With just over five minutes left in UCLA’s first-round win over California Baptist on Saturday, freshman Sienna Betts took a shot. She missed. She grabbed the rebound. She missed again. Then, she put it in the basket.

On the bench, her older sister, Lauren Betts, was laughing. No. 1 seed UCLA was up big late, the Bruins were going to advance and Lauren was getting joy from seeing her sister succeed — and fail.

“I’m like, Sienna, just make the shot, and she’s laughing; she’s not serious,” Lauren said.

The sisters recorded double-doubles during the 96-43 win that secured the Bruins a second-round date with Oklahoma State. Sienna had 10 points and 12 rebounds, six of them offensive, and Lauren had 22 points and 10 rebounds.

UCLA freshman forward Sienna Betts plays tight defense on California Baptist guard Sofia Alonso during the Bruins’ first round NCAA tournament win Sunday at Pauley Pavilion.

(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)

“She is so hard on herself and she’s so driven, I think her humor is actually a saving grace for her,” UCLA coach Cori Close said of Sienna. “It’s sort of a light moment. It’s laughter. Because when she’s not smiling and bringing joy, she’s usually beating herself up for a mistake. As she continues to grow in that, I hope it doesn’t have to be her escape, but I just have absolutely enjoyed Sienna so much.”

The sisters have only this season to play together before Lauren, a senior, graduates. They played just one season together in high school in Colorado, and this season might be the last time they are ever on the same team.

“It’s this weird thing, on the one hand, I want them to enjoy this connection they have,” Close said. “I want them to enjoy this year. They will look back on this year and just really treasure it.

“Simultaneously, I want to especially treat Sienna on her own journey, and to not make her feel like she’s in the shadows of anything that Lauren is doing.”

Sisters have posted double-doubles in the NCAA tournament before. At Stanford, Nneka and Chiney Ogwumike did it multiple times in the early 2010s. In the 1980s, USC twins Pamela and Paula McGee averaged double-double their senior years.

But it’s a rarity, and one that could only happen this season for the UCLA sisters.

Sienna, though, didn’t want to make a big deal of it. Sitting to the side in the locker room after the win over California Baptist, she was critical of her own game, just the way Close expected.

“I’m trying to focus more on just that game and just taking what we can learn from our mistakes in the first half, especially, and trying to move on,” Sienna said. “But, I mean, I think in an hour, I’ll take that in and be more excited about that.”

Lauren said she thought Sienna played one of her better games of the season.

“Honestly, besides her scoring, I thought her defense was a lot better today and I know that’s something she wanted to get better at,” Lauren said Saturday. “She was just really proud of her slides. Like she didn’t say anything about her points. She was like, I’m so glad that I can guard them. I worked so hard on that.”

Sienna has had back-to-back strong efforts, with 14 points against Iowa in the Big Ten tournament championship game two weeks ago. She has done so without being hounded by her big sister.

“I think [Lauren] respects my boundary to figure it out on my own,” she said.

Lauren, meanwhile, has averaged 16.5 points and 8.7 rebounds per contest this season. The projected WNBA lottery pick is considered one of the best centers in the nation.

UCLA center Lauren Betts drives to the basket under pressure from California Baptist forward Grace Schmidt during the NCAA tournament on Saturday at Pauley Pavilion.

(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)

“I love the moments you catch when they have a connection and an eye contact or a smile that is different than everybody else because they are sharing it as sisters and I just think how special that is,” Close said. “That’s so wonderful.”

Charlisse Leger-Walker played with her sister, Krystal Leger-Walker, at Washington State for two seasons. There, the duo shared time in the backcourt for an up-and-coming Cougars squad.

“It’s just a different connection,” Charlisse Leger-Walker said. “Out there, you have someone who is your blood and unconditional love and support. And it’s just awesome to be able to see [Lauren and Sienna] in their journey, and have so much success early.”

Sienna will carry the torch for the Bruins beyond this season when the majority of the veteran roster graduates and many go pro.

That’s when she could be the face of the program on her own. But first, she is working to extend an NCAA tournament run alongside her sister.

“I want Sienna to feel like she’s Sienna,” Close said. “She’s not Lauren’s sister. She can enjoy that, but for our team, she’s Sienna Betts.”

Israeli settlers have been filmed vandalising a boys’ school in Huwara, spray-painting racist graffiti and raising an Israeli flag on the roof. The attack comes as settler violence intensifies across the occupied West Bank with homes and cars set on fire, leaving at least nine Palestinians injured.

Former Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp says speculation that he will return to management with Real Madrid this summer is “nonsense”.

The 58-year-old has been linked, external with a move to replace Alvaro Arbeloa at the end of the season.

Klopp left Anfield at the end of the 2023-24 season and has not coached since – taking up a role as head of global football with Red Bull.

He denied any talks with Real but says he might coach again.

The German told reporters at the Magenta TV World Cup team presentation in Munich: “If Real Madrid had phoned, we would have heard about it by now.

“But that’s all nonsense. They haven’t called even once, not once. My agent is there, you can ask him. They haven’t called him either.

“Right now I’m not thinking about that, luckily there’s no reason to.

“For my age I’m quite advanced in life, but as a coach I’m not completely finished. I haven’t reached retirement age.

“Who knows what will happen in the coming years? But there’s nothing planned.”

In the summer of 2025, Walt Disney Co. executives placed a big bet on a reality TV star prone to high drama: messy personal relationships and allegations of domestic violence.

Now, Disney’s ABC network could lose at least $70 million with a nearly finished season of “The Bachelorette” sitting on the shelf.

Last week, ABC yanked this season of “The Bachelorette,” which features 31-year-old Taylor Frankie Paul, just three days before the premiere episode was set to air Sunday night. Disney pulled the plug after the emergence of a three-year-old video that showed Paul — the protagonist of Hulu’s massive hit series, “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” — physically attacking her ex-partner.

Paul can be seen screaming and throwing metal chairs, one of which apparently struck one of her children who witnessed the altercation. Her onetime partner, Dakota Mortensen, recorded the video of the attack on his cellphone.

Trouble has been brewing around “The Bachelorette” for weeks as Paul was doing publicity for the show.

Draper City, Utah, police have separately confirmed an investigation into a subsequent domestic violence incident in February between Mortensen and Paul. As part of that inquiry, Paul, 31, has temporarily lost custody of the couple’s son, Ever, who turned 2 last week — the day the troubling video came out.

“Taylor is very grateful for ABC’s support as she prioritizes her family’s safety and security. After years of silently suffering extensive mental and physical abuse as well as threats of retaliation, Taylor is finally gaining the strength to face her accuser and taking steps to ensure that she and her children are protected from any further harm,” said a spokesperson.

Representatives of Mortensen could not immediately be reached for comment. In a statement to People magazine, a representative for Mortensen said that “his number one priority here is protecting” his son, Ever.

Last month, Disney requested an investigation to sort out Paul’s and Mortensen’s differing accounts of the February incident, according to people close to the situation who were not authorized to speak publicly about the sensitive situation.

The scandal has become the first big test for Dana Walden, who last week was installed as Disney’s president and chief creative officer — the day before the video showing a violent Paul was leaked to TMZ.

The episode has raised uncomfortable questions about why Disney made Paul the face of one of ABC’s marquee franchises.

It also has shined a light on the decision-making of Walden’s newly anointed ABC team: Debra OConnell, the chair of Disney Entertainment Television; Disney Television Group President Craig Erwich; and Rob Mills, Disney TV’s executive vice president of unscripted and alternative entertainment.

Disney declined to comment.

The network has not said whether it plans to eventually air Paul’s season of “The Bachelorette.”

But the network made a huge investment, paying a license fee of about $5 million an episode for the season to Warner Bros., said sources familiar with the matter. The season includes nine episodes and other programming elements, including a special that ran immediately after ABC’s Oscar telecast this month, which attracted 5.5 million viewers, according to Nielsen.

Dakota Mortensen, left, and Taylor Frankie Paul are stars of “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.”

(Fred Hayes / Disney)

ABC also orchestrated a huge marketing blitz — billboards for the show had sprouted around the country, social media channels were crackling and Paul appeared on ABC’s stalwart “Good Morning America,” where she discussed her role on “The Bachelorette,” where she dated nearly two dozen men in search of her soulmate.

She also acknowledged simultaneously facing domestic abuse allegations, which she called a “heavy time.”

“For me, dating as a mom of three is extremely difficult,” Paul told ABC anchor Lara Spencer. “I was like, I get to go out, get away from my toxic cycle here in Utah, go date, and also have my kids come out and visit me. That to me seemed like, why not?”

Advertisers, including Cinnabon, have also pulled back in light of the controversy.

Viewers have long been fascinated by Paul, who earned notoriety on TikTok and formed a community there called MomTok. Her combative relationships added to the intrigue.

Hulu’s “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” has been a massive hit, developing a loyal following and an alternative to the “Real Housewives” franchise on the rival network, Bravo. A clip from the show was included in a Disney video montage of movies, TV shows and other headlining attractions shown to investors last week.

Mills and other Disney executives who oversee ABC and Hulu programming had been looking for ways to reinvigorate “The Bachelor” franchise, and they had taken notice after fans latched on to a playful video that Paul had posted on TikTok, expressing her desire to join the long-running ABC show, which is produced by Warner Horizon.

Comments posted about Paul’s video were intriguing, particularly for viewers who said that they would return to watch “The Bachelorette,” if it featured her.

“I flew out to Utah and met with her and she was serious [about joining],” Mills told The Times two weeks before the controversy. “Then I sent her roses the next day and said, “Would you be ‘The Bachelorette’ and the rest is history.”

Disney recognized that Paul’s relationship with Mortensen was messy.

Disney executives were aware of the altercation in 2023 and briefly debated internally whether to move forward with Paul in a prominent role in “Mormon Wives,” according to a source close to the situation but not authorized to comment. Paul is an executive producer on that show.

The first episode of the first season of “Mormon Wives,” which debuted in September 2024, featured Utah police bodycam footage from the February 2023 fight that was the subject of the just-released video.

The final moments of the most recent season ended with Paul and Mortensen sleeping together again, the night before she was scheduled to fly to L.A. to begin filming “The Bachelorette.” She missed her initial flight, but took a later flight.

Disney also has paused filming on “Mormon Wives” during production of its fifth season.

Over the show’s four-season run, there have been tensions among the castmates, which accelerated as Paul and the other wives pursued fame in other venues, including on ABC’s “Dancing with the Stars.”

When the recent allegations of domestic violence surfaced, castmates expressed concerns about working with her, which contributed to the decision to hire an outside law firm to investigate.

The firm was hired, at Disney’s request, by the show’s production firm, Jeff Jenkins Productions, based in Sherman Oaks.

Times Staff Writer Yvonne Villarreal contributed to this report.

In rejecting a key element of a legal challenge to the government’s warrantless wiretapping program, federal appellate judges on Friday demonstrated once again the willingness of U.S. courts to give the Bush administration considerable latitude in handling the war on terror.

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, by a 3-0 vote, barred an Islamic charity from using a confidential government document to prove that it had been illegally spied upon, agreeing with the administration that disclosure would reveal “state secrets.”

The lawsuit, filed by Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation and two of its attorneys, challenged the National Security Agency’s spying endeavor, the Terrorist Surveillance Program, launched after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The U.N. Security Council has declared that Al-Haramain, which operates in more than 50 countries, belongs to or is associated with Al Qaeda.

The suit was one of 50 legal challenges brought across the country after the program’s existence was revealed in the New York Times.

Other courts have shown similar deference to the Bush administration on the state secrets privilege, which permits the government to bar disclosure in court of information if “there is a reasonable danger” it would affect national security.

But the ruling in this case was particularly striking because it came from a panel of three liberal jurists, all appointed by Democratic presidents.

Moreover, the charity, unlike other plaintiffs, says it has evidence of surveillance — a call log from the National Security Agency that the government inadvertently turned over in another proceeding.

In the ruling, Judge M. Margaret McKeown wrote that the judges accepted “the need to defer to the executive on matters of foreign and national security and surely cannot legitimately find ourselves second-guessing the executive in this arena.”

Erwin Chemerinsky, a liberal constitutional law professor at Duke University law school, said the court showed “how much deference even a liberal panel of judges is willing to give the executive branch in situations like this, and I find that very troubling.”

Doug Kmiec, a conservative constitutional law professor at Pepperdine law school, said “the opinion is consistent with” a ruling by the federal appeals court in Cincinnati earlier this year striking down a challenge to the surveillance filed by the American Civil Liberties Union.

He said the dual rulings indicated that “federal courts recognize that the essential aspects of the Terrorist Surveillance Program both remain secret and are important to preserve as such.”

The court’s ruling was not an absolute victory for the government. McKeown rejected the Justice Department’s argument that “the very subject matter of the litigation is a state secret.”

That finding could prove important in numerous other cases in which the government contends that even considering legal challenges to warrantless wiretapping would endanger national security.

In addition, the 9th Circuit panel sent the case back to a lower court to consider another issue: whether the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires approval by a special court for domestic surveillance, preempts the state secrets privilege. McKeown said that issue “remains central to Al-Haramain’s ability to proceed with this lawsuit.”

Georgetown University constitutional law professor David Cole said he thought Friday’s ruling showed partial victories for both sides.

Indeed, lawyers for the government and for the charity said they were happy with the outcome.

“The 9th Circuit upheld the government’s position that release of this information would undermine the government’s intelligence capabilities and compromise national security,” the Justice Department said.

Oakland attorney Jon Eisenberg, who argued for Al-Haramain before the 9th Circuit, said: “The government wants this case dead and gone. It is not. We are alive and kicking.”

Eisenberg expressed optimism that his client would prevail under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a statute enacted in the aftermath of revelations of illegal spying on civil rights and antiwar activists in the 1960s and ‘70s.

“That provision would be meaningless if the government could evade any such lawsuit merely by evoking the state secrets privilege,” Eisenberg said.

In support of her opinion, McKeown detailed statements by government officials — including President Bush, then-Atty. Gen. Alberto Gonzales and Gen. General Michael V. Hayden, principal deputy director for national intelligence — acknowledging the existence of the Terrorist Surveillance Program and extolling its importance.

“In light of extensive government disclosures about the TSP, the government is hard-pressed to sustain its claim that the very subject matter of this litigation is a state secret,” wrote McKeown, an appointee of President Clinton. “Unlike a truly secret or ‘black box’ program that remains in the shadows of public knowledge, the government has moved affirmatively to engage in public discourse about the TSP.”

Nonetheless, after privately reviewing the secret document, McKeown said she and her colleagues Michael Daly Hawkins, another Clinton appointee, and Harry Pregerson, a Carter appointee, agreed it was protected by the state secrets privilege.

“Detailed statements underscore that disclosure of information concerning the Sealed Document and the means, sources and methods of intelligence gathering in this context of this case would undermine the government’s intelligence capabilities and compromise national security,” she said.

The state secrets privilege was first utilized successfully by the government in a case shortly after the Civil War.

The leading case in the area, U.S. vs. Reynolds, was issued by the Supreme Court in 1953 to block a lawsuit after the crash of a B-29 bomber.

Three widows of crewmen sued and sought the official accident reports. The Air Force said the reports could not be revealed because the bomber was on a secret test mission.

(When the reports were declassified in 2000, they revealed that the aircraft was in poor condition, evidence that might have helped the widows’ suit.)

The Bush administration has evoked the state secrets privilege numerous times in recent years. In most instances, courts have accepted the word of government lawyers, often with a fairly cursory review, according to George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, who, like Cole, has challenged the privilege in court.

McKeown took pains to say that the 9th Circuit had carefully scrutinized the government’s assertions.

She said the judges had taken “very seriously our obligation to review the documents with a very careful, indeed a skeptical eye, and not to accept at face value the government’s claim or justification of privilege.”

But she said the panel could go no further than what already has been publicly disclosed that “the Sealed Document has something to do with intelligence activities.”

When the court heard the Al-Haramain case in August, it also entertained arguments in a related case, Hepting vs. AT&T; Corp. In that case, lawyers representing millions of AT&T; customers are seeking damages from the telecommunications giant for allegedly sharing their private records with the National Security Agency as part of the surveillance program.

On Friday, the 9th Circuit panel issued a brief order saying that the AT&T; case had been severed from the Al-Haramain matter. A decision is expected in the next several months, although there is no deadline.

—

henry.weinstein@latimes.com

Michael Jordan didn’t seem too upset.

Hours after Kevin Durant knocked him out of the top five on the NBA’s all-time scoring list , Jordan was all smiles as he walked to Victory Lane to greet Tyler Reddick after the driver’s win Sunday at Darlington Raceway.

Reddick — who drives for 23XI Racing, which is co-owned by Jordan and veteran driver Denny Hamlin — joined NASCAR Hall of Famers Dale Earnhardt and Bill Elliott as the only Cup Series drivers to win four of the first six races in a season.

To do so, Reddick had to overcome a malfunctioning battery and a large deficit in the final 50 laps. Afterward, Jordan jumped the track’s safety barrier to greet Reddick and his team with some hard high fives and enthusiastic cheers.

“I think the key to him winning was just keeping his head,” Jordan said after the race. “We just had to get the car right, and I think he did an unbelievable job. I just wanted everything to be good, because once he gets back out there, then I feel like his competitive juices are going to carry him all the way to the end. He earned it all week, and I’m real proud of the team.”

Earlier this year, Reddick became the first NASCAR driver to start the season with three consecutive wins. He stands atop Cup Series standings, leading second-place Ryan Blaney of Team Penske by 95 points. Reddick’s 23XI teammate Bubba Wallace is currently in third place.

One night earlier, Durant scored 27 points in the Houston Rockets’ 123-122 victory over the Miami Heat to overtake Jordan for fifth place on the NBA’s all-time leading scorer list. In his 18th season, Durant has 32,294 points — two more than Jordan, who played 13 seasons for the Chicago Bulls and two for the Washington Wizards. Durant and the Rockets play the Bulls in Chicago on Monday.

Jordan has yet to comment publicly on the matter, but Durant had plenty of praise for the man considered by many to be basketball’s GOAT on Saturday during his postgame news conference.

“It’s kind of crazy passing him up because he’s meant so much to the game,” said Durant, who passed Wilt Chamberlain and Dirk Nowitzki on the scoring list earlier this season and now trails only Kobe Bryant, Karl Malone, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and all-time leader LeBron James.

“I’ve been inspired by all of these players that I’m either coming close to or passing up, and MJ is in a world of his own,” Durant added. “He’s in a galaxy of his own as somebody that I look up to, respect and who basically shaped the game for me.”

Durant also pointed out that Jordan would have scored many more points had he not taken multiple seasons off during the span of his playing career.

“He left a few, I want to say, thousand or so points on the table, too, with the amount of games he missed,” Durant said. “… He scored points quickly, man. So he set the bar high, and it’s pretty cool to reach that bar.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

France’s president Emmanuel Macron said Lebanon’s fight against threats to its security is ‘just’, while stressing that no violation of sovereignty can be justified. His comments come as fighting escalates between Israel and Hezbollah, with more than 1,000 people killed and 1.1 million displaced in Lebanon.

INFLUENCER Lydia Millen has revealed she’s finally snapped up her dream home after a six-year search just as her “fake accent” was exposed.

The controversial ‘poshfluencer’, who was recently accused of putting on a more well-spoken voice, shared the exciting news with her millions of followers.

Lydia posted a series of coastal snaps from her new property in Norfolk.

The 36-year-old opened up about the long journey in a heartfelt caption as she prepares to add another property to her portfolio.

Writing rather than speaking to her followers, she penned: “We bought a new home.

“Six years ago we began our search, first in the Cotswolds, and then after a trip to Cley-next-the-Sea where we completely fell in love with the Norfolk coast, our search moved there.

LAVISH LIFE

Truth behind ‘poshfluencer’ Lydia Millen as she ditches council estate past

green fingers

YouTube star Lydia Millen shows off huge garden but fans have same complaint

“We looked for something special but never quite found it.

“Until October, when I stumbled across a 200-year-old fisherman’s cottage. And last week, we finally completed.”

Even modest cottages on the Norfolk coast can fetch £300,000, while prime properties soar past £1million.

The new coastal bolthole marks a lifestyle shift for Lydia and Ali, who have long documented their countryside life online.

The crumbling cottage is expected to undergo a full-scale transformation, with fans already anticipating a series of renovation updates across her social platforms.

Lydia explained: “It needs everything. Heating, rewiring, kitchen, bathroom, windows. A full renovation.

“But one day hollyhocks will grow in the front garden again, and Paul’s Himalayan musk roses will ramble their way back across the flint and brick facade.”

Lydia has previously revealed she owns multiple properties, all mortgage-free, explaining she “doesn’t like having debt”.

The influencer has faced backlash in recent months, with some fans accusing her of not being entirely truthful about her roots.

Born in Watford, Hertfordshire, Lydia has spoken openly about growing up in a council house with her mum after her parents split.

She has previously said she “flunked” her GCSEs before training as a beauty therapist.

Before finding fame online, Lydia also spent seasons working in Ibiza.

Her social media career took off after moving to the countryside, where she spotted a gap in the market for aspirational British lifestyle content.

However, critics have claimed she has “reinvented” herself including adopting a more polished speaking voice.

Responding to one follower who asked why she had changed the way she speaks, Lydia said: “Because I just don’t see why I shouldn’t?

“I value being well spoken, and I know it also helps my international audience.”

Now a social media powerhouse, Lydia shares her idyllic country lifestyle with 1.6million Instagram followers, 1.4million on TikTok and more than one million YouTube subscribers.

The TikTok star is married to Ali Gordon, whom she met on Instagram in 2012.

The pair tied the knot in December 2017 at Aynhoe Park in Oxfordshire and are now thought to be worth around £10million.

Exactly at 10 o’clock on a Monday morning, the strike of a gavel echoes through the courtroom, and the nine black-robed justices of the Supreme Court emerge from behind a red velvet curtain. As those assembled in the ornate hall take their seats, the lead lawyer rises, and the arguments begin.

Soon, most of the justices are up on their elbows, hurling questions at the attorneys. Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg take turns poking holes in the advocate’s argument. Justice Antonin Scalia, sympathetic to his case, leaps in to prop up his contention. “Aren’t you really arguing that . . . ,” Scalia offers helpfully.

Anthony M. Kennedy, looking pensive, asks a philosophical question. Troubled by the answer, Justices David Souter and John Paul Stevens want to know how far the advocate seeks to push his claim. All the while, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist leafs through the briefs, trying to find a disputed passage of the law in question.

But one justice looks out of place. At the far end of the bench, Justice Clarence Thomas rocks back in his leather chair and gazes at the ceiling. He rubs his eyes and stares off into the distance. Sometimes, Thomas has a brooding look, as if he is pondering deeply. More often, he just looks bored.

“I don’t understand it. He is engaged,” says a former Thomas clerk, who like most of those who have worked for him, expresses great admiration for the justice. “He likes to argue out the issues in chambers” and displays a special interest in bankruptcy law and state tax disputes, he says. But Thomas’ interest is not apparent in the courtroom. While Scalia and Ginsburg may ask five or six questions during a one-hour argument, Thomas asked not a single question during the last term of the court.

Lawyers in Washington and visitors to the courtroom never fail to comment on how removed he seems. “What’s wrong with Clarence Thomas?” one lawyer new to the high court commented. “He just sits there.”

That’s a marked contrast from his 18 months on the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, says a judge who observed him then. “He’s like two different people,” says the judge. “He was talkative, gregarious on our court, a real participant. Now he seems to be in a shell.”

This eerie courtroom silence has marked Thomas’ career for all of the three years since he inadvertently became the best-known member of the Supreme Court. At first it seemed that he was simply trying to retreat, somehow, from the stinging visibility of the “he said, she said” confrontation with Prof. Anita Hill that made him the ostensible villain in a TV drama about sexual harassment. It was, perhaps, the worst imaginable fate for a fiercely proud and intensely dignified man.

For a time he was the most carefully watched, most reviled man in town. On the November day he took the oath of office at the court, his ceremonial walk down the marble steps was cut short when a small group of protesters began to boo and shout, “Down with the Male Supremacist Court.” Not surprisingly, rather than beam for assembled photographers, Thomas turned away and walked back into the basement of the court. A few months later, the new justice accepted an invitation to judge a moot court competition at Seton Hall University Law School but canceled when word came that a women’s student group was planning a candlelight vigil.

Wounded, Thomas retreated into the silence that protects a judge who is even more rigid and dogmatic than his opponents feared. As the hoopla over the man has died down, his judicial record has become clearer. He has compiled the most conservative voting record on a conservative court and lambasted his colleagues for refusing to go further in changing the law. He has voted to revoke the right to abortion and return some prayer to the public schools. He cast a key vote to cut off further hearings in a death penalty case, even when newly revealed evidence might have proven the defendant’s innocence. He cast the deciding votes to make it harder for minorities to prove they were victims of job discrimination, harder for victims of stock fraud to sue lawyers and harder for environmentalists to be heard in court.

“He has shown himself to be exactly what his opponents said he would be: a knee-jerk right-winger,” says University of Virginia law professor Pamela Karlan. “He was always going to be tainted somewhat for how he got to the court, but I think he is going to be more tainted by how he is acting now. He’s shown no capacity for growth.”

Georgetown University Law Center Associate Dean Mark Tushnet concurs. “So far, it’s been the least impressive performance of any justice since Whittaker,” he says, referring to justly forgotten Charles Whittaker, who resigned from the court in 1962 after having a nervous breakdown in his fifth year.

But friends and admirers say Thomas is unfairly treated because he is a conservative. “He is not the justice that the NAACP would like,” says Stephen McAllister, a former Thomas clerk who teaches law at the University of Kansas. “He brings his own perspective to the law, but he certainly knows what it was like to grow up poor and black.”

Fueling the debate are Thomas’ activities outside the court. The confirmation fight separated Thomas’ allies from his enemies, and it deepened an already strong commitment to conservative values. While other justices avoid any appearance of partisanship, he boasts of his friendship with conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh, speaks mostly to gatherings of conservatives, brags about not reading the papers and indulges a “not politically correct” fondness for smoking cigars and driving a black Corvette.

Both his demeanor and his record have renewed questions about his qualifications for the high court. No one, not even Thomas himself, had rushed to defend President George Bush’s assessment that he was “the best man for the job.” After all, he had had no significant legal experience as a prosecutor, defense attorney, trial lawyer, law professor or judge and had spent only a year as Bush’s appointee to the influential U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington when he was nominated to the Supreme Court. But at the very least, Thomas promised, he would be impartial. “My personal views have no place in adjudication,” he said. “I can assure you, I have no agenda.”

Many of those who believed him, such as Sen. Arlen Specter, a moderate Pennsylvania Republican who cast a key vote for him, now admit they are dismayed by Thomas’ record. “Frankly, I have been very disappointed with his first three years,” Specter says. “I had thought his roots would show. But he came out of those hearings a changed man, an embittered man.”

*

Each day when the court is in session, Thomas and his wife, Virginia, leave their new home in suburban Virginia and drive into town before most Washingtonians have hit the road. “We travel everywhere together, like a pair of nuns,” Thomas tells friends. His wife, a senior policy coordinator for the House Republican Conference, was said by friends to have been deeply hurt by her husband’s confirmation ordeal. She said they survived by praying together. It “was not a normal political battle. It was spiritual warfare. Good versus evil,” she told a People magazine interviewer a few days after his confirmation.

Theirs is a strange sort of celebrity: They are instantly recognized but seldom seen outside carefully chosen venues. While none of the justices sits for TV interviews on Sunday morning, most make the rounds of bar groups, civic organizations and law schools, giving speeches and answering questions about the work of the court. As members of the nation’s highest court, they can count on a warm reception and instant respect.

Not so with the youngest justice. “It’s like he’s in the federal witness protection program,” says one prominent Washington lawyer.

Thomas has told friends he quit watching most television–for a time, he was a regular punch line on some sitcoms–and stopped reading most newspapers and magazines, with the exception of reliably conservative publications such the Washington Times. (He also refused requests to be interviewed for this story.) “They can say absolutely anything they want about me. I will never read them again to see it,” he told one friendly interviewer last year.

But the confirmation struggle sealed his loyalty to those who stood with him. Each morning as he lifts weights in the Supreme Court’s gym before his workday begins, he says he likes to listen to tapes of Rush Limbaugh poking fun at feminists, environmentalists and all manner of liberal crusaders.

The men are more than passing acquaintances. On May 27, when the rotund entertainer married for the third time in a ceremony at the home of Virginia and Clarence Thomas, the justice performed the official duties. After a sit-down dinner, the assembled guests gathered for “cigars and adult beverages on the deck,” according to Limbaugh’s office.

Among friends, Thomas hardly appears to be a bitter man hidden in his shell. “He is not brooding or angry at all,” says McAllister, his former clerk. “I found him to be warm, supportive and friendly. He has a positive outlook.” He has a big handshake and a hearty laugh, although his eyes have a wary look. As a speaker, he has an endearingly personal style. Far from being the polished high official whose comments drift above the audience, Thomas speaks slowly, emotionally, as if measuring each word to describe his joys and pain. Almost invariably he speaks of his childhood and recounts stories about his grandfather. Even if the tales are a bit familiar now, he comes across as warm, genuine and personal.

From the start, conservatives pointed to Thomas life story as his main qualification for the high office. Here was a man, the vaunted story went, who was born to a teen-age mother in a dirt-floor shanty near the marshes of Pinpoint, Ga., and grew up poor in the segregated South. When his mother could no longer care for him, young Thomas was rescued first by his grandparents and then by the Catholic schools, working his way through Holy Cross College and then Yale Law School, where he graduated a year behind Bill Clinton. “I was drunk with anger,” he told students at Holy Cross, describing himself in the late 1960s, “out of control with hostility toward what I saw as the oppression around me.”

But his up-from-poverty experience brought him to far different conclusions than did the middle-class upbringing of Thurgood Marshall, his black liberal predecessor on the court. Success depends on hard work and individual effort, says Thomas, espousing the lessons that conservatives champion, and government welfare checks or official “affirmative action” preferences serve only to hurt blacks by dampening their drive and cheapening their accomplishments.

Thomas was denouncing his sister back home in Pinpoint for being dependent on her monthly welfare check when he came to the attention of leaders of the incoming Ronald Reagan Administration at a 1980 conference of young conservatives in San Francisco. (The sister, Emma Mae Martin, was receiving welfare assistance while raising her children and caring for an aunt but soon after worked her way off welfare.)

Offers of government positions followed, and despite Thomas’ having announced that he would not work on “black issues,” he became assistant secretary for civil rights in the Education Department in 1981. A year later, he was named chairman of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the agency charged with enforcing the laws against job discrimination, though he often seemed skeptical of its mandate. He had no patience with the civil rights activists who urged him to enforce the law more vigorously. All they do, he said, is “bitch, bitch, bitch, moan and whine and whine.”

In a steady round of provocative speeches, he denounced the conventionally liberal positions on race and civil rights, criticized environmentalists, called for strengthening property rights and praised as “splendid” an article calling for the reversal of the Roe vs. Wade ruling that legalized abortion.

His star rose quickly in the Reagan Administration, and Bush’s Court of Appeals appointment signaled what came next: He’d be the designated Republican successor to the aging Justice Thurgood Marshall.

In five days of Senate testimony–largely obscured by Anita Hill’s later accusations–Thomas publicly backed away from many of his earlier statements. “A judge must be fair and impartial,” Thomas said in his opening statement to the committee. “A judge must not bring to his job, to the court, the baggage of preconceived notions, of ideology, and certainly not an agenda.”

When asked about his previous comments on affirmative action or the right to abortion, about his criticisms of liberal decisions and his long track record of deriding the civil rights establishment, Thomas reverted to the same theme. He denied he had any such strong views, and regardless, none of it would affect his judicial role. A justice has a nearly sacred duty “to strip down like a runner, to eliminate agendas, to eliminate ideologies,” he said. When interpreting the law, “it is the will of the legislature that counts,” he added reassuringly.

Thomas raised eyebrows when he testified that he had never discussed or debated Roe vs. Wade, even during his law school days when the case was decided. Asked about the separation of church and state and the so-called “Lemon test” often criticized by conservatives, Thomas replied that he had “no quarrel” with it. (The term refers to the court’s 1971 ruling in Lemon vs. Kurtzman that it will strike down any law or government program that has religious purpose, advances religion or creates “an entanglement” between church and state.) “I think the wall of separation is an appropriate metaphor,” Thomas commented, sounding more like a Jeffersonian liberal than a Reagan-era conservative.

He also praised the doctrine of stare decisis , Latin for letting the matter stay as decided. Many senators were skeptical, but the nominee sought to reassure them. “I understand your concern that people come here and they might tell you A and then do B,” he told one senator who had pressed him on the abortion issue. “But I can assure you . . . I have no agenda.”

This was not the Clarence Thomas whose provocatively conservative speeches, articles and statements the committee Democrats had reviewed for weeks prior to the hearing. And it was not the Clarence Thomas whose true views became clear soon after he took his seat.

*

Thomas’ first opportunity to weigh in on abortion came in January of 1992, two months into his tenure, when the court agreed to hear a case from Pennsylvania challenging that state’s new abortion regulations. The law didn’t prohibit abortion but required pregnant teen-agers to obtain parental consent, wait 24 hours before undergoing the procedure and, if they were married, to inform their husbands in advance.

Though the case of Planned Parenthood vs. Casey did not require the court to decide the fate of Roe vs. Wade and the right to abortion, and Pennsylvania’s lawyers urged the court to uphold the regulations as consistent with Roe, it looked like a suitable vehicle for the court’s conservatives, who were determined to overturn the abortion right. Three years earlier, in Webster vs. Reproductive Health Services, four members of the court–Rehnquist, Scalia, Kennedy and Byron White–had indicated a willingness to reverse Roe vs. Wade. Clarence Thomas could provide the fifth vote.

But that majority didn’t coalesce in the Casey case. Kennedy, citing the importance of precedent and stare decisis , joined an opinion affirming women’s basic right to choose abortion, and Roe was upheld. As expected, however, Thomas took the other side, signing on to one dissent by Rehnquist that called for Roe to be overturned and to a second, more fiery one from Scalia that compared the abortion ruling to the Dred Scott decision, the pre-Civil War era ruling that sanctioned slavery. Pretty strong stuff for someone who had had no views on the matter just a few months earlier. Since neither side in the case had argued that Roe vs. Wade should be flatly overturned, Thomas could have filed an opinion upholding the Pennsylvania regulations, but deferring a ruling on the broader question of Roe vs. Wade. According to the scuttlebutt from the court’s clerks that year, however, no such half-step was even considered in Thomas’ chambers. The justice’s mind was made up.

“He clearly lied to them (his confirmation committee) about legal issues, “ says Karlan, the University of Virginia professor. “I think he perjured himself about Roe.”

That same term, the issue of prayer in the public schools returned to the docket. For a decade, lawyers for the Reagan and Bush administrations had pressed the court to permit more religion in the schools and to stop insisting on such a strict separation of church and state. They had made little progress, but pressed ahead in a case from Rhode Island that arose when a middle-school principal invited a cleric to deliver a prayer at a graduation ceremony. After a Jewish parent complained, a federal judge ruled that the graduation prayer was unconstitutional and could not be repeated.

The case of Lee vs. Weisman was appealed to the high court when again there was a surprising setback for the conservatives. Thomas did join them once again, but Kennedy switched to the liberal side, and a 5-4 majority upheld the judge’s ruling, saying that officially sponsored religious invocations have no place in the public schools. An angry Scalia slammed the decision as as “jurisprudential disaster” and demanded the scrapping of the Lemon test for judging religion cases. Thomas, who had said he had “no quarrel” with the standard a few months before, signed Scalia’s dissent.

In his first three years on the court, Justice Thomas has rarely had a chance to write a major opinion. Having staked out a position on the far right, he rarely affects the outcome in key cases, except to supply the fifth vote for a conservative majority. He seems less interested in being an influential coalition builder than in forcefully stating his position. So far, his voice has been heard more loudly in political circles than within the confines of the court. So repeatedly, the chief justice has assigned him to write mundane decisions involving federal jurisdiction or bankruptcy disputes. However, Thomas has strongly asserted himself in two areas of law: prisoners’ rights and voting rights. Parting company even from conservatives such as Chief Justice Rehnquist, Thomas has called for reversing precedents that have benefited inmates and Southern blacks.

Thomas had been on the bench just two weeks when the court heard a case involving Keith Hudson, an inmate in a Louisiana prison. Late one night, Hudson, locked in his cell, got into an argument with a nearby guard, Jack McMillian. Assisted by two other guards, McMillian handcuffed and shackled the prisoner and took him into a hallway. As the others held Hudson, McMillian punched him in the face and jaw and kicked him in the stomach. A supervisor on duty watched but merely told the guards “not to have too much fun.” Hudson emerged with a badly swollen face, loosened teeth and a cracked dental plate.

Hudson sued the officers in federal court, alleging he had suffered cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment. A magistrate concluded that the beating was unrelated to any disciplinary purpose and awarded Hudson $800 in damages.

On a 7-2 vote, the court upheld the magistrate’s decision in Hudson vs. McMillian. Justice O’Connor said prison guards have broad authority to use all necessary force to enforce discipline or put down disturbances, but “the unnecessary and wanton infliction of pain” violates the Eighth Amendment. Thomas, however, argued that the prisoner’s injuries were at most “minor” and accused his colleagues of creating “a National Code of Prison Regulation.”

His written dissent attracted attention, and not just for its strident conclusion. During his confirmation hearings, Thomas had displayed a minimal knowledge of constitutional law. He drew a blank, for example, when Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) asked him to name some of the most important high-court rulings of the past 20 years. But his dissent in the Hudson case delved into early English law and quoted a series of precedents from the 19th Century.

Around the court, that was seen as a sign that Thomas had turned over his writing duties to his young clerks. Most justices employ their clerks to do research or write preliminary drafts, but their final opinions tend to reflect their own personal styles. Not so with Thomas. “I don’t see any distinctive touches, what you might call ‘Thomasisms’ in his opinions,” says a veteran attorney who appears regularly before the high court.

The dissent in the prisoner’s case argued that in the 18th Century, “cruel and unusual punishments” referred to the punishment imposed by a judge. Therefore, the court should limit the Eighth Amendment only to officially imposed punishments and not to “a deprivation suffered in prison.” Of course, if Thomas’ view became the law, prison guards could use electric shocks, cattle prods and other means of torture without violating the ban on cruel and unusual punishments.

More than a few observers remembered how Thomas had, during his confirmation hearings, told the senators that he could identify with the plight of prisoners. From his courthouse window, he said, he saw “busload after busload” of young men going into the jailhouse. Leaning forward intently, he’d concluded, “I say to myself almost every day, but for the grace of God, there go I.”

Scalia, the court’s liveliest intellect, its most energetic questioner and its best writer, signed Thomas’ dissent, but he later confided to a friend that he did not fully agree with it. Rather, he wanted to protect his embattled new colleague from being “out there all alone.”

Twice since then, the court has revisited the issue of prisoners’ rights, and in both instances, Thomas has slammed the majority for adhering to the view that the Constitution forbids cruel and unusual punishment in prison. “Judges or juries, but not jailers, impose punishment,” he wrote in a dissent issued in June. This time, however, Thomas spoke only for himself. Scalia had joined with the majority.

*

Thomas has stepped boldly into the mine field of voting-rights law, the controversial area that was the undoing of C. Lani Guinier in her bid to become Clinton’s attorney general. Unquestionably, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 has had an enormous impact in the South. Under penalty of that law, Southern officials could no longer use techniques “subtle as well as obvious” to nullify the votes of blacks, and finally, a century after the Civil War, black citizens have gained a voice in government. The reach of the law, however, is uncertain, and Thomas has taken an active role in trying to define it. Some had expected him to show a special sensitivity because of his background, but instead he urged the court to overturn past rulings favoring blacks.

One case testing the act’s limits came before the court in his first month on the bench. In 1986, Lawrence Presley became the first black man in this century to be elected a county commissioner in Etowah County, Ala., after a judge ordered the county to select its commissioners by district, rather than county-wide. Presley won a seat in a new black-majority district, and the post was a powerful one, since each commissioner also controlled the budget for road maintenance in his section of the county. Soon after Presley was elected, however, the new county council voted to put all road decisions in the hands of the whole commission. With one stroke, the white majority had regained all power.

Presley sued, contending that this move to strip him of power violated the Voting Rights Act. But on a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court rejected the claim in Presley vs. Etowah County. “This is a case where a few pages of history are far more illuminating than volumes of logic,” John Paul Stevens wrote for the three dissenters. Congress wanted to end schemes used to deprive blacks of political power, so the court should enforce the will of Congress, not thwart it, he said.

But writing for a conservative majority, Justice Kennedy said the 1965 law applies only “with respect to voting,” not to “routine actions of state and local governments.” Thomas joined his opinion.

Alice Presley told Emerge magazine that her husband had, in the tumultuous days of Thomas’ confirmation, believed that because of his background, “we ought to give the guy a chance.” But after the 1992 ruling, Presley, who died in January, 1993, realized he had made a mistake. “That really hurt him more than the decision. He would walk around saying, ‘I can’t believe Thomas voted against me,’ ” Alice Presley said.

Last year, Thomas cast the deciding fifth vote to rule that drawing congressional boundaries solely to create black-majority districts violated the constitutional rights of whites. And this year, Thomas went even further and disputed the entire 25-year history of using the Voting Rights Act to help elect more blacks in the South.

The issue arose in an unusual case from rural Bleckley County, Ga., where all power is exercised by a single county commissioner who acts as both executive and legislature. Blacks, who make up 20% of the population, said they were excluded from power and filed a suit under the Voting Rights Act. The U.S. Court of Appeals, relying on Congress’ 1982 amendments to the voting rights law, agreed with the black voters and ordered the county to switch to a five-member commission.

Those amendments underlined that any “standard, practice or procedure” used in the electoral process would violate the law if it denied racial and ethnic minorities the right “to elect representatives of their choice.” If a large black or Latino population is denied representation because of the way district boundaries are drawn, those lines are illegal, even if they were not intended to discriminate. Minorities are not guaranteed proportional representation, but the law tells judges they must examine “the extent to which members of a protected class have been elected to office in the state or political subdivision.”

On the high court, the justices voted 5 to 4 to overturn the appeals court and uphold Bleckley County’s single commissioner system. Why? Three members of the majority–Kennedy, Rehnquist and O’Connor–said the courts can’t decide the size of a governing body because there is no “benchmark” for deciding what is fair. If Bleckley would need five commissioners to give blacks a voice, should the next county have 20 commissioners so it could serve a group with 5% of the population? they asked.

But Thomas, in a 59-page separate opinion, took the view that the Voting Rights Act does not cover the make-up of governing boards and the drawing of electoral boundaries, no matter what their effect on minorities. He said he would reject 25 years of court precedent on the issue and ignore what Congress has said on the subject.

His broad arguments, though familiar, have a certain power. The law as currently interpreted “encourages federal courts to segregate voters into racially designated districts . . . . In doing so, we have collaborated in what may aptly be termed the racial Balkanization of the nation,” he wrote.

Wall Street Journal columnist Paul Gigot called his opinion, which Scalia joined, an “intellectual bombshell” and a “tour de force.” This is Thomas at his best, arguing that there is a price to pay for elevating race as the all-important factor in politics and the law.

But Thomas’ view of the law has one obvious drawback: Congress does not agree with him. As Justice Stevens pointed out in an opinion joined by Souter, Ginsburg and Blackmun, it is “crystal clear” that Congress wrote the law to apply to voting districts that denied minorities the right “to elect representatives of their choice.”

Sen. Specter, who had closely questioned Thomas to seek assurance that the nominee would abide by long-standing interpretations of federal civil rights law, heard Thomas give the desired assurances. “If there is a longstanding interpretation and Congress does not act . . . that certainly would be, at least from my way of looking at a statute, evidence that cannot be ignored in revisiting that particular statute,” he told Specter. But that was just the kind of longstanding interpretation of the voting-rights law that Thomas ignored in June.

*

While no one has proved whether Thomas told the truth when he “categorically denied” all of Anita Hill’s accusations, there is ample reason to believe that he did not honestly describe his legal views in his testimony before the Judiciary Committee.

That’s not a problem in the eyes of those who strongly supported Thomas from the beginning. “I think he is proving to be an excellent justice,” says Charles Cooper, the former Reagan Administration lawyer. C. Boyden Gray, White House counsel under George Bush, praises Thomas’ opinions on voting rights and the prisoners’ cases as “gutsy, not politically correct. I think he’s doing a great job. He’s been just what I had hoped for,” Gray says. Danforth says he has paid little attention to his performance on the court. “I stood by him as a friend,” he replies. “I’m not a critic.”

But disappointment and anger are strong in other circles. Ralph Neas, the executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, concludes that Thomas has been exactly what he feared. “We opposed him because we thought he would be a right-wing ideologue, and that’s what he’s been,” Neas says. Before, Scalia had been generally seen as the court’s most conservative justice, and Thomas has voted with him in 86% of the cases. It is the closest pairing of justices since the liberal tandem of William J. Brennan and Thurgood Marshall retired.

Harsh criticism has come from blacks. Last November, Emerge magazine, which appeals to black professionals, published a scathing attack on Thomas titled “Betrayed” in which several black Republicans who supported Thomas three years ago said they now regret having done so. Film director Spike Lee commented that “Malcolm X, if he were alive today, would call Thomas a handkerchief head, a chicken-and-biscuit-eating Uncle Tom.” The magazine’s cover featured a photo of Thomas with his head wrapped in a handkerchief.

Reactions to Thomas differ so sharply in part because his friends indeed see a different person. Consider these two stories:

Sen. Danforth calls Thomas “warm, pleasant, funny, inspiring, just a delightful person to be with.” To illustrate, he cites his summer interns, who expressed an interest in seeing the Supreme Court. “I called Clarence, and he had them come over the next day. He took time with every one of them. The personal warmth just comes through. That’s the real Clarence Thomas,” the senator says.

William L. Robinson, dean of the District of Columbia School of Law, also wanted to bring some young students by the Supreme Court. A black civil rights lawyer who knew Thomas from his EEOC days, Robinson considered the justice a friend, even if they disagreed on the law.

“It would really mean a lot to these kids if they could see someone like him (Thomas) who made it. I just hoped he would duck his head in the room and maybe say ‘hello’ while we were there,” Robinson says. He called Thomas’s chambers repeatedly, explained why he was calling and left messages. “He wouldn’t even call me back. And I guess I’m pissed about it now,” Robinson says. That’s the real Clarence Thomas, too.

A more confident Thomas was on display this spring as the justice showed a new willingness to get outside the court. He gave talks at his high school and college alma maters, discussed crime before the Federalist Society, spoke to judges in New York and Baltimore, dropped by uninvited to chat with the disc jockeys at a local “oldies” radio station and even donned a football jersey and visited the practice field of his favorite team, the Dallas Cowboys. Why the Cowboys? Because the local Redskins are hugely popular in Washington and their arch-rival, the Cowboys, are generally hated, he explains. He also says he likes the Los Angeles Raiders “because everybody hates them.”

His Federalist Society speech on crime was powerful and provocative, sounding like the Thomas of old. He blamed the “rights revolution,” promoted by 1960s-era liberals, for much of the crime and mayhem that besets America’s cities today. It’s a view gaining increasing currency in Republican circles.

One thing seems certain. Justice Thomas and the controversy that follows him figure to be with us for many years to come. This fall, two new books on his confirmation fight are due to be published. Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson of the Wall Street Journal take a critical look in “Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas.” The authors are not promising a “smoking gun” about sexual harassment, but they do say that the Bush White House deliberately painted a misleading picture of Thomas.

Meanwhile, Danforth gives an insider’s account of the 10-day fight to save his friend’s nomination in a book entitled, “Resurrection: The Confirmation of Clarence Thomas.” Danforth, according to an account in Washingtonian magazine, describes how Thomas’ nomination was saved by a quick prayer session in the moments before Thomas presented his final defense. Thomas, his wife, Virginia, and Danforth, along with Danforth’s wife, Sally, met in the restroom of Danforth’s office, the story goes, praying and listening to a recording of “Onward Christian Soldiers.” “We reached out to each other and held hands as we listened: ‘Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war.’ I looked at Clarence. His eyes were closed, his head bowed; his foot beat time to the music.”

“An effective criminal justice system–one that holds people accountable for harmful conduct–simply cannot be sustained under conditions where there are boundless excuses for violent behavior and no moral authority for the state to punish,” Thomas said. He ticked off the modern-day explanations for crime–”poverty, substandard education, faltering families, unemployment, systemic racism”–but none of them can excuse an individual’s wrongdoing, he said. While he offered no precise recommendations for what can be done, his message about crime and personal responsibility seems sure to win broad approval.

As for the 46-year-old Thomas, he tells almost every audience that he is “getting comfortable” being a justice and is settling in for a long stay. “It’s a joy to work at the court,” he told a meeting of federal judges in New York. “And in good health, I hope to be there for another four decades or more.”

Comic and television host Stephen Colbert knows the feeling William Person recounts in his new lawsuit alleging that USA Bobsled/Skeleton was negligent by concealing knowledge that the repeated sub-concussive blows sledders endure could cause permanent brain damage.

Shortly after taking a bobsled run with Team USA in Lake Placid, N.Y., in 2009, Colbert described the experience.

“It felt like I was being hit in the head with ice hammers,” he said . “It was like losing the worst snowball fight of your life.”

Person can relate, according to his attorneys, who wrote in the suit filed Tuesday in Los Angeles County Superior Court that the symptoms of brain injury have a name among bobsled and skeleton athletes : “Sled Head.”

“This action seeks justice for a decorated American athlete who, in his pursuit of Olympic glory, was knowingly sacrificed to a silent epidemic of brain injury,” the court filing said.

Person says he experienced chronic headaches, migraines, fogginess, vertigo and blackouts during his career.

“[He] currently suffers from traumatic brain injury and latent neurodegenerative disease,” the filing said. “Memory loss, cognitive decline, emotional instability, and chronic pain. These injuries have required, and will continue to require, extensive medical care.”

The action is the second brought on behalf of Person, who competed internationally for the United States from 1999 to 2007. He filed a lawsuit in December 2021 that asked USA Bobsled/Skeleton to implement a medical monitoring system to identify and treat sledders with sled head symptoms.

That lawsuit, which languished in court for five years, included a class-action component and accumulated several hundred plaintiffs. Person’s new lawyers, Kamau Edwards and Christopher Perry, are taking a different approach. They plan to file separate lawsuits and seek monetary damages for each plaintiff based on their circumstances and diagnosis.

Edwards and Perry also added new defendants. In addition to USA Bobsled/Skeleton, the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee, Anschutz Southern California Sports Complex and former bobsledding supervisor Tracy Lamb are named.

Anschutz owns the Home Depot Center, where the U.S. bobsled and skeleton teams train. The lawsuit says the venue is responsible for premises liability and Lamb for negligent hiring and supervision.

The defendants have yet to be served with the lawsuit and declined to comment. Once served, they will have 30 days to respond through the court.

Edwards and Perry also filed personal injury lawsuits last week on behalf of two other former USA sledders — Joe Sisson and Rick Baird. Through their court filings, both recount head injuries sustained while sledding and lingering symptoms.

The New York Times published stories several years ago about former bobsled and skeleton athletes who struggled with symptoms similar to what Person, Sisson and Baird describe. A handful were posthumously diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the progressive, degenerative brain disease found in people with a history of repetitive head impacts.

Dr. Ann McKee, director of Boston University’s CTE Center, studied the brain of former Olympic bobsledder Pavle Jovanovic, who killed himself in 2020 at 43, and determined he had CTE.

Jovanovic wasn’t the first elite bobsledder to commit suicide. Steven Holcomb, who piloted the American bobsled known as the “Night Train” to the Olympic gold medal in 2010, was found dead in Lake Placid, N.Y., in 2017 from an apparent overdose of alcohol and sleeping pills.

Also, Sisson’s sledding mentor Travis Bell killed himself in 2012 at 27 after experiencing years of debilitating symptoms that Sisson believes stemmed from his career as a driver on the U.S. bobsled team.

“I’ve got survivor’s guilt big time,” Sisson told the New York Times in 2022.

Person’s lawsuit alleges that Lamb and USABS coaches witnessed his symptoms during training sessions but failed to intervene.

“They did not pull [Person] from the sled. They did not refer him for a neurological evaluation. They did not institute a concussion protocol,” the lawyers wrote. “Instead, fostering a culture of silence, they encouraged [him] to continue training through the injury, exacerbating the damage to his brain.”

The lawsuit asserts that the link between sledding and brain injury has been known since the 1980s and that officials intentionally concealed the information because “a full disclosure of the risks of CTE and permanent brain damage would deter top-tier athletes like [Person} from competing,” the suit said. “By suppressing this information, they robbed [him] of his ability to make an informed choice about his own life and health.”

Person was a track and field athlete at Weber State in Utah when he was recruited by USA Bobsled/Skeleton. He represented the United States in the America’s Cup, World Cup, Olympic Trials and World Championships from 1999 through 2007.

The dangers of sliding sports took center stage at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics when 11 crashes occurred in two days of bobsled training ahead of the Games. Gold medal bobsled favorite Beat Hefti of Switzerland suffered a concussion and luger Nodar Kumaritashvili died after being ejected from the track at nearly 90 mph during the final training run.

March 23 (UPI) — A sheriff in Riverside, Calif., has seized more than 650,000 ballots from a 2025 state election that allowed the state to redistrict to gain five congressional seats.

Sheriff Chad Bianco, who is running for California governor, said Friday that he is investigating allegations by an activist group that alleged the reported tallies don’t match the ballots.

“This investigation is simple,” he said at a press conference. “Physically count the ballots and compare that result with the total votes reported.”

The election Bianco is investigating is the special election for Proposition 50, asking voters for endorsement to redraw the congressional districts in response to other Republican-led states, like Texas, redrawing their districts to pick up seats.

Californians voted to redistrict, and it was not a close election: 7.4 million in favor to 4.1 million.

A group called Riverside Election Integrity Team called for the investigation saying its examination of records shows about 45,000 more ballots were counted than received, Bianco said.

Local election officials said those allegations were based on a misunderstanding of how ballots are officially counted, the Palm Springs Desert Sun reported.

“County election staff follow detailed procedures established by state and federal law to protect the integrity of the vote and to ensure that every eligible ballot is processed and counted in accordance with those legal requirements,” Riverside County Executive Officer Jeff Van Wagenen said in a statement.

Bianco seized the ballots with two warrants signed by a judge. California Attorney General Rob Bonta sent Bianco a letter March 6 alleging, “my office has serious concerns as to whether probable cause existed to support the issuance of the warrants and whether your office presented the magistrate with all material evidence as required by law.”

Bonta also alleged that Bianco’s office is not qualified to count ballots and the investigation “sets a dangerous precedent and will only sow distrust in our elections.”

Bianco replied: “A judge approved the warrant, so Bonta’s opinion means absolutely nothing.”

Bianco also said Friday that he would give the investigation to a judge-appointed special master.

Democrats and Republicans in the state have said the investigation is baseless.

“It looks to me like it’s a politically motivated effort,” Jon Fleischman, former executive director of the California Republican Party, told The New York Times. “It’s awfully coincidental that he would be taking this high-profile and extreme of an action literally two months before he’s facing a statewide election.”

California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, a Democrat, said Bianco’s claims are not supported by the evidence.

“The Riverside County Sheriff’s Office has taken actions based on allegations that lack credible evidence and risk undermining public confidence in our elections,” Weber said in a statement on Friday.

“Investigations into election processes must be conducted by those with the appropriate legal authority and subject matter expertise. Similar claims raised in other states by individuals without election administration experience have been thoroughly reviewed and debunked.”

Antonio Villaraigosa, a Democrat running for governor, said Bianco is trying to gain national exposure.

“What we’re seeing from Chad Bianco is a dangerous abuse of power and no different from what we’re seeing from Donald Trump and the extreme Republican efforts to disenfranchise voters nationally,” Villaraigosa said in a statement.

“Seizing hundreds of thousands of ballots without credible evidence is an attack on the very foundation of our democracy. If you’re willing to undermine free and fair elections for MAGA stardom, you have no business holding public office.”

Schools and hospitals bombed; strikes on apartment buildings; energy facilities targeted and attacks on neighbouring states.

Have Israel, the United States and Iran broken international law in the war? Or what legal justification might they claim?

Presenter: James Bays

Guests:

Geoffrey Nice – Human rights lawyer and former International Criminal Court prosecutor

Brian Finucane – Senior adviser with the US programme at the International Crisis Group and former legal adviser at the US State Department

Nicholas Tsagourias – Professor of international law at the University of Sheffield

The Repair Shop star Dom Chinea was left stunned during the latest episode of Dom Chinea’s Cornish Workshop

Dom Chinea suffered a massive setback on the most recent instalment of Dom Chinea’s Cornish Workshop as he tackled drift car racing for the first time.

The Repair Shop favourite, his wife Maria and their dog Wendy are embarking on the adventure of a lifetime as they exchange the commuter chaos of Kent for the rugged splendour of West Cornwall. The series chronicles Dom as he forges a new existence in the far west of Cornwall.

During the most recent instalment, Dom constructed a drift car with engineer Sam Lovegrove, where they competed in a drift car race. Dom revealed: “Today, I’m slightly nervous because Sam has emailed me with a link to a Mazda for sale. An MX5 with the title of ‘Let’s Go Drifting’, which fills me with fear.”

He continued: “But you know what? I’ve moved down here, moved down to Cornwall, willing to try new things. Drifting is something I have never done, never tried, and no experience in. But I would actually quite like to give it a go. It’s something I’d quite like to learn. So we’ll have to see.”

Subsequently, the pair went to inspect the Mazda MX5, where they purchased it and restored it. Later in the programme, they entered it into a drift racing competition, reports the Express.

Dom confessed: “This is not my world at all. It just goes to show being into cars is a very broad category, and this is something I’ve never experienced before. I am, to say I’m out of my depth here, is an understatement.

“In drift competitions, it’s not about who crosses the finish line first, but how well the cars perform on the track. Judges give points for how well drivers control their drifts, or skids, going around the corners. They’re looking for speed, and who can do it with style.”

Yet, mere minutes into the race, Dom and Sam’s vehicle swerved off track and collided with the barrier. Dom explained in a VT: “With our modifications, we’re confident our Phoenix is going to fly. The steering, the cornering, the suspension, all working together in perfect harmony. Until it didn’t.”

Exiting the car, Sam joked: “That didn’t go so well!” to which Dom replied: “Seriously? I didn’t even get a go. Are you kidding me? After all that work?” Sam then observed: “I think it’ll fix, but not this afternoon, I don’t think!”

In a VT, Dom quipped: “Well, we wanted our car to make an impact”, before adding: “We started this crazy adventure in the hope we’d meet like-minded petrolheads. I’d say this was mission accomplished.”

Discussing the episode beforehand, Dom revealed about the car race: “Sam showed me a Mazda MX5 for sale that we could fix up to try drift racing – something I’ve never done.”

He continued: “But we had to change the car quite a bit first – we needed a hydraulic handbrake, and the rear wheels needed to be able to spin, we had to lock them together to both spin at the same time. But that wasn’t completely straight forward – the underside was quite rusty.”

Dom Chinea’s Cornish Workshop can be viewed on U and Channel 4.

WASHINGTON — The Senate is on track to confirm Markwayne Mullin as Department of Homeland Security secretary, President Trump’s nominee to take over the embattled department after firing Kristi Noem amid a public backlash over the administration’s immigration enforcement and mass deportation operations.

Mullin, a Republican senator from Oklahoma known for his close friendship with Trump, has tried to present himself as a steady hand, saying that his goal as secretary would be to get the department off the front page of the news. But Mullin tangled with Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, who questioned Mullin’s character and temperament during last week’s combative confirmation hearing.

Senators advanced Mullin’s nomination on Sunday during a rare weekend session on a largely party-line vote, and confirmation is expected late Monday.

He would take the helm of the department at a difficult time. The department’s routine funding has been shut down, leading to long waits at U.S. airports during the busy spring break travel season, as Democrats demand changes in immigration enforcement operations after the deaths of two U.S. citizens during protests this year in Minneapolis.

Trump announced over the weekend he’s ordering immigration officers to help Transportation Security Administration agents, which lawmakers and others warned could escalate tensions at crowded airports.
Although the senator comes to the position after more than a dozen years in Congress, and with the management experience of running an expanding family plumbing business in Oklahoma, he has not been seen as a key force in immigration issues.

A former mixed martial arts fighter and collegiate wrestler who has led early-morning workout sessions in the members-only House gym, he became close with members of both parties and is often seen as a negotiator in partisan Washington.

It is his loyalty to Trump that landed him the job, and he’s not expected to sway from the president’s approach. Mullin was a strong supporter of Trump’s immigration agenda and ICE officers before being tapped for the Homeland Security job.

“I can have different opinions with everybody in this room, but as secretary of homeland I’ll be protecting everybody,” Mullin said during his confirmation hearing.

Santana writes for the Associated Press.

In less than two months, six UCLA women’s basketball players might be working out with WNBA teams. The draft is April 13, a week after the NCAA national championship game, and the season starts less than a month later.

One of the most consequential pieces of the new WNBA collective bargaining agreement for current college players, including the UCLA super senior class, is expanded rosters.

Not only are two new teams — Portland and Toronto — entering the WNBA this season and adding 24 roster spots, but the new CBA will allow each team to have 12 traditional roster spots and two developmental player spots.

The new developmental players will get housing assistance and can practice and travel with their respective WNBA squads.

UCLA’s Charlisse Leger-Walker, left, and Angela Dugalic, back, swarm California Baptist forward Grace Schmidt during an NCAA tournament game at Pauley Pavilion on Saturday.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

Across the country during the NCAA tournament, players and coaches have noted how much the new WNBA CBA changes the future for the next generation of players.

South Carolina coach Dawn Staley noted to reporters last week that it’s one of the first times many women’s basketball players will be able to accumulate generational wealth. And they can do so without necessarily having to play in other leagues around the world during the WNBA offseason.

“The WNBA will make you make a choice because you have to be on time in training camp.” Staley said. “It’s worth it now. It’s worth it to actually have your body recover and just play in the WNBA season.”

Last season, just 20 rookies made rosters out of training camp. The fight for those spots might get more competitive for some young players now that the league offers higher salaries and some high-end international players might find it more worthwhile to sign in the WNBA.

Teams are now required to roster 12 players, compared with the option to have 11 instead of 12 under the previous CBA, which allowed franchises to spend more on top players and have less of a cap hit by triming their roster size.

But likely, more players who otherwise wouldn’t have gotten looks or would have been cut during past training camps will now have a realistic shot a developmental player spot.

“I just feel a lot of pride,” said UCLA sixth-year forward Angela Dugalic. “Because of them, I’m able to have a lot of things that they maybe weren’t able to have at the start of their career. And some of them, like, they’re either at the end of their career or they’re even finished right now, they’re still fighting for us.”

The entire UCLA starting lineup — Charlisse Leger-Walker, Kiki Rice, Lauren Betts, Gianna Kneepkens and Gabriela Jaquez, plus Dugalic off the bench — project as WNBA picks, most as early as the first round.

Kneepkens or Leger-Walker (though she was recovering from an ACL injury) would have been WNBA draft-eligible after last season. Their rookie salaries would have been around $70,000, depending on where they were selected. This year, the rookie minimum will be $270,000, and top picks, which Betts and Rice are projected to be, will make as much as $500,000.

“Just like the growth we’re even experiencing now in college, we have so many people before us to thank that. [They] fought for better exposure and TV rights … fought for Title IX and resources to be allocated appropriately,” UCLA coach Cori Close said. “I think it’s similar right now in terms of the CBA. We need to really thank the people in that room that fought hard.”

UCLA guard Kiki Rice dribbles up the floor under pressure from California Baptist guard Filipa Barros Saturday at Pauley Pavilion.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

UCLA players are understandably locked in on the NCAA tournament, but they haven’t ignored an important moment.

“I think it’s awesome for women’s basketball and the progress going forward,” Leger-Walker said. “I love that we have players who are willing to advocate and really stand on what they believe in. We’re making steps forward.”

Where they all fit on individual teams or in respective mock drafts will all be more clear after free agency begins in the week ahead of the draft. Around 80% of the league are free agents, so there are going to be plenty of new-look teams.

UCLA players will soon get a chance to join those roster makeovers under working conditions past players never enjoyed.

“I’m just grateful for all the women who fought for what they’ve earned,” Kneepkens said. “That’s just super cool for anyone that’s a WNBA fan and anyone that’s part of it. They made this happen.”

Israeli President Isaac Herzog was forced to take cover as a missile struck nearby shortly after he gave a press conference in the northern Israeli town of Kiryat Shmona. During the speech, Herzog aid Israel cannot return to last year’s ceasefire and must secure “strategic depth inside Lebanon.”

Bill Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted a former waitress in 1972 after escorting her to one of his shows, a civil jury in California concluded Monday, awarding the woman $19.25 million in damages.

The verdict was the latest turn in a series of legal battles the disgraced entertainer, now 88, has faced since allegations that he repeatedly drugged and raped women exploded publicly about a decade ago. Since then, he served about three years in a Pennsylvania prison on sexual assault charges before the case was overturned in 2021.

Donna Motsinger, now 84, said in her lawsuit filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court that Cosby had given her wine and a pill that left her unable to move, and that she woke up in her house wearing nothing but her underwear, according to court records, and that “she knew she had been drugged and raped by Bill Cosby.”

Cosby has denied the allegations, as well as those brought by dozens of other women who claimed they had been drugged and raped. Coming in the early years of the #MeToo movement, a broad social media-inspired campaign to name and prosecute men accused of sexual misconduct, Cosby’s attorneys painted him as an unfair target of mass vigilantism gone awry.

Motsinger sued Cosby in 2023, alleging that, at the time, she was working at a Sausalito restaurant called The Trident that was popular with celebrities, including Cosby, according to the complaint her attorneys filed Sept. 27 of that year. One night, Motsinger accepted Cosby’s invitation to go with him to his show at the Circle Star Theater in San Carlos. Cosby picked her up at her home in a limousine, according to her complaint, and, on the way to the venue, gave her the wine and a pill that she thought was aspirin.

“Next thing she knew, she was going in and out of consciousness while two men attending to Mr. Cosby were putting her in the limousine,” the complaint said. “The last thing Ms. Motsinger recalls were flashes of light,” before waking up in her house in nothing but underwear.

Motsinger didn’t consent to Cosby’s sexual contact and, having been rendered unconscious by drugging, she couldn’t consent to it to begin with, according to the complaint. As a consequence of her ordeal, her complaint says she suffered lost wages, medical bills, pain and suffering and emotional distress.

GREGGS sausage rolls are seriously taking off — as easyJet is serving free ones on board for the first time.

The budget airline is dishing out the popular flaky pastries to mark the opening of a base in the heart of Greggs country.

And passengers can dip them in a range of new sauces inspired by destinations around the world, including kebab.

The collaboration celebrates the launch of easyJet’s new hub at Newcastle International Airport — 75 years after Greggs’ first shop was opened in the city.

Holidaymakers flying from there yesterday were treated to a free sausage roll, and all week punters can scoff one from a special easyJet service landing in the city centre.

They will also be offered limited-edition dips, such as Turkish-style kebab, with aromatic choices of lemon, vinegar and smoky paprika.

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There is also Tunisian– inspired harissa ketchup, or Italy’s silky affogato flavour, with hints of deep-roasted coffee, cocoa and vanilla.

Flyers tucked into their favourites yesterday.

Easyjet’s new Tyneside base is the airline’s 11th in the UK, and will offer more than 80 flights a week to 22 destinations.

It will also support around 1,200 jobs, including 140 direct roles for pilots and cabin crew.

Garry Wilson, CEO for its holidays business, said: “This is a major milestone for us, so partnering with Greggs, a true Geordie icon and one of the city’s most famous exports, felt like the perfect way to ­celebrate our arrival.”

Greggs director Hannah Squirrell added: “This is a fantastic opportunity for the local community, and we can’t think of a better way to celebrate than with a sausage roll.”

John Gregg founded the bakery in Newcastle in 1939, and its first outlet opened in the city’s Gosforth in 1951.

Chad Bianco, the Riverside County sheriff and a leading Republican candidate for governor, has seized more than 650,000 ballots from last November’s election as part of an investigation that he called a “fact-finding mission” to determine if they were fraudulently counted.

Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, the state’s top law enforcement official, has sharply criticized the probe, which he called “unprecedented in both scope and scale.”

In a March 4 letter to the sheriff, Bonta said the seizure of the ballots “sets a dangerous precedent and will only sow distrust in our elections.” He threatened to seek legal recourse if Bianco does not halt his investigation.

Bianco said Friday that his investigators are looking into allegations by a local citizens group that “did their own audit” and found that the county’s tally was falsely inflated by more than 45,000 votes — a claim that local election officials have emphatically rejected.

Here is what we know.

Why were ballots taken?

According to Bonta’s office, Bianco’s department on Feb. 26 took about 1,000 boxes of ballot materials in Riverside County related to the November election for Proposition 50, which temporarily redrew the state’s congressional districts to favor Democrats in response to partisan redistricting in Republican states, including Texas.

Bianco said that it’s his “constitutional duty” to investigate a potential crime and that he is not trying to change the election results.

The investigation includes all of the ballots cast in the county, where Proposition 50 passed with 56% of the vote, a margin of more than 82,000 ballots. Statewide, it passed with 64% of the vote, a margin of more than 3.3 million ballots.

Bianco said he had been contacted by “a group of citizen volunteers” that said it performed an audit finding that 45,896 more ballots were counted than were cast. He did not name the group, but the allegations match those made by a group called the Riverside Election Integrity Team.

In a February presentation to the Riverside County Board of Supervisors, Registrar of Voters Art Tinoco disputed the group’s allegations and said they were based on a misunderstanding of raw data that had not been fully processed.

The actual discrepancy, Tinoco said, was 103 votes — a variance of 0.016%.

How did the sheriff get the ballots?

Bianco said his department served the registrar with a warrant “approved and signed by a judge” on Feb. 9.

According to Bonta’s office, an additional warrant was issued on Feb. 23. Bianco said the warrants are now sealed.

In the March 4 letter to Bianco, the attorney general said he had “serious concerns” about whether the sheriff had probable cause to seize the election materials.

Bonta questioned whether Bianco had concealed information from the magistrate judge who approved the warrants, including details from the registrar’s analysis of the citizen group’s allegations.

An official from Bonta’s office told The Times that the attorney general “found out in the middle of the week that [Bianco] was going to execute the warrants on a Friday.” Bonta’s office asked the sheriff to slow down and share information about the investigation, but “instead of waiting, he actually moved it up” and seized the ballots sooner than planned, said the official, who would only speak on background.

Bianco said a Riverside County Superior Court judge ordered the appointment of a special master to oversee the ballot count. His investigators had already begun counting, but the tally would start over under the court’s guidance, Bianco said.

The ballots would have soon been destroyed

California law requires county officials to keep election materials — including ballots and voter identification envelopes — for 22 months for elections involving a federal office and for six months for all other contests.

The materials must be sealed and then destroyed at the end of the retention period.

The Proposition 50 election took place on Nov. 4, so the ballots are scheduled to be destroyed in May.

Why investigate now?

Political observers say that Bianco — a leading gubernatorial candidate — appears to be vying for attention from President Trump and his supporters.

Kim Nalder, a political science professor and director of the Project for an Informed Electorate at Sacramento State, said the investigation appears to be “an electoral ploy.”

“At this stage in the election, most voters haven’t really tuned into the gubernatorial race, and there are a ton of candidates,” she said. “People who don’t know his background will know now. This is clear signaling.”

Trump has repeatedly called on the federal government to “nationalize” state-run elections. He remains fixated on his 2020 election loss and has falsely claimed widespread fraud.

In January, the FBI raided the elections office in Fulton County, Ga., seizing 2020 presidential election records. And this month, the Republican leader of Arizona’s state Senate said he had handed over 2020 election records to the FBI, complying with a federal grand jury subpoena for records related to a controversial audit of the election in Maricopa County.

Bianco is an outspoken Trump supporter.

A poll released last week by UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies and co-sponsored by The Times showed Bianco and conservative commentator Steve Hilton leading the crowded field of gubernatorial candidates by slim margins, with the Democratic vote split among multiple candidates in a left-leaning state.

The top two vote getters, regardless of party, will advance to the November election.

Bianco said the investigation was “not a recount” for Proposition 50 and had nothing to do with his campaign for governor.