Minnesota United added nearly $2 million in guaranteed compensation across its five new players brought in during the summer transfer window, according to data from the MLS Players Assocaition released Wednesday.

The Loons have two headliners making up the three-fourths of that total: attacking midfielder Dominik Fitz at $853,000 and defensive midfielder Nectar Triantis at $722,665.

Fitz comes in as United’s fifth-highest played player, while Triantis slots in as the eighth-highest. Midfielder Robin Lod remains the Loons’ highest earner at $1.6 million.

Since joining from abroad in August, Triantis has provided an instant impact, while Fitz is still looking to gain traction.

Triantis, a 22-year-old Australian, started the Loons opening MLS Cup Playoff game against Seattle on Monday and scored a penalty kick in the 3-2 shootout win at Allianz Field. However, Fitz, a 26-year-old Austrian, was an unused sub in Game 1.

That involvement mirrored their contributions to close out the MLS regular season. While Triantis and Fitz each played in five games, Triantis made four starts and accumulated 352 minutes, while Fitz made one start and played 151 total minutes.

Trianits also contributed two stunning long-range goals and two assists. His debut MLS goal at San Diego on Sept. 13 was a jaw-dropper estimated at 60 yards, while his powerful hit at Colorado on Sept. 27 was marked at 31 yards.

Both Triantis and Fitz have 4 1/2-year contracts with MNUFC through 2029, with club options for 2030.

The Loons’ other three additions are considered projects.

Paraguyan midfielder Alexis Farina ($172,500) is on a one-year loan from Cero Porteno and has been contributing on MNUFC2.

Costa Rican winger Kenyel Michel ($104,000) signed a 2 1/2-year deal in August and was loaned back to Costa Rican club Alajuelense for the rest of the 2025 season.

Center forward Momo Dieng ($83,769) was signed from Hartford Athletic to help replace Tani Oluwaseyi. Dieng, a 21-year-old from Senegal, has played only 114 minutes across four matches and stayed on the bench for the first playoff game.

With Oluwaseyi transferred to Spanish club Villarreal, his guaranteed compensation of $558,750 in 2025 comes off United’s book.

By CLAIRE RUSH and GENE JOHNSON, Associated Press

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — A federal trial over whether President Donald Trump can deploy the National Guard to Portland, Oregon, was underway Wednesday, with police officials expected to testify that federal agents at the city’s U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building have inflamed protests in recent weeks through excessive force.

U.S. District Court Judge Karin Immergut, a Trump appointee, will preside over the trial in Portland. The trial stems from a lawsuit filed by the city and state against the Trump administration in a bid to block the troop deployment.

Immergut has already issued two temporary restraining orders in the case blocking the troops pending further litigation. She found that Trump had failed to show he had met the conditions set out by Congress for using the military domestically. She described his assessment of the situation in Portland, which Trump called “war ravaged,” as “simply untethered to the facts.”

One of Immergut’s orders was paused last week by a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Court of Appeals. But late Tuesday the appeals court vacated that decision and said it would rehear the case before an 11-judge panel.

The complex case comes as Democratic cities targeted by Trump for military involvement — including Chicago, which has filed a separate lawsuit on the issue — are pushing back. They argue the president has not met the legal requirements to deploy troops and doing so would violate states’ sovereignty. The administration argues that it needs the troops because protests have impeded law enforcement operations.

Portland’s ICE building outside downtown has been the site of nightly protests that peaked in June when police declared one demonstration a riot. Smaller clashes have also occurred since then, and federal officers have fired tear gas to clear crowds, which at times have included counterprotesters and livestreamers.

During the trial, witnesses are expected to take the stand for both sides and face cross-examination. The federal defendants will call officials from ICE, the Department of Defense and the Federal Protective Service, the agency that provides security for federal buildings.

The administration argues that it has had to shuffle Department of Homeland Security agents from elsewhere around the country to respond to the Portland protests, showing that the city has been unable to enforce the law with regular forces — one of the conditions set by Congress for calling out the National Guard. It has also characterized the protests as a “rebellion” or “danger of rebellion” — another of the conditions.

The state and city argue that federal officers have at times used force that appears to be “needless and arbitrary.”

“They have deployed tear gas and pepper balls on small numbers of nonviolent protesters outside of the ICE building repeatedly, in some cases without apparent need or provocation, and without first exhausting de-escalation or other less-aggressive options,” the plaintiffs wrote in a trial brief.

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Portland police have also been “gassed by federal law enforcement” and, on at least one occasion, hit with a crowd-control projectile, the brief said.

The Trump administration says the Portland Police Bureau has been unwilling to help control the protests, describing authorities in a trial brief as “unhelpful and at times hostile.”

“The record is replete with evidence of the PPB failing to provide assistance when federal officials have requested it,” Justice Department attorneys wrote.

The police say they have made arrests when crimes have been committed, but that they also must respect protesters’ First Amendment rights.

Communication between local and federal authorities worsened as federal agents surged to the building “without a clear command and control structure,” the state and city said.

“To list just one illustrative example, at one point pepper balls were shot in the direction of a PPB officer,” the trial brief said. “When confronted, federal officials responded, ‘help or get out of the way.’”

In Chicago, police officers have similarly been exposed to tear gas deployed by federal officials against protesters.

The Portland trial is expected to last three days.

Johnson reported from Seattle.

This month, President Donald Trump released new federal guidance encouraging private employers to include fertility treatments in their insurance coverage and announcing an agreement to reduce the cost of some IVF-associated drugs.

For those dealing with the disheartening struggles of infertility, this is good news. Republican Sen. Katie Britt said it was the “most pro-IVF thing that any president in the history of the United States of America has done.”

But from a regulatory perspective, it’s more gas in a car without a steering wheel. We barely have regulations on the books about IVF. Yet IVF is the opening gate for a new world of reproductive technologies, ethical quagmires and designer babies.

It is already standard practice at American fertility clinics, for example, to screen embryos for gender and disease. But new Silicon Valley companies such as Orchid are taking it one step further, quite literally scraping off genetic material from embryos to allow for a full gamut of embryo comparisons, including disease probabilities but also things like BMI, depression risk, hair color and more.

Ethical quagmire aside: Who wouldn’t want to implant the healthiest, strongest, happiest embryos? It’s the ultimate MAHA move; improving the health of your child before they are even in the womb.

Investors also see the appeal. More than $1 billion has been poured into fertility start-ups in the last decade, according to the New York Times.

But this, too, is only the beginning. Soon it may not only be selecting the healthiest embryos to implant, but altering them — and thus all future generations. Already, scientists are able to go into the genome itself to alter disease-carrying genes. This year, a Pennsylvania baby was the first human patient ever to undergo gene editing therapy to treat a life-threatening genetic disorder. Nothing short of miraculous.

Scientists are on the brink of even preventing some diseases — not just treating them — at the sperm, egg and early embryo stage, with technology called germline editing. The catch is that this procedure permanently genetically modifies the person and all of their future offspring: the generational consequences of which remain unknown. China’s already waded into this murky water.

It’s the sci-fi of tomorrow. Forget the rich paying off Ivy League schools to let their children in; we’re not so far away from designing embryos who can get in on their own (engineered) genius.

Which raises all sorts of questions, some of which were on display in a recent Free Press debate, “Is designing babies unethical or a moral imperative?” Observing it, I was struck by how unwittingly the debate still hinged around President Bill Clinton’s abortion framework from 30 years ago: safe, legal and rare. (And what a time we’ve had holding onto something as seemingly simple as that.)

Safe, because when we think about “designer babies” we tend to think of eliminating disease and negative health outcomes. But in the debate, Lydia S. Dugdale, a physician and ethicist at Columbia University, emphasized the complexity of the human genome. She questioned whether germline editing will ever be completely safe given the endless potential interactions and unseen consequences of toggling inheritable genes — not to mention the “safety” of the unchosen embryos left indefinitely on ice.

Legal, because we don’t have the best track record when it comes to regulating reproductive technologies. It’s mostly been a free-for-all for IVF. The regulatory landscape for abortion is one of extremes that don’t reflect public opinion, which tends to be pro-choice during the first trimester with a sharp drop-off after.

But “rare” seems to be the public sticking point around the morality of reproductive technologies. Polling from Pew Research confirms a general public wariness of using any new technologies to create “superhumans.” For example, only 5% of Americans support their use for making a baby more physically attractive. There’s more openness to germline editing if it’s therapeutic, medicinal in the traditional sense; but even then, public opinion is closely divided (30% for, 30% against) with the largest category of people being “unsure” (40%). Most (84%) believe that germline editing will end up being used in morally questionable ways, even if it’s used in good ways too.

This quandary was on full display in the aforementioned debate. Allyson Berent, a veterinarian and chief science officer at the Foundation for Angelman Syndrome Therapeutics (FAST), spoke of her daughter born with Angelman syndrome, a devastating diagnosis for which there is no cure. The disease is caused by a single gene, which if altered would fully eliminate the disease.

Her debaters warned of a slippery slope. How the same technology used for seemingly clear-cut, medicinal reasons for very specific outlier diseases could also be used to select desirable traits. But the audience, in the end, shifted in Dr. Berent’s direction, with 35% believing that designer babies are not only ethical, but a moral imperative.

We are people with bleeding human hearts. When it comes to reproductive technologies, in a culture that celebrates freedom and self-actualization while increasingly eschewing ancient moral restraints, sympathy-inducing individual stories have a way of making regulatory lines seem arbitrary, or even cruel.

But I can’t help but think that holding some type of line still matters. The obvious one is allowing a little bit of scientific tampering for therapeutic, but not cosmetic, reasons. Yet we’ve already moved past this in IVF (by letting parents choose the baby’s sex). The therapeutic line will always be an ambiguous one, as we’ve seen with the furious debate over medical exceptions to abortion bans.

No wonder many people are simply unsure of what to think about the gene editing technologies on our doorstep, whether it’s a good idea or bad idea for society to have this power.

Which means that we’re likely to keep barreling ahead with the democratization of new technologies and the opportunities that they create. The hard ethical questions will wait on ice — maybe indefinitely.

Abby McCloskey is a columnist, podcast host, and consultant. She directed domestic policy on two presidential campaigns and was director of economic policy at the American Enterprise Institute. She wrote this column for Bloomberg Opinion.

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By BARBARA ORTUTAY, AP Technology Writer

The Trump administration has been signaling that it may have finally reached a deal with China to keep TikTok running in the U.S., with the two countries finalizing it as soon as Thursday.

President Donald Trump is visiting South Korea, where he will meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping to try to de-escalate a trade war.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CBS’s “Face the Nation” Sunday that the two leaders will “consummate that transaction on Thursday in Korea.”

If it happens, the deal would mark the end of months of uncertainty about the fate of the popular video-sharing platform in the United States. After wide bipartisan majorities in Congress passed — and President Joe Biden signed — a law that would ban TikTok in the U.S. if it did not find a new owner in the place of China’s ByteDance, the platform was set to go dark on the law’s January deadline. For a several hours, it did. But on his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order to keep it running while his administration tries to reach an agreement for the sale of the company.

Three more executive orders followed, as Trump, without a clear legal basis, continued to extend the deadline for a TikTok deal. The second was in April, when White House officials believed they were nearing a deal to spin off TikTok into a new company with U.S. ownership that fell apart after China backed out following Trump’s tariff announcement. The third came in June, then another in September, which Trump said would allow TikTok to continue operating in the United States in a way that meets national security concerns.

Trump’s order was meant to enable an American-led group of investors to buy the app from China’s ByteDance, though the deal also requires China’s approval.

However, TikTok deal is “not really a big thing for Xi Jinping,” said Bonnie Glaser, managing director of the German Marshall Fund’s Indo-Pacific program, during a media briefing Tuesday. “(China is) happy to let (Trump) declare that they have finally kept a deal. Whether or not that deal will protect the data of Americans is a big question going forward.”

“A big question mark for the United States, of course, is whether this is consistent with U.S. law since there was a law passed by Congress,” Glaser said.

About 43% of U.S. adults under the age of 30 say they regularly get news from TikTok, higher than any other social media app, including YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, according to a Pew Research Center report published in September.

Americans are also more closely divided on what to do about TikTok than they were two years ago.

A recent Pew Research Center survey found that about one-third of Americans said they supported a TikTok ban, down from 50% in March 2023. Roughly one-third said they would oppose a ban, and a similar percentage said they weren’t sure.

Among those who said they supported banning the social media platform, about 8 in 10 cited concerns over users’ data security being at risk as a major factor in their decision, according to the report.

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The TikTok recommendation algorithm — which has steered millions of users into an endless stream of video shorts — has been central in the security debate over the platform. China previously stated the algorithm must remain under Chinese control by law. But a U.S. regulation that Congress passed with bipartisan support said any divestment of TikTok must mean the platform cut ties with ByteDance.

American officials have warned the algorithm — a complex system of rules and calculations that platforms use to deliver personalized content to your feed — is vulnerable to manipulation by Chinese authorities, but no evidence has been presented by U.S. officials proving that China has attempted to do so.

Associated Press Writer Fu Ting contributed to this story from Washington.