Today is Wednesday, April 23, the 113th day of 2025. There are 252 days left in the year.

Today in history:

On April 23, 1971, hundreds of Vietnam War veterans opposed to the conflict protested by tossing their medals and ribbons over a wire fence constructed in front of the U.S. Capitol.

Also on this date:

In 1635, the Boston Latin School, the first public school in what would become the United States, was established.

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In 1898, Spain declared war on the United States, which responded in kind two days later.

In 1940, over 200 people trapped inside a dance hall died in the Rhythm Club Fire in Natchez, Mississippi, one of the deadliest nightclub fires in U.S. history.

In 1988, a federal ban on smoking during domestic airline flights of two hours or less (accounting for 80% of all U.S. flights) went into effect.

In 1993, labor leader Cesar Chavez died in San Luis, Arizona, at age 66.

In 2005, the recently created video-sharing website YouTube uploaded its first clip, “Me at the Zoo,” which showed YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim standing in front of an elephant enclosure at the San Diego Zoo.

In 2007, Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first popularly elected president, died in Moscow at age 76.

In 2018, a man plowed a rental van into crowds of pedestrians in Toronto, killing 10 people and leaving 16 others hurt. (Alek Minassian was later convicted of 10 counts of murder and sentenced to life in prison.)

Today’s Birthdays:

Actor Lee Majors is 86.
Actor Blair Brown is 79.
Actor Joyce DeWitt is 76.
Filmmaker-author Michael Moore is 71.
Actor Judy Davis is 70.
Actor Valerie Bertinelli is 65.
Actor-comedian George Lopez is 64.
Actor Melina Kanakaredes (kah-nah-kah-REE’-deez) is 58.
Actor-wrestler John Cena is 48.
Retired MLB All-Star Andruw Jones is 48.
Comedian-TV host John Oliver is 48.
Actor Kal Penn is 48.
Actor-model Jaime King is 46.
Singer Taio Cruz is 45.
Actor Dev Patel is 35.
Model Gigi Hadid is 30.
Olympic snowboarding gold medalist Chloe Kim is 25.
Prince Louis of Wales is 7.

LAS VEGAS — If you return from a four-day trip to Vegas able to say you broke even, you’re ahead of the game.

After as dominating a 30-minute stretch of hockey as they have played this season, the Minnesota Wild are heading home from Sin City having broken even in the first 120 minutes of their first-round playoff series against the Vegas Golden Knights.

The duo of Matt Boldy and Kirill Kaprizov led the way as the Wild took advantage of a rash of Vegas turnovers, jumping out to a commanding lead on the way to a 5-2 win in Game 2 of this best-of-seven, sending the team back to Minnesota with the series knotted 1-1.

Game 3 of the series is Thursday evening in St. Paul. Opening faceoff is 8 p.m. CT.

Anchoring the team’s top line with Joel Eriksson Ek and Boldy, Kaprizov had two goals, while Boldy had a goal and an assist. Filip Gustavsson stopped 29 shots for the Wild, who led 4-0 halfway through the game, quieting the normally raucous crowd inside the rink that locals call “the Fortress.”

Minnesota Wild players celebrate a goal by left wing Kirill Kaprizov against Vegas Golden Knights goaltender Adin Hill (33) during the second period of Game 2 of a first-round NHL hockey playoff series Tuesday, April 22, 2025, in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/David Becker)

Marcus Foligno and Mats Zuccarello scored goals, as well, as Minnesota beat Vegas for the first time this season in their fifth head-to-head meeting. Adin Hill had 12 saves for the Knights.

Gustavsson was busy right from the start, turning aside a pair of Vegas shots in the game’s opening minute, including one off of his mask. After four minutes the shots were 5-0 Knights, but the Wild pushed back, hard. Hill had to stop Ryan Hartman on a solo rush to the net, then brought the crowd to its feet when he denied Joel Eriksson Ek with a glove save on what looked like a sure goal shot from the side of the net.

Undaunted, the Wild struck first near the midway point of the opening period when Kaprizov’s long lead pass found Boldy a half-stride ahead of two Vegas defenders at center ice. Boldly held off his pursuers long enough to slip a low shot past Hill, giving Minnesota its first lead of the series.

The Wild doubled the lead less than 2 minutes later when Hartman’s pass from behind the net found Foligno uncovered at the top of the crease for a quick shot and Foligno’s first playoff goal. It was 3-0 before the period ended after Marcus Johansson’s pretty backhand pass from just inside the blue line caught Zuccarello in stride, and the veteran wing went around a Knights defender and to the net alone, flipping a wrist shot past Hill’s glove.

It was a play that began when a Vegas defender tried to deliver a hard check on Zuccarello along the boards and missed, giving Minnesota a numbers advantage heading into the offensive zone.

Not content with their three-goal advantage, the Wild pounced on another Vegas turnover early in the second, keying a two-on-one rush with Kaprizov and Boldy. Carrying the puck and given the option to pass or shoot, Kaprizov took the second option and the puck slipped under Hill’s pad after the goalie made the initial save for a 4-0 Minnesota lead.

Vegas made a push midway through the second, pinning the Wild’s fourth line in their zone for more than a minute, with two Minnesota players missing their sticks, and forcing Gustavsson to make a trio of saves before the puck deflected out of play.

But the home team kept pressuring and got on the board with just under eight minutes left in the middle frame when defenseman Noah Hanifin zipped a wrist shot past Gustavsson’s glove from 15 feet out. Vegas outshot Minnesota 11-3 in the second, but the Wild emerged up by three goals.

But the home club kept chipping away at Minnesota’s lead, with Tomas Hertl getting his second goal of the series early in the third, not long after Hill had stuffed an Eriksson Ek scoring chance on the doorstep.

The “let them play” approach by the on-ice officials continued, with just one penalty called in the game. The Wild got the game’s lone power play in the third period but did not get a shot on Hill. Vegas defenseman Nicolas Hauge, who was not called for a cross check to the face of Hartman in Game 1, got away with a clear punch to Kaprizov’s face late in Game 2.

The Russian sniper’s revenge came on the ice, as he hit an empty net with a 190-foot shot from beyond the far goal line for the clincher.

This is the 18th playoff series in Wild franchise history, and they avoided falling in a 0-2 hole for the 10th time with the win.

 

LOS ANGELES — Minnesota stunned the Los Angeles Lakers with its physicality in Saturday’s Game 1 victory in Los Angeles.

The Lakers returned the favor on Tuesday.

Los Angeles was the clear aggressor from start to finish, putting Minnesota on its heels early. The Wolves never recovered, falling 94-85 to even the series at 1-1.

Game 3 is Friday in Minneapolis.

Minnesota has the ability to match and exceed just about anyone’s physicality. But the Wolves instead grew frustrated and frequently demonstrated an utter lack of composure for 48 minutes that ultimately did them in.

In the fourth quarter alone, Naz Reid ran the ball down the floor out of frustration following a whistle that triggered the team’s second delay of game violation of the contest, giving the Lakers a technical free throw when the Wolves were trying to mount a rally.

Then Julius Randle, who scored a new playoff career-high 27 points to pace Minnesota, had a bucket wiped away when he needlessly swiped his off hand into the face of LeBron James before the ball could fall into the bucket. So instead of Minnesota trimming its deficit to 11, it stayed at nine.

Little things like that kept Minnesota from ever mounting a serious rally.

After getting overrun on Saturday, Los Angeles busted out of the gates Tuesday with a renewed tenacity and intensity on both ends of the floor that helped it build a 22-point first-half advantage.

Minnesota’s defense finally matched the Lakers in the second half, making every Los Angeles bucket difficult over the final two frames. But Minnesota never got any type of rhythm going offensively. The Wolves relied almost entirely on Randle isolations.

One game after seemingly dissecting the Los Angeles defense, Anthony Edwards did little in the form of playmaking. The guard finished with zero assists. And after they shot the lights out from deep in Game 1, Minnesota went ice cold from the field Tuesday.

Minnesota went 5 for 24 from beyond the arc, and shot just 38% from the field.

Luka Doncic had 31 points, 12 rebounds and nine assists for the Lakers.

For a moment on April 9, the average U.S. tariff rate leapt to 32%, making American consumers the highest tariffed people in the world. For the next 90 days, the average U.S. tariff rate will be about 25%, which will leave Americans paying more than the citizens of any other industrialized nation, putting us in the company of Sudan and Djibouti.

America, despite what you may have heard, is currently a pretty great place to live and work. While Americans represent just 4.2% of the world’s population, they produce more than 26% of the world’s GDP. As a result, U.S. median income is nearly nine times the global average and the U.S. poverty rate is about one-fortieth the global rate.

We have our problems. Every nation does. But Americans are among the healthiest and wealthiest people to ever walk the planet and are generally quite satisfied with their lives.

But this prosperity didn’t just happen. It was built on a foundation of economic freedom. And by our calculations, that freedom is rapidly eroding thanks to President Donald Trump’s trade war.

Individuals are more economically free when they are allowed to make more of their own economic choices. Governments can protect these choices by impartially safeguarding everyone’s right to own, use and exchange property. Or they can limit economic choice through taxes, regulations, tariffs and manipulation of the value of money.

One of us (Lawson) has been measuring economic freedom for nearly three decades. His annual Economic Freedom of the World report, published by the Fraser Institute in Canada and the Cato Institute in the U.S., measures the degree of economic freedom in each of 165 countries using 45 indicators of government policy. Ten of these indicators measure trade freedom, reflecting its importance in overall economic freedom.

Many of us cherish economic freedom for its own sake, believing that each of us has the inalienable right to choose our own vocation, to spend our own resources as we see fit, and to contract with others as we like.

But even if these considerations don’t appeal to you, you should value economic freedom. That’s because — as has been documented in nearly 1,000 peer reviewed studies — it makes life better. Compared with the least-economically free places, people in the freest nations earn 7.6 times as much, live 16 years longer, and are 40% more satisfied with their lives. They also tend to be more literate, more tolerant and less corrupt.

All of this helps explain why the United States — which last ranked as the fifth-freest economy in the world — is so prosperous. Americans have long been some of the most economically free people on the planet. U.S. trade freedom, the area of economic freedom that gauges our ability to exchange with people in other nations, is a key component of that. It accounts for tariffs, regulatory trade barriers, controls, and black-market exchange rates. U.S. trade freedom peaked in the 1990s at 8th in the world. But as other countries allowed their own citizens to trade more freely, the U.S. failed to keep up and by 2022, it had fallen to 53rd place.

As U.S. tariff rates have gyrated up and down, we have re-run the numbers, estimating the effects on U.S. trade freedom and on U.S. economic freedom more broadly. For the brief time this month when average U.S. tariff rates were 32%, U.S. trade freedom slipped to 72nd place, just behind Haiti, a country that the president has brutally mocked for its poor living conditions.

We also slipped to 10th place in overall economic freedom. Now, with average U.S. tariffs at 25%, U.S. trade freedom has crept back up to 70th place, just ahead of Rwanda while overall economic freedom remains 10th.

America is a great nation. But our prosperity depends on our freedom and Trump’s trade war is a clear threat to that.

Robert Lawson is Fullinwider Chair in Economic Freedom and director of the Bridwell Institute for Economic Freedom at Southern Methodist University. Matthew Mitchell is a Senior Fellow in the Center for Human Freedom at the Fraser Institute and a Senior Affiliated Scholar with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. They wrote this column for Tribune News Service.