Michael Jordan is condemning violence against both African-Americans and police. His forceful and emotional statement, released by ESPN’s The Undefeated, is a marked change for the NBA legend.

Jordan has been famously apolitical during his career — first as a Hall of Fame basketball player for the Chicago Bulls and more recently as an owner of the Charlotte Hornets — avoiding public statements on politics and civil rights, when other athletes have spoken out.

“I can no longer stay silent,” Jordan writes. “We need to find solutions that ensure people of color receive fair and equal treatment AND that police officers — who put their lives on the line every day to protect us all — are respected and supported.”

The statement comes after the recent police shootings of two African-American men, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, and two deadly attacks against police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge.

“I know this country is better than that,” Jordan writes.

Jordan says he’s making $1 million donations to two organizations, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Institute for Community-Police Relations, which was recently established by the International Association of Chiefs of Police. The aim, Jordan writes, is to help “build trust and respect between communities and law enforcement.”

The donations come during a period of renewed advocacy and statements about social issues by professional athletes and sports leagues.

Current NBA stars LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony, Dwyane Wade and Chris Paul opened the 2016 ESPYs, earlier this month, by asking professional athletes to speak up on issues of social justice and to help unite communities in the U.S.

WNBA players have spoken out, too, wearing solid black shirts during warm-ups, or shirts with the printed words “#BlackLivesMatter” and “#Dallas5,” in reference to the five police officers who were killed in Dallas earlier this month.

Most recently, the NBA announced that it was stripping Charlotte, N.C., of the 2017 NBA All-Star Game because of North Carolina’s House Bill 2 — the so-called bathroom bill — which has been called discriminatory against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.

In making that announcement, the league stated: “While we recognize that the NBA cannot choose the law in every city, state, and country in which we do business, we do not believe we can successfully host our All-Star festivities in Charlotte in the climate created by HB2.”

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Eleven U.S. Army soldiers are headed to the Summer Olympics in Brazil next month on a mission that doesn’t have anything to do with security. They’re all U.S. Olympians, including some who only recently became American citizens.

The size of the contingent is testament to the Army’s World Class Athlete Program, a detachment that allows soldiers to essentially train full-time in their sports. Credit is also due to a provision of U.S. law that offers expedited citizenship to immigrants who serve in the armed forces.

Paul Chelimo, 25, is one of four Army runners to make the U.S. team. All four were born and raised and started running in the highlands of Kenya. They won athletic scholarships to American universities. After college, they enlisted in the U.S. Army, which is open to non-citizens with legal residency. Chelimo signed up in 2014.

“Actually, my main goal was to represent the United States. Being an Olympian is the best way to represent the United States,” he said. “That was the best program because I could do my career as a soldier and also focus on my talent.”

Chelimo was part of the crowded field at the start of the men’s 5,000 meters (3.1 mile) at the U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials, held July 9 in Eugene, Oregon.

Most runners wore brightly-colored uniforms featuring their shoe company sponsors. But Chelimo was in beige, black and camouflage with “Army” in big letters across his chest.

The final lap came down to a furious sprint, and Chelimo finished third, snagging the final spot on the team in the 5,000.

His military service had already provided a fast-track to U.S. citizenship. Chelimo and his Kenyan countrymen became citizens after basic training — and in time to compete for this year’s Olympic team. Normally, naturalization can take five years or more.

Another Kenyan-born runner in the Army, Shadrack Kipchirchir, 27, qualified in the 10,000 meters (6.2 miles).

“It’s not about me. It’s all about all the soldiers that sacrificed their lives and dedication and hard work. I’m not going to let them down,” he said.

The Kenyan-born athletes in the Army program come from the Rift Valley region, a cradle of champion runners. Kenyans from there have dominated the Olympic medals podium in distance running for decades.

“In Kenya, running is like soccer in Brazil,” explained Spc. Leonard Korir, who also qualified for the Olympics in the 10,000 meters.

All together, the Army is sending 11 soldier-athletes to Rio de Janeiro — four runners, a race walker, five marksmen, and one in the modern pentathlon. In addition, two more Army athletes — a swimmer and an archer — have qualified for the Paralympic Games.

“They are great ambassadors for the Army. They represent sacrifice, determination, loyalty, commitment — all of our ethos,” said Dan Browne, the coach of the Army’s track athletes.

Browne competed in the 10,000 meters and marathon for the U.S. at the 2004 Games in Athens and is now a major in the Oregon National Guard. He stresses that the World Class Athlete Program is open to everyone in the Army who can meet the tough entry standards.

Kenyan-born runners dominate the roster of the Army’s World Class Athlete Program for track and field. He says the popularity among Kenyan-American runners has apparently spread through “word-of-mouth.”

Browne persuaded his superiors to let some Army runners relocate from their posts to his hometown of Beaverton, Ore. There’s no Army base there, but it is home to Nike’s world headquarters and a cadre of other professional runners to work out with.

In an increasingly mobile world, a growing number of athletes are leaving their country of birth to compete for another country at the Olympics.

The president of track and field’s world governing body IAAF, Sebastian Coe, raised the issue of athletes switching national allegiance during a conference in May.

“I’ve asked our corporate governance review to look at this, to come back with a set of proposals,” Coe said. “In the past, these transfer of allegiance requests have been, sometimes, a little flimsy and we need to address that.”

“My instinct is that we need to settle upon a principle that if an athlete starts their international career competing for a particular country, they finish their career for a particular country,” Coe added.

The Army says 65 soldier-athletes have competed at the Olympic and Paralympic Games since the World Class Athlete Program was established in 1997. Male and female soldiers competed in everything from target shooting, boxing and wrestling to (paraplegic) sled hockey and cross-country skiing.

The U.S. Air Force has its own program, which includes First Lt. Cale Simmons, who made the U.S. men’s team in the pole vault.

The Navy and Marine Corps have not created dedicated detachments to groom elite athletes, but they do grant leave to Olympic hopefuls. The Navy will be represented in Rio by rower Edward King. And David Higgins, an Air Force Academy cadet who plans to become a Marine officer after the Games, will compete in the prone rifle event.

KRCC reporter Holly Pretsky contributed to this report.

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The entire Russian Paralympic team is facing a possible ban from the upcoming Summer Games in Brazil because of signs of widespread drug violations among Russian disabled athletes, the sports’ governing body said Friday.

The announcement by the International Paralympic Committee was the latest pointing to widespread Russian doping practices in recent years, though this was by far the most serious leveled against the country’s para athletes.

Until Friday, the sanctions and potential punishments against Russia had been directed at its Olympic team, not the Paralympic team.

Russia’s track and field team has already been banned from the Summer Games that start in Rio de Janeiro on Aug. 5. The International Olympic Committee is weighing a decision about whether to ban the rest of the Russian squad. That decision could come at a meeting Sunday.

Russia’s Paralympic team became a possible target for sanctions on Friday.

The International Paralympic Committee said that “in light of the prevailing doping culture endemic within Russian sport, at the very highest levels … Russia appears unable or unwilling to ensure compliance.”

The Paralympic Committee said it had received the names of 35 Russian para athletes with “disappearing positive samples” from a Moscow lab that has been implicated in the broader doping scandal.

A report released Monday by the World Anti-Doping Agency pointed to the recurring cases of the disappearing positive samples in the lab among many Russian athletes. That investigation produced the 35 names of Russian para athletes, the Paralympic Committee said.

“The report revealed an unimaginable scale of institutionalized doping in Russian sport that was orchestrated at the highest level,” said Sir Philip Craven, the president of the International Paralympic Committee.

The Paralympic Committee plans to announce during the week of Aug. 1 whether it will suspend Russia’s team. If it does so, the Russian para athletes would presumably be barred from the upcoming competition in Rio.

The Paralympic Games will be held Sept. 7-18, following the Olympic Summer Games, which end Aug. 21.

The Russians have one of the top Paralympic teams. They won 102 medals at the 2012 Summer Paralympics in London, coming in third, behind only China and Great Britain and just ahead of the United States.

In the report released Monday, the World Anti-Doping Agency said Russia launched an extensive state-sponsored doping program after a poor showing at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, where it won just 15 medals and came in sixth overall.

In the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, the Russians won 33 medals, more than any other country.

The report said the Russians used a “mouse hole” in the anti-doping lab to swap out urine samples that were expected to show banned substances with clean samples the same athlete had provided months earlier.

In a separate development Friday, the International Olympic Committee said it retested urine samples from athletes at the 2008 and 2012 Summer Games and found an additional 45 positive tests for banned substances, including at least 20 medal winners. The committee did not name the athletes or say what countries they were from.

Urine samples from Olympic competitors are frozen and retested years later as the technology becomes more sophisticated to detect banned substances.

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The NBA will be relocating the 2017 All-Star Game from Charlotte because of HB2, North Carolina’s controversial state law limiting civil rights protections for LGBT people.

The league says that the Charlotte Hornets and the city of Charlotte “have been working diligently to foster constructive dialogue and try to effect positive change.”

But the local support for LGBT rights couldn’t overcome “the climate created by HB2” in North Carolina, the NBA said in a statement.

The league says the city might host an All-Star Game in 2019, if the situation changes.

The location for the 2017 All-Star Game hasn’t yet been announced.

As we’ve reported, HB2 excludes LGBT people from North Carolina’s nondiscrimination laws and prevents local governments from offering discrimination protections that go beyond the state’s. It also requires schools, government offices and other public institutions to ensure that multiple occupancy bathrooms are “designated for and only used by persons based on their biological sex” as stated on their birth certificates.

After the NBA’s announcement, North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory issued a statement Thursday accusing “the sports and entertainment elite, Attorney General Roy Cooper and the liberal media” of misrepresenting the law, and writing that “most people believe boys and girls should be able to use school bathrooms, locker rooms and showers without the opposite sex present.”

“American families should be on notice that the selective corporate elite are imposing their political will on communities in which they do business, thus bypassing the democratic and legal process,” he wrote.

Charlotte has been at the center of the debate over the bill since the very start. Early this year, the city passed a measure protecting gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people from being discriminated against by businesses. It included a provision allowing trans people to use bathrooms corresponding to their gender.

Shortly before that measure was due to go into effect, the state’s General Assembly called a special session and over the course of 12 hours, introduced, debated and passed HB2 to override the Charlotte ordinance.

The new state law nullified a half-dozen other anti-discrimination ordinances as well. Citizens in the state are deeply divided over the law, with supporters feeling drowned out by the condemnation of the measure, as Emily McCord has reported for NPR.

Reaction from outside the state was indeed swift and intense, with several states banning non-essential travel to North Carolina by government employees. Paypal also nixed plans for an operations center in Charlotte.

President Obama has said the law should be overturned. The Justice Department has sent McCrory a letter warning him that the law violates the Civil Rights Act, and the state and the DOJ are currently suing each other over the issue.

The NBA began discussing the possibility of moving the 2017 All-Star Game shortly after HB2 was passed. “We have been guided in these discussions by the long-standing core values of our league. These include not only diversity, inclusion, fairness and respect for others but also the willingness to listen and consider opposing points of view,” the league writes.

“… While we recognize that the NBA cannot choose the law in every city, state, and country in which we do business, we do not believe we can successfully host our All-Star festivities in Charlotte in the climate created by HB2.”

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After a subpar showing at the 2010 Winter Olympics, the Russians devised an elaborate, clandestine plan to ensure a stellar performance at the 2014 games they were hosting in Sochi.

Here’s how it worked: In the dead of night, Russian officials exchanged the tainted urine from their athletes who had been doping with clean samples by passing them through a “mouse hole” drilled into the wall of the anti-doping lab. When the urine was tested the next day, there were no signs of doping, according to a detailed new report.

The Russian results in Sochi were spectacular. The Russians won 33 medals, more than any other country, compared with a disappointing 15 medals in Vancouver four years earlier, a count that put them in sixth place, just behind Austria.

The report released Monday was produced by Canadian professor Richard McLaren, on behalf of the World Anti-Doping Agency.

The Russian actions have been so egregious, and the doping so pervasive, that the anti-doping agency recommended the unprecedented step of banning the entire Russian team from the Summer Olympics next month in Brazil.

The International Olympic Committee, which has already barred the Russian track and field team, held an emergency meeting Tuesday to consider the recommendation. The IOC said it would “explore legal options” but put off a final decision, though the games start in less than three weeks.

The Russians have repeatedly denied the existence of a state-run doping program.

“Today, we see a dangerous return to this policy of letting politics interfere with sport,” President Vladimir Putin said in a lengthy statement on Monday.

The Russian operation in Sochi was first reported at length by The New York Times in May, and McLaren’s findings provided additional details as it looked at Russian efforts that apparently began ramping up after the poor showing in 2010.

The key source for both McLaren and The Times is Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, the former head of Russia’s anti-doping agency, who fled the country after he was implicated last November. Rodchenkov, who is now in Los Angeles, has estimated that 100 urine samples were swapped out during the Olympics, including those of at least 15 Russian medal winners.

Tight security at the lab

The new report said the widespread Russian doping efforts included a special operation set up specifically for the Sochi Games.

Security was extremely tight at the anti-doping lab for the Olympics, but Russian officials were among those with access. In an adjacent room, Rodchenkov said, he had clean samples from the Russian athletes. The athletes had produced them months earlier, when they temporarily stopped taking a three-drug cocktail the doctor said he developed. Those clean samples were frozen.

A small hole in the wall of the lab, near ground level, was covered during the day. But at night, it was opened so the urine samples could be exchanged with Evgeny Kurdyatsev, a Russian official who worked inside the lab, according to the latest report and the earlier one in the Times.

“At a convenient moment, usually around midnight when no one else was in the room, Kurdyatsev would pass the protected athletes’ A and B samples through the mouse hole in the [lab] to the operations room where Dr. Rodchenkov and others were waiting,” the report said.

“Once the samples were passed through, they were given to [Russian intelligence agent Evgeny] Blokhin, who had a security clearance to enter the laboratory under the guise of being a sewer engineer employed by engineering company Bilfinger.”

However, the exchange of urine was complicated because the dirty samples, produced by the athletes shortly after competition, were in marked bottles with seals that were supposed to be tamperproof.

The Russians managed to open the bottles without detection, disposing of the dirty samples. They then replaced them with the old, defrosted, clean samples and resealed the bottles.

Investigators checked a representative set of 11 bottles and found that all 11 “had scratches and marks on the inside of the bottle caps representative of the use of a tool used to open the cap,” the report said.

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A former director of baseball development for the St. Louis Cardinals has been sentenced to 46 months in federal prison for unauthorized access to the Houston Astros’ computer systems.

Chris Correa pleaded guilty to the unauthorized access — which involved finding or guessing passwords to the computer system where the Astros store scouting reports — in January.

In the 2013 draft season, he accessed “scout rankings of every player eligible for the draft,” among other things, the Justice Department says. In 2014, he viewed “notes of Astros’ trade discussions with other teams.” He accessed “lists ranking the players whom Astros scouts desired in the upcoming draft, summaries of scouting evaluations and summaries of college players identified by the Astros’ analytics department as top performers.”

U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes, as she sentenced Correa, noted that the crime has resulted in stricter security at other baseball teams, according to a press release from the Justice Department.

When Correa apologized and called his actions “reckless,” Huges replied, “No, you intentionally and knowingly did these acts.”

The “total intended loss” for Correa’s unauthorized access to the Astros computer systems is approximately $1.7 million, the Justice Department says. No one else from the Cardinals has been charged in connection with the crime.

Here’s more from the Justice Department on how Correa accessed the Astros’ proprietary information:

“In one instance, Correa was able to obtain an Astros employee’s password because that employee has previously been employed by the Cardinals. When he left the Cardinals organization, the employee had to turn over his Cardinals-owned laptop to Correa – along with the laptop’s password. Having that information, Correa was able to access the now-Astros employee’s Ground Control and e-mail accounts using a variation of the password he used while with the Cardinals.”

In 2014, the Astros reacted to the unauthorized intrusions into their system by requiring users to change their passwords, the Justice Department says:

“The team also reset all Ground Control passwords to a more complex default password and quickly e-mailed the new default password and the new URL to all Ground Control users.

“Shortly thereafter, Correa illegally accessed the aforementioned person’s e mail account and found the e mails that contained Ground Control’s new URL and the newly-reset password for all users.”

As we reported in January, the hack was uncovered last summer, and it soon “became apparent that the hack may have had something to do with the Cardinals’ familiarity with a former executive, Jeff Luhnow, who had gone to work for the Astros.”

“Luhnow became the Astros’ general manager in late 2011; prior to that, he was a vice president in the Cardinals’ organization, focusing on evaluating players,” the Two-Way reported last year. “[H]e’s a former business consultant whose analytical approach was credited with modernizing how the Cardinals evaluated talent. Despite being a divisive figure, he rose to lead the team’s scouting department.”

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“O Canada,” the national anthem of our neighbors up north, comes in two official versions — English and French. They share a melody, but differ in meaning.

Let the record show: neither version of those lyrics contains the phrase “all lives matter.”

But at the 2016 All-Star Game, the song got an unexpected edit.

At Petco Park in San Diego, one member of the Canadian singing group The Tenors — by himself, according to the other members of the group — revised the anthem.

Instead of singing, “With glowing hearts we see thee rise, the True North strong and free,” Remigio Pereira sang, “We’re all brothers and sisters. All lives matter to the great.”

Pereira also held up an “All Lives Matter” sign.

The other three singers, who say they weren’t aware of Pereira’s plans, weren’t singing any words at the time. In video of the moment, you can see one of them turn and stare at Pereira before turning back to face forward.

Major League Baseball says it was also unaware of Pereira’s intention to change the song.

The revision has been controversial for several reasons. The phrase “all lives matter” is often used by opponents and critics of the Black Lives Matter movement.

“It has been perceived to use reductive reasoning to trivialize the problems specifically facing black people,” the CBC notes.

The change to the song has also been sharply criticized by those who say it is highly inappropriate to politicize a national anthem — or, indeed, to change it at all.

In a statement posted on Twitter, The Tenors wrote that Pereira’s actions were “disrespectful” and “shameful,” and said he would not be performing with them until further notice.

Pereira took to Twitter to defend his lyrical decision.

“I’ve been so moved lately by the tragic loss of life and I hoped for a positive statement that would bring us ALL together. ONE LOVE,” he wrote on Twitter.

“That was my singular motivation when I said all lives matter,” he said.

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