In chess, as in life, you are bound to make some mistakes.

That was the message Ed Bourgeois, access and outreach coordinator for the Minnesota State Chess Association, had for 32 inmates at the Minnesota Correctional Facility-Stillwater on Thursday morning, prior to participating in the state’s first prison chess tournament.

“It’s your first time playing on the clock, and you’re going to blunder,” said Bourgeois, referring to the digital game timers required for tournament play. “It happens to the best players in the world. Please just keep your head about you. Your opponent is probably going to blunder one too. Just don’t give up, never give up.”

The inmates who gathered in the prison’s recreation room at 8:30 a.m. got to spend the morning playing four official games of chess. The tournament, which took more than two years to plan, was open to any interested and eligible inmates.

Each player who participated got to keep a chess board and pieces provided by The Gift of Chess, a nonprofit organization dedicated to bringing the game of chess to incarcerated individuals. The top four finishers will get to play in a nationwide virtual chess tournament against other incarcerated players.

Warden Bill Bolin said playing chess helps people develop critical-thinking and problem-solving skills — and make positive choices.

“Those skills are critical when we talk about transforming lives,” Bolin said. “Because we don’t want individuals who are continually having the same thoughts or making the same choices. We want them to look at things differently, and chess, really, if you’ve ever played chess, is a game of critical thinking and strategy and at times you’re looking two or three moves ahead.”

Warden William Bolin, standing, watches as 32 inmates play chess during a tournament at the Minnesota Correctional Facility-Stillwater on Thursday. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

Impulsivity doesn’t work in chess, Bolin said. “You want to slow down your thinking, especially when you’re making some critical decisions. Then you want to come up with a positive choice.”

‘Chess is like life’

Inmate Hannabal Shaddai, 52, said he learned to play chess when he was a student at Laura Ingalls Wilder Elementary School in Minneapolis.

“My sixth-grade teacher taught me to play. Mr. Wendell. I’ll never forget him,” said Shaddai, who is serving a life sentence for murder. “He spent the last hour of school every day teaching students to play.”

When Shaddai started playing chess in prison, he said he remembered his teacher’s words of wisdom. “Mr. Wendell said that chess is like life,” he said. “You should know every move that you’re making. I equated that to my rehabilitation.”

The intellectual demands of the game appeal to Shaddai. “It makes you think. It makes you use your brain,” he said. “It’s a game of strategy, a game of tactics. You have to remember, ‘Why did I do that? Okay, don’t do that. Yeah, let that go. Don’t worry about that.’”

Shaddai was paired with Richard Adams for his first game. Adams drew white, which meant he got to go first. Each player got 25 minutes on their clock to play the entire game, with an increment of 5 seconds per move.

At Shaddai’s request, Dean Zagar, tournament director, went over the “touch-move rule” just minutes before they started playing.

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“Hey, y’all!” he yelled to the other inmates. “Listen up to the rules!”

Zagar, the president of Chess Castle of Minnesota, explained that if a player intentionally touches a piece on the board, they must move that piece if it has a legal move. “If you touch one of your opponent’s pieces first, you have to capture it,” he said. “If you have multiple options, you can capture it with whatever option you’d like to capture it with.”

Said Shaddai: “I’ve been telling people that for the longest time, ‘No, that’s not what touch-move rule is.’ Because people get into stuff, but they don’t get books, and they don’t get rules. They play games, but they don’t know the rules.”

Trash talk

Shaddai beat Adams, but then Lon Newman, president of the St. Croix Valley Chess Club, teamed up with Adams to play Shaddai for a second time.

“Castle early,” Newman told Adams. “There are principles in the opening. One is fight for the center. Two is develop your minor pieces – your bishops and knights. And three is protect the king. So every move in the opening should be directed at one of those three things.”

Shaddai didn’t hold back from trash-talking his opponent. “I was a step behind him because I got black, but now I’m gonna step in front of him,” he said. “He gave it back to me. He should have castled before me. Now I’ve castled. My king is safer than his. His is still in the middle of the board.”

“I just don’t believe in the whole castle thing,” Adams said.

“So in boxing, you don’t believe in putting your gloves up? You believe in putting your chin out?” he said.

“I’m too fast,” Adams countered. “You won’t hit me in a boxing match.”

“That’s what that dude from Brazil thought,” Shaddai said, referring to MMA legend Anderson Silva’s loss to YouTube star-turned-boxer Jake Paul.

“You guys are the trash-talking champions here,” Newman said.

“You know what Mike Tyson says?” Shaddai said. “Mike Tyson said, ‘Everybody has a plan until you get punched in the face.’”

Before the tournament started, Newman encouraged the men to be on their best behavior. “If we screw it up now, we won’t be doing it again,” he said.

Welcome respite

Inmates gather in the gymnasium for a chess tournament at the Minnesota Correctional Facility-Stillwater on Thursday. The tournament, the first in a Minnesota prison, was hosted by the St. Croix Valley Chess club and the Minnesota State Chess Association. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

In an interview with the Pioneer Press, Newman, who lives in Stillwater, said he hopes there will be future tournaments at the prison, which is located in Bayport.

“I’m hoping we can move forward,” he said. “I would have a monthly club meeting if I could get one.”

Inmate Robert Kendell-Bey, 44, thanked the organizers and said playing in the tournament was a welcome respite from everyday prison life.

“Any time that we can come together outside the madness and traditional modes of being in here is great for me,” Kendall-Bey said. “I’m all about cooperation and community, collaboration and mutualism. We look forward to moments like this where we can engage in community that’s outside the bounds of normal prison etiquette, so this is a moment of joy. Sincerely.”

Inmate Pierre Brown, 39, said he started playing chess in a juvenile detention center when he was 11.

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“From that point on, I just always had passion for the game,” he said. “I love the game. It’s really like life. It’s like a war game, but it’s, like, you got to protect your king at all costs, so sacrifices must be made.”

Brown, who generally plays about five hours a day, said playing chess helped him grow and mature.

“It just helped me think about things,” he said. “Because I see in a game, when you make an impulsive move, then you have to suffer the consequences of that. You got to pay for it.”

Despite the amount of time he spends playing, Brown said he doesn’t dream about chess moves.

“I’m not gonna lie. I take my melatonin, and it just knocks me out,” he said.

By CHRIS MEGERIAN

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump is drastically shrinking the workforce and mission of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, eviscerating an agency created after the Great Recession with the goal of protecting Americans from fraud, abuse and deceptive practices.

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The plan, which is being challenged by an employee union, is the latest step in an extraordinary reshaping of the federal government. Conservatives and businesses have often chafed at the agency’s oversight and investigations, and Elon Musk made it a top target of his Department of Government Efficiency.

Roughly 1,500 employees are slated to be cut, leaving around 200 people, according to an administration official who wasn’t authorized to disclose the figure publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity. Fox Business first reported the number of layoffs.

Employees started receiving layoff notices on Thursday. Their access to agency systems, including email, ends on Friday evening.

“The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau identified your position being eliminated and your employment is subject to termination in accordance with reduction-in-force (RIF) procedures,” the emails said.

The Trump administration’s plans have been the subject of a legal battle. A federal judge initially blocked what she described as “a hurried effort to dismantle and disable the agency.”

However, an appeals court said Friday that layoff notices could be sent “to employees whom defendants have determined, after a particularized assessment, to be unnecessary to the performance of defendants’ statutory duties.”

On Thursday, the National Treasury Employees Union asked a federal judge to step in by arguing that officials were violating the order.

“It is unfathomable that cutting the Bureau’s staff by 90 percent in just 24 hours, with no notice to people to prepare for that elimination, would not ‘interfere with the performance’ of its statutory duties, to say nothing of the implausibility of the defendants having made a ‘particularized assessment’ of each employee’s role in the three-and-a-half business days since the court of appeals imposed that requirement,” the union wrote.

Mark Paoletta, the chief legal officer for the agency, sent a message to employees on Wednesday describing the CFPB’s reduced mission.

“To focus on tangible harms to consumers, the Bureau will shift resources away from enforcement and supervision that can be done by the States,” he wrote.

Problems with mortgages will be the top priority, while issues involving medical debt, student loans and digital payments will receive less attention, according to Paoletta.

The change in focus could benefit Musk’s efforts to offer financial services through X, his social media company. He has long wanted to allow users to make peer-to-peer payments using his platform, and he announced in January that X would be working with Visa.

Such services will now be a lower priority for the CFPB.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat who helped create the CFPB, said in a statement that Trump was preventing the agency from doing “its job of helping Americans who get scammed by big banks and giant corporations.”

She described his plans as “yet another assault on consumers and our democracy by this lawless administration, and we will fight back with everything we’ve got.”

The CFPB was formed in 2010, two years after the financial crisis and subprime mortgage-lending scandal. Officials said that it has obtained nearly $20 billion in financial relief for U.S. consumers since its founding in the form of canceled debts, compensation and reduced loans.

By TOM NOUVIAN and SYLVIE CORBET

PARIS (AP) — French President Emmanuel Macron said Thursday that historic injustice was imposed on Haiti when it was forced to pay a colossal indemnity to France in exchange for its independence 200 years ago.

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Macron also announced the creation of a joint French-Haitian historical commission to ‘’examine our shared past” and assess relations, but did not directly address longstanding Haitian demands for reparations.

France ″subjected the people of Haiti to a heavy financial indemnity, … This decision placed a price on the freedom of a young nation, which was thus confronted with the unjust force of history from its very inception,” Macron said in a statement.

It comes on the 200th anniversary of the April 17, 1825 document issued by King Charles X of France, which recognized Haiti’s independence after a slave revolt — but also imposed a 150 million gold francs debt as compensation for the loss of France’s colony and enslaved labor force.

Although the indemnity was later reduced to 90 million gold francs, the debt crippled the Caribbean nation, which continued to pay it off through French and American banks until 1947. Economists estimate it’s the equivalent of billions of dollars today.

Experts have said Haiti’s current situation can be traced back to its past. Gangs have flourished in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, with a growing number of children becoming members as families struggle to find food.

Violence has surged since last year, with gangs that control 85% of the capital, Port-au-Prince, attacking new communities daily in a bid to control even more territory. More than 5,600 people were reported killed last year, with gang violence leaving more than one million people homeless in recent years.

″Acknowledging the truth of history means refusing to forget or erase it,″ Macron said.

The new commission will be made up of historians from both countries, and will aim to propose recommendations to both governments, ’’so that they can learn from them and build a more peaceful future.″

Since taking office in 2017, Macron has already addressed France’s role in past colonial conflicts, including in Algeria, Cameroon, and Rwanda.

Over the years, French governments have acknowledged the historic wrong of slavery in Haiti and other former colonies but like other former colonial powers have resisted calls for reparations.

Danica Coto in San Juan contributed to this report.

By CHRISTINA LARSON

A colossal squid has been caught on camera for the first time in the deep sea by an international team of researchers steering a remotely operated submersible.

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The sighting was announced Tuesday by the Schmidt Ocean Institute.

The squid filmed was a juvenile about 1 foot in length at a depth of 1,968 feet in the South Atlantic Ocean. Full-grown adult colossal squids, which scientists have uncovered from the bellies of whales and seabirds, can reach lengths up to 23 feet — almost the size of a small fire truck.

The squid was spied last month near the South Sandwich Islands during an expedition to search for new sea life. Researchers waited to verify the species identification with other independent scientists before releasing the footage.

“I really love that we have seen a young colossal squid first. This animal is so beautiful,” said Kat Bolstad, a squid researcher at the Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand, who helped confirm it.

Researchers are testing different cameras in hopes of catching an adult colossal squid, Bolstad said.

The young squid is almost entirely transparent, with thin arms. As adults, the squids lose this glassy appearance and become an opaque dark red or purple. When full grown, they are considered to be the world’s largest known invertebrates.

AP video journalist Mustakim Hasnath contributed to this report.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.