A man being pursued by federal agents in St. Paul crashed and was taken to the hospital Wednesday with non-life threatening injuries, according to St. Paul police.

Officers responded to a report of a crash at 9:40 a.m. at Western and Selby avenues. The man crashed into two vehicles before hitting a snowbank, said Sgt. Toy Vixayvong, a St. Paul police spokesman.

St. Paul Mayor Kaohly Her spoke out amid the surge in federal immigration enforcement, saying Wednesday’s incident underscores that ICE is “causing chaos, and putting residents at risk in St. Paul.”

St. Paul fire department medics transported the man to a hospital. People in the vehicles that were struck did not need medical attention at the scene, according to Vixayvong.

The situation drew a crowd and Her added, “I want to thank those who continue to show up and keep watch over their neighbors. I also want to thank the St. Paul Police for staying on the scene to clean up and ensure those impacted received assistance.

“Because of the reckless way that ICE is running their operation, one person ended up in the hospital for non-life-threatening injuries, and several bystanders had their cars damaged,” she said. “This is just another incident that tells us loud and clear: Operation Metro Surge needs to end immediately.”

St. Paul police officers took a crash report and are investigating.

Police referred additional questions to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. A Pioneer Press message to DHS wasn’t immediately returned.

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By JOSEPH WILSON

LIVIGNO, Italy (AP) — Some saw it as a ground-breaking moment for transgender athletes when freestyle skier Elis Lundholm competed at the Winter Olympics.

As for Lundholm? He’s just focused on the sport.

“I haven’t really thought about it that much,” the 23-year-old Swede told reporters after finishing 25th in the women’s moguls qualifying on Wednesday, missing the final. “I’m here at the same conditions as everyone else, so yeah, I’m just skiing.”

Outsports, an LGBTQ+ sports website, reported before the competition started that Lundholm would become the first openly transgender athlete to compete at a Winter Games. The International Olympic Committee-endorsed online statistics site Olympedia lists more than 20 transgender athletes who have competed at the Summer Games, but none at the Winter Olympics.

Lundholm, who was assigned female at birth and identifies as a man, competes in the women’s category. The Swedish ski team said Lundholm has not undergone any gender-affirming treatment or surgery, meaning there is no discussion of having an unfair advantage.

Despite some voices on social media questioning whether he should compete with the women given he identifies as a man, Lundholm’s competitors have expressed no objections.

“I think it’s great that Elis is competing as the, I think, first transgender Winter Olympian,” U.S. skier Tess Johnson said. “I think that’s awesome and, yeah, I mean we’re here to ski we’re here to have fun and that’s exactly what we do.”

The soft-spoken Lundholm couldn’t agree more.

“I guess I want everyone to be able to be themselves and just do what they want to do,” Lundholm told reporters in Livigno.

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The International Ski and Snowboard Federation (FIS) wants to introduce a gene testing policy for gender eligibility in women’s events in the near future. That would follow genetic testing for gender eligibility introduced in world athletics.

From the late 1960s and for the next 30 years Olympic athletes competing in women’s events had to undergo a gender test and be issued with a “certificate of femininity,” until it was decided to be too intrusive and not accurate enough.

Last year, the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee effectively barred transgender women from competing in women’s sports, saying they were complying with an executive order issued by President Donald Trump.

“I want everyone to be able to compete fairly against each other,” Lundholm said about testing that would not impact his eligibility but could affect other transgender athletes.

Most of all he wanted to keep his focus on improving his skiing.

“I’m happy to put down a run today. It wasn’t the best run,” he said. “There are some things to fix, but I’m happy.”

AP Winter Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/milan-cortina-2026-winter-olympics

By DAVE SKRETTA

MILAN (AP) — The text message that popped up on Nathan Chen’s phone underscored the enormity of the moment, its arrival shortly after the American figure skater had won his long-awaited gold medal with a soaring free skate at the 2022 Beijing Olympics.

“Congratulations,” it read. “Welcome to our chat.”

“This is everything,” Chen typed back in reply.

The text had come out of nowhere, welcoming him to what is surely one of the most select groups of U.S. athletes. It is called simply the “OGM chain,” which stands for “only gold medalists,” and as the name implies, it includes only American figure skaters who have captured Olympic titles, from 90-year-old Tenley Albright all the way down to Chen, who was 22 at the time.

“It’s really fun. You go into the chat and you’re like, ‘Wow,’” said 1988 champion Brian Boitano, who provided the The Associated Press with a scroll through the text chain. “You just think to yourself, ‘I’m actually in this community.’

“Not only that you’re in the Olympic community,” Boitano clarified, “but you’re a gold medalist.”

Team USA celebrate winning the gold medal after the figure skating team event at the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Milan, Italy, Sunday, Feb. 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)

The U.S. has a long and successful history in figure skating, dating to its very first medal, a bronze won by Theresa Weld at the 1920 Antwerp Games — four years before the inaugural Winter Olympics. Dick Button provided its first gold medal when he won the men’s event at the 1948 St. Moritz Games, then defended his title four years later at the 1952 Oslo Games.

Button died just over a year ago at the age of 95, the only American figure skating gold medalist no longer alive.

“When we started the chain, I thought it was just really cool,” Boitano said. “You have Evan Lysacek and Carol Heiss and Scott Hamilton and Dorothy Hamill, and you just keep going — Kristi Yamaguchi, Meryl Davis, Charlie White.”

Team USA’s Ilia Malinin celebrates with his gold medal after the figure skating team event at the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Milan, Italy, Sunday, Feb. 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Ashley Landis)

If Boitano continued to rattle off names, the total would have come to an even two-dozen, a figure that grew by five more this past Sunday night. That’s when Ilia Malinin anchored the Americans in the team event, beating Japan’s Yuma Kagiyama in a head-to-head showdown to help them defend the gold medal that Chen had helped them win in Beijing.

Welcome to the text chain, Ilia. Same for Alysa Liu, Amber Glenn, Ellie Kam and Danny O’Shea, all of whom played a part in the heart-stopping one-point victory. Ice dancers Madison Chock and Evan Bates were already in the club from the team win in 2022.

Team USA’s Alysa Liu celebrates with her gold medal after the figure skating team event at the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Milan, Italy, Sunday, Feb. 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Ashley Landis)

“It means a lot personally,” said the 86-year-old Heiss, who is married to fellow Olympic champion Hayes Allen Jenkins, “because we are able to talk about the sport and about skaters and about the U.S. team. If we feel strongly about something, we kind of voice our opinions.”

Does that mean this elite group of Olympic champions is quietly helping to shape Team USA?

“I don’t know about that,” Heiss replied. “But we all know how it feels. We all have that memory of standing on an Olympic podium.”

Team USA’s Amber Glenn celebrates with her gold medal after the figure skating team event at the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Milan, Italy, Sunday, Feb. 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Ashley Landis)

“It happens so fast,” Hamill added. “Four minutes on the ice and two minutes on the podium and then boom, life changes.”

It’s not always happy moments that are shared on the text chain.

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When an American Airlines flight bound for Washington, D.C., collided with an army helicopter over the icy Potomac River, it killed all 67 people aboard the two aircraft. Dozens of them were members of the tight-knit figure skating community, including kids who were traveling home from a development camp that had followed the U.S. championships in Wichita, Kansas.

The OGM chain lit up as the gold medalists shared news and attempted to console each other.

“It was very active during the plane crash, yeah. Everybody was talking then,” Hamilton said. “It was just such a tragedy.”

Through the chain, the Olympic champions began discussing ways to help out with a benefit for the families of those involved in the crash. By the time “Legacy on Ice” happened last March, more than a half-dozen members were there to participate.

“Everybody came together,” Boitano said. “That’s what is so unique about our sport. We are all part of a family.”

AP Winter Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/milan-cortina-2026-winter-olympics

The more divided we become, the more absurd it all starts to look.

Not because the problems aren’t real — they are — but because the patterns are. The outrage cycles. The villains rotate. The language escalates. And yet the outcomes remain stubbornly the same: more anger, less trust, and very little that resembles progress.

This isn’t a new problem. It’s an old one we’ve dressed up with better technology.

Gene Roddenberry understood this more than half a century ago. In the 1968 “Star Trek” episode “Day of the Dove,” the Federation and the Klingons find themselves trapped in a relentless conflict aboard the Enterprise. Each side is convinced the other is irredeemably hostile. Every insult escalates. Every clash justifies the next. Cooperation feels not only impossible, but immoral.

Then comes the reveal: an alien entity is feeding on their hatred. The fighting isn’t the point — it’s the fuel. As long as anger flows, the creature thrives.

The moment the crews stop fighting, it weakens. When they refuse to escalate, it dies.

Roddenberry wasn’t writing about aliens. He was writing about us.

Modern America doesn’t suffer from a shortage of disagreement. We suffer from a surplus of amplification — much of it built into the incentives of modern media, politics, and online life, regardless of ideology. Our divisions are constantly nudged, magnified, monetized, and weaponized by systems that profit from keeping us emotionally engaged and perpetually agitated. Politics has become performance. The media has become incentive engineering. Social platforms reward outrage with visibility and punish restraint with obscurity.

The result is a population that feels constantly under threat — yet oddly unable to name who actually benefits from the chaos.

Most people don’t wake up wanting conflict. They want stability, dignity, and a sense that the rules still matter. But outrage is contagious. Once it becomes habitual, it starts to feel like principle. We mistake emotional intensity for moral clarity. We confuse tribal loyalty with conviction.

And so we fight each other — over symbols, language, and exaggerated caricatures — while the underlying structures that profit from dysfunction remain largely untouched.

Like the crews in “Day of the Dove,” we are encouraged to believe that standing down is weakness. Refusing to escalate is surrender. That restraint is betrayal. The system depends on that belief. It cannot function if too many people pause long enough to ask a simple question: Who benefits from this never-ending fight?

Roddenberry’s answer wasn’t forced unity or naïve consensus. It was something far more unsettling: withdrawal.

The refusal to be endlessly provoked.

The refusal to let every disagreement become an existential crisis.

The refusal to confuse outrage with agency.

When the characters aboard the Enterprise stop feeding the conflict, the parasite starves. No speeches. No grand reforms. Just the quiet realization that rage, once denied reinforcement, loses its power.

That lesson hasn’t aged a day.

We don’t need fewer opinions. We need fewer systems that profit from turning disagreement into identity warfare. Until then, we will keep mistaking noise for truth and combat for courage—convinced we’re fighting each other, while something else quietly feeds.

Roddenberry warned us.

We just forgot the episode.

Joe Palaggi is a writer and historian whose work sits at the crossroads of theology, politics, and American civic culture. He writes about the moral and historical forces that shape our national identity and the challenges of a polarized age. He wrote this colum for The Fulcrum, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news platform covering efforts to fix our governing systems.

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