The Timberwolves open their season Wednesday night in Portland.

Will Anthony Edwards be on the court for it?

Edwards was healthy throughout the team’s training camp, but popped up as questionable on Minnesota’s injury report Tuesday with back spasms.

As the season progresses, Edwards frequently carries the questionable tag on pre-game injury reports. But rarely does it result in the guard missing time. He has played 79 out of 82 games in each of the past three seasons.

This injury update is more notable on the eve of the season opener.

Edwards was questionable with back spasms in March 2024 ahead of a bout with Denver. He played and scored 25 points in a contest the Wolves won by 13.

By HANNAH SCHOENBAUM and COREY WILLIAMS

Daniel Naroditsky, a standard-bearer in the world of competitive chess that flourished in the COVID-19 pandemic, died Monday at the age of 29, leaving behind a legacy as one of the greats of the game who helped usher in its digital era.

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The American grandmaster won several championships and amassed hundreds of thousands of subscribers on YouTube, Twitch and other platforms, where he would livestream matches and explain strategy in real time. But he also struggled with the cyberspace he helped build.

High-speed games became wildly popular online during the pandemic, creating a chess community that was soon rife with cheating allegations as players gained access to sophisticated computer programs that could give them an unfair advantage.

Naroditsky’s untimely death has shined a spotlight on the dark underbelly of the game that fellow pros say brought undue criticism and hostility upon the chess star in his final months.

His cause of death has not been released.

Legacy of integrity

Naroditsky had been dogged by unsubstantiated claims of cheating from Russian grandmaster and former World Chess Champion Vladimir Kramnik, whom Naroditsky had called one of the “heroes” he looked up to as a young player.

The California-born pro had denied the claims as he excelled at blitz and bullet chess, where players have mere minutes to finish intense matches. He was vocal about how the allegations took a toll on him.

“Ever since the Kramnik stuff, I feel like if I start doing well, people assume the worst of intentions,” Naroditsky said Saturday in the last livestream he filmed before his death. “The issue is just the lingering effect of it.”

He ruminated about his legacy and hoped other top players would trust that he played with integrity.

Grandmasters and other chess pros from around the world have applauded Naroditsky as an honorable ambassador of the game who used his online platform to make chess accessible to everyone. His family said in a statement that they hope he will be remembered for the joy and inspiration he brought people every day.

Naroditsky became a grandmaster, the highest title in chess aside from World Chess Champion, at the age of 18. He was consistently ranked in the top 200 worldwide for traditional chess, and he won the U.S. National Blitz Championship in August. He spent much of his time training young players in Charlotte, North Carolina.

This undated photo released by Charlotte Chess Center shows Daniel Naroditsky playing chess on the board. (Kelly Centrelli/Charlotte Chess Center via AP

“Daniel was an incredible teacher and explainer of chess and concepts and ideas,” said Daniel Weissbarth, co-owner of Silver Knights Chess Academy in Fairfax, Virginia.

Arkady Dvorkovich, president of the International Chess Federation, said the organization will establish a prize in memory of Naroditsky and his contributions to chess. Dvorkovich described the young grandmaster as brilliant, kind and a truly good person.

Blame game

Many pros this week called for an end to the constant finger-pointing that seemed to follow players like Naroditsky who thrived in fast-paced play.

Kenneth Regan, a chess international master and computer science professor at the University at Buffalo, said the opportunity to cheat has exploded as the cerebral sport has shifted online. There are ways to police the game online, but Regan said they are intrusive.

“The rate of cheating online is 100 to 200 times higher than the rate over the board,” Regan said. “From my point of view, there are five to 10 cases per year over the board.”

The popular internet chess server Chess.com shut down Kramnik’s blog on the site in 2023, saying he had used it to spread baseless cheating allegations about “many dozens of players.” At the time, the platform warned of “Kramnik’s escalating attacks” against some of the most respected members of the chess community and some promising young talents.

The speedy style of play popularized in chess’ digital arena is somewhat reliant on the honor system.

Top talents analyze the board so quickly and move with such precision that cheating allegations have become common. Bullet chess is so fast, Regan said, that it’s essentially “playing chess entirely with your gut.”

Nurturing young talent

Last week, Naroditsky posted a video on his popular Speedrun chess series on YouTube, telling viewers he was “back, better than ever” after a short “creative break.” His videos, in which he gave tips and discussed strategy, were great tools for chess players of various abilities, said Benjamin Balas, professor of psychology at North Dakota State.

“He would tell you ‘This is the kind of mistake you’re going to see at this level,’ and he would make mistakes, too, and talk to you how to manage them,” Balas said.

Other grandmasters such as Hikaru Nakamura and five-time World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen are using social media to take chess to a wider audience, increasing its popularity around the world.

“People, they see Daniel or other streamers and they start to play online chess,” said John Hartmann, editor of Chess Life magazine. “The streaming personalities, they lead people into the chess world.”

Carlsen credited Naroditsky for his work in the streaming space, saying he was universally loved and “such a resource to the chess community.”

PORTLAND (AP) — A baby elephant at the Oregon Zoo had more tricks than treats to show when handlers gave it a small pumpkin to play with during an annual fall event where giant elephants smash half-ton pumpkins.

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Weighing just 775 pounds, eight-month-old Asian elephant Tula-Tu is about the heft of one of the giant pumpkins so is too small to smash them. Instead, zoo handlers gave her a small pumpkin to practice with. The little elephant dribbled the gourd around like a soccer ball, a video from the zoo shows.

Her elephant family at the Oregon Zoo enjoyed the large pumpkins on Oct. 16 at the annual “Squishing of the Squash,” a tradition that goes back to 1999 when a farmer donated a pumpkin weighing 828 pounds. The donated pumpkins have gotten bigger, around 1,000 pounds this year, thanks to competitive hobbyists at the Pacific Giant Vegetable Growers Club.

To break open the gargantuan gourds, zookeepers present them to Tula-Tu’s adult relatives like her brother and father who weigh slightly over 10,000 pounds. In a video from the zoo, they appear to delicately place one foot at the top, and gently press down. The pumpkins crack with a loud pop, sending rind and seeds flying.

Past years’ videos have shown midsized, young elephants putting both feet on top of the pumpkins but being too light — or lacking technique — so the giant vegetables don’t burst.

This year the adults elephants smashed the massive pumpkins in front of a cheering crowd of zoo visitors, and then the family of elephants ate the many tons of squash fragments.

Asian elephants like Tula-Tu and her family are considered highly endangered, according to Oregon Zoo officials. There is a fragmented population of around 40,000 to 50,000 such elephants in the wild in places ranging from India to the Malaysian island of Borneo. But there have been successful conservation milestones in recent years, including in Cambodia.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump said Tuesday that the federal government owes him “a lot of money” for prior Justice Department investigations into his actions and insisted he would have the ultimate say on any payout because any decision will “have to go across my desk.”

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Trump’s comments to reporters at the White House came in response to questions about a New York Times story that said he had filed administrative claims before being reelected seeking roughly $230 million in damages related to the FBI’s 2022 search of his Mar-a-Lago property for classified documents and for a separate investigation into potential ties between Russia and his 2016 presidential campaign.

Trump said Tuesday he did not know the dollar figures involved and suggested he had not spoken to officials about it. But, he added, “All I know is that, they would owe me a lot of money.”

Though the Justice Department has a protocol for reviewing such claims, Trump asserted, “It’s interesting, ’cause I’m the one that makes the decision, right?”

“That decision would have to go across my desk,” he added.

He said he could donate any taxpayer money or use it to help pay for a ballroom he’s building at the White House.

The status of the claims and any negotiations over them within the Justice Department was not immediately clear. One of Trump’s lead defense lawyers in the Mar-a-Lago investigation, Todd Blanche, is now the deputy attorney general at the Justice Department. The current associate attorney general, Stanley Woodward, represented Trump’s valet and co-defendant, Walt Nauta, in the same case.

“In any circumstance, all officials at the Department of Justice follow the guidance of career ethics officials,” a Justice Department spokesperson said. A White House spokesperson referred comment to the Justice Department.

Trump signaled his interest in compensation during a White House appearance last week with Blanche, FBI Director Kash Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi, who was part of Trump’s legal team during one of the impeachment cases against him.

President Donald Trump answers questions from reporters during a Diwali celebration in the Oval Office at the White House, Tuesday, Oct. 21, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

“I have a lawsuit that was doing very well, and when I became president, I said: ‘I’m suing myself. I don’t know. How do you settle the lawsuit?’” he said. ”I’ll say, ‘Give me X dollars,’ and I don’t know what to do with the lawsuit. It’s a great lawsuit and now I won, it looks bad. I’m suing myself, so I don’t know.”

The Times said the two claims were filed with the Justice Department as part of a process that seeks to resolve federal complaints through settlements and avert litigation.

One of the administrative claims, filed in August 2024 and reviewed by The Associated Press, seeks compensatory and punitive damages over the search of his Mar-a-Lago estate and the resulting case alleging he hoarded classified documents and thwarted government efforts to retrieve them.

His lawyer who filed the claim alleged the case was a “malicious prosecution” carried out by the Biden administration to hurt Trump’s bid to reclaim the White House, forcing Trump to spend tens of millions of dollars in his defense.

That investigation produced criminal charges that Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith abandoned last November because of department policy against the indictment of a sitting president.

The Times said the other complaint seeks damages related to the long-concluded Trump-Russia investigation, which continues to infuriate the president.