A former dance instructor from Lakeville who repeatedly sexually assaulted a teen student has been given two months in the Dakota County jail and seven years of probation.

Timothy Mark Olson Jr. (Courtesy of the Dakota County Sheriff’s Office)

Timothy Mark Olson Jr., 36, was sentenced Wednesday after pleading guilty in August to the sole count of third-degree criminal sexual conduct for acts that authorities say took place with a teenage girl at his home from June 2022 through the end of that year.

The victim went to Lakeville police in November 2023 and reported Olson sexually assaulted her at his home approximately five to eight times in the summer and fall of 2022, while she was under the age of 18.

She said Olson was her instructor at a dance studio beginning when she was in ninth grade and that her parents began paying him to teach her individual lessons when she was an 11th-grader. Olson started contacting the girl through Instagram messages, which “started out innocuous but progressed to asking Victim to come to his residence in Lakeville,” the criminal complaint said.

Olson made a straight plea to the charge — meaning no agreement was in place with the prosecution — and faced a presumptive three-year stayed sentence under state guidelines.

Olson’s attorney asked Judge Krista Marks for no additional time beyond the one day he had served after his arrest, or, in the alternative, 180 days on house arrest.

His 60-day jail sentence will begin Feb. 16, court records show. His sentence includes a stay of imposition, which means the felony conviction will be considered a misdemeanor if he successfully completes probation.

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By ANDY WONG

JIUQUAN, China (AP) — China said Thursday it’s on track to land astronauts on the moon by 2030 as it introduced the next crew of astronauts who will head to its space station as part of the country’s ambitious plans to be a leader in space exploration.

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“Currently, each program of the research and development work of putting a person on the moon is progressing smoothly,” said Zhang Jingbo, spokesman for the China Manned Space Program, citing the Long March 10 rocket, moon landing suits and exploration vehicle, as fruitful efforts of that work. “Our fixed goal of China landing a person on the moon by 2030 is firm.”

China is also preparing to send up its latest rotation of astronauts who make up part of the ongoing mission to complete the Tiangong space station, part of its broader space exploration plans. Each team stays inside the station for six months, conducting research.

The latest crew joining others on the station will be made up of Zhang Lu, Wu Fei and Zhang Hongzhang. They will take off from the Jiuquan launch center Friday at 11:44 p.m. in China. Zhang was previously part of the Shenzhou 15 mission to the station. For Wu and Zhang, this will be their first time in space.

The astronauts will also carry four mice with them on this trip, two male and two female. They will study the effects of weightlessness and confinement on the animals.

China began work on the Tiangong, or “Heavenly Palace,” after the country was excluded from the International Space Station over U.S. national security concerns over the Chinese space program’s direct link to the People’s Liberation Army.

By MIKE CORDER and MOLLY QUELL

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — Anti-Islam lawmaker Geert Wilders’ far-right Party for Freedom and the centrist D66 were tied with nearly all votes counted Thursday in the Dutch general election in an unprecedented neck-and-neck race to become the biggest party.

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The near-total count tallied and published by Dutch national news agency ANP and cited by Dutch media showed each party winning 26 seats in Wednesday’s election.

The nail-biting finish is expected to lead to delays in starting the process of forming a new coalition. No Dutch election has previously ended with two parties tied for the lead.

When D66 reached its previous record of 24 seats in in 2021, the leader at the time, Sigrid Kaag, danced for joy on a table at a party meeting.

This time, current D66 leader Rob Jetten cut cake for the party faithful gathered at Parliament.

“This is the best result for D66 ever,” the 38-year old told a crowd party insiders and media on Thursday morning after he’d been welcomed with chants of the party’s optimistic election slogan “Het kan wel,” or “It is possible.”

Wilders’ Party for Freedom is forecast to lose 11 seats in the 150-seat House of Representatives, while D66 gains 17, according to the vote count.

Wilders insisted early Thursday that his party, known by its Dutch acronym PVV, should play a leading role in coalition talks if it is the largest.

“As long as there’s no 100% clarity on this, no D66 scout can get started. We will do everything we can to prevent this,” he said. A scout is an official appointed by the winning party to look into possible coalitions.

Wilders faces an uphill battle to return to government, however. Mainstream parties including D66 have ruled out forming a coalition with the PVV, arguing that Wilders’ decision to torpedo the outgoing four-party coalition in June in a dispute over migration underscored that he is an untrustworthy partner.

As a result, which party ultimately gets the largest number of seats is “completely and utterly irrelevant,” political scientist Henk van der Kolk told The Associated Press.

Van der Kolk sees a possible path forward with a centrist coalition of D66, the center-left bloc of the Labor Party and Green Left, the center-right Christian Democrats and the right-wing People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy.

In fallout from the vote, former European Commission vice president Frans Timmermans said he was quitting Dutch politics after the center-left bloc he led lost seats in an election it had hoped to win.

The election is “unlikely to mark the end of populism in the Netherlands,” said Armida van Rij, senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform think tank. She noted that another right-wing party, JA21, which she described as a “PVV-light party with equally undemocratic ideas,” made big gains. The party had one seat in the last parliament and is forecast to rise to nine seats.

The vote came against a backdrop of deep polarization in the Netherlands, a nation once famed as a beacon of tolerance. Violence erupted at a recent anti-immigration rally in The Hague — when rioters smashed the windows of the D66 headquarters — and protests against new asylum-seeker centers have been seen in municipalities around the country.

In the splintered Dutch political landscape, forming a coalition is likely to take weeks or months.

While party leaders were handing out cake to their members, thousands of volunteers were trying to finalize the ballot count.

The ballots of some 135,000 Dutch nationals who voted by mail are also outstanding. The Electoral College will certify the count next week.

Counting was halted in the southern town of Venray, a Wilders stronghold, after a fuse box caught fire and volunteers were evacuated. No one was injured but it was not clear when work will resume.

By ALANNA DURKIN RICHER and MICHAEL KUNZELMAN, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department has stripped references to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack from court papers and punished two federal prosecutors who filed the document seeking prison time at sentencing Thursday for an armed rioter arrested near former President Barack Obama’s home.

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The prosecutors from the U.S. attorney’s office in the District of Columbia were locked out of their government devices and told they were being put on leave Wednesday morning shortly after they filed a sentencing memorandum describing the crowd of President Donald Trump supporters who attacked the Capitol as a “mob of rioters,” according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss personnel issues.

Later Wednesday, the Justice Department replaced the court filing with an updated version that stripped references to the Jan. 6 riot. The new filing also no longer included a reference to the fact that Trump posted on social media what he claimed was Obama’s address on the same day that the defendant, Taylor Taranto, was arrested in the former president’s neighborhood.

It’s the latest move by the Justice Department to discipline attorneys tied to the massive Jan. 6 prosecution and represents an extraordinary effort by the government to erase the history of the riot that left more than 100 police officers injured.

Trump himself for years has worked to downplay the violence and paint as victims the rioters who stormed the Capitol and sent lawmakers running into hiding as they met to certify Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential election victory. Since Trump’s sweeping Jan. 6 pardons in January, his administration has fired or demoted numerous attorneys involved in the largest investigation in Justice Department history.

The Justice Department declined to comment on Thursday.

Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, said her office would not comment on personnel decisions, but added: “We have and will continue to vigorously pursue justice against those who commit or threaten violence without regard to the political party of the offender or the target.”

Prosecutors are seeking more than two years in prison for Taranto when he is sentenced Thursday in federal court in Washington. He was convicted in May for illegally possessing two guns and roughly 500 rounds of ammunition in Obama’s neighborhood in June 2023. U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, who was nominated to the bench by Trump, also convicted Taranto of recording himself making a hoax threat to bomb a government building in Maryland.

The defense argued at trial that the video showed Taranto was merely joking in an “avant-garde” manner, and that he believes he is a “journalist and, to some extent, a comedian.”

Taranto, a Navy veteran from Pasco, Washington, was separately charged with four misdemeanors related to the Capitol attack before Trump’s sweeping clemency order erased his case. He was captured on video at the entrance of the Speaker’s Lobby in the House around the time that a rioter, Ashli Babbitt, was fatally shot by an officer as she tried to climb through the broken window of a barricaded door.

The prosecutors overseeing Taranto’s case were not told why they were being put on leave, the person familiar with the matter said. Two new prosecutors, including the head of the criminal division for the office, entered the case and submitted the new brief on Wednesday. ABC News first reported that the prosecutors, Samuel White and Carlos Valdivia, had been placed on leave.

Trump’s pardons in January released from prison people caught on camera viciously attacking police as well as leaders of far-right extremist groups convicted of orchestrating violent plots to stop the peaceful transfer of power after his 2020 election loss. Those pardoned include more than 250 people who were convicted of assault charges, some having attacked police with makeshift weapons such as flagpoles, a hockey stick and a crutch.

In January, then-acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove ordered the firings of about two dozen prosecutors who had been hired for temporary assignments to support the Jan. 6 cases, but were moved into permanent roles after Trump’s presidential win in November.

And in June, the department fired two attorneys who worked as supervisors overseeing the Jan. 6 prosecutions in the U.S. attorney’s office in the District of Columbia, as well as a line attorney who prosecuted cases stemming from the Capitol attack.