Sophomore Cash Hardie’s goal with 4:11 left in the first overtime lifted Minnetonka past Rosemount 4-3 in a Class 2A state semifinal Friday night at Grand Casino Arena, despite a 41-save performance from Irish goaltender Drew Sherman.

The Skippers (26-2-2) advance to meet the winner of Friday night’s late semifinal between Moorhead and Edina for the state championship at 7 p.m. Saturday. Minnetonka is back in the title game for the first time since winning the Class 2A championship in 2023.

The loss stopped the second state tournament run in Rosemount program history just short of the championship game. The Irish (24-5-1) — who will play for third place at 4 p.m. Saturday at Grand Casino Arena — advanced to the title game in the first year of the two-season Tier II tournament in 1992. Teams during those two seasons were assigned to Tier I and II based on regular-season performance.

Rosemount goaltender Drew Sherman (1) deflects a shot by Minnetonka in the second period of a Class 2A semifinal game of the State Boys Hockey Tournament at Grand Casino Arena in St. Paul on Friday, March 6, 2026. (Craig Lassig / Special to the Pioneer Press)

The two-class system began in 1993-94.

It marked the second overtime game in as many days for the Irish, who beat Grand Rapids 3-2 in OT in the quarterfinals Thursday afternoon.

Both teams had plenty of chances in the opening period, finishing with 12 shots-on-goal apiece.

But Rosemount struck first early when senior forward Quinton VeDepo had a shot blocked by Minnetonka goalie Chase Jerdee. As the loose puck floated in front of the net, senior forward Peter DeGroot swooped in to score, putting the Irish on top 1-0 with 14:42 to play.

That was where the goals ended in the first period, but they came fast and furious during an under-four-minute stretch of the second.

Irish junior Connor Schubert fired off a long-range shot to score with 12:58 remaining before Skippers senior Ethan Sturgis answered exactly one minute later, cutting the Rosemount lead to 2-1.

The Irish again expanded their margin to two when senior Cade Sherman scored 19 seconds into a Rosemount power play. But Minnetonka responded once more on an unassisted goal by sophomore Mason Schemenauer from inside a crowd in front of the Irish net, trimming the gap to 3-2 with 9:11 still to play before the intermission.

The Skippers held a 17-6 edge in shots-on-goal in the period, but the Irish again took a one-goal lead into the third.

That changed when Sturgis tied things up on his second goal of the night with 14:15 remaining in regulation. But neither team scored from there, sending the game to overtime and setting the stage for Hardie’s heroics.

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ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — A Bangladeshi man accused of using social media to trick teenage girls into sending him sexually explicit images — and then threatening to share them with their friends and family if they didn’t send more — has been transported to Alaska to face federal charges of child sexual exploitation.

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Zobaidul Amin, 28, pleaded not guilty during an initial court appearance in Anchorage on Thursday after the FBI took custody of him in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where he had been studying medicine and facing related charges, U.S. prosecutors wrote in a detention memorandum.

“Amin delighted in sexually abusing hundreds of minor victims over social media,” the document said. “He bragged about causing victims to become suicidal and engage in self-harm. He shared hundreds of nude images and videos of minor victims all over the internet and encouraged other perpetrators to do the same.”

A federal grand jury indicted Amin in 2022 on charges including child pornography, cyberstalking and wire fraud. He adopted false identities, often posing as a teenager, to trick victims into sending him explicit images.

The investigation began when a 14-year-old Alaska girl reported her abuse to law enforcement, saying that after she had stopped communicating with him, he followed through on his threats by sending pornographic images of her to her friends and followers.

In executing dozens of search warrants and subpoenas, investigators eventually learned his identity and realized he had done similar things to hundreds of minor victims, prosecutors wrote. The only way to get him to stop demanding more images, Amin told the girls, was to recruit other victims, the document said.

“Because he was in Malaysia and his victims were primarily in the U.S., Amin viewed himself as untouchable by law enforcement,” prosecutors wrote. “In one conversation, he told a minor victim that the ‘cops won’t do anything,’ and the ‘cops won’t track me down because I live no where near u.’”

Efforts to extradite Amin to face charges failed, but with the assistance of the FBI, Malaysian authorities brought charges, the Justice Department said. He was released on bail during the proceedings, and eventually the U.S. succeeded in having him expelled from Malaysia. The FBI took him into custody and flew him to Alaska.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Kyle Reardon on Thursday ordered that Amin remain in custody while his case proceeds.

By MATT O’BRIEN

A top Pentagon official said Anthropic’s dispute with the government over the use of its artificial intelligence technology in fully autonomous weapons came after a debate over how AI could be used in President Donald Trump’s future Golden Dome missile defense program, which aims to put U.S. weapons in space.

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U.S. Defense Undersecretary Emil Michael, the Pentagon’s chief technology officer, said he came to view the AI company’s ethical restrictions on the use of its chatbot Claude as an irrational obstacle as the U.S. military pursues giving greater autonomy to swarms of armed drones, underwater vehicles and other machines to compete with rivals like China that could do the same.

“I need a reliable, steady partner that gives me something, that’ll work with me on autonomous, because someday it’ll be real and we’re starting to see earlier versions of that,” Michael said in a podcast aired Friday. “I need someone who’s not going to wig out in the middle.”

The comments came after the Pentagon formally designated S an Francisco-based Anthropic a supply chain risk, cutting off its defense work using a rule designed to prevent foreign adversaries from harming national security systems.

Anthropic has vowed to sue over the designation, which affects its business partnerships with other military contractors.

Trump has also ordered federal agencies to immediately stop using Claude, though the Republican president gave the Pentagon six months to phase out a product that’s deeply embedded in classified military systems, including those used in the Iran war.

Anthropic said it only sought to restrict its technology from being used for two high-level usages: mass surveillance of Americans or fully autonomous weapons.

Michael, a former Uber executive, revealed his side of months-long talks with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei in a lengthy conversation with Silicon Valley venture capitalists Jason Calacanis, David Friedberg and Chamath Palihapitiya, co-hosts of the “All-In” podcast.

A fourth co-host, former PayPal executive David Sacks, is now Trump’s AI czar and was not present for the episode but has been a vocal critic of Anthropic, including for its hiring of former Biden administration officials shortly after Trump returned to the White House last year.

As talks hit an impasse last week, Michael lashed out at Amodei on social media, saying he “has a God-complex” and “wants nothing more than to try to personally control” the military. In the podcast, however, he positioned the dispute as part of a broader military shift toward using AI.

Michael said the military is developing procedures for enabling different levels of autonomy in warfare depending on the risk posed.

“This is part of the debate I had with Anthropic, which is we need AI for things like Golden Dome,” Michael said, sharing a hypothetical scenario of the U.S. having only 90 seconds to respond to a Chinese hypersonic missile.

A human anti-missile operator “may not be able to discriminate with their own eyes what they’re going after,” but an autonomous counterattack would be a low risk “because it’s in space and you’re just trying to hit something that’s trying to get you.”

In another scenario, he said, “who could oppose if you have a military base, you have a bunch of soldiers sleeping, that you have a laser that can take down drones autonomously?”

In response to the podcast comments, Anthropic pointed to an earlier Amodei statement saying “Anthropic understands that the Department of War, not private companies, makes military decisions. We have never raised objections to particular military operations nor attempted to limit use of our technology in an ad hoc manner.”

Michael, the defense undersecretary for research and engineering, was sworn in last May and said he took over the military’s “AI portfolio” in August. That’s when he said he began scrutinizing Anthropic’s contracts — some of which dated from President Joe Biden’s Democratic administration. Michael said he questioned Anthropic over terms of use that he deemed too restrictive.

“I need to have the terms of service be rational relative to our mission set,” he said. “So we started these negotiations. It took three months and I had to sort of give them scenarios, like this Chinese hypersonic missile example. They’re like, ‘OK, we’ll give you an exception for that.’ Well, how about this drone swarm? ‘We’ll give an exception for that.’ And I was like, exceptions doesn’t work. I can’t predict for the next 20 years what (are) all the things we might use AI for.”

That’s when the Pentagon began insisting Anthropic and other AI companies allow for “all lawful use” of their technology, Michael said.

Anthropic resisted that change, while its competitors — Google, OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI — agreed to them, though some still have to get their infrastructure prepared for classified military work, Michael said. The other sticking point for Anthropic was not allowing any mass surveillance of Americans.

“They didn’t want us to bulk-collect public information on people using their AI system,” Michael said, describing the negotiations as “interminable.”

Anthropic has disputed parts of Michael’s version of the talks and emphasized that the protections it sought were narrow and not based on any existing uses of Claude. The next stage of the dispute will likely happen in court.

By JENNIFER PELTZ

NEW YORK (AP) — A Pakistani business owner who tried to hire hit men to kill a U.S. politician was convicted Friday in a trial that showcased allegations of Iran-backed plotting on American soil.

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As the Iran war unfolded in the Mideast, Asif Merchant acknowledged in a U.S. court that he sought to put an assassination in motion during the 2024 presidential campaign — a plot that was quickly disrupted by American investigators before it had a chance to proceed.

A jury in Brooklyn convicted Merchant on terrorism and murder for hire charges.

The verdict after only a couple hours of deliberations followed a weeklong trial that included remarkable testimony from Merchant himself.

Merchant told the jury he was carrying out instructions from a contact in the Islamic Republic’s powerful paramilitary Revolutionary Guard. According to Merchant, the handler never specified a target but broached names including then-candidate Donald Trump, then-President Joe Biden and Nikki Haley, the former U.N. ambassador who was also in the race for a time.

The Iranian government has denied trying to kill U.S. officials.

The nascent plot fell apart after Merchant showed an acquaintance what he had in mind by using objects on a napkin to depict a shooting at a rally. He asked the man to help him hire assassins. Instead, he was introduced to undercover FBI agents who were secretly recording him, as had the acquaintance.

Merchant told the supposed hit men he needed services that could include killing “some political person” and paid them $5,000 in cash in a parked car in Manhattan.

“This man landed on American soil hoping to kill President Trump — instead, he was met with the might of American law enforcement,” U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement released after the conviction.

FILE – This image provided by the Justice Department, contained in the complaint supporting the arrest warrant, shows Asif Merchant. (Justice Department via AP, File)

Merchant’s attorney, Avraham Moskowitz, didn’t immediately reply to a message seeking comment.

Merchant, 47, worked for Pakistani banks for decades before going into clothing and other businesses. He has two families, in Pakistan and Iran, and he sometimes visited the U.S. for his garment business.

Merchant testified that he met a Revolutionary Guard intelligence operative about three years ago. The contact gave him countersurveillance training and assignments including the assassination scheme, Merchant said.

He maintained that he had to do his handler’s bidding to protect loved ones in Iran. The defendant said he reluctantly went through the motions but thought he’d be arrested and explain his situation to authorities before anyone was killed.

“I was going along with it,” he said, speaking in Urdu through a court interpreter.

Prosecutors emphasized that Merchant admitted taking steps to enact the plan on behalf of the Revolutionary Guard, which the U.S. considers a foreign terrorist organization, and he didn’t proactively go to authorities.

Instead, he was packing for a flight to Pakistan when he was arrested on July 12, 2024, a day before an unrelated attempt on Trump’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania. Officials said it appeared the Butler gunman acted alone but that they had been tracking a threat on Trump’s life from Iran, a claim that the Islamic Republic called “unsubstantiated and malicious.”

When Merchant subsequently spoke to FBI agents to explore the possibility of a cooperation agreement, he didn’t say he had acted out of fear for his family.

Prosecutors argued that he didn’t back up a defense of acting under duress. Merchant sought to persuade jurors he simply didn’t think the agents would believe him because they seemed to “think that I am some type of super-spy,” which he said he was “absolutely not.”