After opening his concert Tuesday night at St. Paul’s Xcel Energy Center, Rock and Roll Hall of Famer James Taylor told the crowd of about 12,000: “Minneapolis. It’s great to be back.”

But a few songs later, the 77-year-old corrected himself and then told a great story about Minnesota guitar maker Jim Olson. Back in 1989, Olson heard Taylor was going to be in town to play a benefit show and managed to get one of his guitars into Taylor’s hands. “I haven’t put it down since,” Taylor told the crowd, looking down at his six string. (Olson, he added, was in the audience Tuesday.)

That’s the kind of night it was at the X. With the mild manner of a retired Presbyterian minister, Taylor played a two-hour set of some of the gentlest popular music of his generation. His voice has retained much of its warmth, in part because he’s never been about power, but rather intimacy.

As such, Taylor gave the show the feel of an intimate club gig on a breezy summer evening. The crowd certainly helped matters by sitting in quiet rapture, applauding and cheering only at appropriate times. Yeah, the occasional fan would yell “We love you James” or “You’re kicking ass, JT” between songs, but even Taylor didn’t seem to mind.

For the first part of the show, Taylor played a series of songs about traveling, including “Wandering,” “Walking Man,” “Stretch of the Highway,” “Mexico” and “My Traveling Star.” Between numbers, he chatted with the crowd, offering plenty of dad jokes along the way. He also poked fun at his age, showing the crowd the comically oversized set list he was reading from and offering to take out his teeth after he took off his jacket.

Taylor also took time throughout the show to introduce the members of his All-Star Band, a group of seasoned musicians that aren’t household names, but have played with plenty of them over the decades. Among them was bassist and Minneapolis native Jimmy Johnson and Taylor’s son Henry, who has been singing backup in the band since 2021.

Kate Markowitz, Dorian Holley and Andrea Zonn joined Henry and provided some gorgeous harmonies for the main attraction. The rest of the band, too, gave Taylor plenty to work with and even occasionally rocked out — well, as much as Taylor rocks out — on songs like “(I’ve Got to) Stop Thinkin’ ‘Bout That” and “Up on the Roof” (a song Taylor’s pal Carole King co-wrote for the Drifters). After the latter, Taylor told the crowd “No Kings, except Carole” and earned some of the biggest cheers of the evening in the process.

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Hours after the shootings of two Minnesota lawmakers over the weekend, authorities asked David Carlson to identify his lifelong friend in a harrowing photograph.

Carlson says he had known and trusted Vance Boelter from the time the two played together as children. But he barely recognized the 57-year-old in the surveillance image police showed him of Boelter wearing a flesh-colored mask as he carried out what authorities described as a political rampage against Democrats and abortion providers.

“The guy with the mask, I don’t know that guy,” Carlson said in a telephone interview with the Associated Press, recounting his decades-long friendship with a man he likened to a brother. Boelter’s involvement in such an attack, he said, was as surprising to him as “getting struck by lightning.”

“There was a darkness that was inside of him,” Carlson said. “He must have kept it hidden.”

As authorities piece together Boelter’s movements and motivations, Carlson and others are conducting their own inventory of their interactions with the one-time pastor, wondering whether they missed any red flags.

This booking photo provided by the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office shows Vance Boelter in Green Isle, Minn., on June 16, 2025. (Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office via AP)

Boelter is a married father of five but often stayed at Carlson’s home in North Minneapolis to shorten his commute from Green Isle, Minn., to work. In hindsight, Carlson said, Boelter “was a sick man” and needed help, even if those around him didn’t realize it in time.

Law enforcement has cautioned the motive could be more complex than observers might prefer, even as Boelter’s own disjointed writings suggest he was hell-bent on targeting Democrats.

Boelter has been charged with federal murder and stalking, along with state counts, in the fatal shootings of former Democratic House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, at their suburban Minneapolis home. He is also accused of wounding Democratic Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, in their home nearby.

At the time of the shootings, Carlson said Boelter had been struggling to find work and was “disappointed” he wasn’t hearing back from people.

In February, Boelter abruptly quit his job delivering bodies from assisted living facilities to a Twin Cities mortuary and returned for several weeks to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where he had founded several companies focused on farming and fishing.

“I thought it was a mistake for him to quit his job,” Carlson said. “I didn’t think he was going to get anywhere with the Congo.”

But the life change was in keeping with Boelter’s impetuous “mentality to always go to the extreme,” Carlson said, recalling a time in the 1990s when Boelter was captured by security forces after sneaking into the Gaza Strip to preach Christianity on a trip to Israel. “That’s how crazy Vance is,” Carlson said. “He wasn’t supposed to be there.”

Years earlier, after becoming a born-again Christian, Boelter “burned all of his belongings,” Carlson said, including karate and martial arts weapons and anything else that distracted from his religion.

Vance Boelter, the man suspected of shooting two Minnesota lawmakers and their spouses, is taken into custody Sunday, June 15, 2025, in Sibley County in this image posted to Facebook by Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher. The officers’ faces were blurred in the photo prior to posting. (Courtesy of the Ramsey County sheriff’s office)

Boelter graduated in 1990 from an interdenominational Bible college in Dallas, earning a diploma in practical theology in leadership. The Christ for the Nations Institute said in a statement it was “aghast and horrified” to learn the suspect was among its alumni, saying “this is not who we are.”

The church Boelter attended in Jordan, Minn., has not responded to emails from AP but issued a similar statement condemning the shootings as “the opposite of what Jesus taught his followers to do.”

Boelter, who long worked in the food industry before beginning to style himself as a private security contractor, offered a glimpse of his opposition to abortion in a 2023 sermon he gave in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, saying “they don’t know abortion is wrong in many churches.”

“He wasn’t a radical cultist,” Carlson said. “He was just a regular Christian and kind of outspoken.”

Boelter was unrestrained when it came to his distaste for Democrats, Carlson said, but that rhetoric never seemed threatening. Carlson and another friend, Paul Schroeder, told AP they never heard Boelter talk about abortion or any of the officials who were targeted.

The FBI said Boelter “made lists containing the names and home addresses of many Minnesota public officials, mostly or all Democrats.”

“It wasn’t like, ‘We gotta stop them, man,’” Carlson said. “But it chills me to think he was in his room writing that stuff in my house.”

Boelter would go to a shooting range occasionally but was not fanatical about firearms, Schroeder said.

“I thought he was just collecting them for self-defense,” Carlson said. “It was 1,000 miles away from stalking people and killing them.”

Carlson said he awoke Saturday to an alarming text message from Boelter, who warned he was “going to be gone for a while,” and “may be dead shortly.” Carlson initially thought his friend was suicidal and went to check his room.

He said he was so concerned he called police, who “at first didn’t seem too interested” before quickly connecting the messages to the shootings that led to a two-day manhunt concluding with Boelter’s arrest in a field near his Green Isle home.

“Why throw your whole life away? God, he’s so stupid,” Carlson said. “He had everything.”

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Courtney Williams took over in the second half, scoring 18 of her game-high 20 points, and the Lynx rallied without injured star Napheesa Collier to beat Las Vegas 76-62 Tuesday night at Target Center.

“She put the team on her back with Phee out,” coach Cheryl Reeve said.

With the win, Minnesota (11-1) will host the Commissioner’s Cup championship game on July 1 against Indiana. The Lynx beat New York in last year’s title game of the WNBA midseason tournament.

But of larger concern for the Lynx could be Collier, who left early in the third quarter with a back injury and did not return. There was no update postgame.

Diamond Miller and Natisha Hiedeman each scored 12 points off the bench, and starting center Alanna Smith finished with 10 points and a season-high 13 rebounds.

For Miller, the performance has been a long time coming.

The No. 2 overall pick in the 2023 draft, she was named to the All-Rookie Team but has battled injuries since. She played in just 21 games last season and has been a single-minutes player much of this season, if she gets in at all.

“I’m just a fighter. I’ve gone through a lot of stuff,” she said while fighting her emotions. “This moment means a lot to me, because it took a lot to get this. I’ve worked really hard, and sometimes things don’t happen as quickly as you want, and God makes you wait.

“It’s really hard to be in my situation where you don’t know what’s going to happen from game to game and still being resilient to be ready for your moment. And today I was.”

Williams couldn’t help but smile talking about her teammate.

“I’ve been telling her since the game was over that I’m so proud of her because we see the work that Diamond has put in. … She was huge. She gave me that boost that I needed.”

Down by 14 in the first half and nine at the break, Miller scored seven points in the third quarter as the Lynx took over, including a step-back 3, and trash-talking Chelsea Gray with a hand gesture after a basket that she’s too small.

She was also solid on defense. “I just love playing basketball no matter what, good days, bad days, being on the court is just something that I live for,” Miller said.

“We needed that extra energy today, and that’s exactly what Diamond brought. Honestly, that’s the reason we won this game,” Hiedeman said.

The Lynx doubled up Las Vegas 46-23 in the second half.

Up 56-52 to begin the fourth quarter, Williams scored 11 of Minnesota’s points in a 14-2 run to put the Lynx up by 16. Her final two buckets came via a floater in the lane and a 3-pointer.

The guard was 1 of 6 from the field and a minus-18 in the first half. She finished 8 of 23 and a plus-4.

“Courtney has a very, very special way about her. She never believes that she’s out of it,” Reeve said.

Losing for the fourth time in five games and again playing without reigning Most Valuable Player A’ja Wilson (concussion protocol), Las Vegas (5-6) turned the ball over 21 times, leading to 27 Lynx points.

The Aces, who led by nine at intermission, missed nine shots and had four turnovers in an 8 minute, 20 second stretch over the third and fourth quarters.

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On a recent Thursday evening, 14-year-old Nubia Rhamato met one of her celebrity heroes at the new North End Community Center in St. Paul.

Jamad Fiin, a Boston-bred former professional basketball player with the women’s national team in Somalia, doubles as a social media influencer with more than 1.2 million fans on Instagram and 2 million on TikTok.

“I follow her!” said Rhamato, excitedly.

Rhamato’s mother, Habiba Feki, might have been even happier to see the 26-year-old Fiin lead a two-hour open gym session targeted to girls. Fiin, who wears a Muslim headscarf as she dashes down the court, said she expects to return to the community center Thursday evenings throughout most of the summer to drill, dribble and shoot with young ladies.

“We really need something like this, especially with summer coming,” said Feki, of Woodbury, who said many immigrant families keep their daughters close, sometimes to their children’s detriment. “We don’t want them just sitting home on the phone all the time. … As a parent, we just let the boys go to play, but we don’t send the girls.”

As a basketball captain at Emmanuel College in Boston, Fiin developed a reputation for fierceness on the court and patience with younger players on her team. Not every spectator was accustomed to seeing a female athlete wearing a full set of lashes and a hijab, the Muslim headscarf. Fiin bore both with pride, earning her a spot a few years ago in a Google Pixel television ad.

“She taught me everything,” said Yan Man, an athlete from Hong Kong who was new to the United States when she walked onto the Emmanuel College court. “She was helping me to adapt to everything, from basketball to life in general. Her family adopted me. She was like my big sister. Younger girls really looked up to her.”

Man later transferred to the Division I Iona University in suburban New York, while Fiin went on to play for four years with Somalia’s national team, competing in Dubai, Uganda and Tunisia.

Jamad Basketball Camps

Since then, Fiin has hosted basketball tournaments and clinics in the United States, Canada, Sweden, England and Africa through Jamad Basketball Camps, and inspired a hefty social media following. Most of her work involves other Muslim girls who play while wearing their hijabs.

Growing up, Fiin said she didn’t see many women who looked like her playing basketball. Even so, she joined her college basketball team and gained the confidence to compete while wearing the hijab. “They didn’t judge me because I had a scarf on my head,” said Fiin. “They welcomed me with open arms.”

Her fame, rather than place her out of reach to everyday Somali-Americans, has done just the opposite. In a phone call, state Rep. Samakab Hussein, DFL-St. Paul, urged Fiin to swing by the new North End Community Center in St. Paul, where she has plenty of friends and relatives, and work with young girls on their basketball skills.

She said yes, and brought Man with her. On June 4, Fiin — better known by her first name — spent two hours with school-age girls during a girls-only open gym at the new rec center at Rice Street and Lawson Avenue. She and Man plan to return from 6 to 8 p.m. each Thursday night for the better part of the summer, helping with drills during the second hour while keeping the drop-in environment casual.

“I called her and said, ‘Come to the North End.’ We really need it,” Hussein said, noting many immigrant families are hesitant to let their daughters hang out at rec centers unattended. “A lot of people have responded to us and said this is really needed, especially for young Muslim girls who are stuck at home or in public housing. Many young girls love to see someone who looks like them play basketball.”

“A lot of parents bring their kids; they’re very open to the idea,” Fiin said. “People are becoming more accepting of their girls if they want to play any sports.”

Man, who took inspiration from Fiin and has hosted her own basketball clinics in Hong Kong, said she expects to stick around St. Paul and support her mentor until preseason workouts. Also on hand for the inaugural girls-only open gym in early June were Hussein, St. Paul City Council Member HwaJeong Kim and members of the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office.

St. Paul Parks and Rec Director Andy Rodriguez said he’s seen the demand for girls-only or girls-mostly gym sessions, and hopes to create more such opportunities in the future, though scheduling around organized youth sports can be difficult. Competing with boys for court time can be intimidating for many girls who want to play in a judgment-free, hassle-free environment.

“We’ll start here,” said Rodriguez, noting the gender restrictions are light. “If we have a sibling or something here, we’re not going to kick them out.”

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