Reunited country trio Rascal Flatts will return to the road next year, with a Jan. 23 stop planned at St. Paul’s Xcel Energy Center, a venue they last played in 2011.

Tickets go on sale at 10 a.m. Friday through Ticketmaster. Chris Lane and Lauren Alaina will open.

Second cousins Gary LeVox and Jay DeMarcus were pursuing fame in Nashville in 1999 when they met guitarist Joe Don Rooney, who was leading Chely Wright’s band at the time. The trio hit it off and formed Rascal Flatts. They signed a record deal at the end of that year and had their debut single “Prayin’ for Daylight” at radio stations in February 2000.

The single was an instant hit and, for the next decade, Rascal Flatts landed 22 singles in the Top 10, including “Bless This Broken Road,” “Fast Cars and Freedom,” “What Hurts the Most” and “My Wish.” That said, their biggest selling single to date — a cover of Canadian musician Tom Cochrane’s “Life Is a Highway” — only made it to No. 18 on the country charts.

They continued to score radio hits in the ’10s, but by the end of the decade they announced they were embarking on a farewell tour in 2020. It was postponed due to the pandemic and never happened. In late 2021, LeVox quietly announced the band had broken up.

But in late 2024, the trio revealed they had reunited. After performing together for the first time in nearly five years at Donald Trump’s Commander in Chief Ball, they hit the road for a sold out tour celebrating the band’s 25th anniversary.

Starting Sept. 3, Xcel Energy Center will be named Grand Casino Arena. Minnesota Sports & Entertainment and Grand Casino announced a 14-year naming rights partnership on June 17.

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ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — A New York man has been charged with cyberstalking a family member of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, allegedly leaving threatening voicemails that expressed glee about Thompson’s killing within hours of the fatal shooting, federal prosecutors said Wednesday.

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Shane Daley, 40, is accused of placing multiple calls to Thompson’s family member after the shooting, justifying the killing and saying that the person deserved to die in a similar manner, according to a criminal complaint.

Daley, of Galway, New York, a small town north of Albany, was scheduled to be arraigned Wednesday afternoon. Information on whether Daley had an attorney was not immediately available in online federal court records.

In a statement, Acting United States Attorney John A. Sarcone said that “Brian Thompson was gunned down in midtown Manhattan. Daley, as alleged, gleefully welcomed this tragedy and did all that he could to increase the Thompson family’s pain and suffering.”

FILE – Members of the New York police crime scene unit photograph bullets lying on the sidewalk as they investigate the scene outside the Hilton Hotel in midtown Manhattan where Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was fatally shot, Dec. 4, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Stefan Jeremiah, File)

Thompson was fatally shot outside a hotel in New York City in December by a man who prosecutors said was angered over what he viewed as corporate greed. The suspect, Luigi Mangione, has pleaded not guilty.

CARO, Mich. (AP) — A pickup truck went through a stop sign in rural Michigan and crashed into a van carrying members of an Amish community, killing at least six people, authorities said.

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The crash occurred Tuesday afternoon in Tuscola County’s Gilford Township, 100 miles north of Detroit.

Thirteen people were in the two vehicles, including 10 in the van, the sheriff’s office said.

“Multiple passengers were ejected from the van and the pickup,” the sheriff’s office said on Facebook. “At this time there are 6 confirmed fatalities and the condition of the additional patients is unknown.”

Members of a local Amish community were in the van, Undersheriff Robert Baxter said Wednesday.

“They had a paid driver in the van,” he told The Associated Press. “I’m not sure where they were headed or where they were coming from. They’re county residents.”

Baxter said seven people were taken to a hospital. He had no update on their conditions.

The Amish generally follow basic Christian beliefs while maintaining a degree of separation from common society. They typically rely on horse-drawn buggies for transportation and do not operate their own cars or trucks but will ride with in vehicles driven by people who are not Amish.

About 61% of North America’s Amish population lives in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Indiana, according to Elizabethtown College, though Michigan also has a relatively large share.

By JOCELYN GECKER, Associated Press

A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to restore millions of dollars in National Science Foundation grants it has withheld from the University of California, Los Angeles, saying they were made in violation of her earlier court ruling.

U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin ruled late Tuesday that the NSF must reinstate the research grants that were suspended for reasons she had already ruled “arbitrary and capricious,” and gave the administration until Aug. 19 to show compliance or explain why it hasn’t restored the money.

It was not immediately clear how much funding could be returned to UCLA. The school’s chancellor said last week that the Trump administration has pulled $584 million in federal grants from various federal agencies. The judge’s ruling applies specifically to NSF grants.

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UCLA’s money as been frozen as part of a wider pressure campaign targeting universities that Trump says are out of step with his political agenda.

University of California researchers challenged the cuts as “abrupt and unexplained” and won a preliminary injunction in June from Lin, who ruled that the NSF and other agencies could not terminate grant funding without specifically explaining why.

But on July 30, the NSF sent out a new round of letters that Lin described as “en masse, form letter funding cuts.” One said the awards “no longer effectuate program goals or agency priorities.” Another cited allegations of racism, antisemitism and policies around transgender athletes at UCLA. It did not elaborate.

The administration argued in a Tuesday hearing that the UCLA funding cuts were “suspensions” rather than “terminations.” Lin dismissed this as semantics.

“NSF’s indefinite suspensions differ from a termination in name only,” and the reasons the agency provided are based on “the same type of deficient explanations as the original terminations,” she ruled.

The university issued a brief statement praising the decision, saying that “restoration of National Science Foundation funds is critical to research the University of California performs on behalf of California and the Nation.”

UCLA also faces a Trump administration demand to pay $1 billion to settle antisemitism allegations. UCLA became the first public university to be targeted as the administration seeks to dominate academic institutions around the country.

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