By STEPHEN WHYNO, AP Hockey Writer

One more goal. That’s how close the U.S. was to beating Canada in the final at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics before losing in overtime.

One more goal. That’s how close the U.S. was from tying Canada in the semifinals at the 2014 Sochi Olympics before losing 1-0.

One more goal. That’s how close the U.S. was to beating Canada in the final at the 4 Nations Face-Off a year ago before losing in overtime.

“Canada won, right?” U.S. center Jack Eichel said. “So, they’re obviously on top.”

Canada has won every major international men’s hockey tournament featuring the NHL’s best players over the past 16 years, a run that includes the 2016 World Cup of Hockey. With Sidney Crosby, Connor McDavid, Nathan MacKinnon and Cale Makar joining forces for the first time on the same sheet of ice, the nation known as the cradle of the sport goes into the Milan Cortina Olympics next month as the gold medal favorite.

“It’s always been Canada,” longtime U.S. star Patrick Kane said.

FILE – United States’ Adam Fox, left, battles Canada’s Mitch Marner for the puck during the first period of the 4 Nations Face-Off championship hockey game, Feb. 20, 2025, in Boston. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa, File)

The U.S. has been closing ground for decades, and the fight-filled 4 Nations put the border rivalry in the spotlight while ramping up expectations that the Games will be another showcase of North American dominance.

“The men haven’t been able to get over that hump and defeat Canada and win a gold medal, and I think this is their best chance to do it,” said retired U.S. winger T.J. Oshie, whose shootout heroics against host Russia in Sochi is one of the most memorable Olympic moments in history. “This is the best U.S.A. team that I’ve seen. And if they can come together like they did in the 4 Nations, I think that for the first time, I’d say it’s a pretty fair fight going into it.”

European powerhouses Sweden and Finland, the latter being the defending Olympic champion, will be in the mix, as could the Czechs or Germans. But in a tournament without the Russians, the U.S. and Canada look like the teams to beat. BetMGM Sportsbook set Canada as a 5-4 favorite, ahead of the U.S. at just over 2-1.

Canada won the 4 Nations on McDavid’s goal in Boston last February and has the deepest, most talented forward group of any of the 12 countries involved. That includes 19-year-old Macklin Celebrini, who was on the couch cheering last February while in awe of the quality of play on display.

“That was the best hockey I’ve ever watched,” Celebrini said. “Just the pace, the amount of skill, physicality — all of it combined is the best.”

FILE – Canada, bottom, and United States, top, players shake hands following an overtime period of the 4 Nations Face-Off championship hockey game, Feb. 20, 2025, in Boston. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa, File)

It could be even faster in Milan, and not only because the rinks are more than 3 feet shorter than NHL-regulation length.

“That’ll probably make the game a lot tighter, too,” Makar said. “The Olympics will be a completely different kind of thing, almost even more amplified.”

The U.S. has hopes for its first men’s hockey gold medal at the Olympics since the 1980 “Miracle on Ice” team. That’s not a pipe dream, as the U.S. National Team Development Program and grassroots growth of the sport has closed the gap on Canada.

“The talent pool and the level of the players of the Americans now I think is as high as it’s ever been,” Kane said. “That’s kind of how we felt in 2010, 2014, (and it) keeps getting better.”

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The teams split at the 4 Nations, games that U.S. center Jack Hughes described as crazy and just a taste of what he and other players are in for in Milan.

“Once you see the level of competition at the 4 Nations, you’re so hungry to get back to that and you want to be in the Olympics so bad just because the level of hockey was so high,” said Hughes, who is set to play with older brother Quinn at the Games.

Oshie grew up in Warroad, Minnesota, a 20-minute drive from the Canadian border. He described the simmering rivalry as hatred: “For a long time, they were just almost too good to get past.”

Maybe not anymore, particularly given Canada’s seeming vulnerability in goal and the U.S. strength at hockey’s most important position. But there is no guarantee these teams face off in single-elimination play at the Olympics, so USA Hockey general manager Bill Guerin insists he and his staff did not construct a roster just to beat Canada.

“We built the best team possible,” Guerin said. “We did that with us in mind. We’re worried about us, not anybody else.”

AP Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/milan-cortina-2026-winter-olympics

Two off-duty St. Paul police officers have been pulled over by federal agents during an immigration crackdown in Minnesota, the police chief said Tuesday.

The same happened to an off-duty Brooklyn Park police officer who was stopped at gunpoint.

“This isn’t just important because it happened to off-duty police officers, but … our officers know what the Constitution is,” said Brooklyn Park Police Chief Mark Bruley. “They know what right and wrong is, and they know when people are being targeted. … If it is happening to our officers, it pains me to think how many of our community members are falling victim to this every day.”

Bruley, St. Paul Police Chief Axel Henry and Hennepin County Sheriff Dawanna Witt, speaking in the Minnesota Capitol rotunda Tuesday with law enforcement leaders at their side, emphasized there is a need for immigration enforcement.

“We have to find common ground here,” Henry said. “… If American citizens are being grabbed or stopped or seized, this can’t happen. We have to make sure that everyone’s civil rights are intact. I truly want to believe that there isn’t anybody on either side of the political aisle that thinks that people’s civil rights aren’t important.”

Elected officials have been meeting with local law enforcement from around the state on the subject.

Law enforcement is not “suggesting that there isn’t a legitimate, lawful authority to operate here as federal agents,” Henry said. “But we are trying to come together to say, ‘Can we please find a pathway forward? Can we find a way to make sure that we can do these things without scaring the hell out of our community members?’”

Police chiefs are hearing from people who are “afraid to go outside,” Henry said, and it’s not because they’re in the U.S. illegally, but because they “know people that are getting stopped by the way that they looked, and they don’t want to take that risk.”

Bruley said he’s talked to federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Homeland Security Investigations agents about what’s happening.

“This is not widespread,” he said. “This is a small group of agents within the surge in the metro area that are performing or acting this way. … I’ve received phone calls from ICE agents and HSI agents indicating this is not how they act, this is not what they do.”

Bruley called for more supervision over the surge in immigration enforcement.

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By MARK SHERMAN

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s unprecedented bid to reshape the Federal Reserve board is putting the Supreme Court in a familiar position, weighing an emergency appeal from the president’s lawyers in a politically charged case.

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The court is hearing arguments Wednesday over Trump’s effort to oust Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook based on allegations she committed mortgage fraud, which she denies.

No president has fired a sitting Fed governor in the agency’s 112-year history.

The true motivation, Trump’s critics say, is the Republican president’s desire to wrest control of U.S. interest rate policy. Trump wants interest rates to fall sharply so the government can borrow more cheaply and Americans can pay lower borrowing costs for new homes, cars or other large purchases, as worries about high costs have soured some voters on his economic management.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell and the board cut a key interest rate three times in a row in the last four months of 2025, but that’s more slowly than Trump wants. The Fed also suggested it may leave rates unchanged in coming months, concerned about triggering higher inflation.

Powell is expected to be in attendance when the justices take up an emergency plea from the Trump administration to be allowed to remove Cook from her job while her challenge to the firing plays out in court. Judges on lower courts have allowed her to remain in her post as one of seven central bank governors.

If Trump could name someone to take Cook’s place, he would have four of his appointees on the seven-member board. Cook, the first Black woman to serve on the Fed’s governing board, was appointed in 2022 by President Joe Biden, a Democrat.

The justices are being asked to effectively bless Trump’s effort to undermine the Fed’s independence, said Columbia University law professor Lev Menand, who has joined a brief in support of Cook.

“This case is about much more than Cook,” Menand said. “It’s about whether President Trump will be able to take over the Federal Reserve board in the coming months.”

The threat to the Fed’s independence spurred Powell’s three living predecessors, Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen, to weigh in on Cook’s behalf. They were joined by five former Treasury secretaries appointed by presidents of both political parties and other former high-ranking economic officials.

In their filing, lawyers for the former officials wrote that immediately ousting Cook “would expose the Federal Reserve to political influences, thereby eroding public confidence in the Fed’s independence and jeopardizing the credibility and efficacy of U.S. monetary policy.”

Economists warn that a politicized Fed that caves in to the president’s demands will damage its credibility as an inflation fighter and likely lead investors to demand higher rates before investing in U.S. treasuries.

With Cook’s case under review at the high court, Trump dramatically escalated his confrontation with the Fed. The Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation of Powell and has served the central bank with subpoenas.

Powell himself took the rare step of responding to Trump, calling the threat of criminal charges “pretexts” that mask the real reason, Trump’s frustration over interest rates. The Justice Department has said the dispute is ostensibly about Powell’s testimony to Congress in June over the cost of a massive renovation of Fed buildings.

In Trump’s first year in office, the justices generally, but not always, went along with Trump’s pleas for emergency action to counteract lower-court rulings against him, including allowing the firings of the heads of other governmental agencies at the president’s discretion, with no claim that they did anything wrong.

But the court has sent signals that it is approaching the independence of the nation’s central bank more cautiously, calling the Fed “a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity.”

In Cook’s case, Trump is not asserting that he can fire Fed governors at will.

Cook is one of several people, along with Democratic New York Attorney General Letitia James and Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff of California, who have been accused of mortgage fraud by federal housing official Bill Pulte. They have denied the allegations against them.

The case against Cook stems from allegations she claimed two properties, in Michigan and Georgia, as “primary residences” in June and July 2021, before she joined the Fed board. Such claims can lead to a lower mortgage rate and smaller down payment than if one of them was declared as a rental property or second home.

Cook has denied any wrongdoing and has not been charged with a crime. “There is no fraud, no intent to deceive, nothing whatsoever criminal or remotely a basis to allege mortgage fraud,” a Cook lawyer, Abbe Lowell, wrote to Attorney General Pam Bondi in November.

Cook specified that her Atlanta condo would be a “vacation home,” according to a loan estimate she obtained in May 2021. In a form seeking a security clearance, she described it as a “2nd home.” Lowell wrote that the case against her largely rests on “one stray reference” in a 2021 mortgage document that was “plainly innocuous in light of the several other truthful and more specific disclosures” about the homes she has purchased.

U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb ruled that the Trump administration had not satisfied a legal requirement that Fed governors can only be fired “for cause,” which she said was limited to misconduct while in office.

Cobb also held that Trump’s firing would have deprived Cook of her due process, or legal right, to contest the firing.

By a 2-1 vote, a panel of the federal appeals court in Washington rejected the Trump administration’s request to let Cook’s firing proceed.

At the Supreme Court, the administration argues Cook has no right to a hearing and courts have no role to play in reviewing Trump’s actions.

Trump lawfully fired Cook, Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote, “after concluding that the American people should not have their interest rates determined by someone who made misrepresentations material to her mortgage rates that appear to have been grossly negligent at best and fraudulent at worst.”

Sauer will face off against Paul Clement, a conservative lawyer who served in Sauer’s role under President George W. Bush and has argued for expanding gun rights, against same-sex marriage and for striking down the Affordable Care Act. Both men once worked as law clerks for Justice Antonin Scalia.

Cook’s fate should not be determined by “untested allegations” or “before any facts are found,” her lawyers told the court. She should be able to remain in her job at least while her case proceeds, they wrote.

AP Economics Writer Christopher Rugaber contributed to this report.

Follow the AP’s coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court at https://apnews.com/hub/us-supreme-court.

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico’s security minister said Tuesday that it had sent another 37 members of Mexican drug cartels to the United States, as the Trump administration ratchets up pressure on governments to crack down on criminal networks it says are smuggling drugs across the border.

Mexican Security Minister Omar García Harfuch wrote in a social media post on X that the people transferred were “high impact criminals” that “represented a real threat to the country’s security.”

It is the third time in the past year that Mexico has sent detained cartel members to the U.S.

Harfuch said that the government has sent 92 people in total.

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This is a developing story and will be updated. 

Follow AP’s coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean at https://apnews.com/hub/latin-america