On July 13, Yankees owner George Steinbrenner died of a heart attack. He was 80 years old. He died on the same day as the All-Star Game.
The controversial baseball figure had a reputation for supporting his squad with his own wealth to improve his team while being extremely hands-on. His attitude and micromanaging earned him the nickname “The Boss.”
He famously fired manager Billy Martin five times, even firing and rehiring him multiple times in one press conference.
While Steinbrenner won two titles in the late 70’s, the Yankees would not win a title again until he had come back from a suspension and detached himself from many of the personnel choices. After that, the current Yankees dynasty began. The team reached its peak when it won four times from 1996-2000. They had a nearly-decade title drought before again winning the title last year.
Steinbrenner bought the team back in the early 70’s for nearly nine million dollars, and Forbes pegs the current value at over 1.6 billion dollars, the third richest franchise in any sport around the world.
Operations of the franchise are expected to be handled by his sons, Hal and Hank. They have handled the day-to-day operations and taken over many of the responsibilities their father used to assume before falling into poor health.
Google renewed its license with China, ending a long standoff between the two that spanned back to the hacking attacks from last year.
Shortly after the hacks, Google threatened to not cave to China’s demands for certain results to be censored. Instead, Google redirected its users to the Hong Kong search engine where all the results were not filtered. The new agreement will now disable an auto redirect to the Hong Kong website but still feature a link to it on the Chinese website.
Critics say that the agreement is a small victory for both sides and may also help the Chinese people. While Google gets to remain in China, an extremely lucrative market with the most internet users in the world, and have some autonomy, China displays the influence it can still exert over larger companies like Google. It also gives users an alternative to the extremely popular Badiu.