, 2023.

And the violence appears to be on the rise. The OHCHR noted that there was a 13-percent increase in the number of killings during the first six months of 2025, compared with the same period last year.

‘Pain I can’t even describe’

An Al Jazeera analysis also found that Israeli forces and settlers have killed at least nine US citizens since 2022, including veteran reporter Shireen Abu Akleh.

None of those deaths have resulted in criminal charges, with Washington typically relying on Israel to conduct its own investigations.

So far, US President Donald Trump has not directly addressed Sayfollah’s killing. When asked in the Oval Office about the fatal beating, Trump deferred to Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

“We protect all American citizens anywhere in the world, especially if they’re unjustly murdered or killed,” Rubio replied on Trump’s behalf. “We’re gathering more information.”

Rubio also pointed to a statement issued a day earlier from the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee. The ambassador called on Israel to “aggressively investigate” the attack, saying “there must be accountability for this criminal and terrorist act”.

It was a particularly jarring sentiment from Huckabee, who has been a vocal supporter of Israel’s illegal settlements in the West Bank and has even denied the very existence of a Palestinian people.

Nevertheless, no independent, US-led investigation has been announced.

According to Israeli media, three Israeli settlers, including a military reservist, were taken into custody following the deadly attack, but all were subsequently released.

It has only been four days since Sayfollah’s killing, and his family told Al Jazeera the initial shock has only now begun to dissipate.

But in its place has come a flood of grief and anger. Muhammad still struggles to accept that he “died because he was on his own land”. She sees Sayfollah’s death as part of a broader pattern of abuses, whether in the West Bank or in Gaza, where Israel has led a war since 2023.

“I see it on the news all the time with other people in the West Bank. I see it in Gaza – the indiscriminate killing of anybody in their way,” she said.

“But when it happens to you, it’s just so hard to even fathom,” she added. “It’s pain I can’t even describe.”