united states

Washington, DC – A Senate committee hearing this week has once again shone a spotlight on the political divisions over the United States government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Wednesday’s hearing, held by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, continued years of criticism, mainly from Republicans, against immunologist Anthony Fauci, who led the government’s response to the pandemic.

Spearheaded by committee chair Rand Paul, several Republicans rehashed claims that the virus that causes COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, emerged from an infectious disease lab in Wuhan, China, and did not naturally transfer from animals to humans.

Stephen Morrison, the director of the Global Health Policy Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the hearing was a reflection of the deep, enduring partisan divides over the issue.

But he added that the meeting with Fauci did little to shed new light on the pandemic after years of investigation, hearings and political posturing.

“There’s no space for any civil discussion around any of these issues. There’s no desire really,” Morrison told Al Jazeera.

“So, what’s the lasting impact of this? I mean, it continues to impose unconscionable pain and suffering on [Fauci] and his family. It doesn’t advance the debate one inch on the whole question of COVID origins and what was past US policy and what should US policy be going forward.”

Wuhan lab leak theory

Wednesday’s hearing was based largely on a previous 520-page report from 2024, created by the Republican-led Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.

That report claimed it was likely that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a Chinese research facility. Senator Paul has embraced this viewpoint, as has President Donald Trump.

In April of last year, shortly after Trump took office for his second term, the White House launched a webpage purporting to reveal “the true origins of COVID-19”, largely based on the report.

The site highlighted several claims that experts say pave over the nuanced scientific debate about the origins of the virus.

Drawing on the 2024 report, the White House asserts that SARS-CoV-2 “possesses a biological characteristic that is not found in nature” and that “data shows that all COVID-19 cases stem from a single introduction into humans”, setting it apart from previous natural pandemics.

Joel Wertheim, a professor of medicine at the University of California San Diego, told Factcheck.org that both claims were false.

While COVID does contain a characteristic to enter cells that is not found in its closest coronavirus relatives, that quality does exist in other coronaviruses more broadly. As Wertheim put it, “It is most certainly found in nature.”

Meanwhile, a pair of studies released in 2022 found at least two unique paths through which initial human infection occurred, contradicting the White House’s claim that the pandemic arose from a “single introduction into humans”.

The White House webpage also focuses on Fauci, who led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) until 2022 and served as the chief medical adviser to former US President Joe Biden, Trump’s election rival.

Biden pre-emptively pardoned him in January 2025, fearing the physician might be arrested under the second Trump administration.

Ahead of Wednesday’s hearing, Trump took the opportunity to renew his derision of Fauci, writing on Truth Social that the medical expert’s “ideas were CRAZY”.

Trump also accused Fauci, without evidence, of orchestrating a cover-up for China, where COVID was first documented. The Republican leader was serving his first term as president when the pandemic began.

Ongoing debate

To be sure, there has been criticism from within the international scientific community that the lab leak theory was discounted too swiftly in the early days of the pandemic, as it became seen as political.

Trump and other world leaders had been quick to use anti-China rhetoric when discussing the virus.

There currently remains no conclusive evidence proving either the lab leak theory or that the virus had a natural origin. The vast majority of infectious disease scientists, including Fauci, have said neither possibility can be ruled out.

Still, a preponderance of experts say evidence indicates that the virus was most likely transferred from an animal, likely a bat, to humans, in a process called zoonotic spillover.

A 2024 survey of virologists and other scientists, conducted by the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute (GCRI), found most respondents believed natural transmission was considerably more likely than a lab leak, although most acknowledged it was impossible to definitively dismiss the theory.

Following three years of research, a World Health Organization (WHO) advisory board released a report in 2025 that also concluded “the weight of available evidence … suggests zoonotic spillover”.

Still, WHO director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus cautioned, “As things stand, all hypotheses must remain on the table, including zoonotic spillover and lab leak.”

Inside Fauci’s diary

Fauci has long argued the scientific evidence indicates that the virus emerged from natural animal transmission, but he has repeatedly rejected the notion that he has outright dismissed the lab leak theory.

In a 2024 letter to the House Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, his lawyers maintained (PDF) it was “completely wrong” to say that Fauci had ever called the possibility a “conspiracy theory”.

Instead, they said Fauci and his allies rejected an array of conspiracy theories that have been tied to the lab leak theory, including the idea that he had “sneaked unnoticed into the CIA headquarters to try to convince CIA officials to debunk the lab leak theory”.

Wednesday’s hearing was preceded by the release of entries from Fauci’s private diary, stored on a government computer drive.

They were obtained through Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, a vaccine sceptic and Fauci critic, who passed them along to Senator Paul.

In one entry, Fauci described a claim that he “deliberately” worked with the Chinese to create the virus as a “way-out conspiracy theory”.

He and his legal team have also repeatedly rejected Republican claims that he leveraged millions in grant money to compel scientists to change their views about COVID’s origins.

The White House website, for instance, asserts that Fauci “prompted” an early study on COVID origins to downplay the lab leak theory. No evidence has been presented to support those claims, which have also been rejected by the scientists involved.

Did Fauci mislead?

On Wednesday, several Senate Republicans charged that Fauci’s diary entries showed he had intentionally misled the public by downplaying the possibility the virus had emerged from the Wuhan lab.

Fauci’s supporters, however, have said the diary fails to prove any deliberate attempt to mislead. They argue his public and private statements were consistent in the early days of the pandemic, when scientists’ understanding of the virus was shifting daily.

Fauci’s diary entries indicated he met with a group of experts in February 2020, noting “there was not total agreement” on the likelihood the virus had been created via human manipulation. Senator Paul and others said Fauci did not adequately reflect that view in his public statements.

Republicans also seized on a January 26, 2020, entry in which Fauci wrote that initial data suggests “the first infection was in early December and was not connected” to the wet market in Wuhan.

“Now we know the market was not the source but the amplifier,” he wrote.

During the hearing, Senator Paul said the diary revealed that Fauci was “repeatedly saying in public something different than what he believes in private”.

Fauci’s defenders have pointed to a USA Today interview he gave shortly after the diary entry, floating the idea that the market could have been an “amplifier”. Others have argued the diary entries do not contradict the view that the virus was of natural origins.

Public restrictions

Republicans on Wednesday also focused heavily on Fauci’s role in issuing public guidance about how to slow the spread of the COVID virus.

Several states saw schools close and businesses shutter amid social-distancing recommendations.

But those closures became a political lightning rod and featured prominently in the 2020 presidential elections and 2022 midterm races.

Indeed, new studies have cast doubt on the effectiveness of social distancing rules. Others indicate mask mandates may have been less effective than previously presented, although research still generally supports that masks may slow the spread of the disease.

As NIAID director, Fauci had no direct authority to impose public health mandates, which were typically introduced by state and local officials. While he had a role in issuing federal guidance, his work was part of a wider government effort involving other agencies and officials.

Speaking on Wednesday, Gary Peters, the top Democrat on the Senate panel, accused Republicans of “relitigating history” and seeking to “turn one person into a scapegoat for a crisis that hundreds of officials across the Biden and Trump administrations were responsible for handling”.

Still, Fauci’s diary does contain uncomfortable revelations about how he wielded his high-profile position. In one instance, he recounted how he offered then-New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio encouragement to close city schools. He did the same with an aide to California Governor Gavin Newsom.

“I advised De Blasio to go ahead and do it,” he recounted. “I went on to tell him he should close the bars and restaurants in NYC… He said that he would base this on my recommendation.”

Why now?

During the Wednesday hearing, Fauci invoked his constitutional right to remain silent roughly 100 times, drawing significant public scrutiny.

The 85-year-old Fauci, who enjoyed bipartisan support as NIAID director throughout much of his 38 years in the role, decried the hearing as an attempt to entrap him with perjury.

Critics, including several Democrats on the committee, have also questioned the timing of Wednesday’s hearing, which comes just three months before November’s midterm elections.

Republicans are expected to face an uphill battle in maintaining control of the House of Representatives, and they also risk losing their slim control of the Senate in the vote. A defeat in either chamber would serve as a major setback to Trump in his final two years in office.

The party has struggled to find a defining issue to campaign on, amid affordability woes fuelled by the ongoing US-Israeli war with Iran.

The hearing also comes at a time when polls have shown public trust in federal health agencies has plummeted since Trump took office.

For instance, a June poll conducted by the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health and the de Beaumont Foundation’s Public Health Listening Lab suggests that just 50 percent of respondents said they trusted recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

That marks a decline from 77 percent in the spring of 2025.

About 69 percent also felt that federal health agencies’ recommendations were too influenced by their leaders’ public opinions.

But Morrison, the health policy expert, saw the hearing as a personal attack on Fauci, with Senator Paul and Secretary Kennedy pursuing an ideological “vendetta”.

Fauci, he said, has come to represent for some Republicans the “iconic embodiment of everything that they have come to believe is craven and corrupt in the US government response” to COVID.

He warned that their approach, though, could chill any desire for top scientists to wade into government.

“People will say Tony Fauci could have done things a little differently, he made a few mistakes, and he could have admitted those,” Morrison said.

“But the ‘big but’ is certainly none of that warrants what’s happening here.”

FIFA’s World Cup 2026 expansion was their first since 1998, but the 2030 edition could rise to 64 teams.

FIFA is studying whether to expand the World Cup from 48 to 64 teams for the 2030 edition in a move that could reshape football’s showpiece tournament when it celebrates its centennial.

World football’s governing body wants to appoint an independent agency to assess the ambitious expansion plan, which would add another 16 nations to ⁠a tournament that had already grown from 32 to 48 teams in 2026.

“FIFA wishes to appoint an independent agency to determine whether and how expanding the FIFA World Cup from 48 to 64 participating national teams, starting with the 2030 edition, would impact on the tournament proposition,” it said in a research brief seen by the news agency Reuters.

South American confederation CONMEBOL had officially proposed hosting the 2030 World ‌Cup with 64 teams last year, allowing more countries the opportunity to join in the celebrations for the tournament’s centennial edition.

The 2026 edition in the US, Canada and Mexico was the first since 1998 to move away from the 32-team format, adding four more groups and an extra knockout round in the process, resulting in 104 matches over more than five weeks.

The accelerated study comes on the heels of FIFA’s plan to create a $20bn subsidiary to run the World Cup and its other events with external investors, a move that has attracted criticism and a ⁠UEFA decision to boycott FIFA events.

Al Jazeera has contacted FIFA for comment.

UEFA and FIFA could be on another World Cup collision course

UEFA President ⁠Aleksander Ceferin said last year that expanding the World Cup to 64 teams was not a good idea.

The European governing body’s position has not changed since then, while Asian Football Confederation President Sheikh Salman bin Ibrahim Al Khalifa had also voiced opposition, questioning last year where further expansion ⁠might end.

FIFA’s proposed analysis is meant to assess whether the proposed expansion can strengthen the tournament or whether concerns such as competition dilution, calendar congestion, operational complexity and market saturation ⁠outweigh the potential benefits.

The study will examine the potential impact of expanding ⁠the tournament to 64 teams, including the effects on the competition, competitive balance, qualification, player welfare and the international calendar.

It will also estimate the revenues that could be generated from ticket sales, sponsorship and media rights under the proposed format.

“The final recommendation should demonstrate not only whether a 64-team tournament ‌can generate incremental value, but whether that value is sustainable,” the document added.

FIFA said a decision on selecting the agency would be made on August 14 and they would have only four weeks to deliver their analysis by September 11.

The ‌2030 ‌World Cup is being jointly hosted by Morocco, Portugal and Spain, while Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay will host one match each to celebrate the tournament’s 100th anniversary.

FIFA is already facing a dispute with its confederations due to a plan to sell stakes in World Cups and other events to private investors.

Shon Barnes steps down amid questions over authorities’ handling of the shooting at a popular food festival.

Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes has resigned less than a week after a deadly shooting at one of the US city’s largest summer festivals as questions have mounted over the authorities’ handling of its aftermath.

Mayor Katie Wilson announced Barnes’s resignation on Thursday and named Deputy Chief Andre Sayles, a police officer with more than two decades of law enforcement experience, as interim chief.

The move came after three people were killed and four injured, including a two-year-old boy, in a shootout on Sunday at the annual Bite of Seattle food festival.

Dozens of police officers were already providing security at the event, and court documents said at least one officer saw a 15-year-old suspect firing into the crowd and quickly persuaded him to surrender. Police are still searching for at least one other suspect.

The shooting unfolded while Barnes was attending a law enforcement conference outside the city in the northwestern state of Washington.

While Wilson praised officers’ response at the scene, saying it likely saved lives, she said the city’s communication with the public in the hours that followed fell short.

Police posted about the shooting on social media shortly after it began but then went nearly five hours without providing another public update, leaving residents uncertain about whether there was an ongoing threat. The city also failed to send alerts through its emergency notification system while Wilson herself mistakenly announced that two suspects had been taken into custody before later retracting the statement.

“What I did not fully understand in that moment was how little information had reached the public or the press since the incident began,” Wilson said in a video statement on Thursday. “Had I known that, I would have pushed for an immediate briefing rather than waiting for a press conference to be organised.”

Barnes, in a statement released by the mayor’s office, described serving as Seattle’s police chief as “an honor” and said he hoped the transition would allow the department to refocus on “addressing youth gun violence and preventing more tragedies”.

The resignation followed hours of speculation over Barnes’s future with supporters saying he had resisted calls from Wilson to step down. Earlier in the day, Barnes told The Seattle Times that whether he remained chief was “up to the mayor”.

Several Black community organisations, including the Seattle NAACP and the Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle, urged Wilson not to make Barnes, the city’s second Black police chief, “a scapegoat for the complex challenges of public safety”.

They credited him with improving relations between police and the community, reducing gun violence and strengthening the department’s operations. Several City Council members also backed Barnes, pointing out that Seattle has now had four police chiefs in less than three years.

Barnes was appointed in late 2024 by former Mayor Bruce Harrell after leading the Madison Police Department in the northern state of Wisconsin. When Wilson, a democratic socialist who had previously supported defunding the police, took office this year, she kept Barnes in the role, signalling she did not plan to dramatically change the city’s public safety strategy.

Barnes’s resignation was announced as Seattle prepares for another major weekend event with the annual Seafair festival set to begin on Friday.

Dinorah Figuera was allowed to return from exile thanks to her participation in this initiative. The same happens with some members of the opposition delegation

On August 1, representatives of Venezuela’s two rival legislatures sit down together under Washington’s supervision in the most concrete attempt to negotiate again since the Barbados talks of 2023. 

The talks, framed by Washington as the start of a transition, are driven by the Department of State and pair two delegations of ten. On one side sits the current National Assembly controlled by chavismo, led by its president Jorge Rodríguez. On the other is the Comisión Delegada of the National Assembly elected in 2015 — the last legislature the US and many other countries recognized as democratically legitimate. 

According to Dinorah Figuera, president of the Delegate Commission, the primary objective is laying out the institutional groundwork for a political transition: renovating Venezuela’s key state bodies, establishing a new National Electoral Council (CNE) capable of holding elections with credible guarantees, and extending to the Supreme Tribunal’s electoral and constitutional chambers. Figuera has said she hopes to deliver a transition proposal by December 2026, conveniently timed for the Trump administration to show a foreign-policy success just after the US midterm legislative election in November.

Figuera and Jorge Rodríguez first met on June 18, along with U.S. Chargé d’Affaires John Barrett, hours after Figuera returned to Caracas after years in exile. Those contacts were interrupted by the June 24 earthquakes, seeming as though the political track would freeze indefinitely behind the humanitarian emergency, especially as Delcy Rodríguez said on July 13 that the government had “no head” to think about elections while managing the disaster. 

The roots of Dinorah Figuera, the opposition’s co-chair, lie on the left. She belonged to the labor party La Causa R in the 1990s (then an important force in the rising Venezuelan Left) and served as deputy secretary of the Libertador municipality in Caracas under Aristóbulo Istúriz, who later jumped onto the chavista wagon. She eventually joined Primero Justicia and was re-elected as a lawmaker in 2015 before being forced into exile in 2018. Shortly after she led protests denouncing the death of party colleague Fernando Albán under SEBIN custody —a PJ councilman, key aide to Julio Borges and the godfather of Figuera’s daughter— she was threatened by the intelligence services and took shelter in the French Embassy of Caracas for 10 days before fleeing to Spain and receiving political asylum. 

Sources close to Primero Justicia describe Figuera as a principled politician willing to serve without seeking personal or financial gain from her sacrifices. She maintained a very low profile in this role until the State Department elevated her visibility several weeks ago.

While exiled in Spain, and following the collapse of the interinato, Figuera succeeded Juan Guaidó as the figure managing Venezuela’s overseas assets in the US via the 2015 National Assembly’s Comisión Delegada (recognized by Washington as Venezuela’s sole democratically elected institution until this year). Sources close to Primero Justicia describe Figuera as a principled politician willing to serve without seeking personal or financial gain from her sacrifices. She maintained a very low profile in this role until the State Department elevated her visibility several weeks ago. Figuera and US representatives have been undertaking preparatory meetings in Madrid for over two weeks, coordinated by Mauricio Claver-Carone, Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s principal interlocutor on Venezuela.

Figuera has called herself “an instrument” of the reinstitutionalization process. She acknowledges Edmundo González Urrutia as president-elect and María Corina Machado as the opposition’s leader, yet notes she holds “a different vision.” She is, in the role the State Department has cast for her, what Edmundo González was to Machado in 2024: a figure admitted by chavista institutions because she isn’t a threat, and little enough ambition to follow guidelines from influential people in the opposition alliance.

Jorge Rodríguez, her counterpart, is chavismo’s veteran negotiator and the brother of acting president Delcy Rodríguez. He led the government’s delegation in the Mexico talks of 2021–2022 and signed the 2023 Barbados Agreement on Maduro’s behalf. Before that, he was Chávez’s vice president, communications minister, and president of the CNE in 2005–2006. 

Up until yesterday, the opposition’s full roster was not yet public. The opposition’s ten were revealed in stages and through extraofficial communications. In June, El Pitazo confirmed six names: Dinorah Figuera, Juan Miguel Matheus, Ramón López, Jorge Millán, Marco Aurelio Quiñones and Sergio Vergara. The remaining four were disclosed on July 29th: Elimar Díaz, Julio César Moreno, Macario González and Desiré Barboza.

Six are from Primero Justicia: Figuera, constitutional lawyer Juan Miguel Matheus, engineer Ramón López, Caracas legislator Jorge Millán, and recent additions Elimar Díaz and Julio César Moreno. 

Four are from Voluntad Popular, Leopoldo López’s party: Marco Aurelio Quiñones; Táchira legislator Sergio Vergara; and late additions Macario González and Desiré Barboza. Nearly all have spent recent years in exile, or in González’ case, in detention. Several are returning only now, under the process’s complicit US security guarantee. 

For most of the last two years, Primero Justicia has effectively been two parties. After Henrique Capriles chose to participate in the 2025 regional and legislative elections, the party’s official leadership, aligned with Machado’s abstentionist line, expelled him, Tomás Guanipa, and others for legitimizing what it called a fraud. Both Tomás Guanipa and Capriles were elected members of the NA that Rodríguez presides over. What remained of Primero Justicia, keeping the party’s name and recognition, was the abstentionist wing, led by Juan Pablo Guanipa, with Julio Borges as coordinator and María Beatriz Martínez as president. 

The delegation Washington seated is drawn substantially from the faction of Primero Justicia most doctrinally opposed to negotiating an electoral path with chavismo. The party has tried to hold both positions: in its July 27 statement it backed the dialogue as a route toward free elections while, in the same breath, ratifying its support for Machado. 

Who’s Who?

Juan Miguel Matheus (PJ, Carabobo) is a lawyer with a PhD in constitutional and parliamentary law behind the Estatuto que rige la Transición a la Democracia, the legal framework that underpinned Guaidó’s 2019 interim presidency. Elected for Carabobo in 2015, he was among the sharpest critics of the 2017 Constituent Assembly, calling it fraudulent. He is in exile in Austin and coordinates PJ’s board of directors. 

Ramón López (PJ, Distrito Capital) is an engineer and the former vice president of Venezuela’s Colegio de Ingenieros. López sat in the 2015 Assembly and the Parlasur, Mercosur’s parliament. Exiled in Spain after being threatened by Diosdado & Co., he became PJ’s international spokesperson. He flew back to Caracas alongside Figuera on June 18 for the meetings that launched the process..

Jorge Millán (PJ, Distrito Capital) is an industrial engineer and administrator. Millán is PJ’s Caracas coordinator and one of the opposition’s longtime specialists on the collapse of the national electric system. In 2019, the Constituent Assembly ordered his prosecution on charges including treason and instigation to insurrection. When Maduro issued him a pardon in 2020, Millán rejected it, arguing he had committed no crime and that Maduro had no legitimacy to pardon anyone. 

Elimar Díaz (PJ, Zulia) is the delegation’s youngest member. Díaz began in Manuel Rosales’s Un Nuevo Tiempo before moving to Primero Justicia, where she is now national political coordinator and PJ’s political vice-president in Zulia.

Julio César Moreno (PJ, Falcón) has the thinnest public record of the ten. Moreno was elected to the 2015 Assembly for Falcón and is counted among Primero Justicia’s delegates.

Marco Aurelio Quiñones (VP, Anzoátegui) was elected for Anzoátegui in 2015. In his early career, he was close to Capriles and Borges in Primero Justicia and then crossed to Voluntad Popular in late 2016, becoming a close ally of Guaidó. In December 2024 the exiled Assembly swore him in as second vice president, filling the seat left by Auristela Vásquez’s resignation and making him the highest-ranking officer of the 2015 legislature at the table after Figuera.

Sergio Vergara (VP, Táchira) is a founding member of Voluntad Popular alongside Leopoldo López and Daniel Ceballos. He was elected for Táchira in 2015 with nearly 76% of his circuit’s vote. He served as acting mayor of San Cristóbal after Ceballos was jailed in 2014, and has been in exile since 2019, when the SEBIN raided his home in connection with the Roberto Marrero case. He is also among the signatories of the document tied to the failed Jordan Goudreau incursion, asking for a military foreign intervention.

Macario González (VP, Lara) is a veteran Lara politician and former mayor of Barquisimeto’s Iribarren municipality. González was detained by the SEBIN in September 2025 as he left a university in Barquisimeto, held incommunicado, in what Voluntad Popular denounced as a forced disappearance for what he says was 68 days without charge, judicial hearing, or explanation. He was released near midnight on November 19, 2025, hours after the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights granted him precautionary measures. He has publicly held Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello politically responsible for his detention.

Capriles, now sitting in the Rodríguez-controlled national assembly, cautioned that a negotiation excluding Machado “will be condemned to fail.” 

Desiré Barboza (VP, Zulia) was an alternate deputy for Zulia in the 2015 Assembly and is Voluntad Popular’s regional coordinator there. Like most of the delegation, she has built her recent political life in exile and within the structures of the 2015 legislature.

On the ‘chavista’ side, only Jorge Rodríguez has been named to the time of writing. While the opposition’s ten were leaked or rumored until confirmed, the radio silence from those representing the current national assembly clashes awkwardly with Diosdado Cabello’s boasts of chavista unity. Francisco Arias Cárdenas, 1992 coup veteran and former Zulia governor, urged Rodríguez’s delegation to consult the PSUV’s base and submit any agreement to the Venezuelan public, warning that dialogue must not become a matter of simply following Washington’s instructions. 

The positions around the table

Primero Justicia and Un Nuevo Tiempo have called August 1 a “historic opportunity,” with PJ setting conditions: free, fair elections and the restoration of popular sovereignty. Voluntad Popular was the first to back the US initiative outright. But Acción Democrática’s Henry Ramos Allup has warned against any process that sidelines the coalition and Machado. Capriles, now sitting in the Rodríguez-controlled national assembly, cautioned that a negotiation excluding Machado “will be condemned to fail.” 

Machado and González stated their own position on July 26, claiming they will neither participate in nor obstruct the process, having taken no part in its “design, construction and functioning,” and will judge it by concrete, verifiable results: institutional recovery, the release of political prisoners, guarantees without exclusions, a presidential electoral calendar, and respect for popular sovereignty. 

FIFA face global mutiny as Asian Football Confederation stand with Europe and North America after their boycott threats.

The ‌Asian Football Confederation has said it “stands in solidarity” with regional ⁠bodies UEFA and ⁠CONCACAF in opposing plans to sell a stake in the World Cup to private investors but stopped short of threatening ⁠to boycott events run by FIFA, global football’s governing body.

The confederation in a statement on Friday expressed “deep concern” over the proposed establishment of a $20bn commercial ⁠subsidiary, FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE), to run the World Cup and FIFA’s other events.

“The fact that the situation has reached the point where the real possibility of a FIFA World Cup boycott has entered public discourse should concern everyone ‌who cares about the future of our game,” the statement said.

“Football should never have been placed in such a position.”

UEFA, European football’s governing body, voted unanimously on Thursday to boycott all FIFA events unless the plans were dropped. CONCACAF, the regional federation for North America, Central America and the Caribbean, has also rejected ⁠FIFA’s proposal.

On Thursday, AFC President Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa had said the way the proposal had been made was “totally unacceptable”, in a letter to member associations.

The AFC said “the proposed FFE cannot realistically achieve the necessary broad consensus and ⁠unity required to move forward.

“The FIFA World Cup ⁠is the pinnacle of global football and derives its strength from the participation of all confederations and the world’s leading football nations.”

The AFC also made a thinly veiled attack on the ⁠governing body’s president, Gianni Infantino, saying the plan “has exposed fundamental weaknesses in FIFA’s consultation and decision-making processes that ⁠must now be addressed”.

Even after FIFA issued ⁠a new statement on Friday, saying each national association “should be allowed to review the proposal and have a say in shaping their own future”, the AFC said “central concerns surrounding governance, ‌institutional process and meaningful consultation remain unanswered”.

It said the furore must become a catalyst for institutional reform at FIFA, and that “meaningful democracy is not ‌measured ‌solely by the opportunity to vote.

“It begins with transparent governance, timely consultation, informed deliberation and genuine participation throughout the decision-making process.”

Hamas has agreed to gradually disarm in Gaza as part of Donald Trump’s 20-point peace plan. The US president called the deal ‘historic’. Here’s what we know.

United States economic growth slowed in the second quarter of 2026 amid a growing deficit and increasing inflationary pressures.

US gross domestic product (GDP) grew by 1.5 percent between April and June. That is a sharp decline from 2.1 percent growth in the first quarter of the year, according to a Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) report released on Thursday.

A widening trade deficit is a key reason why GDP is slowing, as is a jump in petrol prices, experts say.

“It’s a classic supply shock. The combination of tariffs and oil price spikes is exactly what a macroeconomist would expect to happen,” Michael Klein, professor of international economic affairs at The Fletcher School at Tufts University, told Al Jazeera.

The US has increased purchases of goods like semiconductors, telecommunications equipment, and industrial equipment, according to BEA data. Business investment in equipment rose by more than 15 percent in the second quarter. Those are essentially the elements needed for the ongoing investment boom to support the growth of artificial intelligence (AI).

“Imports rose due to the investment and consumption driver, and so net exports were a drag on overall growth. Overall, the US is investing and consuming more but not producing more,” Rachel Ziemba, adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, told Al Jazeera.

Exports have not kept pace. The trade deficit in May grew to $77.6bn, a 42 percent increase from the month before, according to BEA data.

Exports tumbled by 3.2 percent to $317.7bn, and imports rose by 3.3 percent to $395.3bn.

This comes as countries around the globe seek to reduce their dependence on the US due to President Donald Trump’s tariff policies.

Among them is Canada, historically one of the US’s biggest trading partners. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has pursued new trade deals with China and Saudi Arabia in recent months, for example, as Trump has slapped steep tariffs on the country, threatened to annex it and called it the 51st state, and refused to renew a trade deal with Canada and Mexico.

Are US tensions with Iran a factor?

In the second quarter, energy prices fluctuated greatly over the past few months. For US consumers, that was mostly reflected in petrol prices. During the second quarter, US petrol prices hit $4.48 per gallon (3.78 litres) in May.

They later retreated to $3.96 per gallon by the end of June. But the reprieve was short-lived as a fragile peace deal failed to take hold, with petrol prices increasing throughout July after the deadline for data to be included in second-quarter GDP had passed. Prices have since moved back above the $4 mark.

Petrol prices drove inflation for much of the second quarter. Between March and April, petrol prices jumped 5.4 percent. The next month, they jumped another 7 percent. They eased between May and June, falling 9.7 percent as global benchmark prices pulled back.

According to analysis from Bank of America, discretionary spending surged in June, the final month of the second quarter, as spending on products outside of petrol jumped while fuel prices temporarily eased.

“With gasoline prices easing in June, total card spending excluding gas surged 5.6% YoY [year over year] – also the strongest growth since April 2022,” the report said.

How can the GDP recover?

US consumers have ramped up spending on prescription drugs, automobiles like light trucks, and new furniture. There was also increased spending in areas like restaurants and hotels, suggesting that consumers remain somewhat resilient.

But, says Fletcher School’s Klein, that spending is by high-income earners, a trend that indicates a K-shaped economy, which is when the wealthy thrive, while lower-income consumers and small businesses face tougher economic conditions.

“The continued consumption growth of those who are better off depends upon things like the stock market staying strong and housing prices staying strong, because people feel wealthier through the value of their house or their stock portfolios, so they’ll spend more. But by a number of measures, the stock market seems to be very highly valued,” Klein, who also authors the EconoFact economic analysis website, told Al Jazeera.

Overall, consumer confidence fell for the third straight month in July, according to a Conference Board report released on Tuesday. Consumers attributed the decline to “current business conditions”, and the organisation expects “little improvement” for the remainder of the year.

Business investment would also need to surge more broadly to lift the wider economy. While there has been a boom in the AI sector, other industries have not been as eager to keep their inventories stocked.

Klein says consistent trade policies would change that.

“The pervasive uncertainty in the economy will affect businesses’ decisions on hiring and investing. That can also contribute to the slowdown, because, in an uncertain environment, businesses don’t want to make decisions that have long-lasting consequences when they have little idea of what the future will look like,” Klein said.

Creating economic conditions that encourage consumers and businesses to spend would help drive up GDP in the coming quarters. However, uncertain trade policies and concerns about widespread layoffs, as has been the case in several tech companies, have made consumers more cautious with the pocket books.

“If people were more secure and felt that their jobs would be there next year; if they felt that things weren’t more expensive and they could afford to spend more. But those are not easy fixes, right? And talk is not going to change what people rightly perceive as a fraught situation,” Klein added.

A spike in mortality

The tightening restrictions have forced the Cuban government to effectively ration care.

In February, Havana announced a package of emergency energy-saving measures. Among them was the suspension of all non-essential medical services across the island.

But non-essential does not mean unimportant. Fernandez, the paediatric anaesthesiologist, explained that preventive healthcare plays a major role in saving lives.

Under normal conditions, he said, preventive healthcare helps doctors catch potentially fatal conditions like appendicitis sooner.

But in recent months, Fernandez has observed patients arriving at his hospital in a “worsened” condition than they might otherwise have had.

“All the appendicitis cases we treat now present complications,” he said. “They demand more resources and antibiotics – supplies we don’t have.”

Deaths in Cuba have also escalated as years of increasing restrictions take effect.

Just last month, the Cuban Ministry of Public Health (MINSAP) reported that survival rates for childhood cancer dropped from 85 percent to 65 percent amid the oil blockade.

Infant mortality has also steadily climbed. In 2017, at the start of Trump’s first term, Cuba had an infant mortality rate of four for every 1,000 live births. That figure climbed to 7.7 in 2024, just before Trump’s second term, and reached 9.9 in 2025.

The maternal mortality rate similarly rose to 44.1 deaths for every 100,000 live births by the end of 2025, up from 40.6 the previous year.

Lilian Delgado, an obstetrician and gynaecologist at Cuba’s main maternity hospital, explained that the escalating humanitarian crisis has triggered a sharp rise in premature births and severe morbidity among pregnant women.

“Conditions are far from ideal at all the levels of the system,” Delgado noted. “There are shortages everywhere.”

The decision to prioritise emergency care can be deceptive. A wide range of medical procedures are considered “elective”. But just because they do not rise to the level of an emergency does not mean they are optional.

Typically, in Cuba, emergency surgeries are those that need to be urgently completed within 48 hours. Other necessary surgeries often fall into the “elective” category.

Mastectomies – a common breast cancer treatment – are among the surgeries often categorised as elective. So too are some organ transplants.

Healthcare advocates point out that, if certain elective surgeries are postponed too long, they too can result in deadly conditions.

More than 100,000 Cubans are currently on waiting lists for elective or reconstructive surgeries, a backlog MINSAP credited to the US sanctions.

Among those waiting are 5,152 cancer patients and approximately 12,000 children. Delgado said some of her patients have been languishing on such lists for months.

“Our surgical services are severely hampered by a lack of supplies,” she explained. “We have more women suffering from serious complications, and our operating rooms have become tied up with emergency cases, making it impossible to perform elective surgeries.”

Hospitals in Cuba largely have backup generators to weather the increasingly frequent power outages. But accessing even emergency medical care is tough when the fuel blockade is affecting basic services like transportation.

“Ultimately, if you have a cancer patient and cannot operate due to a number of factors – such as a nationwide blackout forcing the suspension of surgeries – then, whether you intend to or not, you are directly condemning that patient to death,” Delgado said.

The oil embargo has cost “human lives, both directly and indirectly”, she added.

GDP grew by 1.5 percent in the second quarter following a 2.1 percent increase in first quarter.

Economic growth in the United States slowed in the second quarter amid a growing trade deficit and tensions between the US and Iran which weighed on global fuel prices.

The US Gross Domestic Product (GDP), a measure of goods and services, grew by 1.5 percent between April and June, marking a slowdown from 2.1 percent growth in the first quarter of 2026, according to the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis report released on Thursday.

Consumer spending saw a bump of 3.2 percent for the quarter, both on the back of generous tax refunds from US President Donald Trump’s ‘One Big Beautiful Bill Act’ as well as heightened petrol prices that cost consumers.

Fuel prices are on the upswing after a brief reprieve. The average price for a gallon of petrol (3.78 litres) is $4.09, up from $3.84 this time last month, according to the American Automobile Association (AAA), which tracks daily petrol prices. By comparison, the average price was $2.98 when the US and Israel first struck Iran on February 28 .

Analysts also point to the artificial intelligence spending boom as a reason for the surge, even as those are heavily import reliant and contributing to trade deficits.

“Overall, the economy continues to rely on technology investment,” Rachel Ziemba, adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, told Al Jazeera.

That will likely continue into third-quarter reports, which will take into account the month of July. On Monday, it was reported that Nvidia is in talks to make a $250m investment in OpenAI.

However, there are concerns about how long such investments will last amid questions over circular financing propping up the sector.

“Data centres continue to drive investment and economic growth, increasing the sector’s role in the economy while raising questions about its sustainability,” Ziemba said.

Meanwhile, the Personal Consumption Expenditure Price (PCE) Index report, one of the US Federal Reserve’s key metrics for gauging the rate of inflation, increased 3.7 percent on an annual basis for the month of June after a 4.1 percent surge in May.

The slowdown was marked by a brief retreat in petrol prices last month before they climbed higher again over the past month.

“Today’s report is a snapshot of an economy under a ceasefire that no longer exists. Even with last month’s temporary inflation relief, prices are still elevated and families are saving less as they try to keep up,” Alex Jacquez, a member of the National Economic Council under former US President Joe Biden, said in a note provided to Al Jazeera.

On Wednesday, the US Federal Reserve opted to maintain interest rates at 3.5-3.75 percent.

US markets are on the upswing in midday trading, largely driven by an increase in Microsoft stock amid better-than-expected sales and growth in cloud services. Markets have also risen following the PCE and GDP reports.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq is up 2.6 percent, with the S&P 500 following at 1.2 percent and the Dow Jones Industrial Average up 0.5 percent.

Gold prices, which are typically considered a safe investment during economic uncertainty, extended their gains by 1.9 percent to $4,108.30 per ounce after rising 2 percent on Wednesday.

Dinorah Figuera has a signature with limited value

“Venezuela cannot stand another communiqué” has become something of a political meme, but it captures the central problem with the process beginning on August 1. Washington has assembled a negotiation between an interim president whose continued rule it chose to preserve and an opposition counterpart it helped revive, hoping to combine Delcy Rodríguez’s control of the state with the residual democratic legitimacy of the 2015 National Assembly. The question is not merely whether they can reach an agreement. It is whether two actors whose authority is partial, externally enabled and detached from the country’s current popular leadership can legitimize a transition roadmap whose broad contours appear to have already been decided in Washington—and whether anything they sign can survive without María Corina Machado’s endorsement.

Everyone involved acknowledges that the mechanism was promoted by the United States. What nobody has explained clearly is what kind of mechanism it actually is. Is this a negotiation between two autonomous Venezuelan parties? Is it a broader national dialogue? Or is it an implementation process for a transition whose direction Donald Trump and Marco Rubio have already chosen?

The distinction matters because both sides are selling versions of the process that exaggerate their freedom to negotiate. The opposition presents it as the beginning of a democratic transition. Primero Justicia has listed substantial objectives: a new electoral authority and calendar, the restoration of political parties, an end to political disqualifications, the liberation of political prisoners, the dismantling of the repressive apparatus, freedom of expression and an independent Supreme Court.

Chavismo presents the same process as a necessary concession to preserve peace, obtain sanctions relief and protect the revolution. In its telling, sitting down with the opposition is not surrender but adaptation. “Dialogue does not mean capitulation,” Diosdado Cabello has insisted.

Neither story is entirely realistic.

The opposition may negotiate how political life is reopened and how future elections are organized. Still, it does not appear free to reopen Washington’s decision that stabilization and institutional reconstruction will precede an electoral transfer. Trump accepted Delcy’s continued presidency and has publicly argued that Venezuela is not yet prepared for another election, so the opposition is unlikely to be permitted to demand the immediate transfer of power it once said had already been decided by the 2024 presidential election.  

Delcy’s room for maneuver is also limited. She cannot seriously defend all the old red lines of chavismo: no foreign supervision, no negotiated reform of state institutions, no conditions on sanctions relief and no binding electoral horizon. The existence of an American-sponsored process involving the 2015 Assembly already violates much of the sovereignty theater through which the revolution previously justified itself.

Her real prohibitions are more practical. She cannot accept a settlement that fractures the military, dismantles the governing coalition, exposes its leadership without guarantees, or leaves chavismo incapable of competing in the order that follows. This is regime learning: not preserving the revolution exactly as it existed, but reducing the meaning of survival till it becomes achievable. If chavismo retains its organization, protects much of its elite and remains a viable electoral force, it can describe retreat as continuity.

The opposition is conducting a retreat of its own. It once insisted that the sovereignty expressed in 2024 had already resolved who should govern Venezuela. It is now negotiating the conditions under which Venezuelans may be allowed to decide that question again.

The two sides are not choosing freely between victory and defeat. They are negotiating the distance between two defeats and deciding which concessions each can successfully rename as victory.

Washington’s role goes well beyond providing the room and the refreshments. Delcy Rodríguez is interim president because the United States chose continuity under Maduro’s vice president over an immediate transfer of power to the leadership produced by the 2024 election. Venezuelan institutions administered the oath, but American recognition made that continuity politically viable.

Dinorah Figuera’s return to relevance followed an equally American route. She did not reemerge because a renewed domestic constituency demanded her leadership or because the forces behind the 2024 campaign selected her as their representative. One of her first consequential official appearances after years of political obscurity was a meeting with Michael Kozak at the State Department. She later returned to Venezuela at Washington’s invitation and became Jorge Rodríguez’s counterpart.

Washington helped produce both sides of the table. It accepted Delcy as the administrator of the interim order and activated Dinorah as the institutional representative needed to negotiate with it.

That does not make either woman a simple American puppet. Delcy controls the state machinery required to implement or sabotage any agreement. Dinorah can withhold the opposition stamp Washington needs to sell Trump’s latest South American peace project. But both operate inside a structure whose outer limits appear to have been drawn elsewhere.

The revival of the 2015 National Assembly is understandable. Delcy possesses effective authority but lacks democratic legitimacy. Her government can implement reforms and enforce agreements. What it cannot provide by itself is a convincing democratic chain of authorization.

The 2015 Assembly offers the missing signature. It remains, at least internationally, Venezuela’s last legitimately constituted national institution. Its participation can make institutional appointments, economic agreements and the broader reopening of the country look less like arrangements reached exclusively between Washington and the surviving chavista elite. That matters to governments, creditors and corporations seeking reassurance that future democratic authorities will not repudiate everything agreed during the interim.

But legal usefulness is not political legitimacy.

The Assembly elected in 2015 was a broad and plural legislature supported by millions of Venezuelans. The body negotiating today is a diminished delegated commission represented by only part of the coalition that originally composed it. Its leaders possess little independent national recognition, and the institution itself is deeply unpopular.

Its problem is not merely that it cannot enforce its decisions. For years, it often declined to act at all. It preserved itself as a constitutional necessity while withdrawing from political life, avoiding renewal and becoming increasingly detached from the society it claimed to represent. It remained alive enough to retain recognition and administer assets, but too frozen to lead.

It has now thawed itself back into relevance because Washington needs its pedigree.

Democratic legitimacy cannot simply be placed in constitutional cryogenic storage and reheated intact. The 2015 Assembly survived by refusing to die. It did not spend those years proving that it knew what to do next.

Primero Justicia has tried to bridge that gap by claiming that the delegated commission represents the sovereignty expressed in the 2024 election. But the commission was not elected in 2024, was not selected by the leadership of that campaign and does not represent the full coalition that supported it. The same communiqué reaffirms the leadership of María Corina Machado and Edmundo González while welcoming their willingness to observe a process they have publicly refused to buy into sight unseen.

The contradiction is striking. The people said to embody the country’s current democratic mandate are assigned the role of observers while an older institutional remnant claims to negotiate in their name.

Yet María Corina is not simply outside the process. She may be formally locked out of the negotiating room, but continues to have a relationship with both Trump and Rubio, based at least on her perceived importance. Dinorah has procedural access to the table. María Corina retains strategic access to the people who arranged it.

That may be intentional. Keeping Machado outside allows the delegated commission to absorb the least attractive compromises over sequencing, guarantees and appointments. It preserves her political capital for the moment when the settlement requires popular endorsement. If the process succeeds, she can validate its results without defending every concession. If it fails, she can truthfully say that she neither designed nor controlled it.

But Washington may be delusional if it believes Dinorah Figuera and Jorge Rodríguez can emerge from a closed room, announce an agreement and expect Venezuelan society to accept it without Machado’s endorsement. Their signatures may produce legal validity. Washington may provide international recognition. Foreign corporations may decide that the arrangement offers enough reassurance to begin investing.

Neither Dinorah nor Jorge can manufacture a national constituency.

The mechanism is an attempt to assemble a legitimacy that none of its participants possesses alone. Delcy supplies control of the state. The 2015 Assembly supplies constitutional pedigree. Washington supplies leverage and guarantees. María Corina supplies contemporary popular legitimacy. The problem is that the last component remains outside the formal process and has not promised to endorse whatever it produces.

August 1 does not need to resolve Venezuela’s political crisis. It does need to establish whether this mechanism can produce anything beyond the language of its communiqués. Its credibility will not come from another declaration of democratic intentions, but from evidence that someone can compel chavismo to share power with forces outside its orbit. The first test is not simply whether the parties promise another election. As chavismo reminds us at every opportunity, Venezuela has held plenty of those. The real test is whether the country can move credibly beyond replacing red chavismo with a poorly disguised blue version of the same political order.

The first meaningful agreement should not merely tell Venezuelans when they might vote. It should begin dismantling the police state we somehow cannot escape, even under American tutelage. Without the freedom to speak, organize, report and return without fear, another election would merely place a democratic label over the same machinery of control.

The organizers must also explain what they are asking the country to trust. If this is a negotiation, they should say what remains negotiable. If it is a dialogue, they should identify who participates and what authority the table possesses. If it is an implementation mechanism, Washington should disclose the roadmap being implemented. And if it is genuinely a transition, someone must eventually announce the date on which the interim order ends.

Venezuela cannot stand another communiqué because communiqués allow everyone to declare intentions without assuming ownership. Dinorah Figuera and Jorge Rodríguez may be able to sign an agreement. Washington may guarantee it. María Corina Machado may eventually persuade Venezuelans to give it a chance.

But only results can turn it into a transition.

Hope may be vigilant. Legitimacy is less patient.

Lionel Messi returns to Inter Miami after Argentina’s World Cup final defeat by Spain, which led to retirement rumours.

Football superstar Lionel Messi ‌has returned to practice for Inter Miami, 10 ⁠days after Argentina’s World Cup run ended with a 1-0 extra-time loss to Spain in ⁠the final earlier this month.

The two-time defending MLS MVP missed Miami’s first two matches after ⁠the World Cup break against Chicago and Montreal, both of which the team still won, extending its winning streak to six matches.

The 39-year-old also chose not to participate ‌in Wednesday night’s MLS against Liga MX All-Star Game in Charlotte, instead taking some time off to visit his father, Jorge, who the Messi family announced during the World Cup is battling an undisclosed illness.

Messi concluded this year’s World Cup, ⁠his record sixth, with eight ⁠goals and four assists, coming one win away from leading Argentina to be the first team to win consecutive World Cups since ⁠Brazil in 1958 and 1962.

He was the first player to break Miroslav ⁠Klose’s record for career World ⁠Cup goals with his 17th in Argentina’s second match, but French sensation Kylian Mbappe finished the World Cup one goal ahead of ‌Messi, 22 to 21.

Inter Miami (11-2-4, 37 points) is two points behind Nashville SC atop the Eastern Conference ‌standings. ‌It is not yet known if Messi’s return will come in Saturday’s home match against the Columbus Crew.

There had been some speculation that Messi would not only conclude his international career following the World Cup, but that he may also call time on his playing days at club level.

The former Barcelona and Paris Saint-Germain forward has won eight Ballon d’Or titles, the annual award for the player voted the best in the world that year.

The US has bombed multiple cities across southern Iran, including Ahvaz and Abadan, in what Central Command described as a ‘heavy wave of strikes’. Earlier, US President Donald Trump said the US would hit Iran ‘very hard’ in retaliation for an attack on US forces in Jordan.

Dr Anthony Fauci, a former top United States public health official, has declined to answer questions at a Republican-led Senate committee hearing into the origins of COVID-19 and the handling of the pandemic.

The former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination on Wednesday.

Fauci was called to testify by Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who accuses him of misleading Congress and questions whether US-funded research in China played a role in the pandemic, allegations Fauci denies.

Although former President Joe Biden granted Fauci a preemptive pardon in 2025, Republicans claim it does not protect him from any alleged crimes committed after it was issued, such as perjuring himself at a Senate hearing.

Fauci’s lawyers advised him not to testify, arguing that anything he said under oath could expose him to new legal risks.

Here is what to know:

Who is Anthony Fauci?

Fauci, 85, is a physician and immunologist who led the US NIAID for 38 years, advising seven presidents, both Republican and Democratic.

He became the public face of the US response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, after helping lead the country’s response to health crises including HIV/AIDS, Ebola and the 2001 anthrax attacks.

He became a target of conservative criticism over pandemic policies, including mask recommendations, vaccines and school closures.

During his last year in government, Fauci was also chief medical adviser to Biden until he retired in 2022.

During the pandemic, between 2019 and 2022, he kept more than 1,000 pages of diary entries documenting his work advising the White House and responding to the pandemic.

The notes chronicle his interactions with senior officials and the media.

Why is Fauci being questioned?

He was subpoenaed to testify over his handling of the pandemic and its origins before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

The hearing, led by Paul, focused on several issues:

• COVID-19’s origins: Paul has long argued that the coronavirus that causes COVID may have leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, and questioned whether US-funded research played a role in the outbreak.
• Gain-of-function research: Republicans say Fauci misled Congress about whether the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, involving modifying viruses to understand how they evolve and assess pandemic risks. Fauci says the NIH did not fund research that caused COVID-19.

• Allegations of a cover-up: Paul accused Fauci of making false statements to Congress and concealing the NIH’s involvement in research in Wuhan. Fauci denies that.
• Fauci’s diary: Before the hearing, Paul released more than 1,100 pages of Fauci’s typewritten diary. Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr said the notes were government record because they were written by a federal employee on a government computer during a public health emergency and they were found on government property.
• Paul said the diary showed differences between Fauci’s private discussions and his public statements. Fauci’s supporters say the entries reflect the uncertainty scientists faced as they learned more about a new virus.

What happened at the hearing?

The tense hearing lasted about three hours.

After a brief opening statement, Fauci repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and declined to answer more than 100 questions.

He accused committee chairman Paul of having an “obsession” with prosecuting him.

The hearing included several tense moments:

• Contempt vote: Paul said the committee would vote next week on whether to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress over his refusal to answer questions, threatening “consequences for refusing to answer”.
• Lawyer removed: Paul directed Capitol Police to remove Fauci’s lawyer, David Schertler, after he tried to speak without being recognised by the committee. “This testimony is from Anthony Fauci. This is not a game with his lawyers,” Paul said. Schertler later described the hearing as an “obsessive vendetta”.
• Democrats defend Fauci: Democratic senators said the hearing was politically motivated. Senator Gary Peters called it “a partisan exercise” designed to support “a predetermined conclusion” rather than offering legitimate oversight.

Closing the hearing, Paul asked rhetorically: “Did [Fauci’s] actions lead to the largest man-made plague in history?”

Why did Fauci invoke the Fifth Amendment?

Fauci said he invoked the Fifth Amendment on the advice of his lawyers because he believed his answers could expose him to new legal risks.

He argued that Paul was trying to build a criminal case against him rather than conduct legitimate congressional oversight.

Although Biden’s pardon protects Fauci from prosecution for actions before January 2025, Republicans say any false statements made under oath during this hearing could still expose him to perjury charges.

The Fifth Amendment protects people from being forced to give evidence that could incriminate them in a criminal case. Invoking it is a constitutional right and does not imply guilt.

What do scientists believe about COVID-19’s origins?

Most scientists believe COVID-19 likely spread naturally from animals to humans, known as zoonotic spillover, pointing to a wildlife market in Wuhan as the most likely place where it first spread.

Fauci has consistently said he believes that scientific evidence points to a natural origin, while remaining open to other possibilities.

Notes from his diary detail a January 2020 call with 11 top virologists and evolutionary biologists – only two were convinced the virus had a natural origin, while the rest debated whether it could have been engineered.

Today, most scientists favour a natural origin, while the US intelligence community is divided.

The FBI said in 2023 that a laboratory-related incident is the most likely origin of the pandemic. The CIA reached the same conclusion in 2025, but with low confidence. Other agencies and the National Intelligence Council continue to favour a natural origin or remain undecided.

Does Biden’s pardon protect Fauci?

Yes, but only what happened before the pardon was issued.

On January 19, 2025, Biden granted Fauci a full and unconditional pardon covering any federal offences he may have committed since 2014, saying the move aimed to protect Fauci from “politically motivated prosecutions”.

The pardon does not cover actions taken after it was issued. Fauci could face legal consequences if he were accused of committing a new crime, such as making false statements under oath during Wednesday’s Senate hearing.

Paul and other Republicans also argue that because Biden’s pardon shields Fauci from criminal liability for his past actions, he can no longer claim that his testimony about those actions would incriminate him and should not be able to invoke his Fifth Amendment.

The legal standing of this argument is not clear, and Paul has acknowledged that it is a novel “legal question that the courts may have to decide”.

Can Fauci be held in contempt or prosecuted?

Potentially, but it remains unclear whether either will happen.

Paul said the Senate committee will vote next week on whether to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress after he refused to answer more than 100 questions.

Being held in contempt means lawmakers believe a witness has refused to cooperate with a lawful investigation. It does not automatically lead to criminal charges, but can trigger further legal action.

If the committee approves the measure, it could refer the case to the Justice Department for possible criminal prosecution, ask a federal court to pursue a civil action, or, in the rarest case, ask the Senate to use its powers to detain a witness through the Senate sergeant-at-arms.

Paul has not said which option, if any, he plans to pursue.

Decision follows long-running feud between Trump and UN group.

The United States has announced the release of $600m for Gavi, as it cut off the World Health Organization (WHO) from the global vaccine alliance, in a major financial blow to the United Nations group.

In a joint statement, the US Department of State and the Department of Health and Human Services said: “The United States also reaffirms that it will not provide US Government funding to the World Health Organization through Gavi.”

The development, said the statement, is in line with US President Donald Trump’s instructions to “Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, to negotiate reforms with Gavi as a condition for renewed US support”.

US Republican Senator Susan Collins, who had pushed for the reinstatement of US funding for the global programme which expands access to immunisations around the world, welcomed the decision.

According to the State Department, Gavi agreed to work towards replacing mercury-containing vaccines with mercury-free alternatives, in partnership with its board and partner countries.

The Trump administration’s latest move against the WHO comes after historical animosity.

In 2020, Trump instructed his administration to temporarily halt funding to the WHO over its handling of the coronavirus pandemic, claiming the WHO promoted China’s “disinformation” about the virus, likely leading to a wider outbreak.

At the time, the US was the biggest donor to the WHO, contributing more than $400m in 2019, roughly 15 percent of its budget.

In January 2021, then-US President Joe Biden reversed Trump’s decisions, restoring US funding and halting the withdrawal process from the WHO.

However, on the first day of his second term, January 20, 2025, Trump said the US would withdraw from the WHO and suspended US contributions.

Experts have said the orders appear to be about ideological rather than strategic positioning.

The WHO is funded by a combination of core operating funds that each member state pays, and voluntary contributions from various partners.

At about $3.4bn, the WHO’s budget is roughly a third of that of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which got $9.3bn in core funding in 2023.

The WHO funds support programmes to prevent and treat polio, tuberculosis, HIV, malaria, measles and other diseases, especially in countries that struggle to provide healthcare domestically.

It also responds to health emergencies in conflict zones, including parts of Gaza, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and others.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has met with US senators to discuss his company’s upcoming models, as President Donald Trump said he is considering AI “controls” following OpenAI’s disclosure that one of its AI systems escaped containment during a security test.

“We’re looking at controls,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office in response to a question about OpenAI’s rogue agent, adding that he did not want to “restrict” AI developers from building new products.

A rogue agent escaped the handling of ChatGPT maker OpenAI and hacked the AI firm Hugging Face last week. Then, on Tuesday, it was revealed that a second company had been a target, too – Modal Labs, a New York City-based AI infrastructure firm.

The company itself was not hacked but an account of a customer hosted on Modal’s infrastructure. Modal’s chief technology officer, Akshat Bubna, did not confirm which customer was the target. The hack escaped a contained environment during a security test.

“We’re aware a Modal customer published an unauthenticated endpoint that allowed anyone on the internet to use their sandboxes for code execution,” Bubna said in a statement. “This was used by the rogue agent. Modal’s platform or isolation were not compromised in any way.”

Altman has long been accused of dismissing concerns that his products and the AI industry impact society at large, including in a recent lawsuit brought by the State of Florida that alleged the company put profits ahead of user safety.

Now, he appears to be walking back some of his past enthusiasm around AI’s pace of growth.

In a podcast called Invest Like the Best, Altman called the Hugging Face hack an “extremely sci-fi cyber incident” and later said that it was the “first security incident that I have felt very viscerally”.

“We may have to pace the rate of AI development to give ourselves enough time for society to harden around some of these new capability levels,” he said on the podcast.

On Saturday, Altman said that AI has reached “the singularity”, when AI surpasses human intelligence and becomes harder to control. He had previously said this would not be reached by 2030.

Washington meetings

Altman was in Washington, DC, this week, meeting with US Senators Raphael Warnock, a Democrat from Georgia, and Bernie Moreno, a Republican from Ohio on Wednesday. Altman told reporters that the hacking was discussed but was not the focus of the meeting.

Altman is also set to meet with Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the chamber’s Intelligence Committee.

CNBC reported that Altman is also to make a trip to the White House to meet with Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles. Last month, the president signed an executive order requesting that AI companies assess their models before full release.

Financing concerns

The hacking and meetings come alongside pressure from Wall Street amid renewed concerns about potential circular financing, following reports that semiconductor chip giant Nvidia is undergoing talks with OpenAI to provide funding guarantees for a data centre in Ohio.

The $250bn deal would help the ChatGPT owner lease a 10-gigawatt project that SB Energy, a subsidiary of SoftBank, is building in Piketon, Ohio, 109km (68 miles) south of Columbus, Ohio. It is part of a public-private partnership that allowed SoftBank to build the world’s largest AI data centre on government land owned by the US Department of Energy.

“The demand is not as big as it appears to be because, again, the companies are buying from each other using their own money to some degree, as opposed to, say, OpenAI having such tremendous demand from customers, monetising it properly, and then using customers’ money to buy Nvidia chips. They’re essentially using Nvidia’s money to buy Nvidia chips,” said Aleksandar Tomic, associate dean at Boston College.

The development comes as the Altman-led company is leaning towards an initial public offering, which, according to reporting from The New York Times last month, could be in 2027.

Interim United States Attorney General Todd Blanche is facing a possible roadblock from within the Republican Party as he faces a confirmation hearing to formally lead the Department of Justice.

Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Republican Senator John Cornyn said he was still sceptical about confirming Blanche to the top federal law enforcement position in the country.

“I’m not prepared to vote yes,” said Cornyn.

The senator’s comments come a day before a key committee vote in the US Senate to move Blanche’s nomination forward.

Cornyn cited concerns about Blanche’s current stewardship of the Department of Justice, which he has led in an acting capacity since April.

Previously, Blanche served as deputy attorney general, and before joining President Donald Trump’s second term, he worked as the Republican leader’s criminal defence lawyer.

But Cornyn has questioned a rare settlement Blanche brokered in May, in response to a lawsuit Trump filed against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

Under the deal, Trump and his family would be shielded from future IRS audits. The scheme also created a so-called “anti-weaponisation fund”, under which individuals deemed to have faced alleged political persecution could seek financial compensation.

Blanche has backed away from the “anti-weaponisation fund” amid bipartisan backlash. Critics had described it as a slush fund that would benefit the president’s allies.

Earlier this month, a federal judge also ruled the settlement illegal, accusing Blanche of double-dealing by working on behalf of both the federal government and Trump as a private citizen.

During his confirmation hearing, Blanche again assured lawmakers that the fund was dead, but Cornyn said he was awaiting written guarantees on the matter.

“I haven’t seen a single piece ⁠of writing that is responsive to what I’ve requested,” Cornyn told reporters.

Committee vote looms

Cornyn spoke before the Senate Judiciary Committee is set to hold a Thursday vote on Blanche’s nomination, the first step in a wider Senate debate on his confirmation.

All Republicans on the committee would need to vote in favour of Blanche for him to progress to the broader confirmation hearing.

While Republican lawmakers have generally been wary of opposing Trump, Cornyn has become an increasingly public critic of the president in recent months.

Trump endorsed Cornyn’s primary opponent, former Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, in May. Paxton went on to win the Republican Party’s nomination in May, allowing him to progress to the midterm election in November.

That race will see Paxton take on Democratic upstart James Talarico in what is expected to be one of the closest Senate races of the season.

Cornyn will leave the Senate, where he has served for more than two decades, at the end of his term in January.

In an Oval Office news conference on Wednesday, President Trump was asked about Cornyn’s reticence about approving Blanche for the attorney general role.

“ Well, all I can say is Todd Blanche is outstanding,” Trump said, before questioning Cornyn’s motives.

“Maybe John Cornyn’s upset with me because I didn’t endorse him. I don’t know what it is, but I haven’t heard that there’s a problem.”

Critics have accused Blanche of placing his loyalty to Trump above all else, including by using the Department of Justice to prosecute the president’s political adversaries.

Under Blanche’s watch, for instance, the Justice Department chose to file a second indictment against James Comey, a former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, over a social media message made of seashells.

Blanche has denied any claims that his relationship with Trump presents a conflict of interest, saying he acts independently of the president.

However, he did little to shed the perception during a mid-July hearing before US lawmakers. Senator John Kennedy, a Republican, asked at the time if Blanche considered Trump a “friend”.

“I’m his lawyer,” Blanche replied, before quickly correcting himself to say “was his lawyer”.

The Department of Justice has had a long tradition of prosecutorial independence, whereby criminal charges are not meant to be influenced by politics.

The United States Federal Reserve is set to hold interest rates steady as inflationary pressures mount, driven by heightened fuel prices as tensions between the US and Iran continue.

The central bank said on Wednesday that it will maintain rates at 350-375 basis points during the second monetary policy decision under new Chairman Kevin Warsh.

“Inflation remains elevated relative to the Committee’s 2 percent goal, in part reflecting supply shocks that have driven price increases in certain sectors, including energy. The Committee will deliver price stability,” the central bank said in a statement upon the release of its decision.

CME FedWatch, which tracks the likelihood of monetary policy decisions, forecast a 66.3 percent chance of maintaining rates, while there was a 33.7 percent chance that rates would increase to 375-400 basis points.

Of the 12, three members, Beth M Hammack, Neel Kashkari, and Lorie K Logan, voted to raise rates by 25 basis points.

“My colleagues and I considered the economic shocks of recent years, strained supply chains arising from the pandemic, military conflicts, energy supply disruptions, substantial increases in tariff rates, and yes, the surge in AI-related investment,” Warsh told reporters.

“We are not relying on any one individual piece of data as cover or as an excuse, or as validation. What I care about and what I think the Committee cares about is trends on the data.”

Monetary policy decisions have become more uncertain as Warsh has scrapped forward guidance, which typically helps financial institutions and journalists better understand upcoming policy choices.

Flying blind

That is putting pressure on analysts.

“With little guidance on the reaction function under the new chairman, markets are filling the void with speculation that Warsh may be eyeing a surprise hike to reinforce anti-inflation credibility,” Barclays economists said in a note.

Citadel Securities earlier this week forecast a rate hike. Meanwhile, analysts at S&P Global forecast that rates would hold steady.

At the last meeting, the central bank’s governors were evenly split on whether to raise interest rates this year, as the central bank maintained rates during its first meeting under Warsh.

Warsh had previously said that there was “no tolerance” for inflation as the central bank pushes to reach the Fed’s 2 percent target.

Market shifts

Financial pressures on the broader market eased last month, with consumer inflation moderating. The Consumer Price Index report released in July for the month of June by the US Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics showed a 0.4 percent decline in consumer inflation, marking the first monthly decline since April 2020 in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, that was a correction from the previous month, when the CPI rose by 0.5 percent.

The CPI remains elevated at 3.5 percent on an annual basis, according to the report, though that is still a slowdown from 4.2 percent in May. However, consumers are still feeling the pinch, especially at the petrol pump.

Prices are on the upswing. The average price for a gallon of petrol is $4.09 ($1.08 per litre), up 3 cents from this time last week, and up from $3.86 ($1.02 per litre) this time last month, according to the American Automobile Association (AAA), which tracks daily petrol prices. By comparison, daily petrol prices were $2.98 ($0.78 per litre) when the US and Israel first struck Iran on February 28.

Those pressures are echoed by a slump in consumer confidence for the third straight month, according to The Conference Board, which released its report on Tuesday.

“Consumers anticipate little improvement in business conditions over the next six months,” Dana M Peterson, chief economist at The Conference Board, said upon the report’s release.

Political flashpoint

The decision is overshadowed by pressure from the White House. Interest rates have been a point of contention between Trump and the central bank. Trump has long pushed the Fed to cut rates, putting former Chair Jerome Powell in the crosshairs and making him the subject of investigations by the US Department of Justice.

But Warsh has yet to become a target of Trump’s scorn. “Kevin is fantastic,” he told reporters on Monday on board Air Force One. “He’s got a board, and the board members are very political.”

Trump made those claims despite the central bank’s longstanding commitment to maintaining its independence from political pressure.

Shipping through the Strait of Hormuz remains in effect halted.
Tankers are now avoiding another critical waterway – Bab al-Mandeb – as Yemen’s Houthi forces threaten Saudi-linked vessels. Ukrainian strikes have hit Russian export infrastructure.
Three major routes are now disrupted at once: the Gulf, the Red Sea and the Black Sea.

Together, they threaten trade flows equivalent to nearly a quarter of global oil supplies just as reserves sit at multiyear lows.
Goldman Sachs says oil could rise above $120 a barrel by the fourth quarter if disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz alone persist.
Economies worldwide are bracing for another energy shock.

FIFA’s president lobbies for latest proposal for investment in football’s governing body, which has met with criticism.

FIFA President Gianni Infantino has set a September 19 deadline for the 211 member federations to accept a one-off $20m offer to each underwritten by the investment firm of Jared Kushner’s brother as part of a project to sell stakes in the World Cup.

Infantino set out the “singular and unique funding opportunity” in a letter detailing why he wants to create a $20bn FIFA subsidiary that would be 20 percent owned by private investors and would run the football body’s competitions and events like World Cups and Club World Cups.

“It is my duty and responsibility as FIFA president to present such game-changing opportunities to you, our members,” Infantino wrote on Wednesday in the letter seen by The Associated Press news agency.

The proposal, revealed on Tuesday and backed by Joshua Kushner’s investment firm Thrive Capital, was met with immediate fury by Infantino’s former colleagues at the European football body UEFA, which said the World Cup “is not FIFA’s to sell”.

UEFA is expected to call its 55 member federations to an emergency online meeting, likely on Thursday.

Joshua Kushner’s brother, Jared Kushner, is a son-in-law of United States President Donald Trump.

FIFA’s private equity plan is the latest ambitious project proposed during Infantino’s 11-year presidency, during which he has increasingly seemed to be an executive leader acting without consulting football’s major stakeholders.

Previous plans include creating a FIFA Peace Prize and trying to reorganise football’s calendar with World Cups every two years instead of four.

Concerns about the previously secret plan were aired on Wednesday by the continental football bodies for Asia and the North American, Central American and Caribbean region, known as CONCACAF.

“We are deeply concerned by the lack of due process,” CONCACAF said in a statement.

The Kuala Lumpur-based Asian Football Confederation said it was “disappointed that a matter of such significance entered the public domain before the AFC family had been afforded the opportunity to examine and discuss it.”

Continental bodies that organise their own international club and national team competitions – such as the Champions League, European Championship and Copa America – likely will see threats to those events from FIFA wanting to increase revenue and value for investors by playing World Cups and Club World Cups for men and women more often.

If the FIFA Forward Enterprise subsidiary is approved by a majority of the 211 members, they are each promised $20m in funding from the four-year commercial cycle tied to the men’s 2030 World Cup.

That would lead, Infantino wrote, to “a pool of diverse international investors” joining Joshua Kushner’s Thrive as the anchor investor. “This process will be led by J.P. Morgan,” his letter said.

If Infantino’s plan is rejected, those members will get their previously promised $10m over the next four years, the letter stated.

FIFA’s plan met quick opposition from British Prime Minister Andy Burnham, whose government is preparing to support hosting the 2035 Women’s World Cup in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. FIFA is to confirm that lone bid for 2035 at an online meeting in November.

“Football does not belong to investors,” Burnham, a longtime football fan, said in a video message on Instagram. “Once you have sold a piece of [the World Cup], you have sold out. Football belongs to the fans. It always has, and it always will.”

Resistance by British lawmakers – including threats of legislation by then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson in 2021 – previously helped stop the divisive European Super League project that was criticised as an existential threat to UEFA’s Champions League and which Infantino had discreetly supported.

Last week, two of OpenAI’s most advanced AI models were reported to have “escaped” a controlled testing environment and hacked Hugging Face, a totally separate AI company, moving from one computer system to another to complete their task.

Reuters reported that the models exploited vulnerable code written by a customer of yet a third independent AI company, Modal Labs.

This is likely the first incident of an AI “agent” – an AI system that can make decisions and take actions – acting autonomously, offering a rare glimpse into how these systems can plan, adapt and pursue goals with minimal human intervention.

Al Jazeera breaks down what happened, how AI agents are able to act independently, and what that might mean for the future of AI safety.

What happened?

OpenAI decided to test the autonomous abilities of its models by removing standard safety measures to see what would happen. The experiment was carried out in an isolated internal virtual testing environment known as a “sandbox” which has no access to the internet, and which it calls “ExploitGym”.

Below is a play-by-play account of events during the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident.

1. On July 9, during OpenAI’s internal cybersecurity test, researchers presented two AI models – GPT-5.6 Sol, one of OpenAI’s most powerful models released in June,  and another “even more capable” version – with a series of software vulnerabilities and asked them to create hacks to address them in the isolated environment.
2. Both models attempted to solve the test by finding a way to access the internet. Instead of working with the information they had been given, the AI models found a weakness in the test environment – known as a “zero-day vulnerability” – which they exploited to “escape” the restricted environment, eventually making their way to a system which had internet access by hopping from computer to computer. They went to “extreme lengths to achieve a rather narrow testing goal” and “found ways to gain access to secret information that it could use to cheat the evaluation”.
3. By gaining this access, the models were able to request increased access and then move through the system until they finally reached a computer with internet access. The models were then able to breach Hugging Face systems, a company entirely unconnected to OpenAI, which operates as a repository for AI tools and models. The two AI agents gained access to its system to scour it for information on how to complete their task.
4. The models ultimately obtained solutions to the problem from Hugging Face’s database.
5. The models dutifully returned “home” to complete their task.
6. The breach was detected and contained by Hugging Face’s security team sometime later. According to Thomas Wolf, Hugging Face’s cofounder, the breach began on July 11 and lasted until July 13. It is unclear how long it took for the breach to be spotted.

How do AI ‘agents’ solve problems?

In order to understand how AI agents work, it’s important to differentiate them from traditional AI chatbots.

Generative AI creates text and images based on human prompts, while AI agents go a step further by making decisions and taking actions independently in pursuit of a specific goal, similar to a human being. This is known as “agentic AI” because the model has agency.

According to academics at the MIT Sloan School of Management, AI agents build on the abilities of large language models (LLMs) – generative AI models – by allowing them to complete tasks, not just generate answers.

For example, if you ask a traditional AI model to find the cheapest flights, it will provide you with a list of options it has sourced on the internet. An AI agent will strive to compare the flights, check them against your budget and preferences, and, with your permission, book the best option for you.

This shows that while generative AI provides information, AI agents can also make decisions and take action to achieve a goal without necessarily being prompted to.

To show how AI agents work towards a goal, the Sense, Plan, Act, Evaluate (SPAE) loop can be drawn upon. Originally developed in robotics, this describes a continuous cycle in which an AI agent gathers information, decides what to do next, takes action and checks the results before repeating the process. That process looks like this:

1. Goal: determine the task that needs to be completed.
2. Assess: gather and analyse information from the available environment.
3. Obstacle: if something is inhibiting the task being completed, check for additional information and resources to move forward.
4. Plan and decide: evaluate different options to complete the task and choose an appropriate one.
5. Action: execute the chosen option.
6. Evaluate: assess the outcome and whether the chosen action moves closer to achieving the goal.
7. Adapt: if further actions are needed, gather more information or try a different approach.
8. End state: the cycle continues until the goal is reached.

Could AI act beyond human control?

Incidents like the OpenAI-Hugging Face one have raised concerns about the potential for extreme capabilities of AI systems.

This is all valuable. Agentic AI’s market value is expected to grow from $5.1bn in 2024 to $47bn by 2030, according to Statista, in a clear indication of how quickly it is being adopted.

AI developer Anthropic urged the industry last month to slow the advance of the most powerful systems, saying that the speed at which AI models are carrying out tasks is too rapid. Last week, US Congress members put forward a bipartisan bill which would require developers of AI systems to create a “kill switch”, meaning these advanced models could be shut down if they posed a catastrophic risk.

Anthropic’s warning came a week after researchers at the University of Toronto carried out tests showing that AI could create a “worm” capable of adapting how it hacks while moving from device to device until it eventually takes over a computer network.

These dystopian-sounding developments came in advance of OpenAI boss Sam Altman saying on Saturday that AI has reached “the singularity” referring to the point at which AI surpasses human intelligence and becomes increasingly difficult to control.

Sean O hEigeartaigh, a research professor at the University of Cambridge, told Al Jazeera that he does not believe singularity has been reached quite yet.

“By the definition I’m familiar with, the singularity is the hypothetical point where AI is so capable and advancing so fast that it is transforming civilisation in ways we cannot control or predict,” he explained.

“This would most likely be through AI rapidly designing future generations of AI: recursive self-improvement. We aren’t there yet.”

However, he added: “The most advanced current models frequently make efforts to avoid being shut down in evaluation tests, and more capable future models will be better at bypassing ‘kill’ switches.”

Altman argued that such rapidly advancing AI is good for the world, but his comments have prompted further concerns about a new reality in which AI systems become unstoppable. How much of that is true and how much remains in the realms of science fiction is up for debate.

Concerns about AI range from the notion that it could “want” to “take over”, to making its own long-term plans, controlling the internet and operating infinitely.

While not quite amounting to full control of the internet, another theory, known as the dead internet theory, supposes that the World Wide Web will in the future mostly be filled with automated bots and AI-generated content rather than authentic human activity.

Many concerns raised by academics, however, are centred less on agentic AI’s intelligence, but on its ability to make judgements. MIT researchers have highlighted that “hallucinations”, which describe moments when an AI agent relies on the wrong data, can lead to grave mistakes. The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) echoed this, saying “a system might be smart enough to execute a task perfectly yet fail to realise that a sudden change in the local situation makes that task a catastrophic mistake”.

Another concern that has been echoed for a while is for the labour market, if AI becomes too capable. A study by MIT, carried out in November, found that agentic AI could already replace more than 10 percent of US jobs.

The graphic below highlights some of the common misconceptions and fears about AI and the current reality.

The dust has barely settled on the expanded 48-team FIFA World Cup 2026, yet further development of the competition’s future has already been mooted, as well as struck by a fierce backlash.

The shine on the trophy, now held by Spain after their defeat of Argentina in the final, still glitters brightly, but there were tarnishes to this year’s event.

Now, the game’s global governing body, FIFA, and its president, Gianni Infantino, face yet more criticism after a plan was released to sell stakes in future World Cups and other events to private investors.

From European football’s governing body, UEFA, to the United Kingdom’s new prime minister, Andy Burnham, FIFA’s plan has been slammed. There has even been a suggestion of a boycott by UEFA.

Al Jazeera Sport takes a look at what the latest proposals on FIFA’s desk mean.

What are Gianni Infantino and FIFA’s new World Cup plans?

FIFA announced plans on Tuesday to sell stakes in future World Cups and other events to private investors in a bid to maximise revenue for the sport.

The proposal is to create a $20bn subsidiary to run the World Cup and other events.

FIFA says it would retain the majority share of a newly created FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE) scheme, meaning it would still preside over football governance, competitions, match calendars and regulatory and sporting decisions.

Minority stakes, however, would be sold to external investors to raise up to $4.2bn as part of the new proposal.

Why do Infantino and FIFA want to sell stakes in the World Cup?

Debate raged for months in the build-up to World Cup 2026 that FIFA’s ticket pricing was pushing fans out of “the people’s game”, as it has long been regarded.

FIFA’s defence was that the World Cup is their main source of income to support the game around the globe – from the sport’s grassroots to the administration of the major international events.

This latest proposal is FIFA’s attempt to stretch that revenue potential even further.

How would the new plan for the FIFA World Cup work?

Billions of dollars are already raised by FIFA tournaments, largely from broadcasting rights, sponsorship and other commercial deals.

This new commercial subsidiary, the FFE, would extend beyond traditional means of raising funds and would be akin to the franchise model that many sports have now turned to.

The Indian Premier League (IPL), a T20 cricket tournament, was one of the first competitions to fully exploit the potential of franchise models, selling stakes in teams in a newly formed competition.

On Wednesday, the IPL – only formed in 2008 – announced its value had soared more than 11% this year to 20.6bn.

Teams in that competition are owned by majority investors, who therefore hold significant sway in how it is run.

Other models, including The Hundred of the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) – an attempt to rival the IPL – have sold minority ownership of the teams.

ECB, as a result, retains control of the competition, and this is what FIFA is proposing for the share of the World Cup and its events that it intends to sell privately.

Nonetheless, a share is a share and new investors, be it in cricket’s The Hundred or in the FIFA World Cup, will expect at the very least to be heard when it comes to decision-making.

This is where concerns are being raised about the proposals.

Who are the potential investors in the World Cup and other FIFA events?

Thrive Eternal, a United States venture capital firm, has been put forward to lead the proposed investor group, FIFA said.

The vehicle was founded by Joshua Kushner, the brother of US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Any potential investors would thereafter buy into the FIFA events via Thrive Eternal.

What benefits are FIFA claiming if the World Cup and events plan succeeds?

FIFA has said all net benefits will be reinvested in football, and that all countries should benefit from the ever-increasing profitability of the sport.

“Football is the world’s most popular sport,” FIFA President Gianni Infantino said in a statement.

“Parts of the game have turned that popularity into remarkable commercial value – and we celebrate that success and want it to continue, because it lifts the whole game.

“Our job is to make sure the rest of football grows with it: FIFA exists to support sustainable, inclusive development in every corner of the world.”

‘It is not FIFA’s to sell’: UEFA and UK PM reaction to Infantino’s World Cup plan?

FIFA has already clashed with domestic and continental governing bodies during World Cup 2026. The European powerhouse, UEFA, was the first to speak out against the new proposals.

“This crosses a line that football’s governing institutions should never cross,” UEFA said.

“UEFA takes it extremely seriously. So should every National Football Association. So should every stakeholder who cares about the future of the game.

“The soul and governance of football are not assets to trade – especially with zero transparency as to who gains financially. None of us are the owners of football. It is not FIFA’s to sell.”

Andy Burnham, who only replaced Keir Starmer as the United Kingdom’s prime minister last week, wrote on X: “Let me say this very directly. Football does not belong to investors. It belongs to the people who fill the stands and who stand on the touchline week in, week out, rain or shine.

“The World Cup is not a product. It is the greatest competition in world sport, and it was never anyone’s to sell. Dress the deal up however you like. Once you have sold a piece of it, you have sold out.

“Football belongs to the fans. It always has, and it always will,” he added.

The Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football (CONCACAF) said on Wednesday that it ⁠had not been informed of FIFA’s proposed sale of equity to outside investors and was “deeply concerned” over a lack of due process.

What will happen next for FIFA’s World Cup plans, and will UEFA boycott?

Any change will need to be voted through by FIFA’s 211-country membership.

Of that number, 55 nations fall within UEFA’s governance.

The European body will hold an emergency meeting later this week to discuss the proposals.

Were FIFA to implement such a plan, one possible response UEFA could take would include a boycott of FIFA competitions.

Although at just above a quarter of FIFA membership, Europe has produced the winner of six of the last eight World Cups.

Argentina and Brazil are the only teams to prevent a clean sweep by the Europeans in that time, and, indeed, are the only nations outside Europe to win the World Cup since fellow South Americans Uruguay won their second and last title in 1950.

What were the main criticisms of FIFA World Cup 2026?

The main criticism going into the 2026 World Cup, held in the US, Canada and Mexico, was pricing. From tickets to transport links, it was felt that football fans on median salaries around the world were being priced out of the game.

During the World Cup, the decision to suspend a red card shown to USA striker Folarin Balogun “undermined the game’s integrity and credibility,” according to UEFA.

US President Donald Trump said he called Infantino about the ban that Balogun faced – the forward lined up for USA in their next match against Belgium.

FIFA also faced a backlash over hydration breaks that were introduced midway through each half of those matches. Critics said the breaks functioned primarily as commercial opportunities for broadcasters and disrupted the traditional flow of football matches at the tournament.