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International video coverage from The New York Times.
International video coverage from The New York Times.
In the mid-2010s, the actor Shay Mitchell began to spend as much time at 30,000 feet as she did on land, which is to say she had a lot of free time to consider the inconveniences of life as a frequent flier. The subject of her ire? Luggage, which was either too cheap to look good or, perhaps even worse, too expensive to be so impractical.
So on one of her flights, she grabbed the cocktail napkin that came with her complimentary beverage and began to sketch her own designs. “I was creating items that weren’t out there for me that I wanted for myself,” Mitchell told Women’s Wear Daily in 2019. “I looked up these pieces to see if they existed and they didn’t.”
For most people, that would have been the end of that, but not for Mitchell. She already had a thriving career as an actor, a popular YouTube channel, and a production company—why not add entrepreneur to her resume? But Mitchell, who broke out on small screens during her seven-season arc on hit teen soap Pretty Little Liars, needed help turning her rough napkins sketches into a business.
Enter Beach House Group, a brand incubator launched about a decade ago by veteran business builders PJ Brice and Shaun Neff. They were just getting their new partnership off the ground when Mitchell came in for a meeting.
“Shay came out of nowhere,” recalls Neff, Beach House’s bleached blonde public spokesman. “She was already on an entrepreneurial journey. You could tell her juices were flowing and she wanted to build a company.”
Beach House set up a joint venture with Mitchell; installed one of its own executives, Target veteran Adeela Hussain Johnson, as a co-founder, and used Brice’s connections making private label makeup bags and other accessories to get a line of duffles, backpacks, passport holders and other travel essentials into production. Béis—that’s beige in Spanish, a nod to the color of an old bag Mitchell used to travel everywhere with—launched in 2018 and, per Neff, “it was lightning in a bottle.” It hit $200 million in revenue in 2023, according to the company, and Neff tells me that number topped $300 million last year.
As celebrity-founded brands become an obsession in Hollywood, where a billion-dollar valuation is the hot new status symbol, Beach House has carved out a niche as a startup factory. It’s part of a growing number of brand incubators that help celebrities turn great ideas into very real businesses by connecting them with capital, experienced executives, back-end resources like human resources, legal and logistics, and suppliers. A lot of these incubators are small and selective: Beach House, for example, currently has just four brands in its portfolio, including oral hygiene company Moon Beauty launched in partnership with Kendall Jenner and curly hair care line Pattern with Tracee Ellis Ross. But their cultural reach can be significant.
Says Neff, a sort of Willy Wonka in Balenciaga who clearly knows how to sell anything, “Our magic sauce is that we can create ideas out of nowhere and blow them up.”
Before Neff co-founded Beach House, he made his name as the founder of ski and skate apparel brand Neff, which sold to wholesaler Mad Engine in 2017 for an undisclosed price. He then invested in sunscreen startup Sun Bum before its 2019 sale to SC Johnson for a reported $400 million. Which perhaps explains the two code-protected gates I pass through before arriving at his modern, light-filled home in the hills high above Malibu.
Steven Ferdman/WireImage
After Neff, dressed casually in camo pants and a black Pirelli baseball cap, hands me a can of Monster Tour Water, he settles in to tell me how Beach House evolved out of conversations he was having with talent looking to start their own brands. Back then, the talent agencies were more focused on landing their clients starring roles in the next blockbuster movie than helping them become founders.
Neff, meanwhile, had developed a reputation as a partner for celebrities through collaborations at his eponymous apparel brand with everyone from Scarlett Johansson to Snoop Dogg. “For close to 100% of consumer products, the only path to sell is through influencing people,” says Neff, who teamed with retail veteran Brice, founder of disposable tableware brand Cheeky, on Beach House. “That’s why we’re huge believers in talent.”
Beach House got off the ground around the same time George Clooney sold Casamigos for a cool $700 million, Rihanna launched Fenty Beauty and grew it into a nearly $3 billion business, and Ryan Reynolds invested in Mint Mobile ahead of its $1.35 billion sale. These companies added to the growing pile of evidence that the right celebrity could help supercharge the right business. Jennifer Aniston had done it in 2007, when she signed on to become the face of Smartwater in what her agent, Todd Shemarya, says was one of the first equity cash deals of the modern endorsement age.
“I knew they were very close to a sale,” Shemarya says. “And I knew that someone like Jennifer could help them sell faster, so she was worth the equity.” His bet turned out to be correct. Smartwater owner Glaceau sold to Coca Cola for $4.1 billion in 2007 in a deal that, based on conservative estimates, likely netted Aniston tens of millions. She’s since launched vegan hair-care line LolaVie, partnered with fitness company Pvolve, and become chief creative officer of supplement brand Vital Proteins.
The rise of social media—and the direct connection it fosters between star and fan—has created an environment ripe for the evolution of the endorsement deal. Once upon a time you got paid to appear in a commercial for a brand; now you own it. “It’s the idea that you should be creating equity for yourself in spaces where you traditionally created equity for others,” says Mahmoud Youseff, who helps clients at management firm Range Media launch their own ventures, like the Philly cheesesteak shop Bradley Cooper opened in New York City’s East Village late last year.
Yes, you read that right. Bradley Cooper is now a cheesesteak-preneur. Today, practically every A-lister has a brand of their own. Conservative estimates suggest there are more than 300 celebrity-affiliated alcohol brands on the market today. And celebrity beauty brands alone generated $1 billion in sales in 2023, according to the most recent available data from Nielsen. The one-two punch of the pandemic and the Hollywood actors’ and writers’ strikes gave a lot of celebrities a lot of free time in which to launch businesses. JLL Research reports that more than a third of all celebrity brands launched in 2020 or later. There’s Selena Gomez’s Rare Beauty, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s Teremana Tequila, Blake Lively’s Blake Brown Beauty, Jennifer Garner’s Once Upon a Farm, Katy Perry’s De Soi, Naomi Osaka’s Kinlo, and the list goes on and on and on.
Mike Windle/Getty Images for smartwater
The space has gotten so crowded that Golden Globes host Nikki Glaser got big laughs from a ballroom full of actors in January when she quipped, “If you do lose tonight, please just keep in mind that the point of making art is not to win an award. The point of making art is to start a brand of tequila that’s so popular you never have to make art again.” It was funny because it was true. As working in Hollywood has become more precarious, the jobs less prolific, creating a business has become an attractive backup plan—what one executive in the space, Ari Bloom, calls “their 401k”—albeit one that comes with significantly more risk.
“Every time you see Ryan Reynolds sell one of his companies or Kim Kardashian get some crazy valuation or Selena Gomez be announced as a billionaire, we do see a lot of increased inbound because folks are like, ‘Now that they’re worth more than their day job, I should do that too,’” says Bloom, who works with John Legend, Naomi Osaka and others on their business ventures via his incubator A-Frame.
When Shaun Neff is looking for inspiration, he heads to his local Target. “I walk aisles,” he says. “I’ll just go there for an hour or two at a time.” That’s how he discovered an opening for Moon, the oral hygiene company he launched with Kendall Jenner that sells toothbrushes, toothpastes and whitening pens in sleek, attractive packaging. “It was glaring to me in the oral care aisle that it was a sea of sameness,” he says. “It was red, white and blue, Crest and Colgate. There was nothing there that was aesthetically pleasing.”
Neff calls himself the “brand guy, the one that creates stuff, locks in the vision.” It’s his job to help Beach House identify products that fill a void in the market. Take Pattern, which entered the historically overlooked Black haircare market with a suite of natural products designed for curly hair. “It’s got to be an incredible product,” says Neff. “When you start a brand, first and foremost, the product wins every time.”
TheStewartofNY/GC Images
It’s often after the concept is locked into place that Neff goes searching for a celebrity partner to plug into the brand. With Moon, he happened to run into Jenner at a party and asked for her number. She gave him the info for her mom, Kris Jenner, and a deal was born. “What’s crazy about Hollywood,” says Neff, “it’s like there are a handful of parties every year where everyone’s at. So if you’re in the scene, you’ve kind of rubbed shoulders with the majority of everyone.”
Finding the right talent partner isn’t always so easy. Neff says he’s met with hundreds of celebrities over the years about turning their ideas into companies. “It doesn’t take me more than 30 to 45 minutes to make the decision whether it’s a good idea or not,” he says.
Part of Beach House’s “magic sauce” is that it’s incredibly selective about who it brings on as partners. “Not everyone can pull this off,” says Neff, who looks for passion and commitment from any celebrity-turned-entrepreneur. “You can find out really quickly how much they want to be involved.” Mitchell—who declined an interview request for this story—is the source of many of Béis’s product innovations, like the retractable bag strap built into every piece of luggage. Before launching Béis, she also had already built, per Neff, “a credible character around travel” through her YouTube series, Shaycation, and had millions of devoted social media followers ready to buy her luggage.
When launching a brand with a celebrity, things like social media followers and an aspirational lifestyle are table stakes. “Just because you have nice hair doesn’t mean that you can sell haircare; Just because you have nice skin doesn’t mean that you can sell skincare,” says the agent Shemarya. “You have to have a connection with your consumer. There has to be something that is relatable.”
The most crucial component of any of these businesses is authenticity. If your personal brand is all about the laid-back California lifestyle, for example, maybe say yes to the CBD-infused seltzer rather than the high-proof vodka. “A lot of consumers have gotten inundated with celebrity endorsements and have gotten a little bit tired of it because they just look like a money play,” adds Shemarya. “So when there’s actually a celebrity doing something and it’s really organic, it stands out more and it works.”
When Sara Foster and Erin Foster, the sisters behind the Netflix series Nobody Wants This and podcast The World’s First Podcast, began exploring the idea of launching their own fashion line, a lot of people told them they should do it on their own. Why cut in a partner when they could own the vast majority of the business they were building? They ignored that advice and partnered with Centric Brands, which manufactures and distributes dozens of brands including Joe’s Jeans and Juicy. “We didn’t want to own 100% of something that we had to be 100% responsible for,” Erin Foster tells me. “The smartest thing we have done in our career is pair ourselves with people who know what they’re doing.”
The combination of the Fosters’ vision for the brand and Centric’s industry know-how has made the clothing line, Favorite Daughter, a staple of cool-girl wardrobes around the country. They say the company is now well on its way to $100 million in annual sales.
Stefanie Keenan/Getty Images for Nordstrom
Nowadays, there are dozens of ways a celebrity can become an entrepreneur, but for many of them, teaming up with an experienced partner is the obvious path. And there are no shortage of possible partners. All the major talent agencies have venture arms where, for their own slice of the equity pie, they’ll work with clients to get their vision off the ground. Then there are companies that specialize in building businesses across various categories, like Give Back Beauty and Maesa in the beauty and haircare space, Collab for coffee, and Ari Bloom’s A-Frame for socially responsible personal care and wellness brands.
No two deals are the same, but generally these are equity plays that don’t require talent to invest any of their own cash upfront. A celebrity joining an existing brand could get as little as 5% equity in a business, while someone launching their own business or joining one that is less established can get as much as 50%. Bloom tells me A-Frame likes to split the business 50-50 with its celebrity partners “so that we’re both seeing the same motivations and the same returns.”
While startups are a long-term play, celebrities will often get royalties or, in some cases, a cut of all sales associated with a specific capsule collection, to keep them incentivized until they can sell the company for a big payday.
At the 175-employee Beach House, all businesses are launched as joint ventures with the talent partner. There’s no set formula for the equity split, but because Beach House is often bringing the idea to the celebrity and providing shared services—legal, accounting, sales, compliance, distribution, etc.—it typically only doles out minority stakes. “We own ‘em, we operate ‘em,” says Neff. “We’ve created an absolute machine where we can incubate and create brands and rinse and repeat.”
But that doesn’t mean the celebrity can sit back and wait for an exit. If they want to be successful, they have to be willing to roll up their sleeves and get to work, from testing products to approving branding to promoting their brand every chance they get.
Before he was building a cheesesteak business with Cooper, Youseff helped put together Ryan Reynolds’s deal for Aviation Gin. “A big reference for that brand was watching George Clooney and Casamigos and how he lived that brand in every capacity of his life,” says Youseff. “He’d be on a boat wearing a Casamigos hat and serving Casamigos to his friends. He was not just selling it on a commercial, he was living it in his life. And you saw Ryan do the same throughout his journey with Aviation Gin to almost equal success. We want you to be doing something that doesn’t feel like a chore. This should come from your passion, it should be fun for you.”
The Foster sisters see the exits that some of their peers have had. They know they could probably sell Favorite Daughter for a lot of money. But Erin Foster says that’s not the only reason they launched the brand. “This is one of the most fun parts of our career,” she says. “I love this tactile thing that we get to create. The idea that you could go into a meeting and say, ‘I really need a shirt that’s kind of split open in the front because I’m sick of tucking it in.’ And 11 months later it’s in Nordstrom. That’s so cool to me.”
The celebrity business bubble has been propped up on the belief that if you mix the right public figure with the right team and add the right support, you have a recipe for a successful business, one that one celebrity advisor says has a better chance at surviving than “just some random product that has to organically find its audience.”
But for every Hailey Bieber—who sold three-year-old beauty brand Rhode to e.l.f. Beauty for $800 million, plus earnouts that could boost the company’s total valuation to $1 billion—there’s Kristen Bell and Dax Shephard, whose diaper startup Hello Bello filed for bankruptcy in 2023. Last year, Sephora dropped TikToker Addison Rae’s line from its shelves. And before Blake Brown Beauty, Lively launched and quickly shuttered lifestyle website Preserve.
A year after launching Florence by Mills with Millie Bobby Brown, Beach House sold its stake back to the Stranger Things star. She’s since launched a fragrance with Give Back Beauty and a coffee with Collab under the Florence by Mills brand name. “The deal we struck with Millie was beauty centric, and I think she wanted to Florence a lot of things, so that didn’t really align with our core principle,” says Neff. “We did our job, we launched this thing very successfully at Ulta and we had a good run.” He adds, “knock on wood, we haven’t had a dud yet.”
So many startups have launched over the last five years that many close observers in the space expect there to be a shakeout soon. “The last few years before this were taking advantage of a trend,” says Youseff. “This year is definitely much more focused on finding real opportunities to connect both with the talent who’s launching these ventures and with the audience they’re trying to serve.”
Neff is still a big believer in launching brands with celebrity partners. But in perhaps a sign of the times, Beach House launched its most recent product without a celebrity founder by its side. Fragrance brand Noyz dropped last summer with sleek black and white packaging and scents like Unmute, which has hints of black plum, madagascar vanilla and crisp amber. “Fragrance is very magical, everyone’s riding a white horse and their hair’s perfect and the dude’s doing a hair flip with an 18-pack; none of it’s believable,” he says. “We felt like there was no one telling real and raw authentic stories.”
Ulta was a launch partner. “It was their biggest fragrance buy for a first-time brand ever,” Neff boasts. And the marketing campaign featured dozens of TikTokers, including Tara Yummy, Madeline Argy and the Kalogeras Sisters — all of whom got paid but none of whom got equity.
A full year later, TikTok still appears to be crazy for Noyz. Did Beach House just disprove its own thesis of the celebrity brand? Perhaps it created a new one: Why limit yourself to just one famous partner when you can harness the power of many instead.
Names marked with an asterisk have been changed to protect identities.
When Akmal’s* mosque was vandalised last week in Basildon, a town in the English county of Essex, he felt shaken.
“I was so hurt,” said the 33-year-old electrical engineer, who requested Al Jazeera use a pseudonym. “It was so close to home. My local masjid [mosque]. It felt like a real kick in the teeth.”
The South Essex Islamic Centre in Basildon was defaced shortly before midnight on Thursday. Red crosses were daubed across its walls alongside the words “Christ is King” and “This is England”.
The timing, the night before Friday prayers, appeared to many as calculated – an attempt to intimidate a flurry of worshippers in the southeastern English county.
“My wife and baby are growing up here,” Akmal told Al Jazeera. “I want to move out of the area. I just cannot stay here.”
Community leaders condemned the attack.
Gavin Callaghan, the leader of Basildon Council, described it as “pathetic criminal cowardice”.
“Don’t dress it up. Don’t excuse it. It’s scum behaviour, and it shames our town … The cowards who did this will be caught,” he said. “To do this right before Friday prayers is no coincidence. That’s targeted. That’s intimidation. And it’s criminal.”
Wajid Akhter, head of the Muslim Council of Britain, said, “The St George flag is a symbol of England we should all be proud of. For it to be used in this way, [which] echoes how Nazis targeted Jewish homes, is a disgrace to our flag and our nation. Silence has allowed hate to grow.”
Essex police are investigating the incident.
Council staff and volunteers worked in the early hours of the morning to remove the graffiti before worshippers arrived, but a sense of fear is still lingering.
“I was shocked,” said Sajid Fani, 43, who lives in the area. “I didn’t expect something like that to happen here.”
Local bishops decried the misuse of Christian imagery in the attack. They issued a joint statement calling the vandalism “scandalous and profoundly misguided”, saying that invoking Christianity to justify racism is “theologically false and morally dangerous”.
The vandalism took place amid a tense atmosphere in the United Kingdom, amid protests against asylum seekers and a social media campaign dubbed #OperationRaisetheColours.
In recent weeks, those heeding the call have pinned the flag of England bearing Saint George’s Cross and Union Jacks to motorway bridges, lampposts, roundabouts and some shops across the UK. Red crosses have been spray-painted on the white stripes of zebra crossings.
According to the anti-far-right HOPE not hate group, the campaign is led by Andrew Currien, a former member of the Islamophobic English Defence League and now a security figure for the political party Britain First, also an anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant group.
While some supporters frame the project as patriotic, it has been tied to racist incidents.
Racist graffiti has appeared in several other locations. Some 300 miles (about 500km) north of Basildon, for example, xenophobic slurs have been sprayed on buildings in County Durham and Houghton-le-Spring in northern England.
Some have blamed the media’s focus on the issue of asylum.
In recent months, British television networks and newspapers have dedicated significant coverage to asylum seekers, as some social media sites allow hateful content to proliferate.
Shabna Begum, head of Runnymede Trust, a race equality think tank, said the spate of vandalism is part of a “frightening intensification of Islamophobia” driven by political and media narratives scapegoating Muslim communities.
“The violence being played out on our streets and the vandalism of mosques is the product of a political and media soundtrack that has relentlessly demonised Muslim communities,” she said. “Whether it is policy or narratives, we have been fed a monotonous diet that tells us that our economic problems are caused by Muslims, migrants and people seeking asylum.”
She warned that history shows governments that fail to confront economic grievances while scapegoating minorities ultimately collapse.
“The question is how much will this betrayal cost for the Muslim communities that are served as political fodder,” she said.
Fani in Basildon said, “It’s the fear factor. They [media channels] put terror in the hearts of people when it comes to Muslims. I want to show people we are just like them. We’re just human.”
Days before the mosque was vandalised, a roundabout opposite was painted with a red cross.
“I wasn’t offended by England flags being flown,” said Fani. “But this is different. It crossed a line.”
In the wake of the vandalism, mosque leaders encouraged worshippers to attend Friday prayers in greater numbers as a show of resilience.
Fani said the turnout was larger than usual: “Alhumdulillah [Thank God], it resulted in more people coming to the mosque, so the outcome was positive.”
Maryam*, a Muslim woman who lives in Basildon, lamented the “attack on the Muslim community” as she emphasised that it reflects a dark climate.
“There’s a line between being patriotic and being outright racist or Islamophobic – and some people here are crossing that line.”
In her view, a wave of protests against housing asylum seekers at hotels earlier this summer has coincided with Islamophobic abuse – particularly in Epping, a nearby town where The Bell Hotel has been the focus of violent agitation.
Police data is yet to confirm a link or rise in racist attacks, but locally reported incidents tell a troubling story.
Last week, a man in Basildon was arrested after a hijab-wearing woman and her child were allegedly racially abused, while vandals sprayed St George’s crosses on nearby homes.
At the end of July, residents reported glass projectiles being hurled from the upper floors of a building near Basildon station, apparently targeting Muslim women and families of colour.
Beyond the headline incidents, Maryam reeled off a list of other recent examples of racism she has witnessed – a woman of East African origin called a racial slur, a driver mocking a Muslim woman in hijab as a “post box”.
“Unfortunately, I’ve [also] been subjected to a lot of Islamophobia in Basildon – often in front of my child,” she added. “It has affected my mental health … it’s created a lot of trauma and barriers to simply living a normal life.”
While the mosque attack prompted swift attention from councillors and police, isolated incidents against individuals often go unreported.
“If the police engaged with the community better, explained what hate crimes are, how they’re reported, how investigations work, it would remove barriers to reporting,” said Maryam.
Global management company Milk & Honey, a staunch supporter of the MBUK Awards from day one, is returning to sponsor the Publisher of the Year category at this year’s event.
The Music Business UK Awards, presented by MBW, in association with YouTube, will take place on the evening of Tuesday, November 4, at the De Vere Grand Connaught Rooms in London.
Milk & Honey founder Lucas Keller said: “The MBUK Awards is the best industry award show out there, and it’s our pleasure to sponsor it annually.
“It’s also great to have a show that supports the record makers, publishers, and business people behind the songs — we don’t have this in America. It’s great to honor the Publisher of the Year again for 2025.”
“The MBUK Awards is the best industry award show out there.”
Other categories will celebrate achievement in fields including songwriting, production, A&R, legal, artist management, music publishing, and recorded music.
A clutch of extra-special moments will return, including the International Executive Of The Year prize, recognizing a non-British executive who has gone above and beyond for UK & Irish music in the previous 12 months.
Meanwhile, The Sir George Martin Award will celebrate an individual who has not only achieved global success in music, but also fostered a rare level of respect and friendship in the artist/songwriter community.
The finalists for this year’s awards will be announced later this month.Music Business Worldwide
Russian President Vladimir Putin says he reached “understandings” with US President Donald Trump over the end of the Ukraine war, at their meeting in Alaska last month.
But he did not say whether he would agree to peace talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky brokered by Trump, who had apparently given Monday as a deadline for Putin’s response.
Speaking during a summit in China, Putin continued to defend his decision to invade Ukraine, once again blaming the war on the West.
Following the Alaska meeting, US special envoy Steve Witkoff said Putin had agreed to security guarantees for Ukraine as part of a potential future peace deal, though Moscow has yet to confirm this.
Putin was speaking in Tianjin at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit, where he met Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi.
He thanked the Chinese and Indian leaders for their support and their efforts to “facilitate the resolution of the Ukrainian crisis”.
China and Russia are the biggest buyers of Russian crude oil, attracting criticism from the West that they are propping up the Russian economy which has been battered by the war effort.
In his speech, Putin also said that the “understandings reached” at his meeting with Trump in Alaska are “I hope, moving in this direction, opening the way to peace in Ukraine”.
At the same time, he reiterated his view that “this crisis wasn’t triggered by Russia’s attack on Ukraine, but was a result of a coup in Ukraine, which was supported and provoked by the West”.
He also attributed the war to “the West’s constant attempts to drag Ukraine into Nato”.
The Russian president has consistently opposed the idea of Ukraine joining the Western military alliance.
It was in 2014 that Putin seized Crimea and Russian proxies grabbed part of eastern Ukraine. Years later, in February 2022, Putin then ordered Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Putin’s comments come days after Russia launched its second biggest aerial attack on Ukraine in the war.
On Friday, French President Emmanuel Macron said that Putin faced a Monday deadline set by Trump to agree to peace talks with Zelensky.
If the Russian leader does not agree, “it will show again President Putin has played President Trump”, said Macron.
But in an interview with CNN, on 22 August, Trump himself again gave Putin “a couple of weeks” to give a response before the US takes action, in the latest of a series of ultimatums and deadlines he has issued to the Russian leader.
Trump had previously said he could solve the Ukraine war in one day.
Following his meeting with Putin last month, Trump dropped a demand for a ceasefire and called instead for a permanent peace deal.
He also met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky along with top European leaders who paid an urgent visit to Washington DC.
Trump insisted there would be “no going into Nato by Ukraine” as part of a peace deal.
But he also hinted there would be security guarantees, saying Europe was the “first line of defence” and that the US would be involved.
“We’ll give them good protection,” he said, though he clarified it would not mean sending US troops to Ukraine.
The president’s special envoy Steve Witkoff also told CNN that Putin had agreed to security guarantees.
He said this would see the US and Europe “effectively offer Article 5-like language to cover a security guarantee”, referring to the Nato clause which states that member states should defend another member that has come under attack.
Zelensky said he expected a framework for security guarantees to be set out on paper as soon as this week.
But last Friday Russia criticised Western proposals as “one-sided and clearly designed to contain Russia”, adding that it turned Kyiv into a “strategic provocateur”.
Russian attacks have also continued. Last Thursday Moscow fired 629 drones and missiles at Kyiv, killing 23 people in one of the biggest aerial assaults of the war so far that prompted outrage from European leaders.
Germany and France have since pledged to put pressure on Russia to agree to a deal.
Meanwhile, Zelensky has rejected proposals for a buffer zone with Russia as part of a peace deal.
He has accused Russia of not being ready for diplomacy and seeking ways to postpone the end of the war.
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By Anne Lepesant on SwimSwam
Fitter and Faster Swim Camps is the proud sponsor of SwimSwam’s College Recruiting Channel and all commitment news. For many, swimming in college is a lifelong dream that is pursued with dedication and determination. Fitter and Faster is proud to honor these athletes and those who supported them on their journey.
Alexis Cook has announced her verbal commitment to the University of Missouri for 2026-27. At the time of her commitment, she wrote on social media:
“I am SO excited to announce my verbal commitment to continue my academic and athletic careers at the University of Missouri! I want to thank my coaches, teammates, and family for pushing me to where I am today and supporting me through everything. Thank you coaches for this opportunity, I can’t wait to be a tiger! Go MIZ
#rolltigs”
Cook is one of four swimming sisters (her older sister Anabelle Cook swims at Truman State University) from Ballwin, Missouri. Their mother swam at Missouri. She is a rising senior at Parkway South High School and owns school records in the 200 free (1:50.83) and 500 free (4:51.71). She won both events at the Missouri Class 2 Swimming and Diving Championships last year and earned MSHSAA Class 2 Swimmer of the Year and NISCA All-American honors for her feats.
A month after notching PBs in the 200/500 free and 50 back (26.20) at high school States, she swam at Columbia Sectionals with her club team, CSP Tideriders, and lowered her lifetime bests in the 1650 free (17:08.78), 200 back (1:56.58), and 100 fly (57.64). She placed 6th in the 200 free, 5th in the 500, 4th in the 1000, 4th in the mile, 7th in the 100 back, 4th in the 200 back, and 28th in the 100 fly.
This summer, Cook finished the 2025 long course season with best times in the 100 free (1:00.38), 1500 free (17:14.52), 50 back (30.22), and 100 fly (1:04.99) at Columbia Sectionals, and in the 400 free (4:24.66), 100 back (1:04.08), and 200 back (2:14.50) at NCSA Summer Championships.
She told SwimSwam that outside of the pool, “I love to bake and cook.”
Best SCY times:
Cook will join the Mizzou class of 2030 with Amelia Lee, Sara Reppucci, Tess Stavropoulos, and Tori Yamamura.
If you have a commitment to report, please send an email with a photo (landscape, or horizontal, looks best) and a quote to Recruits@swimswam.com.
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Read the full story on SwimSwam: Summer Juniors Qualifier Alexis Cook (2026) to Become 2nd Gen Mizzou Swimmer
new video loaded: Putin and Modi Hold Hands as They Greet Xi
By Hannah Yi•
Recent episodes in International
International video coverage from The New York Times.
International video coverage from The New York Times.
In August, we saw Northrop Grumman unveil (slightly) its contender for the US Navy’s F/A-XX competition. Now, Boeing is stepping in with a misty rendering of its entry for the sixth-gen carrier-based fighter plane to replace the aged F/A-18 Super Hornet.
Six months ago, the F/A-XX Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) fighter competition looked as though it was on its last legs, stumbling toward the ash heap of failed programs. Where the US Air Force’s F-47 commanded a US$3-billion budget, the F/A-XX limped along on an anemic US$76 million.
With Lockheed Martin dropping out of the running in March 2025, the smart money was on the Navy competition soon dying from lack of funds, but Congress pushed against this, with the Senate Appropriations Committee approving an additional US$1.4 billion for the F/A-XX, and the House putting up US$972 million.
This second lease on life was bolstered by remarks by US Navy Vice Admiral Daniel Cheever saying to the press that the F/A-XX was “eagerly awaited.” Since the next step is to reduce the two competitors, Boeing and Northrop Grumman, to one, this optimism seems to have goaded the companies into ginning up public interest in their proposals.
Boeing
The Boeing rendering was released during the Tailhook Symposium and published by Aviation Week and, like the Northrop Grumman version, was deliberately lacking in detail, showing the F/A-XX blasting through the vapor cone caused by the plane going supersonic. However, the nose can be clearly seen and we can make a few deductions.
From previous renderings we know that the Boeing fighter is tailless and twin-engined, with an eye on stealth, though canards are visible on the forward section, suggesting that some stealth has been sacrificed for maneuverability. Designed for strike carrier operations, it has some similarities to the F-47, including a large cockpit canopy for a single pilot, though the forward radome is smaller.
Intended to replace the F/A-18 Super Hornet, which is nearing the end of its service life with what will be 9,000 hours in the air by the early 2030s, the F/A-XX differs from the Air Force program by its requirement to meet the peculiar needs of the Navy. Aside from being able to operate from carriers, the F/A-XX is pilot optional and is a multi-role fighter that can handle air combat, ground attack, surface warfare, and close air support missions. Since it’s a sixth-gen fighter, it also has advanced AI capabilities, allowing it to act as a command and control center for drone swarms as well as sharing huge bandwidths of sensor data with a global network.
The power plant for the F/A-XX is required to give it a 25% increase in range over existing fighters to meet threats in the Pacific theater. It can also provide the aircraft with extra power for new hypersonic missiles as well as directed energy weapons.
Though the Navy appears to be upbeat about the F/A-XX, there is no guarantee that it will survive the budget tug of war between Congress and the White House and concerns about the US defense industry’s ability to support two next-generation fighters. However, a final decision is expected in the next few weeks as to whether the program will continue.
Source: Boeing
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