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AJK Assembly passes resolution against US sanction on PakistanArticle content It was a huge year for the business of sport, with Caitlin Clark and the WNBA leading the charge in a game-changing year for women’s basketball. She’s not alone but she is clearly the poster child for the new economic reality for women’s team sports. Clark is making everyone around her wealthier. Explosive growth in media rights fees and overall revenues reaching the stage where several North American pro sports teams posted more than 30 per cent increases in franchise valuation, year-over-year. The television juggernaut that is the National Football League — which we’ve dubbed the new social network — closes out 2024 with an average franchise value of US$5.7 billion according to Forbes magazine. When your weakest links are still worth $4 billion and have grown by about 70 per cent since the pandemic, there’s no one to feel sorry for. That’s especially true when recent streaming deals will only drive more NFL revenue and audience in the years to come. Amazon Prime paid $100 million for the Black Friday stream last month while Netflix offered up $150 million for the NFL Christmas Day doubleheader that averaged 24 million, peaked at 27 million for a Beyonce half-time show and rallied more than 65 million unique viewers for at least part of the two games played on Wednesday of this week. Also having bullish years in 2024: Alternate telecasts, stadium design, podcasts and collectibles. More to come on those fronts in 2025. It was already an historically bad year for the Chicago White Sox, the Major League Baseball franchise that set an all-time mark for futility despite having the advantages of operating in the third largest market in the U.S. Yet leave it to the Chicago Bears of the NFL to give them a run for the money as one of the biggest losers in the business of sport this year. The Bears (6-3 losers to the Seattle Seahawks on Thursday Night Football this week) have now lost a record 10 straight games after starting the season at 4-2. Outside of deep playoff runs by the New York Yankees, New York Mets and New York Red Bulls, the Big Apple has been largely rotten in 2024. The biggest media market in North America has not one but two also-rans in the NFL (the 2-13 Giants in the NFC and the 4-11 Jets in the AFC), not to mention the New York Rangers, who are an absolute mess at the Christmas break despite being the second-richest franchise in the NHL according to both Forbes and Sportico. Meanwhile, the Oakland Athletics are no more after one of the messiest and protracted break ups in North American team sport. After more than two decades of on-again, off-again talks about a new stadium in Oakland finally collapsed, the Athletics will play in Sacramento for three seasons while they work with Las Vegas stakeholders to fund and construct a new ballpark at the site of the Tropicana Hotel. Once one of the most storied blue collar sport markets in North America, Oakland is now a shell of its former self, with the Golden State Warriors of the NBA now playing at the Chase Center in San Francisco, the Oakland Raiders in Las Vegas and the old California Seals long ago morphed into the Cleveland Barons, merged with the Minnesota North Stars and ultimately relocated to Dallas in 1993.

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On Monday night, the entire Simpsons universe gets to experience it in a way not many could have imagined. The prime-time matchup between the Cincinnati Bengals and Dallas Cowboys will also take place at Springfield’s Atoms Stadium as part of “The Simpsons Funday Football” alternate broadcast. The altcast will be streamed on ESPN+, Disney+, and NFL+ (on mobile devices). ESPN and ABC have the main broadcast, while ESPN2 will carry the final “ManningCast” of the regular season. The replay will be available on Disney+ for 30 days. Globally, more than 145 countries will have access to either live or on replay. “We’re such huge football fans, and the Simpsons audience and the football audience, I feel, are like the same audience of just American families and football. And the Simpsons are so much a part of the DNA of the American family and culture that for us to, like, mush them together in this crazy video game, it’s so fun,” said Matt Selman, executive producer of “The Simpsons.” While the game is the focal point, the alternate broadcast, in some ways, will resemble a three-hour episode of “The Simpsons.” It starts with Homer eating too many hot dogs and having a dream while watching football. Homer joins the Cowboys in the dream while Bart teams up with the Bengals. Lisa and Marge will be sideline reporters. “That’s the beginning of the story, and the story continues through the entire game until Homer wakes up from his dream at the end of the game. It is like a complete story, and the NFL game will happen in between. It’s just going to be an amazing presentation with tons of surprises,” said Michael “Spike” Szykowny, ESPN’s VP of edit and animation. This is the second year ESPN has done an alternate broadcast for an NFL game. It used the characters from “Toy Story” for last year’s Sunday morning game from London between the Atlanta Falcons and Jacksonville Jaguars. “The Simpsons” has featured many sports-themed episodes during its 35 seasons. Even though “Homer at the Bat” remains the consensus favorite sports episode for many Simpsons fans, there have been football ones such as “Bart Star” and “Lisa The Greek.” There also was a Super Bowl-themed one after Fox’s broadcast of Super Bowl 33 between Denver and Atlanta in 1999. Even though “The Simpsons” remains a staple on Fox’s prime-time schedule, it is part of the Disney family after their acquisition of 20th Century Fox in 2019. All 35 seasons are on Disney+. The show’s creators have worked with ESPN and the NFL to make sure the look and sound is definitely Simpsonsesque. The theme song is a mash-up of “The Simpsons” opening and “Monday Night Football’s” iconic “Heavy Action.” There have also been pre-recorded skits and bits to use during the broadcast featuring Simpson’s legendary voices Hank Azaria, Nancy Cartwright, Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner, and Yeardley Smith. The telecast will be entirely animated, with the players’ movements in sync with what is happening in real-time on the field. That is done through player-tracking data enabled by the NFL’s Next Gen Stats system and Sony’s Beyond Sports Technology. While Next Gen Stats tracks where players are on the field with a tracking chip in the shoulder pads, there is skeletal data tracking and limb tracking data — which uses 29 points per player — to get closer to the player’s movements. The other data tracking will allow Beyond Sports and Disney to add special characters to the game. For example, there might be a play where Lisa catches the ball and goes 30 yards instead of Cincinnati’s Tee Higgins. “Lisa is much smaller than the rest of the players. So, in real life, the ball would go over her head, but now, with data processing, we can take the ball and make it go exactly into her hands. So for the viewer, it still looks believable, and it all makes sense,” said Beyond Sports co-founder Nicolaas Westerhof. The other major challenge is making “The Simpsons” two-dimensional cartoon characters into 3-D simulations. Szykowny and his team worked to make that a reality over the past couple of months. “That’s a big leap of faith for them to say, hey, we trust you to make our characters 3-D and work with it. Our ESPN creative studio team has done a wonderful job,” Szykowny said. Lisa, Krusty, Nelson, Milhouse and Ralph will be with Bart and the Bengals; while Carl, Barney, Lenny and Moe join up with with Homer and the Cowboys. The broadcast will also feature ESPN personalities Stephen A. Smith, Peyton Manning and Eli Manning. ESPN’s Drew Carter, Mina Kimes and Dan Orlovsky will call the game from Bristol, Connecticut, and also be animated. They will wear Meta Quest Pro headsets to experience the game from Springfield using VR technology. For Kimes, being part of the broadcast and being an animated Simpsons character is a dream come true. She is a massive fan of the show and has a framed photo of Lisa Simpson — who she said is a personal hero and icon — as part of her backdrop when she makes appearances on ESPN NFL shows from her home in Los Angeles. “I didn’t have any input, and I didn’t see anything beforehand, so I wasn’t sure if it would look like me, but it kind of does, which is very funny,” said Kimes, who drew Simpsons characters when she was a kid. “To see the actual staff turn me into one was a dream.” Even though the Bengals (4-8) and Cowboys (5-7) have struggled this season, Selman thinks both teams have personalities that appeal to “The Simpsons” universe. “We were just so lucky also that the Cowboys are sort of like a Homer Simpson-type team, American team, and Mike McCarthy might be a Homer-type guy, one might imagine,” he said. ”And then you have Joe Burrow on the other side who is a cool young, spiky-haired, blonde bad boy -- he’s like Bart. And that fits our character archetypes so perfectly. “If Homer is mad at Bart and has a hot dog dream while watching ’Monday Night Football’, and then it’s basically McCarthy versus Burrow, Homer versus Bart, and that’s the simple father versus son strangling — Homer strangling Bart dynamic that has been part of the show for 35 years. I don’t know if that would have worked as well if it was like Titans versus Jacksonville. We would have found something. We would have made it work.” AP NFL: https://apnews.com/hub/nfl

It may be the smallest official royal palace in the UK but Kew Palace, nestling in the middle of London’s stunning botanical gardens, packs a mighty punch as the real-life stage for Regency romance, madness and Bridgerton betrayal. Kew Palace in the famed botanical Gardens. A place where things go bump in the night. Credit: Getty Images With a history as triumphant and tragic as that of any monarchy worldwide, it’s a building soaked in memories of past lives, which sometimes still leak out from the fabric. “We sometimes hear children running in the corridors even though there’s no-one else here,” says Emma Dearing, the operations manager at Kew Palace. “At other times, there’s the odd smell of tobacco or of a sweet sherberty lemon, possibly from the perfumes the women used to wear. “And I was here in 2022 when the Queen passed away. All the music had been turned off for the mourning period but when we came to check one morning, we could hear music... but the player wasn’t plugged in.” Historic Royal Palaces conservators arrange artefacts and furniture in the Queen’s Boudoir. Credit: Getty Images Kew Palace started out in 1631 as a City of London merchant’s handsome Palladian-style home until it was developed into a royal palace in the 18th Century. Four storeys high, with its exterior painted in a red ochre colour wash, it was used by successive generations of rulers and their families as a weekend country retreat. King George III was no different, taking it as a refuge for himself and his young bride, Queen Charlotte, and, as the years passed, their 15 children. Visits to the palace have surged since Netflix drama Bridgerton became a massive hit around the world. It tells the story of life in that era and how, as George’s demons spiralled him into despair, Charlotte set the social standards and the feckless Prince Regent became ever more powerful. With the show’s fourth season now in production, it seems everyone has been captivated by the story of the royals in one of the most turbulent times in history, and Kew Palace has been the staunch witness to it all. A dust cover is removed from a piano in the Queen’s Drawing Room. Credit: Getty Images If only the walls could talk. But this palace has so much atmosphere, and so many personal objects on display, it’s not too difficult to imagine life as it was in the day. The king’s flute is in the first room. He was a man with a tremendous appetite for all the finer things in life – books, music and art. Charlotte’s harpsichord is also there. The two often played together, while a visiting Mozart famously duetted with her. A 1761 portrait of George’s young bride glows on one wall. It was painted before she arrived from Germany as a 17-year-old, considered young, innocent and unworldly enough to make a suitable match. George’s former tutor and close advisor Lord Bute was charged with finding a perfect match. “She had to be not too clever, not too beautiful, not too political and not too outspoken,” says Dearing. “Several young women missed out for saying or doing the wrong thing. “But Charlotte knew to be careful in front of Lord Bute... and she waited until after the marriage to show her true colours.” She certainly turned out to be wise, with their marriage lasting 57 years until her death. A painting in the Queen’s Bedroom. Credit: Getty Images In another room, there are life-size models of the couple with all of their children – one pregnancy a year still failed to dim Charlotte’s light – while the dining table is laid for dinner that you can imagine being served any moment. Upstairs, the queen’s boudoir is a sumptuous room, with an elaborate plaster ceiling with figures representing each of the five senses. It’s been decorated according to the snatches of the original furnishings that survived, so now has a lively teal wallpaper, gold and black curtains and thick carpets. It’s here that Charlotte and her maids would spend their time sewing and gossiping. There are also the rooms for all the children, with the girls’ rooms the most fascinating. As females, they were allowed to do little, beyond reading, sewing, walking and playing cards. But there’s also an astonishing large dolls’ house on display, with each of the rooms decorated as they are in the real palace with miniature versions of all the furniture. It’s painstaking work, but it makes you appreciate that, in the absence of little else, this is what the life of a female royal would be. There are plenty of memories of even darker days, too, when George first faltered with a mystery illness in 1788. He took sanctuary in Kew Palace at that time, where he was treated with a mix of leeches, cold baths, laxatives and threats, often being contained in a straitjacket and allowed to do nothing for himself. He recovered a year later, but then descended into what was popularly called “madness” again in 1810. Today, it’s thought it could have been the illness porphyria, a metabolic disorder, or he could have been bipolar. It was then that his son, George IV, took power. The palace was then used by the royals as an elaborate weekender in the midst of the fabulous Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, which was set on the path to becoming one of the world’s foremost gardens by Sir Joseph Banks, who bankrolled Captain Cook’s expedition to Australia and then masterminded transportation to the colony. If walls could talk... The King’s Dining Room. Credit: Historic Royal Palaces But the royal home fell out of favour with George IV, back into prominence with William IV, and then, finally, into disuse before Queen Victoria, George III’s granddaughter, opened it to the public. She would have known that Kew Palace’s incredible history, and its amazing location – quite apart from the advent of TV streaming – would continue to attract visitors, as a true jewel of London, forever more. FIVE OTHER ROYAL PALACES OPEN FOR VISITORS The Tower of London The city’s most splendid fortress, royal palace, home of the Crown Jewels and notorious prison that was once jail to the two little princes. Adults £34.80 ($67.20); children up to 15 £17.40 ($33.60) Hampton Court Palace The palace of Tudor King Henry VIII, his six wives and their various children, set in 24 hectares of magnificent gardens. Adults £27.50; children up to 15 £13.60 Kensington Palace The birthplace of Queen Victoria, and the home of young royals, as well as Princess Diana who had her home and office there. Adults £20.00; children up to 16 £10.00 Hillsborough Castle A splendid castle in Northern Ireland, County Down, used by presidents and royals through the ages, with 40 hectares of ornamental lawn. Adults £20.20; children up to 15 £10.10 Banqueting House The site of Charles I’s execution in Whitehall with a magnificent Rubens’ ceiling. Prices will be set in 2025 after a refurbishment. All these palaces are run by the Historic Royal Palaces. See hrp.org.uk THE DETAILS VISIT Access to Kew Palace is included with a Kew Gardens ticket and is open 10am-3.15pm. Last entry 2.30pm. Tickets: peak February 1-October 31 - Weekdays adults £22 (online £20) and children £6 (online £5); Weekends adults £24 (online £22) and children £7 (online £6). Off Peak November 1- January 31. Weekdays adults £14 (online £12) and children £5 (online £4); Weekends adults £16 (online £14) and children £6 (online £5). See kew.org The writer travelled at her own expense.Jae Crowder is nearing a return to the league. The veteran forward is close to striking a deal to join the Sacramento Kings this season, . Specifics of that deal are still unknown. He is, however, expected to be available as soon as Wednesday’s game against the Minnesota Timberwolves in Minneapolis. Crowder, 34, spent the last two seasons with the Milwaukee Bucks. The 13-year veteran, who was first selected in the second round of the 2012 draft by the Cleveland Cavaliers, will join his ninth team in the league once his deal with the Kings is official. He averaged 6.2 points and 3.2 rebounds per game last season in Milwaukee. Crowder helped lead both the Miami Heat and the Phoenix Suns to the NBA Finals in back-to-back years, though he’s yet to win a championship. Crowder became a free agent this past offseason, and he worked out with the Kings over the summer, though he was unable to strike a deal to land with any team. The Kings are dealing with significant injuries, and have lost seven of their last 10 games entering Wednesday’s contest in Minnesota. Forward Trey Lyles is out for at least three weeks with a right calf strain, which he sustained in Monday’s loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder. DeMar DeRozan will also miss Wednesday’s game with lower back muscle inflammation, though it’s unknown how long he’ll be sidelined. Third-year coach on Tuesday after he chased down an official in their loss to the Brooklyn Nets on Sunday, too. Though it’s unclear what his role will be with the franchise just yet, Crowder should be able to provide some much-needed depth in the frontcourt behind Keegan Murray and Domantas Sabonis at least in the near future. We’ll see if he’s the missing piece to lift the Kings out of their slump.

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Lisa Simpson once said during an episode of “The Simpsons:” What could be more exciting than the savage ballet that is pro football? On Monday night, the entire Simpsons universe gets to experience it in a way not many could have imagined. The prime-time matchup between the Cincinnati Bengals and Dallas Cowboys will also take place at Springfield’s Atoms Stadium as part of “The Simpsons Funday Football” alternate broadcast. The altcast will be streamed on ESPN+, Disney+, and NFL+ (on mobile devices). ESPN and ABC have the main broadcast, while ESPN2 will carry the final “ManningCast” of the regular season. The replay will be available on Disney+ for 30 days. Globally, more than 145 countries will have access to either live or on replay. “We’re such huge football fans, and the Simpsons audience and the football audience, I feel, are like the same audience of just American families and football. And the Simpsons are so much a part of the DNA of the American family and culture that for us to, like, mush them together in this crazy video game, it’s so fun,” said Matt Selman, executive producer of “The Simpsons.” While the game is the focal point, the alternate broadcast, in some ways, will resemble a three-hour episode of “The Simpsons.” It starts with Homer eating too many hot dogs and having a dream while watching football. Homer joins the Cowboys in the dream while Bart teams up with the Bengals. Lisa and Marge will be sideline reporters. “That’s the beginning of the story, and the story continues through the entire game until Homer wakes up from his dream at the end of the game. It is like a complete story, and the NFL game will happen in between. It’s just going to be an amazing presentation with tons of surprises,” said Michael “Spike” Szykowny, ESPN’s VP of edit and animation. This is the second year ESPN has done an alternate broadcast for an NFL game. It used the characters from “Toy Story” for last year’s Sunday morning game from London between the Atlanta Falcons and Jacksonville Jaguars. “The Simpsons” has featured many sports-themed episodes during its 35 seasons. Even though “Homer at the Bat” remains the consensus favorite sports episode for many Simpsons fans, there have been football ones such as “Bart Star” and “Lisa The Greek.” There also was a Super Bowl-themed one after Fox’s broadcast of Super Bowl 33 between Denver and Atlanta in 1999. Even though “The Simpsons” remains a staple on Fox’s prime-time schedule, it is part of the Disney family after their acquisition of 20th Century Fox in 2019. All 35 seasons are on Disney+. The show’s creators have worked with ESPN and the NFL to make sure the look and sound is definitely Simpsonsesque. The theme song is a mash-up of “The Simpsons” opening and “Monday Night Football’s” iconic “Heavy Action.” There have also been pre-recorded skits and bits to use during the broadcast featuring Simpson’s legendary voices Hank Azaria, Nancy Cartwright, Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner, and Yeardley Smith. The telecast will be entirely animated, with the players’ movements in sync with what is happening in real-time on the field. That is done through player-tracking data enabled by the NFL’s Next Gen Stats system and Sony’s Beyond Sports Technology. While Next Gen Stats tracks where players are on the field with a tracking chip in the shoulder pads, there is skeletal data tracking and limb tracking data — which uses 29 points per player — to get closer to the player’s movements. The other data tracking will allow Beyond Sports and Disney to add special characters to the game. For example, there might be a play where Lisa catches the ball and goes 30 yards instead of Cincinnati’s Tee Higgins. “Lisa is much smaller than the rest of the players. So, in real life, the ball would go over her head, but now, with data processing, we can take the ball and make it go exactly into her hands. So for the viewer, it still looks believable, and it all makes sense,” said Beyond Sports co-founder Nicolaas Westerhof. The other major challenge is making “The Simpsons” two-dimensional cartoon characters into 3-D simulations. Szykowny and his team worked to make that a reality over the past couple of months. “That’s a big leap of faith for them to say, hey, we trust you to make our characters 3-D and work with it. Our ESPN creative studio team has done a wonderful job,” Szykowny said. Lisa, Krusty, Nelson, Milhouse and Ralph will be with Bart and the Bengals; while Carl, Barney, Lenny and Moe join up with with Homer and the Cowboys. The broadcast will also feature ESPN personalities Stephen A. Smith, Peyton Manning and Eli Manning. ESPN’s Drew Carter, Mina Kimes and Dan Orlovsky will call the game from Bristol, Connecticut, and also be animated. They will wear Meta Quest Pro headsets to experience the game from Springfield using VR technology. For Kimes, being part of the broadcast and being an animated Simpsons character is a dream come true. She is a massive fan of the show and has a framed photo of Lisa Simpson — who she said is a personal hero and icon — as part of her backdrop when she makes appearances on ESPN NFL shows from her home in Los Angeles. “I didn’t have any input, and I didn’t see anything beforehand, so I wasn’t sure if it would look like me, but it kind of does, which is very funny,” said Kimes, who drew Simpsons characters when she was a kid. “To see the actual staff turn me into one was a dream.” Even though the Bengals (4-8) and Cowboys (5-7) have struggled this season, Selman thinks both teams have personalities that appeal to “The Simpsons” universe. “We were just so lucky also that the Cowboys are sort of like a Homer Simpson-type team, American team, and Mike McCarthy might be a Homer-type guy, one might imagine,” he said. ”And then you have Joe Burrow on the other side who is a cool young, spiky-haired, blonde bad boy -- he’s like Bart. And that fits our character archetypes so perfectly. “If Homer is mad at Bart and has a hot dog dream while watching ’Monday Night Football’, and then it’s basically McCarthy versus Burrow, Homer versus Bart, and that’s the simple father versus son strangling — Homer strangling Bart dynamic that has been part of the show for 35 years. I don’t know if that would have worked as well if it was like Titans versus Jacksonville. We would have found something. We would have made it work.” AP NFL: https://apnews.com/hub/nfl

Carr scores 12, Kohler has double-double and Michigan State beats Minnesota 90-72 in Big Ten openerGreg Gumbel, a longtime CBS sportscaster, has died from cancer, according to a statement from family released by CBS on Friday. He was 78. “He leaves behind a legacy of love, inspiration and dedication to over 50 extraordinary years in the sports broadcast industry; and his iconic voice will never be forgotten,” his wife Marcy Gumbel and daughter Michelle Gumbel said in a statement. In March, Gumbel missed his first NCAA Tournament since 1997 due to what he said at the time were family health issues. Gumbel was the studio host for CBS since returning to the network from NBC in 1998. Gumbel signed an extension with CBS last year that allowed him to continue hosting college basketball while stepping back from NFL announcing duties. In 2001, he announced Super Bowl XXXV for CBS, becoming the first Black announcer in the U.S. to call play-by-play of a major sports championship. David Berson, president and CEO of CBS Sports, described Greg Gumbel as breaking barriers and setting standards for others during his years as a voice for fans in sports, including in the NFL and March Madness. “A tremendous broadcaster and gifted storyteller, Greg led one of the most remarkable and groundbreaking sports broadcasting careers of all time," said Berson. Gumbel had two stints at CBS, leaving the network for NBC when it lost football in 1994 and returning when it regained the contract in 1998. He hosted CBS’ coverage of the 1992 and 1994 Winter Olympics and called Major League Baseball games during its four-year run broadcasting the national pastime. But it was football and basketball where he was best known and made his biggest impact. Gumbel hosted CBS’ NFL studio show, “The NFL Today” from 1990 to 1993 and again in 2004. He also called NFL games as the network’s lead play-by-play announcer from 1998 to 2003, including Super Bowl XXXV and XXXVIII. He returned to the NFL booth in 2005, leaving that role after the 2022 season.