Author: NY TIMES

They entered the NFL with much fanfare and lofty expectations, hoping to one day be among the best talent the NFL has ever seen. But just three years later, the 2021 quarterback draft class largely looks like a giant bust.While NFL teams continue to evaluate another group of highly regarded quarterbacks ahead of the April draft, two of the five quarterbacks selected in the 2021 first round (Justin Fields and Mac Jones) Just got traded for a pittance. The third guy (Trey Lance) is set to enter year two as a backup on the second team. The fourth (Zach Wilson)…

Ahead of one of its signature events, New York Road Runners fielded an unusual email request on Friday night.The rapper and singer Lil Nas X, who was visiting New York from Los Angeles, had seen some advertisements for the United Airlines NYC Half, a 13.1-mile race that was set to be staged on Sunday morning. And one of his representatives was curious: Did the race have room for one more runner?“It kind of came out of the blue,” Rob Simmelkjaer, the chief executive of New York Road Runners, said in a telephone interview on Monday.The nonprofit, which puts on about…

James D. Robinson III, who as chief executive of the American Express Company from 1977 to 1993 helped transform Wall Street into a more competitive financial marketplace, with a wide diversity of businesses housed under single roofs, died on Monday in Roslyn, N.Y., on Long Island. He was 88.The death, at a hospital, was caused by respiratory failure from recurrent pneumonia, Walter Montgomery, a spokesman for the family, wrote in an announcement.A soft-spoken son of the Georgia gentry, Mr. Robinson followed a well-worn path to financial success, power and influence: from private school to the Ivy League and then on…

It was raw and occasionally tense.The former television anchor Don Lemon’s wide-ranging, testy interview with Elon Musk was released online on Monday morning, touching upon topics including politics, particularly the billionaire’s recent meeting with former President Donald J. Trump; Mr. Musk’s reported drug use; hate speech on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, which he now owns; and more.The interview was intended to be the debut episode of a new talk show in a partnership between Mr. Lemon and X, but Mr. Musk called off the deal a day after filming the hour-plus interview at Tesla’s headquarters…

New studies by the National Institutes of Health failed to find evidence of brain injury in scans or blood markers of the diplomats and spies who suffered symptoms of Havana syndrome, bolstering the conclusions of U.S. intelligence agencies about the strange health incidents.Spy agencies have concluded that the debilitating symptoms associated with Havana syndrome, including dizziness and migraines, are not the work of a hostile foreign power. They have not identified a weapon or device that caused the injuries, and intelligence analysts now believe the symptoms are most likely explained by environmental factors, existing medical conditions or stress.The lead scientist…

Gylan Kain, a Harlem-born poet and performance artist who was a founder of the Last Poets, the spoken-word collective that laid a foundation for rap music starting in the late 1960s by delivering fiery poetic salvos about racism and oppression over pulsing drum beats, died on Feb. 7 in Lelystad, the Netherlands. He was 81.He died in a nursing home from complications of heart disease, his son Rufus Kain said. His death was not widely reported at the time.The Last Poets, which originally consisted of Mr. Kain, David Nelson and Abiodun Oyewole, were aligned with the Black Arts Movement —…

The rift over the war in Gaza between Israel and the United States, its closest ally, broadened on Sunday when Israel’s prime minister accused a top-ranking American lawmaker of treating his country like a “banana republic.”Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is facing increasing pressure to negotiate a cease-fire, lashed out at Senator Chuck Schumer over his call for elections to be held in Israel when the war winds down. In an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Mr. Netanyahu suggested that Mr. Schumer, the Senate majority leader, was trying to topple his government and said his call for an…

President Vladimir V. Putin described the death of the imprisoned opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny as an “unfortunate incident” and claimed he had been ready to release him in exchange for Russian prisoners held in the West.Mr. Putin, in a news conference after Russia’s presidential election, said that “some people” had told him before Mr. Navalny’s death “that there was an idea to exchange Mr. Navalny for some people held in correctional facilities in Western countries.”“I said, ‘I agree,’” Mr. Putin said. “Just with one condition: ‘We’ll trade him but make sure that he doesn’t come back, let him stay…

This happens every time Carlos Alcaraz takes the field. He did something so hilarious that people who have been watching tennis matches for decades swear they’ve never seen their favorite doubles partner live before. They’re probably right, because even though he’s been a mess (for him) over the past six months or so, going through some form of sophomore slump, Alcaraz has never failed to create something that’s impressive A performance of wonder. The moment came a little more than halfway through the first set against Daniil Medvedev in the BNP Paribas Open final in Indian Wells on Sunday. As…

Margaret Grade, a California neuropsychologist who made a sharp career turn to open a cozy, eclectic inn near the Point Reyes National Seashore that was known for tending to farmers and fishers with the same attentiveness it gave to the film stars and writers who sought sanctuary there, died on Feb. 28 in San Francisco. She was 72.Ms. Grade was injured in a car accident in Marin County on Jan. 11. She spent several weeks in a hospital before she died there of complications related to her injuries, her brother Matthew Grade, a physician, said.The introverted Ms. Grade acknowledged that…