The Minnesota Court of Appeals panel has issued the University of St. Thomas at least a partial legal victory in a tussle with neighbors over a new Division I basketball and hockey arena on campus.

Homeowners near the St. Paul campus calling themselves Advocates for Responsible Development have fought the 5,300-seat Lee and Penny Anderson Arena on multiple fronts, filing legal claims alleging the $183 million facility lacked proper environmental review and mitigation for traffic and parking, emissions, soil erosion, ice rink refrigerants and bumblebee habitat.

In July 2024, the appeals court forced the city to consider the cumulative impacts of other construction projects on campus, such as the new Schoenecker Center, and spell out specific traffic mitigation measures in a revised Environmental Assessment Worksheet, which was published last October.

On Monday, rebuffing a legal petition filed by Advocates for Responsible Development, a three-judge panel found that the project’s second EAW — which lays out specific measures being taken to address parking and traffic — was sufficient, and a more intense review known as an Environmental Impact Statement would not be necessary.

The judges noted, however, that questions over whether the arena’s height and bluff setbacks violate city zoning restrictions remain open in a legal action before Ramsey County District Court, and the land-use claims would not be addressed in their latest ruling.

The arena will welcome fans with two doubleheaders Oct. 24 and 25 when women’s and men’s hockey play Providence College and on Nov. 8 when women’s and men’s basketball teams play the Army.

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By STEFANIE DAZIO and MALIN HAARALA

KIRUNA, Sweden (AP) — High atop the Luossavaara Mountain in northern Sweden, Sami reindeer herder Lars-Marcus Kuhmunen mapped out a bleak future for himself and other Indigenous people whose reindeer have roamed this land for thousands of years.

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An expanding iron-ore mine and a deposit of rare-earth minerals are fragmenting the land and altering ancient reindeer migration routes. But with the Arctic warming four times faster than the rest of the planet, herders say they need more geographic flexibility, not less, to ensure the animals’ survival.

If a mine is established at the deposit of rare-earth minerals called Per Geijer, which Sweden heralds as Europe’s largest, Kuhmunen said it could completely cut off the migration routes used by the Sami village of Gabna.

That would be the end of the Indigenous way of life for Kuhmunen, his children and their fellow Sami reindeer herders, he said, in this far-north corner of Sweden some 124 miles above the Arctic Circle.

“The reindeer is the fundamental base of the Sami culture in Sweden,” Kuhmunen said. “Everything is founded around the reindeers: The food, the language, the knowledge of mountains. Everything is founded around the reindeer herding. If that ceases to exist, the Sami culture will also cease to exist.”

Sami reindeer herders follow generations of tradition

Sami herders are descended from a once-nomadic people scattered across a region spanning the far north of Sweden, Norway, Finland and the northwestern corner of Russia. Until the 1960s, members of this Indigenous minority were discouraged from reindeer herding, and the church and state suppressed their language and culture.

Lars-Marcus Kuhmunen, a Sami reindeer herder and chairman of Sami village of Gabna, grimaces in Kiruna, Sweden, Sunday, Aug. 17, 2025. (AP Photo/Malin Haarala)

In Sweden alone there are at least 20,000 people with Sami heritage, though an official count does not exist because an ethnicity-based census is against the law. Today, a Sami village called a sameby is a business entity dictated by the state, which determines how many semi-domesticated reindeer each village can have and where they can roam.

“It’s getting more and more a problem to have a sort of sustainable reindeer husbandry and to be able to have the reindeers to survive the Arctic winter and into the next year,” said Stefan Mikaelsson, a member of the Sami Parliament.

In the Gabna village, Kuhmunen oversees about 2,500 to 3,000 reindeer and 15 to 20 herders. Their families, some 150 people in total, depend on the bottom line of the business.

The mining area where a proposed mine would cut off ancient reindeer migration routes in Kiruna, Sweden, Sunday, Aug. 17, 2025. (AP Photo/Malin Haarala)

Even before the discovery of the Per Geijer deposit, they had to contend with the expanding footprint of Kiirunavaara. The world’s largest underground, iron-ore mine has forced the village’s herders to lead their reindeer through a longer and harder migration route.

Mining could reduce dependence on China but hurt Sami herders

Swedish officials and LKAB, the state-owned mining company, say the proposed Per Geijer mine could reduce Europe’s reliance on China for rare-earth minerals. LKAB hopes to begin mining there in the 2030s.

Besides being essential to many kinds of consumer technology, including cellphones, hard drives and electric and hybrid vehicles, rare-earth minerals also are considered crucial to shifting the economy away from fossil fuels toward electricity and renewable energy.

But if work on Per Geijer goes forward, Kuhmunen said there will be no other routes for the Gabna herders to take the reindeer east from the mountains in the summer to the grazing pastures full of nutrient-rich lichen in the winter.

Darren Wilson, LKAB’s senior vice president of special products, gestures next to a model of existing mines, in Kiruna, Sweden, Monday, Aug. 18, 2025. (AP Photo/Malin Haarala)

The village will contest the mine in court but Kuhmunen said he is not optimistic.

“It’s really difficult to fight a mine. They have all the resources, they have all the means. They have the money. We don’t have that,” Kuhmunen said. “We only have our will to exist. To pass these grazing lands to our children.”

Darren Wilson, LKAB’s senior vice president of special products, said the mining company is seeking solutions to assist the Sami herders, though he would not speculate on what they might be.

“There are potential things that we can do and we can explore and we have to keep engaging,” he said. “But I’m not underestimating the challenge of doing that.”

Climate change’s impact on reindeer husbandry

Climate change is wreaking havoc on traditional Sami reindeer husbandry.

Reindeer stand at a farm in Lulea, Sweden, Saturday, Aug. 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Malin Haarala)

Global warming has brought rain instead of snow during the winter in Swedish Lapland. The freezing rain then traps lichen under a thick layer of ice where hungry reindeer can’t reach the food, according to Anna Skarin, a reindeer husbandry expert and Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences professor.

In the summer, mountain temperatures have risen to 86 Fahrenheit and left reindeer over-heated and unable to graze enough to gain the weight needed to sustain them in winter.

Some in Sweden suggest putting the reindeer onto trucks to ferry them between grazing lands if the Per Geijer mine is built. But Skarin said that isn’t feasible because the animals eat on the move and the relocation would deny them food to be grazed while walking from one area to another.

“So you’re kind of both taking away the migration route that they have used traditionally over hundreds and thousands of years,” she said, “and you would also take away that forage resource that they should have used during that time.”

For Kuhmunen, it would also mean the end of Sami traditions passed down by generations of reindeer herders on this land.

“How can you tell your people that what we’re doing now, it will cease to exist in the near future?” he said.

Pietro De Cristofaro in Kiruna, Sweden, contributed to this report.

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Find the AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

A Forest Lake man has been sentenced to a year in the Ramsey County workhouse and seven years of probation for selling fentanyl-laced heroin to a childhood friend who then overdosed and died at a White Bear Lake hotel in 2021.

William James Dykes, 31, was charged with third-degree murder last year in Ramsey County District Court in connection with the death of 28-year-old Joseph Michael Nash at the Best Western Plus along U.S. 61.

William James Dykes (Courtesy of the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office)

Judge Nicole Starr on Friday followed a plea agreement that Dykes reached with the prosecution in March, giving him 364 days in the workhouse and staying a seven-year prison term in favor of probation. He was ordered to complete 48 hours of community service at a treatment recovery facility.

According to the criminal complaint, officers responded to the hotel about 11 a.m. Nov. 8, 2021, on a possible overdose and found Nash unresponsive in a second-floor room. Medics transported him to Regions Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

A 27-year-old woman and 25-year-old man were in the room when officers arrived and both said Nash had used heroin shortly before his death. They didn’t tell officers where Nash got the heroin, and neither of them made themselves available for follow-up interviews throughout the investigation, the complaint says.

An autopsy showed Nash died of mixed drug toxicity and that he had fentanyl and alcohol in his system.

Nash’s former girlfriend told police she had spoken with the 25-year-old man and that he said Nash asked him if “snorting heroin was better than smoking it,” the complaint states. Nash snorted the heroin and became unresponsive five minutes later.

Investigators spoke to Nash’s mother. She said that on the night before his death, he had left his Apple Watch at her home and she was able to monitor messages between her son and Dykes. In the messages, Nash asked Dykes when he was going to arrive at the hotel.

She said her son and Dykes grew up together and played football together. Dykes also used to work for her family’s business, she said.

She said that she called Dykes the morning of her son’s death because she was looking for him. Dykes said he sold her son marijuana.

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In a recorded phone conversation, the 25-year-old man told Nash’s former girlfriend that Dykes had delivered what was “supposed to be heroin but that everything is cut with fentanyl these days,” the complaint reads.

Cellphone records showed texts between Nash and Dykes that mentioned meeting at the hotel the night before the death. They also showed that Nash paid Dykes through Venmo.

Dykes told investigators that he and Nash were childhood friends and he was not sure when he last saw Nash. When asked what he knew about his death, Dykes asked to end the interview.

Dykes’ attorney did not return messages left Monday asking for comment on his sentence.

By KEN SWEET

NEW YORK (AP) — Armen Kirakosian remembers the frustrations of his first job as a call center agent nearly 10 years ago: the aggravated customers, the constant searching through menus for information and the notes he had to physically write for each call he handled.

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Thanks to artificial intelligence, the 29-year-old from Athens, Greece, is no longer writing notes or clicking on countless menus. He often has full customer profiles in front of him when a person calls in and may already know what problem the customer has before even saying “hello.” He can spend more time actually serving the customer.

“A.I. has taken (the) robot out of us,” Kirakosian said.

Roughly 3 million Americans work in call center jobs, and millions more work in call centers around the world, answering billions of inquiries a year about everything from broken iPhones to orders for shoes. Kirakosian works for TTEC, a company that provides third party customer service lines in 22 countries to companies in industries such as autos and banking that need extra capacity or have outsourced their call center operations.

Answering these calls can be thankless work. Roughly half of all customer service agents leave the job after a year, according to McKinsey, with stress and monotonous work being among the reasons employees quit.

Much of what these agents deal with is referred to in the industry as “break/fix,” which means something is broken — or wrong or confusing — and the customer expects the person on the phone to fix the problem. Now, it’s a question of who will be tasked with the fix: a human, a computer, or a human augmented by a computer.

Already, AI agents have taken over more routine call center tasks. Some jobs have been lost and there have been dire forecasts about the future job market for these individuals, ranging from modest single-percentage point losses, to as many as half of all call center jobs going away in the next decade. The drop likely won’t match the more dire predictions, however, because it’s become evident that the industry will still need humans, perhaps with even higher levels of learning and training, as some customer service issues become increasingly harder to solve.

Some finance companies have already experimented with going in heavily with AI for their customer service issues.

Klarna, the Swedish buy now, pay later company, replaced 700 of their roughly 3,000 customer service agents with chatbots and AI in 2024. The results were mixed. While the company did save money, Klarna found there was still a need for higher skilled human agents in certain circumstances, such as complicated issues related to identity theft. Earlier this year, Klarna hired seven internal freelancers to handle these issues.

Earlier this year, Klarna hired a handful of customer service employees back to the firm, acknowledging there were certain issues that AI couldn’t handle as well as a real person, like identity theft.

“Our vision of an AI-first contact center, where AI agents handle the majority of conversations and fewer, better trained and better paid human agents support only the most complex tasks, is quickly becoming a reality,” said Gadi Shamia of Replicant, an AI-software company that trains chatbots to sound more human, in an interview with consultants at McKinsey.

The call center customer’s experience, while improved, is still far from perfect.

The initial customer service call has long been handled through interactive voice response systems, known in the industry as IVR. Customers interact with IVR when they’re told “press one for sales, press two for support, press five for billing.” These crude systems got an update in the 2010s, when customers could prompt the system by saying “sales” or “support” or simple phrases like “I’d like to pay a bill” instead of navigating through a labyrinthian set of menu options.

But customers have little patience for these menus, leading them to “zero out,” which is call center slang for when a customer hits the zero button on their their keypad in hopes of reaching a human. It’s also not uncommon that after a customer “zeros out” they will be put on hold and transferred because they did not end up in the right place for their request.

Aware of Americans’ collective impatience with IVR, Democratic Sen. Ruben Gallego of Arizona and Republican Jim Justice of West Virginia have introduced the “Keep Call Centers in America Act,” which would require clear ways to reach a human agent, and provide incentives to companies that keep call center jobs in the U.S.

Companies are trying to roll out telephone systems that broadly understand customer service requests and predict where to send a customer without navigating a menu. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, is coming out with its “ChatGPT Agent” service for users that’s able to understand phrases like “I need to find a hotel for a wedding next year, please give me options for clothing and gifts.”

Bank of America says it has had increasing success in integrating such features into “Erica,” its chatbot that debuted in 2018. When Erica cannot handle a request, the agent transfers the customer directly to the right department. Erica is now also predictive and analytical, and knows for instance that a customer may repeatedly have a low balance and may need better help budgeting or may have multiple subscriptions to the same service.

Bank of America said this month that Erica has been used 3 billion times since its creation and is increasingly taking on a higher case load of customer service requests. The chatbot’s moniker comes from the last five letters of the company’s name.

James Bednar, vice president of product and innovation at TTEC, has spent much of his career trying to make customer service calls less painful for the caller as well as the company. He said these tools could eventually kill off IVR for good, ending the need for anyone to “zero out.”

“We’re getting to the point where AI will get you to the right person for your problem without you having to route through those menus,” Bednar said.