(The Center Square) – Two Democrats and three Republicans have pulled ahead in Colorado’s crowded race for the soon-to-be vacant Governor’s Office.
Month: June 2026
Friday’s match for the top spot in Group I was a masterclass – led by maestro Ousmane Dembélé and his three goals – as France won 4-1 against Norway and earned three straight victories in the process. It’s the first time Les Bleus have won all three group matches since 1998, which is when they became champions. Les Bleus were without manager Didier Deschamps, who returned to France following the death of his mother, but delivered a performance that once again showed why this team is the favorites. As a result, Group I winner France will most likely face Sweden at New York New Jersey Stadium. But for Norway, it was an acceptable loss. A good one, if there is such a thing. The Norwegians conceded four goals, but this was a rotated squad where Stale Solbakken made a lot of changes, including keeping striker Erling Haaland or midfielder Martin Odegaard on the bench. And still, even with all the changes, it created opportunities, even with the missed penalty. So it should feel good as it now prepares for the Ivory Coast in the Round of 32. Here are my takeaways: 1. Ousmane Dembélé has finally arrived After failing to make an impact for France under the big spotlight (19 previous major international tournament games without scoring a goal), Dembélé now has four goals at this World Cup. The PSG star and 2025 Ballon d’Or winner is now in the Golden Boot race as he has the same number of goals as his teammate Kylian Mbappé. This was a signature performance for Dembélé. When you give him space inside the box, and he cuts inside to his slightly-preferred left foot, there is nothing you can do to stop him and that’s what continually happened. Norway made a big mistake by stepping away and as a result, he kept on punishing them. A fantastic hat-trick, which was the second fastest by a starter in World Cup history (32 minutes) behind Austria’s Erich Probst in 1954 against Czechoslovakia. 2. Right Decision To Sit Haaland? It made sense for Solbakken to sit his regulars, including Haaland, who wanted to make sure his team was as fresh as possible for the knockout stage. But there is such a thing as momentum and confidence, so did he do the right thing? Yes. Norway was all prepared for whatever outcome. On Monday, after winning 3-2 against Senegal, Haaland spoke about France’s dominance, giving a refreshingly candid (if a bit flippant) answer when talking about his team’s chances against Les Bleus. “Honestly, I don’t care too much [about the France game],” Haaland said. “We’re through, we managed to get through, which is incredible …so I couldn’t care too much about that game now. They [France] are probably going to win against us, they’re probably going to win the whole tournament.” It’s not a defeatist concept, it’s a realistic one. Norway is a very good team, but it does not have the depth of France, so if it loses to the likes of Haaland, then it can almost say goodbye to a strong, deep, historic run. Besides, with a rotated squad against a giant like France, Norway still created lots of good chances and had several chances for more goals, including a missed penalty. At least that’s very encouraging. If there is one team who can handle a loss and get right back up, it’s Norway. 3. France Shows Why It Is The Team To Beat After the victory over Norway, the two-time World Cup champion now ends the group stage in perfect fashion, winning all three matches. This might be a good omen as the last time it achieved this was in 1998, when it won the competition. Naturally, in 2018, it also won the tournament and, at that time, it didn’t win all three group stage matches. However, this summer, to me – as I have said from day one – France is looking stronger and stronger because the entire squad knows its role. How do you even stop this team when you have Mbappé up top, Michael Olise right under him, Désiré Doué on the left … oh, and if you choose to focus on the right wing, there’s Dembélé? This type of devastating attacking talent should not even be legal. The embarrassment of riches is honestly overwhelming for any team at this tournament. Yes, it’s still trying to figure out things defensively – France was caught sleeping in Norway’s lone goal – but you can’t deny the attacking might of France far outweighs any defensive vulnerability. 4. An Emotional Day With Deschamps Absent Didier Deschamps is one of the longest serving managers in international football, having been in charge of France since 2012. But his presence was missed in the game after he returned to France following his mother’s death, which gave Friday an important meaning. “On behalf of the entire France team, France’s family, we extend our condolences to the coach and his family,” said midfielder Aurélien Tchouaméni prior to the match, speaking from the team’s camp. “This is a difficult time for everyone. We tried to make things seem normal, but we have a mission, and we want to make him proud.” And the Real Madrid midfielder did exactly that, playing a very strong performance in the midfield under the guidance of assistant manager Guy Stephan. “He gave us a mission, both the staff and the players. Guy will follow the coach’s instructions. We will continue to respect our playing principles. We are confident that we will do everything we can to win.”Latest Sports News from FOX Sports
SEATTLE — FIFA has not endorsed the Seattle host-city committee’s “Pride Match” designation, which will not be part of the official branding when Iran and Egypt meet tonight at Lumen Field.
“I think they’ve always been aware of what we’re doing,” said Louise Chernin, who as chair of the organizing committee’s Pride Match Impact Council began planning for the day nearly a year and a half ago.
Chernin began her match day at Rough & Tumble, a women’s sports bar in Ballard, a historically Scandinavian neighborhood where a crowd had gathered to cheer on Norway against France. The bar was notably free of FIFA’s commercial imprint: The World Cup posters on the walls and the merchandise for sale were all drawn by local artists without any official logos.
It all reflected the extent to which the “Pride Match” has become a gentle challenge not only to FIFA’s record of clamping down on some expressions of LGBTQ+ rights but also the corporate monoculture it creates in host cities through its restrictive sponsorship rules.
“If there’s going to be revenue spent, let us bring it to LGBTQ-owned businesses,” said Chernin, a longtime head of the Greater Seattle Business Association, an LGBTQ+ chamber of commerce.
Just down the street, fans had gathered at a “regnbue” street festival — the word is Danish and Norwegian for “rainbow” — organized by a local Ballard business association. The Norway-France match was being shown on an oversized screen, but when halftime hit attendees did not listen to any of the ads on the Fox broadcast.
Instead DJ SummerSoft took the stage as Sativa the Queen, a local drag performer, vamped through the break.
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Envoy’s pharaoh well party
Egyptian Ambassador Motaz Zahran and wife are hosting an informal farewell party tonight for close friends and family at his Washington, D.C. residence tonight, according to an attendee, hours before Egypt faces off against Iran in a closely watched game in Seattle. Ambassador Mohamed Hamdy Mohamed Mokhtar El-Molla will replace Zahran as the new Egyptian envoy to the U.S.
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Senegal kept its hopes of reaching the knockouts alive on Friday with a comprehensive 5-0 win over Iraq in Toronto. It was the result the team needed as it moved the Lions of Teranga into third place in Group I; now it must wait for the remaining groups to finish before it knows for certain whether it is one of the top eight third-place teams at the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup. Senegal will leave the game knowing it did everything it could today to give itself its best chance to advance. Here are my takeaways: 1. Perfect Start For Senegal Senegal and Iraq came into this game without a point as both lost to France and Norway. This expanded version of the tournament is more forgiving as eight of 12 third-place teams advance to the round of 32. To have any chance of getting there, however, both teams knew they had to win, likely by a lot of goals, to improve their goal differential tiebreaker. After just a few minutes, it became clear that Senegal was likely going to win this game. The biggest question was whether it could dramatically improve its goal differential to the point where it was the top of the third-place finishers with three points. Senegal got the start it needed when Habib Diarra headed home a corner kick in just the fourth minute. In the 13th minute, Iraq defender Rebin Sulaka was judged to have brought down former Liverpool forward Sadio Mané, who had a clear path to goal. After a long VAR review, it was determined that Sulaka fouled Mané by pulling his shirt from behind in what was a denial of an obvious goal-scoring opportunity. By rule, Sulaka was then sent off. With the game still in its early stages, Senegal was up a goal and up a man in a game it needed to win likely by a large margin. The start could not have gone any better for Senegal, which now seemed to be off to the races. 2. Red Card Decreased First-Falf Intensity After the red card, the entire flow of the game changed. Despite being up a man, the Lions of Teranga were lacking in both the urgency and execution they showed earlier in the game. Immediately after the red card, Mané had a free kick that was well saved by Iraqi goalkeeper Ahmed Basil Fadhil (who would later leave the game with an injury). After that, Senegal did not have another shot on target the rest of the first half. The intensity of the game completely drained, and the crowd grew very quiet. At halftime and in the opening minutes of the second half, it seemed as if the game was going to turn into a dull grind without many opportunities. 3. Thiaw’s Substitutions Changed Everything Immediately after Iraq gifted Senegal another goal and a 2-0 lead in the 56th minute, Senegal head coach Pape Thiaw decided to make a wave of substitutions to go after the blowout win it would likely need. Pape Gueye, Iliman Ndiaye, Nicolas Jackson, and Pathé Ciss all came into the game to bring more energy to the game. With these players, Senegal switched to a more aggressive formation as its wingers moved further up the field into the attack. It paid off in a major way, specifically through Gueye, who scored two fantastic goals with powerful shots. The first was just minutes after coming on in the 59th minute on an assist from Crystal Palace forward Ismaïla Sarr. Then, in the 71st minute, it was Gueye with another goal on an assist from Ndiaye. From there, the rout was on, and it was completed in the 82nd on a goal from Ndiaye, which was assisted by Gueye, who plays for Villarreal in Spain. That put the score at 5-0. The stats from the three 57th-minute substitutes were beyond impressive. They created chance after chance, but most importantly, it was the three goals, two of which were also assisted by substitutes. Specifically, Gueye was the best player on the field, who also had the biggest impact on the score. 4. Iraq’s Repeated Mistakes Proved Costly Iraq will now exit the tournament with three losses in three group stage games. Expectations were low for Graham Arnold’s team because this was one of the most challenging groups of the entire World Cup. While Iraq had to face three very powerful teams in Norway, France, and Senegal, its most difficult opponent was likely itself. That will make this tournament very difficult to accept, because it did not play its best and did not compete as well as it should have. There was a point in both its games against Norway and France when Iraq was playing well and very much in the game. In those games, Iraq became undone through careless passing out of the back that gifted Erling Haaland and Kylian Mbappé with the easiest goals possible. Then, against Senegal, it was a wave of mistakes that did the team in. First, there was the red card. Then, it was Senegal’s second goal that originated when Iraq midfielder Zidane Iqbal was careless with the ball just outside his own box and lost possession to Senegal’s Lamine Camara. Camara then set up Sarr for his third goal of the tournament. Iraq was likely never going to advance out of Group I, but it did not need to gift wrap numerous goals to its opponents.Latest Sports News from FOX Sports
America’s stint hosting the World Cup is drawing mostly positive reviews to date — and it couldn’t come at a better time.
According to a new report from the Pew Research Center, views of America across the world are worsening and confidence in President Donald Trump’s leadership is dropping.
Pew surveyed 42,000 people across 36 countries between February and May, and found that America has a largely negative impression on the global theater. Only 23 percent of surveyed adults expressed confidence in Trump’s leadership — eliciting less confidence than Chinese leader Xi Jinping (34 percent) and Russian President Vladimir Putin (31 percent).
Foreign policy is the biggest pain point for Trump’s international critics, who take issue with his handling of tariffs, Gaza, Iran, Greenland and the Russia-Ukraine war, according to Pew’s findings.
Meanwhile, fewer countries — and longtime allies — believe the U.S. is a reliable partner. In Canada, where 83 percent of respondents described the U.S. as reliable in 2022, that number is now down to 35 percent.
In 2023, 60 percent of Germans said the U.S. considers international interests in its foreign policy decisions. That share has now dwindled to 23 percent — Germany’s public opinion of the U.S. is “now similar to or more negative than what was measured during George W. Bush’s presidency, when many people in Europe and elsewhere strongly opposed the war in Iraq and other major elements of U.S. foreign policy,” writes Pew.
There are only seven nations where a majority rate the U.S. well — Israel leads the pack, with 81 percent of respondents viewing America favorably. Some of the country’s lowest ratings come from predominantly Muslim publics, “such as Malaysians, Pakistanis, Turks, and Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.”
Over the past decade, Pew’s polling has found growing concerns about the health of American democracy. A 2013 Pew survey, just as Barack Obama entered his second term, an all-time high of 75 percent of respondents in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Poland, the Philippines, South Korea and the U.K. said the U.S. respects its citizens’ personal freedoms.
Since then, declining shares of world respondents believe the U.S. respects its citizens’ personal liberties — and this year, 56 percent of respondents said the U.S. does not.
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Alaska crews battle 13 wildfires, Anchorage warns of dangerous mud flats, Juneau shares updates on its ORV park, and a rehabilitated bald eagle returns to the wild.
Alaska crews battle 13 wildfires, Anchorage warns of dangerous mud flats, and a rehabilitated bald eagle returns to the wild.
Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg says he was kept apart from his two young children for 24 hours after someone made a false complaint about him to child protective services in Michigan.
In a Friday post to substack, Buttigieg said an anonymous caller who claimed to have met him several years ago at a conference in Alabama had reported him to CPS for committing “unspeakable violent crimes” and the caller believed his four-year-old twins were still at risk.
Buttigieg said the twins were placed with their grandparents’ and underwent a forensic interview as authorities investigated the allegations.
“For twenty-four deeply distressing hours, we had no idea what I was accused of or what was about to happen,” Buttigieg wrote. “We could not understand someone abusing the system like this in order to hurt me and my family with an absurd and easily refuted allegation of a horrific crime.”
Michigan State Police confirmed in response to questions about the Substack post that they had responded to an anonymous report this week, which they determined to be false.
“False reports are dangerous and divert law enforcement officers and Child Protective Services workers from responding to legitimate emergencies and protecting vulnerable children and families,” Shanon Banner, spokesperson for the state police, said in a statement.
Despite the conclusion that the report was false, Buttigieg said he was told it would “take a bit longer” before the case is officially closed. A spokesperson for the former Cabinet secretary referred questions to the state police.
Buttigieg pointed out that it is a crime to file a false report, adding that “if there is any way to press civil or criminal charges over this, we will.”
Buttigieg, who formerly served as mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and ran for president in 2020, called the false report “the ugliest thing that has happened to me since my career in service began.”
“I cannot describe the mix of rage and sadness that I feel at the idea that someone brought our children into this. They are four years old. Four. They do not know or care what a Democrat or a Republican is,” he said. “For God’s sake, they are just kids.”
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SEATTLE — Iran faces off against Egypt tonight in a match that will have wide-ranging implications for the nation and its U.S. hosts, just hours after the American military conducted a strike in response to an Iranian attack on a commercial ship passing through the Strait of Hormuz.
As the Washington-Tehran ceasefire frays, a draw tonight in Seattle would help set up a situation where Iran plays its potential next two games at a Canadian stadium, rather than again in the United States, a scenario that would offer the Trump administration a two-week reprieve from the complicated task of trying to host a tournament while imposing unique travel restrictions on just one of the 48 competitors.
The Iranian Football Federation decided to move its base camp from Arizona to Tijuana, Mexico, amid concerns that the U.S. could not ensure its security. The State Department did not extend visas to Iran’s full delegation, including government officials and support staff, and limited the team’s players and coach to arrival within 24 hours of kickoff. The Department of Homeland Security relaxed those rules this week, allowing Iran’s team to spend two nights in Seattle before today’s match, although several players complained they were held for extended questioning upon arrival.
“Undoubtedly, the fact that the management and administrative staff could not accompany the team has negatively affected the players’ peace of mind and further complicated the national team’s work,” Abolfazl Pasandideh, Iran’s ambassador to Mexico, told POLITICO. “Despite these difficulties, the Iranian team has repeatedly demonstrated its ability to stay focused and perform at the highest level, even under adverse circumstances. The professionalism shown by the players and coaching staff in the face of these challenges has been paramount, and the results achieved clearly reflect that reality.”
“Any measure that facilitates athletes’ participation and competition on equal terms is a positive step,” Pasandideh said of the Trump administration’s relaxed travel rules for the Iran team.
Nonetheless the World Cup’s one cross-border commuter squad sits on the precipice of advancing to the knockout rounds depending on tonight’s results and an impenetrably complicated formula that FIFA tournament organizers are using for the first time.
“The White House FIFA Task Force has prepared for and is aware of all potential scenarios involving 32 teams that will move into the knockout rounds and will advance from there,” said White House spokesperson Davis Ingle.
There are, according to The Athletic’s invaluable World Cup tracker, 625 plausible scoring combinations between the two final Group G matches that will take place concurrently tonight — Iran’s encounter with Egypt, and Belgium’s against New Zealand in Vancouver.
In 21 percent of those situations, according to The Athletic, an Iranian draw against Egypt would set the team on a path to play its next two matches in Vancouver: on July 2 against Switzerland, and then potentially again there five days later.
That would shift responsibility for managing Iran’s travel arrangements from the U.S. to Canada, whose Prime Minister Mark Carney said yesterday that he would like to restore diplomatic relations with Iran after 14 years of suspension. (Ironically, it is Switzerland that has served as a “protecting power” for Iranian interests with both the U.S. and Canada in the absence of direct connections between those governments.
In other scenarios, including any that involve an Iranian win tonight, the country would play its subsequent matches in Dallas or Seattle. The last path, which The Athletic estimates as a 18 percent probability, would set up the most geopolitically fraught face-off of all: a U.S.-Iran match July 6.
“We have reiterated on numerous occasions that we have no issue with the American people,” Pasandideh said. “Our disagreement lies with the hostile policies that the United States government has implemented against the Iranian people.”
If the Trump administration kept its current travel rules in place, that would mean Iran’s team would touch down on American soil on the 250th anniversary of the United States — a fitting culmination for the first World Cup to begin with a host country at war with a competitor.
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