U.S. Open winners will take home hefty paychecks this year, distributed from a record purse of $75 million for the final Grand Slam tennis tournament of the season. The total pot is 15% bigger than it was in 2023. 

The checks awarded to the men’s and women’s singles draw champions could go to American players. 

Though it’s unclear who the winners will be, two American women — Emma Navarro and Jessica Pegula — reached the semifinals, and Pegula won her match, earning a place in the finals. Navarro and Pegula happen to have fathers who are billionaires. On the men’s side, another American could also take home the trophy — and first-place check — for the first time since Andy Roddick won the tournament in 2003. Americans Taylor Fritz and Frances Tiafoe will face off in one of two semifinal matches on Friday. 

The winners of the women’s and men’s singles draws will each earn equivalent $3.6 million checks — a 20% bump from the $3 million winners earned in 2023. The finalists in each event, or runners-up, will get $1.8 million this year, according to official figures from the Queens, New York, tournament. All four semifinalists in both singles draws will get $1 million a piece. Notably, this year marks the 50th anniversary of male and female players earning equal prize money at the tournament. 

U.S. Open winners earn more than Wimbledon champions, who each took home £2.7 million, or just over $3.4 million, a substantial bump of nearly 15% from 2023, according to official prize money figures released by the grass court tournament.

At the U.S. Open, men’s and women’s singles players who make it as far as the round of 128, also known as first-round main-draw losers, earn prize money too. The payout breakdown is as follows:

• Round of 16: $325,000
• Round of 32: $215,000
• Round of 64: $140,000
• Round of 128: $100,000

Doubles players earn significantly less. The champion women’s and men’s doubles teams each get $750,000, to be split between the two players. Second-place teams get $375,000 each. The winners of the mixed doubles event take home $200,000, while the second-place team gets a $100,000 check. 

The women’s finals take place on Saturday, Sept. 7, while the men’s championship match will be played on Sunday. 

The National Security Agency is revealing aspects it never disclosed before about its role in helping the U.S. government track down Osama bin Laden, the al Qaeda founder and terrorist who orchestrated numerous deadly strikes on U.S. and Western targets including, most notoriously, the attacks of September 11, 2001.

In a new podcast series called “No Such Podcast” that debuted this week, current and former senior NSA officials who were involved in the decade-long search for bin Laden after 9/11 describe how the highly secretive operation unfolded before culminating in the 2011 raid on a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where Bin Laden had fled.

“I remember late night meetings in the fall of 2001, we’d sit around a table and say, ‘How do we find him?'” recounts Jon Darby, former NSA director of operations, according to a transcript of the first episode released by the agency.  “And one of the early theories was a courier, somebody that’s going to be taking care of him. But that was 2001.”

Darby described the operation as “ultra-compartmented,” with no more than 50 of the tens of thousands of NSA employees aware of the effort until after the day of the Abbottabad raid.

“So the government had decided to carry out this special forces raid. So what’s NSA’s role at that point? Our job is to make sure there are no threats to those choppers that are flying in and on the way out,” Darby said, in an apparent allusion to the risk that the two Black Hawk helicopters that had secretly entered Pakistan’s airspace could be intercepted. “So we had people poised, you know, ready to provide any indications and warning of threats to those helicopters,” he said.

NSA aided Ukraine after Russia’s invasion

Natalie Laing, the current director of operations at NSA who was also interviewed for the podcast, offered an overview of the fundamentals of signals intelligence, the NSA’s core focus, and described more recent examples of the agency’s role in informing U.S. policymakers, foreign partners, and the Ukrainian government about the imminence of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Signals intelligence is information about targets obtained from electronic signals and communications from those targets such as phone calls, texts, radio waves and other things that create digital data.

“[W]e collected those signals and we were able to see that Russia had the plans and intentions to invade Ukraine before they invaded,” she said, adding that personnel from U.S. Cyber Command, which works hand-in-glove with the NSA, were dispatched overseas to help Kyiv strengthen its cyber defenses.

“Cyber Command was able to send before the invasion, again, a small team over to Ukraine to help them look through their networks and point to some activity that seemed to be Russian activity there, so they could shore up their networks from a cybersecurity perspective,” Laing said.

She also explained how signals intelligence collected by NSA helped the U.S. government determine the Chinese origins of a chemical used to synthesize fentanyl, whose illicit influx into the country American agencies have deemed a national security threat.

U.S. intel agencies pulling back the curtain more

Once so secretive its very existence was classified, the NSA has sought in recent years to pull back the curtain on some of its operations and to share more cybersecurity information with non-government entities and the public.

In launching its own podcast, the NSA joins other American intelligence agencies – including the CIA, which started a podcast, “The Langley Files,” in 2022, and the Defense Intelligence Agency, whose podcast “Connections” was released in 2020 in an effort to demystify some of their work, albeit through carefully choreographed, in-house productions.

Efforts to better shape the public narrative surrounding the NSA’s activities follows the 2013 disclosures by former contractor Edward Snowden of classified U.S. government mass surveillance programs, which ignited a firestorm of controversy that intelligence officials have acknowledged did lasting damage to the reputation of the American intelligence community.

“Because it’s sensitive, we can’t talk about some of our work, but it’s time to start telling more stories that we can talk about, sharing more of that expertise, and highlighting these incredible public servants,” Sara Siegle, NSA’s Chief of Strategic Communications, said in a statement.

The NSA aims to release six more episodes on major podcast platforms through next month. 

The IRS said Friday that it has recovered $1.3 billion in unpaid taxes from high-income Americans who had either failed to file their returns or who hadn’t fully paid what they owed. 

The announcement, made jointly with the U.S. Treasury Department, is aimed at highlighting the agency’s ramped-up enforcement efforts against tax cheats, which have been funded under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. 

That IRS funding has proved controversial, with some Republican lawmakers falsely claiming the money would be used to hire 87,000 new IRS agents to “to audit Walmart shoppers.” 

Instead, the IRS says the money is being invested in improved customer service following years of snarls during the pandemic, as well as to increase the number of audits on people with more than $1 million in annual income and more than $250,000 in tax debts. 

125,000 high earners haven’t paid taxes in years

The initiative is designed “to crack down on tax evasion so that high earners pay what they owe,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in prepared remarks released ahead of a scheduled speech in Austin, Texas, on Friday. “For too long, this hadn’t been happening. Between 2010 and 2018, the audit rate for millionaires fell by 80%.”

She added, “And during the previous administration, as audit rates on high-income taxpayers fell, the share of audits on taxpayers with incomes under $200,000 increased. In 2019, the top 1% of Americans was estimated to owe over one-fifth of unpaid taxes, leaving ordinary Americans to shoulder the burden.”

Yellen said the IRS is pursuing 125,000 wealthy taxpayers who haven’t filed taxes in years. With stronger enforcement, about 21,000 of those taxpayers have filed their returns over the last six months, paying $172 million in taxes, she added. 

Those 21,000 taxpayers who have filed their taxes were the first to respond after the IRS reached out to alert them that they needed to file, according to a senior Treasury official who spoke on a conference call with reporters. The IRS is likely to recoup hundreds of millions more in new tax revenue from the remaining 104,000 people who still need to file, he said. 

The agency is ready to use its enforcement authority to go after the remaining individuals who haven’t yet filed, the official noted.

Since the crackdown roughly 80% of 1,600 millionaires with overdue taxes have paid up, providing an additional $1.1 billion in taxes, the Treasury said. That represents an increase of $100 million since July, when the IRS noted it had recovered $1 billion from this group of taxpayers.