EPL: Arsenal move second after beating West Ham in 7-goal thriller
FBI Director Wray says he intends to resign at the end of Biden's term in January
VPN concerns
NEW YORK (AP) — Minnesota pitchers Justin Topa and Brock Stewart agreed to one-year contracts ahead of Friday's tender deadline along with fellow right-hander Triston McKenzie of Cleveland and Cole Sulser of Tampa Bay. Agreements and non-tenders reduced players eligible for arbitration to 169 from 238 at the start of last week. Teams and players are to exchange proposed arbitration salaries on Jan. 9, 2025, and those who don’t reach agreements will be scheduled for hearings from Jan. 27 through Feb. 14, 2025, in St. Petersburg, Florida. Topa was guaranteed $1,225,000 as part of a deal that included a $1 million salary for 2025 and a $2 million team option for 2026 with a $225,000 buyout. Stewart agreed to an $870,000 salary and can earn $30,000 in bonuses for days on the active roster: $10,000 for 112 and $20,000 for 142. McKenzie agreed to a $1.95 million, one-year contract and Sulser to a one-year deal that pays $900,000 in the major leagues and $450,000 while in the minors. AP MLB: https://apnews.com/hub/MLB
HENDERSON, Nev. (AP) — Ashlon Jackson scored a career-high 30 points and No. 13 Duke defeated No. 9 Kansas State, 73-62 on Monday, in the semifinals of the Ball Dawgs Classic. The Blue Devils (6-1) overcame an early 11-point deficit behind Jackon’s shooting hand to advance to Wednesday’s championship game against the winner of the game between No. 8 Oklahoma and DePaul. Javascript is required for you to be able to read premium content.The New Yorker's editors and critics considered hundreds of new releases this year in order to select the Best Books of 2024. The magazine's writers also made their way through many other books—novels they had missed upon publication, long-out-of-print essay collections, classics that the passage of time had imbued with fresh meaning. Some of their favorites are below. Last July, during the British general election in which the Labour Party ousted the long-ruling Conservative government in a landslide, I picked up "The Line of Beauty," by Alan Hollinghurst, which I'd somehow neglected to read in the two decades since it was published. Shame on me! I tore through it, and am already reading it for the second time. The book begins at the moment after the Tories' own electoral landslide of 1983, in which Margaret Thatcher secured an overwhelming majority in the House of Commons. This period of social and political history is filtered through the refined consciousness of Nick Guest, a recent graduate from Oxford who has joined the household of a college friend, Toby Fedden, whose father, Gerald, happens to be one of those new Tory M.P.s. Nick is gay—and, at the novel's outset, entirely sexually inexperienced—and has a status somewhere between a lodger and a conveniently charming spare man to make up a dinner party. He is about to embark upon a Ph.D. concerned with style in the works of Henry James, and James's influence on the author radiates from each irony-gilded page. ("Yes, isn't it a nice one," remarks Toby's uncle, Lord Kessler, when Nick compliments him on a Paul Cézanne, while Gerald assesses the painting "with a sharp way he had of scanning any document which might come in useful later on.") Hollinghurst's set-piece party scenes are masterpieces of observation, and his rendering of the shadow cast by AIDs over the eighties is subtle and agonizing. The book ends with the election of 1987, when the Lady, as she is admiringly referred to by all, consolidates her... The New Yorker
