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The Lakers got their backup big man when Kevon Looney signed a one-year, $3.9-million deal on Tuesday, people not authorized to speak publicly told The Times.

The 6-foot-9 Looney won three championships with the Golden State Warriors, in 2017, 2018 and 2021. He played last season with the New Orleans Pelicans. Looney, 30, is an 11-year veteran who went to UCLA. He’s a strong rebounder, very good defender and sets solid screens for teammates.

Looney will be the backup behind starter Walker Kessler, who was acquired in a trade from the Utah Jazz and agreed to a four-year, $130-million deal. The Lakers traded last season’s starting center, Deandre Ayton, and backup Jaxson Hayes signed with the Jazz.

The Lakers now have a 14-man roster and have room for another player.

Jonathan Kuminga is a player the Lakers are after, according to people with knowledge of the situation who said L.A. is looking at a two-year, $20-million deal for Kuminga, the sort of athletic wing player the Lakers need to start at small forward.

He has the size (6-7) and is young (23). He averaged 12.2 points and 5.6 rebounds and shot 33.3% from three-point range last season while playing for the Warriors and Atlanta Hawks.

Stacey Solomon and her Sort Your Life Out team left an East Sussex family in tears with a heartfelt tribute to their late grandmother

BBC Sort Your Life Out viewers were moved to tears by a heartwarming tribute to a beloved late family member.

Host Stacey Solomon and her dedicated team descended on a family in East Sussex to help transform their bursting-at-the-seams converted bungalow.

The household was headed up by single mum Nadine, who had called the property home since her teenage years, sharing it with her own mother.

Having brought up her four daughters there while also caring for her late mum, three generations of the Jamieson women had amassed mountains of DVDs, clothing and fine China for Stacey to work through.

Buried amongst the clutter, she uncovered 106 animal ornaments, 87 board games and over 1,000 pieces of Nadine’s China, reports Kent Live.

Reflecting on the belongings filling her home and how cluttered it had become, Nadine became emotional as she explained: “I’ve lived in this house since 1988 and it’s pretty much still in the condition it was in 1988.”

Her eldest daughter Merle chipped in: “It was a small crowded house but it wasn’t cluttered back then.”

Former NHS nurse Nadine tearfully continued: “Mum was the second parent. She was our rock and she was just our rock and made it so special for the girls.

“She started to need care in the last four years of her life, and I became full time carer. And that’s when I think it started to change.

“I didn’t have the time or energy to focus on the house because I had to focus on so many people.”

She added: “I need to have a home again and start living again.”

She heartbreakingly went on: “It’s a place I don’t want to be in. There’s no joy to come home to because you know what’s surrounding you.”

After the challenge of letting go of 40 years’ worth of possessions and memories, the family were left touched by a special tribute to Nadine’s mum.

Coming back home after Stacey and her team, including guest star Zoe Sugg, worked their magic, they saw a special memory of Nadine’s mum.

Nadine had earlier explained how her mum’s chair held its place of honour in the living room, with her old combs and hairbands still on it.

Instead of having the objects still there, Stacey, having transformed the living room to a brighter, emptier space, decided to embroider Nadine’s mum’s comb and headband and radio onto a little cushion.

She said: “I know how important Nan’s comb and headband and radio were to you, so instead of having them sat precariously on top of the chair, ready to fall at any minute, I thought, we could put it into the pillow, and then you could always look at her favourite things but keep her actual favourite things safe away.”

“It’s absolutely beautiful,” Nadine’s daughter Merle commented. Breaking down into tears as she saw the cushion, she added: “That is too much.”

“It’s making you emotional,” Stacey replied, as Nadine’s daughter Beth also wiped back tears.

After seeing the response the family had to their new home, Stacey shared: “I think that might have been one of my favourite reactions ever.

“Nadine has, for the last 20-something years, just been looking after everyone around her.

“She’s been raising her kids, looking after her mum, putting all of her energy into everybody else.

“And now finally, she can bring some of that energy back to her, and she just deserves this so much.”

Nadine emotionally added: “Dreams come true.”

Sort Your Life Out is available to watch on BBC iPlayer.

Ahead of President Trump’s arrival in Beijing on Wednesday for his summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, longtime China expert Kurt M. Campbell offered a novel way of watching the two leaders’ high-stakes faceoff. Think of it not as nation-versus-nation or army-versus-army, but as the sort of “single combat” celebrated in ancient literature, along the lines of David and Goliath in the Bible or Achilles and Hector in “The Iliad.”

“This one has the feel of a geopolitical heavyweight matchup,” Campbell, chairman of the Asia Group strategic consulting firm, wrote in Foreign Affairs this week.

Unlike in their initial get-together early in Trump’s first term, both men now are seasoned leaders in their separate ways — Xi an unchallenged dictator, and an envious Trump seeking to be. Both act with few immediate checks on their power, though Xi acts strategically and Trump impulsively and transactionally. And both, as leaders of super-powers, have the capability to shape the economic and security fates of a wary world.

That world, Campbell concluded in his essay, is “eager to see whether the two leaders emerge driving together in the chariot, or with one dragging the other behind,” as Achilles did the vanquished Hector.

However the Trump-Xi meeting ends, Trump is no Achilles going into this match. In fact, in the six decades of U.S.-China relations, perhaps no American president has entered the summit arena in a weaker position than Trump, the would-be strongman and artiste of the deal. Worse, his weakness — and by extension his country’s — is mostly self-inflicted.

Trump had postponed what was intended as an early April meeting in hopes of striding triumphantly into Beijing as the conqueror of Iran, a China ally. Instead China is receiving him as a “giant with a limp,” in the phrase of its Communist Party-controlled Global Times newspaper.

Trump’s Mideast war, the sort he’d promised never to start, lingers for a third month in a costly stalemate — $29 billion and counting — that has humiliated the president in the public words of Germany’s chancellor and the private thoughts of many more global leaders, Xi likely among them. Trump can’t “project the same arrogance” as he did visiting China in 2017, a former Chinese army officer, Yue Gang, told the New York Times.

At home, the conflict has caused gasoline prices and inflation to spike while tanking Trump’s already depressed polls. A newly released CNN poll conducted April 30 to May 4 had 65% of Americans disapproving of his overall job performance and a whopping 70% against his handling of the economy — the issue that arguably got him elected. With experience, American consumers and soybean farmers now know that they, not the Chinese, have paid for Trump’s beloved tariffs.

The president’s standing at home could hardly have been helped by his parting words to reporters at the White House. Asked “to what extent are Americans’ financial situation motivating you to make a deal” with Iran, Trump blithely replied, “Not even a little bit.” He added, in the sort of political gaffe that journalist Michael Kinsley defined as telling the truth: “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody.”

He’s already a loser in the negotiations with Xi. For weeks the Trump administration has unsuccessfully urged China to use its leverage to goad Iran to accept a peace on Americans’ terms or, at a minimum, to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, given China’s self-interest as Iran’s biggest oil customer by far. As China scholar Henrietta Levin of the Center for Strategic and International Studies told the Associated Press, “I don’t think China has any interest in solving the problems the U.S. has created for itself in the Middle East.”

Not least, perhaps, because China has seen that, by the Pentagon’s own reckoning, the war has depleted U.S. stockpiles of weaponry after thousands upon thousands of strikes against Iran. And that has further raised questions in China and beyond about whether Trump would have the United States come to the defense of Taiwan, the self-governing, U.S.-armed island that China claims as its own.

After all, the thinking goes, if the United States can’t bring a lesser power like Iran quickly to heel, how might it fare against a near-peer such as China, especially with a diminished U.S. arsenal and Mideast distractions?

It’s mostly a mystery what the leaders’ talks might yield. In a break with diplomatic tradition, though not with Trump’s seat-of-the-pants style, apparently little planning went into this super-power summit — another reflection of a distracted U.S. side. Still, with a number of tech, agribusiness, finance and aerospace chieftains in tow, Trump and his team are hoping for a few politically appealing deliverables, such as sales of U.S. soybeans and Boeing aircraft, to give the president a lift back home.

But don’t look for progress on the longstanding issues dividing the United States and China over trade and military dominance in the Pacific region. And as for another of those perennial issues — climate change and clean-energy technology — the U.S. under Trump has willfully surrendered global preeminence to China, ceding markets for solar, wind energy, electric vehicles, grid storage and more in his backward-looking, ostrich-like obsession with drilling oil and mining coal.

Whatever hyperbolic claims Trump makes for his China trip, the outcome of the summit (on top of his quagmire in Iran) should at least be this: retiring the myth of Trump the deal-maker and savvy businessman.

If he were such a visionary, Trump would be prodding the nation to global leadership in technology and clean-energy investments, not reversing past progress and paying companies billions of taxpayers’ dollars to stop clean-energy projects. In markets worldwide, the future is now and America is forfeiting the game to China.

In this contest, Trump is letting Xi drive the chariot. Unfortunately, average Americans are the ones being dragged through the dust as China rides into the 21st century.

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