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WNBA All-Stars make statement with warmup shirts

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INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — The WNBA All-Stars wanted to send a clear message to the league on the game’s bright stage.

All of the players on Team Clark and Team Collier warmed up for Saturday night’s WNBA All-Star Game in shirts that read “Pay us what you owe us.”

“We get a very tiny percentage of all the money that’s made through the WNBA, which obviously is made through the entertainment we provide,” said Napheesa Collier on the decision to wear the shirts. “So we want a fair and reasonable percentage of that.”

The idea was hatched Saturday morning at a players meeting.

The demonstration comes after the players and the league failed to reach a new collective bargaining agreement at an in-person meeting Thursday. The league’s players opted out of their last CBA in October, and are looking for a better revenue-sharing model, increased salaries, improved benefits and a softer salary cap.

After the failed negotiations, many players said there was a large discrepancy between what they wanted and what the league was offering. If a new CBA is not reached by October some players, including All-Stars Napheesa Collier and Angel Reese, have mentioned the potential of a walkout.

At the end of the game, chants of “Pay them!” broke out in the arena. Some fans held signs that read “Pay the players,” during the game.

“We had no idea that they were in solidarity with our demonstration,” said Nneka Ogwumike, president of the WNBPA. “I’ve been hearing it all weekend at the fan events, supporting us and wanting us to get our fair share of the value.”

This was potentially the last time that so many players would be together in one place before the season ends — a fact not lost on the union leadership.

“This is a perfect opportunity to raise awareness for what we’re doing and do it together,” Collier said.

The players aren’t decided whether they’ll wear the shirts on their own teams over the course of the second half of the season which begins Tuesday. They hope that fans will wear them as the union announced on social media during the game that the shirts were on sale.

Ogwumike was unaware that the shirts were already on sale.

“You put it out there, and you stand on business,” said Courtney Williams about the shirts. “And we’re standing on business.”

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AP WNBA: https://apnews.com/hub/wnba-basketball





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Dancing With the Stars Pros Not Returning for Season 34

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While Lindsay Arnold will be cheering on sister Rylee Arnold, she won’t be competing on Dancing With the Stars herself.

“The answer is no,” she shared in an Aug. 29 TikTok video. “I will not be doing Dancing With the Stars this next season.”

Ultimately, the Mirrorball champion, who last vied for the trophy on season 30, noted it’s the right move for her and her family, who include daughters Sage and June with husband Sam Cusick.

“I just know that I’m exactly where I need to be,” she added, “and where I should be.”

But if Lindsay ever did want to return, she’d have to be the one to ask.

“Since the season that I stepped away from the show, never once have the producers been like, ‘Oh please come back’ or asked me to come back,” the dancer, who joined DWTS in 2013 as a pro and has also performed as a troupe member, continued. “If I wanted to come back at this point I would definitely need to express that desire to the producers of the show. And then, it still wouldn’t even be a guarantee.”





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Russia says it will not discuss foreign troops in Ukraine in ‘any format’ | Politics News

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Foreign Ministry spokeswoman says deployment of a post-conflict security force would be ‘fundamentally unacceptable’.

Russia has flatly rejected the prospect of any talks that consider the deployment of foreign troops in Ukraine.

Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Wednesday that Moscow would not entertain discussion of an international post-conflict security force “in any format”.

“Russia is not going to discuss the fundamentally unacceptable and security-undermining foreign intervention in Ukraine in any form, in any format,” Zakharova told reporters on the sidelines of the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok.

Zakharova said that European leaders, who are working on plans for a multinational force in the event of an agreement to end the war in Ukraine, should take note that the “next time they aim to discuss this topic, they should have a pointer in the form of Russia’s position”.

“Judging by Ukraine’s losses, the European Commission has simply outdone itself,” she said.

Zakharova made her comments after European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told The Financial Times earlier this week that the European Union had “pretty precise plans” for deploying a multinational force to Ukraine.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and European leaders are set to meet in Paris on Thursday to firm up details of post-conflict security guarantees for Kyiv.

On Wednesday, French President Emmanuel Macron said the details of the security guarantees for Ukraine had been worked out but remained “extremely confidential”.

“We are ready, we the Europeans, to offer the security guarantees to Ukraine and Ukrainians the day that a peace [accord] is signed,” Macron said.

Despite United States President Donald Trump’s pledge to bring a swift end to the conflict, Moscow and Kyiv remain far apart on the terms of any potential peace agreement.

Russia has said that any deal with Ukraine would need to include land in four regions it has annexed since 2022, while Kyiv has ruled out ceding any territory.

Trump is scheduled to speak with Zelenskyy by phone on Thursday, and has said he intends to speak to Putin in the coming days.



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Louisiana prison chosen for immigration detainees due to its notoriety, says Noem | US immigration

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The Trump administration purposefully chose a notorious Louisiana prison to hold immigration detainees as a way to encourage people in the US illegally to self-deport, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) secretary Kristi Noem said Wednesday.

A complex inside the Louisiana state penitentiary, an immense rural prison better known as Angola, will be used to detain those whom Noem described as the “worst of the worst” Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detainees. Noem was speaking to reporters as she stood on the grounds of the facility near a new sign reading, “Louisiana Lockup.”

“This facility will hold the most dangerous of criminals,” Noem said, adding it had “absolutely” been chosen for its reputation.

Officials said 51 detainees were already being housed at Angola. But Louisiana governor Jeff Landry said he expects the building to be filled to capacity, expecting over 400 people to come in ensuing months, as president Donald Trump continues his large-scale attempt to remove millions of people suspected of entering the country illegally.

The dirt road to the new Ice facility meanders past lofty oak trees, green fields and other buildings – including a white church and a structure with a sign that says, “Angola Shake Down Team”.

The facility is surrounded by a fence with five rows of stacked barbed wire. Overlooking the outdoor area is a tower, where a guard paced back and forth.

At the prison entrance a sign reads: “You are entering the land of new beginnings.”

A Louisiana corrections officer looks out from a tower by Camp 57 at Angola prison. Photograph: Matthew Hinton/AFP/Getty Images

The Associated Press joined officials for a brief tour of the facility, viewing some of the cells where detainees would be held. The cells, built of three cinder block walls and steel bars on the front, were single occupancy – one bed, toilet and sink in each.

Outside were confined enclosures of chain-link fencing, tall enough for multiple people to stand in.

“If you don’t think that they belong in somewhere like this,” Landry said of the detainees during Wednesday’s news conference, “you’ve got a problem.”

The building holding Ice detainees is not new, but rather refurbished after sitting vacant for years. The rest of Angola, which is made up of many buildings, has remained active. Many of Angola’s 6,300 inmates still work the fields, picking long rows of vegetables by hand as armed guards patrol on horseback.

In addition, the prison is home to more than 50 death row inmates. The most recent execution was in March, using nitrogen gas to deprive the inmate of oxygen, causing death. The state’s electric chair, nicknamed “Gruesome Gertie”, is still on display in the prison’s museum.

The notoriety of the 18,000-acre (7,300-hectare) prison stretches back well over a century. Described in the 1960s and 1970s as “the bloodiest prison in America,” it has seen violence, mass riots, escapes, brutality, inhumane conditions and executions.

The Trump administration has crafted its immigration messaging to reinforce a tough-on-crime image and create a sense of fear among people in the US illegally, most pointedly with the detention center dubbed Alligator Alcatraz that it built in the Florida Everglades.

Kristi Noem tours the facility at the Angola prison. Photograph: Gerald Herbert/AP

The Everglades facility may soon be completely empty after a judge upheld her decision ordering operations there to wind down indefinitely.

Racing to expand the infrastructure necessary for increasing deportations, the federal government and state allies have announced a series of new immigration detention facilities, including the “Speedway Slammer” in Indiana and the “Cornhusker Clink” in Nebraska.

The approximate 400 people the Angola immigration facility will be able to hold is just a tiny percentage of the more than 100,000 people that Ice seeks to detain under a $45bn expansion for immigration detention centers that Trump signed into law in July.

The prison traces its history back to a series of wealthy slave traders and cotton planters who built an operation known as Angola Plantation. An 1850s news report said it had 700 slaves, who historians say were forced to work from dawn to dark in Louisiana’s brutal summer heat.

The plantation became the state prison after the Civil War, with a former Confederate officer awarded a lease that gave him control over the property and its convicts.

“The majority of black inmates were subleased to land owners to replace slaves while others continued levee, railroad, and road construction,” the museum’s website says. White inmates at the time worked as clerks or craftsmen.

Inmate leasing ended in the late 1800s amid a public outcry, and the state took direct control of the prison in 1901.



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