The £75m questions for Lukaku The 21-year-old Denmark international has renewed his contract and he is seen by the club as the academy prospect that can finally take the mantle from John Terry. Conte has brought him into the fold and he has to be regarded as the most successful player to emerge from a 38-player loan group last season. Chelsea wanted Virgil van Dijk but have saved £75 million by promoting a player from within to boost their back line....

The Blues are not happy with the lack of game time the 21-year-old has accrued since joining the Scottish champions in the January transfer window. As such, they are set to cut a year off what was supposed to be an 18-month deal. Musonda, who is currently absent with a shoulder problem and receiving treatment at Chelsea’s Cobham Training Centre, has started only three times for the Glasgow giants and has made a total of eight appearances....

Brazil winger Lucas has been linked with a January exit from the Parc des Princes amid limited game time this season – with Chelsea reported to be among his suitors - all five of his Ligue 1 appearances have come off the bench and he is yet to make an outing in the Champions League. PSG -5 4/1 to beat Troyes The arrivals of Neymar and Kylian Mbappe have restricted the opportunities handed to the 25-year-old, but Emery claims the situation such squad members would find themselves in was made clear before the campaign got underway....

The champions are 15 points behind leaders Manchester City and have slipped down into fourth place with little chance of retaining their crown. Brighton, who the Blues tackle on Saturday, are just three points above the relegation zone as they have shown inconsistency in the busy winter period. CHELSEA INJURIES Ross Barkley is still waiting to make his Chelsea debut after seven months out injured. The £15 million January signing had surgery on his hamstring while at previous club Everton....

The Blues have won one of their last eight top-flight matches and look ripe for the taking as City arrive amid a title battle. Premier League top scorer Erling Haaland could be Chelsea’s grim reaper, running away with the Golden Boot race in record-setting fashion. LIVE: Follow the latest updates from Chelsea vs Manchester City Chelsea will start the game 10th in the Premier League table and need a revival badly....

The books are giving the clear edge to Manchester City (anywhere from -114 to win in regulation and -240 to win the cup). They are, after all, the reigning English Premier League champions and considered by many to be the best team in the world today. After their poor start to the season and their recent stumbles, Chelsea simply don’t have the same standing. But that’s not to say this won’t be a tightly contested final....

Some cities in our Mt. Rushmore series produced heated debates on which athletes should be included, creeping into every office conversation for weeks (I’m looking at you, Philadelphia). Chicago’s lasted about 15 minutes. Producing some of the greatest professional athletes of all time can have that effect. Jerry Reinsdorf may have gotten Harold Baines into the Baseball Hall of Fame, but no amount of lobbying from the Bulls and White Sox owner was going to change our top four....

Having slipped down the pecking order under David Moyes, the Mexico international striker attracted plenty of interest during the winter window. He has admitted as much, with advances from Premier League rivals shunned by the Hammers. With the deadline having passed, Hernandez now knows that he will remain in east London until at least the summer, so he is prepared to knuckle down and give his all to the collective cause....

Leverkusen progressed from Group E behind Monaco and at the expense of Tottenham, although star striker Hernandez did not have his expected influence upon proceedings. Chicharito still a star at the highest level The former Manchester United man netted five in six round-robin outings during last season’s competitions but had to be content with a solitary strike in a 1-1 draw against the Ligue 1 leaders this time around....

The Line: Dolphins -4, Total: 42 Line movement: The Dolphins opened as 5.5-point favorites at the Westgate Las Vegas SuperBook but opened lower at other sports books in town, between -4 and -5. On Friday morning, the line was sitting at -4 across Vegas. The total ranges from 41.5 to 43. For updated spreads and totals, visit our live odds page. Trends that matter: The Chiefs are 3-1 ATS in their last four games as road underdogs....

Still at Chicago’s Auditorium Theatre for the second round of the draft, Jones literally danced onto the stage after the Chiefs selected him with the 37th overall pick. MORE: Scenes from the draft | SN’s draft site; info and analysis He told NFL Network the wait “was damn worth it.” MORE: Jones laughed off Combine stumble The 6-6, 310-pound Jones was a second-team All-American selection last year. He left Mississippi State after three seasons with 102 career tackles, 18 for loss, and 8 1/2 sacks in 39 games....

The man, who has not been identified, was attacked at Sanctuary Beach in South Africa’s Western Cape, and died at the scene. The National Sea Rescue Institute (NSRI) told local news Times Live that an eyewitness reported the shark attacking a swimmer at 14.09 p.m. local time. The shark was then videoed by holidaymaker Gunnar Sigge at 14.10 p.m. Great whites are often sighted off the waters of South Africa, although their numbers have been dropping in recent years....

Petr Pavel, 61, an independent candidate voted into the top Czech post over the weekend, beat Andrej Babis, 68, the country’s populist former prime minister and a billionaire Euroskeptic. Like most countries in the world, the Czech Republic maintains official relations with China and only informal economic and cultural ties with Taiwan. Pavel’s call with President Tsai Ing-wen on Monday marked an unprecedented departure from decades of diplomatic practice....

This summer, Beijing and Washington began publicly airing conflicting viewpoints on the status of the waters, over which the former claims jurisdiction, but which the latter argues grants foreign commercial and military vessels a right to unimpeded use. The legal basis for China’s position revolves around its claim to Taiwan itself, which neither the United States nor Canada officially recognizes. The U.S. sails naval assets through the strait on a near-monthly basis to assert navigational rights....

Wang said Washington should realize that no country is superior to others and that U.S. officials should realize that Beijing will not be talked down to. His remarks come as Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman is set to visit Tianjin today, making her the highest-ranking U.S. official to set foot in China since the Biden administration took the White House in January. Earlier this year, Wang stirred controversy by saying the U....

That’s probably because the crowd was chanting, “Long live China!” They had gathered in Tiananmen, as elsewhere across the country, to commemorate the victims of a magnitude 8.0 earthquake that killed at least 55,000 people in Sichuan province, perhaps many more. Yet if their purpose was different, their passion sharply echoed that of the students in 1989. Susan Shirk, author of “China: Fragile Superpower” and a professor at the University of California, San Diego, says the Sichuan quake is “going to be a memorable moment in their lives for many Chinese, like Tiananmen was, like the Cultural Revolution was....

The PLA’s Western Theater Command commissioned a new fleet of Shenyang J-16 strike fighters for its air force, which already has two J-16 combat units, Chinese Communist Party newspaper Global Times reported. The requisition of more multirole J-16 aircraft is understood to be part of a military build-up on China’s border with India, where violent melees in Ladakh along the 2,100-mile Line of Actual Control caused the deaths of 20 Indian soldiers and an unknown number of Chinese troops this summer....

Data reviewed by WHO experts showed that two doses of the Sinovac vaccine prevented half of those who received the jabs from getting COVID-19, the Associated Press reported. Sinovac’s authorization is the second approval by the WHO for a Chinese vaccine following China’ Sinopharm shot approval last month. “Nevertheless, WHO is not recommending an upper age limit for the vaccine,” the WHO said in a statement on Sinovac’s authorization. Since fewer older adults participated in the research the agency reviewed, they could not estimate the vaccine’s efficacy for those over 60....

The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission released on Tuesday its annual congressional report, which for the first time focused on China “surpassing” the U.S. in terms of economics as well as diplomacy, technology and diplomacy, rather than simply “catching up.” While both President Robin Cleveland and Vice Chair Carolyn Bartholomew discussed with Newsweek areas of potential cooperation between the two powers on issues such as the economy, health care and climate change at a virtual press conference held a day before the report’s release, both issued criticisms of China mirroring the 575-page document’s findings that alleged the country was taking advantage of the U....

In May, President Joe Biden ordered a 90-day review of “two likely scenarios” about where the virus came from. One theory is that there was a lab leak in Wuhan, China, where the virus was first identified, at the end of 2019. The other theory is that the virus jumped from animals to humans. Although a joint WHO-China report published earlier this year said that a lab leak was “extremely unlikely” and that the animal-to-human theory was most likely, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in late March that “all hypotheses are on the table and warrant complete and further studies....