Here are our picks for some of the biggest games in the East Metro on Friday

Farmington (2-0) at White Bear Lake (2-0), 7 p.m.

Bears quarterback Oluwatomi Animasaun has lifted White Bear Lake to a 2-0 record with his dual-threat capabilities.

But now the Bears take a massive step up in competition. Farmington is fresh off a 7-3 win over Lakeville North. Defensively, White Bear Lake’s defensive front will have to hold up against a Tigers team that ran the ball 44 times in each of the first two games.

Our pick: Farmington 28, White Bear Lake 14.

Apple Valley (1-1) at Two Rivers (1-1), 6:30 p.m.

A big tilt for future Class 5A, Section 3 tournament seeding. Two Rivers’ Drew Altavilla and Apple Valley’s Quieris Barnslater are dual-threat quarterbacks that figure to give each opposing defense issues.

But Two Rivers’ running game — which exploded for 276 yards last week against Simley — will be the key to this contest.

Our pick: Two Rivers 30, Apple Valley 23.

Chaska (2-0) at Hastings (2-0), 6:30 p.m.

Zack Shatek ran for 376 yards and five scores for the Raiders last week against Bloomington Jefferson.

Half of that would be a great night against Chaska, who has the look of a legitimate contender in Class 5A this season. This is Hastings’ chance to prove it can leap into that company this fall, as well.

Our pick: Chaska 27, Hastings 14.

Shakopee (2-0) at Stillwater (1-1), 7 p.m.

Shakopee has been wildly impressive across the board en route to its 2-0 start.

Stillwater’s Charlie Zollar is quickly establishing himself as Jack Runk’s No. 1 receiving target after scoring three touchdowns last week against Park.

Can Stillwater hold up against a Shakopee run game that averaged nearly 7 yards per carry on the ground last week in a come-from-behind win over Lakeville South?

Our pick: Shakopee 35, Stillwater 20.

New Richmond (3-0) at Hudson (3-0), 7 p.m.

The two Big Rivers Conference title favorites clash in a meeting that very well could determine the champion at season’s end.

Hudson is fresh off an 18-point win over Menomonie, while the Tigers have scored 40-plus points in all three games this season.

Our pick: Hudson 24, New Richmond 21.

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By MICHAEL LIEDTKE

Amazon’s Zoox on Wednesday launched its robotaxi service in Las Vegas, offering free rides through parts of the entertainment mecca for anyone willing to gamble on the safety of a driverless vehicle that operates without a steering wheel.

The Las Vegas debut of Zoox’s long-planned ride-hailing service reflects Amazon-owned robotaxi maker’s confidence in the safety of its boxy vehicles after two years of testing them in the city.

The robotaxis initially were only available to employees in Las Vegas before gradually expanding to friends and family members. Now, anyone with the Zoox app will be able to request a ride to five designated locations, including Resorts World, the Luxor hotel and the New York-New York hotel. The longest distance the Zoox robotaxis will travel is about three miles (4.8 kilometers) while carrying up to four passengers.

All rides will be provided for free for at least the first few months to help promote the existence of the service in the perennially popular travel destination. Once it begins charging for rides in Las Vegas, Zoox says its prices will be comparable to traditional taxis and ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft.

Zoox can afford to give free rides largely because of Amazon’s deep pockets. The e-commerce powerhouse, currently worth $2.5 trillion, bought Zoox for $1.2 billion five years ago as part of its efforts to establish a foothold in other fields of technology.

Amazon-Zoox robotaxis is beginning to give free rides through parts of Las Vegas as part of its driverless service’s launch. (Zoox Inc. via AP)

The Las Vegas market marks Zoox’s first step in its attempt to catch up with robotaxi leader Waymo, a Google spin-off that offers that already provides driverless rides in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Atlanta and Austin, Texas (where Tesla is still in the testing phase of a robotaxi service that its CEO, Elon Musk, has been hyping for the past decade).

While Waymo implants its driverless technology in vehicles built by traditional automakers, Zoox is manufacturing its distinctively designed robotaxis in a former bus factory located in Hayward, California — about 25 miles southeast of San Francisco.

In a sign of its ambitions, Zoox hopes to manufacture as many as 10,000 robotaxis annually as it expands into other markets. While the company is currently testing its vehicles in San Francisco, it hopes to open up its service to all passengers next year. Some San Francisco passengers who signed up for Zoox’s testing program are expected to be able to start getting driverless rides before the end of this year.

Zoox is currently operating about 50 vehicles in Las Vegas and San Francisco, with most of them in Nevada for now. After it starts charging for rides in San Francisco, Zoox hopes to expand to Austin and Miami next.

By JAMIE STENGLE

DALLAS (AP) — One of the nation’s first doctors accused of illegally providing care to transgender youth under GOP-led bans was found to have not violated the law, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office says, nearly a year after the state sued the physician.

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Dr. Hector Granados, a pediatric endocrinologist in El Paso, was called a “scofflaw” last year by Paxton’s office in a lawsuit that accused him of falsifying medical records and violating a Texas ban that took effect in 2023. More than two dozen states have prohibitions on gender-affirming care for transgender youth, but Texas was the first to bring cases against doctors, filing lawsuits against Granados and two other providers.

The cases against the other doctors, both in Dallas, remain ongoing. But Paxton’s office quietly withdrew its lawsuit last week against Granados, saying in a statement that “no legal violations were found” following a “review of the evidence and Granados’ complete medical records.”

Granados, who says Paxton’s office never reached out before suing him last October, said he wished the state had first let him show he had stopped providing gender-affirming care for youth before the law took effect.

“It was just out and then we had to do everything afterwards,” Granados said in an interview.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that states can ban gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors, and at least 27 states have adopted laws restricting or banning the care. Although those accused of violating bans face criminal charges in some states, they do not in Texas, where the punishments instead expose providers to steep fines and revocation of their medical licenses.

Paxton’s office said in a statement that Dr. May Lau and Dr. M. Brett Cooper, the other accused physicians, will “face justice for hurting Texas kids both physically and mentally.” Their attorneys didn’t offer comment Wednesday.

“Attorney General Paxton will continue to bring the full force of the law against the delusional, left-wing medical professionals guilty of forcing ‘gender’ insanity on our children,” Paxton’s office said.

Paxton, a close ally of President Donald Trump, has sought to position himself as a national leader among the GOP’s ascendant hard right and is running for the U.S. Senate.

Trump, in his second term, has launched a broad charge against transgender rights, moving to reverse years of legal and policy gains for transgender Americans. Even in states where the care is allowed under state law, major hospitals and hospital systems have said they were stopping or restricting the care.

Harper Seldin, a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union’s LGBTQ & HIV Project, said that even when a lawsuit is dropped, it still takes “an enormous toll” on those who have to defend themselves.

“I think this continues to be best understood as part of the Texas AG’s campaign to intimidate medical providers,” he said.

FILE – Pediatric endocrinologist Dr. Hector Granados poses for a photo outside his private practice in El Paso, Texas, Jan. 21, 2025. (AP Photo/Andres Leighton, File)

Granados said he was meticulous in halting gender-affirming care for youth before Texas’ ban took effect. He said that before the ban, treating transgender youth was just an extension of his practice that treats youth with diabetes, growth problems and early puberty.

He said that after the ban, he did continue to prescribe puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy, but that those treatments were not for gender transition. Granados said they were for youth with endocrine disorders, which occur when hormone levels are too high or too low.

Texas’ lawsuit against Granados called him a “scofflaw who is harming the health and safety of Texas children.” It referenced a 2015 news article about transgender care that quoted Granados and medical articles he had written on the topic. Also listed in the lawsuit were details on unnamed patients, including their ages and what they had been prescribed, including testosterone.

In a court document filed in Cooper’s case, an attorney in Paxton’s office said they had subpoenaed provider reports for the doctor’s testosterone prescriptions from the Texas Prescription Monitoring Program.

FILE – Pediatric endocrinologist Dr. Hector Granados speaks during an interview at his private practice in El Paso, Texas, Jan. 21, 2025. (AP Photo/Andres Leighton, File)

Granados’ attorney, Mark Bracken, said that after entering into an agreed protective order with the state, they were able to confidentially produce patient records to show Granados had complied with the law.

Peter Salib, an assistant professor of law at the University of Houston Law Center, said that it’s “unusual” for a state to drop a case due to lack of violations after filing a lawsuit.

“They have a lot of opportunity to find out what is going on before they decide to bring a lawsuit,” he said.

Granados said he’s grateful to no longer have the lawsuit on the back of his mind.

“It always puts a toll on you and how you feel,” he said.

The Big 10 is a powerhouse. As fall arrives, our student athletes will be returning to campuses, and we will have the pageantry of Saturday afternoon football. But the Big 10 is also the educational engine of our nation.

Our 18 member institutions are spread across the country, from Rutgers, New Jersey, to Seattle and Los Angeles. Each fall, in large cities and Midwest college towns, we welcome more than a half-million undergraduate students to our doors. Our collective library (the Big Collection) holds more than a quarter of all the books in all the libraries of North America. We do higher education at a scope and scale unmatched in this country and the world.

Public support for higher education is essential for the collective health of our future society. To be sure, there are many routes our young people can choose in life, including entering the workforce right out of high school, trade schools and higher education. And while some may say academics exist in an ivory tower, the experience of welcoming generations of young people into our institutions each year provides a constant reminder of what is gained by educating young adults to ask why and why not rather than to rely on rote certainty.

As a professor at the University of Illinois, I wear multiple hats. I teach classes that range in size from 60 to nearly 200 students, run a research laboratory that pursues cutting-edge biomedical research and do the service work that help our universities run.

In the classroom, I help students learn how, not what, to think. We live in an age where literal mountains of information are just … available. The trick is knowing what to do with that information. How to navigate what is known, but most importantly how to deal with what is uncertain.

I also run a tissue engineering research lab. Undergraduate students, graduate students seeking a doctorate, and postdoctoral associates (those who have already received a doctorate) work together in teams to develop new biomedical technologies. It is essential young researchers learn how to identify a problem, develop strategies to address it, build teams and assess how well they meet their goals, and overcome failures along the way.

Instead of learning to pattern match, young researchers must learn how to illuminate new spaces and create entirely new connections. And because we work at the edge of what is known, our studies often take us in directions both surprising and entirely different from how we set off.

This fall not only marks a return to classes but also a deadline. U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr., the person tasked to oversee not only our nation’s health care systems but also our health research infrastructure including the National Institutes of Health, pledged this spring“a massive testing and research effort” that would determine the cause of autism by September.

This statement fundamentally misrepresents how research is done. It offers fast certainty rather than acknowledging and embracing the reality of an unknown horizon. It offers false hope to patients and families. And it mocks the efforts of those who have committed their lives and careers to understanding disease and developing cures.

One of the most important skills I teach young researchers is how to navigate uncertainty. Biology and our bodies are complex. Progress requires understanding what your research does, and often more importantly does not, contribute. Publishing our findings as scientific manuscripts is the currency of academic researchers. Yet a single research project does not, and cannot, solve all things.

So in the discussion section of these manuscripts we identify the new things we have found, describe connections between our findings and the prior work of others, and where we acknowledge what we don’t yet know or what our studies do not allow us to know. The best researchers have the most nuanced discussions that contextualize this uncertainty. This is the truth we offer. Show me a discussion that only offers certainty, and I see a scientist who ether does not understand what they are working on or is too arrogant to admit the things they don’t yet know.

We must all learn to more confidently embrace uncertainty. The world is only getting more complicated and the challenges we face harder. Our young people especially deserve the opportunity to learn how to work on hard problems, to fail, to persist and eventually to make progress.

The health of our society depends on generations of young students equipped to embrace, and succeed in the face of, uncertainty. The Big 10 and our nation’s higher education community provides the tools they need to be able to confront the largest of challenges we all face. To embrace uncertainty and difficult conversations, and come out prepared to co-create a healthier future.

Brendan Harley, Sc.D, is a Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology-trained bioengineer and decorated professor at the University of Illinois who works at the intersection of health, society and our imagination.