wall

Nvidia has recruited Wall Street to bankroll its own customers.

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The US chipmaker said last week it had signed memorandums of understanding with Wall Street’s largest asset managers, including Apollo Global Management, Blackstone, BlackRock, Brookfield Asset Management, Goldman Sachs and KKR to raise upwards of half a trillion dollars for AI companies to borrow against, money that will buy its chips and build the servers that run them.

The six firms will set up what Nvidia calls “compute financing platforms,” drawing on institutional money, insurance funds and private credit. Borrowers can use the proceeds for the chips as well as servers, networking equipment, buildings and power supply.

Nvidia has the option to guarantee up to a quarter of any given deal, which lowers the interest rate its customers pay while leaving most of the credit risk with the lenders.

CEO Jensen Huang said he approached only these six companies and none refused.

Keeping that spending off their own books is precisely the point, and the fact that such a structure is needed at all tells investors a great deal about where the constraints in the AI boom now lie.

The financial engineering rests on a single reclassification. Graphics processing units (GPUs) have always been treated as equipment that loses value quickly, superseded whenever a faster generation arrives.

Nvidia is effectively asking lenders to treat them instead as long-lived infrastructure, closer to a toll road or a power plant, that can be borrowed against for years.

“These are revenue-generating assets now,” Huang said, describing them as productive, long-lived and transferable between customers.

Why the money had to come from somewhere else

The timing reflects a squeeze that has been building all year.

Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta and other hyperscalers whose cloud platforms host most of the world’s AI workloads have together guided roughly $720 billion (€624bn) to $745 billion (€646bn) of capital spending in 2026, an increase of about 77% on last year.

What analysts expect the hyperscalers to spend in 2027 alone has more than doubled in the space of a year, from a consensus of $480 billion (€416bn) in August 2025 to $1.08 trillion (€943bn) this month, a rise of about 127%, according to Bank of America.

The pattern has repeated at every stage.

Analysts who already considered last year’s investment unsustainable then watched the hyperscalers guide higher at the start of 2026, revise those figures upward again through the year, and pencil in larger sums still for next year and 2028.

Moody’s has warned that spending on this scale is eating into free cash flow and pushing tech groups into heavier borrowing. Alphabet recorded negative free cash flow of $5.9 billion (€5.1bn) in a quarter when it spent $44.9 billion (€38.9bn) on projects.

That is the pressure the structure of Nvidia’s Wall Street deal relieves.

Debt raised through these “compute financing platforms” sits with the financing vehicles rather than on a hyperscaler’s own accounts and also has Nvidia’s backing, which protects credit ratings and leaves room for conventional borrowing elsewhere.

For smaller operators the effect is larger still as companies such as CoreWeave and Nebius, which lack investment-grade ratings and pay dearly for credit, gain access to capital on terms previously reserved for the giants.

What the market actually read into it

The reaction was more ambivalent than the headline number suggests, and came weeks after a July selloff driven by doubts over whether AI spending will pay for itself.

Essentially, equity investors saw a bottleneck being cleared while credit investors saw something else: the cost of insuring Nvidia’s own debt against default rose after the news and has roughly doubled since late May.

Their doubt concentrates on the reclassification previously mentioned.

“Chips depreciate fast and lose value the moment a newer generation arrives,” warned Nigel Green of financial advisory firm deVere Group, noting that lending against them only works if the collateral holds its value.

Critics also point out that Nvidia is helping finance purchases of its own products, deepening the circularity that already worries the sector.

Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon called it “a pivotal moment of a historic AI investment cycle.”

Whether it proves pivotal in the direction Solomon means depends on a question nobody can yet answer: what will the value of a current GPU be in five years?

WASHINGTON — A federal judge has refused to block the Trump administration from taking steps to build 62 miles of international border wall along part of a Native American tribe’s reservation without its consent.

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon in Washington denied the Tohono O’odham Nation’s request for a court-ordered halt to border wall construction on its 2.8-million-acre reservation. Leon ruled Friday that the tribe hasn’t established that a border wall will change its reservation boundaries without congressional authority.

The judge also rejected the tribe’s claim that the planned border wall would illegally trespass on its reservation.

“And in any event, I find that the Government’s interests in securing the border, enforcing immigration laws, and ensuring public safety outweigh any surviving irreparable harms at this juncture,” Leon wrote.

The tribe released a statement late Friday strongly disagreeing with the decision.

“Too many critical issues were not adequately addressed, such as inevitable impacts construction will have on the Nation’s land and the permanent destruction of sacred sites,” Tohono O’odham Nation Chairman Verlon M. Jose said. “The Nation will consider all possible options for moving forward, as this issue is simply too important to the O’odham.”

The O’odham reservation in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona abuts 62 miles of the Mexico border. The tribe has more than 37,000 members, including thousands who live in Mexico.

Building the border wall would lead to “significant devastation” on the reservation, including the destruction of mountain peaks that are sacred to the O’odham, tribe attorneys said.

“It would fray the ties between O’odham communities and families on opposite sides of the border, interfere significantly with O’odham religious rituals and practices, and destroy plant and animal resources sacred to the O’odham,” the lawyers wrote.

In 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt issued a proclamation reserving a 60-foot strip of public land along the U.S.-Mexico border for a buffer zone dubbed the “Roosevelt Reservation,” which was formed a decade before the reservation’s establishment.

Tribe attorneys say it is “fanciful at best” to suggest that border wall construction can be confined to a 60-foot-wide corridor.

During a July 22 hearing, Leon appeared to be skeptical that U.S. laws tip in favor of the tribe’s bid for a preliminary injunction, calling it an “extraordinary” request. Leon, who was nominated to the bench by President George W. Bush, said he couldn’t find a previous court ruling under comparable circumstances.

“This is a novel case with novel issues,” the judge said.

Kunzelman writes for the Associated Press.

The Trump administration has moved heavy-duty construction equipment into Big Bend National Park and started work on a border security project despite bipartisan concern about damage to the environmentally sensitive area of west Texas.

Bulldozers and other machinery appeared last week in the remote park, which sits about 300 miles southeast of El Paso and includes one of the least crossed stretches of the U.S.-Mexico border, according to Laiken Jordahl, a national public lands advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity, which has sued the Biden and Trump administrations seeking to halt border-wall construction.

Jordahl said he and other activists watching the work have seen bulldozers plowing through vegetation “clearing a path for the barriers, the wall or whatever is going in.”

U.S. Customs and Border Protection “is building an access road, improving existing roads, installing detection technology and placing vehicle barriers in limited, strategic locations,” Commissioner Rodney Scott, the agency’s top official, said in an email Thursday. “We are securing this park to protect its legacy — keeping it safe, secure, and pristine so American families can enjoy the beauty of our country, free from fear of cartel activity.”

The Trump administration is moving ahead with the project over the objections of not just environmental activists and others opposed to the crackdown on immigration, but also local residents, many of them Republicans who otherwise support President Trump, as well as retiring GOP Sen. John Cornyn. They note that the rugged terrain — mostly desert with steep ravines and scrubland covered in creosote bushes and prickly pear cactus — serves as a natural barrier from anyone trying to cross from Mexico, making the infrastructure unnecessary.

They say the construction and equipment will mar the landscape and imperil the animals who live in the park, including javelinas, ringtails, mountain lions and desert bighorn sheep.

In June, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin formally waived all environmental laws and reviews that could otherwise slow any work in the park.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s office has said he supports using every tool available to help deter illegal immigration, including deploying technology in rugged and isolated areas such as Big Bend.

Trump has long pledged to build a wall along all of the roughly 2,000-mile U.S. border with Mexico, though Customs and Border Protection has repeatedly said it wouldn’t build his preferred 30-foot barrier in the environmentally sensitive park.

Earlier this year, the administration issued a $1.7-billion contract for the project in Big Bend. The vehicle barriers set to be installed are typically 5-foot steel posts set a few feet apart and intended to block cars or trucks from crossing.

The park is part of the Border Patrol’s Big Bend Sector, which has for decades been one of the least crossed areas along the whole of the border. In June, agents there made 148 arrests. Since Oct. 1, the start of the government’s fiscal year, agents have made 1,509 arrests, about 1.5% of all apprehensions along the Mexican border, according to Customs and Border Patrol arrest data.

Brandon Herrera, the GOP candidate for a House district that includes the park, met with White House and Department of Homeland Security officials in March to pitch a less-invasive “alternative solution.”

In a letter this month, Cornyn asked Mullin to meet with local officials who have voiced concerns over the project, citing complaints about its effect on the region’s natural beauty, wildlife, cultural sites and economy. Cornyn wrote that his “constituents believe that the 1,000-foot riverbank cliffs and remote Big Bend terrain offers its own source of deterrence for any illegal migrants crossing into the United States.”

James Talarico, a Democratic state representative running to succeed Cornyn in the U.S. Senate, echoed the Republican’s concerns and called the project irresponsible spending.

“This monument to corruption represents wasteful, irresponsible government spending that no Texan asked for, enriching wealthy contractors without making Texans one bit safer,” he said.

Texas’ Big Bend region relies on tourism as an economic driver, with more than 568,000 visitors to the national park in 2025. Local businesses in Terlingua, a small gateway town west of the park, have revolted against the proposed wall, with workers at one restaurant wearing shirts that read “No Al Muro” — No to the Wall.

Caldwell and Lovinger write for Bloomberg.

Los Angeles police Officer Daniel Flores may have broken the law when he secretly recorded his colleagues making ugly, unacceptable comments that were variously racist, homophobic, misogynistic or otherwise gross and unprofessional at best.

So L.A. County Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman is right to take this, or any, violation of the law by a badge-wearing member of our police force seriously, no matter what Flores’ intent was.

But Monday, Flores was arraigned on 16 felony counts that could lock him up in state prison for 13 years (he pleaded not guilty).

That court hearing was preceded by an unusual and disturbing summary of the case filed with the court by Hochman. It seemed like an inappropriate attempt to smear Flores as a money-grubber with a convoluted plan to sue taxpayers into a sweet retirement (as opposed to intending to expose misconduct), while simultaneously giving an aw-shucks, it-was-all-in-good-fun defense of the ugly commentary of the recorded officers.

Regardless of what Hochman’s intent is in throwing the book at Flores, the result is one that will haunt this city for years to come: a police force in which the officers are clear that if you rat out the cops for misconduct, you get what you get.

“The message to everyone in the police department is keep your mouth shut,” said David A. Harris, a law professor at University of Pittsburgh and an expert on police misconduct. “You cannot stand up for principle or even for the policy of the police department, except at the risk of your own career and your own well-being, and perhaps your freedom.”

Hochman spoke with me for nearly an hour about his reasons for what many, myself included, see as his prosecutorial overreach in this case. Before I tell you the reasons why I think Hochman has it wrong — dangerously wrong — in the decision to charge Flores’ so harshly, I’ll tell you where we agree.

First, we agree that cops shouldn’t do things such as refer to Black people as “monkeys,” as my colleagues Libor Jany, James Queally and Richard Winton reported allegedly happened in this case.

Cops, we concur, should not call women “bitches.” They also should not call women “rapeable,” even if, as Hochman’s filing assures us, “the use of the phrase ‘rape’ was not in a sexual context.”

I am not sure what the nonsexual context of rape is, but OK.

Cops should not make fun of, in no particular order, people with disabilities; candidates applying for jobs; co-workers; Asian people; Hispanic people; or people who may be overweight — as the officers in this case allegedly did.

“These comments are deplorable. They’re despicable. They’re racist. They’re homophobic. They’re sexist,” Hochman told me. “There’s no place in our society for them, and they should be punished.”

So Hochman and I agree that Flores may have broken the law, and that the comments of his fellow officers are unacceptable.

And now the roads diverge.

Because faced with those competing truths, Hochman could have used prosecutorial discretion — the art of tempering the law with the mores and ethics of the community.

He could have used that discretion to cut Flores a break, charge him at a lower misdemeanor level or not at all, and put the focus where it belongs — on the officers who disgraced their badge with their behavior, and what is seemingly a culture of disrespect and degradation within the unit charged with choosing the next generation of officers.

These are the officers charged with recruiting the officers of the future, so the stakes here are high. This is misconduct that the people of L.A. need to know about, because if these officers are so casual in their hateful comments, can we trust their judgment on hiring?

“On one hand, being a whistleblower doesn’t give a person the right to violate the law,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of UC Berkeley’s law school, who did an investigation on police culture in the LAPD in 2000 in the wake of the Rampart scandal. “On the other hand, I would hope that the district attorney would take context into account. And 16 felony charges seems really excessive.”

LAPD Officer Daniel Flores, left, listens as his attorney Alan Jackson speaks to reporters Monday.

(Libor Jany / Los Angeles Times)

But Hochman argues that a “message has to be sent” because it’s a police officer who broke the law.

“If you don’t hold police officers accountable, it’s very hard to hold anybody accountable,” Hochman said. “I believe that no, we’re not going to let the ends justify the means, even if the ends may be laudable, like exposing bigotry, because it leads us down a very slippery slope.”

Hochman said Flores simply could have taken notes on the inappropriate comments and turned them in to superiors or the independent inspector general, which strikes me as either sweetly naive or disingenuous.

“The officer would be shunned; his career would be over, and he would probably find himself on the receiving end of some kind of retaliation,” Harris, the law professor, said of the likely outcome of that plan.

Chemerinsky said retaliation against whistleblowers has long been a part of the culture of the department. Make a complaint, his report in 2000 found, and an officer might get “freeway therapy,” transferred to someplace far from where they lived to send a message, or even find themselves without backup in a dangerous situation.

This decision to treat Flores so harshly, Chemerinsky said, comes off as “part of that long history of LAPD trying to very much crack down on whistleblowing.”

Hochman told me that he wants to make it “crystal clear” that “nothing in this prosecution should be read that we are in any way trying to chill whistleblowers.”

He added that he did use discretion.

“I hope you note in your article that the district attorney could have brought 122 felony charges, or 122 misdemeanors, or some combination of felonies and misdemeanors up to 122,” Hochman said.

Flores made 122 total recordings of 16 people. Hochman charged on the number of people recorded, not the number of recordings, he pointed out.

So sure, we can count that as discretion, I guess?

This is where Hochman has his messages dangerously backward. Sure, hold Flores reasonably accountable for taking matters into his own hands, if he broke the law in doing so. Certainly, Flores knew there would be consequences to his actions.

But that Hochman is trying to frame this as a fair and reasonable prosecution, while protecting the officers who made the comments by giving us their weak-sauce excuses about having no ill intent, does not provide this city the justice it expects and deserves.

Hochman, you may recall, replaced George Gascón, a prosecutor who was accused of forcing his own values on the city.

Now, Hochman seems to be doing the same with his heavy-handed approach to Flores.

Hammering on Flores does not reflect the values of the majority of the Los Angeles community that wants a police force in which integrity and respect are fundamental, impunity is the outcast, and whistleblowers aren’t attacked, even if it turns out their motives aren’t pure.

Personally, I don’t care what Flores’ intent was in making the recordings. I don’t care if the officers caught on tape didn’t intend to offend, and I don’t care what Hochman intends the message to be with his vast over-charging of Flores.

I care about the result: a city in which misogyny and racism are just locker room talk, but breaking the blue wall of silence is a serious crime.

MIAMI — Kyle Stowers tripled, singled and drove in two runs before exiting because of left hamstring discomfort in the fifth inning, and the Miami Marlins beat the Angels 12-3 on Sunday.

Griffin Conine homered twice and Javier Sanoja had two singles and three RBIs for the Marlins. Miami’s Otto López had two infield singles, giving him 46 multi-hit games.

Stowers grimaced as he rounded first after his two-run single capped a six-run fifth that put the Marlins ahead 10-2. He was immediately replaced by pinch-runner Leo Jimenez.

Sanoja hit a two-run single and Conine added a two-run drive against Angels reliever Shaun Anderson before Stowers’ single.

Conine went deep again with a shot over the wall in right against position player Tyler Heineman to lead off the eighth.

Michael Petersen (2-2) threw a scoreless fifth for the win. Marlins starter Ryan Gusto was pulled after four innings of two-run ball and 60 pitches. Gusto gave up three hits and struck out four.

The Marlins (60-59) erased a 1-0 deficit with a three-run first against Angels starter Grayson Rodriguez (3-5).

Stowers tripled and scored on a wild pitch. An errant throw to third by Angels first baseman Nolan Schanuel attempting to get Xavier Edwards out allowed him to score for a 2-1 lead. Owen Caissie capped the scoring with an RBI single.

The Angels (45-73) narrowed the gap on José Siri’s solo blast in the third. Siri hit a fastball from Gusto over the wall in center for his seventh homer.

Sanoja’s RBI single in the fourth made it 4-2.

Zach Neto put the Angels on the board with a run-scoring double in the first.

Rodriguez completed four innings. The right-hander gave up four runs and four hits. He walked four and struck out eight.

Published on
04/08/2026 – 8:09 GMT+2

In addition to earnings reports this week, investors were also still weighing the impact from last week’s joint US-Japan currency intervention, analysts said.

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Japan’s benchmark Nikkei 225 slipped 0.3% to 63,585.58, as the US dollar inched up to 157.51 Japanese yen from 157.18 yen. The euro cost $1.1511, little changed from $1.1514. The dollar was trading at 160-yen levels before regulators stepped in to boost the yen’s value after it fell to nearly 40-year lows.

Some analysts said the effectiveness of such an intervention remains uncertain as it doesn’t address the fundamental economic reasons behind the currency fluctuations, including inflation, interest rates and the relative strengths of the economies.

“A US-backed operation carries far more signaling weight than Tokyo acting alone, and the pledge of further action will give speculators pause. But any US contribution will probably be constrained by size,” a report by BMI, a unit of Fitch Solutions, said.

Matthew Ryan, head of market strategy at global financial services firm Ebury, noted the latest effort could have some impact because it appears to signal a real change in monetary policy rather than just a one-time defensive move.

“This is an historic and meaningful development for the yen, which materially improves confidence in our mildly bullish call for the currency,” he said.

Markets unsettled

South Korea’s Kospi sank 1.3% to 6,174.72. Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 added 1.2% to 9,129.00. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng fell 0.5% to 25,881.99, while the Shanghai Composite gained 0.2% to 3,802.61.

Markets remain unsettled by swings for stocks of companies that make computer chips. They’ve been veering up and down for weeks on worries about whether their surging revenues because of the artificial-intelligence boom are sustainable.

Dow hits all-time high

On Wall Street, share prices rallied Monday after easing oil prices helped calm worries over inflation. The S&P 500 jumped 1.5% and is just 0.1% below its record set earlier this summer.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which measures a narrower slice of the US stock market, climbed 693 points or 1.3% to an all-time high, while the Nasdaq composite leaped 2.1%.

Oil prices rebound

In energy trading in Asia early Tuesday, benchmark US crude gained 84 cents to $81.18 a barrel. Brent crude, the international standard, jumped $1.15 to $84.92 a barrel.

A day earlier, oil prices dropped more than 5% after US President Donald Trump said over the weekend that he had decided to hold off on new strikes against Iran at the urging of allies in the region.

Brent’s price careened between $72 and $102 last month as worries rose and fell over the war in Iran and when oil tankers would be allowed to freely exit the Persian Gulf again to deliver crude to customers worldwide.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury sank to 4.68% from 4.75% late Friday. It remains well above its 3.97% level from before the war with Iran.

Additional sources • AP

MEXICO CITY — After what may have been the most important game in the Mexican national team’s World Cup history, coach Javier Aguirre hugged each of his 26 players.

The embraces weren’t to celebrate a victory. They were hugs of gratitude, encouragement and, above all, resignation.

Minutes earlier, the players paraded around Azteca Stadium — traditionally an impenetrable fortress — to applaud El Tri fans with tears in their eyes. Mexico had just lost 3-2 to England, extinguishing the hope that it could parlay its World Cup co-host role into the deepest tournament run in the country’s history.

The goal was to advance to the quarterfinals for the first time since 1986 and, above all, to show the world that Mexican soccer finally had taken the leap that had been demanded for so long — defeating a past world champion, England, that hadn’t looked particularly dominant. But reality, once again, hit hard as the loss became Mexico’s eighth defeat in the round of 16 since 1994.

This time, Mexico had the support of its fans, playing on home soil. And it wasn’t enough.

“I’m satisfied with the work we’ve done, but when you lose — and I’ve lost a lot in my career — you never quite get over it,” Aguirre said. “It’s very painful because dreaming gives us hope; losing this way hurts a lot.”

Mexico fans show their support before their team faced England in a Round of 16 World Cup match at Azteca Stadium on July 5.

(Richard Pelham / Getty Images)

After weeks of celebrations following wins over South Africa, South Korea, Czechia and Ecuador, Mexico failed the test against England, ranked fourth in the world. El Tri dominated possession but could not convert it into goals, while the English were clinical, led by Jude Bellingham, Harry Kane, Anthony Gordon, Bukayo Saka and goalkeeper Jordan Pickford.

For Aguirre, the loss reopened a familiar wound. In the 2002, Mexico lost 2-0 to a U.S. squad led by Landon Donovan in what many consider the most painful defeat in the country’s World Cup history. This defeat to England very well could rival it.

“I would have liked to win five games, to leave home with five victories. That hurts — it hurts a lot,” Aguirre said. “A loss is a loss. Our opponent didn’t make the same mistakes we did.”

Judging Aguirre solely on the end of this World Cup run would be simplistic given what he inherited. Two years ago, he was asked to lead the struggling team for the third time. When he arrived, Mexico was ranked 17th in the world and had not won the Nations League. He leaves with Mexico ranked in the top 10 and as Nations League champion and two-time defending Gold Cup champion.

This World Cup wasn’t the disaster that Qatar was four years ago, when Mexico was eliminated in the group stage. This summer, Mexico secured its first knockout-round victory since 1986, advanced to a fifth World Cup match for the second time and swept three games during the group stage without conceding a goal — something no other Mexican team achieved.

In 22 months at the helm — having taken over in 2024 following Jaime Lozano’s failure at the Copa América, where Mexico failed to advance past the group stage — Aguirre achieved something that went beyond the scoreboard by uniting players previously accused of having too much ego and preferring not to sacrifice to help the team.

At this World Cup, that squad gave its all — body and soul — and rebuilt a relationship with the fans that had seemed broken since the 2024 Copa América. Thousands of fans filled the Ángel de la Independencia, the Zócalo and other squares across the country, as well as watch parties in cities like Los Angeles.

“We managed to restore the pride of being part of the national team — for the national anthem and for its people. It’s a privilege to be here, and they know it,” Aguirre said of his players. “I think we’ve returned to a Mexican identity.”

Green jerseys were seen all over Mexico as people set aside their differences to cheer on El Tri.

“Mexico was the best host of the three. It had the best atmosphere — it’s a country that truly loves soccer,” Mexico City native Santiago Mondragón said before the England match.

Mexico had standout and inspired performances from Erik Lira, Gilberto Mora and Roberto Alvarado, but its lineup struggled to keep pace with English players trained at elite European clubs.

Mora, just 17 years old and with tremendous potential, made a mistake on the play leading to England’s second goal. Alvarado, who provided strong passes to Raúl Jiménez and was solid in defense throughout the tournament, lost track of Bellingham on the first goal. Raúl Rangel, who was outstanding against South Korea and who three years ago was playing for Tapatío in the Mexican expansion league, stepped too far forward on the penalty kick that sealed the match, minutes after an English player was sent off in the second half. Edson Álvarez, who did not have a good season with Turkey’s Fenerbahce because of an injury, received little playing time and made a serious mistake marking Kane, which led to Gordon’s breakaway on the play that resulted in the penalty kick.

Mexico’s Raúl Jiménez gets tangled with England’s Ezri Konsa while going for the ball during a World Cup Round of 16 match at Azteca Stadium on July 5.

(Francois Nel / Getty Images)

Following the loss, many in Mexico still are wondering why, despite having a one-man advantage for 36 minutes —plus 11 minutes of stoppage time — the team was unable to tie England. Aguirre replaced Mora and goal-scorer Julián Quiñones, bringing on an attacking lineup that focused on sending in crosses, which the English defense easily cleared.

While it’s possible a few changes could have shifted the match in Mexico’s favor, there were limits to how much the technical staff could get out of the roster.

El Tri lacks sufficient depth to assemble a truly competitive 26-man roster, as players such as Álvarez and Santiago Giménez didn’t arrive at their best form, and players such as Brian Gutiérrez weren’t ready for the pressure of a tournament of this magnitude, in need of more time to develop.

Mexico lacked game-changing players capable of breaking down tight defenses — the role Hirving Lozano played in 2018 or Giovani Dos Santos in 2014. The lack of creativity that showed against Saudi Arabia in 2022 flared up late against England.

Thanks to Jiménez and Quiñones, the team did show firepower, scoring 10 goals in five matches, but it lacked depth to break down a well-organized English defense.

The talent pool has been hindered by the Mexico club system.

Mexico’s Julián Quiñones is tossed in the air by teammates as they celebrate a Round of 32 World Cup win over Ecuador at Azteca Stadium on June 30.

(Kevin C. Cox / Getty Images)

Liga MX owners maintain a narrow view of domestic soccer, prioritizing foreign signings over the development of local players and promotion and relegation remain abolished — removing competitive pressure that is the backbone of English leagues.

Top Mexican players continue to be overvalued by their home clubs, which makes it difficult for European clubs to sign them when there are cheaper options with more impressive résumés.

“This was the opportunity; that’s why it’s frustrating, that’s why it’s sad,” Mexican journalist Javier Alarcón said of El Tri’s World Cup exit. “With the Mexican federation and its owners, there isn’t much hope.”

Rafael Márquez, a former FC Barcelona star and one of the greatest players in Mexican national team history, is succeeding Aguirre after serving as one of his assistant coaches. Márquez has formed a close bond with players, who tossed the 47-year-old former defender in the air after one of their World Cup wins, and is familiar with all the reasons Mexico continues to hit the same World Cup wall.

“Rafa is a great guy, a great coach,” said Aguirre, who noted that the team’s average age has dropped and that more and more players are playing in Europe. “Hopefully he can do better than we were able to.”

A reservoir wall broke in Nanning in China, sending out a torrent of water after rivers swelled from the passage of a typhoon. At least four people have been killed by flooding due to Typhoon Maysak, while another 62,000 have been evacuated across the southern city, officials say. The emergency flood control response has been raised to its highest level.

President Xi Jinping has called for “all-out efforts” to rescue people affected by the floods across China. Authorities have warned that torrential rains will continue in the coming days.

PHOENIX — For decades, all that separated the U.S. from Mexico was barbed wire.

Now, after a massive infusion of cash from Congress, President Trump’s administration is swiftly building what it has dubbed a “smart wall,” a combination of 30-foot-tall steel fencing and an array of sophisticated technology like sensors, cameras and towers allowing Border Patrol to surveil the territory.

The wall is under heavy scrutiny for the billions of dollars being dedicated to it when border crossings are at their lowest in decades. Critics say the U.S. is militarizing the border as it increasingly deploys sophisticated surveillance technology to the area, impacting local communities.

“We are seeing a massive expansion of surveillance and surveillance technology across the borderlands,” said Ricky Garza, border policy counsel at the Southern Border Communities Coalition, an advocacy group. “The wall in all its forms is harmful to communities.”

Officials say the technology is complementary to the physical wall and frees up agents for other tasks.

“It’s a smart wall. It’s not just a barrier,” Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott said during recent congressional testimony. “It maximizes the use of our most valuable resource, which is our agents.”

Contracts for hundreds of miles of wall already inked

The wall has been a top priority for Trump, a Republican, since he first ran for president.

During the administration of President Joe Biden, a Democrat, the border emerged as a flashpoint, with thousands of people seeking to cross into the country each day. Those numbers started to taper off shortly before Trump returned to office last year and then slowed to a trickle, with his broader immigration crackdown serving as a deterrent for would-be migrants.

Flush with $46 billion to finish the wall after an infusion by Congress for immigration enforcement, CBP is inking tens of billions of dollars in contracts to build the wall and push along the president’s signature project.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said recently that a preliminary part of the wall will be finished by “this time next year.” Scott said his agency is putting up 6 miles of wall a week.

Hundreds of miles had already been built before Trump returned to office. As of mid-June 2026, CBP has erected another 74 miles and aims to build hundreds more. There is no wall planned for roughly 535 miles of the roughly 2,000-mile-long border, because rugged terrain already serves as a barrier. Ground sensors and towers will be used instead.

CBP is also going back to hundreds of miles of already built wall and adding more technology, lights and roads. Along the long stretches of river in Texas that mark the border with Mexico, they’re deploying 12- to 15-foot-long cylinder-shaped buoys meant to keep migrants or smugglers from crossing the border.

More technology being deployed on the border

Technology is playing a greater role in the Trump administration’s effort to make illegal crossings along the border more difficult, part of a broader transformation of CBP in the years since Sept. 11, 2001, into an intelligence operation with a mass surveillance network whose reach extends far beyond the nation’s frontiers, according to reporting by The Associated Press.

And critics say the border technology poses a threat.

The Southern Border Communities Coalition says surveillance technologies can push migrants into more dangerous routes to avoid being detected.

Garza, the group’s policy counsel, warned that surveillance technology infringes on the privacy rights of border residents and that locals have found ground sensors used to detect smuggler or migrant traffic placed on their property without their consent.

Nayda Alvarez and her relatives own land along the Rio Grande roughly 125 miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico. She has found cameras placed on her family’s land, and just last week she spotted a surveillance tower about a quarter of a mile down the river from her house.

“Are we expecting a war or something?” she said. “It doesn’t make me feel safer.”

Dave Maass, director of investigations for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that focuses on civil liberties related to digital technology, said the technology has made the border area “a hostile environment” for locals and would-be migrants.

The foundation has published a guide on the various types of surveillance towers in use along the southern border designed to help local residents.

These can range from fixed towers with video, infrared and radar technologies that have a range of roughly 8 miles to remote video surveillance systems that have cameras and a spotlight fixed on top. Some are mounted on the backs of trucks so agents can drive them to different parts of the border.

Increasingly, these towers are autonomous. They can scan an area, analyze what they’re seeing using artificial intelligence and alert Border Patrol agents to something suspicious. Proponents say this helps keep Border Patrol agents out in the field instead of sitting in front of computer screens watching for activity. But it also increases AI decision-making along the border when experts have warned about the technology’s potential for bias or other problems.

The big GOP tax cuts and spending bill passed by Congress last summer requires that CBP buys only the autonomous towers, and the department is deploying an additional 95.

Underground, buried fiberoptic cables can sense movement, capturing data that is also then analyzed by AI.

“We follow the contour of the land. We go through trees. We go down into the river banks. We can go absolutely everywhere,” said Magnus McEwen-King, CEO of Sintela, which has a contract with CBP to install the cables. He spoke at a recent border security expo in Phoenix, where some of the technology was on display.

CBP also uses ground sensors and trail cameras to detect smuggling routes.

Concerns over cost and future plans

The nonpartisan watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense has questioned both the huge amounts of money for the wall-building and whether taxpayers are getting their money’s worth.

In 2011, under Democratic President Obama, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano pulled the plug on a project to build a “virtual wall” of integrated technology like radars, sensors and cameras across the entire border after it ran over budget, faced technological glitches and was behind schedule.

Josh Sewell, director of research and policy at Taxpayers for Common Sense, said the organization would like to see more “robust evaluation” of the technologies being used to avoid similar scenarios. And he criticized the Trump administration for lack of oversight on how the money is being spent, a charge CBP has denied, citing “oversight mechanism.”

In the Big Bend area of southern Texas, opposition to the department’s wall-building plans gathered strong bipartisan support especially in the most sensitive areas that run through a state and national park and a wildlife area.

CBP now says it is not planning to build a 30-foot-high bollard wall in those areas. Its recently announced plans include installing patrol roads and some barriers designed to stop cars and using detection technologies.

Clara Benson, who is one of the founders of the No Big Bend Wall coalition, says bright lights in the area designed to illuminate the border could pollute the skies in an area renowned for having some of the best views of the stars. Even without a 30-foot-tall steel wall running through the land, there is concern about CBP’s plans.

“There’s still a lot of fear and dread that the plan is still going to be quite damaging,” she said.

Santana writes for the Associated Press.

For more than three years, the ‘Magnificent Seven’ or ‘Mag 7’, which includes Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Tesla, carried Wall Street.

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Then came June 2026.

Nvidia dropped over 5%, Microsoft fell about 17%, its worst monthly performance since December 2000, Alphabet declined nearly 6%, Amazon lost roughly 12% and Meta dropped around 11%.

As for Apple and Tesla, the companies had directionally different but equally volatile monthly moves.

Apple made a new all-time high closing price of $315.2 on the second day of the month but subsequently declined more than 10% from that peak.

On the other hand, Elon Musk’s company dropped more than 6% in the first week of June but clawed most of that back by the close of the month, ending roughly flat.

Taken together, the ‘Magnificent Seven’ erased about $2.3 trillion (€2tn) in market value in a single month.

What made the selloff remarkable was its breadth. Usually one or two stocks stumble while the others hold up. This time, nearly every member of the group moved lower.

The Roundhill Magnificent Seven ETF (MAGS), which holds all seven companies, fell about 13% from its late May record high.

So what happened to Wall Street’s favorite technology stocks? And why are investors backing away?

Growing pains and spending

The MAGS ETF bled more than $700 million (€615mn) over the month, its worst outflow since it launched in 2023, according to TradingView data. For a fund that had become the simplest way to bet on the US tech boom, the reversal was striking.

One name outside the club had it even worse. Oracle, a hyperscaler not included in the ‘Magnificent Seven’, crashed around 35%, its steepest month since September 1990, after alarming investors with a surge in AI spending and debt.

The fall wiped roughly $100 billion (€87.9bn) off the fortune of co-founder and billionaire Larry Ellison. The market punished the biggest AI spenders, and the numbers explain it.

The five largest hyperscalers are set to spend more than $700 billion (€615bn) on AI infrastructure this year. Microsoft alone is heading towards roughly $190 billion (€167bn), according to estimates from the Bank of America.

The bank said that hyperscaler capital spending has jumped from about 70% of operating cash flow in 2025 to nearly 100% in 2026.

The translation is simple: far less capital left over for share buybacks and dividends, and an increasingly larger bill that will need to be justified with future revenue as costs are climbing too.

The ‘Magnificent Seven’ are the biggest buyers of the memory that feeds AI data centres, and those chips have become scarce and expensive.

Micron Technology, one of the main memory chipmakers, reported earnings per share of $24.67 for its latest quarter, up from $1.68 a year earlier, close to a fifteenfold jump.

Prices for DRAM, the memory inside almost every device, rose as much as 98% in the first quarter alone, a surge some in the industry have nicknamed “RAMageddon”.

A quieter shift beneath the surface

While the biggest technology stocks struggled, the rest of the market continued to rise.

LPL Financial chief equity strategist Jeff Buchbinder points to that trend. Excluding the ‘Magnificent Seven’, the remaining S&P 500 companies grew earnings by 17.5% in the first quarter, helped in part by semiconductor and memory producers.

Buchbinder expects that figure to exceed 20.5% in the second quarter. Meanwhile, the earnings growth projection for the ‘Magnificent Seven’ will be lower than that.

In other words, the other 493 companies are now growing earnings faster than the market’s biggest stars, and investors have noticed.

By late June, the S&P 493 – which excludes the ‘Magnificent Seven’ – had climbed 13.7% for the year. In contrast, the ‘Magnificent Seven’ basket was down 6.6%, while the broader S&P 500 posted a more modest 7.4% gain.

According to veteran investor Ed Yardeni, investors are beginning to show signs of AI fatigue, questioning whether unprecedented spending on infrastructure will ultimately generate attractive returns as cheaper open source models proliferate and AI token prices continue to decline.

Are the ‘Magnificent Seven’ still “magnificent”?

The ‘Magnificent Seven’ still delivered an estimated 29% earnings growth in the first quarter, and they are unlikely to lose their leadership positions anytime soon.

Yet, the debate has shifted.

Investors are no longer asking whether AI will transform the economy. They are asking when hundreds of billions of dollars in AI investment will begin producing meaningful returns.

June may have offered the first clear answer.

The AI trade is no longer a one way bet on seven companies. The ‘Magnificent Seven’ created the AI boom, but they are no longer the only way to invest in it.

In Lincoln Park, past Plaza de la Raza cultural center and under swaying pine trees, stands a row of 10-foot wooden panels etched with names. Robert Zaldivar stood quietly in front of the names, surrounded by community members holding lit candles as memories of old friends resurfaced.

The panels bear nearly 2,000 names, and more are added every year. Each one represents an Angeleno, mostly Latinos, who died of AIDS. Zaldivar led the movement to erect this monument, named the Wall Las Memorias, which was finalized in 2004.

Inspired by his late best friend, who was HIV-positive, the Wall represents to Zaldivar the power of remembering those in his community affected by HIV and AIDS. It was designed in the shape of Quetzalcoatl, or the “Feathered Serpent,” an Aztec deity and symbol of rebirth.

Robert Zaldivar leads a sunset vigil at the Wall Las Memorias AIDS Monument in Lincoln Park on the anniversary of the first HIV diagnosis in L.A. on June 4, 2026.

(The Wall Las Memorias)

That day in early June, he hosted a sunset vigil, joined by AIDS Memorial Quilt founder and Harvey Milk mentee Cleve Jones, to recognize the lives lost since AIDS was first diagnosed 45 years prior, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a report detailing immunodeficiency in five young gay men in Los Angeles.

At Zaldivar’s feet was a poem, one he wrote in 1995 with his friend Anna Contreras.

It reads:

It is here, we free ourselves from the teaching of guilt.
We unite as one people in our vision, our teaching, and our truth.
Through truth we live, through knowledge we survive.

Contending with stigma and misinformation has been a constant struggle for people who are HIV-positive, he said, a struggle that Zaldivar hopes to make more visible now than it has been in previous decades.

“Sometimes it feels like there’s no other way to draw attention to this problem than to have a physical reminder,” Zaldivar said of the monument. “This reminds us of real people, as more than statistics.”

The statistics Zaldivar refers to include the continuing rise in HIV diagnoses in Latinos across the United States. The most recent CDC data show 39,000 people across the U.S. received an HIV diagnosis. And a Kaiser Family Foundation analysis revealed that between 2010 and 2022, there was a 24% increase in new cases among Latinos. In 2022 alone, Latinos made up 31% of new diagnoses, despite only representing 19% of the American population, the KFF study found.

“Just last week, we had two new diagnoses of HIV in our clinic,” said Bernardo Gomez, assistant manager of HIV resources at the Wall Las Memorias Project. “For context, we had 15 in the past six months, including straight women … I think what we’re seeing is a dangerous loss of support for outreach and education.”

Last year, President Trump released his presidential fiscal year budget for 2026, much of which went into effect last October. In it, he revealed significant cuts to HIV health programs — amounting to $1.5 billion.

The budget recommendation signaled the administration’s yearly priorities, and Trump’s fiscal plan and staffing cuts to HIV teams under the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) showed a shift away from HIV prevention and healthcare, which advocates say has led to providers losing jobs and places for testing and resources to shrink. In L.A., the Latino community is feeling the brunt of the loss, Zaldivar said.

The biggest cut to HIV care in the 2026 budget affected the CDC, which lost around $3.6 million. Another devastating loss was $1.7 million cut from the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program, which many L.A. resource centers report relying on to fund part of their programming and staffing.

Robert Gamboa, associate director of public policy at the L.A. LGBT Center, said that in Trump’s first term, his “Ending the Epidemic” program created hope for soon seeing the end of HIV in the U.S. — a hopefulness that he said was quickly dashed in his second term.

“Now there’s this 180-degree shift in policy, we see these enormous proposals pulling away from funding, and his lack of acknowledgment of World AIDS Day, and Pride in general,” Gamboa said. “The message of that is loud and clear: [The Trump administration] is telling our LGBT community, ‘We don’t care about you.’”

Since Trump’s inaugural address last year, Gamboa said executive orders have only solidified Trump’s shift away from LGBT organizations, “challenging the structural integrity of almost everything we’ve done.”

Gamboa said that last spring, the Department of Public Health, Division of HIV and STD Programs), which supplemented L.A. organizations with substantial HIV funding, sent out a notice that all of their contracts were terminated.

“Well, this caused a massive alarm all across L.A. County. Everyone started freaking out. We had to say, ‘We need an emergency allocation [from state funds] so that we can continue providing HIV services across California,’” Gamboa said. “We’re used to getting upwards of around $20 million in funding at the county level, and it wasn’t happening.”

Robert Zaldivar leads a sunset vigil at the Wall Las Memorias AIDS Monument in Lincoln Park on the anniversary of the first HIV diagnosis in L.A on June 4, 2026.

(The Wall Las Memorias)

Since then, nonprofit representatives have confirmed that the contracts were restored at reduced rates. However, the impact of the uncertainty shook the health services community and only caused further distrust among Latino patients.

“We’re already seeing [the impact in L.A.]. In the Latino community, there’s so much fear from the ICE raids. People are afraid to even leave their homes,” Gamboa said. “We’ve worked so hard in building trust and relationships with our communities of color. Now, they’re afraid to even come in. Many of the places they’ve gone to in L.A. County have already closed their doors and ceased services.”

Most recently, the Trump administration announced plans to cut millions in public health funding. This includes $1.1 million that would be slashed from the National HIV Behavioral Surveillance Project, an early-warning system for HIV outbreaks, established by the L.A. County Department of Public Health.

On the White House website, a page called “Cuts to Woke Programs” reads: “President Trump is committed to eliminating radical gender and racial ideologies that poison the minds of Americans.”

Gamboa said that organizations have been discouraged of using “LGBT” in their programming to avoid being defunded as part of the targeted “woke” programs.

“It really affects me,” said Gomez, who has been living with HIV since 1996. “How long will I have medicine?”

Gomez, who is the breadwinner of his family, says his monthly supply of medication costs $1,500 a bottle. “It’s so expensive, and I have insurance. For people without insurance, [the Ryan White program] is the only way they can afford treatment,” Gomez said. “I’m afraid of what will happen to them.”

Gomez takes antiretroviral therapy, a lifesaving medication that reduces the number of infected cells, making the disease less transmissible and prevents HIV from developing into AIDS. According to 2024 HRSA data, the Ryan White program provided antiretroviral therapy to 602,000 people, preventing the spread of HIV.

As the program loses funding, jobs providing HIV care have become more sparse — and programs like the Wall and the L.A. LGBT Center have become more essential to support the thousands left without life-saving care.

HIV program funds are trickling back into L.A. County for nonprofits this year; although some, like the Wall, maintain that it’s “not enough to address the need.” Up until last May, the organization shared that the county funded $1 million of its annual HIV reduction efforts. This year, that number was drastically reduced to $100,000 per six-month contract.

“Many of my social worker friends are off the streets [where they helped at-risk communities] due to just not having enough funding to do their jobs,” said Miguel Rodriguez, program coordinator of HIV testing and prevention at the Wall. “People think only gay men are affected, but basic sexual health for everyone is at risk here. Less [testing] means more infections and transmissions across the board.”

As Robert Zaldivar stresses, the only way to protect L.A.’s Latino HIV-positive community is to support remaining HIV services to get tested or donate to local service organizations.

“What we saw in the ’90s, I’m scared that it will repeat. I want people to remember how serious [HIV] is, and to educate,” Zaldivar said. “Keep getting tested. We don’t report your immigration status or sexuality. Just come in.”

Published on
16/06/2026 – 13:52 GMT+2

Wall Street’s most famous market label may be outdated.

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The ‘Magnificent 7’ or ‘Mag 7’ defined the first phase of the AI rally, as it included Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Tesla, but a fresh grouping is now circulating among investors keen to capture its next leg.

In the wake of SpaceX’s blockbuster listing, analysts are looking to add Elon Musk’s company, as well as OpenAI and Anthropic, which are expected to IPO later this year, to a new market label.

Coined by the British financial firm Vanda Research, the ‘FAB 10’ stands for Frontier AI & Big Tech 10, and takes the original seven companies from ‘Mag 7’ together with the three new market darlings.

According to Vanda, last Friday’s SpaceX IPO offered the clearest signal yet that attention is widening beyond the ‘Magnificent 7’.

After Monday’s close above $192 per share, Elon Musk’s space and AI firm is now the sixth most valuable company in the world by market capitalisation.

What the new label captures

The term ‘Magnificent 7’ was coined in late 2023 by Michael Hartnett, who wanted a single term for the megacap stocks powering the market to records.

Their combined value now sits at roughly $22.6 trillion (€19.5tn), with Nvidia alone worth more than $5 trillion (€4.33tn) as the most valuable company in the world by market capitalisation.

The three newcomers represent a different flavour of the same AI boom.

SpaceX brings aerospace and satellite connectivity through its Starlink unit, while OpenAI and Anthropic are among the leading developers of frontier AI models.

According to Vanda, the ten companies collectively map the direction of the AI and technology sectors over the coming decade.

However, a wrinkle in the label is that two of the additions are not yet listed.

OpenAI and Anthropic remain private, though both have filed to approach public markets this year, potentially at valuations surpassing $1 trillion (€861bn) and making the ‘FAB 10’ as much a shorthand as a tradable basket.

The ‘FAB 10’ is also not the only contender.

Bank of America has floated an ‘AI Big 10’ that instead adds the chipmakers Broadcom, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Micron, reflecting the semiconductor rally.

Others have suggested smaller clusters, such as the rival ‘MANGOS’ label, which has surfaced and includes Meta, Anthropic, Nvidia, Google (Alphabet), OpenAI and SpaceX.

Strategists caution that none of the names signals the demise of the ‘Magnificent 7’, which still accounts for roughly a third of the S&P 500 index. Investors are not abandoning the originals but simply broadening the definition of who leads the AI era.

As Vanda frames it, the next decade’s winners may simply need a bigger tent.

Nothing could possibly generate a headline Tuesday night when the worst American League team — the Angels — played host to the perhaps the worst National League team — the Colorado Rockies.

Except. . .

This.

A fly ball conked Angels right fielder Jo Adell on the head and bounced over the fence for a home run, reminding fans of José Canseco’s similar gaffe 33 years ago.

Adell chased TJ Rumfield’s fourth-inning drive onto the Angel Stadium warning track and reached up to catch it. The ball grazed his glove before bouncing squarely on his noggin and over the wall.

The ball caromed back into the outfield and Rumfield momentarily stopped at second base. But the umpires confirmed the home run, coupling Adell with Canseco in numerous social media posts.

Canseco, the steroids-fueled, defensively challenged left fielder of the Texas Rangers, made a similar blunder on May 26, 1993, when a ball hit by Cleveland’s Carlos Martínez bounced off his head and over the wall.

Mike Trout presumably has witnessed every possible blooper, blunder and boo-boo in 16 seasons with the woeful Angels. The center fielder stood only a few feet from Adell when this one occurred and did not make himself available for comment afterward.

To his credit, Adell faced reporters.

“It looks like I’ve never played in the field before, which is disappointing, because it’s beyond the truth,” he said. “I’m the only one that really knows what happened. I was out there, and it happened to me, so it is what it is.

“It was kind of the icing on the cake, because I was [expletive] all the way around the whole day today.”

Adell was hitless in four at-bats, striking out twice, in the 8-2 loss that dropped the Angels to 23-39, the worst record in the AL.

The play was emblematic of Adell’s seven-year career with the Angels, who made him a first-round draft pick in 2017. At first blush, his lifetime Wins Above Replacement of 0.3 would indicate that he’s little better than the fictional minor league “replacement player” to which MLB players are compared in calculating the statistic.

Yet Adell’s physical tools and occasional highlights scream stardom. He shouldn’t be an ordinary Jo. The antithesis of the embarrassing episode Tuesday night came less than two months ago when he robbed the Seattle Mariners of three home runs in one game.

“It was the Jo Show,” Angels manager Kurt Suzuki said at the time. “This guy works as hard as anybody I’ve ever been around. His work ethic, attention to detail, his desire to improve every single day. To see him do that, I don’t believe you’ll see that again.”

Suzuki, who was Adell’s teammate in 2021 and 2022, likely never thought he would see a fly ball bounce off the outfielder’s head and into the stands, the Jo Show shifting to Oh, No!

“I saw the play, but for me, Jo’s made great strides defensively from when I played with him,” Suzuki said Tuesday. “And obviously, he had the night he robbed three home runs. It was a tough play tonight, but at the same time, the strides that he’s made defensively have been great.”

Adell was considered a defensive liability early in his career and was saddled with a four-base error in 2020 when a fly ball hit his glove and went over the fence. But he steadily improved and became a Gold Glove Award finalist in 2024.

That didn’t stop the “Tarps Off” throng of shirtless fans at Angel Stadium from chanting Adell’s name after the gaffe against the Rockies. For his sake, they likely will revert to imploring Angels owner Arte Moreno to “sell the team” soon enough.

Adell might have to stay away from social media forever, but he would like to forget the ball bouncing off his head as soon as possible.

“That’s what we have to do,” he said. “I mean, there’s really no other way around it. Let it fester and tumble over, but these are plays I’ve made hundreds and thousands of times. I’ve got to just keep going, and as a team, we’ve got to keep going.”

The artist who painted a giant mural on a building in downtown Dallas of life-sized swimming whales has filed a $25 million lawsuit against soccer’s international governing body and others, saying they illegally painted over his work to promote the city’s upcoming World Cup matches.

The artist Wyland says he hand-painted the sprawling mural that covered roughly 17,000 square feet across two of the building’s walls.

The mural stood for nearly three decades before workers began painting over it last month, causing an uproar among residents who admired the mural’s grand scale and message of ocean conservation.

The area’s World Cup organizing committee said in a statement that, in place of Wyland’s mural, new artwork is planned “that captures this current historical moment and reflects the energy, unity, and global spirit surrounding the World Cup 2026.” It said a portion of Wyland’s mural would be preserved.

Wyland filed suit Monday in U.S District Court in Dallas saying that World Cup organizers, along with the building’s owner and management company, painted over his mural without his consent or even notifying him. He says their actions violated a 1990 federal law passed to protect visual artists from destruction of publicly displayed works.

Wyland is seeking at least $25 million in damages. His lawsuit says world soccer’s governing body, FIFA, and other defendants “hastily and irrevocably destroyed a civic landmark” to promote the World Cup.

“Though FIFA claims they were working to develop art for the host city, in truth, they defaced an historic fixture of the host city,” the artist’s lawsuit says.

A FIFA spokesperson said Tuesday the federation “has no involvement in this whatsoever” and referred a reporter to the tournament’s local organizing committee.

A spokesperson for the North Texas FWC Organizing Committee declined to comment. The committee isn’t named as a defendant in the lawsuit.

A spokesperson for Slate Asset Management, which manages the building where the mural was painted over, said in a statement that local World Cup organizers asked Slate in March to donate the mural space for “a new public art installation.”

“Slate is not being compensated in any way for the use of the wall space and was told by the local groups that Mr. Wyland had been notified,” the management company’s spokesperson said in an email.

Dallas is hosting more World Cup matches than any of the other sites in the event co-hosted by the U.S., Canada and Mexico, with nine matches set to be played at AT&T Stadium in suburban Arlington, home of the Dallas Cowboys.

Wyland’s Dallas mural, titled “Whaling Wall 82,” was finished in 1999 and is among more than 100 similar murals known as Whaling Walls the artist painted around the world to promote the conservation of ocean life.

An online petition protesting the mural’s destruction and calling for protecting of public artwork in Dallas has received more than 2,600 signatures.

Wyland’s lawsuit alleges violations of the Visual Artists Rights Act, a 1990 federal law that protects artwork of “recognized stature” even if someone else owns the physical artwork.

A judge cited that law in 2018 when he ordered a property owner to pay a group of New York graffiti artists $6.7 million for whitewashing dozens of their spray-painted murals on buildings that once housed a factory in Queens. The ruling was upheld on appeal.

Bynum writes for the Associated Press. Bynum reported from Savannah, Ga.

Venezuela holds the largest proven oil reserves on earth. It has lithium. It has agriculture, a coastline three hours away from Miami, and—for the first time in a generation a political window. The reconstruction investment case is real. So is the obstacle for every actor, across every ideology, that wants Venezuelan assets to perform.

The obstacle is not the oil price. It is not the OFAC sanctions framework, which has been substantially liberalized since January 2026. It is not even the absence of functioning institutions, though that is the proximate problem every investor will encounter. The obstacle has a nucleus with name, a title, and an active intelligence apparatus. And his continued presence in power is not merely a moral affront. 

This is not a story about mismanagement. Mismanagement leaves a paper trail.

What happened across Venezuela’s infrastructure ministries between 2002 and 2012 lest almost none, deliberately. Over $150 billion in documented railway, housing, and infrastructure contracts were disbursed across that decade. The projects largely do not exist. The documentation largely does not exist. The Tinaco-Anaco railway, a $7.5 billion contract signed with China Railway Engineering Corporation, produced looted campsites and empty concrete columns. The National Railway Plan, budgeted at $150 billion, produced less than one percent of its projected track. 

One of the ministers who oversaw that disbursement period of the infrastructure that is so dire, and who preserved an influence only surpassed by Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro, today is the Interior Minister of Venezuela. He controls the national intelligence apparatus, the police, and the armed colectivos. He is Diosdado Cabello, your competing General Partner that has acted without impunity. He carries a live indictment from a New York court on narco-trafficking charges. He is sanctioned by the US Treasury. He hosts a television program that airs every Wednesday evening.

By 2011, the beneficial ownership architecture built by Venezuela’s ruling network spanned more than forty trustees across multiple jurisdictions: a parallel private equity structure embedded inside a sovereign state.

The distinction that every institutional investor must internalize is this: a mismanaged State is recoverable. A State whose productive apparatus was deliberately extracted (not ruined by incompetence but hollowed out because extraction was more profitable than production) presents a categorically different investment problem. The destruction was not the side effect of the governance model. It was the point of it. Cabello remains an icon of that governance model.

The counterparty problem

Conventional private equity rests on a foundational assumption: your counterparty has an interest in the underlying asset performing. Returns depend on it. Exit depends on it. The entire structure of an LP agreement, a term sheet, a co-investment right, all of it assumes a counterparty whose incentive is aligned with asset value.

In Venezuela, the sophisticated actor on the other side of the table for two decades was running a competing structure. One with no limited partners, no fiduciary duty, no quarterly reporting, and a sovereign intelligence apparatus for compliance. That structure had a single mandate: maximum extraction, minimum documentation, zero accountability. It executed that mandate with precision.

By 2011, the beneficial ownership architecture built by Venezuela’s ruling network spanned more than forty trustees across multiple jurisdictions. This is not a warlord’s operation. This is a parallel private equity structure embedded inside a sovereign state.

That sophistication is precisely what makes the residual presence of these networks so consequential for reconstruction capital. They did not disappear with the January 2026 transition. They repositioned. The structures that governed Venezuela’s extraction apparatus are experts at corporate layering: shell companies, nominee directors, off-channel financial instruments designed to distance beneficial owners from the assets they control.

This is the counterparty environment that reconstruction capital is walking into. Not a post-conflict landscape with residual corruption. An active, sophisticated, multi-jurisdictional extraction network that has spent 25 years perfecting its operational security

These are not improvised operations, they are multi-jurisdictional corporate architectures spanning Switzerland, Brazil, Spain, the Caribbean, and more recently Turkey and the Middle East. Each node chosen for its specific regulatory gap or enforcement lag. The $5.2 billion in gold shipped to Switzerland between 2013 and 2016, the Alex Saab procurement network running through Turkey and Cape Verde, the Zapatero indictment revealing consulting structures designed to siphon money from China, Venezuela, and Spain simultaneously these are documented examples of the same operational capability.

These networks retain the best advisors money can pay. Former heads of state, international law firms, financial intermediaries operating across jurisdictions. The Zapatero case is not the exception, it is the template. And they operate with the enforcement discipline of a cartel: strategic asset moves backed by the implicit and sometimes explicit willingness to use coercion when commercial pressure is insufficient. The SDNY indictments against senior regime figures on narco-trafficking charges are not separate from the financial architecture. They are evidence that the same command structure manages both.

This is the counterparty environment that reconstruction capital is walking into. Not a post-conflict landscape with residual corruption. An active, sophisticated, multi-jurisdictional extraction network that has spent 25 years perfecting its operational security, asset acquisitions by “patriotic”expropriations to serve their drug-logistic hubs and is now repositioning for the reconstruction window. 

Why China doesn’t actually want this

China’s position in Venezuela is widely misread as unconditional support. The reality is more commercially specific. China has over $60 billion in loan-for-oil exposure through CNPC and the China Development Bank. Those loans require one thing: barrels flowing. Barrels require functional production infrastructure. Functional production infrastructure requires institutional stability, contract enforcement, and (critically) a counterparty with an interest in assets performing.

Beijing understands this better than any outside observer because its own institutions have investigated the damage. Xi Jinping’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection placed a CITIC Group vice president under investigation for serious disciplinary violations, the same CITIC that embedded confidentiality clauses in Venezuelan housing contracts barring the Venezuelan government from accessing financial information about its own projects. An Andorran court documented $100 million in bribes paid by CAMC Engineering to Venezuelan officials. China did not need backchannel meetings to understand the corruption. Its own companies were defendants in it.

China also enforces its own code of conduct internally. The CCP’s anti-corruption apparatus, operating through the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, has a long reach, including over state enterprise executives who participated in overseas schemes that damaged China’s institutional reputation. Chinese firms implicated in Venezuelan bribery networks in Andorra for payments to PDVSA lobbyists related to Venezuela’s electricity system did not operate without consequence within their own system. Beijing does not publicize these accountability mechanisms, but they exist. The party does not tolerate reputational exposure that undermines its economic diplomacy, regardless of the geography.

Every dollar that disappears into the extraction apparatus is a dollar that does not produce the barrel that services the Chinese loans.

The Trump-Xi summit concluded in Beijing on May 15, 2026, the same day Lamargas exploded on Lake Maracaibo, a facility operated by China Concord Resources Corp under a PDVSA joint venture contract. At the moment, the US and Chinese governments are navigating toward economic stabilization and a framework for managed competition, building on their South Korea thaw. That G2 stabilization has direct implications for Venezuela: a China that is repositioning toward US capital markets, Boeing purchases, and agricultural commitments is a China with diminishing strategic incentive to backstop a Venezuelan network that embarrasses it commercially.

The Chevron model—US-anchored, internationally governed, with Chinese off-take embedded through structured contracts—is precisely the kind of framework that serves Beijing’s debt recovery needs without requiring it to defend the indefensible.

A ministry based in a kleptocracy whose financial architecture is premised on assets not performing for the state is structurally incompatible with Chinese debt recovery. Beijing is not sentimental about this. It is calculating.

China’s $50-60 billion in loan-for-oil exposure to Venezuela requires one thing above all else: barrels flowing. Barrels require functional production infrastructure. Functional production infrastructure requires institutional stability, contract enforcement, and a counterparty whose economic interest is aligned with assets performing. When the ministry overseeing oil production is the same apparatus that systematically extracted value from every sector it touched, railways that produced concrete columns and nothing else, housing programs with $76 billion in unaccounted deficits, power plants that were paid for and never built, you can see that the problem for Beijing is not political. Every dollar that disappears into the extraction apparatus is a dollar that does not produce the barrel that services the loans.

China tried to correct this internally before abandoning the effort. In 2018, Margaret Myers at the Inter-American Dialogue pointed out that Beijing “tried over the past couple of years to guide decision-making in Caracas by providing advice or by tying loans to production capacity projects in the oil sector, in order to try to help Venezuela right itself economically. That has not proven successful.”

By 2016, China stopped issuing new loans entirely. That is not a diplomatic signal. That is a credit committee decision. The same kind of decision any institutional lender makes when the counterparty’s governance structure has made repayment structurally unlikely.

The Brazilian vector

Brazil’s relationship to Venezuela’s reconstruction is complicated by a paper trail that runs through the largest corruption scandal in Latin American history. Odebrecht paid the highest figure of any country outside Brazil itself. Venezuela’s own former prosecutor general, Luisa Ortega Díaz, formally linked those payments to senior Socialist Party figures including Diosdado Cabello after being removed from office and forced to flee the country. The investigation was halted by Venezuela’s highest court. The Swiss banking system was asked to provide a list of Venezuelan recipients. Neither process was allowed to reach its conclusion.

In Brazil, the Odebrecht network reached the highest levels of political life. Federal prosecutors investigated Lula for allegedly lobbying foreign governments on Odebrecht’s behalf after leaving the presidency, and for his role in directing state development bank BNDES financing toward Odebrecht projects abroad. The contracts that linked Odebrecht to Venezuela were not arm’s-length commercial transactions. They were, by Odebrecht’s own admission in its US Department of Justice plea agreement, instruments of a coordinated bribery architecture that spanned twelve countries and operated through a dedicated internal division (the Division of Structured Operations) whose sole purpose was managing political payments.

What does not yet exist is the decision—by US institutional capital—to arrive with a governance structure that the extraction network cannot penetrate.

Brazil has significant commercial interests in Venezuela’s reconstruction, across energy, agriculture, and infrastructure. Those interests are legitimate and Brazilian private capital is a natural reconstruction partner. The complication is not Brazil. It is the specific political-commercial network that governed Brazil’s prior engagement with Venezuela. Odebrecht did not select its Venezuelan counterparties through competitive markets. Contracts were directed through political relationships — between heads of state, with BNDES as the financing instrument, and with the Odebrecht Division of Structured Operations managing the payments in between.

Political networks have institutional memory. The preferred partners that flow through certain diplomatic channels into Venezuela’s reconstruction window carry relationships forged in that prior architecture. A governance framework serious about reconstruction cannot simply exclude Odebrecht, the legal entity. It must screen for the network that Odebrecht served. That screening is structural, not political. It is the difference between Brazilian capital that competes on merit and Brazilian capital that arrives pre-selected by the same diplomatic infrastructure that enabled the extraction.

The structure that worked and the decision that remains

One Venezuelan asset survived twenty-six years of chavismo with its value intact. One. CITGO Petroleum, incorporated in Delaware, governed under US fiduciary law, with its governance architecture anchored entirely outside Venezuelan legal jurisdiction. It survived not because of political protection but because of structural protection. US law held when every Venezuelan institution around it failed. That is not a coincidence. It is the blueprint.

Venezuela sits very close to Miami. Capital will flow in. The question is whether it arrives with a governance structure equal to the threat, or whether it arrives the way it always has in captured states: trusting counterparties who already demonstrated, at extraordinary scale, that trust was the wrong instrument.

The SDNY indicted the man who sits in the Interior Ministry. The US Treasury sanctioned him. He is still in the building. Turkish construction conglomerates, Asian commodity traders, and European energy juniors are already positioning—without FCPA compliance costs, without fiduciary obligations, without LP reporting requirements. They will move faster. They will price lower. This is what happened in Iraq after 2003. It is what happened in Libya.

The architecture to do this differently exists. Human capital exists in the diaspora: eight million Venezuelans left and within them there are over a million that hold verifiable credentials embedded in US and European institutions, carrying the technical and legal knowledge to rebuild what was taken. The OFAC licensing framework exists. The proof of concept exists in CITGO’s survival. What does not yet exist is the decision—by US institutional capital—to arrive with a governance structure that the extraction network cannot penetrate. That decision is the only thing standing between reconstruction and a second extraction with better letterhead.