Minnesota men’s hockey released a stacked, home-heavy nonconference schedule on Monday. Eight of the 11 two-game series will be held at 3M Arena at Mariucci beginning Oct. 3.

Former WCHA rival Michigan Tech will be at Minnesota Oct. 3-4, the first meeting between the schools since they split a series in 2012. That’s followed by a rare Thursday-Friday home series against Boston College Oct. 9-10.

The Gophers will begin their four-year home-and-home series against North Dakota Oct. 17-18 in Grand Forks, then play host to Minnesota Duluth Oct. 24-25.

Minnesota will make its first trip to play nascent Division I program Long Island Nov. 14-15 before playing University of Denver in the annual U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame game at the Colorado Avalanche’s Ball Arena. That will be Nov. 28 or Nov. 29, depending on the schedule of the NHL team.

The Gophers will play an exhibition game at former WCHA rival Bemidji State on Jan. 2 while the 2026 IIHF World Junior Championships are being held on campus before returning to Big Ten play.

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By CALVIN WOODWARD and NATHAN ELLGREN

WASHINGTON (AP) — In his confirmation hearings to lead the National Institutes of Health, Jay Bhattacharya pledged his openness to views that might conflict with his own. “Dissent,” he said, ”is the very essence of science.”

That commitment is being put to the test.

On Monday, scores of scientists at the agency sent their Trump-appointed leader a letter titled the Bethesda Declaration, challenging “policies that undermine the NIH mission, waste public resources, and harm the health of Americans and people across the globe.”

It says: “We dissent.”

In a capital where insiders often insist on anonymity to say such things publicly, 92 NIH researchers, program directors, branch chiefs and scientific review officers put their signatures on the letter — and their careers on the line. Another 250 of their colleagues across the agency endorsed the declaration without using their names.

The four-page letter, addressed to Bhattacharya, also was sent to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and members of Congress who oversee the NIH. The White House defended its approach to federal research. “In recent years, Americans have lost confidence in our increasingly politicized healthcare and research apparatus that has been obsessed with DEI and COVID, which the majority of Americans moved on from years ago,” spokesman Kush Desai said. “The Trump administration is focused on restoring the Gold Standard of Science — not ideological activism — as the guiding principle of HHS, the NIH, and the CDC to finally address our chronic disease epidemic.”

Confronting a ‘culture of fear’

The signers went public in the face of a “culture of fear and suppression” they say President Donald Trump’s administration has spread through the federal civil service. “We are compelled to speak up when our leadership prioritizes political momentum over human safety and faithful stewardship of public resources,” the declaration says.

Named for the agency’s headquarters location in Maryland, the Bethesda Declaration details upheaval in the world’s premier public health research institution over the course of mere months.

It addresses the termination of 2,100 research grants valued at more than $12 billion and some of the human costs that have resulted, such as cutting off medication regimens to participants in clinical trials or leaving them with unmonitored device implants.

In one case, an NIH-supported study of multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis in Haiti had to be stopped, ceasing antibiotic treatment mid-course for patients.

In a number of cases, trials that were mostly completed were rendered useless without the money to finish and analyze the work, the letter says. “Ending a $5 million research study when it is 80% complete does not save $1 million,” it says, “it wastes $4 million.”

The mask comes off

Jenna Norton, who oversees health disparity research at the agency’s National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, recently appeared at a forum by Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, D-Md., to talk about what’s happening at the NIH.

At the event, she masked to conceal her identity. Now the mask is off. She was a lead organizer of the declaration.

“I want people to know how bad things are at NIH,” Norton told The Associated Press.

The signers said they modeled their indictment after Bhattacharya’s Great Barrington Declaration in 2020, when he was a professor at Stanford University Medical School.

His declaration drew together likeminded infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists who dissented from what they saw as excessive COVID-19 lockdown policies and felt ostracized by the larger public health community that pushed those policies, including the NIH.

“He is proud of his statement, and we are proud of ours,” said Sarah Kobrin, a branch chief at the NIH’s National Cancer Institute who signed the Bethesda Declaration.

Cancer research is sidelined

As chief of the Health Systems and Interventions Research Branch, Kobrin provides scientific oversight of researchers across the country who’ve been funded by the cancer institute or want to be. Cuts in personnel and money have shifted her work from improving cancer care research to what she sees as minimizing its destruction. “So much of it is gone — my work,” she said.

The 21-year NIH veteran said she signed because she didn’t want to be “a collaborator” in the political manipulation of biomedical science.

Ian Morgan, a postdoctoral fellow with the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, also signed the declaration. “We have a saying in basic science,” he said. “You go and become a physician if you want to treat thousands of patients. You go and become a researcher if you want to save billions of patients.

“We are doing the research that is going to go and create the cures of the future,” he added. But that won’t happen, he said, if Trump’s Republican administration prevails with its searing grant cuts.

The NIH employees interviewed by the AP emphasized they were speaking for themselves and not for their institutes nor the NIH.

Dissenters range across the breadth of NIH

Employees from all 27 NIH institutes and centers gave their support to the declaration. Most who signed are intimately involved with evaluating and overseeing extramural research grants.

The letter asserts “NIH trials are being halted without regard to participant safety” and the agency is shirking commitments to trial participants who “braved personal risk to give the incredible gift of biological samples, understanding that their generosity would fuel scientific discovery and improve health.”

The Trump administration has gone at public health research on several fronts, both directly, as part of its broad effort to root out diversity, equity and inclusion values throughout the bureaucracy, and as part of its drive to starve some universities of federal money.

A blunt ax swings

This has forced “indiscriminate grant terminations, payment freezes for ongoing research, and blanket holds on awards regardless of the quality, progress, or impact of the science,” the declaration says.

Some NIH employees have previously come forward in televised protests to air grievances, and many walked out of Bhattacharya’s town hall with staff. The declaration is the first cohesive effort to register agency-wide dismay with the NIH’s direction.

The dissenters remind Bhattacharya in their letter of his oft-stated ethic that academic freedom must be a lynchpin in science.

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With that in place, he said in a statement in April, “NIH scientists can be certain they are afforded the ability to engage in open, academic discourse as part of their official duties and in their personal capacities without risk of official interference, professional disadvantage or workplace retaliation.”

Now it will be seen whether that’s enough to protect those NIH employees challenging the Trump administration and him.

“There’s a book I read to my kids, and it talks about how you can’t be brave if you’re not scared,” said Norton, who has three young children. “I am so scared about doing this, but I am trying to be brave for my kids because it’s only going to get harder to speak up.

“Maybe I’m putting my kids at risk by doing this,” she added. “And I’m doing it anyway because I couldn’t live with myself otherwise.”

Associated Press Medical Writer Lauran Neergaard contributed to this report.

By JOSH FUNK, Associated Press

Authorities are investigating after a small plane crashed into the ocean 5 miles off the coast near San Diego with six people aboard.

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U.S. Coast Guard officials said a debris field was discovered near Point Loma Sunday afternoon and began searching for the wreckage in an area where the water is about 200 feet deep.

The Federal Aviation Administration said the twin-engine Cessna 414 crashed around 12:30 p.m. Sunday not long after it took off. Flight tracking website, Flightaware.com, showed that the plane was bound for Phoenix.

The National Transportation Safety Board and FAA confirmed they are investigating the crash.

NEW YORK — ABC News has suspended correspondent Terry Moran for calling Trump administration deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller a “world class hater” in a since-deleted social media post.

Terry Moran (Courtesy of National Association of Broadcasters / Associated Press)

Moran’s post was swiftly condemned by officials in the Republican administration, including Vice President J.D. Vance. ABC News, in a statement, said it “stands for objectivity and impartiality in its news coverage and does not condone subjective personal attacks on others.”

The New York-based network said Moran was suspended pending further evaluation.

Moran, who interviewed President Donald Trump a few weeks ago, said in his post on X at 12:06 a.m. on Sunday that the president was a world-class hater, too. But he wrote that for the president, his hatred is a means to an end, “and that end is his own glorification.”

For Miller, Moran’s post said, “his hatreds are his spiritual nourishment. He eats his hate.”

Vance, on X, said that Moran’s post was “dripping with hatred.” The vice president wrote: “Remember that every time you watch ABC’s coverage of the Trump administration.”

Miller, on X, said Moran’s “full public meltdown” exposed the corporate press. “For decades, the privileged anchor and reporters narrating and gatekeeping our society have been radicals adopting a journalist’s pose. Terry pulled off his mask.”

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