Minnesota rebounded from a disappointing double-overtime loss to No. 7 Maryland on Sunday by hammering an overmatched nonconference opponent on Wednesday, an 82-44 victory over Alabama A&M at Williams Arena.

Minnesota guard Mara Braun (10) shoots during the first half of an NCAA college basketball game against Alabama A&M Wednesday, Dec. 10, 2025, in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/Abbie Parr)

Redshirt junior Mara Braun scored eight points to surpass 1,000 career points.

Tori McKinney had a game-high 13 points to go with four assists and a pair of steals, and Brylee Glenn added 11 points and a game-high eight rebounds for Minnesota.

Makena Christian came off the bench to score 12 points on 4-for-6 shooting from 3-point range for Minnesota (7-3 overall, 0-1 Big Ten), which had 27 assists on 34 made baskets. The Gophers used a 16-0 run in the second quarter to build a 47-23 halftime lead, and a 7-0 run to go up 64-32 with a minute left in the third.

Minnesota outrebounded the Bulldogs, 33-30, and turned the ball over just five times while forcing 16 turnovers, 11 of them steals. Rakiyah Beal was the only Alabama A&M player in double figures, scoring 12 points for the Bulldogs (3-7 overall, 0-0 SWAC).

The Gophers are host to Wyoming on Sunday at Williams Arena. Tipoff is set for 5 p.m.

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Head coach Niko Medved had a sneaking suspicion the Gophers men’s basketball team was going to get Purdue’s best after the former top-ranked Boilermakers suffered an uncharacteristic home loss to Iowa State on Saturday.

“I thought Iowa State played terrific, and if Purdue was being honest, they missed a lot of plays that they normally make,” Medved told the Pioneer Press on Tuesday. “I’m fairly confident we will see and ‘A’ effort from Purdue on Wednesday.”

That top letter grade came to the forefront in the second half as No. 6 Purdue used a 21-0 win to cruise to a 85-57 win over Minnesota at Mackey Arena in West Lafayette, Ind.

The Gophers (5-5, 1-1 Big Ten) had a strong close to the first half — a 17-5 run to trail 35-32 at the break — and it teased the potential for consecutive upsets after knocking off No. 22 Indiana at Williams Arena last Wednesday.

“They went on that run and we just could not find a way to stem the tide,” Medved said on the KFAN postgame show. “I thought they just kind of broke our spirit, which you don’t want to see happen and unfortunately, Purdue, we’re not the only team and the last team they are going to do that to.”

The Boilermakers (9-1, 2-0 Big Ten) showed why they were picked to win the Big Ten and were ranked No. 1 until the 81-58 loss to now-No. 4 Iowa State last weekend.

“Purdue was preseason No. 1 in the country and playing like the No. 1 team in the country for a reason: They’ve got an elite culture, an elite coach, veteran players who have played together and know what it’s like. (They) got a great system,” Medved said. “They’ve got all the pieces to play at the highest level.”

The Boilermakers emphasis in the second half was getting the ball in the paint and exploiting their size advantage. In the game, they had 40-24 advantage in points in the paint and doubled Minnesota up on the glass, 46-23.

“They wore us down,” Medved said. “We are pretty small and thin down there and you’re in foul trouble. So when you are trying to engage those guys down there, it makes it pretty difficult. You don’t really have anyone to go to necessarily off the bench. Maybe we could have double teamed a little bit in the post in the second half, but they really stretch you out with their spacing. This is the No. 1 offense in the country for a reason.”

The Gophers continue to be shorthanded without two starters — point guard Chansey Willis Jr. (foot) and center Robert Vaihola (knee) — and two backups BJ Omot (leg) and Chance Stephens (illness).

Similar to the Indiana game, Minnesota continued to deal with extensive foul trouble. Jaylen Crocker-Johnson, Isaac Asuma, and Grayson Grove each had four fouls with eight minutes left in the game. Langston Reynolds also dealt with foul trouble in the first half.

Crocker-Johnson paced Minnesota with 11 points, including three treys, in the first half. He finished with 17.

Point guard Braden Smith, a Big Ten player of the year candidate, led the way for the Boilermakers with 15 points and 12 assists.

Purdue’s quality was on display in the first half, too, and the Gophers were down 27-15 with six minutes to go. But Minnesota started to hit shots and ended the half with a big run to make it a one-possession game at the break.

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By Nilesh Christopher, Los Angeles Times

People aren’t lovin’ it.

McDonald’s was forced to pull down an AI-generated Christmas commercial from YouTube after some consumers said the AI-slop-filled tongue-in-cheek take on the holidays was distasteful.

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The ad, titled “It’s the most terrible time of the year,” was a satirical take on holiday realities. It showed a series of short, chaotic clips of people braving the winter, tripping while carrying overloaded gift bags, getting stuck in tangled lights, burning homemade cookies or starting an unexpected cooking fire during a family gathering.

The ad agency TBWANEBOKO collaborated with film production company Sweetshop, whose Los Angeles-based directing duo Mark Potoka and Matt Spicer shot the film. The 45-second ad was created for McDonald’s Netherlands.

It ends with a call to ditch the madness and hide out in McDonald’s till January. The ad, meant to spread cheer, irked viewers.

“Even without all the ai slop this ad feels incredibly odd,” said one comment on the commercial posted on YouTube. “Ditch your family and hide in mcdonalds because christmas sucks???”

Some said the ad was a sloppy move by one of the world’s largest advertisers.

“The McDonald’s ad emphasizes all that is negative about the holiday season, and the suggestion that McDonald’s is a respite from such negative experiences is not credible,” said David Stewart, emeritus professor of marketing at Loyola Marymount University. “It is likely that a very unhappy human came up with the idea of denigrating the holiday experience, even if AI was used to create part of the ad.”

After the McDonald’s backlash, the Sweetshop said it used AI as a tool for the commercial but a lot of human effort went into it as well.

“We generated what felt like dailies — thousands of takes — then shaped them in the edit just as we would on any high-craft production,” the company said in a statement. “This wasn’t an AI trick. It was a film.”

McDonald didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mainstream brands are gradually embracing AI-generated ads. Last month, Coca-Cola released a holiday ad in which a Coca-Cola truck drives through snow and forests, awakening animals and lighting up trees, then pulls up to a town square.

This is the second year in a row Coca-Cola has dropped an AI holiday ad despite widespread artist pushback.

“AI is gaining traction for the creation of ads because it is viewed as a way to save costs,” Stewart said.

More brands, including Google, Toys R Us and Under Armour, have produced synthetic ads. Proponents of AI ads see them as a change from traditional advertising.

“Whether we like the ad itself, McDonald’s is making a statement with this campaign: AI has changed the playbook. As one of the largest consumer brands on the planet, McDonald’s is reading the tea leaves of what’s to come for brand marketing and is aggressively indexing its brand for the new generative decision funnel,” said Justin Inman, chief executive of Emberos, a platform that monitors how brands appear inside major AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Gemini.

AI-powered search could influence $750 billion in revenue by 2028, and half of consumers now use chatbots to discover brands, according to McKinsey & Co.

Such an association with AI may even boost McDonald’s visibility inside chatbots, surfacing its brand name ahead of others.

“Love it or hate it, expect to see more of it,” Inman said. “McDonald’s getting thousands of people to prompt McDonald’s + AI will greatly benefit their overall brand visibility.”

©2025 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By DAVID BAUDER

The New York Times, attacked by President Donald Trump for reporting about his physical condition, said on Wednesday that it wouldn’t be deterred by “false and inflammatory language” that distorts the role of a free press.

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The president had posted on his Truth Social platform that he believed it was “seditious, perhaps even treasonous” for the Times and other media outlets to do “FAKE” reports on his health.

“They are true Enemies of the People, and we should do something about it,” Trump wrote.

The 79-year-old president wouldn’t specify, but the newspaper has posted a handful of reports about his health in recent weeks. In a Nov. 25 story headlined “Shorter Days, Signs of Fatigue: Trump Faces Realities of Aging in Office,” reporters examined Trump’s public and travel schedules to conclude Americans were seeing less of him than they were used to.

A story on Dec. 2, accompanied by a video, said that Trump “appeared to be fighting sleep” during a Cabinet meeting that day.

Trump says he hasn’t slowed down

Columnist Frank Bruni discussed these reports in a Dec. 8 opinion piece headlined “Trump’s Approval Ratings Have Declined. So Has His Vigor.” Bruni wrote that Americans “might want to brace ourselves for some presidential deja vu. He’s starting to give President Joe Biden vibes.” Biden, who was in his early 80s, dropped out of the 2024 race for the White House after a disastrous debate with Trump that raised doubts about the then-incumbent’s fitness for office.

Trump, in his post, said he was history’s hardest-working president with a lengthy list of accomplishments. He said he went out of his way to do “long, thorough and very boring” medical examinations, including three cognitive tests that he “ACED.”

“The New York Times, and some others, like to pretend that I am ‘slowing up,’ and maybe not as sharp as I once was, or am in poor physical health, knowing that it is not true,” the Republican president said.

The health of American presidents has long been a delicate and sometimes thorny issue between the White House and the press that covers it — from Grover Cleveland’s secret tumor surgery to Woodrow Wilson’s debilitating stroke to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s polio to Dwight D. Eisenhower’s heart attack. Trump has frequently critiqued the cognitive fitness of his predecessor, Biden.

Trump has fought back against some reports

Trump already has a $15 billion defamation lawsuit pending against the Times. In the suit, filed in September, Trump targeted four Times journalists about three articles that discussed his finances. He has also been involved in legal cases involving The Associated Press and CBS News, among others.

Nicole Taylor, a spokeswoman for The New York Times, said the outlet’s reporting on Trump’s health is heavily sourced, based on interviews with people close to the president and with medical experts.

“Americans deserve in-depth reporting and regular updates about the health of the leaders they elect,” Taylor said. “Mr. Trump welcomed our reporting on the age and fitness of his predecessors; we’re applying the same journalistic scrutiny to his vitality.”

Taylor said that “we won’t be deterred by false and inflammatory language that distorts the role of a free press.”

David Bauder writes about the intersection of media and entertainment for the AP. Follow him at http://x.com/dbauder and https://bsky.app/profile/dbauder.bsky.social.