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Caleb Wilson, North Carolina men's basketball's superstar freshman forward, broke his left hand in a loss at Miami on Tuesday and will be out for a yet-to-be-determined period of time,the university announcedon Thursday, Feb. 12.

Wilson suffered the injury in the first half of the75-66 loss. X-rays taken during the game came back negative, which prompted him to return to the contest, but additional imaging that was done after the No. 13 Tar Heels returned to Chapel Hill, North Carolina revealed a fracture.

"The evaluation process is ongoing to determine the timetable for Wilson's return," North Carolina said in a statement.

REQUIRED READING:Bracketology projection for NCAA Tournament field has new No. 1 seed

Wilson has been one of the brightest stars in what has been widely hailed as one of the best freshmen classes in the sport's recent history. The 6-foot-10 Atlanta native is averaging 19.8 points, 9.4 rebounds, 1.5 steals and 1.4 blocks per game for North Carolina, which is 19-5 after a disappointing 2024-25 season in which it barely snuck into the NCAA Tournament field.

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Wilson has been integral in that improvement. He has set North Carolina program records for scoring in double figures in each of his first 24 career games and for his 17 games with at least 20 points. He's fourth in the ACC in scoring, third in rebounding and fifth in field goal percentage (at 57.8%).

In athrilling 71-68 win last Saturday over archrival Duke, he had a team-high 23 points and helped keep the Tar Heels' offense afloat in a game in which it fell behind by as many as 13 points.

The former five-star recruit is widely projected as one of the top five picks in the 2026 NBA Draft.

Three of North Carolina's seven remaining regular-season games come against teams ranked in the latestUSA TODAY Sports Coaches Poll: No. 23 Louisville (on Feb. 23), No. 18 Clemson (March 3) and the rematch with No. 6 Duke (March 7), as well as a Feb. 17 game at an NC State team that's receiving votes in the poll.

The Tar Heels are a No. 4 seed in thelatest mock NCAA Tournament bracket from USA TODAY Sports.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY:Caleb Wilson breaks hand, out indefinitely for UNC basketball

MANHATTAN, Kan. (AP) — Kansas State coach Jerome Tangblasted his playersafter Cincinnati beat the Wildcats by 29 points Wednesday on a night many fans showed up with bags on their heads.

The Wildcats dropped to 10-14with the 91-62 loss, including 1-10 in the Big 12 Conference.

"This was embarrassing," Tang said. "These dudes do not deserve to wear this uniform. There will be very few of them in it next year. I'm embarrassed for the university, I'm embarrassed for our fans, our student section. It is just ridiculous. We've got practice at 6 a.m. tomorrow morning, and we will get this thing right. I have no answer and no words."

He then said he would take only two questions from the media, adding, "Right now, I'm like pissed."

Kansas State went 26-10 in Tang's first season and came a three-point loss to Florida Atlanticfrom making the 2023 Final Four. His record since then is 45-46.

The Wildcats have lost three home games in a row by at least 20 points, a big reason fans showed up with paper bags on their heads.

"I'd wear a paper, too, if I were them," Tang said.

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PHOENIX — They are hated.

They are loved.

They are ruining baseball.

They are great for baseball.

They are theLos Angeles Dodgers.

The Dodgers will open theirspring trainingcamp on Friday morning at Camelback Ranch as the first team in more than a quarter-century asrepeat World Series champions, and the first in baseball history to have a payroll exceeding $400 million, $406.5 million to be exact.

If you include their estimated luxury tax penalties, their payroll will exceed $550 million.

Their payroll is so immense that their mere luxury tax penalties is greater than the entire payroll of 10 teams.

Why, if you consider the 110% tax penalty they're paying for new right fielderKyle Tucker's $60 million annual salary, their tax bill is greater than the payroll of theMilwaukee Brewers, who won a major league-leading 97 games last season.

They are Exhibit 1-A for whythe owners want a salary capin the next collective bargaining agreement, and while they are willing to shut down the sport to obtain it.

Los Angeles Dodgers celebrate back-to-back World Series titles with thousands of fans

Oh, and just in case the non-Dodger fans aren't angry enough, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts had a proclamation on Feb. 12 that will have them screaming into the night and flooding MLB fan sites.

"This team, looking at the guys in their prime, the experience, the talent, the starters, the pen, the depth of the young players that we have coming behind them on the pitching side," Roberts said, "this probably is the best team we've had on paper yet."

Yep, once again the Dodgers will treat the regular season as a dress rehearsal for their gala performance in October, using a six-man pitching staff in which $1 billion worth of players — Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto — likely will pitch just once a week.

What other team in baseball has the resources to make two free-agent blunders with closer Tanner Scott and outfielder Michael Conforto in free agency a year ago, and then replace them with the best player on the free-agent market in Tucker, and the best reliever on the market inEdwin Diaz?

Indeed, the best team in baseball got even better.

"When we played them in the playoffs last year,"Cincinnati Redsmanager Terry Francona said, "I didn't know whether to try to get them out or get their autographs. They just keep running guys at you.

"I don't blame them. They're trying to win, and they've got the resources to do it. I'm just glad we're in a different division."

Really, it's similar to the same mantra heard throughout the land during the Yankees' dynasty and their payroll. Where was the outcry when Atlanta won 14 consecutive division titles? Did the Oakland A's ruin baseball duringthe Charlie Finley days?

"You always have to have somebody that teams and fans enjoy disliking,'' Roberts said, "and that's good for sports. I was one of those guys that didn't like the Yankees, but saw their value within the sport, certainly.

"I think what gets lost is all of the things that we do well, the scouting and player development, I think we do as good as anyone in baseball, and all of that to get superstars to play well every night, to put out a good product every single night.

"But when you're talking about the Yankees, if you be put in the same vein of the Yankees in the 90s, you're doing something right?''

See the Dodgers' World Series winning moment and champagne-soaked party

While MLB is using the Dodgers to argue for a salary cap, and fans will either scream at the Dodgers for their payroll or bash their own ownership for not spending, general managers and players surveyed in the Cactus League refuse to criticize the Dodgers' extravagant spending.

They might be jealous over the Dodgers' resources, but they rave about the Dodgers' front office and coaching staff, recognize their ability to scout and develop players, and praise the way they play the game.

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"They're the juggernauts of the major leagues right, but you're not going to fault the team for spending money,'' Brewers ace Brandon Woodruff told USA TODAY Sports. "As a player, that's what you want to see. So why would anyone get mad at them for spending money. I mean, if they can do it, they can do it.

"They have good players, and a lot of money, but what's so impressive about them is that they play the game the right way. You go play them, and you see all of these superstars ... Freddie Freeman, Mookie [Betts] and those guys, and they're all out doing early work. They put in their work.

"They just don't show up when the game starts. They're good, but they put their work in. You've got to respect them.''

What folks conveniently forget is that while the Dodgers are consistently picking last or next-to-last in the draft, they still are a team filled with homegrown stars, from catcher Will Smith to recently retired Clayton Kershaw, and they used their own prospects to trade for All-Star shortstop Mookie Betts, infielder/outfielder Tommy Edman and starter Tyler Glasnow.

Sure, their enormous resources allow them to supplement their roster with whatever free agents they desire, enabling them to retain their own prospects without having to trade them away, but a team like theNew York Metshave spent more than the Dodgers the past five years and are still seeking their first World Series title since 1986.

"Hey, it's not necessarily who has the best players, but who plays the best,''Los Angeles AngelsGM Perry Minasian said. "Anybody can beat anyone on any given night. That's the beauty of baseball. It's 162 games. There are no Cinderella stories in 162 games. You have to earn it.

"They've earned it.''

Said J.J. Picollo,Kansas City Royalspresident of baseball operations: "They've done this strategically, and have done it well. They're capitalizing on things that are perfectly within what's permitted. What they're doing is fascinating, and it's really impressive.''

Chris Young,Texas Rangerspresident of baseball operations, added: "Whether somebody is having a problem with what they're doing and questioning whether or not it's good for the game, are two different things in my opinion. What they're doing is completely within the rules. They've operated with the resources they have in a tremendous matter.''

Really, if you want to feel sorry for anyone, you can sympathize with the other four teams in the NL West, particularly theSan Diego Padres. The Padres have been to the postseason in four of the past six years, winning 183 games the past two seasons, but the Dodgers are that roadblock that keeps them from greatness.

Yep, just like the days when no matter what theBoston Red Soxdid, the Yankees stood in their way.

"The difference between the Yankees teams and the Dodgers is the financial component of it,'' said A.J. Preller, Padres president of baseball operations. "I mean, you're talking over $500 million, and all of the deferrals. So that's a different level.

"But we understand they're a great team. They've got star players that are impactful. They just set up super high bars. If you want to get to that championship level, you've got to get past them.''

Year after year after year.

So you can complain, can get mad and can scream, but in the end, the Dodgers' rivals will tell you that there is respect, like it or not.

"The Dodgers are unquestionably awesome,'' said Jerry Dipoto,Seattle Marinerspresident of baseball operations. "There are superstars all around the field. They have awesome role players. They have depth everywhere you look. So to have a team like that, and to sustain it, is so impressive.

"Really, there's always been that team that dating back to as long as I watched or have been a fan of baseball. Look at the Yankees in the 90s and early 2000s. You had [Mariano] Rivera, [Jorge] Posada, [Andy] Pettitte and [Derek] Jeter. They were homegrown players. It was the with those great Braves' teams. And it's the same with the Dodgers.

"The team costs a lot more money to field, but that doesn't take away from anything they're doing.''

The Dodgers aren't about to apologize.

They plan to keep on winning.

And they dare someone to stop them.

FollowBob Nightengaleon X@Bnightengale.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY:Dodgers payroll: Why MLB's most hated team is also its most respected

By Dietrich Knauth

Feb 12 (Reuters) - A federal judge on Thursday ordered U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to ensure that detainees have access to their attorneys in Minnesota, after finding that the agency had blocked thousands of people from seeing their lawyers during a recent ‌enforcement surge.

U.S. District Judge Nancy Brasel, who was appointed by President Donald Trump in his first term, said ICE's practices during the ‌recent Operation Metro Surge, including a policy of quickly moving detainees out of Minnesota and depriving them of phone calls, "all but extinguish a detainee's access to counsel."

Brasel made the initial ruling in ​a class action lawsuit that was filed on behalf of detainees on January 27 and her order will remain in place for 14 days while the proceedings play out.

The court order requires the government to stop rapidly transferring detainees out of the state and to allow attorney-client visits and private phone calls between detainees and their lawyers.

A U.S. Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said detainees have access to phones that they can use to contact their families and lawyers and denied that there ‌was any "overcrowding" at the Minneapolis federal building where detainees ⁠are processed.

Democracy Forward, a nonprofit that filed the lawsuit on behalf of detainees, said that the right to a lawyer is not "optional" in the U.S.

"DHS has been detaining people in a building never meant for long-term custody, shackling them, secretly transferring ⁠them out of state and blocking access to counsel and oversight in a deliberate effort to evade accountability," Democracy Forward President Skye Perryman said in a statement.

ICE did not dispute that detainees had a constitutional right to counsel and it said it does not have a policy of preventing detainees from seeing their lawyers, according to the ​ruling. ​But in practice, it provided conditions that isolated thousands of people from their attorneys, Brasel ​said.

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The plaintiffs, who are noncitizen detainees, had provided substantial and ‌specific evidence about their detention conditions, which contradicted ICE's "threadbare" explanations of its policies and its protestations that it did not have enough resources to provide detainees with access to their lawyers, the judge found.

"Defendants allocated substantial resources to sending thousands of agents to Minnesota, detaining thousands of people and housing them in their facilities," Brasel said in her ruling. "Defendants cannot suddenly lack resources when it comes to protecting detainees' constitutional rights."

Most detainees are initially held at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis, but many are immediately transferred out of state, without notice, with no way for attorneys to contact them, according to the ‌ruling.

Detainees are sometimes moved so quickly and frequently that ICE loses track of where they ​are, the judge found.

Most detainees are provided some phone access, but that falls short of ​providing adequate legal representation, Brasel's ruling said.

ICE does not always provide the ​name or phone number of a lawyer when detainees ask and phone calls often take place in a public area ‌where ICE personnel and other detainees can listen in, according to ​the ruling.

One detainee in the lawsuit, ​a 20-year-old asylum seeker with a government-issued work permit, was sent to a detention center where ICE provided two flip phones to be shared among 72 detainees in a single holding cell, according to the court ruling. The detainees each had no more than two minutes for a ​call, it said.

The 20-year-old detainee was released after 18 ‌days in detention, despite a court order requiring his release after five days. In the meantime, he was transferred first to Texas ​and then to New Mexico before being returned to Minnesota; ICE officers never told him why he was detained or why he ​was released, according to the ruling.

(Reporting by Dietrich Knauth; Editing by Thomas Derpinghaus)

SUNLAND PARK, New Mexico – Under a blue midday sky, the soundscape at the border fence included the call of roosters in Mexico, a Union Pacific train in the U.S. and a law enforcement helicopter chopping overhead.

Not heard at the time: the buzz of "cartel drones."

Trump administration officials and security experts say drones used by Mexican criminal organizations to smuggle drugs or surveil border security forces represent a potential security threat – one that provoked a sudden, eight-hour closure of the nearby El Paso International Airport on Feb. 10.

An administration official publicly blamed the no-fly order on a "cartel drone incursion," before competing accounts from other officials suggested border agents fired a new laser technology onwhat turned out to be a party balloon, according to multiple media reports. The FAA abruptly shut down the airport as a precaution.

Experts say it's true Mexican cartels are using drones with greater frequency and growing capabilities. The cartels are surveilling U.S. law enforcement at the border and smuggling in payloads of drugs. Inside Mexico, they've begun outfitting drones with explosives to attack rival criminal organizations and security forces.

But the last thing Mexican criminal organizations want is to attack Americans or U.S. law enforcement and provoke the wrath of the U.S. government, said Juan Camilo Jaramillo, a Colombia-based investigator for the cartel research group InSight Crime.

"That is a line they aren't going to cross," he said.

'No evidence ... of weaponized drones on the US side'

In a 2025 executive order, PresidentDonald Trumprecategorized six Mexican cartels as "Foreign Terrorist Organizations," a move that U.S. officials have claimed lends them greater authority to target the organizations with military force. Experts havequestioned the legality of that assertion.

The Department of Homeland Security has trackedtens of thousands of suspected drone sightingsin recent years, but none has yet posed a deadly threat inside U.S. territory, experts say.

The Pentagon recently supplied DHS with anti-drone laser technology, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection deployed it in El Paso on Feb. 9, people familiar with the matter told USA TODAY.

DHS didn't respond to a request for comment regarding the agency's deployment of the technology or its role in the airport closure.

Sunland Park is part of the El Paso metropolitan area, where the U.S.-Mexico border fence cuts through urban sprawl for miles, separating the city and southern New Mexico communities from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. At ports of entry, U.S. Customs and Border Protection uses thermal and other technologies to detect people trafficking drugs, includingcarrying drugs internally. But drones present new challenges.

Ina Senate hearingin July, Steven Willoughby, director of a DHS program to counter unmanned aircraft, said border agents detected more than 27,000 drones near the border, on the U.S. or Mexican sides, in the last six months of 2024. Many were flying above the legal altitude, and at night when darkness can shroud illegal activity.

As rival cartels use explosive-laden drones to attack each other, he warned lawmakers, "it is only a matter of time before Americans or law enforcement are targeted in the border region."

Jaramillo, the InSight Crime investigator, said most cartel drone capacity is basic and business-related, involving commercially available drones used to surveil smuggling routes and competitors.

Warring criminal factions are increasingly using drones to carry improvised explosive devices, he said, but their use has been concentrated in lawless regions of Mexico's interior.

Forty percent of all IED seizures in Mexico occurred near the border between Michoacán and Jalisco in the country's south, according todata obtained by InSight Crimefrom Mexico's defense department. That's where theJalisco Cartel New Generationhas battled disparate armed criminal groups for control of smuggling routes.

Mexican states such as Guerrero, Zacatecas and Sonora have seen "exponential increases" in the use of drones, as well, InSight Crime reported.

Still, "there is no evidence in the public sphere of weaponized cartel drones on the U.S. side of the border," said Austin Doctor, director of strategic initiatives at the University of Nebraska'sNational Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology and Education Center.

"They are primarily targeting either rival cartel forces, local civilian populations to motivate displacement or to attack local security forces," he said. "The question is, are we at a growing risk of that shift?"

'The threat has been neutralized'

The morning of the El Paso airport closure, on Feb. 11 at 7:37 a.m. local time, Transportation Department Secretary Sean Duffy posted on social media that the FAA and the Pentagon had "acted swiftly to address a cartel drone incursion."

"The threat has been neutralized," he wrotein a post on X, "and there is no danger to commercial travel."

Other administration officials challenged that version of events as the day progressed. Shortly after Duffy's post, a reporter asked Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo what her government knew about the so-called incursion.

She had no information, she said. "If the FAA or any other part of the U.S. government has any information, they can ask the Mexican government (about it)," she added. "We will maintain what we have always maintained: permanent communication."

U.S.-Mexico cooperation on security matters has improved dramatically under Sheinbaum Pardo, said Roberta Jacobson, a former U.S. ambassador to Mexico and co-founder of consultancyDinámica Americas. That includes partnering on extraditions, intelligence-sharing and joint surveillance, she said.

Over the last year, Sheinbaum Pardo has faced perilous political obstacles in her country's relationship with its powerful northern neighbor. But every time Trump takes to social media, angered by drug trafficking – or drone incursions, Sheinbaum Pardo has deftly reminded him of their working partnership, Jacobson said.

The two leadersspoke in January. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his Mexican counterpart followed up days later, and a "ministerial security" meeting was planned for February.

"Maybe ironically, maybe not, it has always seemed to me that the best cooperation occurs behind the scenes without much fanfare," Jacobson said. "It comes from the unglamourous and behind-the-scenes sharing of information that happens behind the scenes."

Lauren Villagran covers immigration and the border for USA TODAY and can be reached at lvillagran@usatoday.com.

Cybele Mayes-Osterman covers national security.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY:CBP may have downed a balloon with a laser. Is a 'cartel drone' next?