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CLEMSON, S.C. (AP) — Clemson defensive coordinator Brent Venables has spent a lot of time watching No. 8 North Carolina score quickly. And he’s sharing them all with players in film sessions that get quite repetitive.

“It’s ‘How you like this play? How about this play? How about that score?'” Venables said Tuesday. “First play of the Duke game, it’s all jacked up, in state rivalry, then they run the flea flicker. Touchdown, 80 yards.”

Venables knows the difficult challenge ahead for No. 1 Clemson (12-0) in slowing down the Tar Heels (11-1) in the Atlantic Coast Conference championship game Saturday night.

North Carolina is 16th nationally in yards gained at better than 494 a game. More impressive, in Venables’ view, is how fast the Tar Heels can strike.

“There’s a lot of explosive play-makers” on UNC’s offense, Venables said.

But Venables without options; Clemson has a few play-makers on defense, too. Defensive end Shaq Lawson leads the country in tackles for loss. Linebacker B.J. Goodson and Ben Boulware have combined for 234 tackles, 22 of those behind the line of scrimmage.

No one at Clemson was completely sure how long it would take this year’s defense to come together. The Tigers lost eight starters off last season’s No. 1 ranked defense in the country, including first-round NFL draft picks in defensive end Vic Beasley and linebacker Stephone Anthony.

If that wasn’t enough, linebacker Korrin Wiggins hurt his knee in camp and starting defensive tackle D.J. Reader took an extended leave of absence from the team for personal reasons in late August.

Through it all, Clemson ended the regular-season seventh nationally in the Football Bowl Subdivision, allowing 288 yards a game.

“I thought we had a chance to be solid,” Venables said. “But probably not to the same level” as 2014.

They’ll need that to corral the Tar Heels, who’ve scored 38 points or more in eight of their 12 games this season. They scored 66 points in that Duke contest, then had 59 a week later against Miami on the way to the ACC’s Coastal Division crown.

Venables called North Carolina the best offense Clemson’s faced all season, including Notre Dame and Florida State. If the Tigers don’t bring their best effort, the perfect season and trip to the College Football Playoff could easily slip away Saturday night.

“The margin for error is less because of the opponent,” Venables said.

North Carolina coach Larry Fedora is equally awed by Clemson’s defense.

“This is best football team we’ve have faced,” he said. “I mean, they’re the number one team in the country. And they’ve been that way for how many weeks? So they’re really good.”

Clemson’s defense, though, has gone through a late-season slide.

In its first seven games, only two opponents in Notre Dame and Georgia Tech scored 20 or more points against the Tigers. Clemson is giving up an average of 25 points a game allowed its final five contests.

South Carolina scored its most points all season in a 37-32 loss to the Tigers last week — most of it coming after Clemson had taken a 28-10 lead.

Lawson, Clemson’s junior defensive end, said the Tigers have been prepping for their league title game all season and will be ready to go at North Carolina this weekend.

The Tar Heels worst offensive showing was their first game, an inexplicable 17-13 loss to the Gamecocks at the title game site, Bank of America Stadium.

“Ever since then they’ve been on fire,” said Lawson, Clemson’s junior lineman.

But Clemson’s has practicing all season, Lawson said, against their own high-flying attack, which leads the ACC in total yards this season and can be as quick-strike as the Tar Heels.

“We’re used to going against their offense because that’s what our offense does against us when we’re going to practice every week,” he said. “So it’s not a big challenge for us. We’ve just got to be ready to play.”

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AP Sports Writer Aaron Beard in Chapel Hill, North Carolina contributed to this report.

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Saudi Arabia’s Jeddah Tower will be the world’s tallest building. It will be 1 km (3,280 feet) tall. 

Produced by Jacqui Frank. Special thanks to Emmanuel Ocbazghi.

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Los Angeles (AFP) – LeBron James expressed sadness at Kobe Bryant’s retirement decision on Tuesday, voicing regret that he never got to face off against his boyhood idol in an NBA Finals series.

Speaking two days after Bryant announced he would quit basketball at the end of this season, James told reporters he was sorry to see the 37-year-old Lakers star leaving.

“It was kind of sad actually,” Cleveland Cavaliers superstar James said. “The guy’s had a hell of a career.”

James revealed Bryant had influenced him at every stage of his basketball career, from being someone he had revered as a schoolboy as well as an opponent and USA Olympic team-mate who had set the standards to aspire to.

But James said it still nagged at him that he had never managed to face Bryant and the Lakers in the NBA Finals. Either Bryant or James has appeared in every finals since 2007, but the two men never met.

“I didn’t hold up my end of the bargain in 2009 for the fans, for us, to meet in the Finals,” James said, referring to the 2009 campaign when the Cavs had a 66-16 record but were upset by the Orlando Magic in the Eastern Conference finals. The Lakers went on to eventually win the title.

“I know the world wanted to see it. I wanted it, we wanted it. He held up his end and I didn’t hold up my end, and I hate that. I hate that that didn’t happen.

“I’ve seen the stat that since ’07 either he has or I’ve been in the Finals but we’ve never matched up. And that definitely sucks. Not only for us two being competitors, wanting to go against each other in the Finals, but also for the fans.”

James meanwhile said he had reveled in being a team-mate of Bryant on the gold medal-winning US Olympic teams in 2008 and 2012, saying he had gained an insight into Bryant’s competitive make-up when he saw how he played against Spain’s Pau Gasol, then a team-mate on the Lakers.

“The first play of the game he ran through the chest of Pau Gasol and got a flagrant. And Pau Gasol was his teammate with the Lakers. I was like, ‘Yeah, this guy is on another level.’ It was one of the first plays of the game. I was like, ‘This guy’s all about winning and whoever he’s playing for or who he’s playing with at that point in time.’ …It was crazy.”

James added that Bryant’s ferocious professionalism had also served to motivate him during his NBA career.

“I knew I had to be better because of Kobe Bryant,” James said. 

“I knew he was in the gym and I knew he was working on his game. So every day that I didn’t want to work out or every day I felt like I couldn’t give more, I always thought of Kobe. 

“Because I knew that he was getting better and I was like, ‘Man, if you take a day off, he’s going to take advantage of it. You cannot take a day off.'”

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ANN ARBOR, Mich. (AP) — A Canadian man has pleaded guilty to smuggling or attempting to smuggle thousands of turtles from southeastern Michigan, more than a year after he was caught at a border crossing with 51 of the reptiles taped to his body.

Kai Xu ordered turtles online and would travel to the U.S. to ship them to China or return with them to Canada.

The 27-year-old Xu pleaded guilty Tuesday in federal court in Ann Arbor.

In 2014, Xu was caught with turtles taped to his body in plastic. It’s illegal to export wildlife from the U.S. without a license from the government.

Xu faces a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison although his sentence likely won’t be that high.

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This story has been corrected to delete reference to Xu being a student. The University of Waterloo says he’s not enrolled.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Former top national security officials in Republican and Democratic administrations on Tuesday urged Congress to continue allowing the resettlement of Syrian and Iraqi refugees in the United States.

“Refugees are victims, not perpetrators, of terrorism,” the 19 retired military, security experts and others wrote in a letter sent to all lawmakers. “Categorically refusing to take them only feeds the narrative of ISIS that there is a war between Islam and the West, that Muslims are not welcome in the United States and Europe, and that the ISIS caliphate is their true home.”

ISIS is one of the acronyms for Islamic State militants.

Among those signing the letter are former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger, George Shultz and Madeleine Albright. Retired Gen. David Petraeus also signed the letter, as did former Homeland Secretary Michael Chertoff and onetime Defense Secretaries Leon Panetta and Chuck Hagel.

Last month, the House voted overwhelmingly to erect high hurdles for Syrian and Iraqi refugees to come to the United States in the aftermath of the terror attacks in Paris. The bill would require new FBI background checks and individual sign-offs from three high-ranking U.S. officials before any refugee could come to the U.S. from Iraq or Syria, where the Islamic State group that has claimed credit for the attacks has flourished.

The administration, which has announced plans to accept about 10,000 Syrian refugees in addition to the 2,500 who have settled here since 2011, says it already takes around 18-24 months on average for them to make it into this country. They must pass a battery of screening requirements including interviews overseas, fingerprinting and biometric investigations. Many are women and children and only about 2 percent are single men of combat age.

Republicans have called for a pause in the system, a reflection of their constituents’ anxiety. Forty-seven House Democrats broke with President Barack Obama and backed the legislation.

The bipartisan group of former officials said they opposed the legislation, arguing that the vetting of refugees is robust and thorough.

“Given the stringent measures in place, we are especially concerned by proposals that would derail or further delay the resettlement of Iraqis who risked their lives to work with the U.S. military and other U.S. organizations,” the letter said.

The legislation is pending in the Senate, where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said Tuesday that the issue will be part of the must-pass spending bill that Congress needs to complete later this month to keep the government open.

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It’s been 30 years since the world was introduced to “Super Mario Bros.”

A spiritual successor to the 1983 arcade hit, “Super Mario Bros.” was the first game on the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) to star Super Mario and his brother Luigi. More importantly, it cemented Mario’s role as the face and mascot of Nintendo.

And now, luxury Swiss watchmaker Romain Jerome is celebrating the most iconic character in video game history with this new Super Mario Bros. watch, which costs a whopping $18,950. Mama mia!

Romain Jerome makes rare, artistic, avant-garde luxury timepieces. Take this steampunk “DNA” watch, for example, which was made from the hull metal of the Titanic. Yes, the actual Titanic.

Or this “DNA” watch, which is made from real moon dust. There are only 1,969 of these timepieces to commemorate the year man first set foot on the moon.

That brings us to the Super Mario Watch, a collaboration between Romain Jerome and Nintendo.

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CLINTON, Iowa (AP) — Iowa Republican Sharon Gilbert thinks her party veered off course in the past two presidential elections by nominating candidates who were too moderate.

This time around, the 73-year-old Gilbert wants to send a staunch conservative into the general election, and she thinks Texas Sen. Ted Cruz might be that candidate. But she also has a nagging feeling that Cruz’s hard-line views and combative style might keep him from getting anything done in Washington, a city where he’s frustrated his own party’s congressional leaders as much as — if not more than — the Democrats.

“I know he’s very far to the right, but I hope that he could work with both sides,” says Gilbert, who attended a town hall event with Cruz in her hometown of Clinton. “We don’t know that now because he’s been against Washington.”

It’s a central question of Cruz’s campaign as he gains momentum in the Republican primary: Can the uncompromising conservative unite a polarized nation and work with what he’s derisively called Washington’s “cartel” of career politicians, lobbyists and special interests?

Asked by a voter this week how he’d persuade Washington to follow his lead, Cruz said he planned to remake the way the nation’s capital works instead of trying to succeed within the current system.

“You do it with the power of the people,” he told the crowd gathered in a cavernous packaging factory in Clinton. He compared his campaign to a “grass-roots tidal wave” and said he’d emerge from the general election “with a mandate from the people.”

Cruz says his approach is modeled after Republican hero Ronald Reagan’s after the 1980 election. Yet his remarks are laced with echoes of President Barack Obama, one of the senator’s most frequent foils on the campaign trail.

Obama campaigned in 2008 on a pledge to bring change to Washington, propelled by a grass-roots campaign and the power of millions of Americans. But the president’s term has been marred by near-constant confrontation with Republicans on both domestic and foreign policy, a government shutdown and numerous other fights that put the nation at the brink of default or interruptions in federal services.

Some Iowa Republicans wonder if Cruz — who like Obama is running for president midway through his first term in the Senate — could do much better.

“I’m not completely sold on him as somebody who can unify this country,” said Ron Mann, a 65-year-old Republican from Bettendorf who attended a jam-packed town hall with Cruz Monday evening. Mann used to live in Texas and voted for Cruz when he ran for Senate in 2012. Now an Iowa resident, Mann is leaning toward Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.

Republican voters have long debated whether it’s better to nominate a hard-line conservative who can rally the party’s base or a more moderate candidate with broader general election appeal. The party’s last two nominees — former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and Arizona Sen. John McCain — fell into the latter category, and some GOP voters blame their defeats on an inability to energize conservatives.

Since arriving in the Senate three years ago, Cruz has cultivated a reputation as an unbending conservative with an attention-grabbing style. He was the driver of the 2013 government shutdown, staging a 21-hour filibuster in the effort to defund Obama’s signature health care law and rallying House Republicans to block government funding that included spending on “Obamacare.”

Cruz’s strategy was derided by Republican leaders, who believed the public blamed the party for a shutdown that ultimately did nothing to advance the senator’s health care goals. The shutdown also contributed to a belief among some GOP leaders that Cruz is a self-promoter with no party loyalty.

“Ted Cruz makes Donald Trump look like a consensus builder when you consider his total inability to work with anybody of either party during his tenure in the Senate,” said Josh Holmes, a former adviser to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican who has clashed frequently with Cruz. “If you consistently have trouble getting three senators of your own party to stand with you, it’s pretty tough to explain how you’re the candidate who can accomplish conservative reform.”

Cruz wears his tense relationship with Republican leaders as a badge of honor. Still, his campaign advisers say the Texas senator does have a track record of finding common ground with both Republicans and Democrats. Aides cite his work with New York Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand on military sexual assault reforms and his partnership with Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley on gun legislation.

Bonnie Temperley of Clinton has Cruz on her short list of candidates for the Iowa caucuses, now just two months away. She, too, hopes he can ease Washington’s partisan gridlock — but not if it means shedding his conservative credentials.

“I want him to work with the other side, but not cave and be so worried about what people are going to think about Republicans,” said Temperley, who is also considering caucusing for Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon. “We have to stand for something.”

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The big carmakers are releasing their numbers on US auto sales throughout Tuesday.

According to Autodata’s estimate (cited by CNBC’s Phil LeBeau) based on the data available so far, domestic vehicle sales grew at an annualized pace of 18.19 million in November.

Analysts had forecast an annualized pace of 18.10 million, according to Bloomberg.

Unless December’s numbers come in really bad, US auto sales could achieve a record year. The previous record, set in 2000, was 17.4 million, and the pace of sales has crossed 18 million since then although we’ve never finished a year at that level. 

Business Insider’s Matt DeBord broke down the four main reasons why auto sales have been so strong in 2015.

In short, lots of people have lots of old cars (11 years old on average), gas is cheap, it’s easier to access credit, and there are plenty of jobs. 

“In recent years, we have seen automakers make greater use of Black Friday temporary deals to drive auto sales and we expect this trend to continue this year,” RBC Capital’s Joseph Spak said in a client preview. “The focus will be on VW sales following the “dieselgate” crisis, which we expect will be pressured.”

Here are the latest numbers:

• Fiat Chrysler: +3% (+3.2 expected)
• Nissan: +3.8% (2.6% expected)
• Ford: +0.3% (3.2% expected)
• GM: +1.5% (+2.9% expected)
• Honda: -5.2% (-1.5% expected)
• Volkswagen of America: -24.7% 
• Toyota: +3.4% (+2.4% expected)

This post is being updated as the data roll in, refresh it for updates.

SEE ALSO: Automakers are about to do something in the US that’s never happened before

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NOW WATCH: We drove the fastest Tesla you can buy

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Some of the biggest fireworks in the 2016 presidential race continue to come between Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas).

The two senators — who poll in the No. 3 and No. 4 positions in most national GOP primary surveys — have repeatedly taken swipes at each other in recent weeks, and this week has been no exception.

Both have a pet issue with which to hit each other.

For Rubio, it is Cruz’s support for a bill he claims weakened national security. For Cruz, it’s Rubio’s support for “amnesty.”

Cruz said in a Monday interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that he laughed when he saw an ad from a pro-Rubio group that hit him on national security. Politico reported last week that the ad, from a pro-Rubio 501(c)(4) nonprofit, attacked Cruz for voting for the USA Freedom Act, which curtailed some of the government’s bulk collection of phone metadata.

Or as the ad put it, Cruz voted to “weaken America’s ability to identify and hunt down terrorists.”

“I have to say my first reaction when I saw the attack ad was to chuckle,” Cruz told Hewitt. “I don’t think it is an attack that is going to work. I think it is a substantively false attack. And I think the reason that Rubio’s allies have resorted to false attack ads is they are very, very nervous about our surge in the polls, about the fact that conservatives are uniting behind our campaign.”

Cruz claimed that Rubio’s supporters were trying to distract Republican voters from Rubio’s past support for comprehensive immigration reform. Cruz reminded Hewitt’s audience three times that Rubio was a member of the “Gang of Eight” with Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-New York) on the 2013 immigration bill, legislation from which Rubio has since backed away.

“They’re even more nervous about all the scrutiny that people are focusing on Marco Rubio’s longtime partnership with Barack Obama and Chuck Schumer pushing a massive amnesty plan,” Cruz said while arguing that the Freedom Act actually strengthened national security. “And so I think they were looking to change the subject, and they believed that launching a false attack based on the USA Freedom Act was the way to do it.”

The Texas senator further declared that it was ironic for Rubio’s supporters to hit him on national-security issues because the Rubio-backed immigration bill would have given President Barack Obama “more authority to admit Syrian refugees.”

“Now you want to talk about a threat to national security — Marco Rubio and Chuck Schumer giving Barack Obama a blank check to admit as many Syrian refugees as he wants with no background checks. That is a profound threat to national security,” Cruz said.

In a Monday interview on Fox News, Rubio was asked about some of Cruz’s recent criticism. Rubio responded by continuing to hit Cruz for “unfortunately” voting for the Freedom Act, which he said made the country less safe from terror attacks.

“I stand strongly on behalf on the ability of this government to gather intelligence on our adversaries and our enemies,” Rubio told Fox’s Greta Van Susteren. “Those keep us safer. And there are Republicans — including Sen. Cruz — that have voted to weaken those programs. That’s just part of the record. It’s nothing personal.”

Because of the Cruz-backed bill, Rubio said, “If God forbid there were a terrorist attack in America tomorrow, we would not be able to gather the phone records of individuals that might be part of that plot in a time-effective way.”

The two senators continued to take shots at one another in a Bloomberg Politics article published Monday evening.

Cruz told Bloomberg’s Sahil Kapur that Rubio “emphatically supported Hillary Clinton in toppling [Muammar] Qaddafi in Libya,” which Cruz said “made no sense.”

“While Senator Cruz voted to gut US intelligence programs and make Americans less safe,” Rubio’s campaign spokesman responded, “nobody has shown a better understanding of the threats we face in the 21st Century than Marco.”

SEE ALSO: Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz are locked in a burgeoning brawl over immigration

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NOW WATCH: Here’s how a conservative crowd reacted when Marco Rubio announced that Speaker John Boehner is resigning

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For Millennials, there are two trends that have developed over the last few years. The amount of student debt is skyrocketing and the number of young homeowners is cratering. According to researchers, this may be related.

The issue all starts with the ballooning balance of student loans young people are taking on.

“From 2005 to 2015, outstanding student loan debt rose from $364 billion to $1.2 trillion, and the percentage of people aged 18 to 30 with a student loan increased from 27% to 40%,” wrote researchers Yuliya Demyanyk and Daniel Kolliner.

“Even after total consumer debt started to decline during the Great Recession, student loan debt steadily increased at an average quarterly rate of 3.2%. The sharp rise in student loan debt has raised concerns that young people with a lot of student debt may be having trouble getting a mortgage or other types of loans”

This expansion in student debt has also coincided with a decrease in the number of people aged 18-30 holding a mortgage from 11% in 2005 to 7% this year.

Part of the issue, said the researchers, is that those with student debt are being evaluated differently when they apply for mortgages to buy a home.

“A major constraint for getting a loan can be how much debt a person already has,” said the study. “Lenders calculate the ratio of a borrower’s debt payments to his or her income and consider this number, called the debt burden, when they decide whether a borrower can take on more debt.”

According to Demyanyk and Kolliner, student debt repayment for young people is taking up about 20% of income. This makes getting a home incredibly difficult since a mortgage can eat up 30-45% of income.

So while the number of young people that have mortgages has decreased, those with student loans have felt it even more so. The researchers said the two are probably connected:

“There was a sharp decline in the percent of young borrowers with a student loan who had a mortgage in 2009, compared to the milder decline for those without a student loan This sharp decline coincides with the increased share of young borrowers who have a student loan. A plausible explanation for this larger decline in mortgage borrowing could be that banks would no longer lend to these borrowers, or that young borrowers with a student loan could not afford a mortgage.”

Demyanyk and Kolliner did say that the decline is probably not totally caused by college debt, but there was certainly some influence. And with the number of student loans expected to continue rising, the researchers don’t think the mortgage trend will turn around.

SEE ALSO: People who start careers with $50k in student loan debt could find themselves with $530k less at retirement

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NOW WATCH: The biggest security mistakes people make when buying things online

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