Making his weekly appearance with Paul Allen on KFXN-100.3 on Tuesday, Chris Finch had the sound of a confident coach.

Fresh off a pair of weekend wins in Miami and Washington D.C., Finch noted he was pleased with where the Timberwolves were at, and insinuated he felt more strong play was to come.

Which hasn’t been a guarantee at any point this season. The first third of Minnesota’s campaign was hallmarked by inconsistency. One day’s result did nothing to predict what was to come.

But the coach’s confidence has been proven correct, as Minnesota has largely looked impressive in home victories over Miami and the Cavaliers on Tuesday and Thursday, which ran the team’s winning streak to four heading into Saturday’s matinee in Cleveland.

Finch saw the way Minnesota played Sunday in Washington on the second half of a back to back – in which they delivered 48 minutes of committed basketball.

They were connected and focused. There was no fighting the game. The performance was uncommon, and a signal there was more to come.

Not only are the Wolves winning, they’re doing so in convincing fashion via the brand of basketball they strive to play – a pace-filled offense that moves the ball and makes good, quick decisions and a tenacious, disciplined defense that’s aggressive and smart.

“I just think we’re focused as a group,” Wolves forward Julius Randle said on the floor after the home win over Cleveland. “We’re maturing every single game, every single day, trusting and believing in each other every single night, and it’s fun when we play like this, so connected.”

The NBA season is flush with ebbs and flows. You aren’t going to play well 82 times out of 82. But Minnesota’s performances over the season’s first two and a half months consistently oscillated between awesome and awful.

So how did Minnesota finally get here?

“A lot of kicking and screaming,” Finch joked.

The coach has pleaded with his team throughout the season to play this way. He noted the Wolves have “seen it inside ourselves,” but only in glimpses. They’d beat the Thunder one week, then get manhandled by the Nets the next as apparent interest waxed and waned.

Until New Year’s Eve, when, as Donte DiVincenzo aptly put it: “We got our (butt) whooped.”

By 24 points to a Hawks team that’s otherwise struggled mightily over the past six weeks. When the Atlanta outcome was determined and starters were subbed out in the fourth quarter, Anthony Edwards tossed a towel and walked into the tunnel.

Finch said the losses to Atlanta and Brooklyn were “revealing.”

“I think they were quite embarrassing for us,” Finch said.

It may have been exactly what a team full of prideful players needed.

“We didn’t get too low after the Atlanta game,” DiVincenzo said. ‘We responded to coaching, we responded to film and we responded to each other.”

Edwards grew tired of showing up on film for all the wrong reasons – not boxing out his man, not chasing down loose balls, taking a contested shot when Rudy Gobert was open in the pocket.

He’s played his most complete basketball over Minnesota’s last four games.

“Just keeping everybody happy on the team,” he said. “Ultimately, that’s good.”
Everyone else has followed suit. The extra passes are being made on offense. The extra rotations are being made on defense. The extra efforts are being made all around the floor.

“We just made a commitment to playing our best basketball,” Finch said. “We challenged them and we said, ‘We’re never going to know how good we can really be until we just play better basketball every single night, with a little bit more focus.’”

If this is it – the results are really good. Over the last week, Minnesota is:

-Third in offensive rating

-Eighth in defensive rating

-Second in net rating

-First in true shooting percentage

-Second in rebounding percentage

-Fourth in pace

The Wolves had four players score 22-plus points in Thursday’s win over Cleveland, as Edwards – who became the third-youngest player to cross the 10,000 career point threshold in the win – and Randle both flirted with triple doubles.

“I think ultimately we know that we’re at our best when we play like that,” Randle said. “We’ve had moments in the season where we have and we’ve had moments where we haven’t. It’s more about finding consistency in that play style.

“We’re starting to realize how good we can be, and it’s up to us to come out and prove it every night.”

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By NICOLE WINFIELD

VATICAN CITY (AP) — In his most substantial critique of U.S., Russian and other military incursions in sovereign countries, Pope Leo XIV on Friday denounced how nations were using force to assert their dominion worldwide, “completely undermining” peace and the post-World War II international legal order.

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“War is back in vogue and a zeal for war is spreading,” Leo told ambassadors from around the world who represent their countries’ interests at the Holy See.

Leo didn’t name individual countries that have resorted to force in his lengthy speech, the bulk of which he delivered in English in a break from the Vatican’s traditional diplomatic protocol of Italian and French. But his speech came amid the backdrop of the recent U.S. military operation in Venezuela to remove Nicolás Maduro from power, Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine and other conflicts.

The occasion was the pope’s annual audience with the Vatican diplomatic corps, which traditionally amounts to his yearly foreign policy address.

In his first such encounter, history’s first U.S.-born pope delivered much more than the traditional roundup of global hotspots. In a speech that touched on threats to religious freedom and the Catholic Church’s opposition to abortion and surrogacy, Leo lamented how the United Nations and multilateralism as a whole were increasingly under threat.

“A diplomacy that promotes dialogue and seeks consensus among all parties is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force, by either individuals or groups of allies,” he said. “The principle established after the Second World War, which prohibited nations from using force to violate the borders of others, has been completely undermined.”

“Instead, peace is sought through weapons as a condition for asserting one’s own dominion. This gravely threatens the rule of law, which is the foundation of all peaceful civil coexistence,” he said.

A geopolitical roundup of conflicts and suffering

Leo did refer explicitly to tensions in Venezuela, calling for a peaceful political solution that keeps in mind the “common good of the peoples and not the defense of partisan interests.”

Pope Leo XIV holds his weekly general audience in the Paul VI Hall at the Vatican, Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2026. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

The U.S. military seized Maduro, the Venezuelan leader, in a surprise nighttime raid. The Trump administration is now seeking to control Venezuela’s oil resources and its government. The U.S. government has insisted Maduro’s capture was legal, saying drug cartels operating from Venezuela amounted to unlawful combatants and that the U.S. is now in an “armed conflict” with them.

Analysts and some world leaders have condemned the Venezuela mission, warning that Maduro’s ouster could pave the way for more military interventions and a further erosion of the global legal order.

On Ukraine, Leo repeated his appeal for an immediate ceasefire and urgently called for the international community “not to waver in its commitment to pursuing just and lasting solutions that will protect the most vulnerable and restore hope to the afflicted peoples.”

On Gaza, Leo repeated the Holy See’s call for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and insisted on the Palestinians’ right to live in Gaza and the West Bank “in their own land.”

Comments about abortion, surrogacy and discrimination

In other comments, Leo said the persecution of Christians around the world was “one of the most widespread human rights crises today,” affecting one in seven Christians globally. He cited religiously motivated violence in Bangladesh, Nigeria, the Sahel, Mozambique and Syria but said religious discrimination was also present in Europe and the Americas.

There, Christians “are sometimes restricted in their ability to proclaim the truths of the Gospel for political or ideological reasons, especially when they defend the dignity of the weakest, the unborn, refugees and migrants, or promote the family.”

Leo repeated the church’s opposition to abortion and euthanasia and expressed “deep concern” about projects to provide cross-border access to mothers seeking abortion.

He also described surrogacy as a threat to life and dignity. “By transforming gestation into a negotiable service, this violates the dignity both of the child, who is reduced to a product, and of the mother, exploiting her body and the generative process, and distorting the original relational calling of the family,” he said.

Associated Press religion coverage 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.

GUATIRE, Venezuela (AP) — The United States and Venezuelan governments said Friday they were exploring the possibility of restoring diplomatic relations between the two countries, and that an delegation from the Trump administration arrived to the South American nation on Friday.

The small team of U.S. diplomats and diplomatic security officials traveled to Venezuela to make a preliminary assessment about the potential re-opening of the U.S. Embassy in Caracas, the State Department said in a statement.

Venezuela’s government on Friday acknowledged that U.S. diplomats had traveled to the South American country and announced that it will send a delegation to the U.S. but it did not say when.

In a statement, Delcy Rodríguez’s government said it “has decided to initiate an exploratory process of a diplomatic nature with the Government of the United States of America, aimed at the re-establishment of diplomatic missions in both countries.”

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

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By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the entire United Nations climate-fighting apparatus takes America’s environmental isolation to another level and is likely to damage both the United States and the world as the planet flirts with ecological tipping points, experts say.

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Leaders from around the world say the United States will be left behind as more than 190 other nations join in what they call a blossoming green economy that is transitioning from polluting coal, oil and gas to cleaner and cheaper solar, wind and other renewable energies.

Wednesday’s action starts the process to pull the U.S. out of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). It’s the main way nations negotiate, monitor and enforce agreements to curb worsening climate change, and is a bigger step than Trump’s 2017 and 2025 withdrawals from the bedrock 2015 Paris Agreement aimed at limiting warming.

The framework was negotiated in Brazil in 1992, championed by Republican U.S. President George H.W. Bush and ratified unanimously by the U.S. Senate. It’s what Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden used to justify signing and reactivating the Paris deal without needing Senate approval. The Trump administration also withdrew Wednesday from a United Nations climate science panel, a biodiversity-saving effort and the Green Climate Fund to help poor nations as well as many other international collaborations.

“It is a more serious step definitely. The world loses a lot and it is very damaging,” said Johan Rockstrom, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “The U.S. turns its back against science, against global collaboration, against any kind of action on climate change. So, yes, in that sense, it’s more fundamental and more damaging” than earlier efforts.

“This is the gateway to the preeminent international forum for combatting climate change,” said University of Pennsylvania law professor Jean Galbraith, an expert on international treaties.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in announcing the U.S. withdrawal, said the Trump administration “has found these institutions to be redundant in their scope, mismanaged, unnecessary, wasteful, poorly run, captured by the interests of actors advancing their own agendas contrary to our own, or a threat to our nation’s sovereignty, freedoms, and general prosperity.”

Since 1850, the United States has put more than 480 billion tons (440 billion metric tons) of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the air through the burning of coal, oil and natural gas. That accounts for nearly one-quarter of the world’s historic emissions of a gas that stays in the atmosphere for more than a century, according to the scientists at the Global Carbon Project.

The Jeffrey Energy Center coal-fired power plant operates at sunset near Emmett, Kan., Saturday, Jan. 3, 2026, in Topeka, Kan. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)

Emissions keep rising despite Paris agreement

Under the Paris agreement, countries voluntarily pledge to curb emissions by various amounts, but each year global emissions continue to rise. The United States, under the Biden administration, had promised to cut its emissions by 61% to 66% by 2035.

“It will mean more warming because the U.S. is not going to be fulfilling its obligations of reducing their emissions,” said Adelle Thomas, climate adaptation director of the Natural Resources Defense Council and also a vice chair of the U.N. climate science panel that Trump is quitting.

And it comes at a critical time as Earth is approaching 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming since pre-industrial times — the internationally agreed warming threshold established in Paris, Thomas and Rockstrom said.

“We need to start reducing emissions globally by 5% per year,” Rockstrom said. “It’s our last chance. And exactly at that moment, the biggest player in the world steps out of the game.”

The world is perilously close to several “tipping points’ of irreversible change, such as coral reef loss, said former Ireland president Mary Robinson, a tireless climate change advocate for the group of retired leaders called The Elders.

”We really have no time and it is so unbelievably stupid at one level and reckless for the Trump administration to be taking the steps that they are taking,” she said.

FILE – Workers install panels for a solar energy project Wednesday, May 21, 2025, in Galena, Alaska. (AP Photo/John Locher, File)

Another step in U.S. shift away from leading on climate

In past international climate negotiations, especially when Democrat John Kerry was secretary of state or America’s top climate envoy, the United States kept oil countries, such as Saudi Arabia, from watering down deals too much, experts said. But that was missing last November in Brazil’s negotiations, which the U.S. skipped under Trump.

Kerry called Trump’s action “a gift to China and a get-out-of-jail free card to countries and polluters who want to avoid responsibility.”

Tom Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance, which represents industries that emit much of the heat-trapping gases, said “removing the U.S. from the U.N. climate framework will accelerate a positive shift towards abandoning the destructive global climate framework.”

Thomas, Rockstrom and Christiana Figueres, the Costa Rican diplomat who helped fashion the Paris agreement, said the United States is leaving itself behind in a new, cleaner world of cheaper energy and more jobs.

UNFCCC Executive Secretary Simon Stiell said Trump’s move will hurt the U.S.

“It will mean less affordable energy, food, transport and insurance for American households and businesses, as renewables keep getting cheaper than fossil fuels, as climate-driven disasters hit American crops, businesses and infrastructure harder each year,” he said.

Some environmental advocates have feared that future presidents won’t be able to easily reinstate the U.S. to the climate convention in an era when Senate approval would likely be far harder.

But Sue Biniaz, a former State Department lawyer and deputy chief negotiator who now teaches at Yale, said the next president would have the power to undo Trump’s action.

“I wouldn’t want to say any sort of damaging action or inaction is irreversible,” Biniaz said. “I imagine a future U.S. government would work with other countries to revive as much as possible. We did that in 2021 after the first Trump administration.’’

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.