MILAN, Italy — Hilary Knight scored to tie the U.S. Olympic women’s hockey career goal record, and the Americans wore down a Finland opponent that spent much of the week dealing with a stomach virus in a 5-0 win at the Milan Cortina Games on Saturday.

Defender Megan Keller had a goal and two assists, while Alex Carpenter, Taylor Heise and Abbey Murphy also scored. Aerin Frankel stopped 11 shots for her first shutout in just her second career Olympic game.

The tournament favorite Americans (2-0) improved to 11-0 in Olympic meetings against Finland, and had just about everything going in their favor on Saturday.

The Finns returned to the ice as a full team for the first time since last being together at practice on Tuesday. That night, four players developed symptoms of a norovirus. Two days later, Finland’s 23-player roster was down to eight forwards and two goalies, prompting Olympic officials to postpone the team’s tournament opener against Canada to Feb. 12.

On Friday, coach Tero Lehtera vowed his team would play the Americans even if it meant having a minimum five forwards and a goalie. After canceling their morning skate on Saturday, the Finns took the ice six hours later with a full 22-player contingent.

Finland came out with speed but showed signs of rustiness while struggling to handle the puck. Petra Nieminen had it slide off her stick on a potential break two minutes in. The Finns eventually wore down in managing nine shots through two periods and 11 overall.

Goalie Sanni Ahola stopped 44 shots overall, and kept the Finns in the game through a first period in which she stopped 14 of 15 shots. Carpenter was the only one that beat her wjth a one-timer from the slot for a power-play goal with 4:48 left in the period.

The U.S. then broke open the game with three goals through the first 9:17 of the second period.

Knight capped the run by being set up to the left of the net. She paused, then spun toward the net and banked a shot in off of Ahola’s blocker.

The goal was Knight’s second of the tournament and 14th in her USA Hockey-record fifth Olympic Games. The 36-year-old tied the U.S. record for goals shared by Natalie Darwitz and Katie King, and Knight’s 29 career points are only three back of matching Jenny Potter on the U.S. list.

Finland didn’t manage its first shot on net in the third period — and 10th overall — until the 11-minute mark, when Sanni Vanhanen’s snapper was gloved by Frankel.

In other Group A play, Canada was scheduled to open the tournament facing Switzerland, which also had a stomach flu scare. The Swiss team skipped the opening ceremony, and spent Friday night in isolation after one player showed symptoms of the norovirus.

The player was cleared on Saturday.

In earlier Group B play, Thea Johansson scored twice and added an assist, and Sweden improved to 2-0 with a 6-1 win over host Italy (1-1).

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Hours after an immigration agent fatally shot Renee Good inside her SUV on a Minneapolis street last month, a senior federal prosecutor in Minnesota sought a warrant to search the vehicle for evidence in what he expected would be a standard civil rights investigation into the agent’s use of force.

The prosecutor, Joseph H. Thompson, wrote in an email to colleagues that the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, a state agency that specializes in investigating police shootings, would team up with the FBI to determine whether the shooting had been justified and lawful or had violated Good’s civil rights.

But later that week, as FBI agents equipped with a signed warrant prepared to document blood spatter and bullet holes in Good’s SUV, they received orders to stop, according to several people with knowledge of the events who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

The orders, they said, came from senior officials, including FBI Director Kash Patel, several of whom worried that pursuing a civil rights investigation — by using a warrant obtained on that basis — would contradict President Donald Trump’s claim that Good “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer” who fired at her as she drove her vehicle.

Over the next few days, top Department of Justice officials presented alternative approaches. First, they suggested prosecutors ask a judge to sign a new search warrant for the vehicle, predicated on a criminal investigation into whether the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who shot Good, Jonathan Ross, had been assaulted by her. Later, they urged the prosecutors to instead investigate Good’s partner, who had been with Good on the morning of the shooting, confronting immigration agents in their Minneapolis neighborhood.

Several of the career federal prosecutors in Minnesota, including Thompson, balked at the new approach, which they viewed as legally dubious and incendiary in a state where anger over a federal immigration crackdown was already boiling over. Thompson and five others left the office in protest, setting off a broader wave of resignations that has left Minnesota’s U.S. attorney’s office severely understaffed and in crisis. Officials have not said whether they ultimately obtained a new warrant to search the vehicle.

From an office of about 25 criminal litigators, gone are the top prosecutors who had overseen a sprawling, yearslong investigation into fraud in Minnesota’s social services programs, which the White House months ago cited as a reason for the immigration crackdown in the state.

The departures also have drained the U.S. attorney’s office as it prepares complex cases, including trials in the fatal attack on a Minnesota state lawmaker and in a terrorism case, and investigations into fentanyl trafficking.

The prosecutors who remain have been flooded with new cases related to the immigration crackdown — allegations of assaults on federal officers and lawsuits challenging the legality of individual detentions of immigrants.

“This is potentially destroying all of the progress that we have made, working together between local and federal law enforcement officials in a very coordinated way, to actually go after the worst of the worst,” Brian O’Hara, the Minneapolis police chief, said in an interview.

This account of tumult at the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota is based on interviews with about a dozen people in Minnesota and Washington, D.C., familiar with the events. Some spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying they feared retaliation from the administration. Some read from notes they took during key moments.

Cindy Burnham, a spokesperson for the FBI in Minnesota, declined to comment for this article, as did Daniel N. Rosen, the U.S. attorney in Minnesota. Emily Covington, a Justice Department spokesperson, did not respond to a request for comment.

A Fraud Scandal

The crisis at the U.S. attorney’s office followed a turbulent year.

The Minnesota office was led temporarily by assistant U.S. attorneys for months as Trump’s nominee for U.S. attorney, Rosen, awaited confirmation.

Some career prosecutors in the office, which has a long reputation for winning complex and high-profile cases, were unsettled by a memo that Attorney General Pam Bondi issued in February 2025, signaling that the Department of Justice would “zealously advance” Trump’s policies.

For months, the prosecutors in Minnesota focused their attention on high-impact cases that were already underway, including the investigation into fraud in social services programs, largely insulating the office from some priorities in Washington. The office mantra became: “The best defense is a good offense.”

That approach unraveled late last year. News articles about the fraud cases — and later a video by a right-wing influencer — drew attention from Trump. Administration officials focused on the fact that most of the defendants charged in the sprawling fraud cases were of Somali descent. Although most Somalis in Minnesota are citizens or legal residents of the United States, White House officials cited them and the rash of fraud as a reason to send thousands of immigration agents to the state.

Tensions quickly rose on the streets between immigration agents and Minnesotans. And at the prosecutors’ office, the fraud investigations slowed as prosecutors said they were overwhelmed with requests for briefings from federal agencies on that issue.

Debating an Investigation

Not long after Good’s death, senior administration officials were quick to blame her for the shooting. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem called Good a domestic terrorist, language that Vice President JD Vance echoed.

Even in a rules-shattering administration, the hasty conclusions about the shooting shocked federal prosecutors in Minnesota. Veteran lawyers in the office watched numerous videos of the shooting. Virtually all presumed there would be a civil rights investigation into the use of force, an approach often used in shootings involving law enforcement officers.

Some believed that a civil rights investigation could establish that the ICE agent had a reasonable fear for his life when he opened fire as Good’s car began lurching toward him — the sort of police shooting investigators consider “awful but lawful.” Others suggested that such an investigation might find otherwise, or even that the failure of agents to provide medical aid to Good after the shooting might be deemed a civil rights violation.

Even Chris Madel, a prominent Minnesota defense lawyer who provided legal advice to Ross, the agent, after the shooting, supported conducting a civil rights investigation. Madel worked at the Department of Justice years ago.

“In the absence of an independent use-of-force investigation, you lead the public to believe that there must be something to hide,” Madel said.

As Department of Justice officials pushed back against suggestions that a civil rights investigation was in order in the days after Good’s death, clashes between Minnesota residents and immigration agents escalated. Some prosecutors were met with resistance when they urged supervisors to open investigations into reports of assaults and abuses by federal agents. The Justice Department also blocked the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension from taking part in investigating Good’s killing, adding to prosecutors’ frustrations.

At one point, Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol leader who was the face of the administration’s immigration crackdown in Los Angeles, Chicago and Minneapolis, called federal prosecutors, pressing them to charge demonstrators with crimes. When a prosecutor asked what the operation’s end goal was, several people familiar with the call recalled Bovino saying that he did not intend to “calm it down,” but instead, he said, “We’re going to put it down.”

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment.

Rosen, who took office as U.S. attorney in October, urged his top deputies again to seek the alternative warrant that leaders in Washington had called for, focusing on a criminal investigation into Good’s partner and her behavior and ties to protest groups.

At that, Thompson submitted his resignation letter. Others soon followed.

Soon after, Bondi told Fox News that the lawyers who left “suddenly decided they didn’t want to support the men and women at ICE.” Referring to them as members of the “deep state,” Bondi said she had fired them, resulting in the loss of months of unused vacation they had banked.

Weeks after Good’s death, Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, brushed aside questions about the Justice Department’s refusal to open a civil rights investigation into the shooting, saying: “Cases are handled differently by this department depending on the circumstances.”

An Office on Edge

With roughly a dozen prosecutors gone, Rosen has worked to reassure those who remain in the office. As he sought to build a new leadership team, Rosen approached several prosecutors about possible promotions. At least three of them soon left the office: Allen Slaughter, the chief of narcotics investigations and cases from tribal territories; Dan Bobier, a fraud expert; and Lauren Roso, a national security specialist who was preparing to try a terrorism case.

None of the prosecutors who have left the office have discussed their reasons publicly.

Unease among prosecutors has continued to mount as the Justice Department announced a criminal investigation into leading Democrats in the state and charges against nine people, including two journalists, accused in connection to a protest at a church in St. Paul, Minnesota, where an ICE official serves as a pastor.

In recent days, as Rosen has sought to steady an office on edge, colleagues say he has made comments that unsettled them further. Several people said that Rosen vowed not to ask anyone to do anything illegal — an assurance that normally, the people said, would go without saying.

Rosen, a commercial litigator who had no prior criminal litigation experience, also has conveyed that the office, under his leadership, was committed to furthering the goals of Trump.

In a declaration submitted as part of an immigration lawsuit late last month, Rosen described an office under extraordinary strain as a severely understaffed team found itself contending with a “flood” of cases that have grown out of the federal immigration crackdown. He said detained immigrants had filed more than 420 lawsuits in January alone. The office, he wrote, “is operating in a reactive mode,” with lawyers and paralegals “continuously working overtime.”

O’Hara said he was disappointed that Rosen had been unable to keep veteran prosecutors from leaving the office. “I couldn’t imagine being the leader of a team where so many of the best players that are just so central to the mission decide they’ve got to walk away because they don’t want their integrity to be compromised,” he said.

Andrew Luger, who preceded Rosen as the U.S. attorney in Minnesota during the Obama and Biden administrations, said the exodus of prosecutors will have far-reaching implications, particularly for the stated purpose of the immigration crackdown: fighting fraud and crime.

The top fraud experts in the office left. So did Melinda Williams, a veteran in prosecuting sex crimes and child pornography cases. Thomas Calhoun-Lopez, who oversaw the major violent crimes unit, also departed.

“It will take years to build the contacts in state and local law enforcement that has been lost,” Luger said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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A large-scale fire and small explosion broke out at a University of Minnesota steam plant in Minneapolis late Friday night but was under control within an hour, according to alerts by the university.

University officials sent out a public safety alert about the fire and a “slight explosion” around 11:15 p.m. Friday, telling people to avoid the area of the steam plant located at 600 Main St. S.E. University police were working on traffic control.

Less than an hour later, another alert was issued saying there was no longer a visible fire but that the Minneapolis Fire Department was still on scene and that university police were still performing traffic control.

It’s not the first time the university’s steam plant, which is located on the Mississippi River and supplies steam to the university, has caught fire. Another fire broke out on the plant’s roof in 2006, causing minimal damage.

The steam plant works with the university’s main energy plant to provide heat, hot water and power to the U’s Minneapolis campus and some nearby buildings.

No further details about the fire were available Saturday morning.

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CHICAGO — The other day the author Sara Levine asked me to meet her at a dog beach in Evanston. I didn’t have a hard time finding her. She said she would be wearing an orange cap and she was. The problem — and here is where I felt as though I slipped suddenly into a Sara Levine novel — was that the beach was padlocked and Levine arrived without her dog. Also, at the very moment we met, Northwestern University’s Emergency Notification System began to boom out a test, which sounds like a tornado siren with the addition of a deep male voice imploring you to stay calm, no emergency is occurring.

In a Sara Levine novel — and so far, she’s only written two in 25 years — the heroine would likely take that as a sign, like some kind of cosmic irony that an emergency was definitely occurring.

Levine suggested we meet at a dog beach because “The Hitch,” her new novel — her first since “Treasure Island!!!,” Levine’s beloved 2012 cult classic — centers on a dog attack in Evanston that leaves a corgi dead and a 6-year-old boy certain he’s possessed by the dead dog’s soul. But like “Treasure Island!!!,” it’s also funny and unhinged and so relatable you wonder if Levine, who chairs the writing department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, has been slowly making a case for the lost art of the literary comedy novel.

Indeed, Levine’s characters are so queasily recognizable, this wasn’t even the first time in recent months that I felt as if I had stepped unwittingly into a Sara Levine story. By some twist of completely off-the-wall fate, the same week I was reading an early copy of “The Hitch,” I was bitten several times by a dog. Seriously. It was bonkers. I was walking through a restaurant patio on the North Shore and a dog launched itself onto my calf like I was sirloin. My first thought: Why me? I felt like that guy in a movie who hasn’t yet become a werewolf but all of the neighborhood dogs know he’s a werewolf and start barking. And yet, it wasn’t even the dog attack that reminded me of Levine — it was the way diners glared at me, as if I interrupted their burgers. I felt a weird shame.

When I told Levine this — and that I was not that excited to hang out at a dog beach anyway, considering — she told me about the attack in Evanston that led to “The Hitch.”

“So I was walking my dog by (Evanston Township High School) and he’s a little goldendoodle and this dog — no leash, but with a pink collar — suddenly appears in the alley. It’s a pit bull. I’m not anti-pit bull and I don’t mean to stereotype. She’s a little pit, but pits do have strong jaws and she attacks my dog. This was 2020. I have these horrible voice memos with my dog wailing. Anyway, now I’m in a crisis, and what am I doing to do? I’m terrible in a crisis. I also don’t want to hurt the other dog. If I let my dog off the leash he might get hit by car, so I’m frozen there, and I’m also trying to separate them, but I’m also thinking I can’t kick this dog — even with what’s happening in front of me, I couldn’t do it. The house on the corner has a Newfoundland standing in the yard, and the woman at the house sees me. She tells me to run for her car, but it’s actually a truck with a flatbed. She grabs a shovel and starts swinging at the dog, and my legs at this point are jelly but we make it into the flatbed and the pitbull is just launching itself at us, just like Cujo. My first thought was, Did I make this happen? I had started writing about a dog, so: Did I bring this on? That’s nutty, but it’s how you feel at times when things happen.”

Sara Levine’s new novel “The Hitch.” (Stacey Wescott/Chicago Tribune)

Levine’s novels feel right for early 2026, for this gray period when we’re all expected to reassess our lives, make changes and emerge in the spring with clearer heads. The way certain works of fiction can do, her books could double as perverse self-help, starring heroines who go out of their ways to show how not to conduct your life. Her writing voice, sardonic, breezy, chimes with Joy Williams and Donald Barthelme, but it’s hard not to hear “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and even “The Office” — that nexus where unraveling people lacking self-awareness stumble across empathy.

The heroine of “Treasure Island!!!” — a 25-year old clerk of a “pet library” — reads Robert Louis Stevenson’s legendary adventure and quickly reassess her narrow timid life, deciding there and then to live by a credo culled from Stevenson: Boldness, Resolution, Independence, Horn-blowing. But by the end, she kills a parrot and is so obsessed with “Treasure Island,” family and friends stage an intervention between her and the novel. The heroine of “The Hitch” could be related, if only tangentially: Her name is Rose Cutler and she is an Evanston yogurt company CEO (as well as “antiracist, secular Jewish feminist eco-warrior”). Rose is also perilously up her own keister. She does not want children (“not for one atom-spitting second”) but she is never so shy with opinions about the way her brother and sister-in-law raise their own kid. When they go on vacation, Rose jumps at the chance to play aunt for a week — which is when the dog attack occurs, her nephew decides (cheerfully) the dog’s soul leapt bodies, and worse.

Rose is a micromanager, and lousy in a crisis. It spoils nothing to say the closest she gets to enlightenment is a brief ah-ha: “Sometimes my mind gets active as a prairie dog and I build elaborate tunnels underground, room after room of judgement and justification.”

The writer Roxane Gay — who once included Levine’s work in an essay on unlikeable women characters (“Not Here to Make Friends”) — said that just after she landed her own imprint (Roxane Gay Books) at Grove Atlantic, she sought out Levine and asked what she was working on: “It had been some time since ‘Treasure Island!!!’ and Sara did not disappoint. The writing voice I fell in love with was still there, but she had grown, and though this Rose character was older, you’re reminded that sometimes we don’t really outgrow our lesser selves — that sometimes we just learn to live with them, you know?”

Levine told Gay that not every reader is a fan of unlikeable woman characters. She told Gay about the (smallish) subset of Goodreads reviewers who describe her women as “utterly unlikeable” and “irredeemable.” Gay told me, “I don’t know why writers are so willing to expose themselves to Goodreads. Some people have a parasocial relationship with book characters, and it meets a puritanical streak where people decide they don’t like a character who is a ‘bad person,’ forgetting flawed people exist. Rose is convinced she knows the right way to do things and her ethics are in the right place — bless her heart.”

Levine’s sweet spot is what literary scholars have long called “unreliable narration” — she even taught a class at Brown University (where she got her Ph.D. in English) on the topic. Levine said: “My father’s a psychiatrist and he tells me we’re all unreliable narrators. But in a novel, it means there’s a deficit of comprehension from the character telling the story and that deficit is part of the story. But when I hear from people who hated ‘Treasure Island!!!,’ often they think I’m the narrator. My feelings get hurt. But maybe they don’t understand that gap. It took me a long time to realize it.

“Or maybe ‘unreliable’ is the wrong term for this. Should I just refer to my characters as ‘difficult women’? No, maybe not — I was at a party recently and told someone I write about ‘difficult women’ and this person said, ‘OK, wait, what do you mean by difficult …?’”

Sara Levine sits in home writing space on Jan. 9, 2026, in Evanston. Levine is the chair of the writing department at School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a novelist whose new book, “The Hitch,” follows her 2011 novel Treasure Island. (Stacey Wescott/Chicago Tribune)

Horror novelist Paul Tremblay — whom Levine consulted to get a sense of how to handle the possession part of “The Hitch” — is a big fan of Levine, and included “Treasure Island!!!” on his ballot for the New York Times poll of the best books of the 21st century. Part of that appreciation, he said, is “how she is reviving an old tradition of first-person a-hole narrators. Think of ‘Confederacy of Dunces,’ or the novels of Sam Lipsyte, except publishers don’t like books by women who go there. Readers are getting more literal, I think. It can feel like a risk to just include any moral uncertainty in a novel now. I hear this especially from younger readers, who want to know what the moral is, and the thing is we are not writing to bestow morals but explain what it means to be human, which can be dark and uncomfortable — all words I would use to describe Sara’s books.”

You could also argue the long afterlife of “Treasure Island!!” — a perpetual word-of-mouth bookseller favorite, handed down to friends who can relate to spiraling exhaustion — is a mirror of contemporary America. Or at least indie culture: Rose Byrne is likely to grab an Oscar nomination soon for “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” as a stressed mother who makes a series of bad decisions; she’d slide neatly into Levine’s books. Levine is one of your favorite literary writers’ best-kept secrets: Blurbs for “The Hitch” came from Elizabeth Gilbert, Rumaan Alam, Adam Levin and Chicagoan Michael Zapata, who told me: “Blurbs can be blurby, but the one I wrote was truly sincere.” “Treasure Island!!!,” which has yet to be adapted to TV or film (but probably will be one day), has already been developed (and dropped) by Natalie Portman and James Franco.

Levine sounds almost naive about the depth of this love.

She told me another established screenwriter got pretty far with “Treasure Island!!!” but then appeared to bail and never signed their contract; Levine never heard from the woman again. One day, during a class at SAIC, she projected an email exchange between her and the writer as an illustration of professional etiquette. “I had to explain how she opted out of the project, and as students do, one took out his phone and googled the woman’s name and a minute later replied, ‘Oh, Sara, no — that woman had died. That’s probably why she never got back to you.’”

Sounds like a Sara Levine story, I said.

“It does?” she asked.

Sara Levine sifts through a box of drawings from 2012 that she created in the early stages of writing her novel “The Hinge” at her home on Jan. 9, 2026, in Evanston. (Stacey Wescott/Chicago Tribune)

To be frank, the biggest disappointment about Sara Levine is that she’s not nuts. I anticipated erratic and flighty and I got calm and rational. James McManus, author of the poker memoir “Positively Fifth Street,” who taught alongside Levine for 25 years, said: “She is as sane and responsible an adult as they come. In fact, (SAIC) wanted her to move into even more active leadership roles, but that can be a time suck, creatively.”

She has long gray hair and large cartoon eyes and comes across as naturally funny. She said people do expect her to be a wacko. “Someone introduced me at a party recently as ‘one of the most sane people’ at the Art Institute, or maybe it was ‘the least insane.’”

Levine, who is 55, grew up outside Cleveland and wrote a couple of plays that were produced when she was still a teenager (one professionally, for a Cleveland theater group). She went to Northwestern for theater only to find her way to creative writing. She then bounced from Brown to the University of Iowa to SAIC, which she joined in 2000. She describes herself as “ornery” that entire time. She threatened to drop out of Brown, refused to start a novel, moved to Iowa to teach non-fiction, only to decide, “‘I don’t want to live here, I don’t want to teach this my whole life’ — it was like looking into my coffin.”

She found she was more interested in “‘hysterical’ voices, the more obstreperous personalities of fiction.” “Treasure Island!!!,” which she began to see if she could write a novel after years of short stories and nonfiction academia, took a decade, but she found that she was more ambitious than she knew. She also learned she had a knack for describing everyday suburbia with cutting precision: “The Hitch” is filled with Evanston parents who over-schedule kids so much you wonder if they “can’t sit still in a room” with children. Doctor’s offices offer “six televisions playing six different channels.” Vast expanses of Illinois contain “a strip of road that featured an abandoned movie theatre, a discount shoe store, and a cemetery bordered by a six-foot high metal fence capped with snow,” as well as a hospital “founded in affiliation with the Evangelical Lutheran Church and rooted in the belief that all persons were created in the image of God, a hospital that had not in the past five years received higher than a two-star Yelp review.”

Sara Levine sits in her home writing space with her dog Lenny on Jan. 9, 2026, in Evanston. (Stacey Wescott/Chicago Tribune)

After “Treasure Island!!!,” she wrote a big sprawling novel titled “Leave It,” a more lyrical and somber kaleidoscope of Evanston characters; she didn’t want to follow one “difficult woman” with a second. She gave it to her agent, but then soon after, she pulled it back and shelved it.

“I was worried I was reinforcing the ‘hysterical’ woman thing, so I wrote something else, but that something else? Other people do that book well. So I have this narrow track. Twyla Tharp talks about knowing your own creative DNA, and that helped me. I’ve always had teachers who said you need to keep growing, you’ve got to keep pushing, that there is a natural aesthetic restlessness where you should never repeat yourself. I really bought into that. But what if it’s helpful to focus on one form and go very deep into only that? Look at Monet, who spent a lifetime painting haystacks …”

“‘Compares self to Monet,’” I interrupted, joking, pretending to jot that in my notebook.

“Oh, and also Nabokov!” she said, laughing. “And of course Jane Austen! Write that down.”

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com