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Malik Beasley has been indicted by federal prosecutors, on charges related to suspicious gambling activity. According to earlier reporting, authorities began looking at Beasley last summer after at least one U.S. sports book noted unusual betting interest on Beasley's statistical production. The suspicious activity reportedly took place during the 2023–24 NBA regular season, when Beasley was a member of the Milwaukee Bucks. Shams Charania reported Monday that the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York is currently working to coordinate Beasley's voluntary surrender sometime this week. You can lose your mind considering too closely the words chosen by Charania in one of his news releases, but in this case you would be right to zero in on "point shaving and prop bets." The indictment, unsealed Monday, names Beasley, former NBA forward Ed Davis, and four co-conspirators, including current player agent Paolo Zamorano, and charges them with "wire fraud conspiracy, bribery in sporting contests, honest services wire fraud conspiracy, and money laundering conspiracy," and describes a bribery scheme in which Beasley manipulated his performance in order to rig illegal bets. In an announcement to his office's website, U.S. Attorney Joseph Nocella Jr. accuses Beasley and his co-conspirators of seeking "to corrupt sports through illegal means." "As alleged, the defendants turned professional basketball into a criminal betting operation, bribing then-NBA player Malik Beasley to fix his performance in multiple games in order to place fraudulent wagers, enrich themselves and cheat legitimate sportsbooks. Bribery and insider betting schemes like this one involving former NBA players and a current NBA player agent who exploited inside NBA information for profit erode the integrity of American sports and victimize the sports-watching public."

The Dog Days of summer in the Northern Hemisphere don't officially begin until the rising of Sirius, the "dog star." This is usually mid-to-late July, and we can thank the Greeks for the canid construction. "On summer nights, star of stars, Orion's Dog they call it," Homer recited in the Iliad, "brightest of all, but an evil portent, bringing heat and fevers to suffering humanity." The Dog Days of the baseball season—those weeks of malaise and joylessness and what feels like the 12th Tigers-Royals series of the year—traditionally kick off after the all-star break, when teams and fans start to really feel the weight of 162 games. The Dog Days for the New York Yankees come a little earlier. June, usually. You can tell because that's when they let Sonny Gray flirt with a no-hitter. Gray threw seven-and-a-third hitless on Sunday night, though Aroldis Chapman would blow the save, forcing the Red Sox to score three in the 10th for the walk-off. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-YKALnlMi4

It's time to wrap up the month with a challenging themeless. Keep an eye out for tricky clues and fun wordplay. This puzzle was constructed by August Miller, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. August is a vegetable and dairy farmer who recently relocated from Massachusetts to New York. He is thrilled to have his first puzzle at Defector, and hopes we can all find ways to stay cool this week. Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with our friends at AVCX, run every Monday. If you’re interested in submitting a puzzle to us, you can read our guidelines HERE. The AVCX, an independent puzzles and games outlet, invites you to subscribe, or sample the goods with a two-month free trial: "With an AVCX subscription, you get access to weekly themed and themeless crosswords, minis, cryptics, and trivia, by email or in your favorite app. We have no corporate overlord, and we publish top-flight stuff only. We also pay our people fairly, always. Check us out."

While it would be asking too much to expect soccer to deliver anything like justice, you can usually count on the sport's sense of humor. That's why we probably shouldn't be surprised that the 2026 World Cup, marred from the outside by the racist caprices of the Trump administration, could best be described at this point as African soccer's coming-out party. Here at the close of the tournament's group stage, the Africans are triumphant. Nine of their 10 World Cup entrants have made it the round of 32. No other continental confederation can better Africa's percentage of knockout qualifiers. Getting so many teams through is impressive in its own right, but doing so has to feel especially rewarding in light of how much skepticism and bullshit African soccer had to endure coming into the World Cup. Whether explicit or just implied, Africa was one of the main targets of the concerns many had about the quality of this tournament due to the newly expanded field. Eurocentric pundits and officials alike penciled these purportedly benighted teams in for a wave of thrashings at the hands of the Old Continent's elite. Then, when the tournament was finally set to begin, African fans, journalists, players, and even referees were subjected to the noxious indignities of Donald Trump's security theatrics, the "lucky" ones merely manhandled by customs agents en route to their American destinations, the less fortunate seeing their entry into the country denied outright. And yet, now that the games have actually started, the Africans have outperformed all expectations. Saturday's group stage–ending round of matches stood in well for what Africa has brought to this World Cup. Three African teams were in action, each aiming to solidify their place in the round of 32. First up was Ghana, which had no reason to be too bothered by its 2-1 loss to Croatia, given that the Black Stars had already sealed their place in the knockout rounds by taking four points from their first two games. Next came DR Congo, which got the win it needed against Uzbekistan to also stamp its ticket to the next round. Finally, there was Algeria-Austria, a game that offered the Desert Warriors a chance to avenge a nearly half-century-old grudge against the Austrians for the infamous Disgrace of Gijon at the 1982 World Cup. Both teams only needed a draw to advance, and a loss would've seen either ousted. But unlike that day in Spain 44 years ago, there would be no collusion this time. At the tail end of a wild match, Algeria, the victim of the non-aggression pact between Austria and West Germany back then, seemed to have gotten their revenge when a stoppage-time Riyad Mahrez goal put his team up 3-2. However, Austria kept hope alive and was redeemed by an equalizer which allowed both teams to go through.

The NBA offseason presents a pit that must be filled with trade rumors, free-agency drama, and delirium-inducing podcast segments. It takes a lot of slop to fill that pit to the brim, which is how you end up with Jaylen Brown and an ESPN dope conspiring to dust off a tiresome conversation about the place of analytics in the NBA. Brown very much appears to be on the trading block, which is a weird place to be for a guy who has won a Finals MVP and is coming off the best individual season of his career, but here we are. It was widely reported that the Celtics dangled Brown for Giannis Antetokounmpo before the Greek Freak was ultimately shipped off to Miami, and I guess once you dangle a guy of Brown's stature and temperament, you can't just undangle him. Type "Jaylen Brown" into Google or your social media platform of choice and you will be blasted by a dozen or so reports, from NBA insiders you've barely heard of, about which teams are angling to pry Brown away from the Celtics. One of those insiders is, I guess, Bobby Marks of ESPN. If you don't immediately recognize his name, you might recognize his schtick: He's the guy who appears across various NBA podcasts to remind listeners what a specific player's salary number is, and assure you that nothing good will ever happen to your team because of how close it is to the second apron. I assume this is what Marks was doing when he made an appearance on the Sirius XM NBA show over the weekend, but he also got little bit out over his skis and shared that an "analytics guy" from an NBA team had told him that he views Brown as "the seventh-best player on a team."

Dublin closed out a thrilling All-Ireland football quarterfinal weekend with a massive and penalty-aided comeback to beat Galway Sunday afternoon in Croke Park, 1-25 to 1-21. Galway was up by six points with just 15 minutes left on the clock. But the game turned Dublin’s way when Galway defender Liam Silke was assessed a black card for fouling on a goal-scoring opportunity. Veteran Dublin forward Con O’Callaghan banged home the penalty shot to knot the score, and his team never looked back. Galway, forced to play a man down for the game’s final 10 minutes, never scored again. The win could be seen as sweet revenge for Dublin manager Ger Brennan. He’d been handed a stout 12-week suspension in March following a donnybrook between Dublin and Galway during a National League match in which Brennan was red-carded for shoving Galway’s strength and conditioning coach Cian Breathnach McGinn. The squad was spiraling downward in the preliminary rounds of the county tournament with Brennan shelved and Dean Rock, a mainstay player on the dynastic Dubs teams of the last decade, forced to serve as interim manager. Brennan was back on the sidelines earlier this month for Dublin's overtime upset of pre-tournament favorite Donegal to reach the quarterfinals. And now they played avengers for him against Galway.

BROOKLYN — Boots Ennis survived the toughest round of his career, then KOed game but overmatched champ Xander Zayas in a beautifully brutal Saturday night title fight at Barclays Center. When Ennis put Zayas on the canvas for the third time of the bout, Zayas's corner decided to save him from himself and throw in the towel with 1:12 left in the seventh round. With the win, Ennis took Zayas's WBO and WBA super welterweight belts and remained undefeated at 36-0. The Philly fighter also greatly advanced his pursuit of imaginary but highly coveted titles like “the face of boxing” and “pound-for-pound champ.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cb_jO5KUCuw

Covering WNBA games in person is a strange experience. Enriching, for sure: It's cool to hear directly from players and coaches, to be able to pepper them with whatever questions I'd like. Recently, I was able to cobble their insights into an Olivia Miles profile that received, I suspect, fewer comments than this post will. Sometimes you luck into great color: It was funny, at Wednesday night's Fire-Sky game, to hear Portland head coach Alex Sarama directing his players to hunt Rachel Banham on "every single possession." (She was mercifully benched before they could do this.) The in-person experience is also disorienting. If my powers of observation feel heightened in some ways, they are certainly dulled in others. I've learned to appreciate all the work that goes into constructing the story of a game, work done for me by statisticians, broadcasters, beat writers, and online posters when I'm watching on TV. My eyes supply me no graphics, no tickers, no counters. If a player sits for an unusually long stretch, that doesn't always register to me. It might strike me that a team's offense has slowed down, but I might not clock that they haven't actually scored a field goal in six minutes. Turns out, I'm not very good at watching basketball on my own.  In the play-by-play data, the most controversial moment of the WNBA season, a play from Wednesday night's Mercury-Fever game, is dispassionately tagged as "MISS A. Boston 26' 3PT":

The parents of former NFL running back Doug Martin—who died eight months ago while in Oakland police custody—are suing the city of Oakland, five of its police officers, and an ambulance company in federal court. In the lawsuit filed earlier this week, Martin's parents say their son, who was 36 years old at the time, died from restraint asphyxia caused by police officers. This was compounded, the lawsuit says, by the paramedics failing to arrive until more than 15 minutes after the call for service. The lawsuit was filed Tuesday in federal court in Northern California, and was first reported by Jakob Rodgers of the East Bay Times. It makes eight claims, including wrongful death by negligence, assault and battery, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Martin died in the early hours of Oct. 18. At about 4:00 a.m., the retired running back experienced what his family in the lawsuit calls a "a mental health crisis," prompting his mother, Leslie, to call 911. But her son ran away to a neighbor's house, two doors down, where Oakland police found him in the basement. Police restrained Martin, per the lawsuit, placing him face down while "one or more officers pressed on his back." After some time passed, the officers turned Martin on his side. Martin appeared unconscious, the lawsuit says, but the officers thought he was either sleeping or pretending to sleep.

If you went back in time to New York in the early '90s, not a soul would believe you if you told them Jay-Z would end up where he is today. Well, maybe one person would: Jay himself. Jay-Z's relatively delayed breakthrough made him something of a late bloomer, even in an era when stars weren't minted as quickly and early as they are now. It took him a while to figure out how to be himself on wax. It was his big homie Jaz-O who put him on, and the two of them had a Das EFX, Fu-Schnickens fast-rapping style that was as technically impressive as it was uninteresting. The labels didn't know what to do with them. Those who heard them tended to think Jaz was cool, but that the light-skinned kid had something else they couldn't quite put into words. DJ Clark Kent was Jay's biggest cheerleader at that time, but without label interest, Jay figured he was better off prioritizing his life in the streets over the studio. Things continued that way until Clark introduced Jay to Harlem hustler Dame Dash. The pair clicked, and together with another street guy, Kareem "Biggs" Burke, they decided to pool their resources and start their own label, Roc-A-Fella. Their first project would be Jay-Z's proper debut, Reasonable Doubt, which turned 30 this week.