By RONALD BLUM, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — FIFA has invited more teams than ever for a World Cup priced largely for fans in the 1%. The process of figuring out which teams in the expanded 48-nation field will play where begins with Friday’s draw at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Cape Verde, Curaçao, Jordan and Uzbekistan will appear in soccer’s premier event for the first time when next year’s tournament is played from June 11 to July 19 at 16 sites in the United States, Mexico and Canada.

“I’m quite optimistic because to qualify you need to beat the other teams of your confederations, and that’s a sign of quality,” former Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger said Thursday as red carpets were installed at the Kennedy Center. “The teams are not there by coincidence.”

The red carpet is delivered prior to the final draw for the 2026 soccer World Cup at the Kennedy Center in Washington, Thursday, Dec. 4, 2025. (AP Photo/Chris Carlson)

President Donald Trump of the U.S. and Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico are expected along with Canada Prime Minister Mark Carney. Instead of soccer gear, the Kennedy Center gift shop still was filled with socks of Shakespeare, Beethoven and Verdi along with shelves of red and white holiday nutcrackers.

The world’s top 11-ranked teams have all qualified, with No. 12 Italy among 22 nations competing in playoffs for the final six berths to be decided March 31.

Led by captain Lionel Messi, who turns 39 during the tournament, Argentina seeks to become the first nation to win consecutive World Cups since Brazil in 1958 and 1962. Messi will look to extend his record of 26 games played and enters with 13 career goals, three shy of Miroslav Klose’s record.

Games will be played at 11 NFL stadiums along with three in Mexico and two in Canada, where construction is underway to add 17,000 temporary seats to BMO Field, raising capacity to around 45,000. Attendance will top the record 3.59 million in 1994.

“We basically set the new tone in terms of attendance, in terms of surrounding the tournament with a lot of entertainment and glamor,” said Alan Rothenberg, head organizer of the 1994 World Cup in the U.S. “We did a lot of things that kind of broke the ice with respect to how you present the tournament as something other than just a soccer tournament.”

The red carpet is delivered prior to the final draw for the 2026 soccer World Cup at the Kennedy Center in Washington, Thursday, Dec. 4, 2025. (AP Photo/Chris Carlson)

FIFA announced initial ticket prices of $60-$6,730, saying they would be dynamic, up from $25-$475 for the 1994 tournament in the United States. It has refused to release a complete list of prices, as it had for every other World Cup since at least 1990. The governing body also is selling parking passes for up to $175 for a single match, a semifinal in Arlington, Texas.

FIFA spokesman Bryan Swanson did not respond to a request for FIFA President Gianni Infantino to discuss ticket prices.

Sixty-four nations will participate in the draw, 30% of FIFA’s members, but just 42 countries are assured of sports. Among the playoff teams, Albania, Kosovo, New Caledonia and Suriname are trying to reach the World Cup for the first time.

With the expansion, the top two teams in each of 12 groups advance along with the eight best third-place teams. Some nations could reach the new round of 32 with three points.

“I think we’re going to be in pretty good shape,” said former U.S. midfielder Tab Ramos, who during his playing days mapped out permutations for advancement. “We have a good team, so I’m not worried as much as I’ve been in the past about about this draw.”

Opta Analyst’s computer projects the U.S. has a 0.9% chance of winning — the Americans haven’t reached the semifinals since the first World Cup in 1930. Spain tops the forecast at 17%, followed by France (14.1%), England (11.8%), Argentina (8.7%), Germany (7.1.%), Portugal (6.6%), Brazil (5.6%) and the Netherlands (5.2%).

In a new twist, FIFA said the top four teams in the rankings — Spain, Argentina, France and England — will avoid each other until the semifinals if they finish first in their first-round groups.

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Specific sites for most matchups and kickoff times won’t be announced until Saturday. In 1994, there were just seven night games.

A team’s group play sites will be restricted to an Eastern, Central and Western regional

The 1994 World Cup draw in Las Vegas was apolitical, featuring performances by Stevie Wonder, Barry Manilow, James Brown and Vanessa Williams plus comedian Robin Williams, who called the draw screen “the world’s largest keno board,” yelled “Bingo!” when Greece was selected.

This draw figures to be more akin to the ceremony for 2018 tournament in Moscow, opened by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump, who has campaigned for a Nobel Peace Prize, is expected to be awarded FIFA’s own peace prize that Infantino established after traveling to several events with Trump.

But the main event is the pulling of balls from bowls to create groups. Retired tars Tom Brady of the NFL, Shaquille O’Neal of the NBA and Wayne Gretzky of the NHL along with three-time AL MVP Aaron Judge will assist in a ceremony to be run by former England captain Rio Ferdinand.

“There is the angst and the looks of sheer terror and disappointment and/or joy and elation from the coaches and from the staffs,” said former U.S. defender Alexi Lalas, now Fox’s lead soccer analyst. “It really gets kind of real for people.”

By KONSTANTIN TOROPIN and BEN FINLEY, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — New investigative reports into a series of high-profile and costly Navy mishaps during a U.S.-led campaign against Yemen’s Houthi rebels reveal that the most intense running sea battle that the military service has faced since World War II took a toll on ships and personnel.

The four reports released Thursday cover a “friendly fire” incident in December 2024 that saw the cruiser USS Gettysburg shoot at two fighter jets from the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman, downing one, as well as the Truman’s collision with a merchant vessel and the loss of two more multimillion-dollar jets from the carrier to mishaps earlier this year.

Taken together, the reports paint a picture of an aircraft carrier that was not only beset by regular missile attacks that stressed the crew but also other operational demands that put pressure on top leaders to the point that the ship’s captain and navigator were extremely sleep-deprived. That was just halfway through an eight-month deployment originally slated to last six months.

One report also found that, in some parts of the ship, the intense combat operations “led to a numbness among the crew” and some sailors “lost sight of the purpose of their role to the mission.”

The four preventable mishaps cost the Navy over $100 million in three lost aircraft and damage to the Truman as well as injuries to multiple sailors. While no one died, several of the mishaps hinged on just seconds of reaction time.

‘A wake-up call’ for the Navy

The investigation into the Truman’s collision with a merchant vessel said that “had the collision occurred 100 ft forward, the impact would have likely pierced a berthing compartment with 120 sleeping Sailors.”

Capt. Dave Snowden, the Truman’s commander at the time, “reduced the angle of impact, and delayed the time to impact, which likely prevented more significant damage and potential loss of life” in the seconds before the collision, the report said.

The mishaps with the Truman are a “wake-up call” for the Navy about the demands of battle and the dangers of overextending ships and their crew, said Bradley Martin, a senior policy researcher at RAND and a retired Navy captain.

“The clear message from this deployment is that the Navy is not ready to deal with the reality of extended combat,” Martin said, adding that the Truman “was obviously at a point where it was running at a ragged edge.”

The campaign against the Houthi rebels in Yemen began in October 2023 when the militants began launching drones and missiles at ships in the Red Sea amid the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. U.S. military operations to counter the Houthis began under then-President Joe Biden, and President Donald Trump continued the campaign.

It culminated with a monthlong bombing campaign earlier this year, during which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared sensitive information about a strike over Signal chat. The Pentagon’s inspector general said Thursday that the move put U.S. troops at risk, even though Hegseth had the authority to declassify the material.

Unclear accountability following major mishaps

It is unclear what, if anything, the Navy did to hold most of the sailors and leaders involved to account because those sections in the reports were redacted. The Navy did publicly relieve Snowden of command about a week after the collision with the merchant vessel.

Adm. James Kilby, the Navy’s second-highest ranking officer, assured reporters Thursday that “accountability actions were taken across all the operators involved” in the four mishaps but he did not offer any details.

Martin of RAND said there should be individual accountability but added that “some of this is a case of the Navy writ large asking for too much and finding out what happens when too much is demanded.”

“The level of air threat that was coming from the Houthis, it’s nothing like you’d get from China, but it was enough to be stressing,” Martin said. “And I think what you saw was a lot of brittleness in the readiness and preparation.”

All four investigations revolve around the Truman. The ship was the third aircraft carrier dispatched to the region, arriving in December 2024.

Firing on US fighter jets and a collision at sea

The Truman conducted its first defensive strike against the Houthis on Dec. 22, 2024, and other ships in the carrier’s strike group spent several hours defending against retaliatory cruise missiles and attack drones.

The USS Gettysburg, one ship in the strike group, mistook several F/A-18F fighter jets from the Truman for more Houthi missiles and fired at two of them. The heavily redacted report largely faulted the sailors in the Gettysburg’s combat information center for being poorly trained and overly relying on technology that had faced problems.

The troops from one jet ejected before the missile struck, while the ship stopped the second missile shortly before impact.

In February, sailors on the Truman told investigators that they felt the strain of “a pressurized schedule and a culture of ‘just get it done.’”

As it prepared to head back to the Red Sea following a port visit, it had to sail through the highly trafficked waters just outside the Suez Canal. Running behind schedule, an officer drove the massive aircraft carrier at a speed that investigators later called unsafe. It would have needed almost a mile and a half to come to a stop after halting the engines.

As a merchant ship moved into the carrier’s path, the officer did not take enough action to escape danger, the report found, listing his actions as the top cause for the collision. The commander and the ship’s navigator also were faulted for not fully realizing the risks of the transit.

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The loss of two more Navy jets

Once the ship was back in the Red Sea, the crew was conducting combat operations and “flying everyday with little exception” since March 15, Capt. Christopher Hill, the new commander, told investigators.

In April, the ship made a sharp turn to avoid an incoming Houthi missile as sailors in the hangars were moving aircraft around. As the Truman began to tilt with the turn, the jet began to slip.

The sailors moving the jet told investigators that as the plane slipped off the deck and into the ocean, its landing wheels were rolling despite the sailor inside the plane “actively attempting to brake.”

The deck also was far dirtier and more slippery than normal, partly because “high operational tempo of combat flight operations impeded the regular 10-day scrubs” that were needed.

In May, an F/A-18F fighter jet went overboard while trying to land on the Truman. The investigation found that a cable designed to bring the 50,000-pound jet to a halt in just a few hundred feet snapped mid-landing. That’s because poor maintenance on the equipment meant the system was missing a crucial part.

After reading the investigation, then-commander of Truman’s strike group, Rear Adm. Sean Bailey, said maintenance was allowed “to degrade to the level of abject failure.”

Investigators, however, also noted that “personnel struggled to balance maintenance requirements with operational requirements” and that “multiple personnel identified operational tempo as one of the most significant challenges” for sailors tasked with maintaining the equipment.

By Phil Galewitz, KFF Health News

Larry Humphreys, a retired Federal Emergency Management Agency worker in Moultrie, Georgia, says he and his wife won’t be traveling much next year after their monthly health insurance premium payment increases more than 40%, to $938.

Humphreys, 68, feels betrayed by the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program. “As federal employees, we sacrificed good salaries in the private sector because we thought the benefits from government would be better now, in retirement,” he said.

As the nation’s largest employer-sponsored health insurance program, the FEHB Program covers more than 8.2 million federal government employees and retirees, and it was once celebrated as a national model for controlling costs while giving enrollees many health plan options.

But next year, average enrollee premium payments in the system are set to jump more than 12%, on top of a 13.5% hike in 2025. The two-year increase is higher than what many private employers and their workers are experiencing.

The FEHB rate hikes are similar to those for plans sold on the Affordable Care Act exchanges — excluding the government subsidies most enrollees get, a major point of contention on Capitol Hill. The premiums insurers charge for Obamacare plans are rising 26% on average for 2026, following a 4% increase this year.

What’s making the latest hike in FEHB premium payments even harder to stomach for millions of federal employees is its timing: The 2026 increase was announced in October, when many federal workers were on unpaid furlough during the 43-day government shutdown.

Unlike most private employers, the FEHB Program gives its enrollees numerous health plans to choose from. That allows some people to lower their monthly premium payments by switching to plans with higher deductibles or copayments. But each year only about 5% of enrollees switch plans, according to the Office of Personnel Management, which oversees the program.

Humphreys, who has stayed with the same health plan for decades despite steadily higher prices, said it’s difficult determining which plan is best based on their health conditions. He has glaucoma and diabetes, and his wife, Julianne, has faced heart issues.

Their FEHB plan covers costs for their care not covered by Medicare, which typically pays 80% of their health bills.

“There’s a fear that if you do something and change plans and it’s wrong, you could be in a bad spot,” he said.

Open enrollment for federal employees and retirees runs through Dec. 8.

Among the factors causing premiums to increase, according to OPM, are an aging federal workforce with more chronic conditions, as well as prescription drug use, including pricey GLP-1 medications for weight loss.

About 42% of federal employees are over the age of 50, compared with 33% in the general workforce, OPM says. About 7% of federal employees are under the age of 30, compared with about 20% of workers overall.

OPM officials said the Trump administration’s policies aimed at lowering drug costs and focused on prevention of costly medical conditions will hopefully help it control premiums in the future.

“None of these initiatives of course will happen overnight – turning a $79 billion ship takes slow and steady progress,” Shane Stevens, OPM’s associate director for health care and insurance, said in a news release. “But, we are committed to improving the quality of life and quality of care for our members while also ensuring that healthcare remains accessible and affordable for those who work (or have worked) for the American people.”

OPM didn’t respond to requests for comment.

John Holahan, a health policy fellow at the nonpartisan Urban Institute, said OPM’s explanation left out a key reason for rising premiums: hospital consolidation. While the FEHB Program is a collection of health plans, in many markets — including the Washington, D.C., area — those insurers must negotiate with a handful of powerful health systems that have bought up other hospitals and doctors. That market power enables them to drive prices higher on FEHB plans, he said.

Jacqueline D. Bowens, president and CEO of the D.C. Hospital Association, said in a statement that “the costs borne by patients are not determined solely by the care they receive, but by how insurance companies choose to price, reimburse, and restrict access to that care.”

Holahan said it’s surprising that FEHB premiums are rising even faster than those of other, smaller employers. But he is not surprised federal employees don’t switch plans more often, even when it may be in their financial interest.

“It’s that people find the health care world so complicated,” he said. Holahan, a noted health economist, said he, too, finds it daunting to switch Medicare health plans.

Mike Lindquist, a scientific review officer for the National Institutes of Health, said he’s not happy with the rise in his premium payments the past two years. “It’s tough, as it’s a big expense.”

Lindquist, 43, who lives in Brunswick, Maryland, has been on the same Blue Cross and Blue Shield plan through the FEHB Program the past few years even though he evaluates his options each fall.

“By not switching, you don’t have to worry about choosing a new plan that might not take your practitioners,” he said.

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Jonathan Foley, a health consultant who worked as a senior adviser at OPM during the Biden administration, said premium increases will be a hardship for many enrollees. While the FEHB Program offers 200 health plans in total, with about 10 to 20 in each geographic market, enrollment is concentrated in just a handful of Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans.

“This concentration reduces competition and gives outsize influence” to rate increases by Blue Cross and Blue Shield, Foley said in an email.

He said the FEHB Program also faces higher costs because it requires its health plans to cover GLP-1 medications, such as Wegovy and Ozempic. Nationally, fewer than half of large employers offer this benefit, according to the Peterson Center on Healthcare and KFF. KFF is a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News.

Another cost pressure has been more members using behavioral health benefits to treat depression and anxiety since the start of the covid pandemic, Foley said.

The Trump administration’s federal workforce reductions also have contributed to cost increases, Foley said. OPM has lost about a third of its employees in the past year, leaving fewer workers to oversee the FEHB Program and negotiate with dozens of health insurers, he said.

“The workforce reductions and the unpredictable nature of policymaking in the Trump administration has created considerable uncertainty among health insurance carriers,” Foley said. “The response of actuaries to increased uncertainty is to raise rates.”

A Government Accountability Office report this year found that recent OPM staffing vacancies led to a suspension of fraud risk assessments in the FEHB Program.

John Hatton, staff vice president for policy and programs at an advocacy group called the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association, said higher prices mean it’s critical for FEHB members to shop and compare plans for next year. “The program was designed to promote competition to mitigate and drive down costs,” he said.

Hatton said OPM surveys show the main reasons people don’t change plans is they are overwhelmed by their options and worried about making a mistake. Switching to a plan with even a slightly higher deductible, he said, could save people a few hundred dollars a month on premiums.

But Humphreys, the Georgia retiree, said he likes that his current plan comes with low out-of-pocket costs for him and his wife. They owed little money when his wife suffered a kidney stone infection and sepsis, which put her in the hospital for 12 days.

That reassurance will soon come at a higher cost: Their FEHB and Medicare premiums will take up more than half of his pension check next year after accounting for taxes.

“I can take a lower-premium plan, but it’s a gamble I am not willing to take,” he said.

©2025 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By ALI SWENSON

NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on Thursday outlined a strategy to expand its use of artificial intelligence, building on the Trump administration’s enthusiastic embrace of the rapidly advancing technology while raising questions about how health information would be protected.

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HHS billed the plan as a “first step” focused largely on making its work more efficient and coordinating AI adoption across divisions. But the 20-page document also teased some grander plans to promote AI innovation, including in the analysis of patient health data and in drug development.

“For too long, our Department has been bogged down by bureaucracy and busy-work,” Deputy HHS Secretary Jim O’Neill wrote in an introduction to the strategy. “It is time to tear down these barriers to progress and unite in our use of technology to Make America Healthy Again.”

The new strategy signals how leaders across the Trump administration have embraced AI innovation, encouraging employees across the federal workforce to use chatbots and AI assistants for their daily tasks. As generative AI technology made significant leaps under President Joe Biden’s administration, he issued an executive order to establish guardrails for their use. But when President Donald Trump came into office, he repealed that order and his administration has sought to remove barriers to the use of AI across the federal government.

Experts said the administration’s willingness to modernize government operations presents both opportunities and risks. Some said that AI innovation within HHS demanded rigorous standards because it was dealing with sensitive data and questioned whether those would be met under the leadership of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Some in Kennedy’s own “Make America Health Again” movement have also voiced concerns about tech companies having access to people’s personal information.

Strategy encourages AI use across the department

HHS’s new plan calls for embracing a “try-first” culture to help staff become more productive and capable through the use of AI. Earlier this year, HHS made the popular AI model ChatGPT available to every employee in the department.

The document identifies five key pillars for its AI strategy moving forward, including creating a governance structure that manages risk, designing a suite of AI resources for use across the department, empowering employees to use AI tools, funding programs to set standards for the use of AI in research and development and incorporating AI in public health and patient care.

It says HHS divisions are already working on promoting the use of AI “to deliver personalized, context-aware health guidance to patients by securely accessing and interpreting their medical records in real time.” Some in Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement have expressed concerns about the use of AI tools to analyze health data and say they aren’t comfortable with the U.S. health department working with big tech companies to access people’s personal information.

HHS previously faced criticism for pushing legal boundaries in its sharing of sensitive data when it handed over Medicaid recipients’ personal health data to Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials.

Experts question how the department will ensure sensitive medical data is protected

Oren Etzioni, an artificial intelligence expert who founded a nonprofit to fight political deepfakes, said HHS’s enthusiasm for using AI in health care was worth celebrating but warned that speed shouldn’t come at the expense of safety.

“The HHS strategy lays out ambitious goals — centralized data infrastructure, rapid deployment of AI tools, and an AI-enabled workforce — but ambition brings risk when dealing with the most sensitive data Americans have: their health information,” he said.

Etzioni said the strategy’s call for “gold standard science,” risk assessments and transparency in AI development appear to be positive signs. But he said he doubted whether HHS could meet those standards under the leadership of Kennedy, who he said has often flouted rigor and scientific principles.

Darrell West, senior fellow in the Brooking Institution’s Center for Technology Innovation, noted the document promises to strengthen risk management but doesn’t include detailed information about how that will be done.

“There are a lot of unanswered questions about how sensitive medical information will be handled and the way data will be shared,” he said. “There are clear safeguards in place for individual records, but not as many protections for aggregated information being analyzed by AI tools. I would like to understand how officials plan to balance the use of medical information to improve operations with privacy protections that safeguard people’s personal information.”

Still, West, said, if done carefully, “this could become a transformative example of a modernized agency that performs at a much higher level than before.”

The strategy says HHS had 271 active or planned AI implementations in the 2024 financial year, a number it projects will increase by 70% in 2025.