By CHARLOTTE KRAMON

STONE MOUNTAIN, Ga. (AP) — The Georgia chapter of a Confederacy group filed lawsuits this week against a state park with the largest Confederate monument in the country, arguing officials broke state law by planning an exhibit on ties to slavery, segregation and white supremacy.

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Stone Mountain’s massive carving depicts Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Gen. Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson on horseback. Critics who have long pushed for changes say the monument enshrines the “Lost Cause” mythology that romanticizes the Confederate cause as a state’s rights struggle, but state law protects the carving from any changes.

After police brutality spurred nationwide reckonings on racial inequality and the removal of dozens of Confederate monuments in 2020, the Stone Mountain Memorial Association, which oversees Stone Mountain Park, voted in 2021 to relocate Confederate flags and build a “truth-telling” exhibit to reflect the site’s role in the rebirth of the Klu Klux Klan, along with the carving’s segregationist roots.

The Georgia Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans also alleges in court documents filed Tuesday that the board’s decision to relocate Confederate flags from a walking trail violates Georgia law.

“When they come after the history and attempt to change everything to the present political structure, that’s against the law,” said Martin O’Toole, the chapter’s spokesperson.

Stone Mountain Park markets itself as a family theme park and is a popular hiking spot east of Atlanta. Completed in 1972, the monument on the mountain’s northern space is 190 feet across and 90 feet tall. The United Daughters of the Confederacy hired sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who later carved Mount Rushmore, to craft the carving in 1915.

That same year, the film “Birth of a Nation” celebrated the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan, which marked its comeback with a cross burning on top of Stone Mountain on Thanksgiving night in 1915. One of the 10 parts of the planned exhibit would expound on the Ku Klux’s Klan reemergence and the movie’s influence on the mountain’s monument.

The Stone Mountain Memorial Association hired Birmingham-based Warner Museums, which specializes in civil rights installations, to design the exhibit in 2022.

“The interpretive themes developed for Stone Mountain will explore how the collective memory created by Southerners in response to the real and imagined threats to the very foundation of Southern society, the institution of slavery, by westward expansion, a destructive war, and eventual military defeat, was fertile ground for the development of the Lost Cause movement amidst the social and economic disruptions that followed,” the exhibit proposal says.

Other parts of the exhibit would address how the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Sons of Confederate Veterans perpetuated the “Lost Cause” ideology through support for monuments, education programs and racial segregation laws across the South. It would also tell stories of a small Black community that lived near the mountain after the war.

Georgia’s General Assembly allocated $11 million in 2023 to pay for the exhibit and renovate the park’s Memorial Hall. The exhibit is not open yet. A spokesperson for the park did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The park’s board in 2021 also voted to change its logo from an image of the Confederate carveout to a lake inside the park.

Sons of the Confederate Veterans members have defended the carvings as honoring Confederate soldiers.

Changes to the park would “radically revise” the park’s setup, “completely changing the emphasis of the Park and its purpose as defined by the law of the State of Georgia,” the organization said in court documents.

Kramon is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Follow Kramon on X: @charlottekramon.

Chet Holmgren grew up hooping at random parks throughout the Twin Cities. If there was a pickup game to be played, no matter the location, the lanky teenager and his friends were always up for the challenge.

“We would go all over the place,” Holmgren said. “Wherever people were playing.”

In a perfect world for Holmgren, his return to the Jimmy Lee Recreation Center in St. Paul on Thursday afternoon would have been much less conspicuous.

“There’s a bunch of media here,” he said. “I don’t even know how this happened.”

Such is life for an NBA champion.

Less than weeks after the Oklahoma City Thunder defeated the Indiana Pacers in Game 7 to win the NBA championship, Holmgren returned to the Twin Cities and brought the coveted Larry O’Brien Trophy with him to share with the community that helped raise him.

In the hour leading up to Holmgren’s arrival at the Jimmy Lee Recreation Center, hundreds lined up in the parking lot to take pictures with the hardware. They did so while wearing hats and bouncing basketballs that were being handed out for the occasion. There were also a number of food trucks set up in the parking lot, as as well as makeshift basketball court in the distance.

“This is for this kids,” Holmgren said. “Just to kind of show them that anything is possible.”

After talking to reporters inside the recreation center for roughly 15 minutes, Holmgren made his way outside where everybody was anxiously waiting for him.

“This might be a little overwhelming,” he said. “It’s a great problem to have.”

That perspective was on display in Holmgren, who handled himself with grace despite being bombarded as soon as he walked out the door.

Never mind that there were items being shoved in his face as he slowly made his way around the parking lot. He signed autographs for roughly 45 minutes with the sun beating down and temperatures sitting in the mid-90s.

As soon as that crowd started to die down, Holmgren went back inside to cool off, then returned outside and played 1 on 1 with anybody who was up for the challenge.

As the sweat dripped form his forehead it was almost as if Holmgren had been transported back in time. He wasn’t an NBA player for the 30 minutes he was playing on the blacktop, just a hooper sharing the game he loves with those that love it as much as he does.

“It’s all about the kids,” Holmgren said. “Just trying to inspire them and give them something that they’ll remember for a long time to come.”

Why is that part so important to him?

“To show them what they can dream of,” Holmgren said. “The hardest thing for a lot of kids is that they can’t work to accomplish something if they don’t think it’s possible. It’s big for them to be able to see something like this, just so they understand that if they want to do something, they can strive for that.”

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By JIM VERTUNO

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — A mother and her two young children from Honduras who had filed what was believed to be the first lawsuit involving children challenging the Trump administration’s policy on immigrant arrests at courthouses have been released from detention, civil rights groups and attorneys for the family said Thursday.

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The lawsuit filed on behalf of the mother identified as “Ms. Z,” her 6-year-old son and her 9-year-old daughter, said they were arrested outside the courtroom after an immigration court hearing in Los Angeles. They had been held for weeks in the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas. Their identities have not been released because of concerns for their safety.

The lawsuit said that the family entered the U.S. legally using a Biden-era appointment app and that their arrest violated their Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizure and their Fifth Amendment right to due process.

The family’s lawyers said the boy had also recently undergone chemotherapy treatment for leukemia and his mother feared his health was declining while in detention.

The family was released late Wednesday while their lawsuit was still pending, and they went to a shelter in South Texas before they plan to return to their lives in the Los Angeles area, said Columbia Law School professor Elora Mukherjee, one of the lawyers representing the family.

“They will go back to their lives, to church, and school, and the family will continue to pursue their asylum case. And hopefully the little boy will get the medical attention he needs,” Mukherjee said. “They never should have been arrested and detained in the first place. We are grateful they have been released.”

Department of Homeland Security officials did not immediately respond to an email request for comment. Last week, the agency posted on social media that the boy “has been seen regularly by medical personnel since arriving at the Dilley facility.”

Starting in May, the country has seen large-scale arrests in which asylum-seekers appearing at routine hearings have been arrested outside courtrooms as part of the White House’s mass deportation effort. In many cases, a judge will grant a government lawyer’s request to dismiss deportation proceedings and then U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers will arrest the person and place them on “expedited removal,” a fast track to deportation.

Lawyers for the “Z” family said their lawsuit was the first one filed on behalf of children to challenge the ICE courthouse arrest policy.

There have been other similar lawsuits, including in New York, where a federal judge ruled last month that federal immigration authorities can’t make civil arrests at the state’s courthouses or arrest anyone going there for a proceeding.

“The Z family’s release demonstrates the power we have when we fight back against harmful, un-American policies,” said Kate Gibson Kumar, staff attorney for the Beyond Borders Program of the Texas Civil Rights Project.

The family’s lawyers have said that during their hearing before a judge, the mother said they wished to continue their cases for asylum. Homeland Security moved to dismiss their cases, and the judge immediately granted that motion.

When they stepped out of the courtroom, they found men in civilian clothing believed to be ICE agents who arrested the family, Mukherjee said. They spent about 11 hours at an immigrant processing center in Los Angeles and were each only given an apple, a small packet of cookies, a juice box and water.

At one point, an officer near the boy lifted his shirt, revealing his gun. The boy urinated on himself and was left in wet clothing until the next morning, Mukherjee said.

“Heads of State” is not the Cheech & Chong reunion film you’ve been waiting for, but a comic thriller co-starring John Cena and Idris Elba, premiering Wednesday on Prime Video. Previously joined in cultural history by the DC super antihero flick “The Suicide Squad,” the actors have remade their rivalrous characters there into an odd couple of national leaders here, dealing with conspiratorial skulduggery, bullets, bombs and the like.

Call me dim, but I wasn’t even half aware that Cena, whose muscles have muscles, maintains a long, successful career in professional wrestling — which is, of course, acting — alongside his more conventional show business pursuits; he’s ever game to mock himself and not afraid to look dumb, which ultimately makes him look smart, or to appear for all intents and purposes naked at the 2024 Oscars, presenting the award for costume design. (He was winning, too, in his schtick with Jimmy Kimmel.) Elba, whose career includes a lot of what might be called prestige genre, has such natural poise and gravity that one assumes he’s done all the Shakespeares and Shaws and Ibsens, but “The Wire” and “Luther” were more his thing. He was on many a wish list as the next James Bond, and while that’s apparently not going to happen, something of the sort gets a workout here.

Elba plays British Prime Minister Sam Clarke, described as “increasingly embattled” in his sixth year in office, who is about to meet Cena’s recently elected American president, Will Derringer, on the eve of a trip to Trieste, Italy, for a NATO conference. (Why Clarke is embattled is neither explained nor important.) Derringer resents Clarke, who can’t take him seriously, for having seemed to endorse his opponent by taking him out for fish and chips. (This is a recurring theme.) An international star in the Schwarzenegger/Stallone mold — “Water Cobra” is his franchise — one might call Derringer’s election ridiculous, but I live in a state that actually did elect Schwarzenegger as its governor, twice. Wet behind the ears (“He still hasn’t figured out the difference between a press conference and a press junket,” somebody says), Derringer thinks a lot of himself, his airplane, his knowing Paul McCartney and his position. Beyond aspirational platitudes, he has no real politics, but as we first see him carrying his daughter on his shoulders, we know he’s really OK.

Directed by Ilya Naishuller (“Nobody”) and written by Josh Appelbaum, André Nemec and Harrison Query, the movie begins with a scene set at the Tomatino Festival in Buñol, Spain, in which great crowds of participants lob tomatoes at each other in a massive food fight — it’s a real thing — foreshadowing the blood that will soon be flowing through the town square, as a team of unidentified bad guys ambush the British and American agents who are tracking them. They’ve been set up, declares M16 agent Noel Bisset (Priyanka Chopra Jonas), who is later reported “missing and presumed dead” — meaning, of course, that she is very much alive and will be seen again; indeed, we will see quite a lot of her.

Meanwhile, the prime minister and the president board Air Force One for Trieste. They talk movies: “I like actual cinema,” says Clarke, who claims to have never seen one of Derringer’s pictures. “I’m classically trained,” the movie star protests. “Did you know I once did a play with Edward Norton? But the universe keeps telling me I look cool with a gun in my hand — toy gun.”

Following attacks within and without the plane, the two parachute into Belarus and, for the remainder of the film, make their way here and there, trying to evade the private army of Russian arms dealer and sadistic creep Viktor Gradov (Paddy Considine) led by your typical tall blond female assassin (Katrina Durden). They’ll also meet Stephen Root as a computer guy and Jack Quaid as a comical American agent. Elsewhere, Vice President Elizabeth Kirk (Carla Gugino) takes charge. (“Bad?” is the note I wrote. I’ve seen my share of political thrillers.)

There will be hand-to-hand combat, missiles, machine-gun shoot-em-ups, more than a couple helicopters and a car chase through the streets of Trieste — a lovely seaside/hillside city I recommend if you’re thinking of Italy this summer. Must I tell you that antipathy will turn to appreciation as our heroes make common cause, get a little personal and, with the able Agent Bisset, become real-life action heroes? That they are middle-aged is not an issue, though there is a joke about the American movie star being less fit than the U.K. politician.

The logline portends a comedy, possibly a parody, even a satire. It’s definitely the first of these, if not especially subtle or sharp (Derringer stuck in a tree, hanging from a tangled parachute; Clarke setting off a smoke bomb in his own face — that did make me laugh), a little bit the second, and not at all the third, even though it sniffs around politics a bit. Above all, like many, most or practically all action films, it’s a fantasy in which many things happen that would not and could not ever, ever happen in the real world, because that’s not how people or physics behave. (It certainly doesn’t represent America in 2025.)

There is just as much character development or backstory as is necessary to make the players seem more or less human. Plot-wise there are a lot of twists, because the script superimposes a couple of familiar villainous agendas into a single narrative; it’s mildly diverting without being compelling, which, I would think, will ultimately work in its favor as hectic, violent light entertainment. Not even counting the orgy of anonymous death that has qualified as family entertainment for some time now — blame video games, I won’t argue — it’s a painless watch, and, in its cheery, fantastic absurdity, something of a respite from the messier, crazier, more unbelievable world awaiting you once the credits have rolled.

‘Heads of State’

Rating: PG-13 (for sequences of strong violence/action, language and some smoking)

Running time: 1:53

How to watch: On Prime Video July 2

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