VOUX MAG

Justin Thomas took to social media to laud Jordan Spieth after his astonishing shot at the PGA Championship.

The second day of the competition at Aronimink was riddled with issues with Rory McIlroy agreeing withScottie Schefflerover the controversial layout of the course. The world No.1even turned to Justin Rose's caddie to voice his frustrations- deeming it the hardest he had ever seen.

Elsewhere, Bryson DeChambeau didn't even make the cut with pace-of-play issues proving a nightmare, while the greens also caused issues for the players. It comes after McIlroygave another crude response to his second-round score in a fresh interview.

Spieth also fell foul to the tough putting conditions but did pull off an incredible shot on the 11th hole to avoid the bunker. AndThomaswas among those mightily impressed.

"Can’t put into words how incredible this is and how MAYBE 5 people in this tournament could even hit that shot let alone try it during a major, and pull it off," he wrote on social media.

It would prove to be a rare highlight in the second round for Spieth, who sits tied for 30th after shooting two over par. Thomas meanwhile has put himself back into contention, despite being criticized for an angry outburst during the opening round.

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He sits two under going into day three on Saturday and is just two shots off the pace, alongside the likes of Scheffler and playing partner Cameron Young.

His performance came despite his group, of Young and Keegan Bradley, being put on the clock by tournament officialsand Thomas admitted he did not agree with the decision.

He said: "It's hard because it's kind of the whole time par thing. What is time par? How can time par on this course be the same when it's blowing 25 and the pins are tough than if it's not?

"And does time par change every day? There's just so many factors that go into it.

"The hard part to me with the whole pace of play thing is that you, there's so much that goes into golf and there's so much that goes into hole to hole in terms of, are you hitting it close, are you able to tap it in, or you have to mark it, stuff like that, to where, are you holding the group up or are you not, to where it's very hard to make that call.

"So it kind of goes to our point of why we didn't think we should of, but it is what it is. It's a part of it."

St Mirren will likely make changes ahead of the play-offs while Declan John (hernia), Dan Nlundulu (thigh), Shamal George (ankle), Ryan Mullen (thigh), Jonah Ayunga (knee), Malik Dijksteel (groin) and Keanu Baccus (Achilles) remain out.

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Dundee United wing-back Will Ferry has joined up with the Republic of Ireland squad but Emmanuel Agyei returns from suspension. Dario Naamo (foot), Amar Fatah, Luca Stephenson (both hamstring), Kristijan Trapanovski, Isaac Pappoe (both knee) and goalkeeper Ashley Maynard-Brewer (shoulder) remain out.

The historian Andrew Lownie looks in pretty fine fettle for a 64-year-old man with an absolutely brutal work regimen. His day job, he reminds me as we meet in his unexpectedly plain sitting room in Westminster, is as a literary agent. But he is now possibly better known for his side-hustle as a biographer; most recently he producedEntitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York, an explosive and meticulously researched book on Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson.

Lownie says he wrote the book, which has just been updated for itsforthcoming paperback edition, around his agenting duties, which meant lots of early mornings, evenings and weekends, plus the odd snatched day off for important interviews.

“Fergie’s actually sat in that seat,” he says, pointing to the small leather armchair I’ve just settled into. He is dressed in a suit and tie (he’s not a man easy to imagine in jeans); beside us on the mantelpiece are works of art – and a rather plaintive commemorative mug from Andrew and Fergie’s wedding, in 1986. When he was working on the book, he says, he invited the former duchess to meet him – and she came by, seemingly in an effort to nudge the biography in a more positive direction. In that, as in many things, Fergie failed.

Was it strange, finding the woman he had uncovered so much about, suddenly in his house? “Yes,” Lownie says. He alleges several eye-watering details about Fergie in the book: that she frequently failed to pay her staff, that she continued to associate with Jeffrey Epstein years after publicly disowning him, that she once spent £25,000 in a single hour at Bloomingdale’s. Even so, Lownie airily admits, he was “charmed by her. You know, she’s very charismatic. She’s like a Labrador, a bundle of energy. These are the two sides to her.”

Around us is some of the evidence of Lownie’s industry: scruffy boxes filled with Freedom of Information requests, tome after tome about the Royal family, acres of press cuttings. Lownie used, he says, only around 10 per cent of the material he collected. It took him two years just to read it all and to compose a list of names to approach, which eventually numbered some 3,000 people. Of those, just 300 agreed to speak to him – “but”, he points out, “that’s probably about 250 more than most books”.

Andrew’s ‘possible sexual assault’

Many in the publishing world admire Lownie’s completionism, his Pied Piper ability to coax apparently slight but telling anecdotes from an extraordinary range of sources. One of many marmalade droppers in the new edition ofEntitledare comments from an armed police officer who used to work at Heathrow, and who recalls Andrew meeting a British Airways crew member on a plane, spinning her around when she tried to shake his hand and bending her forward “so that his groin was clearly and firmly in contact with her backside”. The police officer judged that the then-prince’s action amounted to a “possible sexual assault” but no action, of course, was taken.

At another point in the updated edition, Lownie returns to his theme of Fergie’sMarie Antoinetteattitude to food, reporting that her chef was ordered to “make a sizeable cream cake” every day. If it wasn’t eaten, the cake was thrown away – and a fresh one baked the following day regardless.

The book itself begins, as with all of Lownie’s books, with a question – in this case, whether Andrew and Fergie really were, as they used to be described, “‘the happiest divorced couple ever’. I thought, of course, that was a myth.” In general, Lownie admits, he is drawn to “what I call rogue royals, the bad boys. They’re more fun.” Still, when he started on Andrew, he was warned off it. “Everyone said ‘You’re crazy, he’s so boring, no one’s interested’.”

It turned out, of course, that people are very interested in Andrew – including various members of America’s Congress. “I was lucky it was part of the news agenda,” he says. WhenEntitledwas first published, “though it got a bit of attention, nothing happened. If there hadn’t been the Epstein releases, it would have just died a death.”

Why Epstein’s death may not have been a suicide

Lownie sets out persuasive evidence that suggests that Epstein may not have died by suicide – a position long dismissed as an outlandish conspiracy theory. “I think the thing with the Epstein revelations is we all say, ‘Oh conspiracies don’t happen, it’s all cock-up’. Then you suddenly realise that there is sort of a conspiracy here. This is all carefully planned and it’s sort of supranational.”

When the news ofAndrew’s arrest on suspicion of misconduct in public officebroke in February, and the press had a field day, a quiet minority of people felt some empathy for the former prince. Does Lownie?

“Well, he’s basically under house arrest. His reputation has been trashed. I mean, that look of absolute terror on his face when he came back from the police station. So, of course anyone who’s human will have sympathy – and have sympathy for Sarah Ferguson.”

‘Andrew’s still quite cocky, he’s not very remorseful’

But, Lownie points out: “they brought all this on themselves. And actually, I had a contact who’s close to him, saying he’s still quite cocky, he’s not very remorseful… I mean, he is so nasty to people.”

Earlier this month,a man pleaded not guilty at Westminster magistrates’ court for using threatening words towards Andrew, while he was out walking his dogs near his home in Norfolk. Lownie estimates that although he does have some protection, if he were to be, “I don’t know, in his car with one policeman and five cars turn up and ram him, and they try to kidnap him – I mean, yes, he is vulnerable.”

In the book we learn that, post-disgrace, Andrew is mainly spending his time watching golf on a vast television and playing on a flight simulator. Now 66, he’s also reportedly sinking many hours into playing Call of Duty; a royal source told Lownie that the former prince “prioritises gaming over work, health and hygiene”. It is hard not to feel a pang of melancholy at this desolate image: the former war hero and pin-up, now gaming deep into the night, all alone.

There is something, Lownie believes, profoundly “sad” about Andrew. “He talks about himself being a loner. And he’s always been kept apart from people. At school, he had separate accommodation because of security. He always had a separate wing on the naval bases. He didn’t drink. I think he kept himself apart, possibly because he thought he might be betrayed. … There is something that is not quitethere. So of course one feels sorry for him, but at the same time he is responsible for his own actions.”

For many, feeling sorry for Andrew is a stretch too far – but it is easier, I venture, to feel sympathy for his and Fergie’s daughters. I mention to Lownie that I’d watched him promise, in a YouTube video last year, that he was going to reveal much more detail about the girls’ activities in the paperback edition. But the book has relatively little about them. How come? “Lawyers,” he says darkly.

Still, Lownie says he feels that the Royal family needs to develop a proper strategy for how it deals with Beatrice and Eugenie. “There’s a slightly schizophrenic approach at the moment. One moment, the daughters arevery publicly not coming to Ascot– the next they can come. They can come to Sandringham – no, they can’t. It’s a bit cruel. I think it’s almost as if they can’t decide what to do.”

Beatrice and Eugenie should give up their titles

Lownie believes that the princesses should give up their titles and keep a low profile. But, he claims, their professional lives – Beatrice is a strategic adviser for the company Afiniti, and Eugenie is a director at the art gallery Hauser & Wirth – are dependent on their association with the Royal family. “Their jobs rely on that access that they give as royals. I mean, it’s never Beatrice Mozzi who’s going off to conferences – it’s always Her Royal Highness. And that’s part of the problem – they want the trappings, the perks, without any of the responsibilities.”

The hardback ofEntitledshot to number one in the bestseller charts, and the paperback is bound to do similarly well. Does it feel good to be at the peak of his career, at 64? “Well, I can only get better,” Lownie jokes. “No, I mean, I’ve watched so many authors over the last 40 years and there’s sometimes a book that catches on because of timing – and then you retire back into obscurity.”

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For all the book’s success, for many – especially in the Establishment – Lownie is deemed a menace. He is perceived as targeting the Royal family, and even sometimes accused of undermining the very fabric of the country, by revealing such damning information about them.

He has, he admits, paid a social toll for his work: there’s been a bit of “cold-shouldering” from his acquaintances. But he is, he insists, a royalist, and he genuinely wishes for the Royal family to continue to reign over us for many decades to come – he just happens to think they need to be held to account.

“I don’t think anyone should be given a pass just because they’re a member of the Royal family. There’s not a two-tier justice system here,” he says. “My father was a judge and Scottish, and I think there’s quite a strong Presbyterian element to this that drives me on. The monarchy depends on trust and respect from the public, and it carries moral authority. It brings the nation together… and that compact is undermined by people who seem to have their noses in the trough.”

It also undermines, he points out, “the reputation and the good work of all the others – the Prince Edwards andPrincess Annes, who get on with it day by day.”

As for the accusations that he is a scurrilous muckracker, Lownie seems exasperated by them: “There are a lot of, I would say, slightly jealous royal writers. Because clearly [the book] has changed the narrative. A lot of them who produce the sanitised stuff don’t like an outsider coming in and disrupting.” Someone has warned him, he adds, that publishing his Andrew biography would be like riding a tiger: “and ithasbeen like riding a tiger. And, you know, I prefer not to.”

Lownie lives in his Westminster townhouse with his wife and their two grown-up children; Alice, who works in publishing, and Robert, a journalist. What do they make of their father’s book? “I think they’re probably slightly embarrassed by it,” he says. “I think they also think I’m probably a bit of a media tart.”

Well, is he? “I hope not,” he says, looking rather worried. “I’ve been in the shadows for the last 40 years as an agent supporting writers, and that’s where I feel happiest.”

He maintains a frequent presence in the public eye – speaking on TV, radio, YouTube, podcasts and so on – as he feels an obligation to publicise the book, and also because he feels “more and more strongly about the need for more royal transparency. Really, that for them, that they do need to modernise. The old system of just hoping the problem will go away isn’t going to work. If they want to survive and want to restore trust and respect, they have to adapt. … And if they really want to restore respect, it’s not by us operating with censorship like Stalinist Russia or China. It’s actually by having openness and behaving well.”

The King’s recent trip to America –during which Charles seemed to charm Donald Trump to his core– is a good example, Lownie believes, of “just how effective” the Royal family can be. “I think we’re very lucky that Charles is clearly a highly cultured, compassionate, clever man.” After all, he says, “We could have got Andrew. I mean, if Charles had been killed in a skiing accident, we might well have had him as regent at least.” How would that have shaken out? A smile. “It would have been a disaster.”

William ‘is quite controlling, quite secretive’

Lownie is cautiously optimistic about how William will fare as king: “From the things I’ve heard, he is more prepared to move to this more European-style monarchy – fewer people with titles who are not working royals, look at the Crown Estates – but at the same time, he’s not declared the tax that the Duchy pays. His father did. And he is quite controlling, quite secretive, quite suspicious of the media.”

He is less ambivalent, however, about Catherine, and agrees with those who see her as the monarchy’s shining hope.The Princess of Wales, he reckons, is a “nice middle-class girl” – and “they’re far better royals than the royals themselves, and I would argue it’s the same with Sophie and Camilla”. Catherine is also, Lownie believes, “very tough – shades of the Queen Mum. And I think as an outsider, she gets it in a way I don’t think the royals do.”

Lownie sees himself as an outsider in the Windsor world, but there are striking parallels between him and the other Andrew: both are around the same age (Lownie is 64 and Mountbatten-Windsor is 66), both went to private schools in Scotland (Lownie to Fettes, Mountbatten-Windsor to Gordonstoun), both were involved in the military (Lownie as a naval reserve). Lownie remembers Andrew coming to play rugby at Fettes, and remembers hearing the stories about him, even then.

And Lownie has said that his wife, Angela Doyle, a house historian, was “brought up” with Ferguson, that they were neighbours: “So I knew quite a lot of the stories. For example, the story which no one has picked up on, Prince Philip and Susan Barrantes [Ferguson’s mother] being lovers. That all came from family information.”

Still, observing the teetering piles of royal material in Lownie’s house, you would imagine that he had been obsessed with the family since he was a boy. But in fact, it took him years to get to the royals. After founding his Andrew Lownie Literary Agency in 1988, he launched his writing career with a biography about the Scottish writer John Buchan in 2003, followed byStalin’s Englishman, a book about the spy Guy Burgess in 2015. He had long had a sense, he says, “that it’s not a proper job, being a writer” and that while various members of his family had done it, “they always had other jobs”.

It was only when he was writing about Burgess that he realised there was a good book to be done on Lord Mountbatten. “I had no interest in the royals until then,” he says. “I’d probably never read a royal biography in my life.”

Now Lownie is in the early stages of a new book about Prince Philip, which is so far shaping up to be a good deal more positive thanEntitled, he says. He clearly loathes the idea that people think he’s on some mission to wreck the Royal family’s reputation to such an extent that the whole edifice collapses altogether. “I don’t want to get a reputation for doing aTom Bower,” he says.

And he is still recovering, he says, from his five-year legal battle to gain access to the diaries and correspondence of Lord and Lady Mountbatten that became his bestselling bookThe Mountbattens: Their Lives and Loves(2019). He was successful in his fight to open up the archive – but was forced to cover his own legal costs, paying around £400,000 from his own pocket.

Entitled, he says, “will hopefully get me back to where I was five years ago. So [Andrew’s] kind of been my saviour.” In the rush to stump up the money for the legal bill, he even had to use money he’d inherited from his late mother that had been earmarked to pass to his children.

The doorbell rings, and Rob, Lownie’s son, appears to let in the photographer. Lownie calls out to him: “Are you embarrassed by my book?” “Not in the slightest,” his son calls back.

As to the claim that he is harming the country by publishing such damaging information about the Royal family, Lownie clearly finds the idea faintly ridiculous. “The role of historian and journalist is to tell the truth. We can’t sugarcoat it just to protect them,” he says. “If they have nothing to hide, they have nothing to fear.”

The updated paperback of Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York by Andrew Lownie is published on May 21. Lownie will be appearing on the Daily T podcast on Sunday, May 17; you can watch episodes of The Daily There. You can also listen onSpotify,Apple Podcastsor wherever you get your podcasts.

To many people, theGolders Green stabbingsalready feel like old news. There was the frenzy of coverage, the spotlight on panicking Jews, the conspiracy theories and mockery. Then the world moved on.

So it was with special gratitude that the community responded toa visit from the King, one of Anglo-Jewry’s closest friends, on Thursday. The relationship has always been warm and personal. Back in 2023, on the eve of His Majesty’s coronation,the Chief Rabbi was invited to a sleepover at St James’ Palaceso he could walk to the ceremony on the Jewish sabbath.

As Moshe Shine, 76, one of the stabbing victims, put it: “[The King] said, ‘Are you sure you’re OK?’ It was the simplicity of it, in the nicest possible way. His ability to interact with ordinary people.”

Which brings us to Prince Harry. Say what you like about the Windsors’ enfant terrible, at least he hasn’t jumped on thewatermelon bandwagon. Given his liberal Montecito milieu, it would have been the easiest thing in the world to don an alpaca-hair keffiyeh and pose for pictures at the Gaza border. So far, however, the Prince has held out.

Last year, his Archewell Foundationquietly cut tieswith a US-based Muslim organisation after its founder used the slogan “from the river to the sea” and described Israel as an “apartheid state”.

“We have zero tolerance for hateful words, actions or propaganda,” Archewell executives wrote in a scathing email to Janan Najeeb, the Palestinian-American head of the Milwaukee Muslim Women’s Coalition. “We will be removing MWC from our network.”

To underline this position,Harry has penned an essay for theNew Statesman. Incredibly, it barely mentioned the plight of the Palestinians – even after the gruesomeOctober 7 Civil Commissionreport, it will always be called a plight – and focused instead on the “deeply troubling” rise of anti-Semitism in Britain. For this, our Harry deserves full credit.

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Let’s not get ahead of ourselves: lift the bonnet and his essay still chimed with the usual calumnies. While Harry emphasised the obvious, often overlooked, point that “hatred directed at people for who they are” is “not protest” but “prejudice”, and decried the “lethal violence in London andManchester”, he used several of his paragraphs to condemn Israel.

“The scale of human suffering … demands sustained scrutiny and action from the international community,” he wrote, adding that the Jewish state – which he did not mention by name – was acting “without accountability, and in ways that raise serious questions under international humanitarian law”.

Did Harry read the full details ofOctober 7, released this week? The butchery, rape, mutilation, humiliation and necrophilia? The way Palestinian savages sliced off body parts during a rape, played games with them, then sent triumphant videos to their families? Faced with 251 hostages and a strategy of human shields, how was Jerusalem supposed to react? How would we? (OK, don’t answer that one.)

Blind to the truths of our times, that anti-Semitism takes its fullest expression as Israelophobia, wears the cloak of benevolence towards self-hating Jews, takes its strength from disinformation and its outrage from luxury – he appeared to confirm the very demonisation that lies at the root of the problem.

“Nothing, whether criticism of a government or the reality of violence and destruction, can ever justify hostility toward an entire people or faith,” he wrote, contrasting the bad Jews who relish bloodshed with the good Jews who are “openly and publicly critical of certain state actions”.

On top of this, Harry lamented the “devastating loss of life among journalists in Gaza, undermining transparency and accountability at a time when both are essential”. Was he unaware how many “journalists” appeared on lists of martyred terrorists released by Hamas and Islamic Jihad?

But now I’ve fallen into the trap of criticising the Prince. I didn’t mean to. He’s a celebrity, not an intellectual or a working royal, and his wife flogs lifestyle products. It would be too much to expect him to puncture the cataracts of propaganda that cap the eyes of almost everybody.

My point is that in his own feeble and inadequate way, Harry is resisting the herd and doing his best to stand by the Jews. It may be a low bar, but that is largely what qualifies as bravery these days. In the future, once the King’s generation is gone, that may be all we have left.

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. and Nigerian forces killed a leader of theIslamic State groupin Nigeria in a mission carried out Friday, U.S. PresidentDonald Trumpsaid.

Trump China

Trump announced the joint operation in Africa’s most populous country in a late-night social media post that offered few details. He said Abu Bakr al-Mainuki was second in command of the Islamic State group globally and “thought he could hide in Africa, but little did he know we had sources who kept us informed on what he was doing.”

Al-Mainuki was viewed as the key figure in IS organizing and finance, and had been plotting attacks against the United States and its interests, according to an official who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to share sensitive information.

Nigerian President Bola Tinubu confirmed the operation and said Al-Mainuki was killed alongside “several of his lieutenants, during a strike on his compound in the Lake Chad Basin."

Born in Nigeria's Borno province in 1982, al-Mainuki took the helm of the IS branch in West Africa after the group’s previous leader in the region, Mamman Nur, was killed in 2018, according to the Counter Extremism Project, which tracks militant groups.

Al-Mainuki was based in the Sahel area, the monitoring group said, adding that it is believed that he fought in Libya when IS was active in the North African nation more than a decade ago. He was sanctioned by the U.S. in 2023.

Trump, in his social media announcement, said Al-Mainuki was “second in command globally,” hiding in Africa, a claim that analysts say is off the mark.

They say Al-Mainuki was the deputy to Abu Musab al-Barnawi, the leader of the Islamic State West African Province whowas reported to have diedin 2021. He is regarded as one of the central proponents of the formation of ISWAP after its split with Boko Haram in 2016.

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“If confirmed, the killing of Al-Mainuki is huge because this is the first time a security agency has killed someone this high in the ranking of ISWAP,” Malik Samuel, a senior researcher at Good Governance Africa who specializes in insurgent groups in Nigeria, said.

“The potential to cause chaos within the group is also there because the operation must have been carried out in the heart of ISWAP’s fortified base, which is very difficult to access.”

Trumpin December directed U.S. forces to launchstrikes against the Islamic State group in Nigeria, though he released little detail then about the impact.

The Nigerian military said the operation was a result of its “recently formed U.S.-Nigeria partnership and intelligence sharing efforts.” Samalia Uba, the military spokesperson, said in a statement that the operation has also “disrupted a violent terrorist network that endangered Nigeria and the broader West African region.”

Nigeria has been battling multiple armed groups, including at least two affiliated with IS, as it has grappled with a multifaceted security crisis. IS affiliates in Africa have emerged as some of the continent's most active militant groups following the collapse of the IS caliphate in Syria and Iraq in 2017.

TheU.S. in February sent troops to the West African nationto help advise its military and in March,the U.S. also deployed drones thereafter Trump alleged that Christiansare being targetedin Nigeria’s security crisis.

The Friday night operation was the latest instance in a string of covert missions abroad that Trump has announced this year, starting with the stunning overnight raid in January to capture and remove Venezuela's then-leader Nicolás Maduro and whisk him to the U.S., followed nearly two months later by the launch of strikes that kicked off the war with Iran.

Adetayo reported from Lagos, Nigeria. Associated Press writers Konstantin Toropin in Washington and Samy Magdy in Cairo contributed to this report.

PEA RIDGE, Ark. (AP) — Walmart and Amazon are racing tospeed uponline order deliveries in rural areas of the U.S., a rich source of untapped sales that major retailers long wrote off as too sparsely inhabited, too remote or too impoverished to serve profitably.

Rural Delivery Wars

Walmarthas a running start in the contest to build a loyal customer base in rural America. Roughly 90% of U.S. residents live within 10 miles of a Walmart store, and 45% of the company’s full-service Supercenters are in places with populations under 20,000, according to a report by investment bank Morgan Stanley.

Competition for the underserved market, which the bank's analysts estimated could be worth up to $1 trillion in annual sales, has intensified as remote workers swell the populations of small towns and communities on the far fringesof metropolitan areas.

The same technology that makes it possible for more people to do office work from wherever they want is making it easier for the nation’s two biggest retail companies to get merchandise to them more efficiently.

Amazon last year invested $4 billion tobring same-dayor next-day deliveries to 4,000 smaller cities, towns and rural communities. They included places like the coastal town of Lewes, Delaware, Milton, Florida, a city hat is considered the state's canoe capital, Padre Island, Texas, which is about 37 miles from Corpus Christi, andAbbeville, Louisiana, known for its Cajun food scene.

In a letter to shareholders last month, CEO Andy Jassy said the average monthly number of Amazon customers receiving same-day deliveries doubled in 2025 compared to the year before. Amazon is using artificial intelligence-based tools to better forecast demand, while opening small micro hubs in rural areas.

“While other companies have been backing away from these customers, we’ve been running to them,” Jassy wrote.

The turf battle between the Goliath of e-commerce and Walmart is taking place as FedEx,UPSand theU.S. Postal Serviceare scaling back or slowing deliveries to some rural areas to cut costs or to concentrate on more profitable businesses.

“These folks want the same types of opportunities, services, experiences, as folks that maybe are more familiar with things like ultra-fast delivery that have been available in places like Manhattan,” David Guggina, now the CEO of Walmart U.S, told The Associated Press last fall.

Here's a look at why and the many ways Walmart and Amazon are cultivating customers in rural America:

Changing demographics

The final step of a package’s journey from a distribution hub to a shopper’s home has always presented challenges in rural areas. Delivery drivers have to travel longer distances between stops and sometimes navigate narrow or unpaved roads in thinly populated areas, adding time that increases per-package labor and fuel costs, experts say.

Rural areas also used to be thought of as less financially well-off and therefore less desirable for retailers. But over the past decade, rural counties have shown steady growth in productivity and income, according to consulting firm McKinsey.

The median household incomein rural countiesrose 43% between 2010 and 2022, reaching an all-time high of nearly $60,000 a year, McKinsey said. Since the pandemic, more exurban communities located as far as 60 miles from a major city's downtown have been among the fastest-growing places in the U.S., the U.S. Census Bureau reported.

The $1 trillion rural shoppers spend annually on electronics, clothing, home furnishings and other merchandise accounts for 20% of all retail purchases in the U.S. except for cars and gasoline, according to Morgan Stanley.

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The shifting retail landscape

Amazon and Walmart are not the only companies that see potential demand from former city dwellers whogrew accustomedto having groceries, clothes and other products brought to their doors quickly.

In an apparent move to stave them off in the countrysides and small towns where it staked a claim, Dollar General in January extended its same-day delivery service to more than 17,000 of the discount chain's 20,000 stores. More than 80% of Dollar General's same-day orders arrived in an hour or less, CEO Todd Vasos told investment analysts in March.

Rural lifestyle retailer Tractor Supply is increasing its direct delivery services to shoppers, particularly for bulky items like fence panels and riding lawnmowers. It announced plans in January to add more than 150 delivery hubs this year for a total of 375, covering more than half of its stores and reaching over 15 million customers.

Different approaches

Both Amazon and Walmart are expanding their use ofdelivery dronesto speed up shipments from stores or order fulfillment centers. They also using methods that reflect their own roots and taking pages from each other's playbooks.

Befitting itsorigins in traditional retail, Walmart is equipping its physical stores with robotic technology technology that picks and packs online orders from a storage area stocked with the most popular delivery items for each location.

The automated retrieval system helped a Walmart Supercenter in Bentonville, Arkansas, home to Walmart's headquarters, deliver groceries within a 30-mile radius, up from 10 miles just a few years ago, Doug Sanders, Walmart’s senior director of e-commerce store fulfillment, said late last year.

The company further credits the adoption of a hexagonal mapping system with making same-day deliveries available to 12 million more households. The system replaced traditional service boundaries like ZIP codes, which can leave out small areas at the edges, executives said.

The switch also gives Walmart an expanded view of which nearby stores might have the items needed to fulfill customers' orders. Instead of shoppers having to place separate orders from multiple locations to get everything they want, drivers now can retrieve packages from more than one store in their service area.

Amazon, which started as an online bookseller andthis year closedits Amazon Fresh supermarkets and Amazon Go convenience stores, is putting local infrastructure in place to shorten the distance between its warehouses and rural areas.

The company is setting up small delivery stations to serve a group of nearby communities based on travel drive time, customer demand, and delivery efficiency, the company said. Packages that were assembled at Amazon’s massive fulfillment centers are sent to the hubs for sorting before local gig workers and contractors pick the up for delivery.

The goal is to halve the time it takes from when a customer places an order to when it arrives, from as many as five days to less than two days, according to Holly Sullivan, Amazon’s vice president of worldwide economic development.

For example, a newly opened station in Roanoke, Virginia, delivers tens of thousands of packages every day that previously weren’t getting to the customer nearly as quickly, station manager Patrick Hamilton said. Delivery routes from the facility can reach customers roughly 90 minutes away by road, spanning both the city and surrounding rural communities.

Dalton Klinger is the operations manager of the Chamber of Commerce for St. George, Utah, a city with a population of 100,000 located in the northeastern part of the Mojave Desert. The city’s mountainous surroundings are difficult for deliveries, but an Amazon station has helped speed them up.

Klinger, who has lived in St. George since 2021, said his Amazon orders of essentials like canned tuna and jars of tomato sauce that used to take four days now get to him in two.

“People are wanting faster deliveries,” he said. “It’s all about instant gratification.”

The NFL has loaded up its Christmas

For the third year in a row, Netflix will be the platform of choice for Christmas Day, with the streaming service airing two high-profile NFL games. The first will be a big matchup between the Green Bay Packers and the Chicago Bears. As a Christmas gift to NFL fans everywhere, Green Bay is heading to Chicago for the second matchup of the season between the division rivals.

The other matchup on Netflix is similarly exciting, with the Buffalo Bills traveling to face the Denver Broncos. It’ll be the first time the two teams meet since the 2026 AFC divisional round, which ended in controversy when a suspected catch by wide receiver Brandin Cooks wasruled an interceptionby Denver. The Broncos ended up winning 33-30 in overtime.

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The other game on the holiday will also be a doozy, with the Seattle Seahawks hosting the Los Angeles Rams in a game that will be broadcast on Fox. The Christmas Day special will be the first meeting of the season between the two NFC West rivals; just two weeks later, they’ll meet again in L.A. in a regular-season finale.

Christmas Day falls on a Friday in 2026, giving NFL fans the unusual treat of getting three games on Friday evening. Prime will alsobroadcasta Christmas Eve game, between the Houston Texans and Philadelphia Eagles, as part of its Thursday Night Football slate.

All but one of these teams (the Seahawks) will also play as part ofa busy Thanksgiving weekend. ThePackers will facethe Rams in the first Thanksgiving Eve NFL game; theBears will go on the roadto face the Detroit Lions on Thanksgiving Day, followed by Buffalo hosting the Kansas City Chiefs. Denver will then play the Pittsburgh Steelers on Black Friday.

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With the NFLreleasing its full scheduleon Thursday, two of the Christmas Day games — the Packers-Bears and Seahawks-Rams matchups — are officially set to besome of the most anticipatedof the entire season. Only 225 more sleeps until Christmas Day.