The flame was lit when the Lakers acquired Luka Doncic in February 2025, a generational player who could put the team atop the NBA again.
World Cup watch parties in Santa Clara and the San Francisco Bay Area brought fans together for the United States vs. Bosnia-Herzegovina match, where the U.S. earned a 2-0 win to reach the Round of 16.
The White House is trying to break a fireworks record on Saturday—but doing so will likely cost taxpayers a pretty penny.The Trump administration has not communicated how much the July 4 celebration will cost, or who is expected to foot the bill for the pyrotechnics display. There has been no public record of the company behind the show, Pyrotecnico, receiving a standard government contract for the job, as has been the case with Washington’s previous July 4 celebrations.In lieu of concrete digits, NOTUS’s Anna Kramer reached out to several fireworks companies for a rough estimate on the show’s price tag. They projected the cost in the millions.“You’re talking a many multimillion-dollar production, without a doubt,” James Woods, the director of sales at Pyro Shows in Tennessee, told NOTUS. Pyro Shows assisted in one of the previous world record-setting fireworks displays in Dubai in 2014.Woods told NOTUS that some of the individual shells used in the upcoming celebration could cost anywhere between $50 to $1,000. NOTUS estimated that if even “3 percent of the devices used in this show cost $50, that would total $1.3 million for those devices alone.”This year, the Freedom 250 celebration has promised a record-shattering 40-minute display beginning at 10:30 p.m. that will use more than 860,000 explosives. They’ll be set off along the Reflecting Pool, as well as in West Potomac Park and off of eight barges on the Potomac River.The current record is held by the Iglesia Ni Cristo, a church in the Philippines that earned the Guinness World Record title in 2016 for lighting 809,000 fireworks during a New Year’s Eve event.Another fireworks professional, Kellner’s Fireworks owner Bob Kellner, hypothesized that even if the entire record-setting show were composed of “filler” shells (the cheapest explosives possible, sold for around $2 a pop), the display would still cost a minimum of $1.7 million. But only hitting that bare minimum is highly unlikely, as more sophisticated fireworks cost significantly more.There is just one federal record offering details about the upcoming semiquincentennial. A document from the Interior Department, dated December 2025, dedicated $1.5 million to Garden State Fireworks to run the display. But that was months before Donald Trump promised to launch “the LARGEST FIREWORKS SHOW IN HISTORY” on Independence Day 2026.NOTUS reported that Garden State Fireworks has been responsible for the capital’s July Fourth show for the last decade, and typically receives a contract between $250,000 and $300,000 for the display.
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board published a Wednesday op-ed slamming President Trump and his family for “cashing in on the presidency” after his financial disclosures showed the president brought in $2 billion last year alone. Trump’s crypto venture, effectively managed by the Trump Organization, reaped in more than $526.8 million in proceeds from tokens…
![[In Photos] How America Celebrated Its Previous Big Birthday in 1976](https://images.wsj.net/im-96990484)
Photos from America’s last big birthday before this one in 2026.
What would the revolutionaries who broke from the British monarchy 250 years ago make of the current head of state?
Some English soccer fans weren't done getting their sports fix after their comeback win over DR Congo on Wednesday.
