Spain’s victory in the 2026 FIFA World Cup Final came with a hefty payout for both the country’s soccer federation and the IRS. Following the Spaniards’ 1-0 win in extra time against Argentina, the team won $50 million of the $655 million prize pool FIFA will split among the 48 competing countries. The country’s soccer federation will then divvy up the prize money among the roster based on its own rules and regulations. Any money made on American soil is taxable, so the tournament has also become a huge event for the IRS.  Robert Raiola, director of the sports and entertainment group at the tax advisory firm PKF O’Connor Davies, spoke to MarketWatch about how the IRS always wins regardless of the outcome of the final match. “It doesn’t make a difference who wins the game. The IRS will get a piece.” Raiola added that coaches, team staff, referees, and players from all participating teams will be taxed in some capacity, though not every member of the organization will be taxed the same. Decisions will be made depending on who they are playing for and where they currently reside. Both factors could affect how they are taxed. “Even within the same team, there may be different tax answers for different players,” Christopher Hall of PKF O’Connor Davies said. “You have to go through and look [at] your entire entourage.” International tax treaties then come into effect, as players may be exempt based on their country’s tax treaty with the United States. Team staff, on the other hand, are not always protected in the same manner. The tax complexities surrounding the World Cup cannot be overstated. Rob Fagan, a senior manager at KPMG’s Washington National Tax, ranked the tournament as an “8 out of 10” on the tax-complexity scale. To help individuals navigate these issues, the IRS’s National Taxpayer Advocate gave a “tax playbook” for foreigners that encouraged professional help throughout the process. The United States also reached an agreement with the other host countries to prevent double taxation. In June, before the tournament kicked off, the IRS released a statement explaining how the Canada Revenue Agency and Mexico’s Servicio de Administración Tributaria came to a consensus on how compensation and income will be allocated.

A Florida Republican congresswoman is firing back after a Wall Street Journal report accused the conservative firebrand of tipping off a MAGA influencer about President Trump’s vice presidential pick so he could allegedly make insider trades. Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported U.S. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) told close confidants in the summer of 2024 that she knew who Trump would pick as his running mate.  At an exclusive social club in Tampa, Luna is said to have passed the information on to Rogan O’Handley, a popular right-wing influencer known as “DC Draino,” so that he could use the information to make money off Polymarket, the Journal reported.   O’Handley told associates he had led a long-shot social media campaign to persuade Trump to pick Luna as his running mate, according to the Journal. After Luna allegedly informed O’Handley that JD Vance would get the nod, he placed a winning bet on Polymarket.  A spokesperson for Luna told The Daily Wire that the congresswoman is not under federal investigation and never had definitive knowledge of Trump’s vice presidential pick. Luna herself dismissed the report as “false” on X and released text messages between her communications director and a Wall Street Journal reporter. The exchange included a now-deleted X post from conservative political commentator and comedian Arynne Wexler that appears to describe the same allegations detailed in the Journal’s report. In the post, reviewed by The Daily Wire, Wexler claimed that in the summer of 2024, she was seated at a lunch table with the MAGA influencer and a female member of Congress, who allegedly boasted about tipping off the influencer, allowing him to pocket $10,000 from the wager. “The fact is: this is false,” Luna said on X. “There are screenshots and time stamps on X to prove it. There is now an open investigation into the false reporting of which people will have to learn, you cannot file fake claims because you’re mad at your ex-boyfriend.” O’Handley also denied the accusations, telling the Journal: “Any suggestion that I traded on confidential information or discussed doing so is inaccurate.”  The Daily Wire reached out to the Department of Justice for comment. The report highlights the growing influence of political betting in Washington, especially in elite circles, raising fresh questions about government transparency and potential conflicts of interest. Vance has publicly said he did not know he had been selected as the running mate until Trump called him shortly before the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.  “I thought I had a good chance, but I wasn’t sure,” Vance said on The Diary Of A CEO podcast. The Daily Wire reached out to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) to determine whether it is investigating the allegations, which appear to conflict with a cornerstone of Luna’s legislative agenda: banning insider trading, a cause she has championed throughout her time in Congress. In December 2025, the Florida Republican filed a discharge petition in an effort to force a House vote on legislation to ban congressional insider trading. “Across the country, from every political background, the American people agree on one thing: Members of Congress should not be enriching themselves with insider knowledge,” Luna said at the time. “This is one of the most popular, most supported issues in the entire country. Americans deserve a Congress that works for them, not for special interests or personal portfolios.”  Luna, a close Trump ally, has also carved out exceptions to her hardline stance on insider trading. In April, she sought mercy for the U.S. Army soldier accused of pocketing more than $400,000 by betting on the capture of former Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro. “Maybe not a popular take but I am calling for this guy to be pardoned. Unless the DOJ plans on going after all the crooks in congress currently insider trading, this is simply skewed justice. There is no ‘justice’ when guys like this get the book thrown at him yet members are illegally profiting every day,” Luna said on X at the time.

Buried beneath the streets of Jerusalem for more than 2,600 years, charred wooden beams from the destruction of Solomon’s Temple have finally seen daylight. Archaeologists digging in the City of David have uncovered massive wooden beams, charred black and twisted by the inferno that consumed Solomon’s Temple during the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE. The timbers, once part of a roof over an inner courtyard near the Temple, did not simply survive by chance. As the building burned and its roof collapsed, melted plaster sealed the beams beneath the rubble, preserving them for more than two millennia. The find, announced by the Israel Antiquities Authority and Tel Aviv University, comes just days before Tisha B’Av, the annual Jewish fast day mourning the destruction of both the First and Second Temples, 656 years apart. Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu said the discovery underscores the Jewish people’s longstanding connection to Jerusalem. “Jerusalem’s soil continues to provide tangible evidence of the city’s ancient past,” Eliyahu said. “The wooden beams burned in the destruction of the First Temple stand as a powerful reminder of the Jewish people’s presence in Jerusalem some 2,600 years ago. On the eve of Tisha B’Av, this discovery underscores that our connection to Jerusalem is rooted not only in faith, but also in history, archaeology, and collective memory. It is our responsibility to continue uncovering, preserving, and passing this heritage on to future generations.” Researchers say the unusually well-preserved timber contains enough growth rings to potentially date Jerusalem’s destruction with unprecedented precision, narrowing estimates from centuries to as little as a decade. “It is very rare in Israel to find wood with such a large number of growth rings,” Dr. Johanna Regev of the Israel Antiquities Authority and Weizmann Institute of Science, stated. “Here, in the City of David, we found beams with many rings, offering significant research potential – with more growth rings enabling higher dating resolution. Until recently, we could date finds from this time within a range of hundreds of years. Now, as we separate and collect the rings one by one in the field, we can attain much greater precision, potentially narrowing the dating range down to as little as ten years.” Perhaps the most striking revelation, though, is not about the fire itself but about what came after. When Jerusalem’s exiles returned from Babylon to rebuild their shattered city, they apparently made a deliberate choice: rather than clear away every trace of the catastrophe, they built the new city directly atop the ruins of the old, letting the wreckage remain as silent testimony. Archaeologists call this a “landscape of memory” — the same impulse, found across countless cultures, to hold onto evidence of loss rather than erase it. The Temple these beams once framed was not an ordinary building. According to biblical tradition, King David purchased the site, Mount Moriah, in the tenth century BCE, and his son Solomon built the First Temple there soon after. For nearly four centuries it stood as the center of Jewish worship and national life, expanded and restored by successive kings, until Babylon’s armies burned it to the ground. A Second Temple later rose on the same spot, rebuilt after the exile and later transformed into a monumental structure under Herod the Great, before Roman legions destroyed it in 70 CE. Even after that second devastation, Jewish attachment to the site never wavered: through Roman bans, Byzantine restrictions, Crusader conquest, and Ottoman rule, Jews continued — whenever permitted, and sometimes when it wasn’t — to visit, pray, and mourn at the Temple Mount, culminating in Israel’s recapture of the site in 1967. Now, just ahead of the fast that commemorates that ancient loss, the ground itself has offered up a fragment of the fire that started it all. For the archaeologists who uncovered it, the beams are more than an artifact. They are a direct, physical thread connecting the mourners fasting this week to the very night, 2,600 years ago, when Jerusalem burned.

Thursday night, President Trump confirmed what the average American has suspected for years: our elections are not as secure as Washington, D.C., has told us they are. He declassified intelligence showing China acquired 220 million American voter files — names, addresses, party preferences — and assigned a dedicated unit to exploit them. He released assessments proving our own government has long known our voting machines and ballot-counting systems are exposed to attack from Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea — and buried it. And the Department of Homeland Security found more than a quarter of a million noncitizens registered to vote in federal elections. It gets worse. The CIA obtained reporting showing Venezuela’s Maduro regime developed methods to digitally rig its own 2020 elections — altering vote totals in ways no audit could detect. And FBI files describe a 2020 voter-registration operation in Michigan where canvassers admitted to signing forms in other people’s names, inventing registrants who never existed, and getting paid in gift cards by the application. This should alarm every American — and is exactly why the Republican National Committee is leading the fight to protect the ballot box. For years, Democrats dismissed every one of these concerns as a conspiracy theory. But President Trump presented voters with the truth and proved what Republicans have been saying all along. Voter rolls padded with noncitizens and dead people are unacceptable. Foreign governments holding information on hundreds of millions of American voters is inexcusable. Democrats blocking voter ID, again and again, is indefensible. America is the greatest nation on earth, and our elections should be the gold standard. The president’s message was simple: secure elections start with voter ID, proof of citizenship, and accurate voter rolls. That’s why Congress must pass the SAVE America Act. This commonsense legislation is not radical. The Democrats opposing it are. The polling is not close: 68% of voters back the bill — including two-thirds of independents and nearly half of Democrats. Eighty-one percent support voter ID and 87% agree that only American citizens should decide American elections. It’s a national embarrassment that Democrats keep blocking safeguards much of the world already has. India and Brazil tie voter identification to a biometric database. Germany and Canada count paper ballots. Here, we run on the honor system. Requiring proof of citizenship and photo ID to vote, ensuring clean voter rolls, and strengthening protections against ballot tampering is not only reasonable — it’s the bare minimum. Here at the RNC, we’re not waiting on Congress — we heard the president’s call loud and clear. We’re leading the largest election integrity operation in Republican Party history — 160 active cases across 36 states. We fought to strike down New York City’s noncitizen voting law. We’re defending Arizona’s proof-of-citizenship requirement at the Supreme Court. We uncovered hundreds of noncitizens on New Jersey’s voter rolls. We are also deploying a massive election integrity ground game in 22 target states, training poll workers and watchers, recruiting attorneys, observing machine testing and ballot-processing activities, and building the infrastructure needed to win. The SAVE America Act would only strengthen those efforts and help ensure the election vulnerabilities exposed by President Trump never happen again. We do this because Americans deserve complete confidence in our elections. We deserve to know our ballot is protected, our vote is counted, and the process is free from interference. That’s exactly what the RNC is fighting for every single day. As President Trump said, “Every American, whether you’re a Republican, Democrat, Independent, or otherwise, should be able to agree that we deserve the most secure, honest, and fair election system anywhere in the world.” He is right. Secure elections are not a Republican issue — they are an American one. Congress should pass the SAVE America Act. And even if Democrats keep blocking it, the RNC will keep fighting in every courtroom in the country, because Americans deserve elections they can trust. You can join the fight with us and help secure our elections at protectthevote.com.  *** Joe Gruters is chairman of the Republican National Committee.

Paramount Skydance Corp’s $110 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. is temporarily halted by a federal judge. On Monday, U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín paused the merger between the two media giants for 14 days after they hoped to seal the deal on July 22, according to Bloomberg Law. Fearing that the merger would harm cable and film competition, 12 states, including California, Arizona, Massachusetts, and Washington, sued Paramount and Warner Bros. on July 13, blocking the deal. Though Warner Bros. has already agreed to sell to Paramount, the judge is preventing Paramount from finalizing the decision. A pre-existing merger-agreement provision mandates Paramount pay WBD shareholders if the deal isn’t closed by September 30.  The hearing is scheduled for Aug. 3, determining whether the deal will be blocked indefinitely.  The deal would allegedly result in 90% of the media market controlled by four companies: Walt Disney Co., Universal, Sony Pictures Entertainment, and the Paramount-Warner merger. The lawsuit also claims that the merged company would control 27% alone of the “market for films widely released to theaters” as well as 30% of anticipated blockbusters, according to Bloomberg Law. New York Attorney General Letitia James, one of the 12 state attorneys general, celebrated the judge’s decision, saying the deal would harm industries, workers, artists, businesses, and consumers.  “Paramount’s unlawful merger with Warner Bros. would mean more expensive theater tickets, higher cable bills, fewer opportunities for workers, and fewer original stories shared with audiences across the country,” James said.  This merger would bring two streaming platforms, two movie studios, and two news organizations under David Ellison’s control, the chief executive officer of Skydance Media.