mother

Il Etait Temps powered over the line in the Queen Mother Champion Chase to earn trainer Willie Mullins his third win of day two at Cheltenham Festival.

Majborough was the odds-on favourite to claim victory in the big race of the day but a poor jumping display made it an impossible victory.

A mistake at the final fence almost cost Il Etait Temps the win, but jockey Paul Townend steered him over the line at the Festival’s first Ladies Day in five years.

“There was a lot of work put into this horse after Ascot so I have a lot of people to thank,” Townend told ITV Racing. “It shows how tough this lad is. He’s such a courageous horse again today. He was flat as a pan everywhere.

“I wasn’t going to force him but he just found his rhythm.”

Mullins told BBC Radio 5 Sports Extra: “Out of the corner of my eye I could see Paul Townend thinking ‘now we have a horse race’.

“He started to get confident and he planned his move around the last bend.”

Libberty Hunter, priced at 50-1, and Sir Alex Ferguson’s horse, L’eau Du Sud, finished third.

The first winner of the day for Mullins came in the opening race with 11-1 shot King Rasko Grey powering over the finish line.

Act of Innocence, ridden by Nico de Boinville, followed up in second.

Mullins was “disappointed” with his horses in Tuesday’s Supreme Hurdle, but King Rasko Grey’s “form worked out”.

He told BBC Radio 5 Sports Extra: “We were all disappointed with our horses in the Supreme, but his form worked out. The day we bought him from the sales, he looked like a really smooth mover.

“I am very happy. When I saw them here on Monday, my worry was they looked too well.

“I don’t think I have seen my team on the gallop look so well, but they are racing well.”

It was a Mullins one-two in the Novices’ Chase with a brilliant jumping display from 11-1 chance Kitzbuhel allowing him to hold off the challenge of 7-2 shot Final Demand.

Jockey Harry Cobden labelled Kitzbuhel a “phenomenal little horse”.

He told ITV: “He’s braver than I am, this little chap. He’s a phenomenal horse.

“He was brilliant today, looking right the whole way, so that’s why I kept him in the middle. Everywhere I asked him, he delivered. He’s very tough.”

The warm smiles coming from Chadrack Mpoyi are plentiful these days. After forcefully dominating the paint and protecting the rim in Crean Lutheran wins, the imposing big man beams as teammates, classmates and supporters congratulate him. He offers a hug in return.

Mpoyi says he’s having fun each game in his one season of high school basketball in the U.S., the 6-foot-11 African enjoying a meteoric rise to become one of the top West Coast centers in this year’s class. A virtual unknown coming from Congo two summers ago to attend school in Orange County, Mpoyi saw his recruitment skyrocket and lead to him signing with Minnesota. He scored 14 points during Crean Lutheran’s 59-52 win over JSerra in the Southern Section Division 1A championship game Saturday. The Saints (26-7) qualified for for the CIF Southern California Regional that begins Tuesday, extending Mpoyi’s senior season.

In a way, it all happened so quickly, by leaps and bounds. Within a week of arriving in June 2024 on a student visa, Mpoyi was donning the Saints’ jersey and playing in a tournament in Corona in preparation for the NCAA evaluation period when college coaches can watch recruits play in person. By that August, he claimed an offer from Washington. The following summer, he had about two dozen offers.

Still, Mpoyi’s swift emergence came amid a rather inauspicious beginning to his journey. He left his father, mother and siblings to pursue a basketball opportunity on another continent. He tried seeking international student transfer eligibility with the highly regarded Crean Lutheran program, but the CIF Southern Section ruled he couldn’t play on the varsity team in the 2024-25 season. He’d be sitting out.

Chadrack Mpoyi saw the Crean Lutheran community support him before he was ever able to play in an official game for the Saints.

(Diamond Leung / For The Times)

And soon after that …

“My mom passed away,” Mpoyi said quietly, declining to discuss it much further.

The Crean Lutheran community responded by wrapping its arms around the teenager with the 7-foot-5 wingspan. A second family — a prominent Orange County one — stepped forward to open its doors to Mpoyi and form a stateside support system.

“And he blended in beautifully,” said Stacy Jones, the mother of his host family.

Crean Lutheran is named after John Crean, the recreational vehicle pioneer and philanthropist with a rags-to-riches story. As a child, Crean and his family left North Dakota at the start of the Great Depression and settled in Southern California as they barely scraped by, and his Irish immigrant father was in poor health. As an Orange County businessman, Crean ultimately became the founder and chief executive of Fleetwood Enterprises, a Fortune 500 company with annual revenue surpassing $3 billion. His foundation donated $10 million after his 2007 death to help establish Irvine’s first Christian high school.

The school has made it a well-worn path for international students to come for a faith-centered education in one of the newer planned residential communities in the city. And boys’ basketball coach Austin Loeb, through his connection to the Luol Deng Foundation, has facilitated the addition of several players from the former NBA All-Star’s native South Sudan. They’ve stayed with host families and gone on to play at the college level. The Saints currently include two Sudanese players in senior forwards Jacob Majok, who has signed with UC Riverside, and Will Malual.

“It’s a ministry as well [as] an opportunity to get kids that come from nothing and give them this,” Loeb said in Crean Lutheran’s gym after a Saints win.

Mpoyi is the first player from Congo to play for Crean Lutheran. He arrived with the ability to speak three languages — French, Swahili and Lingala.

Crean Lutheran guard Caden Jones recalled how the team communicated with the new kid as Mpoyi joined a trip to Santa Barbara for a summer tournament the week after he arrived.

“Through Google Translate,” said Jones, a dual-sport standout who also stars at quarterback for Crean Lutheran. “Every food place we went to, he wanted a cheeseburger or pizza. By the end of it, we just knew what he wanted so we didn’t have to ask him.”

Jones’ mom, Stacy, upon first spotting Mpoyi wearing the Crean Lutheran jersey, wondered who was the player sitting by himself.

“Nobody was talking to him,” Stacy recalled. “Nobody offered him water or anything. We went to him and said, ‘Do you need water or a protein bar?’ He didn’t speak English. He didn’t know what we were talking about. So we just went and got it, and we asked the coach, ‘What’s going on with this kid?’”

Mpoyi was limited not only by the language. He’d been playing basketball only a few years, after he started watching videos of Hakeem Olajuwon, an NBA star from Nigeria, so he also had more to learn on the court.

“He traveled every other possession,” said Loeb, who served as Crean Lutheran’s top assistant coach last season. “I’m not kidding.”

Eventually, Stacy learned about Mpoyi’s living situation off campus and found it to be unsatisfactory for him.

“The coach says, ‘Do you mind? Can you just take him for a couple weeks until I can find a host family?’” Stacy recalled. “And so we did, and then … we couldn’t give him away.”

Chadrack Mpoyi greets Stacy Jones, right, the mother of his host family, after leading Crean Lutheran to a win at Cypress.

(Diamond Leung / For The Times)

She laughed and smiled.

Said Caden: “Just being with him every day, he’s like a brother to me now. I love him to death.”

Stacy never got a chance to speak with Mpoyi’s mother, but she could tell they were very close. She understood that his mom’s life revolved around church and raising nine kids, Mpoyi being the baby of the family.

Less than three months after he left his hometown of Likasi, his mother died.

“It’s pretty sad and incredible,” Loeb said. “His mom had cancer and when this opportunity came about for him to come over to the U.S., she didn’t tell him because she thought he would stay. Once he was here, she told him she was sick, but he didn’t know how quick it would be. Talk about putting your kids above yourself.”

Mpoyi was neither able to travel back home nor play in high school basketball games as an outlet. As Mpoyi mourned, the team had to encourage him to step outside of the house to clear his mind, said Caden, who extended empathy beyond the hospitality inside of it. Mpoyi’s faith deepened.

“I was driving him to school — he wanted to go to school, and put his hand on my arm, and he says, ‘… I really want to get baptized in honor of my mom,’” Stacy Jones said, her voice shaking. “And I just lost it.”

A month after losing his mother, Mpoyi was baptized at chapel held in the school gym. Wearing a Crean Lutheran hoodie, he bowed his head in front of the whole school, including teammates and coaches, and received a standing ovation.

Stacy, who had arranged a French-speaking pastor, also surprised Mpoyi with a letterman jacket, with his mom’s favorite picture and Bible verse custom-printed on the back.

“It was just cool to see him continuing his faith and how happy inside he was to take the journey,” Caden said.

Caden’s father, Steve, is the global chairman and chief executive of Allied Universal, the private security provider for many Fortune 500 companies, and he oversees the third-largest private employer in North America. The only companies with more employees are Walmart and Amazon.

Crean Lutheran teammates Chadrack Mpoyi and Caden Jones, waiting to check into a game, say they are like brothers after living together.

(Diamond Leung / For The Times)

Stacy, his wife, is a philanthropist who has joined him in raising $13 million in the last seven years for victims of human trafficking by supporting Vera’s Sanctuary, an Orange County residential drug rehabilitation center for young women.

Together they opened the doors of their home to Mpoyi and later signed on for guardianship. Mpoyi didn’t know the family well upon arriving to the gated community of Coto de Caza, but adapted — and grew in more ways than one.

Stacy said she enlisted an English instructor who also spoke French and that Mpoyi picked up the language in two weeks. “He’s a sponge,” she said. “He just absorbs everything. He’s wicked smart.”

Mpoyi said it was hard, but in four or five months, Loeb described a night-and-day difference in his English-speaking ability and marveled at the progress, noting that he carries a grade-point average above 3.0. Stanford would join the schools offering him a scholarship.

The Joneses were especially busy during the fall of 2024 raising two sons as elite athletes as well. Caden was a four-star quarterback when he suffered a season-ending knee injury that September before bouncing back as a junior by throwing for 30 touchdowns and more than 3,000 yards to draw heavy recruiting interest. Carter Jones flipped his commitment from California to Arizona that October after developing into a three-star linebacker at Crean Lutheran, and he formed a tight bond with Mpoyi before leaving for college.

With the new dynamics, what was it like in that household?

“We are a very physical family,” Stacy said. “Lots of hugs.”

Said Caden: “A lot of food. We eat a lot.”

And with the team, Loeb said what made Mpoyi special was how he connected, explaining, “He loves people so much and he cares about them. He’s a natural leader.”

Sidelined last season, Mpoyi dedicated himself to lifting weights and adding muscle. That part he could control, according to Loeb, who credited Mpoyi for sticking with the plan. With Crean Lutheran’s strength program — and having access to some weights at the Jones home — he went from 195 pounds to about 245. The transformation of his body enabled him to transform his game as he progressively improved his combination of physicality and skill.

“I can do several things,” said a smiling Mpoyi, who watches video of another 6-11 talent, NBA great Kevin Garnett, before games. “I can dunk on people, and then I can face up.”

Said Loeb: “When he came over, he was more of like a stretchy forward. I wanted to turn him into a more traditional big right now because that would help him to be successful. But he still has the mobility to get out and guard and still be physical. He’s learning the game, and he has really good touch.”

And perseverance, for which Loeb nominated Mpoyi for the Naismith High School Basketball Courage Award. Loeb believes the trait comes from Mpoyi’s strong faith.

Steve Jones, who wrote a book about achieving more in business and life titled, “No Off Season: The Constant Pursuit of More,” sees the same.

“All people see is this giant 7-foot kid,” Steve said. “What people don’t see is how hard of a worker he is.”

Midnight neared as Steve, dressed in Crean Lutheran gear, visited with Arizona football staffers at the Saints’ basketball game at the Nike Extravaganza in Santa Ana. They watched Caden hoop with Crean Lutheran fighting for a spot in the Open Division playoff field, as there’s interest in having him join his older brother on the Wildcats’ football team. Caden, a 6-foot-3 point guard, also has received basketball offers from Washington and UC Santa Barbara.

Aside from running a global company that does about $23 billion in annual revenue out of its Irvine headquarters, Steve, a former college football player at Cal Poly whose father played for Bear Bryant, also oversaw the recruitment process for Mpoyi last summer and looked out for his best interests.

Forced to sit out last season, Mpoyi developed into a three-star prospect while playing for All In Elite on the Under Armour circuit and in summer high school events. Mpoyi and Crean Lutheran traveled to Mesa, Ariz., last June and captured a bracket title at Section 7, an event crawling with college coaches. Minnesota offered the following week, and Loeb counted 23 offers over the summer.

“I wanted to make sure no one took advantage of him,” Steve said. “I wanted to make sure he found the right fit. I wanted to make sure that coaches really wanted him for the right reason, that it was the right offense for him.”

Crean Lutheran coach Austin Loeb has watched Chadrack Mpoyi fight to overcome obstacles after he arrived from Congo.

(Diamond Leung / For The Times)

That ended up being in the bruising Big Ten with Minnesota. After the 19-year-old signed with just five years of playing experience, Coach Niko Medved said in a statement in November: “Chadrack has an incredible upside, has a great motor and is athletic. One of the first things we noticed was how well he moves for his size and his ability to move his feet and protect the rim.”

It’s Stacy who has taken on the difficult task of trying to track down Congolese documentation as she works with Minnesota’s compliance department to help Mpoyi meet NCAA eligibility requirements.

Mpoyi not only acknowledges that the Joneses have supported him but also has shown protective instincts with the family. When they’re walking around, he’ll wait and make sure she’s nearby, Stacy said.

“He’s very humble and I know he comes from small beginnings but he never lets you know it,” she said. “We live in a nice house, and they ask him all the time, what’s it like to live with the Joneses? And he’s like, what are you talking about? He doesn’t engage with those kinds of conversations. How much money do they have? Like, why are you asking? Does it matter?

“He’s a gift.”

“He’ll be in our lives forever,” said Steve, who envisions holidays in which Mpoyi is able to come back from college to their home. “It’s like he’s turned into our son. I don’t know if we originally thought that was going to happen. When you say, ‘Can someone live at your house for a little bit,’ you say ‘Yes.’

“It’s like we have a third son forever.”

The lovely, funny “American Classic,” premiering Sunday on MGM+, is a love letter to theater, community and community theater. Kevin Kline plays Richard Bean, a narcissistic stage actor. He’s famous enough to be opening on Broadway in “King Lear,” but he has to be pushed onstage and is forgetting lines. After he drunkenly assails a hostile New York Times critic — caught on video, of course — he’s suspended from the play, and his agent (Tony Shalhoub) advises him to get out of town and lay low until the heat’s off, as they used to say in the gangster movies.

Learning that his mother (Jane Alexander, acting royalty, in film clips) has died, Richard heads back to his small Pennsylvania hometown, where his family — all actors, like the Barrymores, but no longer acting — owns a once-celebrated theater. To Richard’s horror, it has, for want of income, become a dinner theater, hosting touring productions of “Nunsense” and “Forever Plaid” instead of the great stage works on which he cut his teeth.

Brother Jon (Jon Tenney), running the kitchen at the theater, is married to Kristen (Laura Linney), Richard’s onetime acting partner, who dated him before her marriage; now she’s the mayor. Their teenage daughter, Miranda (Nell Verlaque) — a name from Shakespeare — does want to act and move to New York, as her mother had before her, but is afraid to tell her parents. Richard’s father, Linus (Len Cariou), is suffering from dementia, though not to the point he won’t actively contribute to the action; every day he comes out again as gay.

Across the eight-episode series, things move from the ridiculous to the sublime. Richard’s attempt to stage his mother’s funeral, with her coffin being lowered from the ceiling, while “Also sprach Zarathustra” plays and smoke billows toward the audience, fortunately comes to naught; but he announces at the ceremony that he’ll direct a production of Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play “Our Town” at the theater, to “restore the soul of this town.” (His big idea is to ignore Wilder’s stage directions, which ask for no curtain, no set and few props, with a “realistic version,” featuring a working soda fountain, rain effects and a horse.) Fate will have other plans for this, and not to give away what in any case should be obvious, the title of the play will also become its ethos, with a cast of amateurs, including Miranda’s jealous boyfriend, Randall (Ajay Friese), and ordinary people standing in for the ordinary people of Wilder’s Grover’s Corners.

The series has a comfortable, cushiony feeling; it’s the sort of show that could have been made as a film in the 1990s, and in which Kline could have starred as easily in his 40s as in his 70s; it has the same relation to reality as “Dave,” in which he played a good-hearted ordinary Joe who takes the place of a lookalike U.S. president. The town is essentially a sunny place, full of mostly sunny people, to all appearances, a typical comedy hamlet. But we’re told it’s distressed, and Mayor Kristen is in transactional cahoots with developer Connor Boyle (Billy Carter), who wants clearance to build a casino on the site of a landmark hotel. (Much of the plot is driven by money — needing it, trading for it, leaving it, losing it.) He also wants his heavily accented, bombshell Russian girlfriend, Nadia (Elise Kibler), to have a part in “Our Town.”

As in the great Canadian comedy “Slings & Arrows,” set at a Shakespeare Festival outside of Toronto, themes and moments and speeches from the play being performed are echoed in the lives of the performers, while the viewer experiences the double magic of watching a fine actor playing an actor playing a part. Kline, of course, is himself an American classic, with a long stage and screen career that encompasses classical drama, romantic and musical comedy and cartoon voiceovers; the series makes room for Richard to perform soliloquies from “Hamlet” and “Henry V,” parts Klein has played onstage. He brings out the sweetness latent in Richard. Linney, who played against her sweetheart image in “Ozark,” is happily back on less deadly ground (though she’s tense and drinks a little). Tenney, who was sweet and funny on “The Closer,” and who we don’t see enough of these days, is sweeter and funnier here, and gets to sing. (All the Beans will sing, except for Linus.)

As a comedy, it is often predicable — you know that things will work out, and some major plot points are as good as inevitable — but it’s the good sort of predictability, where you get what you came for, where you hear the words you want to hear, ones you could never have written yourself. “American Classic” is not out to challenge your world view in any way but wants only to confirm your feelings and in doing so amplify them. Shock effects are fine in their place — and to be sure there are major twists in the plot — but there is a certain release when the thing you’re ready to have happen, happens, whether it brings laughter or tears. Either is welcome.

A Palestinian mother from Gaza says she recognised her missing son, Mohammed Sharab, when he was shown shackled, blindfolded and listed as ‘for sale’ in a post shared by Israeli soldiers.

Tayari Jones was feeling intense pressure to deliver a follow-up to her 2018 bestseller, “An American Marriage.” She was three years past her publisher’s deadline. Worse, she had begun to suffer symptoms of what was ultimately diagnosed as Graves’ disease, a serious autoimmune condition that attacks the thyroid. At the time she didn’t know what was causing pain in her right leg and the intense itching on her arms, legs and torso — or why her handwriting had “gone funky.” Meanwhile, 200 pages in, the novel she owed Knopf Publisher and Editor in Chief Jordan Pavlin wasn’t coming together.

She confided to a close friend, “This book got me feeling like a clown right now.” Jones began to doubt that she was ‘worthy’ of another literary success.

“You know how musicians say ‘that band was swinging’? I wasn’t swinging,” Jones, who lives in Atlanta, tells me during a recent phone call.

She says she turned to an empty notebook, and began word doodling — scrawling random words, going wherever her pen took her. “Kin,” the magnificent novel that emerged, is out now. Oprah recently announced that it’s her latest book club pick (the second time Jones has been honored with the selection).

“Kin: A Novel” by Tayari Jones

(Knopf)

“Kin” was supposed to have been an entirely different book — an of-the-moment novel about gentrification in the New South — but what materialized from Jones’ creative experiment was a tiny Louisiana town called Honeysuckle, amid the 1950s and Jim Crow. Then, as Jones puts it, “Annie and Vernice [her main characters] introduced themselves.” All of Jones’ previous fiction has been contemporary, and at first she didn’t know what to make of the path Annie and Vernice were leading her on. “I don’t write historical,” observes Jones, “I’m a writer of my own era.” Not to mention she’d always been suspicious of writers who claim their characters came to them fully realized.

Even at that point, Jones still believed Vernice and Annie might just be part of a larger backstory, perhaps parents to protagonists she had yet to conjure. “So I stuck with it to find out.” The more she wrote, the more the puzzle pieces began to fit together. Annie’s journey out of Louisiana takes her through a sharecropping brothel in Mississippi, then on to Memphis where she is convinced she will find and reunite with her mother. Meanwhile, Vernice attends Spelman (the HBCU Jones is a ’91 graduate of).

Jones began to suspect that she’d had a previously undetected ulterior motive for moving her book to the past. She wondered if “Kin” was actually an effort to better understand her parents, particularly her mother, a former economist who’d been active in the civil rights movement. “My mother is a very tight-lipped person,” Jones says. “I knew very little about her life, and maybe this was my imagination trying to crack the code.”

Jones’ progress wasn’t without its setbacks. She was deep into the writing of “Kin” when her Graves’ disease flared in earnest. Her blood pressure spiked. She got winded just climbing the stairs to her bedroom. She landed in the emergency room with a life-threatening “thyroid storm,” requiring surgery and daily medication. Then her eyesight deteriorated, which necessitated a month of radiation. But she powered through, and sent off the manuscript.

Jones’ editor, Pavlin, admits the novel she received was a surprise. “But it was as perfect a novel as I’ve ever read,” she says. “No publisher in their right mind would stand on anything as insignificant as a contractual description in the face of such a work.”

“Kin” deftly alternates points of view between Vernice and Annie, narrating events by way of a vernacular that would be at home on a front porch rocking chair. When Annie takes a job at a nightclub in Memphis, she says of its penny-pinching owner: “The man was tight as a skeeter’s teeter.” Jones is equally adept at the delicate prose, as in this description of a well-worn family Bible: “The paper, thin as butterfly wings, was heavy with wisdom.”

While Jones had Toni Morrison’s short story “Recitatif” in mind while writing “Kin,” her take on the subject is singular. “Vernice and Annie remain friends because each of them is the keeper of the other’s true self,” she says. “Friendship is particularly meaningful because it’s a relationship you’re constantly recommitting to — reupping.”

Now that “Kin” is out in the world, and Jones has weathered the bumpy road to publication day, we asked her if she’s nervous about how it will be received eight years after her previous novel was published. “I am not ambitious now in the way I was then,” she says. “I’ve learned what success can and cannot do for a person. You have to learn to be satisfied. People say ‘don’t rest on your laurels,’ but what are laurels for?”

Haber is a writer, editor and publishing strategist, and co-founder of the Ink Book Club on Substack. She was director of Oprah’s Book Club and books editor for O, the Oprah Magazine.

A Republican from the South Bay who raised hundreds of thousands of dollars running unsuccessfully against Rep. Maxine Waters four times while promoting QAnon conspiracy theories was sentenced to four years in federal prison for misusing campaign funds, the Department of Justice announced Monday.

Omar Navarro, 37, pleaded guilty in June to a single count of wire fraud for defrauding his own election campaign. The perennial candidate had raised hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years from prominent right-wing figures while promoting QAnon conspiracy theories but never cracked 25% of the vote.

He was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Mark C. Scarsi, who ordered Navarro immediately remanded into federal custody. A restitution hearing will be scheduled at a later date to determine how much money Navarro must pay to compensate victims.

Narvarro ran to represent Los Angeles County residents in California’s 43rd Congressional District in the 2016, 2018, 2020 and 2022 election cycles.

From July 2017 to February 2021, he funneled tens of thousands of dollars in donations to his campaign committee back to himself through his mother, Dora Asghari, and friend Zacharias Diamantides-Abel, prosecutors said. In total, his scheme diverted around $266,00 in campaign funds, more than $100,000 of which went directly into his pocket, prosecutors said.

“Defendant could have used that money to buy radio advertisements, purchase billboard space, or send a mailer to aid him in the election,” prosecutors wrote in their sentencing memorandum. “He chose instead to steal his donors’ dollars and fund his lavish lifestyle, including using it to pay for Las Vegas trips, fancy dinners, and even criminal defense attorneys for his criminal stalking charge after he had the audacity to use his campaign money to pay a private investigator to stalk her.”

He set up a sham charity called the United Latino Foundation to embezzle additional funds for his personal use. He also wrote thousands of dollars’ worth of checks to Brava Consulting, a company owned by his mother. This money was allegedly payment for campaign work, but the bulk of it was simply funneled back to him.

Initially, Navarro denied the allegations publicly, writing on X last year that the claims were “baseless” and suggested Waters herself was behind the investigation. He pleaded guilty months later.

Prosecutors argued that a significant sentence was necessary given the “prolonged and pervasive” nature of his fraud and to discourage others from engaging in similar behavior “that undermines the very fabric of the campaign finance system, a system designed to promote trust in government.”

The other two people connected to the case were also criminally charged.

Navarro’s mother pleaded guilty in June 2025 to one count of making false statements after lying to the FBI when questioned about receiving funds from her son’s campaign. She will face up to five years in federal prison at her April 13 sentencing hearing.

Diamantides-Abel pleaded guilty in May 2025 to one count of conspiracy and awaits sentencing.

Kara Braxton, who won two WNBA championships during a 10-year career, has died at age 43.

“It is with profound sadness that we mourn the passing of 2x WNBA Champion Kara Braxton,” the WNBA said in a statement Sunday. “Our thoughts are with her family, friends, and former teammates at this time.”

No cause of death has been given.

Born in Jackson, Mich., along with twin sister Kim, Braxton played high school basketball at Jackson High for one season and at Westview High in Portland, Ore., for three seasons.

Braxton, a 6-foot-6 center-forward, played at the University of Georgia from 2001-2004, earning SEC freshman of the year and first-team all-conference honors in 2002. She averaged 15.4 points and 7.3 rebounds a game during her three seasons with the Bulldogs.

“Rest in peace Kara,” Georgia basketball posted on X.

Braxton was selected by the Detroit Shock at No. 7 overall in the 2005 draft. She spent 5 1/2 seasons with the team, winning the WNBA championship in 2006 and 2008 and earning her only All-Star nod in 2007. She also played for the Phoenix Mercury from 2010-11 and the New York Liberty from 2011-14, finishing with career averages of 7.6 points and 4.7 rebounds a game.

New York Liberty’s Kara Braxton grabs the ball between Indiana Fever’s Tammy Sutton-Brown, left, and Tamika Catchings on Sept. 17, 2011.

(Mel Evans / Associated Press)

“We mourn the loss of Kara Braxton, a former Liberty player whose presence and passion left a lasting impact on our organization and the women’s game,” the Liberty wrote Sunday on X. “Our hearts are with her family, friends, teammates, and all who were touched by her spirit. Her impact will not be forgotten.”

Braxton is survived by her husband Jarvis Jackson and two sons, Jelani Thurman and Jream Jackson.

Thurman, a tight end who played three seasons at Ohio State before transferring to North Carolina last month, posted a number of tributes to his mother on his Instagram Story, including a photo of her kissing him as a baby at a Shock media day photo shoot.

“imma miss my queen,” Thurman wrote to accompany another photo, which appears to show him as an older child wearing his mother’s No. 45 jersey to school.

Thurman also posted video of an interview from around the time Ohio State won the 2024 national championship in which he was asked what lessons he learned from his mother that helped get him to that point.

“Man, she taught me always go hard,” Thurman said. “There’s one goal, you know what you need to go to do.”

When the pandemic hit, and reality settled in that life would be isolated and mostly inside, Grammy winner Anderson .Paak found himself on the outside looking in, in a way he didn’t anticipate. “I was the odd man out. My son was 8, and BTS took over the whole house,” .Paak explained in an interview with The Times at his WeHo lounge, Andy’s. “It was a K-pop storm. Before that, me and my son were bonding off of my music.”

.Paak’s son, Soul Rasheed, and his now ex-wife originally from Korea, Jaylyn Chang, had become obsessed with K-pop alongside much of America, which reminded .Paak of the intensity of Beatlemania. Black American music influenced the birth of a new style, which formed and expanded across oceans, then returned to the U.S. and exploded. This effect in the .Paak household was palpable, causing Soul and Chang to deeply bond in a new way. .Paak himself, as a soul, R&B and hip-hop aficionado, was tapped into the source, but not the reinterpreted subject. So he had to find a way in.

Soul, at the time, like many 8-year-olds, had also become obsessed with becoming a YouTuber. Besides .Paak’s music, the father-and-son duo had also previously connected over humor, so .Paak started there. They began with funny skits and eventually fused them with BTS dances. Soon, there were even videos featuring them comedically educating each other about their individual music tastes. “I loved it,” .Paak recalled, getting lost in the memory. “I was getting to know him more, and he was getting to know me. My mom would always say, ‘It’s one thing for your kids to love you, but it’s another to share things you’re interested in.’ It wasn’t like I was being Anderson .Paak, I was just Dad.”

“I was getting to know him more, and he was getting to know me,” .Paak said of bonding with his son, Soul.

(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)

Through this exploration and the realization of a potential continued familial bond, a story idea emerged, then a treatment for a K-pop-centered film that .Paak would direct and he and Soul would both star in. .Paak then began directing a slew of music videos as the pandemic began to fade, building a portfolio and gaining experience in the medium. But he could start to sense Soul’s interest fading as time passed. After a few failed pitch attempts, .Paak urgently enlisted the help of one of his oldest friends and fellow entertainer, Jonnie “Dumbfoundead” Park, who brought .Paak and the idea to Stampede Ventures.

“The pitch was from an idea that Anderson had, and [to introduce it], we showed them this TikTok that he had with his son,” Park recalled over Zoom. “Anderson was like, ‘Do you know anything about BET, son?’ And [Soul] was like, ‘No, but I know BTS.’ Then they were just going back and forth, arguing about BET and BTS. That was literally the deck, [us saying] we would take that energy and put it into a two-hour film. They loved it. As soon as we walked out of the office, Anderson looked over like, ‘Are we greenlit?!’ They just understood it, the whole intergenerational, intercultural element of Black and Korean.” Stampede combined forces on the project with Live Nation Studios and .Paak’s debut feature “K-Pops!” was off to the races.

It’s important to note that .Paak is himself Black and Korean. His mother was adopted from Korea by a SoCal Black American military family and .Paak’s father was also a Black military officer. Thus, while his mother was born in Korea, he was raised almost entirely within a Black cultural space. .Paak didn’t experience much direct exposure to Korean culture until his 20s, when he met Chang at the Musicians Institute in Hollywood. As an immigrant directly from Korea, Chang showed him the fortitude of structure amid her community. He was also taken by their inherent family value system. “In Korean households, you stay in the house until you get older so you can take care of your parents, and your parents can help take care of the kids,” .Paak explained. “There’s an infrastructure that’s worked out. Also, Korean food is important, as is learning the language. I was drawn to that. My son didn’t eat anything outside of Korean food for so long, and he’s just now getting into tacos.”

.Paak then further explored his Korean side through a burgeoning friendship with Park, which happened a bit later, after Chang had already given birth to Soul. Park introduced .Paak to K-town-based Korean culture through their shared music scene. “The people that came from K-town had a lot of Latino and Black influences as well,” .Paak remembered. “There was a little more of a melting pot, and it was more urban. But in a similarly communal way [to Koreans from Korea], they were all hanging out in K-town with other Korean friends. They’d drink soju, and go to after-hours where you had to have somebody Korean with you.”

While .Paak had some opportunities in adulthood to grasp a bit of his Korean heritage, in “K-Pops!,” through his main character BJ, he also got to actualize what his mother may have missed. In the film, BJ, a failed karaoke bar R&B musician, gets a lucky chance to go to Korea and be the drummer for a popular K-pop competition series. There, he bumps into his estranged ex-girlfriend’s son, Tae Young (played by Soul), who is competing on the show. He then finds out that the kid is his. While a messy transition ensues, BJ and Tae Young eventually get to galavant around Korea and work together to try to win the competition. Through this exploration, BJ finds out he can thrive in Korea while still holding onto his Blackness. .Paak’s mother’s dive back into her roots had a different result. “My mom went abroad and spent a year in Korea, but when she went there, she just didn’t like it,” .Paak explained. “In the movie, initially, BJ doesn’t really have any connection to his Korean side and doesn’t really care to know, but then he finds a bridge.” That bridge is music.

Actor Yvette Nicole Brown, who in “K-Pops!” plays BJ’s mother, proclaimed over Zoom that, “Everything about the film and the music in it is Blasian, every culture is celebrated and massaged and made into something beautiful.” .Paak made a concerted, intentional effort to explore both the Black and Korean sides of K-pop in two scenes.

The first is an early breakdown initiated by Soul’s character, Tae Young, who explains the structured roles of a K-pop group, which may be fun for superfans and educational for laypeople to the genre. The next is a winding presentation by BJ to Tae Young about the influence of Motown groups like the Jackson 5 and boy bands like New Edition on the momentum of K-pop’s rise. It’s particularly poignant because it is all shot at a record store on the streets of Korea, where .Paak explained he actually found the records he was referencing. “There’s nothing wrong with people doing their interpretation of Black music, as long as you pay homage and as long as you respect it and take care of it,” .Paak declared. “Because [if you do], then they’ll take care of you, but the moment you don’t, you’ll see what happens … I wanted to explain that history because that’s how I saw it.”

Real-life father and son, Anderson .Paak, left, and Soul Rasheed, co-star in “K-Pops!”

(Jake Giles Netter)

”K-Pops!” has as much of who .Paak and Soul are as father and son as he could fit in. There are appearances by legacy Black artists like Earth, Wind & Fire, as well as K-pop stars like Vernon from Seventeen. There are original songs co-written and co-produced by .Paak and musician Dem Jointz, that feature K-pop fused with soul and funk, one of which Tae Young performs as his finale competition number (soundtrack arriving soon). The film was shot in both L.A. and Korea and provided ample time for bonding (especially during scenes filled with off-the-cuff humor) that .Paak envisioned from the beginning. Yet still, at the time they were about to shoot, .Paak almost couldn’t get Soul on board because he had turned 11 and wasn’t as into K-pop or acting comedically anymore; he insisted he was instead “into Slipknot.”

The duo did find their footing, though, and executed a winding story that centers on their connection. As a burgeoning teenager in 2024, Soul went with his father to the world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, along with a plethora of Korean relatives from his mom’s side. .Paak anxiously awaited their full reaction to the culmination of his quest for a deeper bond.

“Everybody really enjoyed it,” .Paak remembered, relieved. “[Soul] was like, ‘I’m proud of you, Dad.’ I asked him, ‘You think you would ever do part two?’ He was like, ‘Nah, I don’t think acting is my passion, but I’ll never forget those moments … You know what? On second thought, it depends on the script.’ But I think he’s really proud of it. I think it’s something like, when he gets older, he’ll see how special it is as well. But yeah, he didn’t say it’s cringe.”

“K-Pops!” has its L.A. premiere on Tuesday and debuts in select theaters Friday.

SACRAMENTO — Gavin Newsom writes in his upcoming memoir about San Francisco’s highborn Getty family fitting him in Brioni suits “appropriate to meet a king” when he was 20 years old. Then he flew aboard their private “Jetty” to Spain for a royal princess’s debutante-style party.

Back home, real life wasn’t as grand.

In an annual performance for their single mom, Newsom and his sister would pretend to find problems with the fancy clothes his dad’s friends, the heirs of ruthless oil baron J. Paul Getty, sent for Christmas. Poor fit. Wrong color. Not my style. The ritual gave her an excuse to return the gifts and use the store credit on presents for her children she placed under the tree.

California’s 41st governor, a possible suitor for the White House, opens up about the duality of his upbringing in his new book. Newsom details the everyday struggle living with his mom after his parents divorced and occasional interludes into his father’s life charmed by the Gettys’ affluence, including that day when the Gettys outfitted him in designer clothes at a luxury department store.

“I walked out understanding that this was the split personality of my life,” Newsom writes in “Young Man in a Hurry.”

For years, Newsom asserted that his “one-dimensional” public image as a slick, privileged politician on a path to power paved with Getty oil money fails to tell the whole story.

“I’m not trying to be something I’m not,” Newsom said in a recent interview. “I’m not trying to talk about, you know, ‘I was born in a town called Hope with no running water.’ That’s not what this book is about. But it’s a very different portrayal than the one I think 9 out of 10 people believe.”

As he explores a 2028 presidential run and basks in the limelight as one of President Trump’s most vociferous critics, the book offers the Democratic politician a chance to write his own narrative and address the skeletons in his closet before opponents begin to exploit his past.

A book tour, which is set to begin Feb. 21 in Nashville, also gives Newsom a reason to travel the country, meet voters and promote his life story without officially entering the race. He’s expected to make additional stops in Georgia, South Carolina, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

The governor describes the book as a “memoir of discovery” that sent him interviewing family members and friends and digging through troves of old documents about his lineage that his mother never spoke about and his father smoothed over. Learning about his family history, the good and the bad, Newsom said, helped him understand and accept himself. Mark Arax, an author and former Los Angeles Times journalist, was his ghostwriter.

“I’ve changed the opinion of myself,” Newsom said when asked if he believed the book would revise his glossy public image. “It kind of rocked so many parts of my life, and kind of cracked things open. And I started to understand where my anxieties come from and why I’m overcompensating in certain areas.”

Newsom writes that his interest in politics brought him and his father, William, closer. His mother, Tessa, on the other hand, didn’t share his father’s enthusiasm.

She warned him to get out while he still could, worried her only son would eschew his true self.

“My mother did not want that world for me: the shrewd marriage of tall husbands and tall wives that kept each year’s Cotillion Debutante Ball stocked with children of the same; the gritted teeth behind the social smiles; the spectator sport of who was in and who was out based on so-and-so’s dinner party guest list,” Newsom wrote.

At the heart of her concern was her belief that Newsom’s “obsessive drive” into business and politics was in response to his upbringing and an effort to solve “the riddle” of his identity from his learning disorder, dyslexia, and the two different worlds he inhabited.

“As I grew up trying to grasp which of these worlds, if either, suited me best, she had worried about the persona I was constructing to cover up what she considered a crack at my core,” Newsom writes. “If my remaking was skim plaster, she feared, it would crumble. It would not hold me into adulthood.”

Newsom’s mother was 19 years old when she married his father, then 32. He learned through writing the book that his mother hailed from a “family of brilliant and daring misfits who had carved new paths in botany and medicine and left-wing politics,” he writes.

There was also secret pain and struggles with mental health. His maternal grandfather, a World War II POW, turned to the bottle after returning home. One night he told his three young daughters to line up in front of the fireplace so he could shoot them, but stopped when his wife walked in the door and took the gun from his hand. He committed suicide years later.

Newsom’s father’s family was full of more traditional Democrats and Irish Catholic storytellers who worked in banking, homebuilding, law enforcement and law. Newsom describes his paternal grandfather as one of the “thinkers behind the throne” for former California Gov. Edmund “Pat” Brown, but his family never held public office despite his dad’s bids for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and the California Legislature.

The failed campaigns left his father in financial and emotional turmoil that crippled his marriage when Newsom was a small boy. A divorce set the stage for an unusual contrasting existence for the would-be governor, offering him brief exposures to the wealth and power of the Gettys through his dad.

Newsom said he moved casually between the rich and poor neighborhoods of San Francisco as a boy.

“It was a wonder how effortlessly I glided because the two realms of my life, the characters of my mother’s world and the characters of my father’s world, did not fit together in the least,” Newsom writes.

Mayor Gavin Newsom and his dad, Judge William Newsom, have lunch at the Balboa Cafe in San Francisco.

(Christina Koci Hernandez / San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)

Though William Alfred Newsom III went on to become an appellate court justice, Newsom’s father was best known for his role delivering ransom money to the kidnappers of J. Paul Getty’s grandson. He served as an adviser to the family without pay and a paid administrator of the $4 billion family trust.

The governor wrote in the book that the ties between the two families go back three generations. His father was close friends with Getty’s sons John Paul Jr. and Gordon since childhood when they became like his sixth and seventh siblings at Newsom’s grandparents’ house.

Gordon Getty in particular considered Newsom’s father his “best-best friend.” Newsom’s dad helped connect the eccentric music composer “to the outside world,” the governor wrote.

“My father had this way of creating a safe space for Gordon to open up,” Newsom writes. “He became Gordon’s whisperer, his interpreter and translator, a bridge to their friends, a bridge to Gordon’s own children.”

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and his sister, Hilary Newsom, in a promotional portrait for the Search for the Cause campaign, which raises funds for cancer research, on Nov. 21, 2025.

(Caroline Schiff/Getty Images)

His father’s friendship with Gordon Getty exposed Newsom and his younger sister, Hillary, to a world far beyond their family’s own means. Gordon’s wife, Ann, and Newsom’s father organized elaborate adventures for the Gettys’ four sons and the Newsom children.

Newsom describes fishing on the Rogue River and riding in a helicopter while studying polar bears on the shores of the Hudson Bay in Canada. He recalled donning tuxedos and carrying toy guns pretending to be James Bond on a European yacht vacation and soaring over the Serengeti in a hot air balloon during an East African safari.

Throughout his travels, Newsom often blended in with the Gettys’ brown-haired sons. He wrote that the actor Jack Nicholson once mistakenly called him one of the “Getty boys” at a party in a 16th-century palazzo in Venice where guests arrived via gondola. Newsom didn’t correct him.

“Had I shared this encounter with my mother, she likely would have asked me if deception was something I practiced whenever I hobnobbed with the Gettys,” Newsom said in the book. “Fact is, I was always aware of the line that separated us from the Gettys. Not because they went out of their way to make us aware of it but because we, as good Newsoms, paid constant mind to the distinction.”

Newsom wrote that his mother seemed to begrudge the excursions when her children returned home. She raised them in a much more ordinary existence. Newsom describes his father’s presence as “episodic.”

“For a day or two, she’d give us the silent treatment, and then we’d all fall back into the form of a life trying to make ends meet,” he wrote. “After enough vacations came and went, a cone of silence took hold.”

Newsom’s mother worked as an assistant retail buyer, a bookkeeper, a waitress at a Mexican restaurant, a development director for a nonprofit and a real estate agent — holding as many as three jobs at once — to provide for her children. His mother’s sister and brother-in-law helped care for them when they could, but he likened himself to a latchkey kid because of the amount of time he and his sister spent alone.

They moved five times in 10 years in search of a “better house in a better neighborhood” with good schools, taking the family from San Francisco to the Marin County suburbs. Though his mother owned a home, she often rented out rooms to bring in extra money.

Tired of his mother complaining about finances and his father not coming through, Newsom wrote that he took on a paper route.

In the book, Newsom describes his struggles with dyslexia and how the learning disorder undercut his self-esteem when he was an emotionally vulnerable child.

Eager to make himself something more than an awkward kid with sweaty palms and a bowl haircut who couldn’t read, Newsom mimicked Remington Steele, the suave character on the popular 1980s detective show. He chugged down glassfuls of raw eggs like Sylvester Stallone in “Rocky” and ran across town and back like a prizefighter in training.

He found confidence in high school sports, but his struggle to find himself continued into young adulthood. Newsom wrote that he watched tapes of motivational guru Tony Robbins and heeded his advice to remake yourself in the image of someone you admire. For Newsom, that became Robbins himself.

“Find a person who embodies all of the outward traits of personality, bearing, charisma, language, and power lacking in yourself,” Newsom described the philosophy in the book. “Study that person. Copy that person. The borrowed traits may fit awkwardly at first, but don’t fret. You’ll be surprised by how fast the pose becomes you, and you the pose.”

His father scoffed at the self-help gurus and nurtured his interest in business.

More than a half-dozen friends and family members, including Gordon Getty, invested equal shares to help him launch a wine shop in San Francisco. Newsom named the business, which expanded to include restaurants, hotels and wineries, “PlumpJack,” the nickname of Shakespeare’s fictional character Sir John Falstaff and the title of Gordon Getty’s opera.

“Gordon’s really inspired me to be bolder and more audacious. He’s inspired me to be more authentic,” Newsom said. “The risks I take in business … just trying to march to the beat of a different drummer and to be a little bolder. That’s my politics. But I also think he played a huge role in that, in terms of shaping me in that respect as well.”

Newsom described Gordon and Ann Getty as like family. The Gettys also became the biggest investors in his wineries and among his largest political donors.

In an interview, Newsom said there are many days when he feels his mother “absolutely” was right to worry about the facade of politics and the mold her son stuffed himself into.

Gavin Newsom heads for his home neighborhood on Nov. 3, 2003, to cast hisvote for San Francisco mayor.

(Mike Kepka / San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)

He described the day the recall against him qualified for the ballot amid the COVID-19 pandemic as humbling and humiliating, though it later failed by a wide margin. Still today, he said, there’s a voice in his head constantly questioning why he’s in politics, what he’s exposing his wife and children to and doing with his life.

By choosing a career as an elected official despite his mother’s warnings, Newsom ultimately picked his father’s world and accomplished his father’s dream of taking office. But he said the book taught him that so much of his own more gutsy positions, such as his early support for gay marriage, and his hustle were from his mother.

Newsom said he’s accepted that he can’t control which version of himself people choose to see. Writing the book felt cathartic, he said, and left him more comfortable taking off his mask.

“It allowed me to understand better my motivations, my purpose, my meaning, my mission… who my mom and dad were and who I am as a consequence of them and what truly motivates me,” Newsom said. “There’s a freedom. There’s a real freedom. And it’s nice. It’s just so much nicer than the plaster of the past.”