By BILL BARROW

ATLANTA (AP) — Donald Trump has played many roles. Real estate developer. Marketing extraordinaire. Reality TV host. Candidate. President — twice.

Another part has been constant through all of them: plaintiff.

Trump both threatens lawsuits and files them with aplomb — against individuals, institutions, even the people who elected him. Sometimes the threats are just that, and no lawsuit materializes. And, certainly, Trump has found himself on the receiving end of many lawsuits and legal challenges. But his own litigious bent goes back decades, and it has continued during his time in the White House.

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U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks once described Trump as “the mastermind of strategic abuse of the judicial process.” Trump, Middlebrooks declared in a short-lived 2022-23 Trump case against Hillary Clinton, is a “sophisticated litigant … repeatedly using the courts to seek revenge.”

The president has his latest potential targets. His Justice Department is suing Harvard University, not long after Trump took issue with a New York Times story about his fight with the school, and he recently threatened comedian Trevor Noah, who connected Trump to Jeffrey Epstein during the Grammy Awards show.

“Get ready Noah, I’m going to have some fun with you!” Trump blasted on Truth Social.

Here are some highlights of Trump’s torts and threats.

1973: Cohn, young Trump, racial discrimination and the feds

Trump started in his father’s Queens-based real estate business. They attracted attention from state and federal government authorities in the early 1970s after prospective Black tenants complained of being denied apartments.

Eventually, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development accused the Trumps of violating the 1968 Fair Housing Act. At one point, investigators counted seven Black families across 3,700 apartments in Trump Village, according to Trump biographer Maggie Haberman, and a Trump employee later testified that documents had a special code to flag Black applicants.

Trump dug in. Aided by his lawyer and mentor Roy Cohn, he countersued the federal government for $100 million in 1973 — equivalent to about $700 million today.

They ultimately settled the dispute, but not until 1975, after spending 18 months generating headlines in New York media to counter the government’s case. Trump promised not to discriminate against prospective renters in the future, but the consent decree he signed included no admission that he’d broken the law in the first place.

Trump recounted in “Art of the Deal,” his 1987 ghost-written book: “I’d rather fight than fold, because as soon as you fold once, you get the reputation of being a folder.”

Stubborn NYC tenants — and a Trump loss

Trump wanted to evict rent-controlled tenants from 100 Central Park South so he could raze the building in the early 1980s. They fought him and in 1985 he sued the tenants’ lawyers for $105 million ($300 million-plus today). The suit got thrown out and Trump paid the defendants’ legal fees.

Attorney Martin London represented one of the defendant lawyers, Rick Fischbein, and wrote in his memoir that Fischbein framed his check from Trump after it was deposited. Fischbein later became one of Trump’s attorneys.

Trump eventually dropped his eviction suit, redeveloped the building and allowed tenants to remain there under rent-control agreements.

The 1980s skyscraper that never was

During the same period, Trump proposed a 150-story development off the tip of Manhattan. A Chicago Tribune critic, Paul Gapp, mocked it as “Guinness Book of World Record architecture” and “one of the silliest things anyone could inflict on New York or any other city.”

Trump sued the Pulitzer Prize winner and the Tribune Co. for $500 million (about $1.5 billion today), saying Gapp’s assessment killed the project.

A federal court dismissed the suit.

Before politics, a fight over a net worth

In 2005, a decade before Trump launched his presidential bid and as his TV career blossomed with NBC’S “The Apprentice,” author Timothy O’Brien wrote “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald.”

The book alleged that Trump was not a billionaire at all and worth between $150 million and $250 million. Trump sued and asked for $5 billion (now $8 billion-plus), saying O’Brien harmed his ability to make business deals. A New Jersey court threw out the lawsuit, and an appeals court agreed.

The 2016 election and ‘Russia hoax’

Trump defeated Hillary Clinton for president in 2016. That did not stop him from making her the lead client, along with a litany of others, in a 2022 lawsuit that alleged a vast conspiracy to cost him the election.

It was part of Trump’s push back against a Justice Department investigation of Russia’s role in the campaign. The inquiry concluded that Russia interfered in U.S. political discourse in “sweeping and systematic fashion” to help Trump and harm Clinton. But the Justice Department stopped short of saying whether Trump was involved. Trump was explicitly not exonerated in the final report, but he still used it to assert that “the Russia hoax” was a deliberate plot against him.

Middlebrooks, the Florida-based judge who got the Trump v. Clinton case, disagreed, tossed Trump’s lawsuit and made Trump pay the defendants’ legal fees, which combined with his reached into the millions.

“This case should never have been brought,” Middlebrooks wrote in a scathing January 2023 order. “A continuing pattern of misuse of the courts by Mr. Trump and his lawyers undermines the rule of law.”

Suing and threatening networks

Since becoming president, Trump has scored two settlements for his presidential library after suing major television news networks.

ABC News agreed in 2024 to pay $15 million to Trump’s future library and $1 million in legal fees after anchor George Stephanopoulos’ legally inaccurate assertion on air that Trump had been found civilly liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll. In fact, a New York jury found Trump had sexually assaulted Carroll in the mid-1990s but concluded she did not prove Trump raped her “within the narrow, technical meaning of a particular section of the New York Penal Law.”

Paramount, which owns CBS, settled with Trump in 2025 after he sued over the way “60 Minutes” edited a Kamala Harris interview during the 2024 campaign. Paramount agree to pay $16 million toward Trump’s future presidential library.

Trump cited those cases in his threat to sue Noah. He followed that a day later with his threat to command $1 billion from Harvard. He’s pushed previously to get $500 million from the school for other educational programs.

His biggest ask is from taxpayers

Trump has bucked presidential tradition by never releasing his tax returns. But after he became president, The New York Times and ProPublica published stories detailing how Trump went years paying no or little in federal income taxes after claiming substantial losses.

In 2024, former Internal Revenue Service contractor Charles Edward Littlejohn, of Washington, D.C. — who worked for Booz Allen Hamilton, a defense and national security tech firm — was sentenced to five years in prison after pleading guilty to leaking Trump’s tax information to news outlets between 2018 and 2020.

Trump has not sued the media outlets in response. Instead, he is suing the IRS for $10 billion.

It’s the largest demand ever made by plaintiff Trump, and if he were successful, it would be U.S. taxpayers paying the damages.

By ANDREW DAMPF and STEVE DOUGLAS

CORTINA D’AMPEZZO, Italy (AP) — Standing on a tower overlooking the cliffs of the Cortina downhill course, there is someone who is just as involved in the biggest skiing races of the Winter Olympics as Mikaela Shiffrin and Breezy Johnson.

Martin Bochatay is the drone cam pilot for the money shots inside the iconic Tofana schuss, the narrow chute between two walls of Dolomite rock.

He is part of a team in control of the buzzing machines that are flying right behind Olympians as they go for gold at the Milan Cortina Games, offering stunning and high-pace visuals to TV viewers back home.

“In my mind, I’m not flying a drone. I’m flying with the skiers,” Bochatay told The Associated Press before the Olympics. “It’s an immersive thing. … The skiers don’t see us. But I’m right there with them. You become the drone.”

A drone follows Philipp Raimund, of Germany, as he soars through the air during his first round jump of the ski jumping men’s normal hill individual at the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Predazzo, Italy, Monday, Feb. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)

Drone cams have become ubiquitous in showcasing the speeds and angles of skiers, lugers, snowboarders, ski jumpers and other Winter Olympians at these Games.

“The skill of those drone pilots is just phenomenal,” U.S. bobsledder and flag bearer Frank Del Duca said. “It gets a really unique perspective.”

Viewers have noted the humming noise coming from the machines, sparking the question: Is it putting off the Olympians in the biggest moment of their lives? Norwegian downhiller Kajsa Vickhoff Lie says that’s not an issue.

“No, you just maybe hear them on the start, but you don’t hear them when you ski,” she said.

The drones are tiny and zoom beyond 100 mph

Drone cams made in inauspicious impact on Alpine skiing 11 years ago when a primitive, massive machine came crashing down from the sky and nearly smashed into Austrian great Marcel Hirscher during a slalom race.

These days, the drones are agile, tiny — they weigh around half a pound — and can easily accelerate to speeds beyond 100 mph.

Drone pilot Jonas Sundal, from Canada, holds one of the drones being flown at the ski jumping venue during the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Predazzo, Italy, Tuesday, Feb. 10, 2026. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

In all the sports, there are rules preventing the drones from overtaking the athletes, and they must keep a safe distance behind the competitors.

Pitch, roll and yaw: how to fly a drone

The drones actually contain two cameras. There’s a high-quality camera for broadcast purposes that is actually controlled by the TV production unit in a truck below the course.

“They can adjust whether it’s too bright, the balance, without us doing anything,” Bochatay said.

Then there’s a lower-quality camera that the pilots use to see where they are going. Those are the images that the pilots see in the goggles they wear to fly the drones.

A drone operator captures video ahead of an alpine ski, men’s super-G race, at the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Bormio, Italy, Wednesday, Feb. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Gabriele Facciotti)

The pilots have a remote control that requires two hands to hold, and contains two main switches to input the flying commands of pitch (front-to-back), roll (side-to-side) and yaw (vertical axis); plus throttle (up/down or altitude control).

“There’s always these four,” Bochatay said. “It’s not like you move one then the other. It’s everything at the same time.”

There’s also a low-tech issue: the batteries for the drones need to be changed constantly — and kept in warming cases due to the cold temperatures — requiring a “pit stop crew” to quickly sub in new batteries between runs.

Flying footage can be ‘nauseating’ but beautiful

Two things were important to Olympic broadcasting officials: Showing off both the beauty of the venues and the point of view of the athlete.

A drone follows China’s Lin Qinwei as he starts for a men’s skeleton training session at the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, Tuesday, Feb. 10, 2026. (AP Photo/Aijaz Rahi)

And the International Olympic Committee is delighted with the results as they look to bring viewers closer to the action. Maybe too close.

“Looking at the screen in the downhill, I almost feel motion sickness,” said Pierre Ducrey, the IOC’s sports director. “That’s how much we are able to project ourselves thanks to this new way of broadcasting the sport.”

U.S. bobsledder Elana Meyers Taylor agreed.

“I’m not concerned about the drone or anything like that,” she said, “but I will say I was watching the luge footage the other day and I was like, ‘This is slightly nauseating.’ I don’t know if I could watch this all the way down the run.”

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Lie, the Norwegian skier, likes how the drones showcase a key aspect of skiing: It’s cool to see the speed a little bit more for the spectators.”

AP Sports Writer Tim Reynolds contributed to this report.

AP Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/milan-cortina-2026-winter-olympics

By MICHAEL CASEY and MARK SCOLFORO

BOSTON (AP) — A college student deported to Honduras while traveling for Thanksgiving in November must be returned to the United States within two weeks, a federal judge in Boston ruled Friday.

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U.S. District Judge Richard Stearns issued an order that required the return of 19-year-old Babson College freshman Any Lucia Lopez Belloza by the end of February.

Stearns said he had hoped the Trump administration would come up with a solution after it acknowledged mistakenly deporting Lopez Belloza. Having failed to do that, Stearns said, he was compelled to act. He said it was up to the courts to determine her rights and the legality of her removal.

“This is not an issue for the Executive to prejudge and arrogate to itself, whatever stance it may choose to take in litigating the removal issue before a court of law,” Stearns wrote.

Asked about the decision, the Department of Homeland Security e-mailed a statement saying Lopez Belloza received “full due process” and a final order of removal. The federal agency said she entered the U.S. in 2014 and that the removal order was issued by an immigration judge the following year.

The government has said she missed multiple opportunities to appeal. But Lopez Belloza said her previous attorney told her there had been no removal order.

Her lawyer, Todd Pomerleau, said previously that the government’s response “spills a lot of ink on the difficulty of a student visa, but it fails to address the numerous simple solutions available to itself to rectify its ‘mistaken’ deportation.” Pomerleau could not be reached for comment late Friday.

Lopez Belloza, who has no criminal history, was detained at Boston’s airport Nov. 20 as she prepared to fly home to Texas for the holiday. She was deported two days later.

She has been staying with her grandparents in her native Honduras, a country she had last been to more than a decade ago.

Babson has offered her support to continue her studies remotely, as she pursues a business degree.

Scolforo reported from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

By CHARLOTTE GRAHAM-McLAY

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — In a near-empty courthouse, in front of almost no one, the appeal by New Zealand’s most reviled killer was heard in muted fashion with little mention of the details of the country’s deadliest mass shooting.

Such is New Zealand’s desire to smother the racist motivations of Brenton Tarrant, who murdered 51 Muslims praying at two mosques in the city of Christchurch in 2019. Tarrant, a self-professed white supremacist, referred to other perpetrators of hate-fueled massacres when he committed his attack and other mass shooters have cited his actions since.

Yet it’s rare to encounter the Australian man’s words in New Zealand, the country where he migrated with a plan to amass semiautomatic guns and carry out the slaughter.

Officials have sought to curb the spread of his views, including through a legal ban on his racist manifesto and a video he livestreamed of the shooting. The effort to prevent public exposure to Tarrant is perhaps most apparent in New Zealand’s courts, where he sought this week to recant his guilty pleas.

A three-judge panel in the Court of Appeal in Wellington heard final arguments Friday by Crown lawyers opposing Tarrant’s application to have his admissions in 2020 to charges of terrorism, murder and attempted murder discarded. He is serving life in prison without a chance of parole, but the case would return to court for a full trial if he is allowed to revoke his guilty pleas.

Opposing lawyers say his appeal has no merit

The 35-year-old told the court this week he didn’t want to plead guilty and made the “irrational” admissions during a “nervous breakdown” induced by his solitary and austere prison conditions. But Crown lawyers opposing his appeal bid said in their response Friday there was no evidence for the claims that he was seriously mentally ill.

Experts had ruled Tarrant was fit to enter pleas, and his former lawyers and prison staff didn’t raise concerns either.

“It’s difficult to see what more could’ve been done,” Crown lawyer Barnaby Hawes told the court. Tarrant, he added, “is an unreliable witness and his narrative should be treated with caution.”

The evidence against Tarrant — including his own livestream of the massacre, in which he filmed his face — was so overwhelming that a guilty verdict was assured if he had fought the charges in a trial, the lawyers said.

“Pleading guilty to charges where his guilt is certain can’t be seen to be irrational,” Hawes said.

The subdued hearing defies the tension over the case

One topic nearly absent from the weeklong hearing was any mention of the hateful motivations Tarrant cited for committing the crimes. Lawyers both supporting and opposing Tarrant’s bid avoided reference to his white supremacist views, and proceedings unfolded in the quiet and stolid way New Zealand court cases usually do.

But there were signs the court sought to limit the public’s exposure to Tarrant, as New Zealand’s justice system has done before. Almost nobody was permitted to view the gunman’s evidence and the appeal bid unfolded in front of nine reporters, nine lawyers, a few court staff, and an empty public gallery.

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Tarrant was permitted to watch the proceedings by video conference from Auckland Prison, but his image was not visible in the courtroom except when he gave evidence. Apart from in Christchurch, where the bereaved and wounded survivors watched a livestream of the hearing at the local courthouse, the shooter was invisible.

The approach New Zealand has enacted — in which even news outlets name the shooter as few times as possible in each article — stands at odds with the publicity given to trials for racist mass killers before, including widely covered proceedings for the Norwegian murderer Anders Breivik, whom Tarrant years later cited as an inspiration. Crown lawyers urged the appeal judges Friday to thwart the prospect of the matter returning to court in a lengthy public trial, which would happen if the Australian’s bid to recant his guilt was successful.

“Keeping this case alive is a source of immense distress” to the shooter’s victims, Crown lawyer Madeleine Laracy said. “It doesn’t allow them to heal.”

A swift ruling isn’t expected

The judges’ decision will be released later. New Zealand’s appeals court delivers 90% of its judgments within three months of a hearing’s end, according to the Court’s website.

If his bid to revoke his guilty pleas is unsuccessful, Tarrant’s case will return to the appeals court for a later hearing where he will seek a review of his life sentence.