Iron Maiden and 5 Seconds of Summer will play new Shakopee amphitheater in 2026

posted in: All news | 0

Grown-up boy band 5 Seconds of Summer and metal legends Iron Maiden are the first two acts announced to play Mystic Lake Amphitheater, the new 19,000-capacity outdoor venue that will open next year in Shakopee.

Tickets for 5 Seconds of Summer’s July 22 concert go on sale at 10 a.m. Friday through Ticketmaster. Iron Maiden’s Sept. 19 show, which also includes Megadeth as the opener, goes on sale at 3 p.m. Friday, also through Ticketmaster.

Not to be confused with Mystic Lake Casino’s own amphitheater, Mystic Lake Amphitheater will host more than 30 concerts each summer and create 700 permanent jobs, according to Swervo Development Corp., a local firm that also transformed the Armory and Uptown Theater in Minneapolis into concert venues. Live Nation will operate the amphitheater.

Mystic Lake Amphitheater serves as an anchor tenant of Canterbury Commons, a $400 million entertainment district in development near Canterbury Park. The district is also expected to include apartments, a brewery, restaurants and an office building. Work on the 37-acre site began in July 2023.

5 Seconds of Summer

Luke Hemmings, left, and Ashton Irwin from the band 5 Seconds of Summer perform on NBC’s Today show at Rockefeller Plaza on Friday, Sept. 30, 2022, in New York. (Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)

Formed in Australia in 2011, 5 Seconds of Summer found their first fame via YouTube and earned new fans worldwide after touring with One Direction in 2013. They stood out from the boy band pack as they played their own instruments and added elements of rock to their sound.

The band’s first three albums hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts, while their next two each reached No. 2. Their sixth album, “Everyone’s a Star,” is due out Nov. 14. They’ve previously headlined the former Xcel Energy Center several times and the Armory in 2022 and 2023.

Iron Maiden

Related Articles


Twin Cities favorite Brandi Carlile books Target Center show in February


Concert review: Country star Lainey Wilson impresses in arena debut


Concert review: Now 83, Paul McCartney maybe amazed U.S. Bank Stadium crowd


What to know if you’re heading to see Paul McCartney in Minneapolis


Review: Paul McCartney rocks Denver with nostalgia, heart and humor

Iron Maiden hit No. 4 on the British charts with their self-titled 1980 debut album. They didn’t find success in the States until their third release, 1982’s “The Number of the Beast,” the group’s first with vocalist Bruce Dickinson. For the decade that followed, Iron Maiden continued to release new music and tour heavily, including a handful of shows at the old Met Center. In 1993, Dickinson left Iron Maiden for a solo career.

Six years later, Dickinson returned to the band, who went on a worldwide reunion tour that ended with a show at the Rock in Rio festival in Brazil in front of an audience of more than 250,000. In the years since, Iron Maiden has continued to find success on the road. Last October, they played the former Xcel Energy Center for the third time in front of about 15,000 fans.

Additional shows at Mystic Lake Amphitheater will be announced on a rolling basis, according to a news release.

OpenAI may move forward with new business structure, partnership with Microsoft, regulators say

posted in: All news | 0

By MATT O’BRIEN and THALIA BEATY

OpenAI said Tuesday it has reorganized its ownership structure and converted its business into a public benefit corporation after two crucial regulators, the Delaware and California attorneys general, said they would not oppose the plan.

Related Articles


Elon Musk launches Grokipedia to compete with online encyclopedia Wikipedia


Layoffs are piling up, raising worker anxiety. Here are some companies that have cut jobs recently


A $20,000 football suite with luxe food is latest money machine for colleges


Officials show little proof that new tech will help Medicaid enrollees meet work rules


Average price for a new car surpasses $50,000 for first time

The restructuring paves the way for the ChatGPT maker to more easily profit off its artificial intelligence technology even as it remains technically under the control of a nonprofit.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a call Tuesday that “the most likely path” for the newly formed business is that it becomes publicly traded on the stock market, “given the capital needs that we’ll have and sort of the size of the company,” though a Wall Street debut was not a part of the announcements detailed Tuesday.

Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings and California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in separate statements that they would not object to the restructuring, seemingly bringing to an end more than a year of negotiations and announcements about the future of OpenAI’s governance and the power that for-profit investors and its nonprofit board will have over the organization’s technology.

The company also said it has signed a new agreement with its longtime backer Microsoft that gives the software giant a roughly 27% stake in OpenAI’s new for-profit corporation but changes some of the details of their close partnership. Microsoft’s $135 billion stake will be just ahead of the OpenAI nonprofit’s $130 billion stake in the for-profit company.

The attorneys general of Delaware, where OpenAI is incorporated, and California, where it is headquartered, had both spent months investigating the proposed changes.

“We will be keeping a close eye on OpenAI to ensure ongoing adherence to its charitable mission and the protection of the safety of all Californians,” said Bonta.

OpenAI said it completed its restructuring “after nearly a year of engaging in constructive dialogue” with the offices in both states.

“OpenAI has completed its recapitalization, simplifying its corporate structure,” said a blog post Tuesday from Bret Taylor, the chair of OpenAI’s board of directors. “The nonprofit remains in control of the for-profit, and now has a direct path to major resources before AGI arrives.”

AGI stands for artificial general intelligence, which OpenAI defines as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.” OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit in 2015 with a mission to safely build AGI for humanity’s benefit. It later started a for-profit arm.

Microsoft invested its first $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019 and the two companies formed an agreement that made Microsoft the exclusive provider of the computing power needed to build OpenAI’s costly technology. It was a lifeline for the startup research lab, which is now valued at $500 billion but continues to lose more money than it makes. In turn, Microsoft heavily used the technology behind ChatGPT to enhance its own AI products.

The two companies first revealed in January that they were altering that agreement, enabling San Francisco-based OpenAI to build its own computing capacity, “primarily for research and training of models.” That coincided with OpenAI’s announcements of a partnership with Oracle and SoftBank to build a massive new data center in Abilene, Texas.

It’s since announced what Altman described Tuesday as a “$1.4 trillion total financial obligation” over the next few years, which includes more data center projects planned in the U.S., Asia, Europe and South America, along with big deals with chipmakers like Nvidia, AMD and Broadcom.

Those investments left Microsoft’s OpenAI arrangement up in the air as the two companies appeared to veer further apart before reaching a tentative new agreement in September.

OpenAI had previously said its own nonprofit board will decide when AGI is reached, effectively ending its Microsoft partnership. But it now says that “once AGI is declared by OpenAI, that declaration will now be verified by an independent expert panel,” and that Microsoft’s rights to OpenAI’s confidential research methods “will remain until either the expert panel verifies AGI or through 2030, whichever is first.” Microsoft will also retain commercial rights to OpenAI products “post-AGI” and through 2032.

“Microsoft can now count on 7 years of runway,” said an investor note from JP Morgan analysts, interpreting the news as a positive development for the software giant.

FILE – The logo of Microsoft is seen outside its French headquarters in Issy-les-Moulineaux, outside Paris on May 13, 2024. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus, File)

Microsoft put out the same joint announcement about the revised partnership Tuesday but declined further comment. Its shares spiked more than 2% on Tuesday.

Going forward, the nonprofit will be called the OpenAI Foundation and Taylor said it would grant out $25 billion toward health and curing diseases and protecting against the cybersecurity risks of AI. He did not say over what time period those funds would be dispersed.

Robert Weissman, co-president of the nonprofit Public Citizen, said this arrangement does not guarantee the nonprofit independence, likening it to a corporate foundation that will serve the interests of the for-profit.

Even as the nonprofit’s board may technically remain in control, Weissman said that control “is illusory because there is no evidence of the nonprofit ever imposing its values on the for-profit.”

The Delaware attorney general’s investigation focused on ensuring OpenAI put its commitment to safety first and before any financial interests. Jennings also said OpenAI promised to keep its nonprofit in control of the public benefit corporation, including the right to appoint and remove its board members.

The removal of OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman in Nov. 2023 by the nonprofit’s board at the time — and his subsequent reappointment — kicked off the company’s effort to restructure.

The nonprofit’s board will continue to include a Safety and Security Committee, which will have the power “to oversee and review” OpenAI’s technology development. It will even have the power to stop the release of a new product, according to the Delaware attorney general’s statement.

Additionally, within a year, the nonprofit’s board will include at least two members who do not also serve on the public benefit corporation’s board.

OpenAI still faces a legal challenge from billionaire Tesla CEO Elon Musk, an early OpenAI investor who now runs his own AI firm, xAI, and has accused the startup he co-founded of betraying its original mission.

A federal judge in March denied Musk’s request for a court order blocking OpenAI from converting itself to a for-profit company but said she could expedite a trial to consider Musk’s claims.

Elon Musk launches Grokipedia to compete with online encyclopedia Wikipedia

posted in: All news | 0

Elon Musk has launched Grokipedia, a crowdsourced online encyclopedia that the billionaire seeks to position as a rival to Wikipedia.

Writing on social media, Musk said that Grokipedia.com is “now live” and its goal is the “truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

Musk has previously criticized Wikipedia for being filled with “propaganda” and called for people to stop donating to the site, which is run by a nonprofit. In September he announced that his artificial intelligence company xAI was working on Grokipedia.

The Grokipedia site has a minimalist appearance with little beyond a search bar where users can type in queries. It states that it has 885,279 articles. Wikipedia, meanwhile, says it has more than 7 million articles in English.

Like Wikipedia, users can search for articles on various topics such as Taylor Swift, the baseball World Series, or Buckingham Palace.

While Wikipedia is written and edited by volunteers, it’s unclear how exactly Grokipedia articles are put together. Reports suggest the site is powered by the same xAI model that underpins Musk’s Grok chatbot, but some articles are seemingly adapted from Wikipedia.

As a huge trove of well-constructed sentences with little restriction on how it’s used, Wikipedia has been a key source used to train AI chatbots, including Grok’s rivals ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. That’s one reason Republican lawmakers in the U.S. Congress said they launched an investigation in August of alleged “manipulation efforts” in Wikipedia’s editing process that could inject bias and undermine neutral points of view on its platform and the AI systems that rely on it.

Wikipedia encourages its volunteer editors to cite nearly every sentence or paragraph with a primary source, and sentences not verified can be challenged and removed. Some of Grokipedia’s entries are thinly sourced, such as an entry on the Chola Dynasty of southern India that has three linked sources, compared to Wikipedia’s that has 113 linked sources plus dozens of referenced books.

Grokipedia’s entry on Wikipedia accuses the site of having “systemic ideological biases — particularly a left-leaning slant in coverage of political figures and topics.”

The San Francisco-based Wikimedia Foundation didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.

‘Cancer doesn’t care’: Citizen lobbyists unite to push past Washington’s ugly politics

posted in: All news | 0

By Noam N. Levey, KFF Health News

Mary Catherine Johnson is a retired small-business owner from outside Rochester, New York. She voted for Donald Trump three times.

Related Articles


Trump administration moves to overrule state laws protecting credit reports from medical debt


Trump administration shakes up ICE leadership across the country in major overhaul


Judge extends order barring the Trump administration from firing federal workers during the shutdown


Officials show little proof that new tech will help Medicaid enrollees meet work rules


Federal judge blocks the Trump administration from pulling funding for sex ed on gender diversity

Lexy Mealing, who used to work in a physician’s office, is from Long Island. She’s a Democrat.

But the women share a common bond. They both survived breast cancer.

And when the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network organized its annual citizen lobby day in Washington last month, Johnson and Mealing were among the more than 500 volunteers pushing Congress to keep cancer research and support for cancer patients at the top of the nation’s health care agenda.

The day is something of a ritual for groups like the cancer organization.

This year, it came as Democrats and Republicans in Washington slid toward a budget impasse that shut down the federal government. But these volunteers transcended their political differences and found common ground.

“Not one person here discussed if you’re a Democrat, if you’re a Republican,” said Mealing, one of 27 volunteers in the New York delegation. “Cancer doesn’t care.”

Every one of the volunteer lobbyists had been touched in some way by the deadly disease, which is expected to kill more than 600,000 people in the U.S. this year.

Johnson said each of her mother’s 10 siblings died from cancer, as did a lifelong friend who died at age 57, leaving behind his wife and two young daughters.

After visiting lawmakers on Capitol Hill, hundreds of volunteers for the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network gathered for a candlelight vigil at Constitution Gardens along the National Mall in Washington. (Charlotte Kesl/KFF Health News/TNS)

Like many of the New York volunteers, Johnson also said she’s worried about the state of politics today.

“I think we’re probably the most divided that we’ve ever been,” she said. “That scares me. Scares me for my grandchildren.”

Katie Martin, a cancer volunteer from outside Buffalo, also worries. She and her daughter recently drove past political protesters screaming at one another on the street.

“My daughter is silent and then starts asking, ‘What is this?’ And I don’t know how to explain it, because it doesn’t even make sense to me,” she said. “It’s very heartbreaking.”

Mealing said she can barely watch the news these days. “A lot of Americans are very stressed out. There’s a lot of things going on.”

Despite a steady rain, volunteers from across the country and across the political spectrum converged on the National Mall in Washington recently to remember people who have died of cancer, part of an annual volunteer fly-in organized by the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network. (Charlotte Kesl/KFF Health News/TNS)

Americans are indeed split over many issues — immigration, guns, President Trump. But helping people with cancer and other serious illnesses retains broad bipartisan support, polls show.

In one recent survey, 7 in 10 voters said it’s very important for the federal government to fund medical research. That included majorities of Democrats and Republicans.

“It’s rare in today’s environment to see numbers like that,” said Jarrett Lewis, a Republican pollster who conducted the survey for patient groups. “But almost everybody in this country knows somebody who’s had cancer.”

Similarly, a recent KFF poll found that three-quarters of U.S. adults, including most Republicans who align with the Make America Great Again, or MAGA, movement, want Congress to extend subsidies that help Americans buy health insurance through Affordable Care Act marketplaces.

These subsidies, which are critical to people with chronic illnesses such as cancer, are among the main sticking points in the current budget impasse in Congress.

As the cancer volunteers gathered in a conference hotel in Washington, they focused on their shared agenda: increasing funding for cancer research, retaining insurance subsidies, and expanding access to cancer screening.

“We may not see eye to eye politically. We might not even see eye to eye in social circumstances,” said Martin, the Buffalo-area volunteer. “But we can see beyond those differences because we’re here for one cause.”

The state delegations practiced the pitches they would make to their members of Congress. They ran through the personal stories they would share. And they swapped tips for how to deal with resistant staff and how to ask for a photo with a lawmaker.

After visiting lawmakers on Capitol Hill, hundreds of volunteers for the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network gathered for a candlelight vigil at Constitution Gardens along the National Mall in Washington. (Charlotte Kesl/KFF Health News/TNS)

On the morning of their lobby day, they reconvened in a cavernous ballroom, decked out in matching blue polo shirts and armed with red information folders to leave at each office they would visit.

They got a pep talk from a pair of college basketball coaches. Then they headed across town to Capitol Hill.

The army of volunteers — from every state in the country — hit 484 of the 535 Senate and House offices.

Not every visit was an unqualified victory. Many Republican lawmakers object to extending the insurance subsidies, arguing they’re too costly.

But lawmakers from both parties have backed increased research funding and support for more cancer screening.

American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network volunteers from all 50 states decorated about 10,000 white paper bags with messages of hope and remembrance for people with cancer. (Charlotte Kesl/KFF Health News/TNS)

And the New Yorkers felt good about the day. “It was amazing,” Mealing said as the day wrapped up. “You could just feel the sense of, ‘Everybody stronger together.’”

When evening came, the volunteers met on the National Mall for a candlelight vigil. It was raining. Bagpipes played.

Around a pond near the Lincoln Memorial, some 10,000 tea lights glimmered in little paper bags. Each luminary had a name on it — a life touched by cancer.

American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network volunteers from all 50 states decorated about 10,000 white paper bags with messages of hope and remembrance for people with cancer. (Charlotte Kesl/KFF Health News/TNS)

John Manna, another New Yorker, is a self-described Reagan Republican whose father died from lung cancer. He reflected on the lessons this day could offer a divided nation.

“Talk to people,” he said. “Get to know each other as people, and then you can understand somebody’s positions.  We have little disagreements, but, you know, we don’t attack each other. We talk and discuss it.”

Manna said he would be back next year.

©2025 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.