Hutchinson has ensured there will be a new Class 3A state baseball champion.

A fielding error allowed two Tigers to score in a three-run fifth inning and seventh-seeded Hutchinson beat No. 2 Totino-Grace 5-3 Wednesday at the Mini Met in Jordan.

“We didn’t think it was an upset at all. We thought that the seven seed was not right for us,” said Hudson Lien, who drove in two runs and earned the save.

Battling a sore hip, Larkun Kurth deftly maneuvered his way through six innings, and Brady Larson had three of Hutchinson’s eight hits.

“I think we knew we were the better team and weren’t going to lose,” Kurth said.

Up next for Hutchinson (18-9), which was seeded fifth in its section and won four elimination games to make state, is a noon Thursday semifinal against Mahtomedi or Simley.

No current Tigers were born the last time Hutchinson was in the tournament. That was 2006. The school’s only other appearance was 1960.

Kellen Westphal had a couple of hits, and Tommy Heifort struck out nine in five innings for Totino-Grace (20-8).

However, the defending state champion committed a couple of fielding errors and made a pair of costly base-running blunders. Three of Hutchinson’s runs were unearned, including a pair in the fifth.

Alex Flores led off with a double, advanced to third two batters later on a Larson single and scored on a Lien rap. Larson and Lien scored with two outs on a booted ground ball.

“Sometimes things kind of work for you, sometimes they don’t. It’s a funny game,” Totino-Grace coach Mike Smith said.

Hutchinson scored in each of the first two innings — including on a wild pitch — and Totino-Grace scored once in the second through fourth innings for a 3-2 lead.

Twice in the first three innings, Totino-Grace ran out of a potential big inning. A runner was thrown out at the plate on a botched pickoff at third base in the second, and a player Smith called “a super-aggressive kid” was thrown out at second trying to extend a single after a throw from the outfield tried to get a runner at third base.

“There’s a couple things that were head-scratchers, but that happens most games. There’s some things that you go, ‘I wonder why that happened.’ Things were a little more important today,” Smith said.

The discovery of more than 900 pounds of crystal methamphetamine in a Burnsville storage unit led to authorities carrying out eight search warrants in the Twin Cities last week, according to a criminal complaint filed this week.

The law enforcement presence during the June 3 warrant action in South Minneapolis drew protesters who were concerned it was a federal immigration enforcement action.

A federal grand jury returned a four-count indictment against a 27-year-old St. Paul woman on Tuesday, charging her with assaulting officers during the protest and punching an FBI agent when she was arrested.

Information in a federal criminal complaint provides the first details about the scope of the investigation that led to the search warrants.

“The search warrants were part of a long-term drug trafficking, money laundering, and human trafficking investigation involving a transnational criminal organization,” Acting U.S. Attorney for Minnesota Joseph Thompson said in a statement.

$22-25M of meth initially seized

The complaint gives the following information:

The 900 pounds of crystal meth found during a previous search warrant in Burnsville were “concealed in multiple tubes separately held in large spools of metal. Agents estimate that, conservatively, this amount of methamphetamine had a street value of between $22 million and $25 million.”

Agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration, FBI, Internal Revenue Service and Homeland Security Investigations executed search warrants on June 3 in Burnsville, Inver Grove Heights, Lakeville, Bloomington, Minneapolis and Northfield.

The warrants, authorized by a federal judge, “directed law enforcement to search for and seize evidence related to … transportation, storage, ordering, purchase and distribution of controlled substances, money laundering, bank fraud, human trafficking, and firearms violations” for multiple years.

The search warrants were filed under seal and will remain sealed, pending indictment, because the investigation is ongoing.

Agents seized evidence at each of the locations, including a set of gold-plated firearms at a Northfield residence. They were “adorned similarly to others regularly observed to be used by and seized from narco-traffickers.”

At a Burnsville business, agents saw multiple “Scarface” movie portraits. “Such ‘homage’ images are regularly observed by law enforcement as adornments to the walls of homes and businesses of those involved in the drug and related money laundering trades,” the complaint said.

Charges against St. Paul woman

Agents started carrying out the warrants at residences at 6 a.m. on June 3 and then progressed to business locations. Shortly after 10 a.m., federal agents began executing a search warrant at a Minneapolis restaurant at Lake Street and Bloomington Avenue.

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A crowd of people gathered in the area. They “appeared to be under the mistaken belief that the gathered law enforcement officers were present to arrest individuals illegally present in the country for immigration offenses,” the complaint said. “This was incorrect.”

While “some people in the crowd were engaged in legal protest activity,” there were incidents of assaults on law enforcement and federal agents worked to identify the people involved. One was identified as the 27-year-old St. Paul woman, the complaint said.

She was seen on body-worn cameras and open-source videos — she kicked an FBI SWAT officer, pushed another FBI SWAT officer and threw a softball at the back of a Hennepin County sheriff’s deputy, according to the charges. She is in custody.

By SHAWN CHEN, Associated Press Technology Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — Disney and Universal have filed a copyright lawsuit against popular artificial intelligence image-generator Midjourney on Wednesday, marking the first time major Hollywood companies have enter the legal battle over generative AI.

Filed in federal district court in Los Angeles, the complaint claims Midjourney pirated the libraries of the two Hollywood studios to generate and distribute “endless unauthorized copies” of their famed characters, such as Darth Vader from Star Wars and the Minions from Despicable Me.

FILE – People visit the Magic Kingdom Park at Walt Disney World Resort in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., April 18, 2022. (AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey, File)

“Midjourney is the quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism. Piracy is piracy, and whether an infringing image or video is made with AI or another technology does not make it any less infringing,” the companies state in the complaint.

The studios also claimed the San Francisco-based AI company ignored their requests to stop infringing on their copyrighted works and to take technological measures to halt such image generation.

Midjourney didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

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In a 2022 interview with The Associated Press, Midjourney CEO David Holz described his image-making service as “kind of like a search engine” pulling in a wide swath of images from across the internet. He compared copyright concerns about the technology with how such laws have adapted to human creativity.

“Can a person look at somebody else’s picture and learn from it and make a similar picture?” Holz said. “Obviously, it’s allowed for people and if it wasn’t, then it would destroy the whole professional art industry, probably the nonprofessional industry too. To the extent that AIs are learning like people, it’s sort of the same thing and if the images come out differently then it seems like it’s fine.”

Major AI developers don’t typically disclose their data sources but have argued that taking troves of publicly accessible online text, images and other media to train their AI systems is protected by the “fair use” doctrine of American copyright law.

The studio’ case joins a growing number of lawsuits filed against developers of AI platforms — such as OpenAI, Anthropic — in San Francisco and New York.

Meanwhile, the first major copyright trial of the generative AI industry is underway in London, pitting Getty Images against artificial intelligence company Stability AI.

A segment of Interstate 94 just west of the Minneapolis-St. Paul boundary will be closed in both directions this weekend.

The freeway will be closed between Huron Boulevard and Interstate 35W starting 9 p.m. Friday, June 13, through Monday morning, June 16, according to the Minnesota Department of Transportation. Traffic will be detoured to Minnesota 36 via I-35W and I-35E.

Six ramps also will close 9 p.m. Friday through late August:

Northbound I-35W to eastbound I-94
South Sixth Street to eastbound I-94
Huron Boulevard to eastbound I-94
Eastbound I-94 to Huron Boulevard
Riverside Avenue to eastbound I-94
Cedar Avenue to eastbound I-94

On Monday, June 16, traffic on Cedar Avenue will be reduced to one lane in both directions under the I-94 bridges through August.

These closures are part of a project repairing five bridges, including the Mississippi River bridge, along I-94.

For more information, visit the project website at dot.state.mn.us/metro/projects/i94minneapolis. For real-time Minnesota travel and traffic information, go to 511mn.org.

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