Horn

Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon have signed new contracts with ESPN that will keep them as hosts of “Pardon the Interruption” at least through the show’s 25th anniversary next fall, the network announced Tuesday.

The previous contracts for both men had expired in August. The new ones are described in an ESPN news release as “multiyear.”

The former Washington Post sports writers have hosted “PTI” since it debuted Oct. 22, 2001. The fast-paced sports debate show has won the Sports Emmy Award for daily studio show three times (2009, 2016 and 2019) and is ESPN’s most-viewed daily studio program.

“Tony and Mike have made PTI into a singular success story and every bit as relevant today as it has ever been,” Burke Magnus, ESPN’s president of content, said in a news release. “Their information and opinions are as smart and strong as ever, and they remain daily appointment viewing for sports fans.”

Kornheiser and Wilbon will continue their daily segment for the 3 p.m. Pacific edition of SportsCenter and Wilbon will also remain a part of ESPN’s NBA coverage.

The news came months after “Around the Horn,” another long-running sports debate show on ESPN, aired its final episode. That show ran from November 2002 until this past May and was paired with “PTI” on weekday afternoons, with “Horn” at 2 p.m. Pacific and “Interruption” at 2:30 p.m.

ESPN also announced an extension with Rydholm Projects Inc. to continue producing “PTI.” Executive producer Erik Rydholm and coordinating producer Matt Kelliher have been with the show since the beginning.

Rydholm was also the executive producer of “Around the Horn” as well as the former ESPN shows “Highly Questionable” and “The Dan Le Batard Show With Stugotz.”

Thursday might be an off-day for the Dodgers.

But for their most intriguing recent draft pick, it’s also the opening day of a different kind of season.

In the 17th round of last month’s MLB draft, the Dodgers took a flier on University of Missouri pitcher Sam Horn, a 6-foot-4 right-hander with a big fastball, a promising slider and an athletic, projectable build.

Like most late-round prospects hoping to become a diamond in the rough, Horn came with questions. He pitched just 15 innings in his college career after undergoing Tommy John surgery as a sophomore. His limited body of work led to a wide range of scouting opinions.

In Horn’s case, however, the biggest unknowns had nothing to do with his potential as a pitcher.

Because, starting Thursday night, he will also be under center as quarterback for Missouri’s football team.

Horn is not only a two-sport athlete, but someone still undecided on whether his future will be on a mound or the gridiron. As a quarterback, he was a four-star recruit in Missouri’s 2022 signing class. And this fall, he has been locked in a battle with Penn State transfer Beau Pribula, jockeying for first-string signal-caller duties at an SEC program coming off a 10-win season.

When Missouri opens its 2025 football schedule Thursday night against Central Arkansas, Pribula will play the first half, and Horn will play the second half. As for the rest of the season, Missouri coach Eli Drinkwitz has yet to hand either player all the keys to the offense.

“I think both quarterbacks have done an excellent job of doing the things that we’ve asked them to do, and there wasn’t enough separation that I felt like there was a clear-cut starter,” Drinkwitz told reporters this week. “And so the next-best evaluation is in a live football game to see how guys respond, not only to preparation and a game plan, but also respond to a crowd, also respond to being tackled and being hit.”

It’s a QB battle that Dodgers officials have followed with fascination throughout Missouri’s fall camp.

Already, the club has signed Horn to a baseball contract with an almost $500,000 signing bonus (well above the norm for the 525th overall pick).

The question now is whether he ever ends up playing for them.

“We’re pleasantly hoping he does,” Dodgers vice president of baseball operations Billy Gasparino said this week. “We think there’s a whole window of opportunity to get him much better, and quickly.”

Once upon a time, the Dodgers viewed Horn as one of college baseball’s better pitching prospects. Even in a limited sample size as a freshman in 2023, Gasparino said the team evaluated him as having potential future first-round talent.

“He’s a tremendous athlete,” said Gasparino, the longtime point man for the Dodgers’ draft operations. “He has really good arm action. I think that part was very elite.”

By the time Horn actually became draft-eligible this summer, though, uncertainties about his future made his scouting process unique.

All along, Horn signaled to MLB teams that he wanted to play football this fall. As a redshirt junior, he will have another season of eligibility in football next year as well. Gasparino said the narrative around Horn, who is originally from Lawrenceville, Ga., is that “baseball is his first love.”

“But,” Gasparino added, “he definitely seemed split on what he wanted to do going forward.”

This is not the first recent example of the Dodgers drafting a power-conference college quarterback.

Two years ago, they used their final 20th-round selection in the 2023 draft on then-Oregon State quarterback DJ Uiagalelei, a former two-sport star at St. John Bosco. Uiagalelei, however, never signed with the team. As a highly-touted five-star talent with NFL aspirations, he never made the switch to baseball either, his draft rights with the Dodgers lapsing after he transferred to Florida State for the 2024 football season.

Horn’s situation appears to be different. Unlike Uiagalelei (who never actually pitched collegiately), he spent the last three years on Missouri’s baseball team. And if he doesn’t win the starting quarterback job with the Tigers football squad this fall, his odds of reporting to the Dodgers next spring figure to be much more realistic.

That’s why, as Missouri’s QB battle has unfolded this preseason, Gasparino scoured Missouri recruiting site message boards and local news outlets, looking for any indication of which way the program was leaning.

“The coach is going to give nothing,” Gasparino said jokingly. “So you kind of have to go on the message boards, and to the local writers, to figure out, ‘Alright, who is winning? What is going on?’ It’s been kind of a hard read.”

Leading up to the draft, Horn’s situation also required extra scouting legwork. The Dodgers dusted off his old freshman year and high school evaluations, after he pitched just 10 ⅔ innings in Missouri’s spring baseball season coming off his Tommy John procedure. They also reached out to NFL scouting departments and college football recruiters, “just to figure out how talented he was at football,” Gasparino said.

The Dodgers do have downside protection if Horn ultimately decides to stick with the football, with Gasparino noting that “to actually get his signing bonus, he has to come to us.”

But in the meantime, they’ll be keeping a close eye on Missouri’s football season — starting with Thursday night’s opener in which Horn is slated to see the field.

“Definitely gonna be watching,” Gasparino said. “I mean, I guess first, it’s like, don’t get hurt. But also just hoping that the right answer becomes very clear on what he should do sport-wise … Of course, we’d be disappointed if it’s not baseball. But would hate another year of in-between.”

The Horn of Africa is a turbulent region whose history and contemporary realities are intertwined with those of the Middle East. Just like the Middle East, it straddles strategic waters that sustain millions of people and connect continents and thus is a theatre of fierce geopolitical rivalry. Great powers and regional players perpetually circle its vast strategic resources, leading to conflicts that ravage the region and its peoples.

Eritrea has long been an eager participant in this theatre of discord. For nearly half a century, Eritrea has been involved to differing degrees in almost every conflict in the region. Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia and Ethiopia have all been affected by its machinations. The ambitions of Isaias Afwerki, the first and only president of Eritrea since 1993, have seen his country get involved in many conflicts miles away from its borders, including those in the Great Lakes region. It seems Isaias is not just drawn to conflict but he seeks it out and thrives in it, like a pyromaniac who can’t resist setting fires.

Isaias’s 32-year reign in Eritrea is a cautionary tale. Since independence, the country has lacked all the traditional tools of governance that most nations take for granted. No constitution. No parliament. No civil service. In Eritrea, there is only one executive, legislative and legal authority – President Isaias.

In Isaias’s Eritrea, military service is also mandatory and indefinite. Young Eritreans often risk everything to try to escape a lifetime in the president’s military. As such, the major export of the Eritrean state, apart from illicit gold, is the large number of young men and women who risk their lives to illegally migrate to neighbouring countries and Europe. Eritreans flee from their country in droves to escape forced conscription into military service and other dystopian realities created by the regime.

War is the main business and preoccupation of the Eritrean state. Stirring conflict here and there, supporting rebels, insurgents or governments seeking war and division throughout the region seems to be the raison d’etre of the Eritrean state.

Today, Isaias is once again engaged in manoeuvres that are as  destructive as they are predictable.

After years of strong animosity towards and direct clashes with the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) – the party that ruled Ethiopia’s Tigray region since 1975 and waged war against the federal government from 2020 to 2022 – Isaias is now trying to exploit divisions within the group’s ranks.

The history here is long and bitter. In the late 1990s, a falling-out between Eritrea and Ethiopia erupted into a bloody war. After years of bloodshed, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed managed to secure a peace agreement between the two countries in 2018 and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts.

Regrettably, reconciliation with Eritrea did not deliver long-term peace dividends. Because, for Isaias, building trade and infrastructure connections between Ethiopia and Eritrea was of no interest. He had no appetite for economic cooperation despite it being beneficial to both countries.

When the TPLF launched its ill-fated bid to reclaim power in Ethiopia by unseating Prime Minister Abiy in 2020, Isaias saw his chance. Eritrean forces surged into Tigray, leaving devastation in their wake. The 2022 Pretoria Peace Agreement, which ended the conflict between the TPLF and the Ethiopian government, was a diplomatic triumph for Ethiopia and the African Union. But it was a personal setback for Isaias, who thrives in conflict and sees peace as an obstacle to his efforts to expand his influence.

It soon became clear that Isaias wanted the conflict in the Tigray region to continue indefinitely and Ethiopia to bleed into oblivion. To invalidate the Pretoria Peace Agreement, he engineered a militia in Ethiopia’s Amhara state. More recently, he has also found common cause and joined forces with elements within the TPLF who were unhappy with the peace agreement.

His cynical and dangerous machinations are now threatening to undo the Pretoria Peace Agreement. A faction of the TPLF and its armed supporters are openly expressing their intent to dismantle the interim administration set up as per the peace agreement and tear up the whole peace deal. The implications of such a development would be catastrophic, both for Ethiopia and the wider region.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. To Ethiopia’s west, Sudan is consumed by civil war. To the east, Somalia is struggling to rebuild after decades of gradual collapse. Across the Sahel, extremist groups are gaining ground. A possible return of conflict to the Tigray region must be assessed in this context. A belt of chaos stretching from the Sahel to the Horn of Africa would be catastrophic. It would embolden groups like al-Shabab and ISIL (ISIS), creating new havens for terror and disrupting global trade through the Red Sea.

The consequences of renewed conflict in the Horn wouldn’t stop at Africa’s borders. Waves of refugees would head for Europe and beyond, further straining already fragile systems. Extremist ideologies would find fertile ground, their reach extending into the Middle East. Global powers, from Washington to Beijing to Brussels, have a stake in what happens here. The Horn’s stability is a shared interest.

The world must act. Diplomatic pressure is needed to deter those who want to see an end to peace, like Isaias. The Pretoria Peace Agreement must be defended. Regional cooperation must be incentivised with investments in trade, infrastructure and governance. This is not just an African problem. It’s a global challenge.

If the Horn descends into chaos, the ripple effects will be felt everywhere. But if peace takes root, the region could become a bridge – linking continents, fostering trade and unlocking potential. The choice is stark, and the time to act is now.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance