MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. (AP) — Neymar arrived with Brazil and is available for the team's World Cup match against Scotland on Wednesday, another sign the superstar forward is set to make his debut at this year's tournament after missing the first two matches.
He was not in the starting lineup, though Brazil coach Carlo Ancelotti raised the possibility earlier this week that he could play as a substitute.
Neymar was one of the final players to get off Brazil’s bus Wednesday afternoon, flashing a thumbs-up, giving a wave and slapping hands with a few well-wishers as he made his way inside the stadium and toward the team’s locker room.
“He is available. He trained very well this week," Ancelotti said Tuesday, without confirming that Neymar would take the field against Scotland. “He is fit and able, ready to play. We are very happy that he is back. He is a high-quality player.”
Neymar has been dealing with a right calf injury, one that has sidelined him from all matches for more than a month. He went through a training session with Brazil on Sunday, prompting the belief that he could finally be set to play.
Neymar is Brazil’s career scoring leader with 79 goals in 129 international appearances. The 34-year-old forward appeared in each of the past three World Cups for Brazil, scoring eight goals.
His role — and whether he deserves to be on this team at all — has been a major talking point among Brazil's passionate fans for some time. Neymar has struggled since returning from tearing the ACL in his left knee in October 2023 in a World Cup qualifier, and has four goals in eight matches for his Brazilian club Santos this season.
AP Sports Writer Alanis Thames contributed to this report.
AP World Cup: https://apnews.com/hub/fifa-world-cup
Brazil's Neymar (10) looks on before the World Cup Group C soccer match between Brazil and Morocco in East Rutherford, N.J., near New York, Saturday, June 13, 2026. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwanmura)
A member of the cultlike group known as Zizians has been charged with murder in the shooting of her parents at their Pennsylvania home on her 30th birthday, and a prosecutor said Wednesday she wasn't acting alone.
Delaware County District Attorney Tanner Rouse said evidence from a neighbor’s doorbell camera, ballistics and analysis of cellphone records have left investigators certain Michelle Zajko is at least partly responsible for the deaths of her parents, Rita and Richard. They were shot in her childhood playroom on New Year’s Eve 2022, surrounded by her old dolls and toys.
"At this time we do not know who her co-conspirators were, but we are very certain that Michelle Zajko was in the home and arranged for the death of her parents,” Rouse said.
The new charges against Zajko, who has been jailed in Maryland on other charges since February 2025, include murder, burglary and conspiracy charges in her parents’ deaths. She has denied killing them, and in court filings suggested her father might have killed her mother and himself.
“I didn’t murder my parents,” she wrote in an April 2025 “ Open Letter to the World” that her attorney sent to The Associated Press.
Authorities had long described Zajko as a person of interest.
The two deaths are among six linked to the Zizians, a group of young, highly intelligent computer scientists who appear to share radical beliefs about veganism, animal rights, gender identity and artificial intelligence. Since 2022, members have been tied to the death of one of their own during an attack on a California landlord, the landlord’s subsequent killing, the Zajkos’ deaths in Pennsylvania, and a highway shootout in Vermont that left a border agent and another Zizian dead.
In the Pennsylvania case, investigators spent years painstakingly collecting evidence, Rouse said, including video from a neighbor's doorbell camera that captured two people getting out of a car outside the Zajkos' home in Chester Heights, a voice shouting “Mom!” and another voice exclaiming, “Oh my God! Oh, God, God!”
Authorities haven't found a weapon, but Zajko made a list describing mistakes such as leaving shell casings behind, he said. Those casings matched ammunition from Zajko's home in Vermont and from a firing range in her backyard, Rouse said.
“If she wasn’t the one who actually pulled the trigger, she was certainly aligned with those who did,” he said.
Online court records didn't indicate whether Zajko had an attorney in the Pennsylvania case as of Wednesday. An attorney representing her in Maryland did not respond to a message seeking comment, and the Delaware County Public Defender’s office declined to comment.
Zajko, now 33, also is charged with providing the gun used to kill U.S. Border Patrol Agent David Maland in January 2025, though nothing has happened in that case. She was arrested in Maryland a few weeks later along with Daniel Blank and Jack “Ziz” LaSota, whom authorities describe as the group’s leader. Police who responded to a landowner's complaint about suspicious people parked in box trucks on his property described them as having “ties with the Zizians Cult” and said they would be questioned about crimes across the country.
All three have pleaded not guilty to charges of trespassing and illegal gun and drug possession, while LaSota also has pleaded not guilty to a federal charge of illegal gun possession by a fugitive. A judge recently granted a defense request for a competency evaluation in the federal case.
In court filings, LaSota’s attorneys said their client eschews the term Zizian and denies that she and her friends have formed a cult. Zajko has claimed authorities arrested the group in Maryland to prevent them from exonerating Teresa Youngblut, who has pleaded not guilty to murder in the Vermont shooting and could face the death penalty if convicted.
Zajko was living with Blank in Vermont at the time of her parents’ deaths and was questioned there by police shortly after they died. A few weeks later, officers briefly took her into custody at a hotel while she was in Pennsylvania for the funeral but released her without charges. LaSota, staying at the same hotel, was charged with obstructing the homicide investigation and disorderly conduct. Her attorney at the time has said she is innocent of those charges.
Zajko had been estranged from her parents in the year leading up to their deaths, the prosecutor said. In a January 2022 text message to her father, she complained that her mother had “assumed the worst” about her since she was a child.
“Every time I interact with mom in a nonsuperficial way she spends the time insulting a life she knows nothing about,” Zajko wrote. Hours before her death, Rita Zajko apologized to her daughter and wished her a happy birthday.
“That text went unanswered,” Rouse said.
Richard Zajko's sister-in-law, Roseanne Zajko, thanked police and prosecutors Wednesday, saying that her family has endured “countless days of darkness and despair" waiting for justice.
“We don't know yet if the trial will begin to heal the void in our lives and the ache in our hearts, but we do know that the detectives, the DA's office, and we, the family, have done everything possible to achieve justice for Rick and Rita.”
The prosecutor described their deaths as a crime that “goes beyond comprehension.”
“I can’t wrap my mind around or figure out what led to this point," he said. "We are clearly talking about someone that has gone down an unimaginably dark road and has led to a tragedy that just defies any sort of description.”
Ramer reported from Concord, New Hampshire.
FILE - This Jan. 29, 2025 photo shows a Chester Heights, Pa., home, the scene of the 2022 killing of Richard and Rita Zajko, (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File)
FILE - In this combination of undated photos provided by the Pennsylvania State Police, Richard Zajko, left, and his wife Rita Zajko, who police say were shot to death in their home in suburban Philadelphia on Dec. 31, 2022, are shown. (Pennsylvania State Police via AP, File)
FILE - In this image from video, Michelle Zajko, who is associated with a cultlike group known as Zizians that is linked to several deaths across the U.S., is escorted into court for a pretrial hearing on trespassing, gun and drug charges in Cumberland, Md., Friday, Jan. 16, 2026. (AP Photo/Mark Scolforo, File)
