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Earlier this month, tennis player Peng Shuai accused Zhang Gaoli, a former high-ranking Chinese government official, of sexual assault. Peng wrote, in a lengthy social media post, that Zhang had forced her to have sex despite repeated refusals.

The post was removed within 20 minutes from her verified account on Weibo, a leading Chinese social media platform, and Peng hasn’t posted on social media or been seen in public since.

Now, her safety and whereabouts have become a growing concern among her peers, fans and those at the WTA. Where is Peng, and what exactly happened? While many questions remain, here’s what we know — and don’t know — so far.

Peng is a 35-year-old Chinese tennis player and former world doubles No. 1. She has won two major doubles titles — at Wimbledon in 2013 and the French Open in 2014 — and reached the semifinals at the 2014 US Open in singles. She has earned 25 titles on tour and last played at the Qatar Open in February 2020.

What exactly did her social media post say and why was it taken down?

In the 1,500-character post, Peng gave a detailed account of her encounters with Zhang, now 75, which began a decade ago. Peng claims, in her post, she had an on-again, off-again affair with Zhang, who was married, starting before he rose up the party ranks and became vice premier.

About three years ago, after Zhang retired from his role, he invited her over to his house to play tennis with him and his wife. She said he then sexually assaulted her while his wife stood outside guarding the door.

Infidelity is strictly prohibited by the Communist Party and results in expulsion from the organization. Peng said he was concerned she might record their encounters and she therefore has no evidence to support her allegations. Despite that, she wanted to publicly voice what happened to her.

“I know that for someone of your eminence, Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli, you’ve said that you’re not afraid,” Peng wrote, according to The New York Times. “But even if it’s just me, like an egg hitting a rock, or a moth to the flame, courting self-destruction, I’ll tell the truth about you.”

Weibo is similar in format to Twitter and is heavily censored by the government. In addition to the deletion of the post, searches for her name and “tennis” were also blocked on the government-run internet.

What was the immediate reaction to Peng’s post?

As public allegations against high-ranking Chinese government officials are unheard of, and due to Peng’s celebrity status, screenshots of the post had already been saved and shared before it was deleted. It quickly went viral, and Peng’s accusations gained media coverage around the globe.

How did the WTA respond?

On Sunday, the organization released a statement from Steve Simon, the chairman and CEO, asking for a “full, fair and transparent investigation” into Peng’s allegations.

“Peng Shuai, and all women, deserve to be heard, not censored,” Simon said. “Her accusation about the conduct of a former Chinese leader involving a sexual assault must be treated with the utmost seriousness. In all societies, the behavior she alleges that took place needs to be investigated, not condoned or ignored.”

Why are there concerns about her whereabouts and well-being?

Peng hasn’t been active on social media since her post was removed on Nov. 2, and has not been seen in public or responded to communication attempts from the WTA. In an interview with The New York Times on Sunday, shortly after his statement was released, Simon said the Chinese Tennis Association and other local sources confirmed that Peng was safe. Yet no one from the WTA, including officials and active players, had been able to directly reach Peng.

In an interview with Time, published on Wednesday morning, Simon said the organization had tried every method at its disposal to reach her.

“Voice, digital, tweeting,” he said. “WeChat. WhatsApp. Text. There are plenty of different messaging things we all use and are all able to communicate with. And none of those have produced a result as of this point.”

Later on Wednesday, China Global Television Network, a government-affiliated media organization posted a tweet with a message reportedly from Peng, but it only furthered doubt about Peng’s whereabouts and safety.

In the message, which CGTN said was from Peng in response to the WTA’s previous statement, the sexual assault allegation is called “not true.” The message also says Peng is “resting at home and everything is fine,” and claims the WTA didn’t verify any of its information. It ends with a hope for the future of Chinese tennis.

In addition to the content of the purported email, users on social media pointed out the cursor visible on the word “and” early in the message — something that would be unlikely in an email that has been received.

Did Simon or the WTA respond to the message that was reportedly from Peng?

Simon released another statement soon after on Wednesday and made it clear he didn’t believe the message had come from her.

“I have a hard time believing that Peng Shuai actually wrote the email we received or believes what is being attributed to her,” read the statement. “Peng Shuai displayed incredible courage in describing an allegation of sexual assault against a former top official in the Chinese government. The WTA and the rest of the world need independent and verifiable proof that she is safe.”

How has the tennis community responded?

In addition to Simon and the WTA, several other active and former players have voiced their concerns and support for Peng this week.

Four-time major champion Naomi Osaka posted a note on Twitter on Tuesday, using the #WhereIsPengShuai hashtag. “Censorship is never ok at any cost, and I hope Peng Shuai and her family are safe and ok,” she wrote in part.

Earlier in the week Chris Evert, the 18-time Grand Slam victor and ESPN analyst, called the accusations “very disturbing” and asked for information about Peng’s whereabouts.

Nicolas Mahut, a former doubles No. 1, pointed out that the concern extends beyond the WTA.

During a news conference at the ATP Finals, world No. 1 Novak Djokovic called it “shocking” and expressed concern for Peng and her family.

Andrea Gaudenzi, the chairman of the ATP, has released multiple statements this week as well and expressed support for the WTA’s calls for an investigation, in addition to hopes for Peng’s safety.

What happens now?

These are perhaps the two biggest questions right now. In his interview with The New York Times on Sunday, Simon said the organization is willing to do whatever it takes to support its players — no matter what is at stake.

And when it comes to the WTA and China, there is a lot at stake. During its normal, non-pandemic-altered schedule, the WTA holds 11 tournaments in the country annually, including the year-end WTA Finals.

“If at the end of the day, we don’t see the appropriate results from this, we would be prepared to take that step and not operate our business in China if that’s what it came to,” Simon told the Times.

On Thursday, Stephen Kinnock, a member of British parliament and a shadow minister for Asia and the Pacific, called on the Chinese to prove Peng is “alive, well and free.” Kinnock said he had reached out to the foreign secretary about the case.

It remains to be seen whether the WTA’s financial threat, or the growing pressure from around the world, will force an investigation or produce tangible evidence of Peng’s safety.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.

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Red Sox activate 3B Bregman from 10-day IL

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Red Sox activate 3B Bregman from 10-day IL

BOSTON — The Red Sox activated All-Star third baseman Alex Bregman from the 10-day injured list before Friday’s game against Tampa Bay.

Bregman, who has been sidelined since May 24 with a right quad strain, returned to his customary spot in the field and was slotted in the No. 2 spot of Boston’s lineup for the second of a four-game series against the Rays. He sustained the injury when he rounded first base and felt his quad tighten up.

A two-time World Series winner who spent the first nine seasons of his big league career with the Houston Astros, Bregman signed a $120 million, three-year contract in February. At the time of the injury, he was hitting .299 with 11 homers and 35 RBI. Those numbers led to him being named to the American League’s All-Star team for the third time since breaking into the majors with the Astros in 2016.

Bregman missed 43 games with the quad strain. Earlier this week, he told reporters that he was trending in a direction where he didn’t believe he would require a minor league rehab assignment. With three games left before the All-Star break, the Red Sox agreed the time was right to reinstate a player to a team that entered Friday in possession of one of the AL’s three wild-card berths.

“He’s going to do his part,” Red Sox manager Alex Cora said before Friday’s game. “Obviously, the timing, we’ll see where he’s at, but he’s been working hard on the swing … visualizing and watching video.”

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How Jim Abbott changed the world

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How Jim Abbott changed the world

JIM ABBOTT IS sitting at his kitchen table, with his old friend Tim Mead. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, they were partners in an extraordinary exercise — and now, for the first time in decades, they are looking at a stack of letters and photographs from that period of their lives.

The letters are mostly handwritten, by children, from all over the United States and Canada, and beyond.

“Dear Mr. Abbott …”

“I have one hand too. … I don’t know any one with one hand. How do you feel about having one hand? Sometimes I feel sad and sometimes I feel okay about it. Most of the time I feel happy.”

“I am a seventh grader with a leg that is turned inwards. How do you feel about your arm? I would also like to know how you handle your problem? I would like to know, if you don’t mind, what have you been called?”

“I can’t use my right hand and most of my right side is paralyzed. … I want to become a doctor and seeing you makes me think I can be what I want to be.”

For 40 years, Mead worked in communications for the California Angels, eventually becoming vice president of media relations. His position in this department became a job like no other after the Angels drafted Abbott out of the University of Michigan in 1988.

There was a deluge of media requests. Reporters from around the world descended on Anaheim, most hoping to get one-on-one time with the young left-handed pitcher with the scorching fastball. Every Abbott start was a major event — “like the World Series,” Angels scout Bob Fontaine Jr. remembers. Abbott, with his impressive amateur résumé (he won the James E. Sullivan Award for the nation’s best amateur athlete in 1997 and an Olympic gold medal in 1988) and his boyish good looks, had star power.

That spring, he had become only the 16th player to go straight from the draft to the majors without appearing in a single minor league game. And then there was the factor that made him unique. His limb difference, although no one called it that back then. Abbott was born without a right hand, yet had developed into one of the most promising pitchers of his generation. He would go on to play in the majors for ten years, including a stint in the mid ’90s with the Yankees highlighted by a no-hitter in 1993.

Abbott, and Mead, too, knew the media would swarm. That was no surprise. There had been swarms in college, and at the Olympics, wherever and whenever Abbott pitched. Who could resist such an inspirational story? But what they hadn’t anticipated were the letters.

The steady stream of letters. Thousands of letters. So many from kids who, like Abbott, were different. Letters from their parents and grandparents. The kids hoping to connect with someone who reminded them of themselves, the first celebrity they knew of who could understand and appreciate what it was like to be them, someone who had experienced the bullying and the feelings of otherness. The parents and grandparents searching for hope and direction.

“I know you don’t consider yourself limited in what you can do … but you are still an inspiration to my wife and I as parents. Your success helps us when talking to Andy at those times when he’s a little frustrated. I’m able to point to you and assure him there’s no limit to what he can accomplish.”

In his six seasons with the Angels, Abbott was assisted by Mead in the process of organizing his responses to the letters, mailing them, and arranging face-to-face meetings with the families who had written to him. There were scores of such meetings. It was practically a full-time job for both of them.

“Thinking back on these meetings with families — and that’s the way I’d put it, it’s families, not just kids — there was every challenge imaginable,” Abbott, now 57, says. “Some accidents. Some birth defects. Some mental challenges that aren’t always visible to people when you first come across somebody. … They saw something in playing baseball with one hand that related to their own experience. I think the families coming to the ballparks were looking for hopefulness. I think they were looking for what it had been that my parents had told me, what it had been that my coaches had told me. … [With the kids] it was an interaction. It was catch. It was smiling. It was an autograph. It was a picture. With the parents, it ran deeper. With the parents, it was what had your parents said to you? What coaches made a difference? What can we expect? Most of all, I think, what can we expect?”

“It wasn’t asking for autographs,” Mead says of all those letters. “They weren’t asking for pictures. They were asking for his time. He and I had to have a conversation because this was going to be unique. You know, you could set up another player to come down and sign 15 autographs for this group or whatever. But it was people, parents, that had kids, maybe babies, just newborn babies, almost looking for an assurance that this is going to turn out all right, you know. ‘What did your parents do? How did your parents handle this?'”

One of the letters Abbott received came from an 8-year-old girl in Windsor, Ontario.

She wrote, “Dear Jim, My name is Tracey Holgate. I am age 8. I have one hand too. My grandpa gave me a picture of you today. I saw you on TV. I don’t know anyone with one hand. How do you feel about having one hand? Sometimes I feel sad and sometimes I feel okay about it. Most of the time I feel happy. I hope to see you play in Detroit and maybe meet you. Could you please send me a picture of you in uniform? Could you write back please? Here is a picture of me. Love, Tracey.”

Holgate’s letter is one of those that has remained preserved in a folder — and now Abbott is reading it again, at his kitchen table, half a lifetime after receiving it. Time has not diminished the power of the letter, and Abbott is wiping away tears.

Today, Holgate is 44 and goes by her married name, Dupuis. She is married with four children of her own. She is a teacher. When she thinks about the meaning of Jim Abbott in her life, it is about much more than the letter he wrote back to her. Or the autographed picture he sent her. It was Abbott, all those years ago, who made it possible for Tracey to dream.

“There was such a camaraderie there,” she says, “an ability to connect with somebody so far away doing something totally different than my 8-year-old self was doing, but he really allowed me to just feel that connection, to feel that I’m not alone, there’s other people that have differences and have overcome them and been successful and we all have our own crosses, we all have our own things that we’re carrying and it’s important to continue to focus on the gifts that we have, the beauty of it.

“I think sometimes differences, disabilities, all those things can be a gift in a package we would never have wanted, because they allow us to be people that have an empathetic heart, an understanding heart, and to see the pain in the people around us.”

Now, years after Abbott’s career ended, he continues to inspire.

Among those he influenced, there are professional athletes, such as Shaquem Griffin, who in 2018 became the first NFL player with one hand. Griffin, now 29, played three seasons at linebacker for the Seattle Seahawks.

Growing up in Florida, he would watch videos of Abbott pitching and fielding, over and over, on YouTube.

“The only person I really looked up to was Jim Abbott at the time,” Griffin says, “which is crazy, because I didn’t know anybody else to look up to. I didn’t know anybody else who was kind of like me. And it’s funny, because when I was really little, I used to be like, ‘Why me? Why this happen to me?’ And I used to be in my room thinking about that. And I used to think to myself, ‘I wonder if Jim Abbott had that same thought.'”

Carson Pickett was born on Sept. 15, 1993 — 11 days after Abbott’s no-hitter. Missing most of her left arm below the elbow, she became, in 2022, the first player with a limb difference to appear for the U.S. women’s national soccer team.

She, too, says that Abbott made things that others told her were impossible seem attainable.

“I knew I wanted to be a professional soccer player,” says Pickett, who is currently playing for the NWSL’s Orlando Pride. “To be able to see him compete at the highest level it gave me hope, and I think that that kind of helped me throughout my journey. … I think ‘pioneer’ would be the best word for him.”

Longtime professional MMA fighter Nick Newell is 39, old enough to have seen Abbott pitch for the Yankees. In fact, when Newell was a child he met Abbott twice, first at a fan event at the Jacob Javits Center in Manhattan and then on a game day at Yankee Stadium. Newell was one of those kids with a limb difference — like Griffin and Pickett, due to amniotic band syndrome — who idolized Abbott.

“And I didn’t really understand the gravity of what he was doing,” Newell says now, “but for me, I saw someone out there on TV that looked like I did. And I was the only other person I knew that had one hand. And I saw this guy out here playing baseball and it was good to see somebody that looked like me, and I saw him in front of the world.

“He was out there like me and he was just living his life and I think that I owe a lot of my attitude and the success that I have to Jim just going out there and being the example of, ‘Hey, you can do this. Who’s to say you can’t be a professional athlete?’ He’s out there throwing no-hitters against the best baseball players in the world. So, as I got older, ‘Why can’t I wrestle? Why can’t I fight? Why can’t I do this?’ And then it wasn’t until the internet that I heard people tell me I can’t do these things. But by then I had already been doing those things.”

Griffin.

Pickett.

Newell.

Just three of the countless kids who were inspired by Jim Abbott.

When asked if it ever felt like too much, being a role model and a hero, all the letters and face-to-face meetings, Abbott says no — but it wasn’t always easy.

“I had incredible people who helped me send the letters,” he says. “I got a lot more credit sometimes than I deserved for these interactions, to be honest with you. And that happened on every team, particularly with my friend Tim Mead. There was a nice balance to it. There really was. There was a heaviness to it. There’s no denying. There were times I didn’t want to go [to the meetings]. I didn’t want to walk out there. I didn’t want to separate from my teammates. I didn’t want to get up from the card game. I didn’t want to put my book down. I liked where I was at. I was in my environment. I was where I always wanted to be. In a big league clubhouse surrounded by big league teammates. In a big league stadium. And those reminders of being different, I slowly came to realize were never going to go away.”

But being different was the thing that made Abbott more than merely a baseball star. For many people, he has been more than a role model, more than an idol. He is the embodiment of hope and belonging.

“I think more people need to realize and understand the gift of a difference,” Dupuis says. “I think we have to just not box everybody in and allow everybody’s innate light to shine, and for whatever reasons we’ve been created to be here, [let] that light shine in a way that it touches everybody else. Because I think that’s what Jim did. He allowed his light to permeate and that light, in turn, lit all these little children’s lights all over the world, so you have this boom of brightness that’s happening and that’s uncontrollable, that’s beautiful.”

“Southpaw – The Life and Legacy of Jim Abbott,” a new edition of ESPN’s “E60,” debuts Sunday at 9 p.m. ET on ESPN; extended version streaming afterward on ESPN+.

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Cubs’ PCA on track for $1.1M from bonus pool

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Cubs' PCA on track for .1M from bonus pool

NEW YORK — Chicago Cubs center fielder Pete Crow-Armstrong is projected to receive the largest amount from this season’s $50 million pre-arbitration bonus pool based on his regular-season statistics.

Crow-Armstrong is on track to get $1,091,102, according to WAR calculations through July 8 that Major League Baseball sent to teams, players and agents in a memo Friday that was obtained by The Associated Press.

He earned $342,128 from the pool in 2024.

“I was aware of it after last year, but I have no clue of the numbers,” he said Friday. “I haven’t looked at it one time.”

Pittsburgh pitcher Paul Skenes is second at $961,256, followed by Washington outfielder James Wood ($863,835), Arizona outfielder Corbin Carroll ($798,397), Houston pitcher Hunter Brown ($786,838), Philadelphia pitcher Cristopher Sánchez ($764,854), Cincinnati shortstop Elly De La Cruz ($717,479), Boston catcher Carlos Narváez ($703,007), Red Sox outfielder Ceddanne Rafaela ($685,366) and Detroit outfielder Riley Greene ($665,470).

Crow-Armstrong, Skenes, Wood, Carroll, Brown, De La Cruz and Greene have been picked for Tuesday’s All-Star Game.

A total of 100 players will receive the payments, established as part of the 2022 collective bargaining agreement and aimed to get more money to players without sufficient service time for salary arbitration eligibility. The cutoff for 2025 was 2 years, 132 days of major league service.

Players who signed as foreign professionals are excluded.

Most young players have salaries just above this year’s major league minimum of $760,000. Crow-Armstrong has a $771,000 salary this year, Skenes $875,000, Wood $764,400 and Brown $807,400.

Carroll is in the third season of a $111 million, eight-year contract.

As part of the labor agreement, a management-union committee was established that determined the WAR formula used to allocate the bonuses after awards. (A player may receive only one award bonus per year, the highest one he is eligible for.) The agreement calls for an interim report to be distributed the week before the All-Star Game.

Distribution for awards was $9.85 million last year, down from $11.25 million in 2022 and $9.25 million in 2023.

A player earns $2.5 million for winning an MVP or Cy Young award, $1.75 million for finishing second, $1.5 million for third, $1 million for fourth or fifth or for making the All-MLB first team. A player can get $750,000 for winning Rookie of the Year, $500,000 for second or for making the All-MLB second team, $350,000 for third in the rookie race, $250,000 for fourth or $150,000 for fifth.

Kansas City shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. topped last year’s pre-arbitration bonus pool at $3,077,595, and Skenes was second at $2,152,057 despite not making his big league debut until May 11. Baltimore shortstop Gunnar Henderson was third at $2,007,178.

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