CLEVELAND —  As the clock wound down towards Major League Baseball’s trade deadline, a group of Twins players gathered together in a room at the team hotel in downtown Cleveland, their eyes glued to MLB Network.

Sometime around 5:50 p.m. local time, outfielder Matt Wallner estimated, reliever Louie Varland’s phone rang. About six minutes later, so did Griffin Jax’s. Everybody in the room knew what that meant.

“It was pretty surreal just seeing them answer phone calls and the next thing you know, they’re on different teams,” starting pitcher Bailey Ober said. “It’s tough. It’s never fun to go through.”

Thursday marked a day unlike any other for the Twins, one in which the front office executed seven different trades. All told, the front office made nine deals before the trade deadline, sending away 10 major leaguers — nearly 40 percent of the 26-man roster — as it attempted a reset on a roster that been underperforming. By the time the Twins returned to the ballpark a day later to take on the Cleveland Guardians, they were still trying to process everything that had happened over the past few days.

“It was the most interesting day of my big-league career, for sure,” Wallner said. “It was just different.”

Wallner said he hadn’t used the social media site X — formerly known as Twitter —  in two years, but logged back into his account to keep up with all the trades, which came in at a dizzying pace.

Ryan Jeffers spent Thursday at home in Minnesota with his family after welcoming his second child, Hayes, on Saturday. He took his daughter, Harper, to the aquarium at the Mall of America and rode the carousel with her, enjoying some one-on-one time with his daughter.

“I’m constantly checking my phone and seeing what’s happening, seeing what latest news is dropping, seeing the dominoes continue to fall, continue to fall, go home and eat some lunch, then see someone else go,” Jeffers said. “It just kept coming. It never felt like it ended.”

By the time the front office was done with its work, Chris Paddack, Jhoan Duran, Harrison Bader, Brock Stewart, Danny Coulombe, Willi Castro, Carlos Correa, Ty France, Varland and Jax had all been shipped to other teams. Twins players walked into a clubhouse on Friday that featured some new faces  — like Alan Roden, who was acquired as part of the Varland/France trade with Toronto — and some more familiar, like Edouard Julien and Austin Martin.

But even a day removed from the deadline, it was still hard to completely comprehend what had happened.

“No one’s done processing all parts of what went on,” manager Rocco Baldelli said. “That might take some time to happen but we have to get back to work.”

Baldelli spent his day bouncing from hotel room to hotel room, touching base with his players, talking both to those who were departing and some of those who remained. Traded players who hadn’t yet traveled to Cleveland received a phone call from the manager.

While the scope of what the front office did was shocking, the individual trade that seemed to surprise people the most within the clubhouse was the Varland deal considering the local product is much further from free agency than the other players who were dealt.

“There (were) some guys that you had a feeling we might trade. I wouldn’t have initially put Louie in that category,” Baldelli said. “Everyone was some version of emotional. I think it was hardest on Lou. I don’t think that’s even close.”

Of the group set for free agency after this season — Bader, Castro, Paddack, France and Coulombe and Christian Vázquez — all dealt but Vázquez, who said he was surprised he was not part of Thursday’s roster purge. The other five players traded — Correa, Stewart, Varland, Jax and Duran — were under team control past this season. In return, the Twins were able to access either more prospect capital or, in Correa’s case, payroll flexibility.

For those who remained, Friday marked the beginning of a new reality.

“A lot of guys were shocked,” outfielder Trevor Larnach said. “I think it’s safe to say not a lot of people have seen something like that. It’s definitely crazy to be a part of.”

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By MARIA SHERMAN, Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — Jeannie Seely, the soulful country music singer behind such standards like “Don’t Touch Me,” has died. She was 85.

Her publicist, Don Murry Grubbs, said she died Friday after succumbing to complications from an intestinal infection.

Known as “Miss Country Soul” for her unique vocal style, Seely was a trailblazer for women in country music, celebrated for her spirited nonconformity and for a string of undeniable hits in the ‘60s and ’70s.

Her second husband, Gene Ward, died in December. In May, Seely revealed that she was in recovery after undergoing multiple back surgeries, two emergency procedures and spending 11 days in the ICU. She also suffered a bout of pneumonia.

“Rehab is pretty tough, but each day is looking brighter and last night, I saw a light at the end of the tunnel. And it was neon, so I knew it was mine!” she said in a statement at the time. “The unsinkable Seely is working her way back.”

FILE – Jeannie Seely performs at the 2018 Medallion Ceremony at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville, Tenn., on Oct. 21, 2018. (Photo by Al Wagner/Invision/AP, File

Seely was born in July 1940, in Titusville, Pennsylvania, about two hours north of Pittsburgh and raised in nearby Townville. Her love of country music was instant; her mother sang, and her father played the banjo. When she was a child, she sang on local radio programs and performed on local television. In her early 20s, she moved to Los Angeles to kick-start a career, taking a job Liberty and Imperial Records in Hollywood.

She kept writing and recording. Nashville was next: She sang on Porter Wagoner’s show; she got a deal with Monument Records. Her greatest hit would arrive soon afterward: “Don’t Touch Me,” the crossover ballad written by Hank Cochran. The song earned Seely her first and only Grammy Award, for best country & western vocal performance in the female category.

Cochran and Seely were married in 1969 and divorced in 1979.

Seely broke boundaries in her career — at a time when country music expected a kind of subservience from its women performers, Seely was a bit of a rebel, known for wearing a miniskirt on the Grand Ole Opry stage when it was still taboo.

And she had a number of country hits in the ‘60s and ’70s, including three Top 10 hits on what is now known as Billboard’s hot country songs chart: “Don’t Touch Me,” 1967’s “I’ll Love You More (Than You Need)” and 1973’s “Can I Sleep In Your Arms?”, adapted from the folk song “Can I Sleep In Your Barn Tonight Mister?”

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In the years since, Seely continued to release albums, perform, and host, regularly appearing on country music programming. Her songs are considered classics, and have been recorded by everyone from Merle Haggard, Ray Price and Connie Smith to Ernest Tubb, Grandpa Jones, and Little Jimmy Dickens.

And Seely never stopped working in country music. Since 2018, she’s hosted the weekly “Sunday’s with Seely” on Willie Nelson’s Willie’s Roadhouse SiriusXM channel. That same year, she was inducted into the Music City Walk of Fame.

She appeared nearly 5,400 times at the Grand Ole Opry, which she has been a member of since 1967. Grubbs said Saturday’s Grand Ole Opry show would be dedicated to Seely.

She released her latest song in July 2024, a cover of Dottie West’s “Suffertime,” recorded at the world-renowned RCA Studio B. She performed it at the Opry the year before.

Minnesota’s Department of Human Services is moving to terminate a Medicaid-funded housing assistance program after federal law enforcement announced it was investigating a “massive” fraud scheme that likely lost the state millions.

DHS on Friday said it sent a letter to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services asking to end the Housing Stabilization Services program, describing the move as an “unprecedented step.” The agency said it intends to redesign and relaunch the program to avoid fraud in the future.

In the letter, temporary Human Services Commissioner Shireen Gandhi said there are not enough controls in the program to stop “bad actors” from taking advantage of the system. The agency’s Office of Inspector General recommended termination of the program, she said.

“DHS is rooting out fraud wherever we find it. We cannot allow one more cent of taxpayer money going out the door to providers who claim to serve Minnesotans in need of stable housing while lining their pockets for personal gain,” Gandhi said in a statement.

Payments cut off

The request to terminate the program comes as the department cuts off payments to housing providers it suspects are defrauding the government. Gov. Tim Walz on Monday said he had directed DHS to cut off payments to 50 housing providers following news of the federal investigation earlier in July.

Eleven more housing stability providers lost funding on Thursday, according to DHS. A total of 77 programs have lost payments due to “credible allegations of fraud” this year, the agency said.

Gandhi has credited recent legislation that went into effect on July 1 with providing her agency the ability to cut off payments when there is credible evidence of fraud.

Minnesota’s Housing Stabilization Services, a first-of-its-kind program authorized in 2018, helps the elderly and people with disabilities at risk of homelessness find and pay for housing. People with mental illness and addiction problems also are eligible.

Susceptible to fraud

But the program is susceptible to fraud, according to an FBI search warrant affidavit. Dozens of companies emerged to provide state-funded services, and many claimed reimbursements for services they did not actually offer, investigators claim.

The state initially expected the program would cost about $2.6 million a year. But from January 2024 to April 2025, 14 providers “received more than $22 million in taxpayer money for housing stabilization services they purportedly provided,” according to the warrant. Each of the 14 received more than $1.2 million through the program.

On July 16, the FBI searched eight locations in St. Paul, Roseville and Little Canada tied to five providers, though no one was arrested.

One of the providers, Brilliant Minds Services LLC, is located in the Griggs-Midway building on University Avenue in St. Paul, where about 22 providers are “purporting to operate,” according to the warrant. Those groups received about $8 million in Medicaid payments between January 2024 and May 2025.

Officials with the human services department said they will work with the federal government, the Legislature and community partners to fix the program and relaunch the benefit.

GOP accuse Walz of trying to ‘dodge accountability’

In a statement on the DHS plan to terminate the program, Senate Republicans accused the Walz administration of attempting to “dodge accountability” for another high-profile government fraud scandal.

“Today we learned Governor Walz is shutting down a housing program riddled with fraud, not to fix it, but to prevent any more embarrassment,” said Senate Minority Leader Mark Johnson, R-East Grand Forks. “Instead of holding anyone accountable, they’re pulling the plug before an audit can expose just how badly they mismanaged millions in taxpayer funds.”

In July, House Republicans sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services asking for an audit of the Minnesota Department of Human Services amid a “wave” of Medicaid billing fraud investigations.

Rep. Kristin Robbins, R-Maple Grove, the chair of the House Fraud Prevention and State Agency Oversight Committee, called the termination request an “admission” of how deep the fraud in the program has become.

“This was a program initially expected to cost taxpayers just $2.6 million a year, yet it ballooned to over $100 million, with fraud so rampant that the agency now admits it cannot guarantee basic program integrity,” she said. “The shutdown of this program confirms what we feared all along: this fraud goes far deeper than the few raids and arrests made public so far.”

A string of fraud cases

Housing Stabilization Services is the latest DHS-administered program in Minnesota to fall under investigation for fraud. Child care, substance abuse treatment and autism support programs have also seen allegations of abuse.

All that comes on top of the single largest known instance of fraud, where federal prosecutors say a scheme centered around the nonprofit Feeding Our Future defrauded the government of $250 million in federal funds from a pandemic-era meal program. In that case, the money was administered by the Minnesota Department of Education.

“Minnesota has a fraud problem — and not a small one,” Acting U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson said in a statement announcing the investigation into housing fraud a few weeks ago.

In a subsequent interview with KSTP-TV, Thompson said the total amount of fraud under investigation by federal authorities could top $1 billion.

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Earlier this year, I glommed onto a trend that is sweeping women of a certain age in the U.S.: I became a woman who lifts.

Admittedly, describing myself as such feels like an overstatement of my fitness level. Seven months in, and I still can’t do a pull-up, while my dumbbell incline press tops out at 40 pounds. But I am a regular at a women-inclusive gym that has nary a stair stepper or treadmill and is purely focused on helping women get strong.

This middle-aged woman has perhaps a more modest goal: not to get weak as I grow older. Women’s current obsession with lifting coincides with a push to better meet their needs during the menopause transition. As recently as 2020, less than a quarter of women in midlife were getting in enough strength training. Yet maintaining muscle mass is vital for healthy aging.

That’s a message that doctors too often failed to deliver to women in the past, says Lisa Larkin, the CEO of the women’s health care company Ms. Medicine and immediate past president of the Menopause Society. “We have really focused on bone loss, but not on the change in body composition and loss of muscle,” she says.

Our bodies undergo a major change at midlife. We become less active as we get older, and hormone levels are changing, as is the balance of fat and lean muscle.

That has real health consequences. The extra pounds of belly fat aren’t just making it harder to fit into your favorite jeans; they’re amplifying the risk of heart disease and Type 2 diabetes. And the decline in lean muscle mass makes us weaker and frail later in life, meaning we’re at a higher risk of falls and fractures.

But the moment a perimenopausal woman starts trying to figure out how to combat that, she’s likely to find herself going down a rabbit hole that can lead to junk science and grifts.

Scroll through any 40-something woman’s social media feed, and you’ll find a stream of influencers, including many doctors, offering advice for managing that decline. It can be dizzying. Strength training is crucial, they say. But be careful not to lose flexibility. Don’t forget the cardio! But don’t work out too hard, either. Why aren’t you on hormones already? Take these four supplements to avoid “mom bod” by age 50.

Lurking beneath much of this advice is a pitch for a product that will benefit someone —unfortunately, not always the woman buying it.

For example, take a short walk around many neighborhoods and you’re sure to come across a middle-aged woman wearing a weighted vest. They’ve become so ubiquitous, one might think they were part of a 40-something welcome pack (other items include reading glasses and an appointment for a colonoscopy).

Their popularity is no doubt due in part to menopause influencers, who, coincidentally, often sell their own vests or get commission if you buy one from their Amazon.com Inc. store. They claim the equipment offers magical muscle-building and bone-strengthening properties. That sounds intuitive. And how convenient would it be if simply adding an extra load could turn a mundane task like walking the dog into an anti-aging exercise?

But while they might help your heart pump a little harder, evidence that the vests can help preserve muscle and bone is scant. Some studies show they don’t work at all, and the ones that suggest a benefit are flawed. Influencers often point to promising bone strength results from a tiny study, but it compared postmenopausal women who exercised with a vest to women who didn’t exercise at all. (Unsurprisingly, those who exercised fared better than those who didn’t.)

Building muscle requires the right amount of resistance, which we’re not getting while walking — even with a weighted vest, says Lauren Colenso-Semple, a muscle physiology researcher. “That’s why lifting weights can’t be replaced with other forms of activity.”

This isn’t to suggest the vests do harm. If pulling it on is motivation to take a walk, then go for it. And it can boost the weight-bearing load to your existing strength training workout.

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Women embarking on a strength training journey might also find themselves trying to sift through how to eat in order to build or retain muscle. They’ll no doubt find plenty of influencers suggesting they will wither away without gargantuan amounts of protein (most ideally, the protein powders and shakes they are selling).

While it’s true that protein fuels muscle growth — and that many experts believe the recommended daily allowance of it is too low — some influencers are pushing people to eat as much as 200 grams of protein per day. Those levels aren’t harmful to someone with good kidney function, Colenso-Sample says, but the returns are diminishing after about 1.6 grams per kilogram. (That’s just under 110 grams per day for someone who weighs 150 pounds.)

Most people can get what they need by eating a decent portion of protein at each meal, maybe with an added protein-rich snack or shake, she says.

Other examples abound of doctors and fitfluencers coaxing women into products they don’t need. Anyone feeling confused should focus on what does work. That’s pretty simple: most of us just need to get back to (or, in my case, start with) the basics by incorporating regular strength training into our lives. Lifting weights as little as once or twice a week can improve long-term health.

In the end, the most valuable menopause fitness hack can’t be bought — it’s finding a strength training routine you love. The goal, after all, is to make this a decades-long journey.

Lisa Jarvis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering biotech, health care and the pharmaceutical industry. Previously, she was executive editor of Chemical & Engineering News.