Investments and Business

Ashlee Wiseman, a waitress at a Sizzler in Idaho Falls, Idaho, was 10 weeks pregnant when a nurse phoned with crushing news: a test of fetal DNA in her blood had found that her baby girl had trisomy 18, a catastrophic genetic abnormality, and was unlikely to survive.Devastated, she called her partner, Clint Risenmay, who was at work. He broke down in tears.Ashlee’s response was different.“A still small voice took over me,” she said. “I’m like, ‘I’m not going to listen to them. There has to be something that can help her. And there has to be someone who can…

In the story Shohei Ohtani’s interpreter Ippei Mizuhara initially told to ESPN, the two men logged into Ohtani’s bank account together on eight or nine occasions in 2023 and wired increments of $500,000 to Mathew Bowyer, an alleged illegal bookmaker under federal investigation. In the story Ohtani told the public days after Mizuhara recanted his initial claims and was fired by the Dodgers, the interpreter stole the money to pay off his gambling debts.Both versions of the story generated a question that stumped the general public: Why would a bookie extend a line of credit of at least $4.5 million to…

Sports Illustrated’s owner on Monday sued Manoj Bhargava, the energy drinks mogul whose foray into media has been rife with chaos and conflict, accusing him of failing to pay millions of dollars for the rights to publish the iconic magazine.The 51-page lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, says that Mr. Bhargava and Arena Group, the publisher he controls, owe $48.75 million in missed payments, as well as damages for infringing on Sports Illustrated’s copyrights and trademarks.The lawsuit represents the latest public skirmish between Authentic Brands Group, which owns Sports Illustrated, and Mr. Bhargava,…

Lin Qi was a billionaire with a dream. The video game tycoon had wanted to turn one of China’s most famous science-fiction novels, “The Three-Body Problem,” into a global hit. He had started working with Netflix and the creators of the HBO series “Game of Thrones” to bring the alien invasion saga to international audiences.But Mr. Lin did not live to see “3 Body Problem” premiere on Netflix last month, drawing millions of viewers.He was poisoned to death in Shanghai in 2020, at age 39, by a disgruntled colleague, in a killing that riveted the country’s tech and video-gaming circles…

By the Numbers: A rising fatality rate.The illness is caused by infection with a bacterium called Neisseria meningitidis. Last year, 422 cases of invasive meningococcal disease were reported in the United States, the highest number since 2014, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.But as of Monday, 143 cases have been reported to the C.D.C. so far this year, 62 more than the number of cases reported last year during the same period.The illness is extremely dangerous. Even with appropriate treatment, 10 to 15 percent of patients who develop meningococcal disease will die. Many recent cases were caused…

OAKLAND — The quarterback wasn’t there. No mention of his name across two hours. Maybe there was no need.The mere prospect of a pairing had already served its purpose — driving news cycles, stirring speculation, drumming up intrigue around a longshot bid for the White House by an outsider intent on defying political norms. But Aaron Rodgers running for Vice President of the United States?This not only defied political norms, it strained credulity.It was all but impossible to envision Rodgers balancing the rigors of his day job as quarterback of the New York Jets with a high-stakes political campaign, particularly…

Jerome H. Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, said on Friday that resilient economic growth is giving the central bank the flexibility to be patient before cutting interest rates.Fed officials raised interest rates sharply from early 2022 to mid-2023, and they have left them at about 5.3 percent since last July. That relatively high level essentially taps the brakes on the economy, in part by making it expensive to borrow to buy a house or start a business. The goal is to keep rates high enough, for long enough, to wrestle inflation back under control.But price increases have cooled…

A singer known for her mastery of standards, she found stardom in Canada on TV and in nightclubs. But she was virtually unknown in the United States. More information

The phone awakened Doug Nordman at 3 a.m. A surgeon was calling from a hospital in Grand Junction, Colo., where Mr. Nordman’s father had arrived at the emergency room, incoherent and in pain, and then lost consciousness.At first, the staff had thought he was suffering a heart attack, but a CT scan found that part of his small intestine had been perforated. A surgical team repaired the hole, saving his life, but the surgeon had some questions.“Was your father an alcoholic?” he asked. The doctors had found Dean Nordman malnourished, his peritoneal cavity “awash with alcohol.”The younger Mr. Nordman, a…

A U.S. District judge in Florida sentenced a convicted sex offender to 220 years in federal prison for producing, receiving and possessing child sex abuse material, and for hacking the jumbotron in the Jacksonville Jaguars’ stadium after the team did not renew his contract upon learning that he was a registered sex offender.U.S. District Judge Brian J. Davis sentenced Samuel Arthur Thompson, 53, for the offenses Tuesday, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Florida said in a release. A federal jury convicted Thompson in November 2023 of the offenses, as well as of producing child sex abuse…