TORONTO – For players like Minnesota Wild forwards Hunter Haight and Ben Jones, who are still working toward every-night spots in the NHL lineup, each game they get to play in “the show” is a gift worth savoring.

But when the rash of injuries that had the Wild playing without five veterans again on Monday lines up with the team’s lone visit to Toronto this season, for players like Haight and Jones who grew up near Canada’s largest metro area, it’s a special treat.

“I definitely felt like I bled blue for a while,” said Jones of his childhood as a Maple Leafs fan, growing up roughly an hour outside the heart of Toronto. “I went out for lunch with my family yesterday and everyone said that if I got a chance to play here and they saw me on the ice, there would be a lot of tears flowing. It’s exciting for them and kind of a full-circle moment for sure.”

Jones, who was skating in his 25th game of the season on Monday, played youth hockey in Toronto on a team with Quinn Hughes when they were kids. Haight, who was slotted in for his fourth NHL game on Monday, was born a little more than 20 miles west of the city and witnessed his first NHL game at the rink where he was working for the Wild.

“It’s something you dream of growing up,” Haight said after the Wild’s morning skate on the Maple Leafs’ home ice. “Always watching through their playoff runs and all that. I haven’t been in this building since I was like seven years old.”

For Wild coach John Hynes, having seen many players return to their hometowns or their former employers over his coaching career, there’s a balance by the emotional boost from playing in front of friends and family, and the need to focus on the hockey, blocking out any potential distractions.

“I think it’s always exciting for guys to be able to come back and play in their hometowns,” Hynes said. “Sometimes it’s no different than if they’re coming back to play for a team they used to play for. Usually it gives them a little bit of extra pop and excitement.”

For both players, there was a little more pop in their wallets as well. The Maple Leafs have some of the most expensive tickets in the NHL, and Haight was on the hook for “a bunch” of them with more than 30 friends and family coming to Monday’s game. Jones said his father took him to his first NHL game in Toronto as a kid, and on Monday night, Ben got to return the favor.

Briefly

Former Gophers star forward Matthew Knies has been a hit in Toronto since he signed with the Maple Leafs just hours after the U of M’s loss in the 2023 NCAA title game. But a nagging lower body injury kept him off the ice for Monday’s morning skate and Toronto coach Craig Berube was unsure of Knies’ availability to face the Wild.

“It’s obviously bothering him a lot for quite some time and hasn’t gotten really much better,” Berube said. “Other than when he gets some breaks, Christmas time and stuff, he comes back, it feels better, but it’s an ongoing issue.”

Knies, 23, has a dozen goals and 28 assists in 45 games for Toronto this season. Originally from Arizona, he spent two seasons with the Gophers, helping them reach the NCAA Frozen Four in back-to-back years and winning the Big Ten’s MVP award in 2023.

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Goodbye, Animal Control. Hello, Animal Services?

Weeks away from relocating into a new building, the city division currently known as St. Paul Animal Control is looking to sport a new name.

Angie Wiese, director of the city’s Department of Safety and Inspections — which oversees the unit that handles endangered and abandoned animals — told the council on earlier this month that the term “Animal Control” is passe within the industry, where workers are more likely to try and rehouse kittens or reunite a missing iguana with its owner than to control rabid dogs.

“The term ‘Animal Control’ is very outdated in the animal services world, and comes from a time when animal care looked a lot different than it does now,” Wiese said. “One of the drivers to make this change now is that we’re preparing to move into a new space, and we want to brand that new space.”

Wiese shared pictures of a giant turtle, a large white goose, an iguana, a kitten and other abandoned or escaped animals that were returned to their owners or rehomed with new families through partnerships with area nonprofits. “We do a lot more than dogs and cats,” she said. “We provide a number of services that are more than just control of animals.”

Wiese said DSI has also worked closely with Human Resources to recast job titles such as “Animal Services officer” and “Animal Services manager.”

The city council will host a public hearing on the division’s potential name change on Wednesday, and likely a final vote a week later.

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Animal Control currently operates out of an outdated animal shelter at 1285 Jessamine Ave. West, by McMurray Fields, that was built in the 1970s. Work began around last April on remodeling what had been a privately-held shelter in the same neighborhood at 1115 Beulah Lane, which will offer better separation between large and small animals and more space for veterinary care and adoption services.

Animal Control is expected to move into the new facility early this year.

Team Fjordwitches, a team of three women from Quebec, Canada, is once again the winner of the World Snow Sculpting Championship, which was held Wednesday through Saturday in downtown Stillwater.

Team Fjordwitches — Fanny-Fay Tremblay-Girard, Joelle Gagnon and Marie-Claude-Paris-Tanguay — beat out 15 other teams from around the world to win this year’s competition and a $1,500 prize with their entry, “The Inosculation of Souls.” The team, which was also crowned champion in 2024, also won the Artists’ Choice Award, which had a $500 prize.

Team Falcon of Mongolia placed second and won $1,000, and Team Thailand took third and won $500.

The People’s Choice Award, which had a $500 prize, went to Team Kawsay of Peru.

Teams were judged on creativity, technical execution and overall visual impact, said Robin Anthony-Evenson, president of the Greater Stillwater Chamber of Commerce Foundation.

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“These artists represent the very best of international snow sculpting,” Anthony-Evenson said. “The championship brings global talent to Stillwater while creating a shared winter experience that celebrates creativity, culture, and community.”

The championship, which brought more than 67,000 people to town Wednesday through Sunday, is considered the marquee event of the city’s World Snow Celebration, which continues through next Sunday, and includes live music, food and beverage events, a winter market, and family activities.

“Visitors are encouraged to experience the sculptures up close while enjoying the broader festival offerings,” Anthony-Evenson said.

The sculptures will remain up for viewing in Lowell Park as long as weather permits, she said.

For more information, go to www.worldsnowcelebration.com.

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By STEPHANIE LIECHTENSTEIN, Associated Press

VIENNA (AP) — In the wake of spiraling tensions between the United States and Iran over Tehran’s violent crackdown on protests, analysts warn that the internal upheaval affecting the Iranian theocracy could carry nuclear proliferation risks.

While in recent days President Donald Trump seemed to have backed away from a military strike on Iran, he called Saturday for an end to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s nearly 40-year reign in Iran. Trump’s comments came in response to Khamenei branding Trump a “criminal” for supporting protesters in Iran, and blamed demonstrators for causing thousands of deaths.

Meanwhile, a U.S. aircraft carrier, which days earlier had been in the South China Sea, passed Singapore overnight to enter the Strait of Malacca — putting it on a route that could bring it to the Middle East.

With those dangers, analysts warn Iran’s nuclear material could be at risk as well.

Nuclear material could fall into the wrong hands

David Albright, a former nuclear weapons inspector in Iraq and founder of the nonprofit Institute for Science and International Security in Washington, said that in a scenario of internal chaos in Iran, the government could “lose the ability to protect its nuclear assets.”

He said that Iran’s highly enriched uranium stockpile “would be the most worrisome,” adding that there is a possibility that someone could steal some of this material.

There are historical precedents for such a scenario.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, highly enriched uranium and plutonium suitable for building nuclear bombs went missing due to eroded security and weakened protection of these assets.

So far, Iran has maintained control of its sites, even after the U.S. bombed them in the 12-day war in June that Israel launched against the Islamic Republic.

Iran maintains a stockpile of 972 pounds of uranium enriched up to 60% purity — a short, technical step away from weapons-grade levels of 90%, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Vienna-based U.N. nuclear watchdog.

The agency said in a report last November that it has not been able to verify the status and location of this highly enriched uranium stockpile since the war in June.

The agency said in November that therefore it had lost “continuity of knowledge in relation to the previously declared inventories of nuclear material in Iran” at facilities affected by the war.

A diplomat close to the IAEA confirmed Monday that the agency had still not received any information from Iran on the status or whereabouts of the highly enriched uranium stockpile. The diplomat spoke on condition of anonymity in line with diplomatic protocol.

Albright said that Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium would fit in around 18 to 20 cylinders that are designed for transport, weighing around 55 pounds each. “Two people can easily carry it,” he said of each container.

Kelsey Davenport, director for nonproliferation policy at the Washington-based Arms Control Association, said that there is a risk that the stockpile “could be diverted either to a covert program or stolen by a faction of the government or the military that wanted to retain the option of weaponization.”

She said that this risk increases as the Iranian government feels threatened or gets destabilized.

Some of the nuclear material could get smuggled out of Iran or sold to non-state actors in the event of internal chaos or potential government collapse, Davenport said.

“The risk is real but it is difficult to assess, given the unknowns regarding the status of the materials and the whereabouts,” she stressed.

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Possibility of Iran building a nuclear bomb

Both Davenport and Albright pointed out that there is also a theoretical possibility of making nuclear bombs with Iran’s 60% enriched uranium. Tehran has insisted for years its program is peaceful.

However, a weapon made directly from 60% enriched uranium rather than the usual 90% purity requires more nuclear material, which makes it “much bigger and bulkier and probably not well suited to delivery” on a missile, said Eric Brewer, a former U.S. intelligence analyst and now deputy vice president at the Nuclear Threat Initiative.

He added that such a device could still be “blown up in the desert,” for example.

Brewer said that the possibility that the current government in Iran goes down that road should not be “totally dismissed,” but he underlined that most information suggests that the highly enriched uranium “remains buried in a tunnel as a result of the U.S. strikes and is probably not easily accessible to the regime; at least not with some major risk of detection and another strike by the U.S. or Israel.”

He added that recent events “have also shown that the Supreme Leader has a very high bar for any decision to weaponize.”

Nuclear power reactor could be a target

In the case of internal chaos, Iran’s nuclear power reactor in Bushehr — Iran’s only commercial nuclear power plant some 465 miles south of Tehran — could also get sabotaged or targeted with the aim of causing havoc or making a political point, Albright said. Bushehr is fueled by uranium produced in Russia, not Iran.

So far, there has been no sign of Iran losing command and control of its security forces.

Albright pointed to the attack by the African National Congress’s armed wing on South Africa’s Koeberg Nuclear Power Station near Cape Town, as the country went through increased anti-apartheid resistance in 1982. The act of sabotage caused significant damage but resulted in no nuclear fallout.

“If the Bushehr reactor has a major accident, the winds would carry the fallout within 12 to 15 hours to the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Oman,” Albright said.

The Associated Press receives support for nuclear security coverage from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and Outrider Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.