What will the Wild’s lines look like to open the season?

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On the eve of the regular season, one constant of a John Hynes‘ training camp remains true in the coach’s second season at the helm: It’s hard.

To a man, Wild players note on-ice sessions are serious, focused and strenuous. The same goes for the off-ice work. It is not for those unwilling or unable to put in a full 60-minute effort every time their skates touch the ice.

A year ago, the results of that relentless prep were seen in October and November, as Minnesota blasted to one of the best starts in franchise history, at one point tallying 19 wins to just four regulation losses.

It didn’t last, as injuries piled up. By April, the Wild needed a last-minute rally in their final game to make the playoffs. Still, Minnesota showed what it could do at full strength.

On Monday, with his his full 23-man roster on the ice at TRIA Rink for the first time, Hynes reflected on the final roster cuts made to prep for the regular season opener.

“There was some tough decisions of who we would send down and who we would keep,” Hynes said, noting that several of the players who will start with the Iowa Wild had flashes in training camp practices and preseason games to state their case for NHL roster spots.

“We feel like this is the group we’ll start with and see where they go,” he said.

In the final tuneup practices before the regular season opens in St. Louis on Thursday, the forward lines have looked like this:

Top line: Marco Rossi centering with Kirill Kaprizov and Matt Boldy on wings.

Second line: Joel Eriksson Ek centering with Marcus Foligno and Vladimir Tarasenko on the wings.

Third line: Ryan Hartman centering with Yakov Trenin and Marcus Johansson on wings.

Fourth line: Nico Strum centering with some combination of Danila Yurov, Liam Ohgren and Vinnie Hinostroza on the wings.

Mats Zuccarello is injured to start the season. On Tuesday, the team placed Zuccarello and Nico Sturm on injured reserve and designated forwards Cameron Butler and Michael Milne and defenseman Stevie Leskovar as injured, non-roster players.

Hinostroza, who the Wild claimed off waivers from Nashville last February, will likely be the veteran wing on the fourth line, with either Yurov or Ohgren on the other side.

“I think Vinnie’s had a strong camp,” Hynes said. “He didn’t get as much action later in the games, but he does have experience, we know what he can do. With Ohgren and Yurov, we’re still working those guys in, and now that camp’s over, see what they look like in different positions.”

Defensively, the pairings have been:

-Jake Middleton with Brock Faber

-Zeev Buium with Jared Spurgeon

-Zach Bogosian with David Jiricek

Newly re-acquired Daemon Hunt and veteran Jonas Brodin – who is still making his way back from off-season surgery – will be the reserve defenseman at the season’s start. Hynes said they initially did not expect to have Brodin much in October, but he’s made good progress in practice.

“I’m sure they’re going to have to test his strength, meet with the doctor, and then maybe put him in a little bit more heavier contact,” Hynes said. “The fact that he’s doing what he’s doing is really encouraging.”

The goalie tandem of Filip Gustavsson and Jesper Wallstedt is set, with veteran Cal Petersen heading to his home state to tend the Iowa net. Like most Wild fans, Hynes smiled at the contract extension given to Gustavsson over the weekend, and the stability it means in the Minnesota crease.

“It’s nice that he’s got that confidence, and I think he’s earned it. He’s the guy for us,” Hynes said. “You can’t win without good goaltending, and the way that he played last year and the way that he looks now is going to be really important for us.”

Among those waiting in the wings in Iowa are defensemen Carson Lambos and Matt Kiersted and forwards Tyler Pitlick and Hunter Haight, all of whom had strong showings in training camp and were among the final cuts.

Veteran forward Brett Leason and veteran defenseman Jack Johnson both attended Wild camp on professional tryouts, but neither was offered a contract.

Similar to October 2024, the Wild will learn much about themselves while getting to know one another away from home.

After the opener in St. Louis, they play home games versus Columbus on Saturday and versus Los Angeles on Monday, Oct. 13. Then the Wild head out on a five-game road trip, during which they’ll visit the Stars, Capitals, Flyers, Rangers and Devils.

Briefly

The Wild’s “Skate It Forward” program — which was announced last season as an effort to promote growth in youth hockey participation in Minnesota, western Wisconsin and the Dakotas — announced its initial grant recipients for the 2025-26 season this week.

The 11 community hockey programs included are Anoka, Bloomington Jefferson, Delano, Langford Park (St. Paul), Minnesota Sled Hockey, Mounds View Irondale, Osseo-Maple Grove, St. Paul Capitals, Waseca, Willmar and Winona. For every first-year player under the age of eight that registers for hockey in those associations, the Skate It Forward program will provide a $250 grant to help encourage more young players to take up the game.

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Government shutdown threatens to stall the recovery in the IPO market

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By DAMIAN J. TROISE, AP Business Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. government shutdown is waving a caution flag at private companies racing to make the move to the public market.

The market for initial public offerings has been on a years-long recovery after spiking inflation slammed the brakes on activity in 2022. The IPO market is already on track for its best year since 2021 with 163 deals and $31 billion in proceeds raised so far, according to Renaissance Capital.

Companies rely on the U.S. government, through the Securities and Exchange Commission, to review and approve IPO filings, while monitoring the ongoing process. The SEC is now operating with minimal staff, significantly delaying or halting those reviews and approvals.

Investors and companies are dealing with more than just technical issues. A prolonged government shutdown could sap confidence in the U.S. markets and economy. IPO activity typically remains strong through October, then slows in the U.S. during the final two months of the year.

“That’s always an end of the year factor,” said Samuel Kerr, head of global equity capital markets at Mergermarket.

Investors and companies had been mostly brushing off much of the uncertainty roiling the U.S. government and economy through the year, including an unpredictable trade policy, ongoing worries about inflation, a weakening job market and questions about Federal Reserve policy. Amid all that, the stock market has notched record after record and new companies keep joining the ranks.

The impasse in Washington, though, has brought a reminder of the challenges facing the market.

“It (the shutdown) reminds you that we’re not operating in normal times,” Kerr said.

Investors have been drawn to IPOs because stocks have looked pricey for a while, especially in the technology sector, leaving them looking for other ways to get into the market. IPOs have offered a way to do that. Many of the bigger IPOs in 2025 have been in growing technology fields, including cryptocurrency technology and artificial intelligence.

Circle Internet Group, the U.S.-based issuer of one of the most popular cryptocurrencies made its public debut in June for about $1.1 billion.

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Circle issues USDC, a stablecoin that can be traded at a 1-to-1 ratio for U.S. dollars, and EURC, which can similarly be traded for euros. It’s shares priced at $31, soared on the first day of trading and currently trade for around $152.

Cryptocurrency exchange Bullish raised about $1.1 billion in August. Cloud-computing company CoreWeave raised about $1.5 billion when it went public in March.

Klarna, the Swedish buy now, pay later company, entered the public market in September, raising $1.37 billion. That made it the largest IPO of the year, according to Renaissance Capital. The IPO priced at $40 and shares currently trade around $42.

Outside of the shutdown, market conditions remain ideal, said Bill Smith, CEO of Renaissance Capital, in a note to investors.

“The IPO market still has a bit of gas in the tank,” he said.

Thousands in Gaza are missing 2 years into the war. Tormented families search for clues

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By WAFAA SHURAFA and SARAH EL DEEB, Associated Press

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza City (AP) — When Israeli bombs began falling, Mohammad al-Najjar, his wife and six children fled their house in southern Gaza in the dead of night, dispersing in terror alongside hundreds of others from their neighborhood.

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When the dust settled and al-Najjar huddled with his family in a shelter miles away, his son Ahmad, 23, was missing. After daybreak, the family searched nearby hospitals and asked neighbors if they had seen him.

There was no trace. Nearly two years later, they are still looking.

“It is as if the earth has swallowed him,” said Mohammad al-Najjar. He spoke from the family’s tent in Muwasi, along Gaza’s southern coast, their ninth displacement camp since that fateful night in December 2023.

Thousands in Gaza are looking for relatives who are missing in one of the most destructive wars of the past decades. Some are buried under destroyed buildings. Others, like al-Najjar’s son, simply disappeared during Israeli military operations.

In a war where the true number of the dead is unknown, “what the accurate number (of missing persons) is, nobody knows,” said Kathryne Bomberger, director general of the International Commission on Missing Persons.

The al-Najjar family has searched through the rubble of their bombed-out home. They went to morgues and checked with the International Committee for the Red Cross.

“Is he a prisoner (in Israel), is he dead?” the 46-year-old father said. “We are lost. We are tormented by everything.”

The Israeli Prison Services and the military said they could not release identifying details about specific prisoners and refused to comment on al-Najjar’s status.

An enormous task

Some 6,000 people have been reported by relatives to still be buried under rubble, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. The true number is likely thousands higher because in some cases entire families were killed in a single bombing, leaving no one to report the missing, said Zaher al-Wahidi, the ministry official in charge of data.

Separately, the ministry received reports from families of some 3,600 others missing, al-Wahidi said, their fate unknown. So far, it has only investigated over 200 cases. Of them, seven were found detained by Israel. The others were not among those known to be dead or buried under rubble.

The ministry is part of the Hamas-run government. The U.N. and many independent experts consider its figures to be reliable.

The ICRC has its own separate list of missing — at least 7,000 cases still unresolved, not including those believed to be under rubble, said chief spokesman Christian Cardon.

Ruins of apartments destroyed by Israeli strikes litter the area next to Khaled Nassar’s home in the Jabaliya refugee camp in Gaza City Feb. 9, 2025. Nassar’s daughter, Dalia, and his son, Mahmoud, were killed in separate airstrikes, leaving both buried under their homes. (AP Photo/Abdel Hana)

There have been many ways to disappear during the chaos of offensives, strikes on buildings and mass displacements of almost all of Gaza’s 2.3 million people. Hundreds have been detained at Israeli checkpoints or were rounded up in raids with no notification to their families. Experts commissioned by a U.N. body and major rights groups have accused Israel of genocide, charges it vehemently denies.

During Israeli ground assaults, bodies have been left in the streets. Palestinians have been shot when they came too close to Israeli military zones and their bodies are found weeks or months later, decomposed.

The Israeli military has taken an unknown number of bodies, saying it is searching for Israeli hostages or Palestinians it identifies as fighters. It has returned several hundred corpses with no identification to Gaza, where they were buried in anonymous mass graves.

Investigating the missing requires advanced DNA technology, samples from families and unidentified bodies, and aerial imagery to locate burial sites and mass graves, said Bomberger. “It is such an enormous undertaking,” she said.

But Israel has restricted DNA-testing supplies from entering Gaza, according to Bomberger and Gaza’s Health Ministry. Israeli military authorities would not immediately comment when asked if they were banned.

Bomberger said it is the state’s responsibility to find missing persons — in this case, Israel, as the occupying power. “So it would depend on the political will of the Israeli authorities to want to do something about it.”

Scent of her son

Fadwa al-Ghalban has had no word about her 27-year-old son Mosaab since July, when he went to get food from their family house, believing Israeli troops had already left the area near the southern town of Maan.

His cousins nearby saw Mosaab lying on the ground. They shouted his name, but he didn’t answer, and with Israeli troops nearby it was too unsafe to approach him and they left. They presumed he was dead.

Returning later, family members found no body, only his slippers.

Her family has put up notices on social media, hoping someone saw Mosaab in Israeli detention or buried him.

Al-Ghalban lives off hope. Another relative had been presumed dead, then four days after the family formally received those giving condolences, they learned he was in an Israeli prison.

Whatever her son’s fate, “there is a fire in my heart,” al-Ghalban said. “Even if someone buried him, it is much easier than this fire.”

Rights groups say Israel is “disappearing” hundreds of Palestinians from Gaza, detaining them without charges or trial, often incommunicado.

Israel does not make public the number being held, except through Freedom of Information Act requests. Under a wartime revision to Israeli law, detainees from Gaza can be held without any judicial review for 75 days and denied lawyers for even longer. Appearances before a judge usually take place in secret via video.

The Israeli human rights group Hamoked obtained records showing that, as of September, 2,662 Palestinians from Gaza were held in Israeli prisons, in addition to a few hundred others detained in army facilities where rights groups, the U.N. and detainees have reported routine abuse and torture.

All al-Ghalban has left of her son is his last change of clothes. She refuses to wash them.

“I keep smelling them. I want a scent of him,” she said, her voice cracking into tears. “I keep imagining him coming, walking toward me in the tent. I say he is not dead.”

Khaled Nassar looks over the destruction at his apartment in the Jabaliya refugee camp in Gaza City Feb. 9, 2025. Nassar’s daughter, Dalia, and his son, Mahmoud, were killed in separate airstrikes, leaving both buried under their homes. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)

Even a ring

With most of Gaza’s bulldozers destroyed, families must search on their own through wreckage, hoping to find even the bones of lost loved ones.

Khaled Nassar’s daughter, Dalia, 28, and his son, Mahmoud, 24, were killed in separate airstrikes, leaving both buried under their homes in the Jabaliya refugee camp.

Rescue workers have largely been unable to access Jabaliya, which was hit by repeated strikes, raids and ground offensives and is now under Israeli military control and off-limits.

Dalia and her husband were killed in their home on Oct. 9, 2023, the third day of the war. Her children survived. They now live with their grandfather.

“We searched and we could not find her,” Nassar said. “She seemed to have evaporated with the rocket.”

A year later, Israel struck the family’s home, burying Mahmoud, who had returned to shower in the house after the family had evacuated.

When the ceasefire began in January, Nassar and his wife Khadra went to search for him. Every day, the 60-year-old father of 10, a former construction worker, used a hammer, shovel and small tools to chip away at the rubble. His wife carried away buckets of sand and debris.

They dug through half the house and found nothing. Then Israel broke the ceasefire in March and they had to flee.

Khadra refuses to despair. If there is a new ceasefire, she will resume digging, she said, “even if I only find (Mahmoud’s) ring on his finger or some bones to put in a grave to call it my son’s.”

El Deeb reported from Beirut. AP correspondents Mel Lidman in Tel Aviv, Israel, Julia Frankel in New York, Jamey Keaten in Geneva, and Toqa Ezzidin in Cairo contributed to this report.

AI will soon have a say in approving or denying Medicare treatments

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By Lauren Sausser, Darius Tahir, KFF Health News

Taking a page from the private insurance industry’s playbook, the Trump administration will launch a program next year to find out how much money an artificial intelligence algorithm could save the federal government by denying care to Medicare patients.

The pilot program, designed to weed out wasteful, “low-value” services, amounts to a federal expansion of an unpopular process called prior authorization, which requires patients or someone on their medical team to seek insurance approval before proceeding with certain procedures, tests, and prescriptions. It will affect Medicare patients, and the doctors and hospitals who care for them, in Arizona, Ohio, Oklahoma, New Jersey, Texas, and Washington, starting Jan. 1 and running through 2031.

The move has raised eyebrows among politicians and policy experts. The traditional version of Medicare, which covers adults 65 and older and some people with disabilities, has mostly eschewed prior authorization. Still, it is widely used by private insurers, especially in the Medicare Advantage market.

And the timing was surprising: The pilot was announced in late June, just days after the Trump administration unveiled a voluntary effort by private health insurers to revamp and reduce their own use of prior authorization, which causes care to be “significantly delayed,” said Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

“It erodes public trust in the health care system,” Oz told the media. “It’s something that we can’t tolerate in this administration.”

But some critics, like Vinay Rathi, an Ohio State University doctor and policy researcher, have accused the Trump administration of sending mixed messages.

On one hand, the federal government wants to borrow cost-cutting measures used by private insurance, he said. “On the other, it slaps them on the wrist.”

Administration officials are “talking out of both sides of their mouth,” said Rep. Suzan DelBene, a Washington Democrat. “It’s hugely concerning.”

Patients, doctors, and other lawmakers have also been critical of what they see as delay-or-deny tactics, which can slow down or block access to care, causing irreparable harm and even death.

“Insurance companies have put it in their mantra that they will take patients’ money and then do their damnedest to deny giving it to the people who deliver care,” said Rep. Greg Murphy, a North Carolina Republican and a urologist. “That goes on in every insurance company boardroom.”

Insurers have long argued that prior authorization reduces fraud and wasteful spending, as well as prevents potential harm. Public displeasure with insurance denials dominated the news in December, when the shooting death of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO led many to anoint his alleged killer as a folk hero.

And the public broadly dislikes the practice: Nearly three-quarters of respondents thought prior authorization was a “major” problem in a July poll published by KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News.

Indeed, Oz said during his June press conference that “violence in the streets” prompted the Trump administration to take on the issue of prior authorization reform in the private insurance industry.

Still, the administration is expanding the use of prior authorization in Medicare. CMS spokesperson Alexx Pons said both initiatives “serve the same goal of protecting patients and Medicare dollars.”

Unanswered Questions

The pilot program, WISeR — short for “Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction” — will test the use of an AI algorithm in making prior authorization decisions for some Medicare services, including skin and tissue substitutes, electrical nerve stimulator implants, and knee arthroscopy.

The federal government says such procedures are particularly vulnerable to “fraud, waste, and abuse” and could be held in check by prior authorization.

Other procedures may be added to the list. But services that are inpatient-only, emergency, or “would pose a substantial risk to patients if significantly delayed” would not be subject to the AI model’s assessment, according to the federal announcement.

While the use of AI in health insurance isn’t new, Medicare has been slow to adopt the private-sector tools. Medicare has historically used prior authorization in a limited way, with contractors who aren’t incentivized to deny services. But experts who have studied the plan believe the federal pilot could change that.

Pons told KFF Health News that no Medicare request will be denied before being reviewed by a “qualified human clinician,” and that vendors “are prohibited from compensation arrangements tied to denial rates.” While the government says vendors will be rewarded for savings, Pons said multiple safeguards will “remove any incentive to deny medically appropriate care.”

“Shared savings arrangements mean that vendors financially benefit when less care is delivered,” a structure that can create a powerful incentive for companies to deny medically necessary care, said Jennifer Brackeen, senior director of government affairs for the Washington State Hospital Association.

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And doctors and policy experts say that’s only one concern.

Rathi said the plan “is not fully fleshed out” and relies on “messy and subjective” measures. The model, he said, ultimately depends on contractors to assess their own results, a choice that makes the results potentially suspect.

“I’m not sure they know, even, how they’re going to figure out whether this is helping or hurting patients,” he said.

Pons said the use of AI in the Medicare pilot will be “subject to strict oversight to ensure transparency, accountability, and alignment with Medicare rules and patient protection.”

“CMS remains committed to ensuring that automated tools support, not replace, clinically sound decision-making,” he said.

Experts agree that AI is theoretically capable of expediting what has been a cumbersome process marked by delays and denials that can harm patients’ health. Health insurers have argued that AI eliminates human error and bias and will save the health care system money. These companies have also insisted that humans, not computers, are ultimately reviewing coverage decisions.

But some scholars are doubtful that’s routinely happening.

“I think that there’s also probably a little bit of ambiguity over what constitutes ‘meaningful human review,’” said Amy Killelea, an assistant research professor at the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University.

A 2023 report published by ProPublica found that, over a two-month period, doctors at Cigna who reviewed requests for payment spent an average of only 1.2 seconds on each case.

Cigna spokesperson Justine Sessions told KFF Health News that the company does not use AI to deny care or claims. The ProPublica investigation referenced a “simple software-driven process that helped accelerate payments to clinicians for common, relatively low-cost tests and treatments, and it is not powered by AI,” Sessions said. “It was not used for prior authorizations.”

And yet class-action lawsuits filed against major health insurers have alleged that flawed AI models undermine doctor recommendations and fail to take patients’ unique needs into account, forcing some people to shoulder the financial burden of their care.

Meanwhile, a survey of physicians published by the American Medical Association in February found that 61% think AI is “increasing prior authorization denials, exacerbating avoidable patient harms and escalating unnecessary waste now and into the future.”

Chris Bond, a spokesperson for the insurers’ trade group AHIP, told KFF Health News that the organization is “zeroed in” on implementing the commitments made to the government. Those include reducing the scope of prior authorization and making sure that communications with patients about denials and appeals are easy to understand.

‘This Is a Pilot’

The Medicare pilot program underscores ongoing concerns about prior authorization and raises new ones.

While private health insurers have been opaque about how they use AI and the extent to which they use prior authorization, policy researchers believe these algorithms are often programmed to automatically deny high-cost care.

“The more expensive it is, the more likely it is to be denied,” said Jennifer Oliva, a professor at the Maurer School of Law at Indiana University-Bloomington, whose work focuses on AI regulation and health coverage.

Oliva explained in a recent paper for the Indiana Law Journal that when a patient is expected to die within a few years, health insurers are “motivated to rely on the algorithm.” As time passes and the patient or their provider is forced to appeal a denial, the chance of the patient dying during that process increases. The longer an appeal, the less likely the health insurer is to pay the claim, Oliva said.

“The No. 1 thing to do is make it very, very difficult for people to get high-cost services,” she said.

As the use of AI by health insurers is poised to grow, insurance company algorithms amount to a “regulatory blind spot” and demand more scrutiny, said Carmel Shachar, a faculty director at Harvard Law School’s Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation.

The WISeR pilot is “an interesting step” toward using AI to ensure that Medicare dollars are purchasing high-quality health care, she said. But the lack of details makes it difficult to determine whether it will work.

Politicians are grappling with some of the same questions.

“How is this being tested in the first place? How are you going to make sure that it is working and not denying care or producing higher rates of care denial?” asked DelBene, who signed an August letter to Oz with other Democrats demanding answers about the AI program. But Democrats aren’t the only ones worried.

Murphy, who co-chairs the House GOP Doctors Caucus, acknowledged that many physicians are concerned the WISeR pilot could overreach into their practice of medicine if the AI algorithm denies doctor-recommended care.

Meanwhile, House members of both parties recently supported a measure proposed by Rep. Lois Frankel, a Florida Democrat, to block funding for the pilot in the fiscal 2026 budget of the Department of Health and Human Services.

AI in health care is here to stay, Murphy said, but it remains to be seen whether the WISeR pilot will save Medicare money or contribute to the problems already posed by prior authorization.

“This is a pilot, and I’m open to see what’s going to happen with this,” Murphy said, “but I will always, always err on the side that doctors know what’s best for their patients.”

©2025 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.