PITTSBURGH – Even though the Wild removed the injured reserve tag from center Nico Sturm on Friday following their morning skate at PPG Paints Arena, coach John Hynes said the season debut for the German faceoff specialist likely will not come until Sunday afternoon in Winnipeg at the earliest.

And with Ryan Hartman and Marco Rossi both still out with lower-body injuries, that meant a second game — and maybe more to come — with rookie Danila Yurov centering the team’s top line between Mats Zuccarello and Kirill Kaprizov.

Things could hardly have started better for Yurov in his debut as the team’s top-line center. Less than two minutes into what would eventually become a 4-3 shootout win over Carolina late Wednesday night, Yurov fed a pass to Zuccarello, whose long-range shot deflected off defenseman Brock Faber and into the net, giving Yurov his third career assist.

“I think that probably was his first shift with those guys, so that probably relieves a little bit of the nervousness going into it and helps settle in,” Hynes said on Friday morning in Pittsburgh.

In the immediate aftermath of the Carolina game — in which the Wild were on the defensive for long stretches after getting 2-0 and 3-1 leads, then hanging on to get the two points — Hynes had a more frank and critical assessment of the entire top line. It was noted that, for an extended stretch late in the second period that night, the trio of Zuccarello, Yurov and Kaprizov did not see the ice. But after taking a more detailed look at things, the coach said Friday that what he saw from the three, and Yurov especially, was encouraging.

“He plays a good two-way game. I felt that he made a nice play on (Faber’s) goal,” Hynes said. “Very good on breakout support. I think he can fit well with those guys too because he can transport the puck.”

Signed by the Wild in May after he was the team’s first-round pick, 24th overall, in the 2022 NHL draft, Yurov had played parts of the previous five years in the Kontinental Hockey League in his native Russia. He entered Friday night’s game in Pittsburgh with two goals and three assists in 16 outings at the NHL level.

“He’s making plays, he’s very responsible, he’s always in the right spot. The offense is going to come,” Wild forward Matt Boldy said after the Carolina game. “It’s hard. It’s not that easy, especially as a young guy playing center and having a lot of responsibility, and then playing with Kirill and Zuccy is a whole beast on its own. I thought he was awesome.”

Keeping it in the room

The players who will talk about it admit that it helped turn things around when Wild captain Jared Spurgeon called a players-only meeting on Halloween. It allowed the members of the team a private forum to air their concerns about why Minnesota had put up a 3-6-3 record to that point.

But hockey also has a strict unwritten code that things said behind closed doors are intensely private. They often like to “keep it in the room” as is the game’s common language.

So, while players like Spurgeon and Faber will talk in general terms about what came out of that meeting, and how it helped the Wild to a 7-1-1 mark in their next nine, a more common response is the one offered by Boldy when he was asked about the meeting and what came from it.

“Yeah, it was good,” he said, and did not elaborate. Asked about the meeting a second time, Boldly offered the bare minimum.

“It was a good meeting,” Boldly said.

Keeping it in the room, clearly.

At long last, Bogo’s back

Shelved for more than a month with a lower-body injury, defenseman Zach Bogosian was eager to re-enter the lineup versus anyone, even if it meant going head-to-head versus future Hall of Fame forward Sidney Crosby on Friday night, as Bogosian played for the first time since getting hurt on Oct. 17 in Washington.

Skating for the past few weeks as he made his way back to playing health, Bogosian admitted on Friday that what Tom Petty once said is true: the waiting is the hardest part.

“Definitely it’s not very fun sitting around,” said Bogosian, who, entering the meeting with the Penguins, had played five games this season and was looking for his first point. “It’s a challenge in itself. The way I look at it, every time you hit a little bit of adversity, you just get through the situation, and this is no different. It feels nice to be back.”

With Bogosian healthy, the Wild scratched Daemon Hunt from the lineup on Friday and sent defenseman David Jiricek back to the Iowa Wild.

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U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar met with Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican Friday with a group of Ukrainians who are working to help return more than 19,000 children abducted by Russian forces during the war.

Klobuchar has pushed for support for Ukraine following the Russian invasion of that country in 2022. The Minnesota Democrat was invited by the Ukrainians to join their delegation advocating for the return of children.

“Pope Leo is a true moral force for peace and justice and a champion for children around the world. It was an honor to meet him as part of our mission to bring home the Ukrainian children abducted by Russia and chart a path towards peace and healing for Ukraine,” said Klobuchar, in a statement. “We cannot accept a world where children are abducted during wartime and used as hostages for negotiations. The United States must remain steadfast in our support for Ukraine’s fight for freedom, and we should all heed Pope Leo’s example of serving those in need, pursuing the common good, and calling for peace.”

Also during her meeting, Klobuchar presented the Pope with a resolution honoring the victims and survivors of the mass shooting at the Annunciation Catholic Church and School in Minneapolis this summer.

During her visit to Rome, Klobuchar also spoke met with other Vatican officials to talk about efforts to return children abducted by Russia. Klobuchar has worked on legislation aimed at the recovery of Ukrainian children with U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican.

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The Ukrainian delegation includes four children who were taken by Russian forces and have been reunited with their families.

There have been 19,546 confirmed reports of unlawful deportations and transfers of Ukrainian children to Russa, Belarus or Russian-occupied territory in Ukraine, according to Ukrainian authorities. As of Oct. 9, about 1,800 have been returned.

According to a State Department report on human trafficking, Russia recruits or uses child soldiers, has a state-sponsored policy or pattern of human trafficking, and is among the worst hubs globally for human trafficking.

A St. Paul man who wore a sweatshirt that read “In Glock We Trust” while firing a fully automatic handgun at a car in Maplewood — wounding a passenger and causing two juveniles nearby to cower in fear — was sentenced Friday to just over six years in prison.

Muhnee Jaleel Bailey (Courtesy of the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office)

Muhnee Jaleel Bailey, 24, pleaded guilty in Ramsey County District Court to drive-by shooting in connection with the incident at an apartment building parking lot at Larpenteur Avenue and McMenemy Street about just before 6 p.m. on April 16.

In exchange for the plea, prosecutors agreed to dismiss five other charges: second-degree attempted murder and four counts of possession of a firearm or ammunition by a person prohibited due to a conviction for a crime of violence.

The six-year, three-month sentence was part of the plea agreement. He received credit for 175 days already served in custody.

According to the criminal complaint, surveillance video showed Bailey get out of a Chevrolet Malibu and fire three volleys, which were in rapid succession, at a gold sedan. Police found 18 spent casings in the parking lot.

Video also showed a 10-year-old girl who had just got off a school bus and another juvenile “cowering in fear as they tried to get into the apartment building,” the complaint read.

A 22-year-old passenger of the gold sedan was soon dropped off at Regions Hospital in St. Paul and treated for gunshot wounds to his shoulder and leg. He did not want to talk to police, the complaint said.

After law enforcement identified the license plate on the Chevrolet, police pulled over the car on April 22 in Minneapolis. Bailey was driving.

Officers discovered Bailey was on release from the Federal Bureau of Prisons to a halfway house in Minneapolis. He had pleaded guilty in March 2023 to a federal charge of possession of a firearm as felon.

Police carried out a search warrant at his house and found a Glock with an extended magazine, another Glock in a backpack, a pistol without a serial number and the sweatshirt.

Bailey has a lengthy criminal history that goes back to when he was a teenager, state court records show. Recent convictions in separate cases include drive-by shooting, fleeing police in a vehicle and possession of a machine gun after being caught with a Glock pistol that had an auto sear, or “switch,” making it fully automatic.

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By JOSH FUNK

The fiery crash of a UPS plane shortly after its left engine flew off its wing and sparked a massive fire during takeoff could spell the end of the 109 remaining MD-11 airliners that have been exclusively hauling cargo for more than a decade.

The fate of the planes won’t be determined until after UPS, FedEx and Western Global see how expensive the repairs the Federal Aviation Administration orders will be and learn whether there is a fatal flaw in their design. The package delivery companies may have already been thinking about retiring their MD-11s — which average more than 30 years old — over the next few years and replacing them with newer planes that are safer and more efficient. The FAA grounded all MD-11s and the 10 remaining related DC-10s after the crash.

Fourteen people — including the plane’s crew of three — died after the aircraft crashed into several businesses just outside the Muhammad Ali International Airport in Louisville, Kentucky, on Nov. 4. The plane got only 30 feet into the air.

This combination photo provided by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) via UPS shows a sequence of framegrabs made from video where an engine is seen detaching from the plane’s left wing upon takeoff at the Louisville International Airport in Louisville, Nov. 4, 2025. (UPS/NTSB via AP)

Mary Schiavo, a former U.S. Department of Transportation Inspector General, said it probably won’t be worth fixing the planes when better options are available from Boeing and Airbus, though the manufacturers have such a backlog that it takes years to get a plane after it is ordered. Still, it will depend on exactly what investigators find.

“For them to order inspections and to ground them as readily as they did makes me think that they’re worried about them,” Schiavo said.

Losing an engine recalls a similar 1979 crash

The National Transportation Safety Board said Thursday that its investigators discovered cracks in key parts that failed to keep the rear of the engine attached to the UPS plane’s wing. The crash reminded experts of the 1979 disaster that killed 273 after the left engine of an American Airlines jet catapulted up and over its wing after takeoff in Chicago.

That crash led to the worldwide grounding of 274 DC-10s, the predecessor to the MD-11. The airline workhorse was allowed to return to the skies because the NTSB determined that maintenance workers improperly using a forklift to reattach the engine damaged the plane that crashed. That meant the crash wasn’t caused by a fatal design flaw even though there had already been a number of accidents involving DC-10s.

The lugs that the NTSB said were cracked and failed in the crash earlier this month are located close to the part that failed in the 1979 crash, but they are different. Investigators will have to determine whether there is a common defect between the UPS plane and other MD-11s or whether the problem that caused the engine to fall off was unique to the plane.

An FAA spokesperson said the agency is working with NTSB and Boeing, which bought the company that made the MD-11s in 1997, to determine what needs to be done.

Both the DC-10 and MD-11 have some of the highest accident rates of any commercial planes, according to statistics published annually by Boeing. Twice in the 1970s, a DC-10 lost its rear cargo door in flight. The second time in 1974 caused a crash outside Paris that killed 346 people. But airlines loved the DC-10 for years, and the Air Force maintained a fleet of dozens of tankers based on the DC-10 that it flew for decades before retiring them last year.

Planes launched with a lot of promise

Formerly independent aircraft company McDonnell Douglas announced the MD-11 in 1984. The three-engine plane appeared promising with its larger capacity and longer range than the DC-10, but its performance never fully lived up to expectations, and newer planes from Boeing and Airbus eclipsed it. Schiavo said the MD-11 was “practically obsolete” when it came out compared to two-engine planes, which are cheaper to operate. Only 200 MD-11s were built between 1988 and 2000.

Most MD-11s started out carrying passengers, but eventually airlines decided to retire the model in favor of other planes. The last MD-11 passenger flight by KLM Royal Dutch Airlines took place in 2014.

MD-11 aircraft made up about 9% of the UPS fleet and 4% of the FedEx fleet, the companies have said. Western Global only owns 16 MD-11 planes.

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MD-11s might still fly again

Aviation journalist Wolfgang Borgmann, who devoted one of his “Legends of Flight” books to the history of the MD-11s and DC-10, said, “I think there is still much more useful life in them.” He pointed to the B-52 bombers that are still key planes for the Air Force even though they debuted in 1955.

“Age doesn’t matter in aviation. It’s the maintenance that counts,” said Borgmann, editor of the Aero International magazine in Germany.

Investigators are looking at the maintenance history of the UPS plane closely. NTSB said the last time a detailed inspection was done on its engines was in 2021. A similar inspection was not done during the extended maintenance the plane underwent the month before the crash, and the plane wasn’t due for another in-depth engine inspection until after roughly 7,000 more flights. Boeing and the FAA will have to determine whether that current maintenance schedule is adequate.