NEW YORK (AP) — Touted freshman guard Braylon Mullins played 10 minutes in his debut for No. 5 UConn on Friday in their 74-61 win over No. 13 Illinois after missing more than a month with an ankle injury.
Limited to about 15 minutes, Mullins checked in for the first time with about 12 minutes left in the first half. His only basket in five attempts was a jumper that gave the Huskies a 63-42 lead with 11:27 left and got a loud ovation from the UConn fans in the crowd.
“He’s going to continue to get better,” UConn forward Alex Karaban said about Mullins. “He’s going to continue to grow and he’s getting way more comfortable there. What he does in practice, he kills in practice, he’s going to get more comfortable there.”
Mullins’ lone appearance for the Huskies occurred Oct. 13 when he scored 12 points in an exhibition game against Boston College. He injured his ankle during a subsequent practice and began fully participating in practices this week.
Mullins is the top recruit for UConn, which also added Silas Demary Jr. from Georgia and Malachi Smith from Dayton in the transfer portal. Last season as a senior for Greenfield-Central High School in Indiana, Mullins averaged 25 points and shot 47% from 3-point range.
Besides Mullins, Tarris Reed Jr. returned after missing the previous two games with an ankle injury. Reed also sat out the season-opener against New Haven with a hamstring injury and is averaging 20 points and 9.3 rebounds this season.
Also on a minute limit, Reed scored two points and grabbed five rebounds in nearly 15 minutes. He missed a jumper in the first half and two layups in the second half and allowed the Huskies to use freshman Eric Reibe off the bench as a backup center.
“Tarris is probably a week ahead of where he should be, but that kid was just a warrior today,” said Huskies coach Danny Hurley, who later added Reed's minutes would not be restricted for Tuesday's game at Kansas.
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FILE - UConn forward Tarris Reed Jr., left, and UConn guard Braylon Mullins watch play from the bench during the first half of an NCAA basketball game against Michigan State, Oct. 28, 2025, in Hartford, Conn. (AP Photo/Jessica Hill, File)
PARIS (AP) — Bernadette Chirac, the steel-willed former first lady of France who spent 12 years at the Élysée Palace from 1995 to 2007 beside President Jacques Chirac while building her own political power in rural Corrèze and turning a children’s hospital charity into a national institution, has died. She was 93.
President Emmanuel Macron confirmed her death Saturday, saying he and his wife Brigitte had learned with “great sadness” of the passing of a woman who marked French history beside Jacques Chirac, who died in 2019, and changed the lives of millions of patients through her charitable work.
“A great lady of the heart has departed,” Macron said.
For more than half a century, Chirac was the fixed point in her late husband’s restless climb — through Parliament, two terms as prime minister, 18 years as mayor of Paris and, in 1995, the presidency.
She appears in the official photographs with her chin lifted, blond hair lacquered into place, a small handbag on her arm, looking less like a spouse than like an institution.
But the caricature never quite contained her.
The Chanel suits, dark glasses, nasal voice and withering judgments became part of the national image.
Beneath them was a relentless worker and a cold-eyed political operator who, almost alone among the wives of French presidents, built a base of power that was her own.
She was born Bernadette Thérèse Marie Chodron de Courcel on May 18, 1933, in Paris, into money, lineage and Catholic duty.
Her father’s family included soldiers, industrialists and diplomats; an uncle had served as an aide to Charles de Gaulle in wartime London.
But her life would be most marked by her time at the prestigious Sciences Po university in Paris, where she met Jacques Chirac, a handsome and much-courted young man whose appetite for politics would come to define them both.
They married in March 1956. The union lasted 63 years and was, by her own account, a long lesson in endurance.
Jacques Chirac was famous for his warmth, appetite and instinctive connection with crowds. Bernadette’s gifts were different, observers said.
She was controlled, socially formidable, devout, exacting and sometimes devastatingly funny.
The Catholic philosopher Jean Guitton called her the “last queen of France,” and she did little to discourage the idea.
Her husband’s reputation as a womanizer was an open secret she chose, after much pain, to meet with dry humor.
Swarmed by photographers in Corrèze in 1998 — after rumors that Jacques Chirac had been unreachable the night Princess Diana died because he was with an actress — she stepped from her car and deadpanned: “Calm down. I’m not Claudia Cardinale. Or Lollobrigida.”
“At first, it was hard. I was very heartbroken, and then I got used to it,” she said years later in a television documentary.
“I told myself that was how things were and that I had to accept it with as much dignity as possible.”
Sent to tend her husband’s rural stronghold in Corrèze while he pursued power in Paris, she did far more than tend it. In 1971, she was elected municipal councilor in Sarran. In 1979, she became a general councilor in Corrèze and held the seat until 2015.
Her influence grew after Jacques Chirac became president in 1995. The role of first lady in France has no constitutional power, but she made the Élysée a place where her approval mattered.
She could be loyal, cutting and unforgiving, and understood that campaigns are made not only of speeches and polls but of debts, slights and resentments.
Yet she also carved out a space for female authority inside a male political culture that had little interest in sharing power — making it quietly clear that she would not be reduced to “the wife of.”
Her deepest grief stayed mostly private.
The Chiracs’ elder daughter, Laurence, developed severe anorexia after meningitis in adolescence and attempted suicide more than once. She never fully recovered and died in 2016 at 58.
That ordeal pushed Chirac toward the charitable work that reshaped her public image.
In 1994, she took over a medical charity that collected coins for children in hospitals. To millions of French viewers, the woman once mocked for hauteur became the face of hospitalized children and families living around hospital beds.
She continued running it until 2019, when she handed it to Brigitte Macron, the wife of France's current president, and became honorary president.
By then, she had long since become a political force in her own name.
“My husband no longer does politics, but I do,” she said to journalists, after Jacques Chirac left office in 2007.
She famously nicknamed Dominique de Villepin, the Élysée official she distrusted, “Nero,” yet also reportedly helped engineer her husband’s reconciliation with Nicolas Sarkozy, the former protégé who had betrayed him politically.
Her 2001 memoir, “Conversation,” written with journalist Patrick de Carolis, sold hundreds of thousands of copies and introduced the French to a franker, funnier and more independent woman than many had assumed.
After Jacques Chirac left the Élysée, his health declined and his public voice faded. Hers remained sharper for longer. Asked how he was, according to French media, she answered in her flat, unmistakable voice: “He keeps the dog.”
Age and grief eventually drew her out of public view.
By the time Jacques Chirac died in 2019, she was too fragile to take part in the public farewell where France and foreign leaders honored him.
FILE - Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy speaks with former first lady Bernadette Chirac during the inauguration of the Foundation Claude Pompidou, Centre teaching and research on Alzheimer's disease, Monday, March 10, 2014, in Nice, southeastern France. (AP Photo/Lionel Cironneau, File)
FILE - French President Jacques Chirac and his wife Bernadette arrive at the airport in Hanover, Germany on Sunday, June 25, 2000. (AP Photo/Jens Meyer, File)
FILE - From left: Cherie Blair, wife of British Prime Minister Tony Blair Bernadette Chirac, wife of French President Jacques Chirac, Lyudmila Putina, wife of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and First Lady Laura Bush, converse as they walk to a press conference site at the G-8 Summit on Sea Island, Ga., Wednesday, June 9, 2004. (AP Photo/Ric Feld, File)
FILE - French President Jacques Chirac, center left, and his wife First Lady Bernadette Chirac are surrounded by the crowd after addressing New Year wishes to the inhabitants of the region of Correze, in Tulle, southwestern France, Saturday, Jan. 14, 2006. (AP Photo/Bob Edme, File)
FILE - Bernadette Chirac, wife of former French President Jacques Chirac attends a ceremony to pay tribute to Simone Veil in the courtyard of the Invalides in Paris, France, Wednesday, July 5, 2017. (AP Photo/Michel Euler, File)
