Gold medal contender against gold medal contender.

A team looking for its first IIHF World Junior Championship gold in 14 years, facing the two-time defending gold medalists, on their home ice.

It’s Sweden against the United States, New Year’s Eve in the State of Hockey, with first place in Group A of the 2026 World Juniors at stake.

“We’ve been looking forward to this game for a long time,” Swedish forward Wilson Bjorck said after his team’s 8-1 Group A win against Germany on Monday afternoon at Grand Casino Arena. “We know the arena will be packed and the atmosphere in it will be crazy.

“It’s a really good game to look forward to.”

The teams meet this evening at Grand Casino Arena in St. Paul. Puck drop is set for 5 p.m.

“I know all the players are excited, but as a coach, to be in the environment that we’re expecting here on New Year’s Eve, I think it could be great. I mean, I really do,” said U.S. head coach Bob Motzko, who has coached in many college hockey conference and NCAA regional tournaments in Grand Casino Arena, formerly the Xcel Energy Center.

“I’ve been in this building when it, when you get — you know — the old tournament (WCHA Final Five) that used to be in here, and the Frozen Fours that have been in here … this state, there’s going to be some juice in this building, for sure.”

Both teams bring 3-0-0 records into the final game of group play. Sweden has defeated Slovakia, Switzerland and Germany by a combined score of 15-5. The U.S. has defeated those same teams by a combined 14-9, including a down-to-the-wire 6-5 win against Slovakia on Monday night.

“It’s good. It’s going to be a good, good hockey game,” said U.S. forward Ryker Lee, a Michigan State freshman who scored the first U.S. power-play goal of the tournament, against Slovakia. “It’s going to be a dog fight again. Every game in this tournament has been super close, super competitive.

“They’re super skilled and play together really well.”

Regardless of Wednesday’s outcome, both teams know when and where they’ll play in Friday’s WJC quarterfinals. The only question remaining is who each team will play. Wednesday’s winner will be the No. 1 seed out of Group A, and will face the No. 4 seed from Group B — either Latvia or Denmark — which is a more favorable matchup than the likely No. 3 seed from Group B, Czechia.

Sweden will play Friday’s first quarterfinal game, at 1 p.m. at Grand Casino Arena. The U.S. will play the day’s third quarterfinal game, at 5 p.m, also at GCA. Canada, which will be the No. 1 or 2 seed out of Group B, will play Friday’s last quarterfinal game, at 7:30 p.m. at 3M Arena at Mariucci, in Minneapolis.

“I’d like it, bu the importance right now is how we’re playing,” Motzko said when asked the importance of earning the No. 1 seed. “Who knows who you play after (the U.S.-Sweden game)? For us, it’s all about how we play and continuing that. I’d like to get the number one seed. But more important, I want to know how we’re going to play.”

The last time the U.S. and Sweden met in the World Juniors was in the 2024 gold medal game, when the Americans blasted the Swedes 6-2 on their home ice in Gothenburg. A year before that, the U.S. prevented Sweden from earning a medal, beating it 8-7 in a high-scoring bronze-medal game in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.

“They obviously beat us in the finals two years ago on our home soil, so I think it’s our turn to beat them on theirs,” said Swedish defenseman Sascha Boumedienne, who is a sophomore at Boston University, where he is teammates with U.S. forward Cole Eiserman and defenseman Cole Hutson. “We have a great team, and I feel like we have a big chance to beat them.”

When asked how high the motivation is for Sweden to win on Wednesday, Boumedienne replied: “It’s high. It’s very high.”

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By JAMES POLLARD

NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission wants to turn America’s 250th birthday celebration into the country’s single biggest year for volunteering.

But America Gives, the program unveiled Wednesday just before the U.S. begins commemorating the 1776 signing of the Declaration of Independence, will have to revitalize a culture of service that has recently waned. Declining volunteering rates still haven’t returned to pre-pandemic levels. Just 28% of Americans said they volunteered time to a religious or secular charitable organization this year, according to a December AP-NORC poll.

Organizers don’t know how many service hours they need to set the record and aren’t targeting a specific number. The idea is to leverage nationwide reflections on the country’s direction to encourage lasting community involvement that will strengthen nonprofits’ volunteer pipelines beyond 2026. Funding comes from congressional appropriations as well as corporate sponsors including Walmart and Coca-Cola.

Participants are invited to pledge their time and log volunteering on an online tracker. Nonprofit partners include Girl Scouts of the USA, which will offer a volunteering badge to any of its roughly 1 million youth members who complete a service project, and Keep America Beautiful, which is leading efforts to clean up 250 million pieces of trash by the Fourth of July. JustServe — a service project coordinator sponsored by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — is sending 250 semitrucks to deliver food donations to 250 food banks across the 50 states.

“We strongly believe that this is as much about the future as it is the past,” said America250 Chair Rosie Rios, who oversees the nonpartisan commission created by Congress to organize the anniversary. “Especially this next generation, we want them to give them something to believe in.”

FILE – America250 chair Rosie Rios speaks during an event to mark the launch of the “Our American Story” oral and visual history project ahead of the 250th anniversary of the United States in 2026, on the National Mall, Monday, July 28, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein,File)

Connection and accessibility for young volunteers

That forward-focused goal requires courting a demographic that many nonprofits struggle to reach: young volunteers.

About one-quarter of adults under 30 said they volunteered their time to charity or provided non-financial support to people in their community in the past year, according to a March AP-NORC poll, compared with 36% of those over 60.

Rios said America Gives is working with high schools, many of which already list community service as a graduation requirement, to ensure those volunteering hours are logged and build giving habits that continue after students’ secondary education.

“They’re very passionate. They’re very purpose driven. They do want to give back,” Rios said, adding that “inspiring them to not just visualize, but maybe fuel their own future, is a big priority for us.”

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Service could be an opportunity to meet younger generations’ desire for in-person connections. Sofia Alvarez — a cohort lead for the Youth250 Bureau, a separate effort to center Gen Z perspectives throughout next year’s programming — said young people want “third spaces.” That means somewhere outside of home, school or work that feels “safe,” she said, but doesn’t require spending money.

“I think any sort of craft or activity that really helps people connect, where they can chit chat and bond with each other, really builds that sense of community,” Alvarez said.

Sarah Keating, vice president of Girl and Volunteer Experience at Girl Scouts of the USA, said they’ve had to make their volunteer opportunities more manageable.

Young people want to give back, Keating said, but they are busy and don’t know how. She said nonprofits must offer experiences “that match their lives.” Someone might not have time to lead an entire troop, for example, but they can help lead a specific badge program.

“A campaign like this shines a light on the multitude of ways that you can volunteer — that it doesn’t have to be whatever stereotype you have in your head,” she said of America Gives. “There are small ways to volunteer. There are big ways to volunteer.”

Building bridges — and habits of giving back

The patriotic appeal must also overcome extreme polarization and the slow erosion of national pride — trends that America Gives organizers believe they can counter with their call to action.

Acknowledging political divisions, Rios said the commission’s research shows that most Americans want to bring back a spirit of volunteerism.

“It is about one country,” she said. “I think there’s gonna be a lot of people who feel like now, more than ever, we all need to stand up.”

Keep America Beautiful CEO Jennifer Lawson expects her nationwide nonprofit network to unify people around the bridge issue of litter. Her benchmark next year is to reach 4 million volunteers through local chapters devoted to cleaning up their communities, planting trees and making gardens.

Lawson wants the volunteer opportunities to show people patriotism is an action — not a concept — that involves working with your neighbors.

“It doesn’t have to be all flags and tricornered hats,” Lawson said. “Patriotism in this country is an act of giving into community.”

America Gives will engage volunteers beyond July 4th in an attempt to build up the habit of giving back. Volunteers who register their service hours can enter a sweepstakes where 250 randomly selected winners will get to donate $4,000 to an approved nonprofit partner.

The program also plans to rally people around the national days of service on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and 9/11. The year-round goal will be to keep things as local as possible.

“It should be on people’s minds all the time, not just the day that they’re doing service,” Rios said. “But how do they plan ahead to keep it going?

Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and non-profits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.

By ANIRUDDHA GHOSAL and HARUKA NUGA

More than a decade ago, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished without a trace, sparking one of aviation’s most baffling mysteries.

Despite years of multinational searches, investigators still do not know exactly what happened to the plane or its 239 passengers and crew.

On Wednesday, the Malaysian government said a vessel began a new search operation for the missing plane, reigniting hopes the aircraft might finally be found.

A previous, massive search in the southern Indian Ocean, where the jet is believed to have gone down, turned up almost nothing. Apart from a few small fragments that washed ashore, no bodies or large wreckage have ever been recovered.

Here is what to know about the deadly aviation tragedy.

Flight goes missing

The Boeing 777 disappeared from air-traffic radar 39 minutes after departing Kuala Lumpur for Beijing on March 8, 2014.

“Good night, Malaysian Three Seven Zero,” the pilot said in the last radio call to Kuala Lumpur and the final communication before the plane crossed into Vietnamese airspace and failed to check in with controllers there.

Minutes later, the aircraft’s transponder stopped broadcasting its location. Military radar showed the jet turn back over the Andaman Sea. Satellite data suggested it continued flying for hours, possibly until fuel exhaustion, before crashing into a remote section of the southern Indian Ocean.

Theories about what happened range from hijacking to cabin depressurization or power failure. There was no distress call, ransom demand, evidence of technical failure or severe weather.

Malaysian investigators in 2018 cleared the passengers and crew but did not rule out “unlawful interference.” Authorities have said someone deliberately severed communications and diverted the plane.

The passengers came from around the world

MH370 carried 12 crew members and 227 passengers, including five young children. Most passengers were Chinese, but there also were citizens of the United States, Indonesia, France, Russia and elsewhere.

Among those aboard were two young Iranians traveling on stolen passports, a group of Chinese calligraphy artists, 20 employees of U.S. tech firm Freescale Semiconductor, a stunt double for actor Jet Li and several families with young children.

Many families lost multiple members.

The search covered a vast area

Search operations began in the South China Sea between Malaysia and Vietnam before expanding to the Andaman Sea and the southern Indian Ocean.

Australia, Malaysia and China coordinated the largest underwater search in history, covering roughly 120,000 square kilometers (46,000 square miles) of seabed off western Australia. Aircraft, vessels equipped with sonar and robotic submarines scoured the ocean for signs of the plane.

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Signals thought to be from the plane’s black box turned out to be from other sources and no wreckage was found. The first confirmed debris was a wing fragment, known as a flaperon, discovered on remote Réunion Island in July 2015, with additional fragments later found along the east coast of Africa.

The search was suspended in January 2017.

In 2018, U.S. marine robotics company Ocean Infinity resumed the hunt, under a “no-find, no-fee” agreement, focusing on areas identified through debris drift studies. The effort ended without success.

The search faced enormous challenges

One reason why such an extensive search failed to turn up clues is that no one knows exactly where to look.

The Indian Ocean is the world’s third largest and the search was conducted in a difficult area where searchers encountered bad weather and average depths of around 4 kilometers (2.5 miles).

It’s not common for planes to disappear in the deep sea, but when they do remains can be very hard to locate. Over the past 50 years, dozens of planes have vanished, according to the Aviation Safety Network.

The hunt is renewed

Malaysia’s government gave the green light in March for another “no-find, no-fee” contract with Ocean Infinity to resume the seabed search operation at a new site stretching over 15,000 square kilometers (5,800 square miles) of water. Ocean Infinity will be paid $70 million only if wreckage is discovered.

However, the search was suspended in April due to bad weather. The government said Wednesday that Ocean Infinity will resume the search intermittently from Dec. 30 for 55 days in targeted areas believed to have the highest likelihood of finding the missing aircraft.

It is unclear if Ocean Infinity has new evidence of the plane’s location. The company has said it would utilize new technology and has worked with many experts to analyze data and narrow the search area to the most likely site.

Staff at the center, many of whom also live in NYCHA housing, say they keep the door to the mold-filled closet closed as much as possible. They say they’ve filed multiple repair tickets with NYCHA, but the agency has yet to address the problem.

The maintenance closet (right) at NYCHA’s O’Dwyer Gardens Community Center, where dark mold has covered the walls and ceiling for almost a year. (Photos by Bella Week)

Just before 3 p.m. at the Community Center at O’Dwyer Gardens, a NYCHA public housing complex in Coney Island, a dozen small kids run in and drop their backpacks. A few greet staff with knee-high hugs as they enter the main room, where after-school programming is about to begin. Behind the door of a maintenance closet near the foosball table, dark mold has been spreading across the walls and ceiling for almost a year.

Staff at the center, many of whom also live in NYCHA housing, say they keep the closet door closed as much as possible to protect themselves, the children, and seniors who use the space. They say they’ve filed multiple repair tickets with NYCHA, but the agency has yet to address the problem.

“We’re all hesitant to go in the closet,” said Chyanne Cooper, who has worked at the center for seven years and participated in its programs before that. “A lot of us have kids as well, so we don’t want it to affect us or affect these kids.”

Sadaf Sheikh, the center’s program director, said the smell is overwhelming. “If you open the closet, it is so strong,” she said. “One time I went in the closet, I felt sick.”

Exposure to mold can cause or worsen asthma and other respiratory illnesses, conditions that disproportionately affect Black and brown children living in low-income households, where environmental triggers, including mold, are common. 

Visible mold covers the ceiling of the maintenance closet in a community center that hosts daily programming for dozens of kids. Photo by Bella Week.

Coney Island has struggled with persistent mold outbreaks since flooding from Hurricane Sandy in 2012, and many residents experience ongoing respiratory issues. A 2023 report by the New York State Department of Health found that asthma rates among NYCHA residents in Coney Island are two-and-a-half times that of residents who don’t live in public housing.

“We definitely have a few kids that have asthma,” said Cooper. She described one child whose parents ask staff to hold on to his inhaler and assist him with it when needed.

Staff say they try to keep the closet door shut and avoid going inside unless necessary, which it sometimes is. “That’s where all our toilet tissue, extra soaps, and cleaning products are,” said Cooper. “But with kids constantly being in that room, it’s hard to just let it air out because we don’t want to get exposed to it, or for the kids to get exposed.”

For some workers, avoiding the closet is not an option. “Mostly the maintenance people are in contact with the mold,” said Sania Riley, who has worked at the center for a year. “So they still have to suffer with it.”

Maintenance worker LaTanya Thomas was the first to notice mold. “When I went in to clean out the closet and straighten it up, the boxes were full of mold,” she said. “They were wet and moldy, so I threw away a lot of stuff.” (Photo by Bella Week)

One of those maintenance workers is LaTanya Thomas, 50, who said she often spent time in the closet after her shifts until a few months ago. “That was my little solace place after I finished work,” she said. “I would go sit in the closet and be on my phone.”

Thomas said she stopped spending extended time in the closet around the time she began experiencing frequent headaches and nausea that led her to call out sick. She was recently diagnosed with lung cancer, which is not known to be related to mold exposure. After using many of her sick days earlier this year, she is now on unpaid leave while undergoing treatment.

Staff say they first submitted a repair ticket in February, a month or two after noticing that the mold had spread from the ceiling to the walls. They were told it would be addressed in October. Since then, NYCHA has sent workers to inspect the closet, but no repairs have been made, and staff say they haven’t been given a timeline. 

“They come in, observe it, then leave without saying when work will be done,” Sheikh said, adding that at one point, NYCHA marked the ticket as resolved, requiring staff to submit a new request. “Now it’s December and it’s still like that. It’s been almost a year.”

In a statement, NYCHA Press Secretary Michael Horgan said the agency has improved its average response time for mold complaints at O’Dwyer Gardens from 83 days in May 2022 to approximately two days as of December 2025. Horgan added that open mold-remediation work orders across the development have decreased by up to 80 percent through more efficient resolution of mold and moisture conditions.

Staff at the community center say those figures mean little as long as the mold in the closet remains unaddressed. “Do better,” said Angoinette Batey, a staff member at the center. “They’re not doing enough. They’re just not doing it.”

Staff say they first submitted a repair ticket for the closet in February, a month or two after noticing that the mold had spread from the ceiling to the walls. (Photo by Bella Week)

NYCHA has a well-documented history of failing to address repairs effectively and on time, including mold. Since 2014, the agency has been under a court order to remediate mold within 15 days of a complaint. 

In 2019, when conditions still hadn’t improved, a judge appointed an Ombudsperson to address unresolved complaints about mold and leaks. That same year, as part of a lawsuit settlement, a federal monitor was appointed to oversee NYCHA’s efforts to improve conditions, including reducing mold.

In response to questions about the mold at the community center, NYCHA Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Sklar said the agency would send an inspector on Dec. 29 to assess conditions and determine next steps. Batey confirmed that the inspector arrived that day.

“When they come in they tell us it’s so bad,” said Sheikh. “We know it’s so bad. We want to know: When are you gonna fix it?”

 To reach the editor, contact Jeanmarie@citylimits.org

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