Minnesota United at Colorado Rapids

When: 8:30 p.m. CT Saturday
Where: Dick’s Sporting Goods Park
Stream: Apple TV Season Pass
Radio: KSTP-AM 1500 ESPN
Weather: 66 degrees, partly cloudy, 11 mph south wind
Betting line: Colorado minus-105; draw plus-280; MNUFC plus-240

Form: MNUFC (7-2-3, 24 points) is unbeaten in four matches with a 2-1 comeback win over Portland last Saturday. Rapids (6-5-3, 21 points) gave up three goals after the 85th minute in 5-3 loss to first-place Real Salt Lake last weekend.

Look-ahead: MNUFC is 4-1-0 away from St. Paul in 2023. With a win Saturday, United would become third team in MLS history (outside the league’s shootout era) to win five of its opening six road games in a season. The 2010 LA Galaxy and 2022 NY Red Bulls each went 5-0-1and advanced to the MLS Cup Playoffs. Galaxy won the Supporters Shield.

Quote: Analyst Taylor Twellman had big praise on Apple TV about Loons sitting atop West standings at two points per match, while getting little from two of its three Designated Players: “Eric Ramsay is inarguably manager of the year at this point —and he wasn’t even (in Minnesota) for the first month.”

Absences: Emanuel Reynoso (return-to-play protocol and transfer rumors), Micky Tapias (red card suspension) and Hugo Bacharach (knee) are out. Hassani Dotson (hamstring), Moses Nyeman (thigh) and Jordan Adebayo-Smith (ankle) are questionable going into Friday’s training session.

RELATED: Loons bracing for possibility of 10 or more players going on international duty in June

Projected XI: In a 5-2-3 formation, LW Franco Fragapane, CF Tani Oluwaseyi, RW Sang Bin Jeong; CM Robin Lod, CM Wil Trapp; LB Joseph Rosales, CB Devin Padelford, CB Michael Boxall, CB Kervin Arriaga, RB DJ Taylor; GK Dayne St. Clair.

Stat: Rosales is the first Loons player to record a primary or secondary assist in five straight games. “Very happy to be able to contribute to the team,” he said this week through team interpreter Marleine Calderon. “And the only thing that’s left is to score a goal.”

Player to watch: Forward Rafael Navarro has scored 4 goals in each of the previous four games, but has outperformed his expected goals (2.7) in that span. The Brazilian leads Colorado with eight goals this season.

Another player to watch: Goalkeeper Zach Steffen was a hot commodity going from Columbus Crew to Manchester City in 2019 — on the recommendation of then-City Football Group scout Khaled El-Ahmad. But the former U.S. men’s national team player has cooled off. He is in the bottom 30 percentile in MLS in a handful of shot-stopping metrics this season, per fbref.com.

Prediction: MNUFC has been at its best on the road this season, while Colorado collapsed late against RSL last weekend. Colorado is averaging 2.5 goals scored across last four games, but another Minnesota counter attack leads to a smash-and-grab win. Loons, 3-2.

By MARK KENNEDY (AP Entertainment Writer)

NEW YORK (AP) — Documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock, an Oscar nominee whose most famous work skewered American food and diets and who notably ate only at McDonald’s for a month to illustrate the dangers of a fast-food diet, has died. He was 53.

Spurlock died Thursday in New York from complications of cancer, according to a statement issued Friday by his family.

“It was a sad day, as we said goodbye to my brother Morgan,” Craig Spurlock, who worked with him on several projects, said in the statement. “Morgan gave so much through his art, ideas, and generosity. The world has lost a true creative genius and a special man. I am so proud to have worked together with him.”

Spurlock made a splash in 2004 with his groundbreaking film “Super Size Me,” which was nominated for an Academy Award. The film chronicled the detrimental physical and psychological effects of Spurlock eating only McDonald’s food for 30 days. He gained about 25 pounds, saw a spike in his cholesterol and lost his sex drive.

He returned in 2019 with “Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!” — a sober look at an industry that processes 9 billion animals a year in America.

“We’re at an amazing moment in history from a consumer standpoint where consumers are starting to have more and more power,” he told The Associated Press in 2019. “It’s not about return for the shareholders. It’s about return for the consumers.”

Spurlock was a gonzo-like filmmaker who leaned into the bizarre and ridiculous. His stylistic touches included zippy graphics and amusing music, blending a Michael Moore-ish camera-in-your-face style with his own sense of humor and pathos.

“I wanted to be able to lean into the serious moments. I wanted to be able to breathe in the moments of levity. We want to give you permission to laugh in the places where it’s really hard to laugh,” he told the AP.

After he exposed the fast-food and chicken industries, there was an explosion in restaurants stressing freshness, artisanal methods, farm-to-table goodness and ethically sourced ingredients. But nutritionally not much had changed.

“There has been this massive shift and people say to me, ‘So has the food gotten healthier?’ And I say, ‘Well, the marketing sure has,’” he said.

Not all his work dealt with food. Spurlock made documentaries about the boy band One Direction and the geeks and fanboys at Comic-Con. One of his films looked at life behind bars at the Henrico County Jail in Virginia.

In “POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold,” Spurlock tackled questions of product placement, marketing and advertising. With “Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?” Spurlock goes on a global search to find the al-Qaida leader.

“Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!” was to premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in 2017 but it was shelved at the height of the #MeToo movement when Spurlock came forward to detail his own history of sexual misconduct.

He confessed that he had been accused of rape while in college and had settled a sexual harassment case with a female assistant. He also admitted to cheating on numerous partners. “I am part of the problem,” he wrote.

“For me, there was a moment of kind of realization — as somebody who is a truth-teller and somebody who has made it a point of trying to do what’s right — of recognizing that I could do better in my own life. We should be able to admit we were wrong,” he told the AP.

Spurlock grew up in a small town in West Virginia. His mother was an English teacher who he remembered would correct his work with a red pen.

He is survived by two sons — Laken and Kallen; his mother Phyllis Spurlock; father Ben; brothers Craig and Barry; and former spouses Alexandra Jamieson and Sara Bernstein, the mothers of his children.

___

Mark Kennedy is at http://twitter.com/KennedyTwits

By KAREN MATTHEWS (Associated Press)

NEW YORK (AP) — A woman who says Sean “Diddy” Combs subjected her to violence and abuse over several years in the 1990s has filed a lawsuit in New York accusing the rapper of sexual assault, battery and gender-motivated violence.

April Lampros, who met Combs in 1994 when she was a college student, described several “terrifying sexual encounters” with him including being forced to take ecstasy and have sex with Combs’ late former girlfriend Kim Porter.

Lampros’ lawsuit, filed Thursday in state court in Manhattan, comes after a series of allegations against the embattled hip-hop mogul. A former model accused Combs of sexually assaulting her at his New York City recording studio in 2003 in a separate lawsuit filed earlier this week.

Lampros, 51, said in the lawsuit that she was a student at New York City’s Fashion Institute of Technology when she met Combs, who showered her with gifts and promised to help her achieve her dream of a career in fashion.

The relationship turned abusive and coercive, according to the lawsuit.

Lampros said Combs raped her in a Manhattan hotel room in 1995. She passed out and woke up the next morning “nude, sore, and confused,” according to the suit.

On another occasion, Lampros said, Combs forced her to perform oral sex on him in a parking garage in full view of a worker at the garage.

Combs forced Lampros and Porter to have sex with each other in his apartment in 1996 after he had shoved ecstasy pills down their throats, according to the lawsuit.

“Ms. Lampros vocally opposed this idea, but Mr. Combs quickly reminded her that she had no control over the situation as he could make her lose her job,” the lawsuit said.

Porter died of pneumonia in 2018.

A message seeking comment on Lampros’ accusations was sent to an attorney for Combs.

The Associated Press does not typically identify victims of sexual assault by name unless they publicly identify themselves, as Lampros has.

The lawsuits filed by Lampros and the former model come days after CNN aired security video that shows Combs attacking singer Cassie in a Los Angeles hotel hallway in 2016. Combs on Sunday released a video admitting he attacked Cassie in the hotel hallway, saying he was “truly sorry” and his actions were “inexcusable.”

A lawsuit filed by Cassie in November alleging beatings and abuse was settled a day after it was filed. It prompted increased scrutiny of Combs, with additional lawsuits filed in the following months, along with a federal criminal sex-trafficking investigation that led to raids of Combs’ mansions in Los Angeles and Miami.

A woman was killed in a Lakeville home late Thursday allegedly by a man who was soon arrested in Rosemount, police said.

Lakeville officers responded to the 17000 block of Encina Path around 11:10 p.m. after a relative of the woman reported a “significant amount of blood” inside the home, police said in a Friday statement. Officers found the woman dead inside.

The man was identified as a suspect, and an alert was put out for his car.

About 10 minutes later, Rosemount police responded to a call of suspicious activity in the 3700 block of 148th Street in Rosemount and located the car unoccupied.

After a short search of the area, the suspect was found in a backyard and taken into custody around 11:50 p.m. He had injuries that appeared to have been self-inflicted and was transported by M Health medics to Regions Hospital in St. Paul, where he remains in custody and in their care.

The Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s office will release the woman’s identity at a later time. The Dakota County Sheriff’s Office and the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension are assisting Lakeville police in the investigation.

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