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Paul Tagliabue, who helped bring labor peace and riches to the NFL during his 17 years as commissioner but was criticized for not taking stronger action on concussions, died Sunday from heart failure. He was 84.NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy said Tagliabue’s family informed the league of his death in Chevy Chase, Maryland.Tagliabue, who had developed Parkinson’s disease, was commissioner after Pete Rozelle from 1989 to 2006. He was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame as part of a special centennial class in 2020. Current Commissioner Roger Goodell succeeded Tagliabue.“Paul was the ultimate steward of the game tall in stature, humble in presence and decisive in his loyalty to the NFL,” Goodell said in a statement. “I am forever grateful and proud to have Paul as my friend and mentor. I cherished the innumerable hours we spent together where he helped shape me as an executive but also as a man, husband and father.”News of Tagliabue’s death came shortly before seven games kicked off Sunday at 1 p.m. EST. Several teams held moments of silence throughout the day for Tagliabue and Marshawn Kneeland, the Dallas Cowboys defensive tackle who died on Thursday.Tagliabue oversaw the construction of myriad new stadiums and negotiated television contracts that added billions of dollars to the league’s bank account. Under him, there were no labor stoppages.During his time, Los Angeles lost two teams and Cleveland another, migrating to Baltimore before being replaced by an expansion franchise. Los Angeles eventually regained two teams.Tagliabue implemented a policy on substance abuse that was considered the strongest in all major sports. He also established the “Rooney Rule,” in which all teams with coaching vacancies must interview minority candidates. It has since been expanded to include front-office and league executive positions.When he took office in 1989, the NFL had just hired its first Black head coach of the modern era. By the time Tagliabue stepped down in 2006, there were seven minority head coaches in the league.In one of his pivotal moments, Tagliabue called off NFL games the weekend after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It was one of the few times the public compared him favorably to Rozelle, who proceeded with the games two days after President John Kennedy was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963. A key presidential aide had advised Rozelle that the NFL should play, a decision that was one of the commissioner’s great regrets.Tagliabue certainly had his detractors, notably over concussions. The issue has plagued the NFL for decades, though team owners had a major role in the lack of progress in dealing with head trauma.In 2017, Tagliabue apologized for remarks he made decades ago about concussions in football, acknowledging he didn’t have the proper data at the time in 1994. He called concussions “one of those pack-journalism issues” and contended the number of concussions “is relatively small; the problem is the journalist issue.”“Obviously,” he said on Talk of Fame Network, “I do regret those remarks. Looking back, it was not sensible language to use to express my thoughts at the time. My language was intemperate, and it led to a serious misunderstanding.“My intention at the time was to make a point which could have been made fairly simply: that there was a need for better data. There was a need for more reliable information about concussions and uniformity in terms of how they were being defined in terms of severity.”While concussion recognition, research and treatment lagged for much of Tagliabue’s tenure, his work on the labor front was exemplary.As one of his first decisions, Tagliabue reached out to the players’ union, then run by Gene Upshaw, a Hall of Fame player and former star for Al Davis’ Raiders. Tagliabue had insisted he be directly involved in all labor negotiations, basically rendering useless the Management Council of club executives that had handled such duties for nearly two decades.It was a wise decision.“When Paul was named commissioner after that seven-month search in 1989, that’s when the league got back on track,” said Joe Browne, who spent 50 years as an NFL executive and was a confidant of Rozelle and Tagliabue.“Paul had insisted during his negotiations for the position that final control over matters such as labor and all commercial business dealings had to rest in the commissioner’s office. The owners agreed and that was a large step forward toward the tremendous rebound we had as a league an expanded league in the ’90s and beyond.”Tagliabue forged a solid relationship with Upshaw. In breaking with the contentious dealings between the league and the NFL Players Association, Tagliabue and Upshaw kept negotiations respectful and centered on what would benefit both sides. Compromise was key, Upshaw always said although the union often was criticized for being too accommodating.Tagliabue had been the NFL’s Washington lawyer, a partner in the prestigious firm of Covington & Burling. He was chosen as commissioner in October 1989 over New Orleans general manager Jim Finks after a bitter fight highlighting the differences between the NFL’s old guard and newer owners.Yet during his reign as commissioner, which ended in the spring of 2006 after pushing through a highly contested labor agreement, he managed to unite those divided owners and, in fact, relied more on the old-timers who supported him than on Jerry Jones and many of the younger owners at the time.Tagliabue was born on Nov. 24, 1940, in Jersey City, New Jersey. He was the 6-foot-5 captain of the basketball team at Georgetown and graduated in 1962 as one of the school’s leading rebounders at the time his career average later listed just below that of Patrick Ewing. He was president of his class and a Rhodes scholar finalist. Three years later, he graduated from NYU Law School and subsequently worked as a lawyer in the Defense Department before joining Covington & Burling.He eventually took over the NFL account, establishing a close relationship with Rozelle and other league officials during a series of legal actions in the 1970s and 1980s.Tagliabue was reserved by nature and it sometimes led to coolness with the media, which had embraced Rozelle, an affable former public relations man. Even after he left office, Tagliabue did not measure up in that regard with Goodell, who began his NFL career in the public relations department.But after 9/11, Tagliabue showed a different side, particularly toward league employees who had lost loved ones in the attacks. He accompanied Ed Tighe, an NFL Management Council lawyer whose wife died that day, to Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, a few blocks from the NFL office.Art Shell, a Hall of Fame player, became the NFL’s first modern-day Black head coach with the Raiders. He got to see Tagliabue up close and thought him utterly suited for his job.“After my coaching career was over, I had the privilege of working directly with Paul in the league office,” Shell said. “His philosophy on almost every issue was, ‘If it’s broke, fix it. And if it’s not broke, fix it anyway.’“He always challenged us to find better ways of doing things. Paul never lost sight of his responsibility to do what was right for the game. He was the perfect choice as NFL commissioner.”Tagliabue is survived by his wife, Chandler, son Drew anddaughter Emily. AP NFL: https://apnews.com/hub/nfl Barry Wilner and Rob Maaddi, AP Pro Football Writers
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The Supreme Court on Monday rejected a call to overturn its landmark decision that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide.The justices, without comment, turned away an appeal from Kim Davis, the former Kentucky court clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples after the high court’s 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges.Davis had been trying to get the court to overturn a lower-court order for her to pay $360,000 in damages and attorney’s fees to a couple denied a marriage license.Her lawyers repeatedly invoked the words of Justice Clarence Thomas, who alone among the nine justices has called for erasing the same-sex marriage ruling.Thomas was among four dissenting justices in 2015. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito are the other dissenters who are on the court today.Roberts has been silent on the subject since he wrote a dissenting opinion in the case. Alito has continued to criticize the decision, but he said recently he was not advocating that it be overturned.Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who was not on the court in 2015, has said that there are times when the court should correct mistakes and overturn decisions, as it did in the 2022 case that ended a constitutional right to abortion.But Barrett has suggested recently that same-sex marriage might be in a different category than abortion because people have relied on the decision when they married and had children.Human Rights Campaign president Kelley Robinson praised the justices’ decision not to intervene. “The Supreme Court made clear today that refusing to respect the constitutional rights of others does not come without consequences,” Robinson said in a statement.Davis drew national attention to eastern Kentucky’s Rowan County when she turned away same-sex couples, saying her faith prevented her from complying with the high court ruling. She defied court orders to issue the licenses until a federal judge jailed her for contempt of court in September 2015.She was released after her staff issued the licenses on her behalf but removed her name from the form. The Kentucky legislature later enacted a law removing the names of all county clerks from state marriage licenses.Davis lost a reelection bid in 2018. Follow the AP’s coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court at https://apnews.com/hub/us-supreme-court. Mark Sherman, Associated Press
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With his tariff policies potentially under threat from the Supreme Court, President Trump over the weekend took to Truth Social to float the idea of doling out a $2,000 “dividend” to every person in America who is not high income. Although experts have expressed doubt about the fiscal feasibility of such a proposaland Trump’s own treasury secretary conceded that he knew of no such plan to send out checksTrump’s post is likely to spark a fresh wave of unsourced news stories designed to induce clicks and raise false hopes among millions of Americans who could actually use a stimulus boost. Here’s what to know: What did Trump propose? In a Truth Social post on Sunday that began with the sentence, “People that are against Tariffs are FOOLS!,” Trump suggested that the government might distribute some tariff revenue directly to Americans. “Record Investment in the USA, plants and factories going up all over the place. A dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone,” Trump posted. However, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent downplayed the idea when he made the rounds on Sunday talk shows. On ABCs This Week, after conceding that he hadn’t spoken to Trump about the issue, he speculated that the dividend could come in the form of “tax decreases.” Fast Company reached out to the White House and Treasury Department for additional details. We’ll update this post if we hear back. Are $2,000 tariff dividend checks feasible? Not likely. As Bloomberg pointed out, such a plan could cost anywhere from $300 billion to $500 billion. Even on the lower end, that’s more than 10 times more than the government has been generating in monthly customs receipts. John Arnold, cochair of Arnold Ventures, posted on X that sending checks that size to every non-wealthy person would still cost more than the Tax Foundation’s projected tariff revenue for all of 2026. Why does this sound familiar? It’s not the first time that Trump has publicly entertained the idea of sending out large checks to Americans. Recall that when his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was slashing government jobs earlier this year, the president appeared to endorse an idea first proposed on social media to distribute $5,000 checks to taxpaying households. Although no such plan ever materialized, it didn’t stop news websites from posting updates about the supposed forthcoming payments for months after the fact What happens next? Expect a deluge of articles over the next days and weeks (and possibly months) about the tariff dividend checks, purportedly explaining who qualifies for them, speculating about possible timelines, and just generally flooding the zone. During the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago, website owners discovered that stories about stimulus checks could generate massive web traffic. Except at that time, there was lots of legitimate news to report: The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) distributed three such payments during the early pandemic years, and in many cases did so in a glitch-prone way that caused confusion among would-be recipients. Although the IRS distributed the final stimulus checks (aka Economic Impact Payments) for the 2021 tax year, in a way, the news cycle never stopped. Rumors of a fourth stimulus check persisted for months after that, followed by the emergence of increasingly sketchy content farms that seemed to exist solely for the purpose of spreading false details about nonexistent government stimulus plans, gaming Google’s trending searches, and generating clicks in bad faith. As Fast Company reported last year, Google has sometimes moved to remove these sites from search results when made aware of them, but it’s a bit like a game of whack-a-mole. The websites tend to operate overseas, and they sometimes repurpose dormant URLs that have already built up a search history and reputation.
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