NFL Draft 2024 ‘The Beast’ Guide: Dane Brugler’s scouting reports and player rankings
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Sports

NFL Draft 2024 ‘The Beast’ Guide: Dane Brugler’s scouting reports and player rankings

Finally! It’s here. I’m thrilled to share this year’s draft guide with everyone. I don’t remember who first referred to it as “The Beast,” but I use that moniker as motivation to make sure this annual primer lives up to the nickname — and I don’t think I’ve let you down this year.Every NFL prospect is a puzzle. And it is a scout’s job to find the puzzle pieces to create as clear a picture of each player as possible. Those puzzle pieces include everything from the player’s physical traits to his mental makeup to the details of his upbringing — and everything in between.That’s precisely how I attack this draft guide. Over the last 18 months, I’ve collected as many puzzle pieces as I could dig up, through countless hours of tape study and conversations with prospects, scouts and other sources...
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Nina Jankowicz Forms New Group to Defend Disinformation Research
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Technology

Nina Jankowicz Forms New Group to Defend Disinformation Research

Two years ago, Nina Jankowicz briefly led an agency at the Department of Homeland Security created to fight disinformation — the establishment of which provoked a political and legal battle over the government’s role in policing lies and other harmful content online that continues to reverberate.Now she has re-entered the fray with a new nonprofit organization intended to fight what she and others have described as a coordinated campaign by conservatives and others to undermine researchers, like her, who study the sources of disinformation.Already a lightning rod for critics of her work on the subject, Ms. Jankowicz inaugurated the organization with a letter accusing three Republican committee chairmen in the House of Representatives of abusing their subpoena powers to silence think tanks ...
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Could the Union Victory at VW Set Off a Wave?
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Economy

Could the Union Victory at VW Set Off a Wave?

“If workers in Chattanooga get a great contract, a big raise, better health benefits, and then the same thing at Mercedes, there will be a lot more good opportunities to win good contracts in short order,” said Madeline Janis, co-executive director of Jobs to Move America, a group that seeks to create good jobs in clean technology industries.Ms. Janis, whose group is involved in unionizing factory workers in the South, said the momentum could travel beyond the auto industry to other manufacturers because employees at different companies in the region often know one another and discuss these issues. “Their brothers and sisters and spouses are working at other plants,” she said. “It will be all over social media.”And some experts said that a rise in unionization at factories could spread to ...
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Ecuador Voters Back Daniel Noboa’s New Security Measures
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News

Ecuador Voters Back Daniel Noboa’s New Security Measures

Ecuadoreans voted on Sunday to give their new president more powers to combat the country’s plague of drug-related gang violence, officials said, supporting his hard-line stance on security and offering an early glimpse of how he might fare in his bid for re-election next year.President Daniel Noboa, the 36-year-old heir to a banana empire, took office in November after an election season focused on the violence, which has surged to levels not seen in decades. In January, he declared an “internal armed conflict” and ordered the military to “neutralize” the country’s gangs. The move allowed soldiers to patrol the streets and Ecuador’s prisons, many of which have come under gang control.In a referendum on Sunday, Ecuadoreans voted to enshrine the increased military presence into law and to l...
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Lori and George Schappell, Long-Surviving Conjoined Twins, Die at 62
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Health

Lori and George Schappell, Long-Surviving Conjoined Twins, Die at 62

Lori and George Schappell, conjoined twins whose skulls were partly fused but who managed to lead independent lives, died on April 7 in Philadelphia. They were 62.Their death, at a hospital, was announced by a funeral home, which did not cite a cause.Dr. Christopher Moir, a professor of surgery at the Mayo Clinic, who has been on teams that separated six sets of conjoined twins — although none of them were joined at the head — said that when one of the Schappells died, the other would have almost certainly followed quickly.“Conjoined twins share circulation,” he said, “so unless you somehow emergently divide their connection, it’s absolutely a fatal, nonviable process.”The Schappells lived much longer than had been expected when they were born as craniopagus twins, joined at the head, whic...
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The Stanley Cup playoff bandwagon guide to all the NHL teams you could root for
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Sports

The Stanley Cup playoff bandwagon guide to all the NHL teams you could root for

The playoffs are almost here, and while we’re still waiting on a couple of matchups, we know the 16 teams. If you root for one of them, you’re not reading this because you’re curled up in a little ball, twitching and sweating and trying not to puke. Playoffs, baby!That leaves the rest of you, the fans of the 16 teams that spent the season being big losers strategically retooling for a brighter future. You’ve got to figure out who to root for over the coming weeks and months. You could skip that part entirely, of course, and just enjoy the playoffs as a neutral observer. You could hate-watch your team’s rivals. Or you could pick and choose, dropping in and out of whichever series looks good and cheering on whoever feels like the right choice in the moment.Those are all valid options. But th...
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Start-Up Founder Sentenced to 18 Months in Prison for Fraud
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Technology

Start-Up Founder Sentenced to 18 Months in Prison for Fraud

Another start-up founder is going to prison for overstating his company’s performance to investors.Manish Lachwani, who last year pleaded guilty to three counts of defrauding investors at his software start-up, HeadSpin, was sentenced to one and a half years in prison on Friday. He will also pay a fine of $1 million.Government prosecutors said Mr. Lachwani, 48, deceived investors by inflating HeadSpin’s revenue nearly fourfold, making false claims about its customers and creating fake invoices to cover it up. His misrepresentations allowed him to raise $117 million in funding from top investment firms, valuing his start-up at $1.1 billion.When HeadSpin’s board members found out about the behavior in 2020, they pushed Mr. Lachwani to resign and slashed the company’s valuation by two-thirds....
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CNN’s Coverage of Man Who Set Himself on Fire Shows Challenges of Live News
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Economy

CNN’s Coverage of Man Who Set Himself on Fire Shows Challenges of Live News

Until Friday, at least, the cable news coverage of the first criminal trial of a former president carried a hint of anticlimax.With the dry and slow-moving proceedings inside a Lower Manhattan courtroom closed to their cameras, the networks could only offer their usual interviews with experts and analysts, set to the sights and sounds of their outdoor, on-location camera positions.That all changed on Friday when a man from Florida, Max Azzarello, set himself on fire near the courthouse — immediately bringing home the promise and perils of live cable news, especially for the network that invented the genre, CNN.The network’s legal analyst and anchor, Laura Coates, was doing a live interview with a jury-selection expert when Mr. Azzarello began throwing a batch of conspiracy pamphlets into t...
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China’s Swimmers Tested Positive. What Happens to Their Medals?
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News

China’s Swimmers Tested Positive. What Happens to Their Medals?

Whenever a suspicion of doping arises in an Olympics, attention can shift quickly from the athletes who won gold, silver and bronze medals to the ones who missed out.On Saturday, The New York Times published an investigation into an unreported case in which 23 top Chinese swimmers tested positive for a powerful banned drug in 2021, only months before the Tokyo Olympics. The swimmers — who made up about half of the Chinese swimming team at those Games — were cleared by China’s antidoping authorities and the World Anti-Doping Agency and allowed to compete.The episode has not only alarmed experts in the antidoping community, but also raised other questions about athletes who tested positive, and what comes next: Which athletes? Which races?And what about the medals they won in them?For now, t...
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Martin Wygod, a Winner on Wall Street and the Racetrack, Dies at 84
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Health

Martin Wygod, a Winner on Wall Street and the Racetrack, Dies at 84

Martin J. Wygod, a Wall Street whiz who graduated from walking horses after races to owning and breeding championship thoroughbreds when he made millions from investing in online companies that sold pharmaceuticals by mail and pruned medical paperwork, died on April 12 in San Diego. He was 84.His daughter, Emily Bushnell, said he died in a hospital from complications of lung disease.Raised near two racetracks in suburban New York and mentored by a software pioneer, an investor and a gambler, Mr. Wygod was said to have been the youngest managing partner of a New York Stock Exchange brokerage in the 1960s. He became a millionaire before he was 30, and in 1993 he sold Medco Containment Services to Merck for $6 billion after building it into the nation’s largest mail-order prescription drug co...
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