The Egyptian Football Association says it has asked Fifa to kick the officials in charge of their World Cup last-16 defeat by Argentina out of the tournament.
The EFA said it had lodged a complaint with football's world governing body and wants an investigation into "double standards" of officiating in the game in Atlanta.
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With Egypt leading 1-0 in the second half, the video assistant referee (VAR) ruled out a goal by Mostafa Zico after Egypt midfielder Marwan Attia was penalised for stepping on Lisandro Martinez's foot at the start of the move.
Egypt also thought Mohamed Salah was fouled in the Argentina penalty area, seconds before the reigning champions broke for the stoppage-time winner in a 3-2 victory.
An EFA statement read: "Hany Abou Rida, president of the Egyptian football federation, filed a complaint with Fifa, demanding an investigation into the French referee Francois Letexier after the serious refereeing mistakes committed by the team of referees and double standards, which caused the Egypt team to lose the match and leave the World Cup."
The EFA has called for an investigation of the team of referees and video technology referees after what it said were "blatant errors and insisting on not reviewing some of the footage".
It "demanded the exclusion of the referee and the entire crew from the World Cup after investigating these mistakes" and alleged "the crime of discrimination against the Egyptian national team".
Egypt have never reached the quarter-finals of the World Cup.
Argentina captain Lionel Messi, who could be playing in his final World Cup, set up their first goal in the 79th minute and scored an 83rd-minute equaliser.
After the game manager Hossam Hassan said Egypt had been "treated unfairly" and "suffered injustice".
"Perhaps they wanted to keep the world champion in the competition. Perhaps they wanted Messi to stay in the running," he said.
Zico said: "The referee was really unfair. The injustice was clear. There's been an unfairness right from the start of the match.
"It is clear that this tournament has been fixed."
The EFA also confirmed it has approved a new contract for Hassan, who has been in charge of the national team since February 2024.
Argentina play Switzerland in Kansas City on Saturday (02:00 BST, Sunday).
BBC Sport has contacted Fifa for comment.
Protests against referees and their decisions rarely get anywhere at the World Cup.
Perhaps the referees' committee might quietly provide the officials with their plane tickets home, but complaints are given short shrift.
At the 2022 World Cup, France lodged a protest following a 1-0 defeat to Tunisia in their final group game.
Les Bleus had a stoppage time goal ruled out via a video assistant referee review which appeared to go against VAR protocol.
As is the way with Fifa, the appeal was thrown out with a very short statement and no explanation of why.
"The Fifa Disciplinary Committee has dismissed the protest submitted by the French Football Association in relation to the Tunisia v France FIFA World Cup match played on Nov 30," a statement simply read.
The issue any football association has in raising complaints about referees is that decisions are almost always subjective.
By human nature, officials do make mistakes. But that does not mean there is anything suspect.
These complaints, raised in the heat of the emotion of defeat, tend to fade away.
Somit Goyal is the CEO of IBS Software, a travel technology company providing AI-powered solutions across aviation, cargo and hospitality.
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When Willie Walsh, director general of IATA (and incoming CEO of IndiGo), recently noted that an airline now earns about $7.90 per passenger transported across the globe—less than Apple makes on a phone case—he gave the industry both its punchline and its diagnosis.
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Few industries are harder to operate than the airline industry. Airlines are capital- and labor-intensive and structurally vulnerable to shocks beyond their control. On top of that, decades of distribution evolution have embedded third parties—GDS systems, online travel agencies, corporate travel managers, metasearch and aggregation platforms—deep inside the customer's journey, siphoning revenue and margin that the carrier would otherwise capture. The result is a 2.0% net margin on a trillion dollars of revenue. Modern technology and standards now make it possible to recover a meaningful share of that journey margin.
The arithmetic of the gap is stark. Three online travel platforms, Booking, Expedia and Trip.com, earned more than $11 billion in profit between them last year, roughly a third of what the entire global airline industry earned. Across the same traveler's full trip, these platforms routinely earn more profit per traveler than the airlines that fly them.
Airlines have spent 40 years optimizing themselves as operators—measured in RASM, CASM, load factor and yield. None of these metrics tells you whether a customer's journey drove value to the P&L.
What Modern Retailing Actually Changes
Modern airline retailing—IATA's "Offers and Orders"—changes how an airline assembles, sells and services what it provides to a customer.
Today, a passenger books a flight and receives an e-ticket bound to a PNR. Bags, seats, lounge passes, ground transport and hotels live in separate systems and separate transactions. The airline sells the seat; everyone else sells the journey.
Under modern offer and order architecture, the same passenger receives a single dynamic offer assembled in real time from the airline's own and selected partner inventory, held as a single order record, and serviced through a unified system regardless of what changes after booking. The airline sees a coherent customer. The margin previously fragmented across intermediaries flows back, in meaningful part, to the carrier that orchestrated the trip.
The Structural Leak
IATA forecasts $23 billion in industry net profit for 2026, on $1.05 trillion of revenue. Industry ROIC sits at 4.3%, persistently below the 8.5% cost of capital. Even at full-throttle demand, airlines barely earn what investors require.
The leak is structural. Global airline ancillary revenue reached $157 billion in 2025—15.7% of revenue, up from 9.1% a decade ago. Premium and business travelers spend lavishly on hotels, ground transport, lounges, dining and experiences, and book most of that adjacent value somewhere else. The hidden margin in aviation is the delta between the seat cost and the total travel wallet, and it is currently being captured by everyone except the carrier.
How Modern Retailing Moves The P&L
Modern retailing moves five things on the P&L, directly or indirectly.
Distribution costs fall when the channel mix shifts toward direct and modern indirect. Conversion lifts when offers are dynamic and contextual rather than static fare classes. Attach rate (the share of customers who buy ancillary products alongside their flight) lifts when those ancillaries are merchandised against intent, rather than presented at checkout as an afterthought. Servicing costs fall when the order, not the PNR, becomes the system of record. And customer lifetime value compounds when the same traveler is recognized across channels and trips, rather than reacquired at marketing cost on every booking.
Three moves separate carriers that will earn the hidden margin from those that will surrender it.
First, reorganize the commercial P&L around the journey rather than the segment. Other industries have already made this turn. Financial services moved from product-line P&Ls to customer-relationship P&Ls built around share of wallet and lifetime value. Retail moved from category to customer-centric merchandising. Telecom replaced line-count metrics with ARPU and churn. In each case, the discipline was the same: Stop optimizing the unit of production, start optimizing the unit of value to the customer. Put ARPU, attach rate and customer lifetime value on the executive dashboard alongside RASM, and compensate against them.
Second, invest in the technology that makes journey-based selling real. The offer side of modern retailing has had the attention and the spend; the order side is where margin actually compounds. Modernizing order architecture—moving from rigid PNR and e-ticket constructs to flexible, real-time order management that holds seats, ancillaries, partner products and post-booking changes as a single customer record—is the essential backbone of this shift. Without it, dynamic offers collapse the moment the customer needs to make a change.
Third, empower the commercial organization to execute the first two moves. Strong airline commercial teams understand the operational constraints better than any outsider can. What helps is bringing in external talent steeped in customer lifetime value disciplines from retail, fintech and consumer platforms, and aligning incentives and authority with the journey so the team can make integrated trade-offs across technology, channels and customer experience.
The journey is where that imbalance gets corrected. The framing I share with airline leaders is this: The question is no longer how to monetize a four-hour flight, but how to convert it into a four-day experience, one where the carrier is present, relevant and earning margin across the full arc of the customer's trip. The carriers that internalize this in 2026 will compound advantage for a decade. The ones that stay focused on selling seats will keep funding everyone else's margin with their own.
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AUSTIN, TEXAS - MARCH 15: (L-R) Rob Tapert and Sam Raimi speak at the Q+A for the "Evil Dead Rise" premiere during 2023 SXSW Conference and Festivals at The Paramount Theater on March 15, 2023 in Austin, Texas. (Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images for SXSW)
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Getty Images for SXSW
As legendary as the Evil Dead film series has become in the past 45 years, the horror geniuses behind the horror franchise — Sam Raimi, Rob Tapert and Bruce Campbell — are well aware that there are plenty of qualified name candidates in Hollywood to direct new terrifying tales of the Necronomicon, aka the Book of the Dead.
Instead, producers Raimi and Tapert, along with Campbell — who has stepped back into an executive producer capacity for the franchise — have been taking a novel approach to the rebirth of the film series 13 years ago by hiring up-and-coming directors to reimagine the film series as it moves forward. As such, the trio hired Fede Alvarez to direct 2013’s Evil Dead, Lee Cronin to helm Evil Dead Rise in 2023 and Sébastien Vaniček to direct Evil Dead Burn, which blazes its way into theaters this weekend.
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“We like to get a young voice and a new take for the franchise [with each Evil Dead film], and I think that has allowed Sam and me to keep the films fresh and original,” Tapert, along with Raimi, said in a recent Zoom conversation. “Each guy feels like they need to top what the previous director has done, so there's a friendly rivalry between them.”
Part of the reason each of the new directors has been successful in their respective visions for Evil Dead, Evil Dead Rise and Evil Dead Burn, Tapert explained, is because the stakes are incredibly high to deliver a film that will satisfy the fans of the original films in the franchise, as well as the new installments.
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Erroll Shand on the set of "Evil Dead Burn."
Warner Bros. Pictures/New Line Cinema
“For the new people coming in, the biggest challenge of making an Evil Dead movie is to not make a bad one,” Tapert observed. “So, they carry a lot of responsibility, and it makes them think and work all the harder. That’s why we get a fresh young voice [for each film]. We are getting people who really need this to work for their careers.”
Playing in Thursday preview screenings before opening in theaters everywhere on Friday, Evil Dead Burn stars Souheila Yacoub (Dune: Part Two) as Alice, who is grieving the tragic death of her husband, Will (George Pullar), despite their tumultuous relationship.
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After Will’s funeral, Alice retreats to her in-laws’ remote, dilapidated house, where, through the Necronomicon, a demonic spirit is unleashed and begins to turn the family members into Deadites.
Rated R, Evil Dead Burn also stars Hunter Doohan (Wednesday), Luciane Buchanan (Chief of War), Tandi Wright, Erroll Shand (Chief of War) and Maude Devey.
The Rebirth Of The ‘Evil Dead’ Film Franchise Began In 2010
Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert’s approach of employing fresh voices to continue their vision of the Evil Dead franchise makes complete sense, considering that the young director and producer were in their late teens and early 20s, respectively, when they made the proof-of-concept horror movie short, Within the Woods, starring Bruce Campbell,in 1978.
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The short, of course, was fully realized as The Evil Dead in 1981, which was followed by Evil Dead II in 1987 and Army of Darkness in 1992. In the wake of the original trilogy, Raimi and Campbell became horror movie luminaries and Campbell’s chainsaw-wielding and boomstick slinging Ash Williams transformed into an antihero icon.
Ten years later, Raimi and Tapert formed their production company Ghost House Pictures, where the duo produced such hits as The Grudge and its sequel in 2004 and 2006, respectively, as well as 2007’s 30 Days of Night. Ghost House also released Drag Me to Hell in 2009, which was directed by Raimi. By decade’s end, however, the idea of continuing the Evil Dead franchise after Army of Darkness was in limbo until the idea of reimaging the original Evil Dead movie came about.
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“We always hoped there would be another one, but we didn’t really have an idea to follow it up,” Raimi, who recently directed the horror hit Send Help, recalled. “Around 2010, Rob started saying, ‘Hey, we got a horror movie company, Ghost House Pictures, let’s get going a remake of the Evil Dead story, and I thought, ‘Yeah, if we can find the right director.’ So, he looked and looked and finally found Fede Alvarez, and that set the template.
Maude Davey, Tandi Wright, Hunter Doohan, and Souheila Yacoub in "Evil Dead Burn."
Warner Bros. Pictures/New Line Cinema
“After that, Rob and I just tried to find the best creative director,” Raimi added. “Somebody that doesn’t have a tremendous amount of experience but they’re still auteurs and are very creative but not set in their ways because the Evil Dead movies really want to deliver the next thing for the horror crowd.”
One of the biggest expectations that Raimi and Tapert have for every new director in the franchise is that they don’t repeat the creative approach of the original Evil Dead films, yet at the same time maintain the essence of the franchise while making the newest chapter their own.
“Their creativity, positive attitude and desire to thrill the audience were really important in hiring them, mixed with elements of the Evil Dead — the demons, the Book of the Dead and the specific props and lore that goes with it,” Raimi said.
Erroll Shand and Sébastien Vaniček on the set of "Evil Dead Burn."
Warner Bros. Pictures/New Line Cinema
Sam Raimi Knew Sébastien Vaniček While Screening The Director’s Horror Thriller ‘Infested’
The original Evil Dead movie trilogy, of course, turned the horror film genre on its head by starting as a straight-up horror story in the original that evolved into horror comedies for the second and third films, as well as the vastly under-appreciated spinoff series Ash vs. Evil Dead from 2015-2018.
The new chapters in the Evil Dead movie series, beginning with the 2013 reimagining, got back into touch with the franchise’s horror film roots, however, and as such, have gripped audiences with liberal uses of blood, guts, gore and unnerving terror, which Sébastien Vaniček ramps up to a whole new level of intensity in Evil Dead Burn.
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Raimi said he was convinced Vaniček was the right director for Evil Dead Burn after Tapert and Ghost House Pictures executive producers Romel Adam and Jose Cañas had him screen the French filmmaker’s 2023 horror thriller Infested.
“The film was great. It was very well made, very precise, intelligent and showed that he had aspirations to do things a little differently,” Raimi recalled. “The scares were working and though I didn’t see it with a crowd, I could tell it was a real crowd pleaser. He was the positive, fun, spooky and audience-thrilling-type of storyteller we were looking for.”
Naturally, Raimi and Tapert interviewed Vaniček after the Infested screening, but by that time, they already had their minds made up.
“It wasn’t the interview; it was his movie that did all the talking,” Raimi noted.
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA - JUNE 30: (L-R) Sam Raimi, Souheila Yacoub, Sébastien Vaniček, Luciane Buchanan, and Hunter Doohan attends "Evil Dead Burn" Fan Event at The Saban Theatre on June 30, 2026 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by David Jon/Getty Images for Warner Bros. Pictures )
Getty Images for Warner Bros. Pictures
Part of the “doing thing a little differently,” Tapert added, was how Vaniček subverted what are sure to be expectations by audiences when it comes to past Evil Dead films and taking slight detours that still pay homage to originals in a different sort of way. Tapert admitted that such moves, while ultimately satisfying, also come with a bit of trepidation.
“It’s a challenge for us when directors — in this case, Sébastien — come in and subvert expectations, but we have a canon within our universe that Sam and I at times have to let go of and say, ‘Okay, you can break that rule because it’s not really written in stone,” Tapert said, while Raimi added with a laugh, “It’s hard for us.”
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And because of that canon, Tapert and Raimi are there to ensure that any subversions don’t go too far astray.
“It’s important to do so because much of the audience has seen other Evil Dead movies, and to deliver them something that they’re not expecting or in a totally different way is what these roller coaster rides and these journeys are all about,” Tapert said.
AUSTIN, TEXAS - MARCH 15: (L-R) Rob Tapert, Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell attend the "Featured Session: Evil Dead Rise: Flesh-Possessing Demons Come Home" during the 2023 SXSW Conference and Festivals at Austin Convention Center on March 15, 2023 in Austin, Texas. (Photo by Amy E. Price/Getty Images for SXSW)
Getty Images for SXSW
Another reason it was important for Vaniček to keep the Evil Dead canon in mind is that Evil Dead Burn is part of a much larger narrative, Tapert said. (Note to audiences: Stay all the way through the end credits of Evil Dead Burn to get the fully fleshed-out picture.)
“We said to Sébastien, ‘You have to connect back to Evil Dead Rise somehow a little bit and push forward the lore of the book, what is the goal of the people with the book — the professors and all that — so he had to carry the ball and move those things down the field a little bit and that was a challenge with that movie for him,” Tapert explained.
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“Left to all the directors’ devices, they don’t want to carry the water for what came before or what’s coming afterwards," Tapert added. "But the one thing that Sam and I feel is that [the Evil Dead movies] can’t just be a whole series of standalones because the audience wants to start connecting the dots. Funnily enough, it’s a jigsaw puzzle in process.”
Evil Dead Burn plays in preview screenings on Thursday before opening in theaters nationwide on Friday.
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Ellis' granddaughter Laura Enston welcomed the news and said: "The shadow of Ruth's execution has fallen across two generations. We have carried shame that was never ours to bear."
Nightclub hostess and mother of two children aged three and 10-years-old, Ellis, from Rhyl, Denbighshire, shot Blakely outside The Magdala pub in Hampstead, London, following a tumultuous relationship involving infidelity on both sides.
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Ellis had an abortion, which was illegal in the UK at the time, and was physically abused by the racing driver - including being punched in the stomach during an argument that led to a miscarriage.
The judge told the jury in her case to disregard the fact that the mother-of-two had been "badly treated by her lover" as a defence.
Her case provoked a public outcry and occurred two years before legal changes saw diminished responsibility introduced as a defence.
The story of her relationship with Blakely was turned into the 1985 film Dance with a Stranger starring Miranda Richardson and Rupert Everett.
On Wednesday in the House of Commons, Labour MP Pam Cox asked Lammy for the pardon on behalf of her grandchildren, who were watching proceedings from the public gallery.
She said: "Her case serves as a haunting reminder of a time when our justice system ignored the realities of domestic abuse and coercive control.
"In the decades since, members of Ruth's family and supporters have campaigned unwaveringly for her to receive a posthumous pardon.
"Will the deputy prime minister agree with me that their courageous campaign, and the terrible lessons of Ruth's case, must strengthen the government's resolve to free women from devastating cycles of abuse?"
Lammy responded: "I have the honour to say that His Majesty the King has accepted our advice to grant Ruth Ellis a conditional pardon, the last woman to be hanged in the United Kingdom.
"While the pardon does not claim she was innocent of killing David Blakely, it replaces the death penalty with a sentence of life imprisonment to recognise a profound injustice in this exceptional case."
The King has the power to grant pardons or commute sentences, which in practice is used only when the government requests it.
He added: "We hope this brings a measure of peace to Ruth Ellis' family, who have carried the weight of what happened to her for over 70 years."
Ellis' granddaughter Laura Enston said that although the impact of the sentence on her family could not be undone, she felt justice had been done after 70 years.
"Ruth was a victim of sustained and brutal abuse. Her children - our mother and uncle - never recovered," she said.
"My uncle took his own life. My mother's trauma left her unable to be the parent we needed.
"The shadow of Ruth's execution has fallen across two generations. We have carried shame that was never ours to bear."
"We hope Ruth's story serves as a lasting reminder that the justice system must reckon with the abuse that drives women to the edge - and must never be afraid to acknowledge when it has got things wrong."
In interviews last year, Enston said the impact of domestic abuse was poorly understood at the time of Ellis' conviction and, had the trial happened now, her grandmother would have been treated very differently by the justice system.
Part of the issue had been Ellis' appearance, Enson told AFP last year, because the glamorous single mother showed no emotion during her trial, at which the jury took just 14 minutes to find her guilty.
"She inadvertently played up to that sort of cold-blooded killer persona that she'd been portrayed to be, but knowing what we know now about trauma and slow-burn provocation, Ruth was traumatised... and typical of domestic abuse victims," Enston said.
The abuse included an incident 10 days before the killing in April 1955 when Ellis suffered a miscarriage after Blakely, the baby's father, punched her in the stomach.
Minister for Victims and Tackling Violence Against Women and Girls Catherine Atkinson said: "I want to thank her grandchildren for their determination in bringing this case forward, and for making sure her story was finally heard."
Katy Colton, a partner at law firm Mishcon de Reya, who acted for Ellis' grandchildren, called the pardon a landmark moment.
"Today's decision does not only right a wrong done over 70 years ago.
"It sends a clear signal about the aspirations of our justice system. Violence against women and girls remains a national emergency.
"The government's public acknowledgement that the abuse Ruth Ellis endured should have impacted the outcome of her case reflects an important principle: that survivors of domestic abuse today deserve a justice system that properly understands and recognises the impact of that abuse."
The death penalty was abolished as the punishment for murder in 1965 and the last executions took place in 1964, when two men were hanged for murder. %!s()
And the 2026 Emmy nominees for best variety series are… The Daily Show, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, The Late Show With Stephen Colbert and Saturday Night Live! In other words, the five shows The Hollywood Reporter (and probably you) predicted.
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So the Television Academy voters went chalk, which left out dark-horse candidate Hot Ones — the viral Sean Evans-hosted talk show could have been the first YouTube series ever nominated in the category. Maybe next year. It was not all a yawn, however: the Emmy Awards‘ variety series category itself has a new look this year.
For the past decade, the variety series category was the variety series … categories, with scripted and talk separated. Not anymore. The TV Academy’s consolidation, announced in January, followed a years-long decline in the number of series submitted in the best scripted variety series and best variety talk series categories. The current setup — one variety show to rule them all — is how the Emmys operated prior to a 2015 rule change. More or less.
The type of variety submission — scripted variety series or talk series — informed the number of nominees today in the unified category. In other words, the nods are proportional to the number of submissions received for each format.
In addition, best variety series is now considered an “area award,” meaning it could produce multiple winners. Nominees for area awards are judged individually on their own merits, so instead of Emmy voters being asked to identify a category winner, voters will be asked about each nominee, “Does this nominee merit an Emmy? Yes/No.” Any nominee that reaches a 90 percent “Yes” threshold will receive an Emmy. If no nominee reaches the 90 percent threshold, then the nominee with the highest “Yes” percentage will be the sole winner.
In the future, should both formats reach 20 submissions in the same year, the Television Academy will automatically split the categories into two again.
But for the present, what we got were the obvious candidates: Last Week Tonight always wins, SNL is in a class of its own — pretty literally here — and The Daily Show still carries cultural cachet. And this time, the two nominated broadcast-TV late night talk shows have each earned their position on the ballot the hard way.
The Late Show famously ended in May after CBS axed the traditional late night talk show format. Colbert blamed politics, Paramount cited cost. A honorary nomination (at the very least) was a slam dunk.
Jimmy Kimmel Live! had its own circus to navigate this past season. In September, Kimmel was suspended by Disney/ABC for a few days following an inaccurate observation he made regarding the political leanings of Charlie Kirk’s alleged assassin.
Colbert and Kimmel are both on President Trump’s (probably very real) list of enemies in the mainstream media. As a result, both men have especially been through the ringer this year — will that be enough to take down John Oliver come September? Or might they just join him? %!s()
