Zach LaVine is back. And after nearly six weeks off the court, the star guard returns to the court to face a litany of questions surrounding his future with the Chicago Bulls.

LaVine will play his first game in 38 days Friday against the Charlotte Hornets, making a return from a right foot injury. The Bulls went 10-7 in his absence, somewhat balancing out the dismal 5-14 start that plunged their season into doubt within the opening weeks.

But after a morning shootaround at the Advocate Center, LaVine didn’t want to talk about records or questions surrounding his status.

“My main objective is to come out here and just get back to playing,” LaVine said. “If I let opinions affect me, I wouldn’t be where I’m at today. I could care less what people think about me. I know who I am and what I do. I know what I gotta go out there and do is help provide for the team and help us win so that’s all I’ve been trying to focus on.”

LaVine will come off the bench Friday along with center Nikola Vučević, who will also make a return after missing the past five games with a groin injury. Both players will be under a minutes restriction for at least their first two games back. LaVine said he will be limited to 25 to 30 minutes Friday.

For LaVine, Friday’s game will be the first opportunity to attempt to mold into an improved style of play that bolstered the team’s positive record during the 17 games he missed.

“We caught a great rhythm in December doing the same thing that we were working on in training camp,” LaVine said. “It was great to see it actually start coming in and clicking.”

The difference has been marked for the Bulls. The offense is moving the ball quickly, spreading shooting evenly and making shots behind the offensive breakout performance of Coby White. The defense is slowly molding itself back into the top-10 form of last season.

But despite the timing of the team’s improvement, LaVine doesn’t feel he needs to change anything about his approach to effectively meld into the current style of play.

“I want to come in and do my job like I was doing before,” LaVine said. “That’s help the team any way possible, if it’s scoring, energy, rebounding. Come in and compete. I’m just excited to go out there and be with my guys again.”

LaVine isn’t the type of player to feign ignorance about the conversations being held around him in the media or in the fan base. He knows his first 19 games of the season were viewed poorly. He knows there are reports that there isn’t any market for him to be traded away from Chicago. And he knows the team’s 10-7 correction in his absence has been a catalyst for a pointed question: are the Bulls better without him?

But LaVine also refused to engage with those questions Friday past acknowledging their existence. He did not address whether he is still interested in a trade, something he has never confirmed but also has not denied. Instead, he stuck to the same mantra: if he performs up to standard on the court, the questions will quickly answer themselves.

“There’s a narrative for everything,” LaVine said. “You can spin something one way, then take it another way the next day. I’m OK with that. As long as I come out here and do my job and be good with my guys, my teammates, and now that I’m healthy go out there and compete when I’ve been sitting down for the last month and a half — I’m more than fine with that.”

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ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — New Mexico’s top prosecutor said Friday that the state’s five Republican electors cannot be prosecuted under the current law for filing election certificates that falsely declared Donald Trump the winner of the 2020 presidential race.

However, Democratic Attorney General Raúl Torrez is making recommendations to state lawmakers that he says would enhance the security of the state’s electoral process and provide legal authority for prosecuting similar conduct in the future.

New Mexico is one of several states where fake electors attempted to cast ballots indicating that Trump had won, a strategy at the center of criminal charges against Trump and his associates. Democratic officials launched separate investigations in some states, resulting in indictments against GOP electors.

Fake certificates were submitted in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

In New Mexico and Pennsylvania, fake electors added a caveat saying the certificate was submitted in case they were later recognized as duly elected, qualified electors. That would only have been possible if Trump had won any of several dozen legal battles he waged against states in the weeks after the election.

President Joe Biden won the 2020 vote in New Mexico by roughly 11 percentage points — the largest margin among the states where so-called fake electors have been implicated.

In December, a Nevada grand jury indicted six Republicans with felony charges of offering a false instrument for filing and uttering a forged instrument, in connection with false election certificates. They have pleaded not guilt.

Michigan’s Attorney General filed felony charges in July 2023 against 16 Republican fake electors, who would face eight criminal charges including forgery and conspiracy to commit election forgery, though one had charges dropped after reaching a cooperation deal. The top charge carried a maximum penalty of 14 years in prison.

Three fake electors also have been charged in Georgia, where they were charged alongside Trump in a sweeping indictment accusing them of participating in a wide-ranging scheme to illegally overturn the results of the presidential election. They have pleaded not guilty.

Among those accused in a Fulton County indictment is Santa Fe attorney and former law professor John Eastman.

In January 2022, then-New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas, a Democrat, had referred the false certificates to federal authorities for investigation. When Torrez took office in 2023, he ordered a state investigation to determine if the electors had committed any crimes.

Torrez’s office said investigators reviewed thousands of pages of documents relating to activities in New Mexico and in the other battleground states. They also interviewed the five GOP electors.

New Mexico prosecutors contend that Trump’s team provided instructions for completing and submitting the documents. Unlike the certification documents the campaign sent to other states, those used in New Mexico were hinged on Trump winning his challenges.

While saying it was disgraceful that New Mexicans were enlisted in a plot to “undermine democracy,” Torrez acknowledged that the conduct by GOP electors in New Mexico was not subject to criminal prosecution.

He’s asking Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and the Democratic-controlled Legislature to amend state election code to give prosecutors more latitude to pursue charges in these types of cases in the future.

Torrez’s recommendations include expanding the prohibition against falsified election documents to include certificates related to presidential electors and creating a new law against falsely acting as a presidential elector.

A child who died in a fire that critically injured her mother and five siblings has been identified as 5-year-old Sivntxhi Vang by the Ramsey County medical examiner’s office.

She died Wednesday at Regions Hospital after a fire broke out early that morning at her Payne-Phalen home. Along with her mother, she was one of six siblings, ages 1 to 6, who had not been able to escape the fire. When firefighters carried them out of the smoke-filled house they were all unconscious and were immediately administered CPR.

Her father, Pa Cheng Vang Vang, wrote on a GoFundMe page that she was his oldest twin daughter.

The fire department determined the fire on Arkwright Street near Maryland Avenue was accidental and the cause is under investigation, said Deputy Fire Chief Roy Mokosso.

Firefighters were notified at 1:30 a.m. Wednesday. A 911 call was believed to have come from inside the house. There were working smoke detectors in the home, but the occupants were likely unable to escape because of the location of the fire on the first floor and because one adult was alone with six children, Mokosso said Wednesday.

Vang was at work when the fire broke out.

Three of Vang’s other children “are at high risk of heart failure and brain death due to the high amount of smoke they” inhaled, Vang wrote. Their mother “is also at high risk of not recovering. Please help pray and hope that they all will make it.”

Two of Vang’s children “were able to get out of a critical zone, thank God,” he wrote.

The conditions of the children were not available Friday night.

The GoFundMe can be found at gofundme.com/f/siv-ntshiab.

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