Once thriving, now fading: The silent decline of the Anglo-Indian community at Ponmalai Railway ColonyCall to exempt listed firms from tax on mergersSamsonov stops 31 shots as Golden Knights earn sixth straight win, 3-0 over the Flames
Shatel: Nebraska is going to a bowl game again — and here are some dream matchups
New York Giants star rookie wideout Malik Nabers (toe) missed practice Thursday and termed himself a game-day decision. He also is unsure if he will be able to participate on Friday. The Giants host the Indianapolis Colts on Sunday. "I'm hoping so, it all depends on how it feels tomorrow, that's really it," Nabers said Thursday. Nabers, 21, has been one of the few bright spots for the Giants and leads the team with 97 receptions for 969 yards and four touchdown catches in 13 games (12 starts). Selected sixth overall out of LSU, Nabers has caught 10 or more passes on three occasions but has just one touchdown catch over the past 10 games. Though the Giants (2-13) are mired in a franchise-worst 10-game losing streak, Nabers isn't down about the situation. "We're happy where we're at," Nabers said. "Continue to grow every day. A lot of things to fix, a lot of things we can look back on in our rookie year and continue to try to get better for next year." In addition to Nabers, running back Tyrone Tracy Jr. (ankle), center John Michael Schmitz (ankle), linebacker Micah McFadden (neck), cornerbacks Greg Stroman (shoulder/shin) and Dee Williams (toe) and safety Raheem Layne (knee) sat out practice Thursday. Quarterback Drew Lock (right shoulder) was a limited participant. --Field Level MediaThe Latest: Former President Jimmy Carter is dead at age 100
Trump wants pardoned real estate developer Charles Kushner to be ambassador to FrancePresident Joe Biden has officially — all except for those of Robert Bowers (the Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue killer), Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (the Boston Marathon bomber) and Dylann Roof (the Charleston, South Carolina, church shooter). Those receiving commutations will remain in prison, probably for life, but the federal government will be unable to execute them. The bulk commutation is a core presidential power, it sits comfortably within the tradition of Anglo-American clemency practice, and it’s politically shrewd. It’s also the right thing to do, especially following the The justification for the bulk commutation begins with what would have happened had Biden done nothing. President-elect Donald Trump has long wrapped his public appeal in cartoonish capital punishment rhetoric — from urging death for the “Central Park Five” to campaign promises . Once in office, Trump further. The during the last six months of his first administration, which matched the number from the . In fact, before Daniel Lewis Lee succumbed to a lethal dose of pentobarbital in the summer of 2020, the federal government . It’s not just that prior administrations couldn’t convert death sentences into executions; they also didn’t seem to want to. Trump and his Justice Department were different. Attorney General the first five scheduled executions as a solemn duty to victims, but, according to sworn testimony from the associate deputy attorney general, the department did not make “a specific effort to reach out to the victims’ families of the 5 that were selected.” And in Daniel Lewis Lee’s case, officials refused to amend the lethal injection calendar to allow the victim's family to attend the execution and were worried about traveling during the Covid pandemic. I’ve previously argued that federal executions operate like vice signals that shape and cohere MAGA, forcing a contrast with (what is depicted as) the left’s virtue-signaled ambivalence and moral equivocation. I’ve as one in which “righteous state killings represent strength and resolve, a clear line separating good and evil, and belief in free will over structural disadvantage.” For Trump, federal executions are a grim exercise in political branding; and they are handpicked political fights that he wins. A new volley of executions would have been a grisly show of political opportunism, and Trump already had a new emcee: , his pick for attorney general. Bondi was Florida’s senior law enforcement officer, and killing prisoners was a defining part of her professional portfolio. Florida executed during her tenure, and she played a pivotal role in through the a invalidating longstanding state practices. She’s a staunch law-and-order conservative, and she will arguably arrive in Washington with more execution experience than any attorney general in American history. There’s no mystery about the execution push that awaited capitally sentenced federal prisoners in the absence of Biden’s intervention. Biden dissolved that gruesome timeline with the bulk commutation. endows the president with “Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States.” This so-called pardon power involves all forms of clemency, and it includes presidential authority to commute sentences for federal crimes. The Constitution, moreover, permits no legislative restrictions. There is a rich presidential history of using the pardon power in bulk, and it traces back centuries. President George Washington to those who had participated in the violent Whiskey Rebellion. When President Thomas Jefferson took office in 1801, anyone who had been convicted under the Alien and Sedition Acts. President the sentence of Eugene Debs and convicted under the Espionage Act. President Abraham Lincoln is perhaps the most famous practitioner of bulk clemency. He pardoned military prisoners convicted by and sleeping on duty — offenses then punishable by death — and he to former Confederates in exchange for loyalty oaths to a fragile Union. More recently, President Jimmy Carter to over 100,000 men who evaded the draft during the Vietnam War. Clemency norms are also fixed by state practices, since the death penalty is primarily a state-level institution. (During the modern death penalty era, which started in 1976, states have executed people; the federal government has executed .) State-by-state history reveals that there’s nothing unusual about bulk clemency for death-sentenced prisoners. In the last 20 years alone, governors from five states have used bulk clemency power to clear death rows: Kate Brown ( ), Jared Polis ( ), Martin O’Malley ( ), George Ryan and Pat Quinn ( ), and Jon Corzine ( ). In each state, the bulk commutations followed formal death penalty moratoria or prolonged periods of execution inactivity. In short, Biden’s bulk commutation is consistent with longstanding practice both under the federal Constitution and across other American jurisdictions. Indeed, the essential legacy of Anglo-American clemency power is mercy — the executive (royal) prerogative to sand down the sharpest edges of criminal punishment. Clemency power does present problems involving favoritism for political allies and personal friends, but those risks aren’t part of the calculus here. Tsk-tsking about restrained clemency power feels particularly silly at after and as he Biden’s bulk commutation is also an exercise in politically savvy loss avoidance. Death-sentenced prisoners are not automatically queued for execution. DOJ must select the unlucky ones, usually when there’s no pending litigation, and the BOP needs to update execution protocols and for lethal injections. More legal challenges follow, producing a unique cycle of public drama: community remembrance of traumatic violence, painful signatures of grief and loss, and climactic legal battles in the news. Biden has spared Democrats and aligned reformers the political costs of these execution media cycles, which creates cultural space for the Trumpist coalition to nurture and project the crude moral certainty that was so successful with the 2024 electorate. Trump and his allies use the execution cycles to position themselves as tough-on-crime protectors of American safety — rallying political communities against progressive ideas about mercy, human frailty, moral luck and the fallibility of legal institutions. Democrats win these cycles by avoiding them. Like any American political executive, modern presidents are drawn to ; otherwise, it’s too politically disruptive. But here there is no incoming Democratic executive to inherit the fallout. The electorate’s memory — and the derived window of political salience — is far too short for any long-term political repercussions. Finally, one hopes that there is a simple moral imperative at work. Biden must know that bulk commutation was the right thing to do. The American death penalty is suffused with the race of the defendant and the race of the victim. Substantially elevated risk of wrongful executions persists because of , , and . Large meta-studies that the death penalty doesn’t deter future offending relative to other severe punishments. And executions are so temporally separated from sentencing — on average, — that people strapped to the gurney bear little moral resemblance to the people who committed the crime decades earlier. There are also moral problems unique to the death penalty. DOJ typically seeks death sentences only in federal districts that sit within capitally active states, so federal death sentences exhibit an unsettling . Furthermore, there is a troubling arbitrariness in both federal death sentencing and federal executions. That’s because the likelihood of federal death sentences now depends quite heavily on which political party holds the presidency. And the more it depends on that, the less it depends on personal culpability and fairness. In pardoning his son, the disproportionate criminal justice response. If unjust treatment of those committing crimes was an authentic concern, then Biden had an obligation to look beyond the moral horizon of his own family’s interests. And he fulfilled that obligation, at least in part, by sparing 37 people that the federal government would otherwise kill.
Iconic retail food manufacturer files for Chapter 11 bankruptcyTurbine installation has been completed at Unit 1 of Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) being the first NPP built in the Republic of Turkey. Turkey’s Minister of Energy and Natural Resources, Alparslan Bayraktar, disclosed the development along with the Director General of the Rosatom State Corporation, Alexey Likhachev, who visited the event dedicated to the pivotal step. He said, “To address Turkey’s increasing energy demand and achieve the 2053 Net-Zero Emission Target, we need nuclear energy. The Akkuyu NPP project is one of the largest projects in our country. Its implementation reflects the political will of our President, President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin, as well as their harmonious interaction. Turkey and Russia, along with all stakeholders, are working together on this project as a unified team.” He stated further that, “the year 2024 was not only a year of serious challenges for Akkuyu NPP, but also of great achievements. “Today, we witnessed one of the key events at the site – the completion of turbine installation. This is a necessary step on the long road to the launch of the power unit. We are committed to making every effort to ensure that Turkey’s first nuclear power unit begins operation in the near future, providing millions of consumers with stable, low-carbon energy.” Sergei Butckikh, Chief Executive Officer of Akkuyu Nuclear JSC, made a report on the main stages of the project implementation in 2024 during the event, he provided a detailed overview of the commissioning work at Unit 1, readiness stage of auxiliary facilities, major construction and installation operations and plans for the upcoming year. Sergei Butckikh also reported the successful completion of a key operation in the turbine hall of Unit 1: the installation of the turbine-generating unit on the shaft-turning gear. This year, a number of key operations were carried out, most notably the start of full-scale commissioning at Unit 1. “All main equipment of the reactor unit has been installed in the reactor compartment, and preparations for pre-launch tests with loading of nuclear fuel simulators are actively underway.” He noted that the turbine assembly was successfully completed, i.e. a set of sequential operations that ended with the key event of placing the turbine-generating unit on the shaft-turning gear. The turbine shaft began rotating at low speeds for the first time. The experts thoroughly checked the correct alignment of all elements and confirmed the high quality of the turbine unit assembly. Butckikh explained that the successful completion of the operation demonstrates the high technical readiness of the turbine and auxiliary systems for the next key stage of the unit’s commissioning – cold-and-hot run-in of the reactor unit. The NPP turbine is a high-power thermal rotary motor. The cylinder rotor is known to be one of the key components of the motor. Superheated steam produced from desalinated water in the reactor facility’s steam generators is delivered to the rotor blades under high pressure. The energy of the compressed and heated steam enables the rotor to spin, converting it into mechanical energy, which is transferred to the turbine generator that produces electric current. At the forthcoming stage, a set of pre-launch tests, including tests of the sealed enclosures system and safety systems, will be carried out in the turbine hall of Akkuyu NPP Unit 1. After that, the turbine will be ready for comprehensive pre-launch operations. The Akkuyu NPP project includes four power units equipped with Generation 3+ VVER reactors of Russian design. The capacity of each power unit will be 1200 MW. Akkuyu NPP is the first project in the global nuclear industry being implemented according to the Build-Own-Operate model. Russia is actively developing scientific cooperation with all interested countries. The implementation of major international projects also continues. Rosatom and its divisions take an active part in this work.
Jimmy Carter, the 39th US president, has died at 100
First downs and second guesses: It feels like the last time I went to a bowl game, Bob Devaney and Bear Bryant were flipping a coin to see who would go to the Orange and Sugar Bowls. All signs point to the Nebraska-Iowa winner on Friday heading to the ReliaQuest Bowl in Tampa, Fla. That’s the bowl speculation. Man, I’ve missed it. The ReliaQuest is the former Outback Bowl, which has never had Nebraska. I always heard that the Outback Bowl served steaks in the press box. These guys will make sure your laptop doesn’t get hacked. It’s a good matchup, with the Big Ten going against the SEC. Which is why Music City would be my preference for a spot if NU doesn’t win on Friday. Some of the potential SEC teams I’ve seen in Nashville are LSU, Oklahoma, Missouri, Ole Miss and Texas A&M. The Huskers against any of them would be a dream matchup. Of course, the last bowl game Nebraska played in was the Music City Bowl, losing to Tennessee in 2016. My memory of that week was hitting the music honky-tonks on Broadway Street and realizing that none of them had TV’s. You were there to listen to music. What a concept. I’ll be happy with any bowl. First-time-in-a-long time bowlers can’t be choosers. Nebraska’s name pops up in several different bowl projections. There’s the Pinstripe Bowl (USA Today) vs. Pitt and vs. Georgia Tech (ESPN), the Duke’s Bowl in Charlotte vs. Syracuse (Action Network) and vs. Georgia Tech (ESPN), Nebraska vs. Texas Tech in the Rate (Phoenix) Bowl and in the Music City Bowl vs. LSU (247Sports). The Huskers will be happy to play in any of them. A good thing about the Duke’s is a Jan. 3 date. But that might be an awkward fit with coach Matt Rhule heading back to the city and stadium where he was fired two years ago. That storyline would dominate the week. Whatever happens, perfect. It’s just nice to be speculating again. I have to admit, the Snoop Dogg Arizona Bowl looks intriguing. Is there a trophy? One day, someone very smart will come up with an NIL Bowl, which will pay the players involved. That’s sort of what Creighton is doing this week, participating in the Players Era Festival in Las Vegas. The tourney will put $1 million into the CU Bird Club collective. Meanwhile, Coach Greg McDermott will earn his money this week and beyond, until point guard Steven Ashworth recovers fully from an ankle injury suffered against Nebraska. Wonder if Mac will have a committee approach to running the offense, including Pop Isaacs and freshman Ty Davis. Fred Hoiberg said on Monday that he has used “tough coaching” with his team twice in the last week — the day after the loss to St. Mary’s and again on Sunday to make sure his Huskers have come down from their win over Creighton. When a coach gets on his team like that, he knows they can handle it. That’s interesting because a good portion of this year’s NU team is new. Hoiberg is obviously going after an older, tougher-mindset kind of player in the portal. It works. Wow, how cool will it be to have Lindsay Krause, Kendra Wait and Ally Batenhorst all on the Omaha Supernovas this season? And Merritt Beason, the No. 1 overall pick to Atlanta in the Pro Volleyball Federation Draft, and Norah Sis, the overall No. 3 pick to Orlando, coming back to Omaha to play. I wonder how John Cook and Kirsten Bernthal Booth feel about having a pro draft in the middle of the season, with the NCAA tournament next week? I’m guessing the players will be focused. But what if the NFL Draft was now? And the NBA Draft was in February? All the talk this season about Nebraska Class A football being in trouble, and yet I couldn’t wait for the Westside-Millard South game on Monday night. It seems to me that there have always been two or three teams better than everyone else. When I arrived here in 1991, it was Omaha Creighton Prep and Lincoln Southeast. Then it was Prep and Millard North. And Millard West. And Omaha North. Westside. Gretna. The difference is the disparity between the top and the middle of Class A is now widening. You see more blowout games. You didn’t used to see those. The transfer issue is a factor, sure. So is OPS shutting down in 2020. And some new schools in districts where the population (and talent) in the district split into different schools. Based on conversations with several coaches, I would add specialization to the list. A lot of football programs have lost kids to playing other sports, like baseball and basketball, full-time. I still love the Friday Night lights, the marching bands, the student sections, all that. And, marquee matchups at state. There’s still a lot of good things going on. Should there be a Nebraska-Creighton basketball traveling trophy? I can’t think of one. But the teams should wear blue and red every year. Get local news delivered to your inbox!Botafogo won the Copa Libertadores for the first time in their history with a 3-1 victory over fellow Brazilians Atletico Mineiro on Saturday. Botafogo played almost the entire match with ten men after Gregore was sent off in the first minute but they showed impressive spirit and resilience to secure victory at River Plate's Monumental Stadium in Buenos Aires. It is the sixth straight season that a Brazilian club has won the Libertadores, the top competition for South American clubs. The 120-year-old Botafogo, the Rio club who have twice won the Brazilian championship, have a rich history, including producing greats such as World Cup winners Garrincha, Didi, Nilton Santos and Mario Zagallo. But they have long suffered taunts from their rivals about their failure to win the continental title -- a jibe that can be made no more. Midfielder Gregore was shown a red card after a wild, high challenge on Fauto Vera, forcing Botafogo to adjust their game plan, but Atletico failed to press home their numerical advantage. Veteran forward Hulk had an effort from outside the box saved by John but the team from Belo Horizonte created little pressure. Sensing the game might not be the rearguard action they might have expected, Botafogo began to show more attacking intent and they were rewarded in the 35th minute. Marlon Freitas's shot from the edge of the box ricocheted around a crowded box before the ball fell to Luiz Henrique, who fired home from close range. To their credit, Botafogo didn't retreat to defend their slim advantage and they were able to double their lead in the 44th minute. Atletico defender Guilherme Arana attempted to shepherd the ball back to goalkeeper Everson, but Luiz Henrique snuck between the pair and went down under challenge from the keeper. More from this section After a VAR review, a penalty was awarded and Alex Telles confidently smashed home the spot kick to give Botafogo an unlikely 2-0 lead at the break. Atletico, who won the Libertadores in 2013, made a triple substitution at the interval and it paid off swiftly with Eduardo Vargas heading in from a corner. Inevitably, there was late pressure from Atletico, but Botafogo made sure of the victory when Junior Santos finished off a counter-attack deep in stoppage time. With the win, Botafogo earns the final of 32 places in next year's FIFA Club World Cup to be held in the United States. The club, owned by American businessman John Textor, also has a chance to complete a double by winning what would be their third Brazilian league title -- they currently lead Serie A by three points with two games remaining. Luis Henrique, whose fine form this season has seen him break into the Brazil squad, said the win was an emotional one for him and the team. "Many people tried to stop me, but I know that God is with me, my family is with me, and I have to keep my feet on the ground because there is still more to come," the 23-year-old striker said. "I want to thank Botafogo a lot, Botafogo needs to be at the top, because it's a club that has been working hard, that has been doing a lot on a daily basis." sev/js
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — President-elect Donald Trump said Saturday he intends to nominate real estate developer Charles Kushner , father of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, to serve as ambassador to France. Trump made the announcement in a Truth Social post, calling Charles Kushner “a tremendous business leader, philanthropist, & dealmaker." Javascript is required for you to be able to read premium content. Please enable it in your browser settings.
Ten-man Botafogo win Copa LibertadoresAdam Nossiter Michel del Castillo, a Franco Spanish writer whose wrenching chronicle of a childhood spent in World War II concentration camps brought him renown on both sides of the Atlantic, died Dec. 17 in Sens, a town in northern Burgundy. He was 91. His death was widely reported in the French news media. No other details were immediately available. Del Castillo published dozens of novels, essays and works of autobiography in the four decades after his debut novel, “Tanguy,” appeared in 1957. (An English translation, “Child of Our Time,” was published in the U.S. and England the next year.) He went on to win several major French literary prizes. But it was his first book, published when he was only 24, that made the most lasting impression. In 1958, reviewing it in The New York Times, Holocaust scholar Richard Plant said it “begins where Anne Frank’s diary ended.” With its graphic account of privation, suffering and death in French and German concentration camps, Plant warned, it was “not meant for the squeamish.” A lightly fictionalized story, it shocked reviewers and readers as a child’s-eye view of mid-20th century Europe’s worst horrors — especially since the boy at the center of the story, Tanguy-del Castillo, had been abandoned by his feckless middle-class parents to face those horrors alone. By the late 1950s, there had been other accounts of life in the concentration camps of Vichy France and Nazi Germany. But never before had the story been told from the perspective of a young boy who was not even in his teens when he was liberated. The book was “a singular novelty: a painting of hell by a child whose physical and moral survival through these tortures is already miraculous,” Émile Henriot of the Académie Française wrote in a review for Le Monde in 1957. The story came directly from del Castillo’s own experience. His father, a conservative French banker, had already abandoned the family when mother and child fled Spain for France in 1939, after Gen. Francisco Franco’s defeat of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. Del Castillo later recalled that his first years were punctuated by the sound of bombs in besieged Madrid. In France, del Castillo’s father denounced his wife, a journalist who had broadcast for the Republicans, to French authorities. Like others in their situation, the young Michel and his mother were picked up and interned in Rieucros, a harsh French concentration camp in the mountainous Lozère region. That was the beginning of del Castillo’s savage odyssey. About 2,000 women and their children, political refugees, were jammed into Rieucros, he recalled in a 1984 interview on the radio station France Culture; he remembered being cold, hungry and isolated. “I was hungry my whole childhood,” he said. At the local school he was allowed to attend, the children made him “the scapegoat,” he said. Worse was to come. In “Tanguy,” del Castillo told of how, in the summer of 1942, his ill mother managed to escape from the camp after being hospitalized. She made plans to flee France, leaving her young son in the care of smugglers. Del Castillo described what happened next in the 1984 interview: “She felt obligated to leave me alone. I was 9 years old. I woke up, alone, in my room. The next five or six years, I have the impression of having been among the living dead. I was taken to Germany, stateless. There were millions of us. There were concentration camps. There were barracks. It was a kind of apocalyptic atmosphere.” He continued: “It unfolded almost like a dream, because I stayed obsessed with the separation from my mother. I lived for only one thing: to find her again after the war.” At the war’s end, he somehow made his way back to Spain, where he was almost immediately confined again — as the “son of a communist” — in a harsh reform school where corporal punishment and hard labor were the norm. He escaped in 1949, and, thanks to a kindly police inspector in Madrid, he was sent to a Jesuit high school in Andalusia. “It was an incredible liberation,” he said in 1984. “I have an enormous debt toward the Jesuits. They literally saved me.” By then, he had discovered literature — in particular, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “The House of the Dead.” “It was a shock,” del Castillo said. “Everything that I was living that I didn’t understand suddenly became luminous. So I understood that in order to survive, I had to write.” And that is what he did, for the next half-century. In 1950s Paris, his determination was further steeled by brief and unsatisfactory reunions with his parents, who were indifferent to him. By 1959, del Castillo was an international celebrity. As French writer and Nobel Prize winner François Mauriac, who appeared on television with him that year, put it: “He saw, with his child’s eye, evil. Evil in its most absolute form: the universe of the concentration camp.” Michel Janicot del Castillo was born Aug. 2, 1933, in Madrid, the son of Michel Georges Janicot, who worked at the Crédit Lyonnais banking office in Madrid, and Cándida Victoria Isabel del Castillo, a journalist. After surviving the war, supported by his uncle, Stéphane Janicot, he earned a degree in literature from the Sorbonne. A quick succession of novels followed “Tanguy” — including “La Guitare” in 1958, “Le Colleur d’Affiches” (“The Disinherited”) in 1959 and “Gerardo Laïn” (“The Seminarian”) in 1967 — although none achieved the acclaim of the first, and few were translated from the French. Del Castillo never married. Information about survivors was not immediately available. Henriot, in his Le Monde review, cited the philosophy of “Tanguy” in a quotation from the book: “He didn’t believe in a world divided into two camps, he wanted nothing to do with hatred. Maybe he was a utopian. But he continued to love life and men with a savage desperation.”Kentucky will aim to improve upon its best start in seven seasons when it hosts Western Kentucky on Tuesday night in Lexington, Ky., in the final game of the BBN Invitational. The Wildcats (5-0) are ranked No. 8 in the latest Associated Press poll and are setting impressive offensive milestones even for a program as tradition-rich as Kentucky, which includes eight national championships. The Wildcats have scored 97 or more points in their first four home games for the first time in program history and eclipsed the 100-point mark in three of those games. Their lone trip out of state was a solid 77-72 victory over Duke in a matchup of top-10 teams in Atlanta. Kentucky has also made at least 10 three-pointers in each of its first five games of a season for the first time ever. "I think Kentucky attracts good people," Kentucky coach Mark Pope said after the Wildcats' 108-59 win over Jackson State on Friday. "It's the one place in all college basketball where you represent just a fanbase in a different, unique way." Otega Oweh and Koby Brea have led the Wildcats' early scoring outburst. Oweh, who is averaging 16.2 points per game, had 21 points on 8-for-12 shooting against Jackson State. "He gets us off to unbelievable starts every night," Pope told reporters after that game. "He's probably been our most consistent guy in games." Brea, who scored 22 points against Jackson State and is averaging 16.0 points per game, is leading the nation in 3-point accuracy at 74.1 percent. As a team, the Wildcats are shooting 42.3 percent from beyond the arc. And the few times they miss, Amari Williams has been doing the dirty work on the glass, averaging 10.8 boards in addition to 9.6 points per game. Kentucky faces a different challenge than it's had to contend with so far in the Hilltoppers (3-2), who have won three in a row after losing their first two games to Wichita State and Grand Canyon. Their up-tempo play hasn't exactly resulted in great offensive output, but in the Hilltoppers' 79-62 win over Jackson State on Wednesday, they shot 45.2 percent from 3-point range (14 for 31). "I was happy to see a lot of different guys contribute tonight and, hopefully, get their feet under them a little bit and get some confidence," said Western Kentucky coach Hank Plona, who is in his first season as head coach. "Obviously, Tuesday will be quite a test and challenge for us and we'll need them to be at their absolute best." Western Kentucky has an experienced group, which returned mostly intact from last season. The team is led by Conference USA first-team selection Don McHenry, who is leading the team with 17.2 points and 2.2 steals per game. McHenry is one of four Hilltoppers with scoring averages in double figures. Julius Thedford (11.4 points per game) and Babacar Faye (15.0) are each shooting 40 percent or better from 3-point range. Western Kentucky also figures to challenge the Wildcats on the boards as it enters the game ranked in the top 25 in defensive rebounding (30.4 per game). Faye leads the Hilltoppers in that department, averaging 7.8 rebounds per game and figures to battle Williams inside. "We're not the biggest team in the world, but our depth and our quickness are our strengths," Plona said. --Field Level Media
