The Super Bowl favorites are making a major move, bringing back one of the most dominant defensive players the NFL has ever seen.

Aaron Donald, the former Super Bowl champion and three-time NFL Defensive Player of the Year, is ending his retirement at 35 to return to the Los Angeles Rams, The Daily Mail has confirmed. ESPN first reported the agreement between Los Angeles and the 6ft 1in, 280-pound defensive tackle.

Donald’s agent, Todd France, confirmed to The Daily Mail that the one-year contract is worth $20 million, with incentives that could push the total value to $30 million.

His return gives the Rams another headline addition after landing reigning NFL Defensive Player of the Year Myles Garrett, setting up what could become one of the league’s most imposing front sevens in Los Angeles.

Whether Donald will be ready for the Rams’ season opener against the San Francisco 49ers in Melbourne, Australia, on September 10 remains uncertain. Even so, he is expected to play a significant role for Los Angeles this season.

‘Do I feel like I can play at a high level? Yes,’ Donald told reporters on Sunday. ‘Do I feel like I can still be myself? One hundred percent, and if I didn’t feel like that, I wouldn’t be here.’

As for playing with Garrett, Donald is obviously intrigued.

‘I already thought it was a stacked D-line with Verse,’ he said, ‘and then you bring a guy like Myles Garrett, a generational talent, and then it’s like, “Gosh, that could be fun.”‘

The two have won a combined five DPOY awards.

Already considered to be Super Bowl favorites, the veteran Rams have been linked to Donald since acquiring Garrett from the Cleveland Browns for budding pass rusher Jared Verse, a 2027 first-round draft pick, a 2028 second-round pick, and a 2029 third-round pick. In fact, Donald had made numerous appearances at the Rams’ training facility in recent weeks, although he has not been practicing with his new teammates. 

ESPN’s Adam Schefter stoked fan interest back in June by posting a graphic on X showing Garrett alongside Donald with the caption: ‘Next in line in LA.’  

And the Rams didn’t exactly hide the looming possibility of Donald’s return. 

Asked about the legendary interior lineman earlier this month, Rams head coach Sean McVay told Sports Central LA: ‘The latest is he’s putting himself in a position to make a decision. He’s working hard, he’s feeling good.’

McVay continued: ‘He’s taken great care of himself in the two years that he’s been off… he’s feeling good so far. I think we’ll have a little bit more of an update once we leave here and get back to Woodland Hills. 

‘But things are looking positive. But again, he doesn’t owe us anything. We’ll take it a day at a time.’

Curiously, Donald seemed determined to remain retired when speaking to The Daily Mail’s Jake Fenner a year earlier. 

‘For me, retirement’s been pretty good, right? Because I left on my own terms when I wanted to,’ Donald told the Daily Mail. 

‘The only thing I would say is, them days you got that aggression, you ain’t able to hit somebody to get it all out, so that’s a big change.’

There had been attempts by other teams to lure him back, though. 

‘Obviously, there’s been a few NFL players that reached out to me to try to recruit me on their team, but my football days are done and passed me, and it’s onto the next chapter of life for me,’ he said.

Donald did not name names, adding ‘there’s been at least four guys’ who tried to lure him back via electronic message. 

‘I’m like, “My days is over, so I’m done,”‘ Donald said. 

Despite being undersized for the position, Donald was generally considered to be among the strongest players of his era, if not football history. 

He put up a then-record 35 reps on the 225-pound bench press during the 2014 NFL scouting combine before being taken out of Pittsburgh by the St. Louis Rams with the 13th pick in the draft.

Although he’d converted from defensive end only a few years earlier, Donald quickly proved to be a capable interior lineman in the NFL, where he won Defensive Rookie of the Year honors in 2014.

Donald earned the first of eight All-Pro nods the following season as the Rams moved back to Los Angeles. Over 10 NFL seasons, the Pittsburgh native was named to ten Pro Bowl teams and recorded a whopping 111 sacks, including a league-best 20.5 in 2018.

He was still playing at an All-Pro level in 2023 when Donald had eight sacks en route to his first Super Bowl title. And although he remained in prime condition, Donald opted to retire before the 2024 campaign.

Now he joins a Rams defense that includes Garrett, run-stuffing nose tackle Poona Ford, edge rusher Byron Young, impressive young safety Kamren Kinchens and Trent McDuffie, the newly acquired All-Pro cornerback who won two Super Bowls in Kansas City. 

CHICAGO (WLS) — Families gathered for a vigil Sunday as they pressed South Chicago Chapel for answers about what happened to their loved ones.

The emotional gathering followed the discovery earlier this month of dozens of decomposing remains that authorities say were improperly kept inside the funeral home.

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For many relatives, grief has turned into anger and uncertainty as they continue trying to learn where their family members’ remains are and how the situation was allowed to unfold.

South Chicago Chapel has been the focus of an investigation since Aug. 6, when the remains of 56 people were found. Authorities moved in after reports of a strong odor coming from the building prompted a raid at the facility.

“Just give us our family back,” Franquella Campbell said, speaking for those in mourning. “Not just my mom — their son, her son, his son, their wife, their husband, their family member… a child… a brother, sister. Everyone here is loved.”

Families rallied together, frustrated with the investigation, and demanded more transparency and the return of their relatives’ remains. There was a prayer and an emotional balloon release.

“I’m just wondering what happened to my son. I don’t know where he’s at… I want his ashes,” said Nora Nuckles.

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A notable new book from Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, “Going Further,” is renewing attention on the life, influence and judicial career of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, whom Cruz presents as the greatest living American.

When Thomas joined the Supreme Court in the early 1990s, his conservative approach and originalist reading of the Constitution often left him writing from the margins, most frequently in dissent.

More than three decades later, Thomas has become the second-longest-serving justice in Supreme Court history, and his once-isolated views now often help shape the court’s majority opinions.

In that sense, Clarence Thomas has prevailed over the long term. The more interesting question is how he did it.

Thirty-five years ago, much of mainstream legal education and judicial practice encouraged judges to interpret laws by searching for broad and often elusive ideas such as legislative history and legislative intent.

It’s now hard to believe, but the commonsense notion that one should begin the interpretive exercise with a document’s text and plain meaning was pretty much unheard of.

Thomas, along with his then-colleagues Justice Antonin Scalia and Chief Justice William Rehnquist, galvanized an intellectual revolution in American legal and judicial practice.

Today, law schools instruct students to begin the interpretive exercise with the text.

In fact, this is hardly controversial: As the liberal Justice Elena Kagan put it in a 2015 Harvard Law School lecture, “We’re all textualists now.”

A big part of the reason for this success is simple: sheer persuasiveness.

The straightforward nature of the originalist and textualist position quickly found mass appeal, putting defenders of legislative history or “living constitutionalism” on their back feet.

They haven’t been able to keep up.

In the area of legal interpretation, liberals have lost the public argument — badly.

In recent years, we’ve seen this manifest in conservative victories at the high court on religious liberty, abortion, gun rights, affirmative action and the administrative state.

There is an underappreciated additional ingredient in Thomas’ winning formula: his kindness, affability and genuine human decency.

Thomas’ life story is the stuff of legend.

He grew up in the most abject poverty imaginable in Jim Crow-era rural Georgia. English was not even his first language.

He overcame all that, in addition to his onetime wavering faith and even an infatuation with Malcolm X and the Black Power movement, to become one of the greatest conservatives in American history.

But here’s the thing: Thomas never forgot where he came from.

It is well known that, inside the Supreme Court building, Thomas is the personal favorite justice.

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That’s true for the justices themselves, it’s true for the law clerks, and it’s even true for the janitors.

Thomas is the justice who will talk NASCAR with the court security guard (he’s a big fan of the sport), and he is the justice who will regale law clerks with funny stories from years gone by — with his signature, boisterous laugh.

The one topic Thomas will not talk about, because it would offend his old-school Southern manners, is himself.

The Supreme Court, unlike Congress or the executive branch, is a small, intimate institution.

Passions can run high, but a justice can best achieve success over the long haul if he can persuade his colleagues in conferences, memoranda and other communications.

As the saying goes, you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

That was not always Scalia’s way, but it is definitely Thomas’ way.

The next Supreme Court term begins in just over month, and the court’s senior-most member will once again anchor the court’s originalist bloc.

There will be Viramontes v. Cook County, a prime opportunity to extend a Second Amendment guarantee to modern sporting rifles (“AR-15s”).

There will be St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy, another case out of stubborn Colorado that could, and should, extend otherwise-universal preschool voucher access to religious schools.

Other big cases on the docket touch on voting rights, climate change and more.

Thomas’ influence will be palpable.

He will once again serve the role he always has: that of dependable workhorse and beacon of intellectual clarity.

He will once again be the court’s most principled originalist, establishing a barometer off of which other originalists can assess their own instincts and rulings.

In a nation short on exemplary role models, Thomas fills the void.

He would never dream of saying so himself, but Thomas is an American hero and the nation’s most inspiring man.

The only question is whether he will stay on the court until May 20, 2028, at which point he will become the nation’s longest-serving justice ever.

If there’s one thing we know from Clarence Thomas’ life: Don’t bet against him.

Josh Hammer is Newsweek senior editor-at-large and host of “The Josh Hammer Show.”