In two Olympic appearances, Joseph Fahnbulleh is now 2 for 2 at reaching the men’s 200-meter dash men’s final.

The 2019 Hopkins High School graduate punched his ticket to Thursday’s medal round, set for 1:30 p.m. Central, with a second-place finish in his semifinal Wednesday in Paris.

Fahnbulleh, who entered the meet ranked No. 11 in the world in the 200, crossed the finish line in 20.12 seconds, just three-hundredths of a second behind American Erriyon Knighton.

Fahnbulleh’s time Wednesday was sixth fastest among all competitors. Rice Lake product Kenneth Bednarek ran the second-fastest time, winning his semifinal heat in 20.00 seconds. The top time of the day went to Botswana’s Letsile Tebogo. The 100-meter Olympic champion, Noah Lyles of America, is still the gold-medal favorite.

Kenneth Bednarek, centre, of the United States, competes in the men’s 200-meter semifinal at the 2024 Summer Olympics, Wednesday, Aug. 7, 2024, in Saint-Denis, France. (AP Photo/Petr David Josek)

Bednarek claimed silver in this event in Tokyo in 2021, while Fahnbulleh, who runs for Liberia, finished fifth. Lyles is the defending world champion, while Knighton was second at Worlds last year, and Tebogo was third.

Bednarek (fifth) and Fahnbulleh (ninth) were each off the podium in Budapest in 2023, something they hope to change on Thursday. Sub-20-second times will likely be required to finish in the top three.

Fahnbulleh has gone that low before, though not this season. Bednarek owns the second-fastest time this year at 19.59 seconds, which trails only Lyles’ best (19.53). Both of those times were set at the U.S. Olympic Trials.

Related Articles

Olympics TV schedule for Thursday, Aug. 8

2024 Olympics schedule Aug. 8: Men’s basketball semifinals, Noah Lyles in the 200

Algerians rally behind gold medal hopeful Imane Khelif amid gender misconceptions

World records are getting shattered in cycling at the Olympic velodrome. There are a few reasons why

Everything Simone Biles did at the Paris Olympics was amplified. She thrived in the spotlight

Ariana Arghandewal | (TNS) Bankrate

We’re in the height of summer travel season, and that means you’ll likely spend more on booking hotels, airfare and other travel necessities. At the same time, more than one in three people planning a summer vacation in 2024 are considering taking on debt to cover the costs , according to Bankrate’s Summer Travel Survey.

Whether you’re traveling alone or with a group, tracking your vacation spending with one of the best travel budget apps can help you avoid overspending and even split expenses equally between your travel partners.

With so many great travel budget apps on the market, you might be wondering which one to get. It really comes down to your travel style and needs. Are you traveling solo or with a group? Do you need a simple budget tracker or do you want planning tools? There’s something out there for everyone, but here are the best options.

Travel budget apps for work

Expensify

Managing your expenses when you’re traveling for work can be challenging. Expensify lets you track your travel expenses easily. Instead of ransacking your luggage for that missing dinner receipt, just snap a picture of the receipt with the Smart Scan feature, and share it with your accounting team for reimbursement.

If you’re merely tracking expenses for tax purposes, Expensify offers several handy tools. The GPS calculator automatically tracks your eligible mileage for you, so you don’t have to enter it manually. This work travel budget app also lets you create expense reports by scanning receipts or entering time worked, for billing purposes.

Sign-up is super easy. All you have to do is provide your email address to set up an Expensify account. You can start using the app immediately, which is free for most users. A “Collect” account, which includes accounting and payroll tools, costs $5 per month. Meanwhile, a “Control” account costs $9 per month and allows for multiple approvers, setting expense policies and custom reporting tools.

When you sign up for Expensify, you can get a seven-day free trial of the Collect and Control memberships.

SAP Concur

If you’re a seasoned business traveler, you may already be familiar with the Concur suite (and in some cases, you may be required by your employer to use it). If you aren’t, get ready to meet one of the most robust, full-featured business travel solutions available today.

Within the SAP Concur suite, you’ll find separate modules for managing travel plans and submitting reimbursement requests for travel-related expenses. Concur Expense’s ExpenseIt app for travel expenses makes it easy to take pictures of your paper receipts and automatically categorize them to submit as expense reports. Meanwhile, Concur Travel lets you book your own business travel or make arrangements with your company’s preselected airline carriers, hotels, and other providers.

SAP Concur offers travel management solutions for organizations of all sizes — from small businesses to enterprise leaders. Business owners and managers can try Concur Expense and Concur Travel for free; individual users who have access to these tools through their employer can download the iOS or Google Play app to get started.

Solo travel budget apps

PocketGuard

PocketGuard markets itself as the “#1 budgeting app for college students and overspenders,” but it’s actually a great vacation budget planner as well. That’s because the app uses the “in my pocket” feature to calculate how much disposable income you have available. You can then allocate this toward your travel budget.

All you have to do is provide your income and spending information. PocketGuard will calculate your disposable income accordingly. If you’re willing to go into debt to travel this summer, then PocketGuard might be able to help with that too. This impromptu travel budget app will recommend a strategy for paying off debt in the most efficient way. You can use PocketGuard to set financial goals, save money and plan for future travel as a reward.

Trabee Pocket

The Trabee Pocket app provides both travel budgeting and expense tracking in a user-friendly interface. Trabee lets you set a vacation budget and then enter your expenses to track how much you’re spending in different categories. The app also provides currency conversion, so you can get an accurate sense of your spending.

At the end of your trip, you can even export your expense data to a PDF or CSV file for future budgeting and tax purposes. Overall, this is a solid vacation budget planner app if you’re looking for a free option. Trabee is available on iOS and the Google Play store.

Tripcoin

The great thing about Tripcoin is that you can use it without an internet connection, which is especially important if you’re traveling through remote areas. The app’s Dropbox integration also makes it possible to back up your data in case you lose your phone.

Tripcoin’s user-friendly interface makes it easy to set up a trip and break down your spending each day by expense category. You can find out how much you’re spending on transportation, meals, activities and other travel expenses, making it a great way to stay accountable and on top of your budget at each destination.

Tripcoin supports over 150 currencies, converging your spending automatically based on current exchange rates. This ensures accuracy in your budget tracking and ensures you don’t have to perform this tedious task yourself.

Budget apps for groups

Splitwise

If you’re traveling with a group, it’s not always practical for each person to pay for their own expenses. Pulling out multiple credit cards to cover the group dinner bill is possible, but booking group tours and even airfare can be a hassle when done individually.

That’s where Splitwise comes in. The app lets users track shared expenses and the balance owed by each person. This transparency can make it much easier to determine who owes what at the end of a group trip. Frequent traveler and UX specialist Christian Castillo has used Splitwise across multiple group vacations to split expenses evenly with friends.

“The app makes it easy to input expenses as they occur and I’m able to send it to the group that I’m traveling with all at once,” says Castillo. “So no miscommunication has been had because with ferry rides, dinners, and excursions, we all agree to split the cost evenly.”

He touts Splitwise’s ability to load expenses as you go and even scan receipts with the paid pro version of the app. One of the biggest advantages he shares is having everything on one platform.

“Splitwise connects to your Paypal, Venmo, or bank account where you can pay back your friends quickly. It doesn’t stop you from adding a gaggle of people. Create the group, add expenses — it’s all tracked in one area. You’re also able to remove people just as easily if one of your friends decided they did not want coffee that day, but everyone else did.”

The one downside Castillo shares about using the Splitwise app is the limited capability of the free version,

“One downfall about Splitwise is that you do get capped on how many expenses you can input in one day unless you have the pro version.”

Even without spending $4.99 per month on the pro version, this travel budget app is still highly useful. If you’re planning a group trip and need a way to split expenses without the hassle, simply download the free app, add group members and seamlessly settle up at the end of the trip.

Batch App

This one is for the planners. Planning bachelor or bachelorette parties are notoriously challenging on both budget and group logistics. But the Batch app simplifies things with budgeting and planning tools designed to make a variety of parties and vacations less stressful. Users can budget, plan and book all activities for a dinner party, group trip, birthday or bachelorette party. You can even add your friends to the app to communicate and make planning decisions easier, as well as divide up expenses in the app.

While Batch is primarily marketed around bachelorette parties, you can use it to book any type of group activity in participating cities. Although you can do just about all of your trip planning through this app, this one doesn’t handle payments. It only helps track group expenses through its Ledger feature, so you can see who owes what. The Batch app is free to use, though there is a processing fee when you book events.

TravelSpend

In my own experience, one of the best travel budget apps is TravelSpend. It’s simple to use, automatically converts spending to your home currency and lets you add friends so you can track expenses together. Plus it gives you a breakdown of which categories you’re doing most of your spending in. I recently used it to track expenses on a trip to Toronto, and it helped me stay within my budget.

It took no time at all to enter my spending as it occurred and it was immediately deducted from my set budget for the trip so I could see how much was left to spend at a glance. It was also nice to see what categories I did most of my spending in which would come in handy for those using a rotating category credit card.

You can also export your spending to a csv or excel file to integrate it with your other budgeting methods. With the premium version (which costs $4.99 per month) you get added functionality such as:

—Creating custom categories

—Attaching GPS locations to your costs

—Adding income

—Creating your own exchange rate

—Seeing and settling debts

Even without the added features of the premium version, using TravelSpend for free is powerful on its own. The primary drawback for me is that even though you can track shared expenses, there are no payment integrations within the app. So you’ll have to switch over to Venmo, Paypal or Zelle once it’s time to settle up, and then switch back to TravelSpend to mark the debts as paid.

The bottom line

With the summer travel season on the upswing, having a travel budget app is more important than ever. Sticking to a budget at home can be challenging in itself, but once you add the thrill of a vacation, budgeting can quickly snowball if you don’t have the right tools or apps to help you reign it in. By utilizing one of the best travel budget apps, you can stay on budget, cut down on unnecessary expenses and plan your travels more efficiently.

___

If you have a so-so screenplay, it doesn’t hurt to have talented people around to make the most of it.

Take, for instance, “The Instigators,” a buddy crime comedy that, after a limited theatrical rollout last week, lands this week on Apple TV+.

The movie is better than it has any right to be thanks largely to the chemistry of stars — and ol’ Boston pals — Matt Damon and Casey Affleck.

It’s better for the supporting work of talented Hong Chau and, to a lesser degree, by big-name bit players including Michael Stuhlbarg, Ving Rhames, Alfred Molina and Paul Walter Hauser.

Last but not least, “The Instigators” benefits — greatly — from having a well-above-average director in Doug Liman, who long ago directed Damon in “The Bourne Identity” and keeps this romp engaging and moving along to, well, let’s say an acceptable ending.

Set in Beantown, “The Instigators” first introduces us to Damon’s Rory, a former Marine who hasn’t seen much go right in his life, in a session with psychiatrist Dr. Donna Rivera (Chau). He won’t reveal much to his caring doctor but does mention that he’d had the thought of ending his life in a year if things didn’t turn around for him.

“And when did you come up with this plan?” she asks.

“It was about a year ago.”

Desperate to generate a little more than $32,000 to address a situation with his son, Rory meets with gangster Mr. Besegai (Stuhlbarg), who wants to rip off Boston Mayor Miccelli (Rob Perlman) on what surely will prove to be his re-election night. Long on the take, Miccelli is expected to be greeted with bags of cash at his waterfront victory party.

For the job, Rory has been recruited by unspectacular Besegai lieutenant Scalvo (rapper and singer Jack Harlow), as has Cobby (Affleck), an ex-con we meet using a neighborhood kid to pass the breathalyzer on his motorcycle so he can start it.

Rory’s quiet, primarily talking only when asking one of his many logistical questions, while Cobby is a chatterbox, commenting, sarcastically, on this, that and the other. Both men frustrate Besegai and Scalvo, the latter also being a constant irritation to the former.

What could go wrong with this operation?

Matt Damon, left, Alfred Molina, top center, Jack Harlow and Michael Stuhlbarg share a scene in “The Instigators.” (Claire Folger/Apple TV+/TNS)

Well, it should come as no surprise, plenty, and soon enough Rory and Cobby are on the run, both from criminals — such as Booch (Hauser), who works for Besegai associate Richie DeChico (Molina) — and the cops — namely Frank Toomey (Rhames), who has an off-the-books relationship with Miccelli and is turned loose by him after the lads swipe something they’ll come to learn is of great value.

Before long, Dr. Rivera is roped into the affair, more or less agreeing to be taken hostage by Rory to provide some medical care to Cobby. She then proceeds to try to re-engage with Rory as a counselor, which is witnessed with bewilderment — and genuine curiosity — by Cobby, who takes an interest in this highly intelligent woman.

Damon scores some laughs as the criminal newbie, but “Manchester by the Sea” star Affleck is more consistently funny cracking-wise, even as he does it at a relaxed pace that befits the actor’s talents.

While Damon is more connected to Affleck’s brother, Ben Affleck — and “The Instigators” is the second movie to be produced by Damon and Ben Affleck’s company, Artists Equity, following last year’s “Air,” which featured both actors — Damon and Casey Affleck have an obvious comfort with each other even if their characters don’t. (The latter appeared in 1997’s “Good Will Hunting,” which, of course, helped to establish Damon and Ben Affleck as stars.)

Rory and Cobby constantly annoy each other, a dynamic with the possibility of becoming annoying but doesn’t.

When you stir Dr. Rivera into the mix, Chau more or less serves the same purpose as Selena Gomez in the hit Hulu series “Only Murders in the Building,” where she shakes up the dynamic of longtime partners-in-comedy Steve Martin and Martin Short. Chau doesn’t fit neatly with Damon and Affleck, which is fun.

Related Articles

Column: The allure of DVDs over streaming

‘Blade Runner,’ ‘The Thing,’ ‘E.T.’ and the legacy of 1982’s summer sci-fi movies

Movie review: ‘Coup!’ is a tasty morsel of social commentary

Prince finally inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame following ‘Purple Rain’ screening

Column: Do movies have a message? (They do, whether studios like it or not)

It’s too bad Chau — an Academy Award nominee for her work in 2022’s “The Whale” whose credits also include “Downsizing” (2017) and “The Menu” (2022) — isn’t in more scenes. She adds something to each she gets.

And she gets many more than Stuhlbarg (“A Serious Man”), Molina (“Chocolat”) and Hauser (“Richard Jewell”), each of whom lends his gifts to only a few minutes of “The Instigators.” We are especially left wanting more of the impactful Stuhlbarg, intimidatingly bearded, as a career criminal at his wits’ end.

Rhames (“Pulp Fiction”) has a bit more to do, but he, too, is underutilized.

The aforementioned screenplay is the work of Chuck MacLean (“City on a Hill”) and Casey Affleck, who’ve known each other for years. MacLean is said to have written an early draft years ago, the script changing significantly when Affleck joined him to work on it.

It sounds as if the story told in “The Instigators” continued to evolve through shooting, Liman encouraging the cast to offer ideas and improvisation during the filming. It certainly has that feel.

Liman, whose credits also include 2005’s “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” and 2014’s excellent “Edge of Tomorrow,” also was at the helm for this year’s guilty-pleasure, straight-to-Prime Video remake of “Road House.” If something has a chance to work, he’ll make it work.

As fun as it is, “The Instigators” certainly isn’t all it could have been. But while it may be rough around the edges, without the people involved, it could have been downright rough.

‘The Instigators’

Where: Apple TV+.

When: Aug. 9.

Rated: R for pervasive language and some violence.

Runtime: 1 hour, 41 minutes.

Stars (of four): 2.5.

By TODD RICHMOND

MILWAUKEE (AP) — Prosecutors charged four Milwaukee hotel employees Tuesday with being a party to felony murder in connection with D’Vontaye Mitchell’s death.

According to a criminal complaint, the four employees dragged Mitchell out of the Hyatt Hotel on June 30 after Mitchell entered a woman’s bathroom and held him on his stomach for eight or nine minutes.

One of the employees told investigators that Mitchell was having trouble breathing and repeatedly pleaded for help, according to the complaint.

An autopsy showed that Mitchell suffered from morbid obesity and had ingested cocaine and methamphetamine, the complaint said.

Relatives of Mitchell and their lawyers had previously reviewed hotel surveillance video provided by the district attorney’s office. They described seeing Mitchell being chased inside the hotel by security guards and then dragged outside where he was beaten.

Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who is part of a team of lawyers representing Mitchell’s family, has said video recorded by a bystander and circulating on social media shows security guards with their knees on Mitchell’s back and neck. Crump has also questioned why Milwaukee authorities had not filed any charges related to Mitchell’s death.

Aimbridge Hospitality, the company that manages the hotel, said previously that several employees involved in Mitchell’s death have been fired.