Thunderstorms are expected to make their way through the Philadelphia region later Monday evening, potentially interrupting the World Cup match between France and Iraq (5 p.m, Fox).
The strongest storms are forecast to move in beginning around 4 p.m., bringing with them heavy rain, wind gusts approaching 60 mph, and the potential for an isolated tornado.
“Storms will certainly have lightning with them,” said Zack Cooper, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service’s Mount Holly station.
An inch or two of rain could fall in and around the city, Cooper said, but depending on the storm’s severity that could all come in an hour or less, leading to flash flooding. Philadelphia and the surrounding region are under a flood watch.
“Exactly how much would fall on a given thunderstorm is impossible to know, but we could certainly see some pretty high rain rates in these storms tonight,” Cooper said.
For those going to the game, umbrellas aren’t allowed in the stadium, but you can bring a poncho.
FIFA will pause play if there is a lightning strike within eight miles of the stadium. The match will remain paused for 30 minutes, with any subsequent lightning strikes resetting the clock.
Six Club World Cup matches were delayed by severe weather last summer. A match between Chelsea and Benfica at Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte, N.C., was delayed multiple times due to lightning strikes, taking four hours and 38 minutes to finish.
The FIFA Fan Fest at Lemon Hill Park in Fairmount would close if lightning is detected within an eight-mile radius. Fans would need to exit the grounds and move to a safe location, and could re-enter after 30 minutes if no additional lightning is detected.
Festivities were interrupted Thursday evening, when high winds prompted the event to close early.
Lincoln Financial Field has been renamed “Philadelphia Stadium” for the duration of the World Cup. In addition to five group stage games, the city will host a Round of 16 game on July 4.
France tops Iraq 3-0 in weather-delayed World Cup match
Kylian Mbappé scored two goals in France’s win.Jose F. Moreno / Staff Photographer
Kylian Mbappé scored two goals and reigning Ballon D’or winner Ousmane Dembele fueled a 3-0 win against Iraq inside Philadelphia Stadium, with Dembele’s goal and Mbappé’s second both arriving after a near one hour, 30 minute rain delay at Philadelphia Stadium.
The goals for Mbappe were his fourth and fifth of the tournament and the 16th of his World Cup career. He trails only Lionel Messi, who has 18 World Cup goals, after scoring two earlier today in Argentina’s win against Austria in Group J.
With the win, France secured its place in the knockout round, but have yet to win Group I outright with Norway on their heels. At the time of this report, the Norwegians were up 1-0 against Senegal.
As for the Iraqis, its World Cup hasn’t yet come to a close but they’d need to win their final match against Senegal on Friday (3 p.m., FS1) and hope for the misfortune of teams in other groups to work in their favor.
France will also play its final match on Friday against Norway (3 p.m., Fox29) with a chance to win Group I outright.
Ex-Villanova star Collin Gillespie get a few seconds of airtime during Fox’s broadcast of Monday’s World Cup match between France and Iraq, though fans watching at home might have been scratching their heads.
Mbappé scores second goal, extending France’s lead
Make that two goals for Kylian Mbappé.
The French star scored his second goal of the night shortly after play resumed, but it was largely due to a terrible mistake made by Iraq’s goalkeeper.
A MASSIVE mistake at the back for Iraq and Mbappé capitalizes 🇫🇷
Mbappé is now tied for No. 2 all time in men’s World Cup goal-scoring with Germany’s Miroslav Klose. Lionel Messi, who scored two more goals today, remains No. 1.
Thunderstorm threat subsides, but more rain expected for Philly
Fans seek shelter from the rain at Lincoln Financial Field.Kerith Gabriel / Staff
The severe thunderstorms storms have backed off in the immediately Philadelphia area, but soaking rains are expected to continue through the night, and perhaps Tuesday.
The National Weather Service has posted several flash-flood warnings, as near to the stadium as Center City.
IRVINE, Calif. – I am sitting in my hotel room here, where it is definitely not thunderstorming, but I’ve been waiting out the delay in France-Iraq like everyone else.
As it happens, an old friend of mine is in Philadelphia today to do one of the many radio broadcasts back to France of the game.
Julien Froment is the director of the sports department at Radio France, one of that country’s biggest broadcasters, and his team is perched in the outside media seats in the upper deck.
Or at least they’re supposed to be. When the worst of the storms hit, they had to evacuate the stands for a while along with all the fans who did. But they couldn’t take all their broadcasting equipment with them, and I can tell you from enough experience doing radio work that it’s expensive – and hard-to-find – stuff.
FIFA kindly provided plastic covers to all the TV and radio networks in the open seats. But Julien and his crew went a step further. The technician, Virginie Lorda, brought a folded tarp, some rope to tie it down with, and a roll of duct tape. When they all had to go back on air before the rain had fully stopped, they started broadcasting from under the tarp.
As Julien wrote on Instagram, MacGyver would be proud.
Alex Freeman’s fast rise with the U.S. team has no bigger fan than his father, former Eagles and Green Bay Packers wide receiver Antonio Freeman. When Alex scored the game’s second goal against Australia, he achieved the rare feat of scoring a World Cup goal in a stadium where his father scored two touchdowns 30 years earlier.
Antonio stopped by Monday’s practice to talk with the media and share his joy.
“I’m sure Alex has heard enough from other people about my success and my moments,” he said. “I don’t really talk about those moments too much. But it was definitely a full circle moment. to just have a father and son combination in any sport have an impact on a game in the same stadium, same state, it’s pretty amazing.”
He called it “a credit to all the work that Alex has put in, the commitment that he’s made. This is his ride, and I’m just happy to be his biggest supporter.”
And what was the father’s message to his son after the game?
“He just continued to amaze me, and that’s all it is,” he said. “When I see him, it’s like, ‘Yeah, boy, that’s what I’m talking about!’ — That’s our little thing. But just keep working, Alex, keep being you. People love who you are, don’t change, just keep working hard.”
He also praised soccer’s growth in the United States, saying this World Cup “has really heightened the awareness in the U.S., and people from all walks of life are getting involved, rallying behind the [U.S.] team.”
A fan services official speaks to a French fan during a weather delay at Lincoln Financial Field.Kerith Gabriel /
Loud cheers erupted twice from the steamy main concourse level of Philadelphia Stadium after it was announced that fans were able to return to their seats. A band of sunlight crept through and hit sections 118-121.
It looked like the game was set to return. However, public address announcer Kevin Casey notified fans that the match was still suspended, cheers changed to groans, but in true Philly fashion, people still milled to their seats.
During the downpour, a fan services official in section 106 was overheard saying, “these people paid good money for their seat, I can’t be the one to tell them to get up if they don’t want to, and if they want to get loud with me, that’s what Apex [stadium security services] is for.
France forward Kylian Mbappé walks off the field during a thunderstorm delay. The game remains suspended. Jose F. Moreno / Staff Photographer
Monday’s World Cup match between France and Iraq remains delayed as severe storms linger in and around Philadelphia.
“FIFA will follow the safety protocols established by the local authorities in the region, and will resume the match as soon as it’s safe to do so,” a FIFA spokesperson said. “The safety and security of all individuals is FIFA’s priority.”
It is unclear when the game will resume. Some fans have trickled back to their seats, even as they’re being told to seek shelter. Parts of the stadium remain empty as FIFA assess the situation.
Fans try to stay dry as storms pass over Lincoln Financial Field.Kerith Gabriel / Staff
Rain coming down in Philly as France and Iraq play on
Fans poncho up as rain begins to fall at Lincoln Financial Field as France plays Iraq.Rob Tornoe / staff
It’s pouring in South Philadelphia as severe storms move through the region.
FIFA will only pause play if there is a lightning strike within eight miles of the stadium. If that happens, the match will remain paused for 30 minutes, with any subsequent lightning strikes resetting the clock.
A storm warning is in effect until 6:15 p.m. if it rains like it did out in Valley forge way, this could turn into a swim meet.
France fans cheer in the stands at the Linc during Monday night’s match against Iraq.Jose F. Moreno / Staff Photographer
For the most part, French fans in Philadelphia for Monday’s game seemed to agree.
“The architecture looks quite French,” said French fan Tao Taumas, pointing to City Hall on Monday. “Yes, a lot, and we are living in Montreal now, and it looks exactly like the French part of Montreal.”
Vincent Magardeau, who traveled to Philadelphia with Taumas, did not fully agree with his friend’s conclusion.
“I’m pretty surprised that you say that,” Magardeau said after being informed of Philadelphia’s similarities to Paris. “But now that you say it, you can see the architecture here and there, but I wouldn’t say that this is the most French city that I could see.”
Gabriel Sabinaud, who “never heard about anything in Philadelphia,” arrived in the city early Monday morning after staying in New York City. A local informed Sabinaud to try a soft pretzel before he leaves, so he headed to the Philly Pretzel Factory near City Hall before the game. Sabinaud, although having limited time to explore, definitely saw the similarities between the two cities.
“The east side of the U.S. is definitely more European than the west side,” Sabinaud said. “I’ve been to San Francisco as well, not European. No, it’s not. So [Philadelphia] is definitely more European and Parisian at some points. You’ve got tiny streets with lots of people making noise with their cars. Very similar, more similar to Paris than the west side.”
Many French fans explored Center City before taking the Broad Street Line to South Philadelphia for the game. For a moment, before it began to rain heavily, “Les Bleus” had taken over downtown.
“You can see the vibe of French people here,” Taumas said. “With the World Cup, I would say it’s a French city, because everyone is wearing French jerseys, so you might be the Frenchest city in the U.S.”
Iraqi social media star serves dolma outside the Linc
Fawzi Bedaweed serves dolma from his native Iraq outside Lincoln Financial Field Monday.Rob Tornoe / staff
Fawzi Bedaweed, an Iraqi native from Zakho, traveled to Philadelphia by way of Texas to watch his beloved “Lions of Mesopotamia” take on France.
A budding social media star, Bedaweed has built up a loyal following on social media sharing Iraqi culture during the World Cup. In Philadelphia, that took the form of handing out authentic Iraqi food like dolma to fans outside Lincoln Financial Field.
“We’re going to win! Iraq!” Bedaweed chanted, dancing on the sidewalk.
While France were clear favorites heading into the game, a strong contingent of Iraqi fans filled the southern stands behind the net at the stadium.
Iraqi fans cheers in the stands at the Linc. Jose F. Moreno / Staff Photographer
It could just be the time of day, or that fact that it’s a 5 p.m. match on a Monday, but the revelry, excitement, and energy that transpired on SEPTA’s Broad Street Line an hour before kickoff compared to Friday’s match between Brazil-Haiti has fallen off.
That’s not to say there won’t be a significant crowd in-stadium, but traveling the express subway down was not the method of choice at this hour.
The subway line was packed heading to the match after the City Hall stop on Friday at 8 p.m., a little less than hour before the game started. Let’s just say it was a vibe.
Fans pack the Broad Street Line ahead of the World Cup game between Brazil and Haiti on Friday, June 19, 2026.Kerith Gabriel / Staff
On the way in to France-Iraq one hour before kickoff after City Hall? Not so much.
Fans ride the Broad Street Line ahead of the World Cup game between Iraq and France on Monday, June 22, 2026.Kerith Gabriel / Staff
Philly will see France’s biggest stars in the starting lineup
Whenever the France-Iraq game kicks off, Philly fans will get to see some of soccer’s biggest stars on the field.
Les Bleus will have Kylian Mbappé, Bradley Barcola, Ousmane Dembélé, and Michael Olise as the front four in their attack, as fearsome a quarter as there is anywhere in the world’s game.
It’s a little bit of lineup rotation from the group that started France’s entertaining 3-1 win over Senegal in the Meadowlands on Tuesday, as Barcola comes in for Désiré Doué — another of the world’s brightest young talents.
Mbappé scored two brilliant goals in that game, playing his own role in the chase for the all-time World Cup scoring record. He now has 14, four behind Lionel Messi’s new record of 18. Messi scored twice in Argentina’s 2-0 win over Austria Monday, after having scored a hat trick in the reigning champions’ 3-0 win over Algeria.
Germany’s Miroslav Klose was the previous men’s World Cup record holder with 16. The overall World Cup record belong to Brazilian women’s legend Marta with 17, until Messi passed that mark Monday.
Iraq’s lineup includes a player from MLS, Nashville SC’s Ahmed Qasem, on the left flank in midfield. There will also be a familiar face from the league in the center circle, as veteran Canadian referee Drew Fischer takes charge of the whistle.
At least so far, FIFA has not delayed the kickoff time from the scheduled 5 p.m.
France and Iraq's starters are out.
Mbappé, Dembélé, Barcola and Olise all line up for France.
Nashville SC's Ahmed Qasem goes for Iraq.
Another familiar face from MLS, Canada's Drew Fischer, is the referee.
Fans ready for today’s Philly match: ‘I just enjoy that vibe’
The FIFA Fan Festival is shut down for the day, but the pre-match party is rolling on across the city.
Mahir Sanori and Gene Lazarraga staked out their spot across from the bar at Lion Sports Bar in Chinatown by 3:20 p.m., more than an hour before France and Iraq’s scheduled kick-off time.
Sanori and Lazarraga have no connection to France, aside from Lazarraga’s French classes at Delran High School in Burlington County, but the former high school classmates chose to cheer on Les Bleus.
“We were both free this day, so [we said], ‘let’s just do it,’” Sanori said.
Lazarraga was wearing a Nike-branded navy blue French kit, while Sanori sported a white T-shirt colored in with fabric marker to make the French tricolor.
The pair also picked up some France face stickers and a French flag at Walmart, the latter of which was draped over Sanori’s shoulders.
Sanori and Lazarraga arrived just after Lion Sports Bar finished hosting a group of French supporters for some pre-match festivities, but both said they appreciated the influx of global culture brought to the region by the beautiful game.
“Seeing all these different groups of people come together, that’s kind of a rare sight in America,” Lazarraga said. “Especially with the sports here, people just go at each others’ throats. But, different countries [are] coming together, everyone’s just having a fun time. I just enjoy that vibe. That’s why we’re here right now.”
IRVINE, Calif. – Star playmaker Christian Pulisic was back on the field in practice for the U.S. men’s soccer team on Monday, taking part for the first time since before the tournament opener against Paraguay.
That was a good sign as the Hershey native recovers from the calf injury that kept him out of the second group stage contest against Australia. But it’s just one step, and practice was open to the media for the first 15 minutes. So we don’t know what happened after that.
Since the United States has already clinched first place, there isn’t much reason to play Pulisic in Thursday’s group finale against Turkey (10 p.m., Fox29, Telemundo 62). There also isn’t much reason to play the players on yellow cards — defenders Chris Richards and Antonee Robinson, midfielder Tyler Adams, and striker Folarin Balogun — since a booking in that game would get them suspended from the round of 32.
Still, it was a good sign to see Pulisic making progress.
The other injury news is that midfielder Cristian Roldan is day to day with a muscle strain. If he can’t play against Turkey, that will leave the United States shallow. Balogun also got a lighter day of practice, with a U.S. Soccer spokesperson saying: “Extra recovery. No issues.”
Opening gate time delayed at Philadelphia Stadium ahead of Iraq-France game
France v Iraq – June 22, 2026
Due to inclement weather in the region, gates opening will be delayed. If you are not in the area, please do not travel to Philadelphia Stadium at this time. A new gates opening time will be communicated once the weather has passed. If you are near…
— Lincoln Financial Field (@LFFStadium) June 22, 2026
// Timestamp 06/22/26 2:17pm
Philly fan festival is closed the rest of the day
Due to inclement weather, FIFA Fan Festival will close for the remainder of Monday. pic.twitter.com/BajUl4whLk
— FIFA World Cup 26 Philadelphia™ (@FWC26Philly) June 22, 2026
// Timestamp 06/22/26 2:02pm
Fan fest at Lemon Hill shuts down due to weather
Stormy weather shut down the World Cup fan festival on Lemon Hill during the afternoon on Monday, June 22, 2026.Owen Hewitt / Staff
The broadcast screens at the FIFA Fan Festival went from showing the Argentina-Austria match to an orange screen with a warning that thunderstorms were approaching the area around 1:40 p.m.
Minutes later, the orange warning switched to a red warning, indicating that “a thunderstorm with lightning is approaching the park.”
Festival organizers said the grounds could re-open if the storm passes through the area quickly. The festival asked fans to pay attention to its social media feeds for further updates on Monday’s schedule.
Organizers would not make an official commitment on whether the grounds would open again, but a member of the festival staff was informing food vendors that they were to shut down for the day as fans were exiting the grounds.
France and Iraq will have to contend with forecast thunderstorms when they kick off at Lincoln Financial Field at 5 p.m.
‘This is Philly, man’: Gov. Josh Shapiro hits Fan Fest
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro poses with volunteers at FIFA Fan Fest at Fairmount Park in Philadelphia Monday.Owen Hewitt / Staff
Gov. Josh Shapiro became the latest elected official to visit the FIFA Fan Festival when he stopped by Lemon Hill Park on Monday afternoon, ahead of France and Iraq’s meeting in Philadelphia this evening.
Shapiro, sporting a navy blue U.S. Soccer polo, walked the festival grounds before kick-off of Monday’s first match, between defending champion Argentina and Austria.
“What a unique event and historic moment for our city at this historic juncture of 250 years,” Shapiro said. “To be able to be together and just celebrate one another, celebrate this great sport and enjoy yourself… I think the world needs some more togetherness, needs some more cheer, and this is a great opportunity for that.”
He was greeted by lines of volunteers as he entered the festival, then followed in Mayor Cherelle L. Parker’s footsteps by customizing a charm bracelet at the Bank of America tent — Shapiro chose charms that read 250.
In a brief news conference in front of the festival stage, Shapiro hailed Philadelphia’s Fan Festival as the best “in the country.”
“This is Philly, man,” Shapiro said. “We know how to do big things. It’s extraordinary to see people come out happy and joyful, cheering for their team. Unlike a typical Philly sports event, our fans aren’t cheering against others. There’s just happiness and joy … I’m glad that Philly is a welcoming city and welcoming people from all across the world to be here.”
Shapiro stopped to chat with dozens of attendees inside Visit PA’s booth and play a large arcade-style video game with a young fan in a Paris Saint-Germain kit. He asked French fans in line if Argentina’s Lionel Messi or France’s Kylian Mbappé was the better player, and stopped with an Argentina fan to recount Messi’s performance in Argentina’s win over Algeria.
One of the people Shapiro introduced himself to was 18-year-old Esra Asfaw, who had a French flag draped over his shoulders. Asfaw, a George Mason student originally from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, said he did not know who Shapiro was when the governor introduced himself.
“I was so surprised,” Asfaw said.
Asfaw traveled up from Virginia to Philadelphia to see Les Bleus face Iraq. He paid $1,089 on the resale market for his 200-level seats. Asfaw said he is not worried about France’s chances against Iraq, but instead about the weather, as looming thunderstorms in the evening could impact the match.
“Maybe the match might get delayed,” Asfaw said. “That’s the only thing I’m worried about. If it rains and they play, then that’s enough for me.”
That’s the front page headline today in L’Équipe, France’s national sports newspaper and one of the most influential sports outlets in Europe.
Whether or not they read The Inquirer (we hope they do!), the word is out that thunderstorms are on the way to South Philadelphia, and are expected to hit the stadium around the time that France and Iraq are on the field (5 p.m., Fox29, Telemundo 62).
The paper’s coverage setting the stage for the game includes some teaching of Philadelphia lore. And of course, it’s Rocky-themed, since Iraq’s challenge is a classic World Cup underdog story.
The front page of @lequipe-actu.bsky.social today:
“It’s the kind of moment that makes you want to strike up a fanfare, to sound the trumpets and the Rocky theme, to be ready to go up the Philadelphia Museum of Art steps four by four, before a run along the waterfront, a spar with a hunk of meat in a cold room, or a World Cup game at ‘the Linc,’ the Eagles’ stadium,” lead soccer reporter Vincent Duluc writes. “It’s been 50 years since visitors to Philly have raised their arms at the top of these steps, jumping in place. But it’s also a moment to remember that this piece of popular culture celebrates an unexpected hero – and that the France team that’s getting ready to face Iraq in Philadelphia feels more like Apollo Creed than Rocky Balboa.”
Elsewhere in the paper, there’s a little feature on the history of Lincoln Financial Field — Philadelphia Stadium during the World Cup — and its place in the city’s culture.
“Here, the Eagles aren’t just a NFL team, they’re a local religion,” reporter Hugo Guillemet writes. “Their logo is omnipresent on the streets, in shop windows, and in the bars of South Philly. Their hymn, ‘Fly, Eagles, Fly,’ is a popular chant on game days, and when it resonates in the stadium, the stands shake.”
As for social media, if you want a fun French perspective, check out Radio France’s sports reporter Julien Froment. He’s been posting lots of videos on his X and Instagram accounts as he travels around town. Here’s one from the France fans’ pep rally on the Art Museum steps yesterday.
Brazilian fans cheers before their country’s match against Haiti in Philadelphia Friday night. Jose F. Moreno / Staff Photographer
France, a favorite by many to win the whole tournament, will take on Iraq in the second game of Group I tonight, but if it’s anything like the previous two matches, the game itself will once again not be the story.
Because for the past two games, the attraction has been that of the fans, and the unbridled passion people have for not just a team and its players, but the nation so many have bought jerseys for, the emblem they proudly wear above their heart, or in the middle of their chest.
This spectacle of what will result in 104 matches of underdogs becoming story lines, a U.S. men’s national team exercising the type of dominance very few expected, has also seen Philly lead the way on the main stage, creating lasting memories for thousands of fans who have flocked to the city, all while becoming lore, in the process.
Soccer in its purest form has provided an escape for a nation that desperately needed one. And what it’s also proved in the process is that people of different races, colors, and creeds don’t hate each other as much as their social media algorithms might suggest.
Proof was on display right here in Philly in the form of fans who packed the stands over the last two matches.
Fans like Maxence Jeanty, a 41-year-old Haitian native living in Chicago who traveled to Philly from the Windy City, dressed in a suit depicting liberator Jean-Jacques Dessalines, a key figure of the Haitian Revolution.
Maxence Jeanty, 41, a fan from Chicago.Kerith Gabriel / Staff
“When I was growing up in Haiti as a kid, I watched the World Cup, and I’ll never forget watching the 1994 World Cup,” Jeanty said. “It’s been so long that my people haven’t made it to the World Cup that the choice was to choose either Brazil or Argentina [as the nation to support]. But now, we’re stepping on the field as equals, and no matter what happens, we’re stepping on the field as equals. The pride that brings to me and to every Haitian fan here, man, that’s indescribable.”
Benjamin Franklin Parkway is one example of urban planners borrowing from the French. Jose F. Moreno / Staff Photographer
Some have called Philadelphia the “Paris of America.” Really.
It might be hard for locals to wrap their heads around the title, but there is some truth to the comparison — mostly due to the cities’ similarities in architecture. With France in town to take on Iraq in the World Cup Monday night, here’s a look at some of Philadelphia’s Parisian connections.
The Benjamin Franklin Parkway is the most glaring example of Philadelphia borrowing from the French. Finished in 1929, the parkway was designed primarily by two Frenchman, architect Paul Philippe Cret and city-planner Jacques Gréber. Their inspiration? Paris’ Champs-Élysées, a similarly grand avenue that stretches throughout the city. The two also both boast similar end points. The Champs-Élysées concludes with the grand Arc de Triomphe while Philadelphians can spot the Philadelphia Museum of Art from the parkway’s start at City Hall.
French fans just need to know not to dress the Rocky Statue atop of art museums steps.
Shortly after the conclusion of World War I, but before the signing of The Treaty of Versailles, Gréber displayed hope that the construction of the parkway would bring in tourists just as the Champs-Élysées does.
“I am glad to say that, if by this work the city of Paris may be enabled to bring its sister in America the inspiration of what makes Paris so attractive to visitors,” Gerbner said in 1918. “It will be the first opportunity of Paris to pay a little of the great debt of thankfulness for what Philadelphia and its citizens have done for France during the last three years.”
Meanwhile, Cret was also the mind behind the Benjamin Franklin bridge and a redesign of Rittenhouse Square, which also get Parisian comparisons. City Hall also looks like it could have been picked up in Paris and plopped down in Philadelphia as it was built in the French Second Empire style.
— Conor Smith
// Timestamp 06/22/26 10:24am
World Cup teams that have qualified for the next round and been eliminated
The U.S. is already in the Round of 32 and have won two group stage games for the first time since 1930. Manu Fernandez
Heading into Monday’s World Cup matches, three teams have already punched their ticket to the next round of the tournament.
Among them is the United States, which have won two games in the World Cup group stage for the first time since 1930. The U.S. has one more group stage match – against Turkey Thursday night – and will play in the Round of 32 on July 1 in San Francisco Stadium at 8 p.m. Philly time.
Here’s a rundown of all the World Cup teams that have qualified for the next round, and those that have already been eliminated from contention:
Thunderstorms in Philly could interrupt tonight’s World Cup match
Scattered severe thunderstorms could move through the region tonight.Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer
Thunderstorms are expected to make their way through the Philadelphia region later this evening, potentially interrupting tonight’s World Cup match between France and Iraq.
The strongest of the storms are forecast to move in beginning around 4 p.m., bringing with them heavy rain, wind gusts approaching 60 mph, and the potential for an isolated tornado.
“Storms will certainly have lightning with them,” said Zack Cooper, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service’s Mt. Holly station.
An inch or two of rain could fall in and around the city, Cooper said, but depending on the storm’s severity that could all come in an hour or less, leading to flash flooding. Philadelphia and the surrounding region are currently under a flood watch.
FIFA will pause play if there is a lightning strike within eight miles of the stadium. The match will remain paused for 30 minutes, with any subsequent lightning strikes resetting the clock.
The FIFA Fan Fest at Lemon Hill Park in Fairmount would also be forced to close if lightning is detected within an eight-mile radius. Fans would need to exit the grounds and move to a safe location, FIFA said in a statement, and could re-enter after 30 minutes if no additional lightning is detected.
The Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla., which issues severe storm watches, listed a 2% chance of tornadoes, and an “isolated” twister can’t be ruled out, said Nick Guzzo, meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Mount Holly.
Four Frenchmen skipped work to go to the World Cup in Philly
Fans react during France’s opening match against Senegal on June 16. Some of those fans have taken up residence in Philadelphia ahead of Monday’s match against Iraq.Hiroko Masuike
Eight years ago, when FIFA announced that the World Cup would be coming to the United States in 2026, a student in France felt a rush of excitement. He and his friends had been watching the international soccer tournament on television since they were kids.
They’d never seen it in person. The last time their native country hosted the competition was in 1998, before all four Frenchmen were born. In the years since, they’d tried to make it to a game, but to no avail.
Russia hosted in 2018, but the four friends were unable to get visas. Qatar hosted in 2022, but this time, they were attending different colleges, which made traveling logistically complicated. So, they looked ahead to 2026 and started saving money.
One man picked up extra work shifts at his Parisian brasserie. Another taught English lessons on the side. All four made a conscious effort to cut back on drinking and eating out.
There was one problem. The men worked in upscale restaurants, and summers were extremely busy. The Parisians knew that they wouldn’t be able to get a few days off, let alone a few weeks.
In the spirit of Ferris Bueller, the 20-something-year-olds decided to tell a white lie. And now, three years and $12,000 in savings later, they are in Philadelphia, enjoying everything it has to offer (unbeknownst to their employers).
“Momo,” the Parisian waiter who organized this trip, participated on the condition that he and his friends’ last names would be omitted (out of fear of losing their jobs).
Fans navigate the stairs in the upper concourse of Lincoln Financial Field, rebranded as Philadelphia Stadium.David Maialetti / Staff Photographer
Philadelphia has hosted two World Cup matches so far – Ivory Coast’s upset of Ecuador, and Brazil’s blowout of Haiti.
Philadelphia Stadium, as it’s called during the tournament, will host four more World Cup games, including a Round of 16 matchup on July 4.
Unfortunately, Philly won’t host the U.S., which clinched a first-place finish in the group stage. They needed to finish in third place to even have a chance of winding up the the Linc.
Here’s Philly’s remaining World Cup schedule:
France vs. Iraq: Monday, June 22, 5 p.m. (Fox)
Curaçao vs. Ivory Coast: Thursday, June 25, 4 p.m. (FS1)
Croatia vs. Ghana: Saturday, June 27, 5 p.m. (FS1)
Philadelphia is known for some great things: the Declaration of Independence (happy 250th!), Rocky, and the cheesesteak. It is also known for “killing” hitchBOT, the famous hitchhiking robot that was dismembered in August 2015. A decade later, there’s a new bot in town: the Uber Eats delivery robot, operated by Avride.
When these robots first arrived, I had my own spontaneous encounter with one. I was surprised by how unsettled I felt, especially as someone who has spent years researching them. I am an expert in human–robot interaction, and my research focuses on why people abuse robots. I immediately wondered how long it would be before another robot made headlines in this post‑hitchBOT world.
Uber Eats robot attacked by Philly pedestriansFuncab Karaoke Taxi
Since these delivery robots rolled into town, they have been making headlines for all the wrong reasons: getting beat up, hit by cars, and colliding with pedestrians. These coolers on wheels are having an effect on Philadelphians, and I do not blame my fellow city dwellers.
We are living in a cultural climate where artificial intelligence and automation are often framed as threats to jobs amid inflation and economic anxiety. Layer on top of that Philadelphia’s unique reputation as a destroyer of robots, and the reaction is hardly surprising.
Clockwise from lower left. 1) Last known image of an intact hitchBOT in Philadelphia in 2018. 2) Frame grab from surveillance video of man in No. 12 jersey after tossing what appear to be hitchBOT’s arms to sidewalk. 3 & 4) Man appears to stomp item believed to be hitchBOT.
With innovative technology, there is always disruption. When UberX and Lyft arrived, Philadelphians were up in arms about the traffic congestion caused by rideshare vehicles, a problem the city later officially acknowledged.
Yet in less than a decade, the norm quietly shifted. Today, many of us hail a rideshare instead of a taxi despite the unresolved congestion issue. The question now is whether we will react to delivery robots as another passing disruption, or whether we will choose to use them to actually improve city life.
Garci Peterkin, owner and CEO of Carter’s Cheesesteaks by Garci in the 1000 block of Race Street, demonstrates how food delivery robots work, in March.Jessica Griffin / Staff Photographer
Recently, Councilmember Jeffery Young proposed a $1,000 surcharge on deliveries made by autonomous delivery devices using city sidewalks. That may sound like mere regulation, but in practice it would push the robots out entirely. Before Philadelphia taxes these devices into irrelevance, we should look at how other cities are putting them to work for the public good.
West Hollywood, for example, has had delivery robots on its sidewalks since 2020. On Jan. 1, 2026, the city implemented a new program, the first of its kind, to use data and fees from these devices to improve and pay for sidewalk repairs. In this program, companies that operate delivery robots partner with an accessibility app used by blind and low-vision residents. As they travel city streets, the robots can report real-time obstacles such as blocked sidewalks, helping make navigation safer. The city then uses information gathered by the robots to map accessibility problems and prioritize sidewalk improvements.
The companies also pay a daily fee for each robot in their fleet, plus an advertising fee (about four dollars per day per device) with that advertising revenue directed into a sidewalk repair fund that is expected to bring in roughly $40,000 to $80,000 per year.
In other words, the robots are not just delivering takeout; they are quietly scanning the city, funding basic infrastructure, and making the streets more accessible.
There are a lot of potential benefits: using robot data to measure and assess street conditions, cutting down on short car trips by shifting them to small electric devices, and easing traffic congestion on already strained streets.
These are practical, achievable ways to use technology to help address the climate crisis and long‑neglected infrastructure. This moment should also demonstrate that it’s past time for us to stop pretending we can opt out of technological change altogether.
Philadelphia City Council should resist a blanket $1,000 surcharge that effectively bans delivery robots and instead work with residents, robotic operators, advocates, and experts in human–robot interaction to build a Philadelphia version of West Hollywood’s data‑and‑sidewalk‑repair model.
Uber Eats’ delivery robot in Chinatown on March 10, 2026.Michael Klein / Staff
If we are going to share our streets with robots, we should make sure the companies profiting from them are paying their way and helping fix the sidewalks they roll on.
Will Philadelphia embrace that possibility, or will we become a city of Robo-NIMBYs, elected officials and residents alike?
Lindsay Ouellette is a Philadelphia-based social psychologist and human-robot interaction researcher who studies public responses to robots and emerging technologies. She recently earned her doctorate from Temple University, where her research examined aggression toward robots.
Franklin Field played host to the New Balance Nationals Outdoors Championship this weekend, where it brought some of the most talented high school track and field athletes in the country to Philadelphia.
The keyword is some. Two other high school track competitions were happening at the same time. The Nike Outdoor Nationals were held in Eugene, Ore., and the Adidas track nationals came to Greensboro, N.C.
This is not a new occurrence. There has long been an overlap between open, registration-based national championships. Besides medaling, these meets serve as a massive marketing opportunity for their sponsors. Famously, competitors at all three meets are given free backpacks with the title sponsor’s logo on them. Penn’s Rockwell Gym was converted into a pop-up New Balance store this past weekend.
What is semi-new to the landscape — and high school sports — is the role that name, image, and likeness deals are playing in these three championship meets. If a student-athlete is signed with Nike or New Balance, he or she would compete at their respective meets.
For example, Eastern Regional senior runner Natalie Dumas, who’s heading to Arkansas, is one of only 20 female high school track and field athletes signed to Nike Elite. Because of this, Dumas competed this past weekend in Eugene a day after running in the USATF U20s on the same track. At the Nike Nationals, she ran a 52.21-second time in the 400-meter dash, placing first.
Meanwhile, 18-year-old Olympian Quincy Wilson, of the Bullis School in Potomac, Md., is signed to New Balance. Wilson also ran in the USATF U20s, clocking a second-place finish of 44.84 seconds on Friday to qualify for the World U20 Championships.
But shortly after, Wilson got on a flight back to the East Coast to compete at Franklin Field due to the meet’s title sponsor. He ran the final leg in the 4×400-meter boys’ championship on Sunday and led his school to a second-place finish.
Outside of NIL deals, New Balance Nationals’ prestige seemed to play the biggest role in winning over competitors from Nike and Adidas.
“I’ve always had just like a natural draw to the New Balance Nationals,” said senior Blake Cook, who attends Corry Area High School in Erie County and placed sixth in the boys’ 110-meter hurdles championship. “It was the first nationals I ever watched knowing that Nike and Adidas did it, they just never appealed as much to me. Just knowing how grand that this meet makes everyone feel. Even if you’re dead last in your heat, you feel elite just walking in and being able to say that you got your [backpack].”
The New Balance Nationals have only operated since 2022, following a split from the National Scholastic Athletic Foundation, a nonprofit that operates and supports high school track competitions. New Balance had partnered with the NSAF from 2010 to 2019 as the national meet’s title sponsor. Then, it was New Balance that called Greensboro home — not Adidas. Nike has been partnered with the NSAF since the nonprofit split from New Balance. Today, many see Nike and New Balance as the “premier” national meets with Adidas trailing behind.
“In general, I think New Balance has the most competition,” said Patrick Logan, who attends Grafton High School in Virginia and ran in the boys’ 400-meter dash. “Nike has some big names, but I think, in general, New Balance is just a more competitive meet and it’s on the East Coast, so it’s easier for me to get to.”
Bullis School’s Quincy Wilson competes in the 4×400-meter relay on Sunday.Isaiah Vazquez / For The Inquirer
‘Bring it back to Jersey’
The weekend brought competition from all over the country, but two runners from South Jersey showed out.
On Friday, Pennsauken senior Sianni Wynn won the 100-meter girls’ championship with a personal-best 11.27 seconds. To finish out Friday, Wynn anchored Pennsauken to a first-place finish in the 4×200-meter championship relay. Then, on Sunday, Wynn finished third in the 200-meter championship.
“It’s been a super long weekend,” said Wynn, who is committed to Florida. “I’m happy to cap it off now, and you know, it’s been a great last high school track for me.”
Sunday was Jasmine Jackson’s day. The Winslow Township High sophomore shattered her personal-best in the 100-meter hurdles, clocking in at 13.04 seconds to place first in the girls’ championship.
South Jersey’s Jasmine Jackson poses after winning the 100m hurdles at the New Balance Nationals.
“I’m feeling great,” Jackson said. “I woke up today, I said, ‘I’m not losing.’ I lost indoor, I got second, I got second in middle school, I got second as a freshman. So today I just knew I was not losing. That was not an option.”
Jackson’s finish also beat the New Jersey state record of 13.18 seconds, which was held by Union Catholic’s Taylor Cox. After the race, Jackson made sure to show love to Cox, who now runs at Georgia.
“Taylor dominated New Balance when she was still in high school,” said Jackson. “I knew I had to bring it back to Jersey.”
BUFFALO, N.Y. — Alexander Command sees a lot of parallels between himself, the city of Philadelphia, the Flyers, and their fans.
“I’ve heard that it’s where the communities, like the people, are pretty hard-working. They do right by themselves, take no [stuff], kind of like me,” the Swede said with a grin and a twinkle in his eye.
Called one of the most competitive players in this draft class by Elite Prospects, the just-under 6-foot-1, 187-pound center commands — pun slightly intended — attention whether he has the puck on his stick or not.
A confident player with a big personality, the recently turned 18-year-old is a self-described hard-working two-way center with a high hockey IQ and compete level who is not afraid to get to the dirty areas. Although other pivots in the draft class are not projected to play the position at the NHL level, no one doubts that Command will play down the middle in the middle-six.
Alexander Command, the No. 11-Ranked International Skater, grew up a Rangers fan in Sweden.
He averaged a point-per-game at both the 2026 Under-18 World Championship and the 2025 World Junior A Challenge. #NHLDraftpic.twitter.com/PRcwDMAEAl
And yes, the Flyers, who met with Command at the NHL scouting combine — he said they mentioned how much they likedhow he plays the game — have drafted eight centers — not including Denver Barkey, who played some center this past season — in the last three drafts.
The only problem for the Flyers, a team he feels a close connection with, is that middle-six centers seldom linger on draft day. And with the consensus that every team has him high on their list, the chances of Command being there at 21 don’t look promising.
Christian and Joanna Command first got Alexander on skates at the age of 3 or 4 in the northern Stockholm suburb of Danderyd, Sweden. They brought him to a public ice rink not far from their home because “they thought it was common knowledge to learn how to skate on ice,” Alexander told The Inquirer at the scouting combine.
“I found it very fun, but when I started playing hockey, I loved it even more.”
It didn’t hurt that his friends were also playing in a municipality that has produced four NHL players, with Edmonton Oilers center Mattias Janmark and retired goalie Jonas Gustavsson having played the most.
At first, Command was a small, skilled player who relied on his skating. But as his NHL dreams began to percolate, he was getting a little anxious about whether he was going to hit the imaginary bar that teams set when it comes to height.
Alexander Command finished in the top-25 of two bike tests, but while he said the dreaded Wingate test was “pretty fun,” he did confess he threw up afterward; to be fair, it is a common result.Staff/Jackie Spiegel
That worry didn’t last too long because in the past two years, he hit a growth spurt. He added almost eight inches and more than 48 pounds right as he was moving two hours west of home to play hockey in Örebro.
“I was like, all the other guys that are moving [to play hockey] are like 10 centimeters [approximately 4 inches] taller. How am I going to manage? But once it came [and I got bigger], I was really happy,” he said, noting he was still the same player but was able to use his body more to his advantage and that, with the growth spurt, he still needs to work on his skating.
“I never went to the gym and ate so much food as I did in that period of time when I started noticing that I can build muscle.”
Command worked out with his uncle Christophe, who has been a personal trainer for 20 years, and as he grew, he started adding weight training. “It was a big difference,” he said, “and I think it’s from there that I gained so much muscle, because I trained the right way, ate all the right stuff, had my good night’s sleep every day, and had my mom’s home-cooked meals.”
He likes his mom’s stuvade makaroner, a recipe that calls for macaroni boiled in milk before it is eaten with sausage and ketchup, and the tacos she makes with chicken and mango. He used to struggle to finish two tacos, but in the last few years he’ll easily chow down on three.
All the work has built an inner belief that Command can succeed as he continues to take steps in his career. It shines through with his big personality, which is a little uncommon in reserved Sweden, and has given him the mentality that he can compete no matter who he is facing.
It’s why Karl Kling, his coach for Örebro’s U20 squad, which plays in Nationell, Sweden’s top junior league, called his biggest strength his mindset.
“He always wants to go to the next level, so he’s always like hunting that next thing in his career, or in his game,” Kling told The Inquirer during a recent phone interview.
“It’s his mentality, because a lot of kids can shoot and pass a puck, but he’s very competitive, and he believes in himself. So, I think it’s his biggest strength.”
This past season, Command led his junior team with 44 points (17 goals, 27 assists) and 61 penalty minutes despite playing in 30 of the team’s 36 regular-season games. Kling said he was among the league’s best in the faceoff circle, that he plays with an edge and is intense, and that he was one of his most important players on the power play. Command added he likes to get under his opponent’s skin.
The then-17-year-old added another 13 points in 14 playoff games before the Vipers lost in the semifinals to Flyers prospect Max Westergård and Frölunda; they’d lose in the final.
During the season, Command, who says his comp is Patrice Bergeron, a former Boston Bruins center and six-time Selke Trophy winner, as the NHL’s top defensive forward, earned a six-game promotion to Örebro’s SHL squad in Sweden’s top league. He did not register a point.
However, he scored a bunch when he helped Sweden win gold at the Under-18 Men’s World Championship, notching seven points in seven games — the same numbers for another gold medalist, Jett Luchanko, in his draft year — while centering the top line.
Like the other men in his family, Alexander Command has his last name tattooed on his arm, noting, “family is important, and it’s those around you who make your day better.”Staff/Jackie Spiegel
“I think people were impressed by how he played at the U18s, in part because he had these two really skilled one-way wingers on his line, and he kind of had to do all the hard work — that would be [Elton] Hermansson and [Marcus] Nordmark, who are highly ranked players in this year’s draft,“ The Athletic’s senior NHL prospects writer Corey Pronman told The Inquirer in Western New York.
“That line had a lot of success, in part due to how Command played at both ends of the ice.”
In May, Command signed a two-year extension with Örebro that will carry him through 2027-28. The expectation is that he will play in the SHL, but Kling would welcome him back to the U20 team if he needs more ice time to work on finding a balance with his game.
Or maybe the next stop is the NHL? And could that be in orange and black?
“I’ve gotten to know their organization good, and we stand for the same things,” he said.
He added with a smile: “My cockiness and maybe a bit of my personality I think fits the Flyers organization and the people.”
Alexander Command’s coach with Örebro HK U20, Karl Kling, called him a game-breaker.Courtesy of Örebro HK U20/Erik Widlund
Alan Greenspan, who as the world’s most powerful central banker maneuvered the United States through two decades of stunning prosperity, but whose decisions contributed to the near-collapse of the economy shortly after he left office, died June 22 at age 100.
The cause was complications from Parkinson’s disease, his wife, Andrea Mitchell, said in a statement.
“He was a giant of a man who helped shape the U.S. economy for decades under presidents of both parties, but was always honest in acknowledging his mistakes,” said Mitchell, chief Washington correspondent and chief foreign affairs correspondent for NBC News. “To me he was my husband, who shaped my life from our very first date in 1984.”
A dour intellectual with eclectic interests who attended the Juilliard music school, played the clarinet in a jazz band and was an acolyte of the philosopher Ayn Rand as a young man, Mr. Greenspan initially made his name as an economic forecaster and adviser to presidents Richard M. Nixon, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan.
During a more than 18-year run as chair of the Federal Reserve beginning in 1987, Mr. Greenspan achieved greater prominence than any central banker before him. He attained an almost mythical reputation for his ability to guide U.S. economic policy with a whisper in the president’s ear, to steer the multi-trillion-dollar economy by nudging interest rates up or down, and to soothe frazzled global financial markets with a few arcane words in a speech.
Mr. Greenspan was a Washington fixture, named to five terms as Fed chair by four different presidents. He exercised greater power, and for longer, than arguably any public official since FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
He was the “Maestro,” as Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward titled his best-selling book about Mr. Greenspan in 2000. He was a founding member of the “Committee to Save the World,” as a 1999 Time magazine cover called the alliance of Mr. Greenspan, Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin and Rubin deputy Lawrence H. Summers.
Mr. Greenspan’s 1996 musing in a speech over how hard it is to know when “irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values” triggered both a sell-off on global stock markets and a new term of art for financial bubbles.
The financial world was so obsessed with his every move that the cable network CNBC would tape him getting into his car on the morning of Fed policy meetings, hoping to judge by the thickness of his briefcase whether the central bank would move interest rates. An entire cottage industry existed of analysts who parsed his rare and often inscrutable public comments. (“If I seem unduly clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said,” Mr. Greenspan once said.)
He was a curious mix of cerebral economist and Washington celebrity. He was a man who spent his mornings reading economic reports as he soaked in the bathtub, his days obsessing over monetary policy transmission mechanisms, and his evenings on the Georgetown cocktail circuit. A man once nicknamed “the undertaker” for his serious manner married one glamorous newscaster, Mitchell of NBC, having earlier dated another, Barbara Walters.
Mr. Greenspan’s peculiar brand of celebrity was built on a very real achievement. Economists call it the Great Moderation, and it coincided almost precisely with Mr. Greenspan’s tenure as the nation’s economist in chief: A period in which growth was steady, inflation low, and recessions rare and mild. The unemployment rate averaged 5.5 percent during his nearly 19 years in the job, compared with 6.4 percent in the preceding two decades.
A tarnished legacy
Mr. Greenspan bent the sprawling Federal Reserve system to his will, using a subtle political touch and a vast reserve of knowledge about the inner workings of the U.S. economy acquired while an economic consultant to businesses. His primary job was to set monetary policy — adjusting interest-rate targets to manipulate the money supply, aiming for low unemployment and low inflation.
Mr. Greenspan guided the economy through rocky economic shoals, including the 1987 stock market crash, which occurred when he had been in office for two months, the 1991 recession, financial crises in emerging markets in 1998, and the dot-com bust and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. He titled his 2007 autobiography “The Age of Turbulence,” though in hindsight it appears a period of enviable economic calm.
When Mr. Greenspan left government service in early 2006, he was widely viewed as one of the greatest economic statesmen of all time. But within a few years, the Great Moderation came to look like a mirage, and the maestro’s legacy was severely tarnished.
Much of the economic expansion under Mr. Greenspan’s watch was built on bubbles, first the 1990s stock market boom and then an unprecedented run-up in house prices in the 2000s. Americans financed their consumption with ever-rising levels of debt: The ratio of household debt to the size of the economy as a whole soared to 82 percent from 53 percent during his tenure.
The Greenspan Fed fueled these trends with ultra-low-interest-rate policies, particularly from 2003 to 2005, and by taking a hands-off approach to regulating a financial system that grew immeasurably in size and complexity during his tenure.
“The mindset was that there should be no regulation,” Scott Alvarez, a longtime lawyer at the Fed and Mr. Greenspan’s general counsel starting in 2004, told the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. “The market should take care of policing, unless there already is an identified problem … We were in the reactive mode because that’s what the mindset was of the ’90s and the early 2000s.”
Around 2000, he specifically rebuffed a request by a fellow Fed governor, Edward Gramlich, for the Fed to crack down on lending to people who might have little ability to repay their mortgages, Gramlich told the Wall Street Journal in 2007. Those “subprime” loans would serve as the initial trigger to the crisis that enveloped the world in 2008.
Mr. Greenspan repeatedly advised Congress against heightening regulation of derivatives, complex financial contracts that, he argued, made the financial system as a whole more stable by distributing risk to those who can afford to take it on. In fact, the unraveling of those markets was a key factor in the 2007-2009 financial crisis.
And while Mr. Greenspan was renowned for his understanding of the workings of the U.S. economy, and by 2005 had expressed some public worry about home prices having risen too high, he did not identify the scale of the housing bubble that was a major underlying cause of the crisis or use regulatory tools or his bully pulpit to try to combat it.
“There do appear to be, at a minimum, signs of froth in some local markets,” he said in 2005, near the peak of the biggest national home-price bubble in U.S. history.
Fostering complacency
More broadly, Mr. Greenspan’s greatest apparent achievement — preventing the series of crises and near-crises in the financial world from damaging the broader U.S. economy — may have been a factor in the steep downturn. His critics call it the “Greenspan Put,” using a financial term for an option contract that protects investors against losses.
His very actions that maintained financial stability — helping prevent extreme losses when conditions turned unfavorable — made global investors complacent about risk. That helped fuel the bad lending and excessive use of borrowed money that caused a massive collapse soon after Mr. Greenspan left office.
“He was the person who came up with the ‘irrational exuberance’ critique of excessive speculation prior to 2000, but he didn’t follow up on it,” said Robert J. Shiller, a Yale economist who warned of stock and housing bubbles during the 1990s and 2000s. “He has an Ayn Rand, pro-market philosophy, and so it wasn’t in his personality to aggressively pursue those ideas and to lean against bubbles.”
The popping of the housing and credit bubble in 2007 led to a deep global recession and near-collapse of the financial system in 2008, and a far worse outcome was avoided only by an expensive series of government bailouts.
“I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interest of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms,” Mr. Greenspan told a congressional committee in October 2008, amid the darkest days of the crisis. “Something which looked to be a very solid edifice, and indeed a critical pillar to market competition and free markets, did break down. And I think that, as I said, shocked me. I still do not fully understand why it happened.”
A libertarian’s pragmatism
Mr. Greenspan was a staunch libertarian, deeply skeptical of government intervention in the economy. In four decades on the national stage, though, he was a pragmatist who used the tools of government in ways that sometimes were at odds with his philosophy.
He served on a key commission in the Nixon administration that led to ending the military draft, which Greenspan viewed as an affront to human freedom. But he also helped Ford bail out a nearly bankrupt New York City in the mid-1970s.
In 1983, he chaired a commission on the finances of Social Security. The accord raised taxes and raised the retirement age over time, and stabilized the finances of the program for a generation.
As Fed chair, he offered crucial public support both to Bill Clinton’s deficit reduction plan in 1993 and to George W. Bush’s proposed tax cuts in 2001. The former attracted accusations from Republicans that he was trying to ingratiate himself with the new Democratic president who would later reappoint him. The latter drew sharp attacks from Democrats who accused Mr. Greenspan of raw partisanship. (“One of the biggest political hacks we have here in Washington” was how Senate Democratic leader Harry M. Reid of Nevada described him in 2005).
His testimony at congressional hearings in the latter years of his Fed chairmanship resembled nothing so much as a series of efforts by members of Congress to win Mr. Greenspan’s endorsement — viewed as the sine qua non of economic seriousness — for their preferred policies and pet causes.
Mr. Greenspan’s impact on U.S. economic policy, in other words, went far beyond that of his official portfolio as a central banker.
“Alan Greenspan has probably been a key player in more Republican presidential campaigns and Republican party platforms and Republican administrations than any other economist in the country,” Martin Anderson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution who recruited Mr. Greenspan to work on the 1968 Nixon presidential campaign, told The Washington Post in 2006. “He’s a wonderful politician.”
The number cruncher
Alan Greenspan was born in New York on March 6, 1926, the only child of parents who would soon divorce. His father, Herbert, was a stockbroker. Raised by his mother, the former Rose Goldsmith, in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood, Alan channeled an uncanny way with numbers as a child into analyzing baseball statistics with an intensity that would be mirrored in his approach to economic analysis decades later.
“I developed my own technique of keeping box scores,” Mr. Greenspan wrote in “The Age of Turbulence.” “I always used green paper, and recorded each game pitch by pitch, using an elaborate code I made up. My mind, which had been essentially empty to that point, filled with baseball statistics.”
His other great passion was jazz; he played the clarinet and was nearly as obsessed with big-band leader Glenn Miller as he was with baseball. After high school, he studied at the Juilliard School, and when a spot on his lung kept him out of the Army during World War II, he joined a 14-man jazz band that played around the country.
During breaks, when most of the musicians would smoke tobacco or marijuana, Mr. Greenspan read about finance and economics. He took to doing his bandmates’ income taxes.
He enrolled at New York University and took a part-time job at the investment bank Brown Brothers Harriman, where he figured out how to take raw weekly information on department store sales and adjust the data to filter out the normal seasonal fluctuations. That would be an easy task for anyone with a modern computer spreadsheet program, but at the time it required hours upon hours of laborious calculations by hand.
As with his baseball statistics, Mr. Greenspan had found his great obsession — analyzing data to discern trends. He graduated summa cum laude in 1948 from NYU, where he also received a master’s degree in economics in 1950.
While in graduate school, he took a job at the Conference Board, which then as now did economic research for big companies.
“I discovered that the Conference Board had amassed a treasure trove of data on every major industry in America dating back half a century and more,” he wrote in 2007. “It became my passion to master all the knowledge on those shelves. I read about the robber barons; I spent hours over the census of population of 1890; I studied railroad freight-car loadings of that era, trends in short staple for the decades after the Civil War … Instead of reading ‘Gone With the Wind,’ I was happy to immerse myself in ‘Copper Ore Deposits in Chile.’ ”
Mr. Greenspan enrolled in Columbia University’s economics PhD program in 1950, and though he would never finish it, he did cultivate a relationship with economist Arthur F. Burns, a mentor who would go on to chair the Federal Reserve in the 1970s. (New York University awarded Mr. Greenspan a doctorate in economics in 1977 for previously published research — after he had already become one of the country’s preeminent business economists and chief economic adviser to Ford).
Mr. Greenspan married art historian Joan Mitchell in 1952, but the marriage was annulled 10 months later. He wrote in his memoir, “I had no real understanding of the commitment required for marriage.”
In Ayn Rand’s circle
It was through Mitchell, however, that Mr. Greenspan met one of his deepest, most enduring intellectual influences. Ayn Rand, the libertarian author of “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged,” maintained a cadre of mostly young men who came over for evening bull sessions, long arguments about philosophy at which Mr. Greenspan was a regular through the 1950s and early 60s.
“When I met Ayn Rand, I was a free enterpriser in the Adam Smith sense — impressed with the theoretical structure and efficiency of markets,” Mr. Greenspan told the New York Times in 1974. “What she did — through long discussions and lots of arguments into the night — was to make me think why capitalism is not only efficient and practical, but also moral.”
Taxes, in her philosophy, were immoral theft; the social safety net an affront to human liberty. He contributed to The Objectivist, a monthly journal published by Rand acolytes, and in a 1966 issue wrote that “the welfare state” was “nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society.”
While Mr. Greenspan distanced himself over the years from many of the extreme implications of Rand’s views, they remained exceptionally close until her death in 1982; she appeared at his side when he was sworn in as Ford’s economic adviser.
While Mr. Greenspan debated with Rand and her other young protégés at night, he was building a business consulting firm by day.
In 1953, he partnered with investment adviser William W. Townsend to start an economic research firm, Townsend-Greenspan, in which Mr. Greenspan would use the knowledge of the inner workings of the U.S. economy he had been accumulating through his work at the Conference Board to consult for some of the biggest American businesses.
When U.S. Steel, Alcoa, Mobil Oil or dozens of other companies wanted to know when the economy was poised to speed up or slow down, or what how demand for steel or aluminum or anything else would trend, Townsend-Greenspan did the analysis. The experience left Mr. Greenspan with a sterling Rolodex, full of contacts across corporate America.
Entering politics
Mr. Greenspan entered politics in 1967, recruited to help Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign. He briefed Nixon regularly on economics during the campaign but served the administration as an outside adviser rather than within the White House.
By the time he was ready to join the Nixon administration, the president had resigned in disgrace and Mr. Greenspan would serve Ford instead. His adjustment to full-time government work was uneasy at times. In his memoir, he recalled blanching at one of his first major policy meetings. Speechwriters unveiled a campaign called “Whip Inflation Now,” aiming to using a mere publicity effort to keep prices unchanged when powerful economic forces were driving them upward.
“The speechwriters had ordered up millions of Whip Inflation Now buttons, samples of which they handed out to us in the room,” Mr. Greenspan wrote. “I was the only economist present, and I said to myself, ‘This is unbelievable stupidity. What am I doing here?’ ”
Early misgivings aside, Mr. Greenspan proved to be an able public servant, winning a lifelong friend in Ford, who was House minority leader before succeeding Nixon, and the trust of such Nixon and Ford White House officials as Dick Cheney and Donald H. Rumsfeld.
As president, Reagan gave Mr. Greenspan the task of salvaging the finances of the nation’s public pension program, which was on the verge of running out of money.
As chair of the National Commission on Social Security, Mr. Greenspan guided a disparate 15-member group, stocked with disparate figures including AFL-CIO head Lane Kirkland, Sen. Robert J. Dole (R-Kansas) and Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-New York), toward a common understanding of how best to put the finances of Social Security on a more sustainable path.
Their agreement, which Congress enacted in 1983, raised taxes on some affluent individuals and increased the retirement age gradually over the decades to follow, among many other provisions that put the finances of the program on a solid footing for a generation.
While the Greenspan Commission, as it was widely known, has been hailed as a triumph of policymaking by bipartisan commission, the reality may have been somewhat different.
Robert M. Ball, a commission member and former commissioner of Social Security, wrote later that the committee was in fact deadlocked. A compromise was achieved when James A. Baker III, Reagan’s chief of staff, and House Speaker Thomas J. “Tip” O’Neill Jr. (D-Massachusetts) hammered out an agreement between themselves, which the commission then accepted.
Mr. Greenspan, for his part, acknowledged the irony that a man philosophically opposed to the social insurance net had played a large role in saving it.
His work on the Social Security commission had another, more personal benefit. A young NBC White House correspondent, Andrea Mitchell, called Mr. Greenspan as a source in 1983. They talked periodically; he declined an invitation to the White House correspondents’ dinner because he was going with Barbara Walters.
Mitchell agreed to go to dinner with him in 1984, and, he later recalled that on their first date, he invited her back to his apartment to read an essay on monopolies he had written for Rand’s newsletter.
Mr. Greenspan and Mitchell quickly became a couple, although they would not marry until 1997. She is his only immediate survivor.
The ‘Black Monday’ test
On Aug. 3, 1987, Mr. Greenspan was confirmed as chair of the Federal Reserve. His first test came remarkably early on. On Oct. 19 that year, the stock market plummeted 22.5 percent in a single nerve-shaking day.
Mr. Greenspan was in Dallas for a previously scheduled speech — or at least he was, until the White House dispatched an Air Force jet to ferry him back to Washington. He immediately realized the risks to the U.S. economy: If banks, reeling from losses and fearful that their clients wouldn’t survive, stopped extending routine credit, the entire financial system could collapse.
Fed lawyers wanted to release a lengthy, complicated statement of the Fed’s stance, according to Woodward’s book “Maestro.” But Mr. Greenspan and a key lieutenant, New York Fed President E. Gerald Corrigan, realized that the central bank needed to give Wall Street a simple, open-ended commitment to prevent financial collapse.
At 8:41 a.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 20, Mr. Greenspan issued a statement under his name: “The Federal Reserve, consistent with its responsibilities as the nation’s central bank, affirmed today its readiness to serve as a source of liquidity to support the economic and financial system.”
That, along with a slew of private calls by Corrigan to Wall Street firms strongly encouraging them not to start canceling credit lines, helped fuel a market rally that day, and ultimately Black Monday in 1987 would have little visible impact on the U.S. economy.
It was the first triumph over markets by the maestro, and Mr. Greenspan’s almost mystical reputation as a soothsayer over financial markets had begun.
Pressure on rates
In Mr. Greenspan’s early years as Fed chair, one of his steepest challenges was the tendency of Reagan and Bush administration officials to constantly — and publicly — push for lower interest rates.
Fed chairs operate independently of the rest of the government for a reason. Higher interest rates may slow down the economy and result in higher unemployment in the short run, but they are often needed to prevent inflation from rising in the longer run. Elected officials, Mr. Greenspan soon saw firsthand, often have a shorter-term perspective than central bankers.
In August 1988, Mr. Greenspan pushed the Fed’s policy committee to raise a key bank lending rate by half a percentage point. Baker was now secretary of the treasury, and Mr. Greenspan went to Baker’s office at the Treasury Department to make the case for raising rates.
Baker, who wanted the economy firing on all cylinders to help Vice President George H.W. Bush win the presidential race that fall, replied, “You just hit me right here” in my stomach, according to “Maestro.”
It was just one in a four-year series of attacks — some veiled, some overt — on Mr. Greenspan from his fellow Republicans in the Reagan and Bush administrations. The frustration that Mr. Greenspan wasn’t doing enough to boost the economy led Bush, by then elected president, to move slowly and reluctantly in deciding whether to appoint Mr. Greenspan to a second term.
The decision was made only a month before his term was to expire, and only after Mr. Greenspan assured the president that he was relatively pessimistic about the economy, which was interpreted within the White House as an indication he was inclined to keep interest rates low.
Referring to Bush’s reluctant decision to reappoint him, Mr. Greenspan wrote in his memoir, “I think he concluded I was his least worst choice” and that any other selection would have roiled markets.
Bush kept pressure on Mr. Greenspan to cut rates in 1992, requests the Fed chair ignored. Bush, he made clear in later interviews, blamed Mr. Greenspan for his losing reelection bid.
A growing reputation
By the mid-1990s, the U.S. economy was growing rapidly and unemployment was low. Mr. Greenspan had a warm relationship with Clinton and his administration, who adopted a hands-off-the-Fed policy. And Mr. Greenspan was using his knowledge of the inner workings of the U.S. economy to great advantage, winning the awe of his Fed colleagues.
Lawrence B. Lindsey, a Fed governor from 1991 to 1997, later recalled a time when the Mississippi River was flooding. “At the time of the weekly Board of Governors’ meeting, the U.S. economy was literally linked together by a single bridge,” Lindsey wrote in his book “Economic Puppetmasters: Lessons from the Halls of Power.” “Greenspan not only knew the location of the bridge, but also the various reroutings that could be used to get merchandise there. Those type of facts fit naturally into the mind of a man who studies statistics on boxcar loadings at all the major terminals in the country.”
The economy, if anything, seemed to be growing too fast. Surely, some Fed policymakers argued, that would soon cause an outburst of inflation. Mr. Greenspan felt differently. He concluded that American businesses were becoming more productive, thanks to information technology and new ways of doing things.
That would allow a speedier rate of growth without prices rising, so he kept interest rates lower than some inflation worriers would have preferred. He even cut rates in late 1998, when East Asian nations were experiencing a financial crisis even as the U.S. economy kept going gangbusters, which in turn helped boost the stock market to stratospheric levels.
Having handled the 1987 market crash, the 1991 recession and the political battles of the Bush years, and having guided the economy through the grand prosperity of the 1990s, Mr. Greenspan was developing a certain aura of greatness.
When Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona) was running for president in 2000, he was asked whether he would reappoint Mr. Greenspan.
“Not only would I reappoint him,” McCain said, “but if he died we’d prop him up and put sunglasses on him as they did in the movie ‘Weekend at Bernie’s.’ ”
Defending his record
Amid the popping of the stock market bubble that his policies had helped fuel, and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Mr. Greenspan led the Fed on an aggressive series of interest-rate cuts. By the summer of 2003, the Fed’s target rate for loans between banks was down to 1 percent.
It worked to keep the 2001 recession a mild one. But while the economy was growing in 2002 and 2003, it did so at a glacial pace. And Mr. Greenspan feared that the nation could fall into a dangerous cycle of falling prices known as deflation.
To fend off that risk, he wanted to keep the low rate in place for a long time — a “considerable period,” as Fed statements of the time put it. That was one factor, although hardly the only one, behind a booming housing market in which national home prices rose by double-digit rates.
In all, from the beginning of 2000 to the middle of 2006, just after Mr. Greenspan left office and a year after receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom, national home prices rose 90 percent, according to one popular index. It was much more than that in some markets, and the fundamental economic reasons that might have justified that rise were few.
And while Congress had given the Federal Reserve the authority to regulate mortgage lending practices, the Fed did little with that authority. Mr. Greenspan’s successor, Ben S. Bernanke, would later call it “the most severe failure of the Fed in this particular episode.”
Mr. Greenspan, testifying before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in 2010, defended his legacy and rebuffed criticism. “History tells us regulators cannot identify the timing of a crisis, or anticipate exactly where it will be located or how large the losses and spillovers will be,” Mr. Greenspan said.
“When you’ve been in government for 20 years, as I have been, the issue of retrospective and figuring out what you should have done differently is a really futile activity,” he added. “My experience has been, in the business I was in, I was right 70 percent of the time, but I was wrong 30 percent of the time and there are an awful lot of mistakes in 21 years.”
Irwin, a former Post staff writer, is the author of “The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire.”
As Philadelphia’s city solicitor, heading a staff of more than 200 lawyers, Sozi Pedro Tulante sued some of the nation’s biggest corporations, accusing them of loan discrimination and pushing lethal painkillers.
Now he’s apartner at Dechert LLP, a Philadelphia-founded, international corporate law firm, where the work includes defending big national corporations from the kinds of complaints he used to file.
Corporate targets during his 2016-18 stint as the city’s top civil lawyer included Wells Fargo & Co., the third-largest U.S. bank, which settled his lending-discrimination complaint for a promise of $10 million in donations to housing programs, and six pharmaceutical companies, four of which were major Pennsylvania employers, for promoting addictive opioids. The city later got a nearly $200 million share of a national settlement.
Tulante’s job also included routine legal reviews. He defended the city’s soda tax and its sanctuary city immigration status.
After leaving his city position in 2018, Tulante — son of a refugee, a Northeast High School and Harvard University graduate, and a former federal prosecutor — lectured at the University of Pennsylvania’s law school.
He joined Dechert’s litigation department the next year, then spent 2022 to 2025 as general counsel at Boston-based Form Energy, which builds iron-based batteries for data centers and other clients at its plant in Weirton, W.Va.
More companies are now aware of the risk. They adjust.
There are extreme cases where litigation ends a company. But for the most part you factor it in.
Who gains from a litigious climate?
Sophisticated national companies have clients everywhere. They know they are going to get sued. They study to minimize litigation. For example, don’t use flip messaging. Just be familiar where the threats may come from. Know what litigation the city is pursuing.
Many of the big companies facing litigation in Philadelphia are more likely to engage counsel that is locally respected and recognized in the area. In Philly, if you can’t answer the question, “Where did you go to high school?” [with a name the parties recognize], it’s a disadvantage. Here, we fight the plaintiff attorney, but we also serve on the same board and attend the same continuing legal education [CLE] classes.
There are great lawyers on the other side, at [plaintiffs’] firms like Kline & Specter and Ross Feller Casey, sophisticated counsel who walk into court and get instant respect.
Part of my role at Dechert is to represent clients in Philadelphia and nationally who are thinking about how Philadelphia has changed as a place of litigation and how that litigation impacts business.
Businesses are saying, “We have the tax burden, the regulatory burden, we’ll comply, but you are pushing on the edges.”
What recent laws have changed the legal climate for business?
The new consumer protection ordinance, passed in 2024, has given the city more power to bring some major cases [through national law firms] that are broader than before. Life sciences cases. Firearms liability. Fair workweek litigation. They may go after [national] retailers in certain cases. The city can go forward and get penalties up to $2,000 per violation.
As city solicitor, I was reminded that government has the broadest power of regulation at the local level. The police authority government has is really broad. Unless there’s some preemption by state or federal government. It’s something folks pay attention to.
Is part of Philadelphia’s affordability a result of its failure to attract private-sector employers?
I live in West Philly. I work at the law school. I have three children in public schools. I want the city to have a secure tax base. I want to make sure investment goes where it needs to.
It’s challenging. One of the biggest challenges is getting people from Temple, Penn, Drexel, and St. Joe’s to stay.
In Philadelphia the strength ultimately is in eds and meds. We have doctors and nurses, lab technicians, people with a high level of training. Philadelphia takes credit for helping solve COVID by our Nobel Prize winners Drew Weissman and Katalin Karikó at Penn, which has led to investments in gene therapy.
What was the most satisfying thing you did as city solicitor?
Working to get local control of the school district and disbanding the state’s School Reform Commission. It was humiliating, the way the state was running our schools. We should have a stake. The most important thing we can do is educate our children and prepare them for businesses that want to hire talent.
Why did you choose the law?
It’s not the ability to argue that makes a good lawyer. You have to solve problems. You have to be really good at writing. And you have to be able to talk to people — to be personable, to make the hard stuff simple, to help them understand.
I like a career where people ask you to help them solve really big problems. They can be CEO of a major company or a pro bono client that needs a habeas petition. They require the same level of skill.
How did you come to be a Philadelphian?
I came here at age 8 in 1983 [after his father, a military official in Angola, fled to Congo following a change in government, was imprisoned, then was resettled in North Philly by a refugee agency].
It was a difficult time to grow up here. I graduated in 1993 from Northeast High School. I got into Harvard, then Harvard Law School.
Eight years ago, I left the city, to be general counsel at a startup.
But it came back to family and affordability. Philadelphia is that place for me, within the larger Northeast corridor.
What gives you hope?
My dad drove a cab when he came here. My mom worked in the prison system. Now here I am, a Black attorney from the public school system.
I am a big booster of today’s public schools. My children are at Central, at Masterman — I couldn’t get into those, I still hold a grudge! — and at Penn Alexander in West Philly.
I want my children with other children who really want to achieve. I motivate them, the teachers motivate them, they are self-motivated, but the friends they are with have more of an impact on them.
And I think we are finally putting into place an infrastructure for understanding government. You know Philadelphia has more political ads and advertising than almost anyplace, a big city in a swing state. But we have not always centered our education on civics. Now my son understands more than I did.
I’m glad to be back at Dechert. I can see a lot from this perch.
This story has been updated to correct some biographical information about Sozi Pedro Tulante.
SOUTHAMPTON, N.Y. — Wyndham Clark couldn’t remember being in a darker place. He was publicly reviled for a moment of petulance when he smashed a locker at Oakmont after missing the cut in the U.S. Open last year. His game, his reputation, he felt it all was slipping away.
That’s what made this U.S. Open title so much sweeter.
On the edge of the greatest collapse in U.S. Open history, Clark held his nerve against a charge by Sam Burns and a Shinnecock Hills crowd that never gave him much love until he showed his mettle with his second U.S. Open title in four years.
“The first one was kind of just the breakthrough of knowing I can do it,” Clark said after a two-putt par from 50 feet for a 3-over 73 and a one-shot victory. “And then this one was a lot of redemption. Last year was so tough, a terrible year. I left this place in shambles, and it’s amazing what a year can do. I’m leaving here this Sunday as a champion, and I’m just so blessed.”
Clark, who won the 2023 U.S. Open at Los Angeles Country Club, became the first wire-to-wire winner of the U.S. Open since Martin Kaymer at Pinehurst No. 2 in 2014.
This sure didn’t feel like a stroll through the Hamptons.
He had the largest 54-hole lead in the U.S. Open in 15 years. It was down to a single shot in just five holes, and stress followed him the rest of the way.
The clincher for Clark was on the par-5 16th, where on Saturday he made the only eagle of the week. This time it was his worst drive, well left into the gnarly fescue. He gouged that out and narrowly cleared a bunker. His 8-iron barely stayed on the back of the green. He rolled in a 30-foot birdie putt for a two-shot lead with two holes to play.
It was a signature moment with muted applause. The gallery rooted against him all day, putting all their support behind Scheffler, who made his own share of mistakes and never got closer than three shots of Clark all day.
“Winning major championships is extremely difficult,” Scheffler said after a 71 to tie for fourth. “He had some stones down the stretch. … Being in the arena is not for everybody, and I think it shows a lot about Wyndham, how he handled not only this golf course but I think the crowd today. And he is a well-deserving champion.”
Clark had the highest final round of a U.S. Open champion since Graeme McDowell closed with a 74 to win at Pebble Beach. No matter. The 32-year-old American has two U.S. Open titles, and two wins in the last month.
Burns closed with a 67, his second chance in as many years to win the U.S. Open. He bounced back from a three-putt bogey on the 15th with an 18-foot birdie to stay within one shot. He made a weak pass at a 10-foot birdie putt to tie for the lead on the 17th. What haunts him is a 17-foot birdie chance on the 18th that grazed the right edge of the cup, causing him to drop to his knees.
“I would say last year at Oakmont I felt more I lost the golf tournament. I certainly don’t feel that way today,” Burns said. “I did everything I could to have a chance to win today.”
Clark finished at 4-under 276 and got a surprise at the end when his father, Randall, took an overnight flight from Denver to watch his son win for the first time.
Even the New York crowd had no choice but to salute him.
“New York didn’t really like me — I love you guys,” Clark said at the closing ceremony, hoisting the silver trophy. “But I get it. Some of it’s self-deserved. I did some unfortunate things last year that I really regret, and I’ve been sorry multiple times and I’m still sorry, so hopefully I can win you guys over eventually.”
Clark noticed fans leaving early on Saturday and hoped for a big crowd and big energy for the final round. He got every bit of that, and it was uncomfortable at times. One was ejected when he shouted, “Don’t choke, Wyndham.” The grandstand behind the seventh green broke into cheers when his shot rolled off the green and into the bunker.
“I get it — they were rooting for Scottie,” Clark said. “Grand Slams only happen a few times. He’s going to get it. He’s the best player in the world. But today it’s my day.”
It almost wasn’t.
But Burns never caught him. No one did.
Tom Kim, who like Scheffler celebrated a birthday on Sunday, was on the fringes of seriously contending until he fell back with a bogey on the 17th and shot 70 to finish third.
Clark’s hit a superb wedge that spun back to 4 feet for birdie on the 10th to restore the lead to two shots. But then he went long on the 13th with a pitching wedge and couldn’t save par. And then came his big moment on the 16th, and one last act of lagging a 50-foot putt to tap-in range.
That’s how it was at Los Angeles in 2023, when he needed two putts from 60 feet and lagged it close. Clark simply is at his best against tough tests, and rough arenas. Three years ago, he denied Rory McIlroy. This time it was Scheffler.
“The first one was amazing, and this one seems even better,” Clark said. “I think especially after such a sour taste last year in this championship, to have some redemption and win this again is almost surreal.”
A month ago, he was two years without a win and No. 75 in the world. Then he shot 60 in the final round to win The CJ Cup, contended the next two weeks and won his second major. It moves him to No. 8 in the world.
The smile he wore holding that U.S. Open trophy would suggest he feels on top of the world.
OBBUERGEN, Switzerland — U.S. Vice President JD Vance and Iran’s parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf on Monday wrapped up a lengthy round of initial talks aimed at solidifying a permanent end to the war between the countries.
The mediation effort in Switzerland, which started Sunday and stretched into the early hours of Monday, had rocky moments. But the talks also led to some agreements between the two sides.
In a joint statement, mediators Pakistan and Qatar said that while the high-level engagement had ended, technical negotiations would continue in Switzerland this week.
Vance was expected to make remarks from the resort at 1 p.m. local time, his office said.
The mediators hailed what they called “encouraging progress” made during the talks. A senior U.S. diplomat claimed progress on multiple fronts, including the establishment of “mechanisms” to ensure the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway for global energy shipments, remains open and that a ceasefire in the fighting between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah militants in southern Lebanon holds.
Yet the talks between the United States and Iran were jolted by blistering statements from U.S. President Donald Trump, who, from thousands of miles away from the Swiss negotiating venue at a mountainside resort near Lake Lucerne, was firing off comments that offended the Iranians.
Iranian state media said talks had paused after the “publication of an insulting message by the U.S. President,” according to Iranian state media.
Ultimately, the Iranians remained on site and negotiations continued, according to the senior U.S. diplomat, who was not authorized to comment publicly and briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity.
Iranian state television reported Monday that the Iranian delegation had left the summit site to head to the airport in Zurich to fly back to Tehran.
Trump didn’t attend what was dubbed the “Lake Lucerne Summit,” but his presence certainly loomed large.
Ahead of the talks, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian had vowed to “never back down from the right to enrich uranium,” according to state media.
Trump on Sunday told Fox News in a phone interview that Pezeshkian should watch what he says and also threatened to take over Iran, according to one of the news channel’s correspondents.
Trump also continued to issue warnings against Iran on social media, posting as negotiators worked: “Iran must immediately stop their highly paid PROXIES in Lebanon from causing trouble. If they don’t, we’ll hit Iran very hard again, just like we did last week, only harder!!!”
It’s unclear when Vance will depart Switzerland. Trump envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff are handling many of the technical details on behalf of the U.S. delegation.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi wrote on X that Pakistani and Qatari mediators delivered “major progress to end the Lebanon War.” But, he added, the first “real test” of negotiations would be whether the mechanism succeeded in halting the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah.
The senior U.S. diplomat said among the issues discussed was Iran’s messaging as it related to the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran’s military said it closed Saturday in response to continued fighting in Lebanon. U.S. Central Command has disputed that Iran closed the strait again.
The interim deal to end the fighting in Iran, signed last week by the leaders of the U.S. and Iran, also sets a 60-day period for negotiators to settle the future of Tehran’s nuclear program amid concerns that it wants to use it for military purposes, a claim Iran denies. The fate of frozen Iranian assets, among other thorny issues, are also on the agenda.
Though the talks will encompass a vast array of complex matters, Iran has insisted on first addressing the fighting in Lebanon.
Saturday’s renewed ceasefire in Lebanon appeared to be holding, and Israel’s military said it would lift movement restrictions for residents near the Israel-Lebanon border on Monday morning. Neither Israel nor Hezbollah is a signatory to the U.S.-Iran deal.
There was cautious calm Monday in Lebanon, with no Israeli strikes reported overnight after a quiet Sunday. Hezbollah likewise has not announced any attacks on Israeli forces since Saturday.
The lull in fighting in Lebanon is the longest since the outbreak of the latest Israel-Hezbollah war on March 2.
LONDON — British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced Monday that he will resign, forced out by his own party after missteps and mistakes soured voters’ goodwill for a prime minister who won a landslide election victory two years ago on a promise of steady leadership and economic growth.
Starmer says he will remain caretaker prime minister until his Labour party chooses a new leader — with expectations growing that it will be former Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham.
Burnham confirmed in a social media post that “I will put myself forward as part of this process.” Former Health Secretary Wes Streeting, who was considered his main rival for the top job, said he will back Burnham.
It was Burnham’s victory in a special parliamentary election last week that triggered Starmer’s decision to resign. After nearly a decade out of Parliament as the mayor of Greater Manchester, Burnham returns to Westminster and will be sworn in as a lawmaker later on Monday.
Only members of Parliament can stand for the party leadership.
Streeting’s statement makes it more likely that Burnham will be selected without a leadership contest.
Starmer is the sixth prime minister in a decade to stand outside 10 Downing Street and announce a premature departure. His statement comes the day before Britain marks the 10th anniversary of its vote to leave the European Union, a decision that still roils the country’s economy and politics.
After weeks of insisting he would fight to keep his job, Starmer conceded to growing pressure to hand over to a new leader who can try and revive the government’s flagging fortunes. He led Labour to a landslide election victory in July 2024, but since then his popularity and that of the party have plummeted.
A new leader in place within weeks
Starmer made the announcement outside his official 10 Downing St. residence, the spot where he delivered his first speech as prime minister two years ago.
His voice choked with emotion near the end of the brief statement, which was watched by a group of staff, Cabinet ministers and scores of journalists.
“The question my party is asking now is whether I am best placed to lead us into the next general election,” Starmer said. “I have heard the answer of my parliamentary party to that question, and I accept that answer with good grace.”
He said he spoke to King Charles III, Britain’s constitutional monarch, to inform him of the decision.
Starmer spent the weekend pondering his future following Burnham’s special election victory.
It’s unclear whether Burnham, who is due to be sworn in as a member of Parliament on Monday, will now face a coronation or a challenge. Starmer said nominations for a leadership contest will open on July 9, and the new leader will be in place by the time Parliament returns from its summer break on Sept. 1.
If Burnham is the only candidate, the change could come by mid-July.
Starmer struggled to fulfill election pledges
Starmer has struggled to deliver promised economic growth, repair tattered public services and ease the cost of living. He has been hamstrung by repeated missteps, including his decision to appoint Peter Mandelson, a scandal-tarnished friend of Jeffrey Epstein, as the U.K. ambassador to the United States.
Labour is losing liberal voters to the growing Green Party and facing a rising Reform UK, the Nigel Farage -led anti-immigration party that consistently leads in nationwide opinion polls.
U.S. President Donald Trump weighed in even before an announcement, linking Starmer’s potential exit to two of his recurring bugbears: immigration and renewable energy.
“Keir Starmer will resign as Prime Minister of The United Kingdom. He failed badly on two very important subjects- IMMIGRATION AND ENERGY (OPEN NORTH SEA OIL!). I wish him well! President DJT,” Trump posted on his social media platform.
Starmer’s initially warm relationship with the president has soured in recent months over issues including the Iran war, which the U.K. didn’t join.
He won praise on the world stage
In contrast to missteps on the domestic front, Starmer has won praise for his international role, notably in rallying European support for Ukraine in its fight against Russia’s invasion, and working to mitigate the economic and political turmoil unleashed by the Iran conflict.
A NATO summit in Turkey next month may be his last foray on the world stage as Britain’s leader.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen praised Starmer’s legacy.
“It can take many leaders years to grow into the statesman you became in just two years,” she said on X. “European and Ukrainian security is stronger because of you. Thank you, dear Keir.”
While many Labour lawmakers have rallied behind Burnham, some have said that Starmer had been treated unfairly. London legislator Neil Coyle railed on X against “the prospect of an utter stitch-up & the media circus being rewarded.
“When the next leader cannot change Trump, Iran, Ukraine, Putin, Musk, broadcast editorial & algorithm bias overnight they’ll bay for his blood too. Better keep that guillotine sharp,” he wrote.
