This will be a max contract for Butler, who really shined last season in Chicago. Yahoo reports there will be a player option after the fourth year of the deal. MORE: What the 27 biggest free agents should do | Why Butler had to take this deal Butler was a restricted free agent and the Bulls were going to match any offer any team would have given him. There was a report earlier in the week Butler wanted to sign with the Lakers, but on a shorter contract....

Garoppolo went 5-0 with 1,560 yards passing in five starts to end the 2017 season. 49ers fans are more energized than they have been in years. But Garoppolo, who San Francisco acquired at the trade deadline in a deal with New England, will be a free agent after the season, so the 49ers will need to make a decision to ensure he remains their QB moving forward. Because quarterback talent is so scarce in the NFL, and because the number of quarterbacks who actually reach unrestricted free agency is so small, any decent QB who makes it to free agency is in line to earn a lucrative contract....

If someone had said then that five years later, Garoppolo would be trying to win his first Super Bowl as a starting QB, everyone would have assumed it would be for New England, succeeding Brady. Instead, in a serendipitous twist, at the exact time when Brady’s future with the Patriots is in doubt, it’s the 49ers who are hoping to reap the benefits of Garoppolo’s winning play in Super Bowl 54....

Garoppolo was expected to be a hot second-tier trade target. Once the futures of players like Aaron Rodgers, Russell Wilson and Deshaun Watson were decided, he was supposed to become one of the top targets that quarterback-needy teams would pursue. However, that interest never developed, as Garoppolo had surgery on his throwing shoulder shortly after the 49ers lost the NFC Championship Game. That left teams across the NFL wary of acquiring him....

The late night host took to Twitter on Tuesday to lament over the countless messages he’s received from people running for office and begged for workers to stop bombarding him with requests for donations. “Dear everyone running, Its today, right? Please stop asking me for money,” he wrote. If you have a television or a smart device, you’ve likely seen the video messages from presidential candidates running for office that started airing as early as 2019....

Rave, real name James Guffey, shared in late October that he had undergone the operation back in June, months after he had his left arm amputated. His wrestling agent Bill Behrens confirmed that Rave passed away on Sunday, sharing a statement that he said he had prepared with the star’s daughter, Kailah. While a cause of death was not revealed, the statement shared: “James had been struggling with drug addition for many years....

That may be an exaggeration, but not by much. There are now at least 4,500 coffee-houses nationwide, and the Specialty Coffee Association of America predicts that that number will double in five years. (Even Mormons, who are forbidden to consume caffeine, have found a few coffeehouses in Provo, Utah, that slyly serve them cappuccinos in opaque 7Up cups.) The marketing of specialty toffees – bringing lattes, espressos and their haute-sounding cousins to the Maxwell House set – certainly helped establish the coffeehouse culture....

The urban unemployment rate in the country hovered around 5 percent in May 2021. It is considered adequate after it went up to 6.2 percent in February 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic. The issue hardly found mention in President Xi Jinping’s address to the nation on the occasion of the centenary of the Chinese Communist Party two weeks ago. If statistics are to be believed, the jobless rate is steadily coming down even if the fall is gradual....

The president’s remarks – the fourth time in 13 months he has made such a pledge – were the clearest indication yet that he was prepared to deploy American forces to the Taiwan Strait in the event of a crisis, breaking with the decades of deliberately vague U.S. policy on the matter. “What we’ve heard is President Biden speaking his mind,” Hsiao Bi-khim, Taiwan’s de facto ambassador to Washington, told reporters on Monday....

Immigration has been a key issue for Biden’s campaign. Some observers say Biden’s outreach to the Latino community has been insufficient to draw voters away from President Donald Trump. While Biden served as vice president under former President Barack Obama, promised immigration reform did not materialize. Biden acknowledged that fact during Thursday’s presidential debate, but said he would handle immigration policy in a different fashion. “We made a mistake,” Biden said of the Obama administration....

Biden addressed potential impeachment while campaigning for Democratic Representative Mike Levin, who is running for re-election in California’s 49th congressional district. Some Republican members of Congress have already indicated an interest in bringing articles of impeachment against Biden if the GOP takes over the House and possibly the Senate in midterm elections that are just days away. “I’m already being told if they win back the House and Senate, they’re gonna impeach me,” Biden told a crowd in San Diego....

Biden is juggling his commitment to diplomacy and multilateralism with his vow to push back on the world’s dictators, figures he and his allies argue former President Donald Trump did too little to rein in. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin traveled to Japan and South Korea this week, expressing shared concerns over Chinese and North Korean regional aggression. But the trip prompted threats from Pyongyang, which a senior administration official told Newsweek has not responded to any American diplomatic outreach for more than a year....

A Monmouth University poll taken between June 9 and 14 shows Biden’s approval rating now stands at 48 percent against 43 percent disapproval - a decline of six points since April. However, Biden’s approval among Republican voters has risen from 11 percent to 19 percent over the same period, bucking a trend that has seen fewer Democrats and independents saying they approve of the job he’s doing. The poll released on Friday showed that Biden’s approval among Democrats had fallen to 86 percent from a high of 95 percent in a Monmouth University poll conducted between April 8 and 12....

In an op-ed for The New York Times, the Democratic front-runner took a swipe at Donald Trump’s reaction to the mass shootings in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas, in light of the president’s view that “mental illness and hatred pull the trigger, not the gun.” Biden said that Trump’s repeal of a rule keeping weapons out of the hands of people with certain mental illnesses was an indictment of the current president’s position on guns, adding, “We can’t trust his diagnosis....

There has been a dramatic surge in the number of migrants, particularly unaccompanied minors, crossing the southern border into the U.S. in recent weeks. Border facilities are being overwhelmed and officials are struggling to accommodate them. Biden aides, including Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, have been traveling to the border to observe the situation, presenting their troubling findings to the president on Wednesday. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said on Wednesday the team “spent the majority of their time discussing what steps can be taken to expedite processes to move more quickly—to move the process more quickly to meet the administration’s goal of getting these children placed with vetted and confirmed families....

Biden’s swearing in came against the backdrop of a tumultuous 10 weeks since the election, filled with a divisiveness that drew comparisons to the Civil War and Great Depression. During his speech, Biden turned the clock back more than 150 years to Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln said it would be the act that put his name in history books, adding “my whole soul is in it.” “On this January Day my whole soul is in this....

Counting continues in a number of seats, with control of both the Senate and House of Representatives up for grabs, though the GOP enjoys a sizable seat lead in the lower chamber. Thus far the Democrats have won 48 Senate seats and the Republicans 49, with control of the chamber to be decided by outstanding contests in Arizona and Nevada, as well as a run-off in Georgia. Victory in two of the three states for either party will give them a Senate majority....

“There are millions, millions Americans out there who, through no fault of their own, have been knocked flat on their backs this past year, as the virus stole their jobs,” Biden said in a public address on the jobs numbers. “While jobs are coming back, there’s still millions of people out there looking for work and the idea that they don’t want to work.… A job is a lot more than a paycheck....

Biden plans to announce that all U.S. troops will be withdrawn from Afghanistan by September 11, exactly 20 years after the 2001 Al-Qaeda attacks targeting New York City and Washington, D.C., which became the impetus for what has become America’s longest war. The president’s timeline would actually extend the withdrawal by several months from the May 1 deadline set under a peace deal signed between the U.S. and the Taliban last year under former President Donald Trump....

According to a poll-of-polls by data website FiveThirtyEight, on Monday, Biden had an approval rating of 43.5 percent and a disapproval rating of 50.6 percent. At the beginning of his presidency, Biden’s aggregate approval rating was 53 percent and disapproval was 36 percent, according to the website. On Friday, the Democratic president’s approval rating sunk to a new low of 43.4 percent, and disapproval reached an all-time high of 50....