Xavier basketball player Filip Borovicanin and 23 other college basketball players were awarded an injunction by an Ohio judge to play college hoops this fall, hours after three players petitioned a judge in Tennessee to be able to play another season.

These players are from the high school class of 2022 and maintain it is illegal for the NCAA to deny them eligibility for another season when its new eligibility rules permit others to play a fifth season.

The core of the dispute rests in the NCAA Division I Cabinet last month unanimously approving a system that provides five years of eligibility beginning at the start of the academic year following an athlete’s 19th birthday or upon full-time enrollment in college, whichever comes sooner. The rule does not apply to college athletes from the high school class of 2022 who didn’t redshirt as freshmen, even though these athletes, as Borovicanin insists, “spent four years competing against athletes who received an extra year through COVID-era waivers.”

Led by attorneys Darren Heitner and Ryan Downton, Borovicanin’s group argues that the NCAA has breached obligations owed to them in the Division I Manual. The alleged breaches center on assurances of fundamental fairness, good faith and consistency. They also portray the NCAA as hypocritical in rendering them ineligible while allowing former G League players and other ex-pros to play.

Hamilton County (Ohio) Court of Common Pleas Judge Christopher Wagner agreed with some of the players’ arguments and granted an injunction that prevents the NCAA from ruling the players ineligible.

Judge Wagner found it problematic that the NCAA waited until June to determine new eligibility rules since that delay left the players’ “status in question until June 2026.”

The judge also concluded there is a sufficient contractual nexus between the NCAA and the athletes, since “the NCAA cannot exist without student-athletes,” because “student-athletes can now be paid directly by NCAA member schools,” and because the NCAA Manual includes language about protecting student-athletes’ well-being. He was not persuaded by NCAA arguments that the manual is not a contract between the NCAA and students who play varsity sports.

Judge Wagner further opined it is “arbitrary and capricious” for the NCAA to exclude the players in question. He found it was permissible for students who graduated high school prior to 2022 to receive COVID waivers and play a fifth season without redshirting, but not for the class of 2022.

Judge Wagner noted that he was informed by testimony given by Xavier men’s basketball coach Richard Pitino, Akron men’s basketball coach Dustin Ford and Cincinnati men’s basketball coach Jerrod Calhoun.

In a statement shared with Sportico, the NCAA said it will immediately appeal the ruling. The statement argued that Judge Wagner “disregarded over a century of precedent and substituted its own judgment, on a limited factual record, for the collective expertise of the nation’s leading higher education institutions,” and criticized the judge for allegedly basing his decision “on assertions by plaintiffs’ counsel about the NCAA and its bylaws that bear no resemblance to reality.”

The NCAA also noted that plaintiffs will “take away valuable participation opportunities from student-athletes who are eligible to compete, in favor of those who have already received exactly the number of seasons of competition they expected.”

Turning to Tennessee, Nebraska long snapper Kevin Gallic, Wisconsin long snapper Nick Levy and Wisconsin kicker Nathanial Vakos are central to a new court filing in Tennessee federal court on Thursday. 

The trio completed their fourth seasons during the 2025–26 academic year and were non-redshirt seniors. They maintain their ineligibility is an antitrust problem.

Gallic, Levy and Vakos are also prospective pro players who have already been in contact with NFL teams about potential employment.

Gallic worked out with the New York Giants in April and is scheduled to attend free-agent camps later this month. Vakos was invited to attend the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ rookie minicamp, though he was passed over for a veteran kicker. Levy, meanwhile, was in contention to sign with the Washington Commanders, but that signing didn’t materialize.

None of the three is currently eligible to play another season of D-I football. 

In a brief authored by Downton as well as Salvador Hernandez (Riley & Jacobson) and Christopher Wilson (Baker Botts), the three players demand their own injunction.

Gallic, Levy and Vakos stress time is of the essence, as they have “mere weeks” to take on expected roster spots before the 2026 college football season begins. The trio also maintain that the chance to play another season is virtually essential for them to have a good chance to join the NFL.

As described in the brief, these players were “within arm’s reach of securing spots on NFL rosters” in recent weeks and months. As the players tell it, “another season of FBS football would provide an irreplaceable opportunity” to further their skills as well as “produce game film, participate in all-star events and receive live evaluation from professional scouts.”

The filing is part of the existing case, Langston Patterson v. NCAA, where several D-I football players (including Gallic, Levy and Vakos) argue that if college athletes have five years to practice and five years to graduate, they should have five years to play. Under the old system, football players could play up to four regular seasons plus postseason games in a redshirt year without the season counting against the four-season cap. Those players could also participate in practices, workouts and other team activities for five years. The Patterson plaintiffs maintain that losing out on another season deprives them of potential NIL income, revenue-sharing payments, scholarship money and educational benefits.

In January, U.S. District Judge William L. Campbell Jr. denied the Patterson plaintiffs an injunction, in part because he was unpersuaded that the labor market for D-I FBS football is meaningfully impacted by the exclusion of some players and, correspondingly, the inclusion of others.

But on Thursday, Gallic, Levy and Vakos insisted that the college sports landscape is now quite different than it was in January. Most relevantly, they assert, the NCAA changed the rules at issue in Patterson so that more athletes can continue to play.

To that point, the trio maintain there is no valid reason to exclude non-redshirt players who played their fourth season in 2025–26 while now allowing football players who similarly enrolled in college in the fall of 2022 and who took a redshirt year. They also question why they can’t continue playing when college athletes who graduated high school in 2022 and then played professionally, or who completed a postgraduate year at a high school, can keep playing.

The arguments raised by Gallic, Levy and Vakos have been advanced in other cases across the country over the last couple of weeks. On Tuesday, Sportico detailed those cases. They could lead to conflicting rulings in different jurisdictions and thus result in some colleges being able to play athletes who have exhausted their NCAA eligibility while others are denied that chance. For example, while Borovicanin’s group has won an injunction, similarly situated players in other courts might lose.

The NCAA has raised a number of defenses, including that, through its membership rule-making process, it has the right to determine eligibility requirements for college students to play sports.

Other defenses include that if players like Gallic, Levy and Vakos become eligible this fall, they would take roster spots that incoming freshmen and transfers are expecting to fill. Along those lines, the NCAA has asserted that, to the extent college sports is populated by athletes who stick around long after their classmates graduate and move on to another phase of life, college sports could morph into something akin to minor league sports, which would be more difficult to market.

The State Department condemned Iran’s intensified repression of Christians, including a Catholic woman on hunger strike in a prison known as one of the most brutal in the theocratic state.

The Trump administration statement on widespread human rights violations carried out by the Iranian regime coincides with new military strikes against it in response to Tehran’s attacks on commercial tankers in the Strait of Hormuz.

The Christian woman on hunger strike is 42-year-old Ghazal Marzban, who sits in Iran’s infamous Evin prison in Tehran, according to Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA). Iran sentenced Marzban, a Catholic, to nearly 10 years in prison for practicing her Christian faith, Iranian experts told Fox News Digital. Marzban’s physical health, as of late May, had deteriorated. Her current condition is not known.

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It is unclear if the administration plans to ramp up pressure on Iran’s leaders for their widepsread persecution of religious minorities and opponents of the regime.

A State Department spokesperson told Fox News Digital, “We are aware of these reports. It is reprehensible that the Iranian regime continues to persecute religious minorities, including Iranian Christians.”

Article 18, an organization that promotes religious freedom in Iran, noted that following Marzban’s conversion, the Islamic law graduate was banned from taking her bar entry examination. Her husband, who also converted to Christianity, has been denied medicine for his Parkinson’s disease, according to Article 18.

Fox News Digital sent a press query to Iran’s U.N. Mission about Marzban and the plight of practicing Christians in Iran.

The State Department spokesperson said, “In Iran, human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedoms of expression, peaceful assembly, association, and religion or belief, are completely ignored. The regime targets members of religious and ethnic minority groups and uses tactics like arbitrary arrest and torture to intimidate opponents and silence dissent.”

After the regime reportedly murdered as many as 45,000 Iranian demonstrators within a 48-hour period in January, including as many as 22 Iranian Christians, the security forces of the regime arrested vast numbers of protesters.

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President Donald Trump has cited the number of 45,000 Iranians killed by the regime. The State Department told Fox News Digital that Iran’s leaders should free those protesters still in detention.

“We reaffirm our unwavering solidarity with the people of Iran and call for the immediate and unconditional release of all political and wrongfully detained prisoners, including those facing persecution for peacefully exercising their fundamental freedoms,” said the State Department spokesperson.

Lisa Daftari, an expert on Iran who is the editor-in-chief of The Foreign Desk, told Fox News Digital that the joint U.S.-Israel elimination of the former supreme leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, in February, “Hasn’t eased pressure. On the contrary, we are seeing more escalation and the implementation of even more hardline influences.”

Daftari said the “Arrests of Christians jumped from 139 in 2024 to 254 in 2025, alongside longer and more frequent sentences. At least 11 people received over a decade. After the recent war, authorities claimed they had ‘neutralized’ 53 elements, which is how they refer to evangelical Christians. That is because the Islamic Republic views conversion as a security threat.”

Hengaw, an organization that monitors human rights violations in Iran, reported on its website on July 3 that the regime plans to seize the St. Peter Church in Tehran. Daftari said, “This is a large Christian compound with schools and family homes, and roughly 20 Armenian and Assyrian families are being expelled under a Revolutionary Court order that’s been sitting unused since 1998.”

When asked about a policy response from the U.S., Daftari said, “If there’s going to be a response, it has to be targeted. That means sanctions on the specific judges, intelligence officials and IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] actors involved in cases like St. Peter Church and Marzban. And the transfer of church property to entities like EIKO [a business empire controlled by the late Khamenei] should be treated as state seizure, not an internal legal matter, and raised accordingly in international forums.”

Ramin, whose real name cannot be disclosed due to “security reasons,” an expert for Open Doors, a global Christian organization that aids persecuted Christians, told Fox News Digital, “The threatened confiscation of St Peter’s Evangelical Church in Tehran is deeply concerning and should not be viewed merely as a property dispute. It reflects a wider and long-standing pattern of pressure on Iran’s Christian communities, including recognized historic churches, Protestant communities, converts and reported cases involving Catholic converts.”

Ramin added, “St Peter’s is one of Iran’s historic Protestant churches, and the reported eviction of families from the compound sends a clear message of intimidation to the wider Christian community. Together with the arrest, detention and sentencing of Christian converts, including those from Catholic backgrounds, this shows that the Iranian authorities continue to treat the peaceful Christian faith as a security concern rather than as a basic right to freedom of religion or belief.”

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Mansour Borji, the executive director of Article 18, told Fox News Digital that “The targeting of Christians whom the founders of the Islamic Republic viewed as an ideological threat began from the earliest days of the revolution. This included both Catholic and Protestant communities. Within days of the 1979 revolution, the Rev. Arastoo Sayyah, an Anglican priest, was murdered in his office. Foreign missionaries were expelled within the first year and Christian schools, hospitals and churches soon came under increasing pressure.”

He added that, “Since 2008, Article18 has documented numerous confidential cases involving the arbitrary arrest of Catholic converts, harassment of church leaders, visa denials for clergy, the revocation of citizenship from a long-serving bishop and the confiscation and demolition of church property.”

Borji continued, “The recent move against St. Peter’s Church is therefore not an isolated incident or a new development. It is part of a long-standing pattern of systematic pressure on independent Christian communities. The Islamic Republic is a totalitarian regime that has consistently sought to suppress any institution or community that operates outside its ideological control.”

In the wake of the intensified persecution of Iranian Christians, he warned that “If the Islamic Republic regains the capacity to project its ideology with renewed confidence, the consequences are likely to extend across the region and beyond.”

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He urged that perpetrators “face targeted sanctions, visa restrictions and asset freezes under existing human rights mechanisms.”

Borji said, “Governments, especially in the EU, U.K. and other trade partners, should also make religious freedom a consistent part of their engagement with Iran, rather than treating it as a secondary issue. Appeasing a regime that persecutes its own people has rarely produced moderation.”

Veteran politician Andy Burnham has taken another step towards becoming the UK’s next prime minister, after the majority of Labour MPs nominated him to replace Keir Starmer.

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The 56-year-old’s Labour leadership bid was backed by 322 Labour MPs on Thursday and he remains the only person to publicly declare themselves a candidate to replace Starmer, who announced he was quitting last month.

Burnham appeared on course to be crowned Labour leader unchallenged on the first day of nominations.

If Burnham reaches at least 323 nominations then it would no longer be mathematically possible for another challenger to get the 81 signatures required to join the race out of the total of 402 Labour MPs.

“It is all starting to feel very real,” Burnham said in a social media video posted shortly after the process opened on Thursday morning.

Nominations close on 16 July. In the absence of a contest, Burnham will be crowned Labour leader and prime minister in waiting at a special conference the following day.

He would then replace Starmer at 10 Downing Street on 20 July after meeting King Charles, becoming Britain’s seventh prime minister in a decade.

“There’s no one else,” one Labour MP told the AFP news agency on condition of anonymity after nominating Burnham.

Armed forces minister Al Carns, thought to be Burnham’s final remaining potential challenger, ruled himself out of the running late on Wednesday.

He had expressed hope a leadership contest would give the party the “opportunity for a proper debate.”

“But months of internal Labour politics isn’t what the country needs right now,” he said.

Burnham, nicknamed the “King of the North” for winning three consecutive Greater Manchester mayoral elections, has vowed to “bring about the biggest rebalancing of power our country has seen.”

His signature proposal is the creation of a “No. 10 North” to coordinate greater devolution, a reference to the UK prime minister’s address at 10 Downing Street.

Burnham has pledged fiscal discipline and to reduce the country’s ballooning welfare bill, having already sought to calm markets by committing to the government’s current borrowing limits.

But he will face the same challenges that buffeted Starmer’s premiership, notably anaemic growth, a cost-of-living squeeze and an unpredictable US president in Donald Trump.

He has also indicated he could stake out a different path to Starmer on Israel, which enjoyed solid backing from the Labour government even as criticism grew of its war in Gaza.

“I am sorry about that,” Burnham told the Guardian newspaper in an interview published on Thursday. “The response has too often not been good enough. We need to do better.”

Starmer, under pressure for months over policy U-turns and questions about his judgement, announced on 22 June that he was resigning after losing the support of Labour MPs.

His move came after Burnham won a by-election that allowed him to return to parliament to launch a widely expected leadership challenge.

On the day Starmer announced his resignation, Burnham was sworn into parliament, becoming an MP again following his stint between 2001-2017.

Roll the dice

Afterwards, some 200 Labour MPs feted Burnham during a group photo in Westminster, in a clear sign that they expect him to take over.

Former health minister Wes Streeting announced he was dropping his intention to run and backing Burnham.

Burnham, seen as slightly to the left of the more centrist Starmer and more charismatic, is Labour’s most popular politician, surveys show.

Many MPs feel he is the party’s best chance of clawing back support from Nigel Farage’s anti-immigrant Reform UK party before the next general election, expected in 2029.

Reform has led Labour in national opinion polls for well over a year, although the gap has narrowed in recent weeks amid questions over Farage’s finances.

One Labour MP, who asked not to be named, said the party was right to “roll the dice” on Burnham, saying “he couldn’t be worse than Starmer.”

“I hope he’s a breath of fresh air,” the lawmaker told AFP.