USA Cricket’s Olympic dreams are in trouble

Written by: Aarthi Ramnath, Raghav Bikhchandani & Yash Budhwar

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USA Cricket’s Olympic dreams are in trouble

In 2024, the US co-hosted the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup—and is slated to host cricket’s debut in the 2028 LA Olympics. But the country’s top cricket body—USA Cricket—is in a nasty battle with American Cricket Enterprises (ACE)—which controls the IPL-style league Major League Cricket. The fight reveals the giant mess that lurks behind the glossy hype over cricket in America.

The context: In 2017, the older United States of America Cricket Association—formed back in 1965—was kicked out from the International Cricket Council (ICC). It was replaced by USA Cricket (USAC) in 2019—which has an equally rocky record. It has had little or no staff—and still doesn’t have a CEO. The association often hasn’t paid its dues—and has faced multiple ICC sanctions. The bigger problem: USA Cricket has outsourced most of its role to others.

The deal: In the very year it was formed, the national board handed over the keys of cricket in Amreeka to ACE:

ACE was granted sweeping control: full commercial rights, infrastructure responsibilities, and funding obligations for elite cricket — all in one bundled deal. In return, USA Cricket would receive a 5% share of all cricket revenues and guaranteed minimum payments.

Point to note: While ACE has NRI investors like Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, the Times Group-wale Jains are firmly in charge. That’s Vineet Jain and his son-in-law Satyan Gajwani. When the Term Sheet was being finalised in 2019, then USA Cricket chairman Paraag Marathe had a consulting deal with Times Internet—a fact he only disclosed in 2021.

The jhagda: USA Cricket has accused ACE of failing to fulfill its side of the deal. The main allegations are:

ACE has built only one of the promised six ICC-standard stadiums—supposed to be up and running by 2024.
Instead, it has palmed off the responsibility to the T20 league clubs—and moved the deadline to 2028, which is cutting it a bit thin.
The Major League clubs are also getting a bigger cut of the sponsorship paisa—diluting USA Cricket’s 5% share.
ACE is also pushing for a Toronto-based franchise and a tie-up with New Zealand Cricket—again without USA Cricket’s permission.
The cricket body claims ACE is doing hera pheri with national staff and player salaries. ACE’s defence, OTOH, is the equivalent of claiming that an Indian player’s IPL paisa should be counted as part of his annual BCCI salary and match fees.

The underlying problem: is that USA Cricket is a jugaadu non-profit organisation that is entirely dependent on a private company. The reason: USA Cricket has no money of its own:

USA Cricket ended 2023 with just $52,533 in cash against $615,110 in current liabilities. Receivables swelled to $505,689, and disclosures show $439,000 of that tied to ACE. When the governing body’s short-term survival depends on collecting from the same private partner it accuses of breach, leverage runs one way. The audit also reports continuing negative operating cash flow, reinforcing how quickly funding gaps can become existential.

In that year, 48% of USA Cricket’s paisa came from the ICC and 12% from ACE.

Why any of this matters: Both the ICC and the US Olympic committee require the national board to be “autonomous in the governance of its sport”—and “free from outside restraint.” USA Cricket doesn’t meet that criteria—because it is entirely dependent on an outside company. In other words, the fight with ACE puts cricket’s future as an Olympic sport at risk.

The bottomline: The only other possible outcome is that the show goes on—but without the host’s participation. The last time that happened was back in 1900—when cricket debuted at the Paris Olympics.

Reading list: Sportstar has an in-depth exclusive on the ACE-USA Cricket battle. Times of India reports on the pressure to push out the board’s current chairman Venu Pisike—who pushes back in this Sportstar report. Our Big Story has everything you need to know about cricket’s long history in the US.

The curious case of the ambassador for West Arctica

The Ghaziabad police arrested Harshvardhan Jain for running a fake embassy for various made-up countries—including West Arctica, Saborga, Poulvia, and Lodonia. He set himself up in a nice bungalow and called himself Ambassador:

Following the arrest now, four cars bearing fake diplomatic number plates, 12 forged diplomatic passports of the so-called micronations, foreign currency, documents related to multiple companies, fake documents stamped with the seal of the Ministry of External Affairs, two forged PAN cards, 34 rubber stamps of various countries and companies and two fake press cards, Rs 44.7 lakh in cash and 18 fake diplomatic number plates have been recovered.

The kicker: He’s been running this scam for 20 years!!

How it started: Son of a wealthy businessman, Jain got himself an MBA from London and first set up shop in Dubai—where he duped businessmen by promising them overseas jobs and deals. He then moved his operations to India in 2011: “He used false flags, fake diplomatic number plates, forged passports and seals to give the impression of being an influential international broker.”

Jain meets the big boys: Jain graduated to far shadier dealings—hooking up with self-styled godman Chandraswami. The fake swami introduced him to the infamous arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi and an India-born Turkish national Ahsan Ali Syed. Soon enough, Jain was floating dummy companies to move money around the world—including a dozen brokerage firms in the UK. By the end, the fake embassy was a multipurpose establishment—serving both a job scam and hawala racket through shell companies.

The amusing bit: This is what the mighty international criminal looks like:

As they say, never judge a man by his crappy T-shirt. The Hindu and Indian Express have the most details.

The ‘Midas’ startup turns mercury into gold

It sounds like a fairytale come true. A San Francisco start-up Marathon Fusion claims to have found its Midas touch by accident—while figuring out how to use nuclear fusion to generate power. Now, the biggest problem with this area of science is that it is not cost-effective:

Physicists first successfully fused atoms in the 1930s but no one has yet managed to produce more energy from a fusion experiment than the process consumes.

So Marathon turned to a process called nuclear transmutation—which is “effectively changing an element or isotope into a different one by ripping out protons from its nucleus.”

The new plan: was to add a mercury isotope called mercury-198 into the fusion reactor—hoping to turn it into mercury-197. Guess what? Turns out mercury-197 is unstable and eventually decays into… gold! In other words, we could be churning out gold ingots—even as we generate energy. At least, that is Marathon’s dream. The real bonus: It could make nuclear fusion ‘cost-effective’:

Rutkowski and Schiller say this means future fusion power plants that adopt this approach would be able to produce 5,000kg of gold a year, per gigawatt of electricity generation, without reducing the power output or tritium-breeding capacity of the system. At current prices, they estimate that amount of gold would be worth roughly the same as the electricity being generated, potentially doubling the revenue of the plant.

The hitch: Since this miracle occurs alongside other types of mercury, the gold could be radioactive—and “has to be stored for 14 to 18 years for it to be labelled completely safe.”

The big picture: The science looks compelling but it has not been thoroughly peer-reviewed. And no one has figured out the engineering required to make this a usable technology. (Financial Times, splainer gift link)

what caught our eye

business & tech

Uber will soon let women riders and drivers in the US choose to be paired only with other women—part of a new safety feature rolling out next month.
TechCrunch has a good read on a programmer who landed a full-time job at a San Francisco startup after impressing the company with his open-source work—while serving time in prison.
Financial Times has the story of how over $1 billion worth of Nvidia’s top AI chips still made their way into China—despite US export bans—fueling a booming black market for American semiconductors.
Microsoft is spending $1.7 billion to buy nearly 5 million metric tons of human and industrial waste—including sewage sludge and manure—which a startup will then inject deep underground to stop it from releasing harmful gases into the air.
Amazon is buying Bee—a $49 wrist device that uses AI to record and transcribe your conversations, track your daily life, and offer personalized summaries, reminders, and suggestions. Privacy be damned.

sports & entertainment

The iconic sports dog is making a comeback—’Air Bud Returns’ is set to hit theatres in summer 2026, written and directed by franchise veteran Robert Vince.
Oscar-winner Hans Zimmer will team up with Labrinth to score the next season of ‘Euphoria’, which is expected to drop in 2026.

health & environment

Nature has new research from Duke University showing that our nerve cells can pick up signals from gut bacteria in real time—including ones that tell us when to stop eating.
As crores of Kanwar pilgrims pour into Uttarakhand, locals and environmentalists say the waste—plastic, faecal, and more—has made it nearly impossible to step outside.
A tragic night in Chhattisgarh’s Raigarh district: two elephants, including a calf, trampled three people to death—among them a sleeping three-year-old boy.

meanwhile, in the world

Doctors in Gaza say they’re so malnourished they’re struggling to care for patients, as overwhelmed hospitals buckle under the growing hunger crisis.
US envoy Steve Witkoff is walking away from ceasefire talks—saying Hamas’ latest proposal showed “a lack of desire to reach a ceasefire,” just as Israel pulls its negotiators out of Qatar.
France will officially recognise the state of Palestine, President Macron said in a surprise statement—adding that he will make the formal announcement at the UN General Assembly in New York this September.
Boston Consulting Group won’t release the findings of an internal probe into its work on Gaza relocation modelling—despite growing pressure to explain its role.
Al Jazeera has obtained phone recordings that reveal former Bangladesh PM Sheikh Hasina ordered police to shoot student protesters last year—before fleeing to India in August after weeks of deadly violence killed nearly 1,400 people.
Several children who suffered severe burns in a fire in Bangladesh—caused by a fighter jet crash earlier this week—have died over the past few days.
At least a dozen people were killed after Thai and Cambodian forces opened fire at each other on Thursday over a long-running border dispute.
The US Justice Department #2 official met with Ghislaine Maxwell in prison last week—part of a wider push by the Justice Department to appear more transparent as pressure builds over the Epstein case files.
Reuters has found that an Indian company sent $1.4 million worth of an "explosive compound with military uses" to Russia in December—despite US warnings of sanctions for helping its war in Ukraine.
A 50-year-old Soviet-era plane crashed while trying to land in Russia’s far east, killing all 48 people onboard.
Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte have sued podcast host Candace Owens for defamation over her claim that France’s first lady was born a man.
The biggest-ever trial of the four-day workweek—with 141 companies—found that employees were happier and more satisfied, and nearly 90% of the companies decided to keep the shorter week even after the six-month pilot ended.
Wrestling legend Hulk Hogan—who helped turn pro wrestling into a global spectacle and was also known for backing Donald Trump—has died at 71.

meanwhile, in India

Over 61 lakh people in Bihar could be missing from the state’s draft voter list, which comes out August 1—with lakhs yet to fill out forms ahead of today’s SIR deadline.
The Supreme Court has put a hold on the Bombay High Court’s verdict that acquitted all 12 men in the 2006 Mumbai train blasts—saying it can’t be used as a legal precedent in other cases for now.
Marathi-medium schools in Mumbai are shutting down fast—even as a language war brews in Maharashtra—with the government blaming parents’ tilt toward English, and educators pointing to crumbling infrastructure and neglect.
The Wall Street Journal reports that China is pouring over $40 billion into rail lines and border infrastructure in the Himalayas—raising concerns in India over the military potential of these dual-use projects.
Indian Express, in an op-ed by Tabshir Shams, has a good read on how history textbooks in India and Pakistan treat figures like Akbar and Aurangzeb—showing how both countries use school curriculums to shape national identity and politics in very different ways.
From pilot training lapses to understaffed long-haul flights, Air India has been flagged for 29 violations by aviation regulators—raising serious concerns about safety.
Scotch lovers in India may soon pay less for their drink—thanks to a new India-UK trade deal that slashes import tariffs from 150% to 75%.
India’s new trade deal with the UK also means Indian workers sent there for short-term jobs won’t have to pay into UK social security—helping them take home more pay and saving money for Indian companies.

Seven things to see

One: CNN has released newly uncovered damning video footage and photos of Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein. Below is an image from 1993 that shows Epstein attended Trump’s second wedding to Marla Maples.

And here’s footage of them hanging out at a 1999 Victoria’s Secret fashion show in New York. Reminder: Victoria’s Secret parent company’s former CEO Leslie Wexner stepped down from his role in 2020 due to his close relationship with Epstein. (CNN)

Two: Just a day after signing a $1.5 billion deal to stream all ‘South Park’ episodes on Paramount+, creators of the satirical animated series released an episode poking fun at Donald Trump, his penis—and his “special relationship” with Satan. It is definitely a must watch! The Guardian has more background on the Paramount-Skydance merger which has caused significant delays in production of new South Park episodes.

Three: Musk’s futuristic restaurant Tesla Diner and Drive-In in Hollywood had its grand opening this week. It is a 24 hours open diner with 80 charging stations, two 66-foot screens and an Optimus robot serving popcorn. The official video is kinda long and dull. We were more impressed by the cybertruck box for your burgers and fries. (The Telegraph)

Four: Meta has developed a wristband that can translate your hand gestures into commands. You can just move a cursor or write in the air and transform it into text on the screen! How it works: sensors “translate electrical motor nerve signals that travel through the wrist to the hand into digital commands that you can use to control a connected device.” Check out how it works below. (New Atlas)

Five: A trailer for a movie titled ‘Dear Erin’ starring Peter Coonan was released three weeks ago. It was full of terrible stereotypes that made lots of Irish folks mad. Turns out it is a trailer for a totally fake movie—released as a publicity stunt by an Irish emigration museum in Dublin: “We created a trailer for a film that we hope never gets made, and filled it with all of the tired, cliched portrayals of Irish people often seen in Hollywood movies.” Point taken. Watch the stereotypical trailer below. (The Guardian)

Six: Just a day after suffering an embarrassing and nasty foot fracture, Rishabh Pant returned to the field for the Test match at Old Trafford—limping—but in form. He even managed to hit 54! See his half century below. A good read: The Telegraph commends Pant’s sportsmanship and says it echoes that of legends Kumble, Sachin and Pujara.