NEWARK, N.J. — A glance at the Wild roster will tell you that when backup goalie Marc-Andre Fleury retired earlier this year, Jesper Wallstedt took his place in the Minnesota crease. But Fleury’s jokes and pranks also kept light-hearted off the ice.

Tough guy winger Marcus Foligno has taken that position.

Philadelphia Flyers’ Nicolas Deslauriers, left, and Minnesota Wild’s Marcus Foligno, right, fight during the first period of an NHL hockey game, Saturday, Oct. 18, 2025, in Philadelphia. (AP Photo/Derik Hamilton)

A case in point came on the team’s recent road trip. At a hotel in Dallas, one night around bedtime, Foligno took the time to call every member of the team, on speaker, with a camera recording it all, to wish each of them a good night. The teammates’ reactions varied from sincere thanks, to confusion, to insider knowledge that a prank must be in the works.

“I knew something was up,” Wild rookie defenseman Zeev Buium said a few days later, after the “goodnight buddy” video was posted on social media. “I didn’t know he was making a TikTok, but I knew something was going on.”

As he gets used to life in the NHL, Buium was one of many Wild players who acknowledged a player like Foligno — deadly serious on the ice, the class clown off it — is an important part of any team.

“You see that with a lot of the bigger, tougher guys who are so scary on the ice, and then off the ice they’re like a teddy bear. You see that with Moose,” Buium said. “He lights up every room he comes in, and I feel very lucky to have a guy like him on my team my first year in the league. I’ll look back in 20 years and say, ‘I had Marcus on my team,’ and tell stories.”

Family business

Marcus was born into pro hockey. His father Mike played more than 1,000 games for a quartet of teams. His older brother Nick is a mainstay with the Chicago Blackhawks. And when they visited Madison Square Garden recently, Foligno wore a sticker on his helmet in honor of his great uncle, legendary New York Rangers goalie Eddie Giacomin, who died last month.

“I think a lot of people don’t know the relationship and that my mom’s uncle is Eddie Giacomin,” Foligno said later. “Everyone talks about my dad, but we’ve got a lot of bloodlines on the other side, too. So, every time I play in New York, I think when I stepped in MSG for my first game, you look up, you see the Giacomin banner and Uncle Eddie’s been at a lot of games.”

It’s been a challenging fall for the Folignos, first with Giacomni’s passing then with Nick taking a leave of absence from the Blackhawks in October to be with his 12-year-old daughter as she battled a health issue. Things are better now, Marcus said, admitting that he and big brother are in communication daily, and visit each other’s homes when the Wild play in Chicago and when the Blackhawks come to Minnesota.

“We’re super close. Nick’s my best friend, and he’s my brother,” Marcus said. “We talk every day, we text and there’s not a day that goes by that we don’t talk to each other. We have three kids each, and they love each other, cousins, and it’s been a special relationship for sure.”

Taking, and giving, a licking

In a 3-1 win by the Wild in Manhattan, perhaps the biggest thing Rangers fans got to cheer that night came at the end of the second period, when Foligno was leveled with an open-ice check by New York defenseman Braden Schneider, snapping Foligno’s stick in half. More accustomed to being on the giving side of big hits, Foligno bowed his head and acknowledged that in a physical game like the NHL, it’s OK to receive now and then.

“I got caught. I normally don’t get caught, and I try to be a skilled player in certain situations. But he baited me great,” Foligno said, acknowledging that a video of the hit made the rounds among the players’ group text chain. “Hey, I’ve hit many guys, and it’s one of those where you just tip a cap and say, ‘I wasn’t injured, it was all good.’ Just laugh it off and get back out there and take another run at each other.

“We’d rather have hits like that than the other way, with an elbow or something involved. It’s all good, and don’t complain.”

When teammates get hit, Foligno is usually the first one over the boards to defend them, unafraid to drop the gloves when it is called for, as he has done once already this season. Wild fans fondly remember about this time four years ago, when Foligno and Winnipeg’s Brenden Dillon threw hands in a game in St. Paul and Foligno left his skates to deliver what became known as the “Superman punch.”

Fun is a good thing

Contrasting the fisticuffs with off-ice humor is by design. The players almost all are making multiple millions a season to play a children’s game invented to help pass the time in the winter. But NHL franchises are billion-dollar businesses, and the pressure to deliver is real. Supplying a mental break from that pressure was Fleury’s role, and it’s been handed down to Foligno.

“It’s just a long season, right? It’s just so many ups and downs. I’ve always been a guy like that,” Foligno said. “You bring in a guy like Flower, and he does that stuff and it makes it fun and before you know it, everyone’s enjoying themselves and trying to bring a team together. It’s always good to keep things light.

“It’s such a stressful, high end, pressure game we play, and when you don’t get results, you think the sky’s falling down.”

After their first handful of games, the sky is definitely not falling on the Wild (3-4-1). But there is work to do in terms of consistency and cohesiveness. On the ice, Foligno offers a consistent game, manning the wing on the third line and sending the constant message that you could meet his fists at any moment. Off the ice, there is always a smile, as he works to bring that cohesiveness — one joke or prank at a time — to a team still learning how to play together.

“He’s a leader for our team, but he does it in his own way,” coach John Hynes said. “On the ice, we know the physicality and the details he plays with, and what he brings to our team from an emotional standpoint. But I think off the ice, he’s such a good leader. He’s got a great personality, he’s talkative, he gets along with everybody, and that’s what you need. He brings a lot of energy to the team, on and off the ice.”

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By GEOFF MULVIHILL, Associated Press

A federal food aid program that helps about one-eighth of Americans buy groceries stands to be paused Nov. 1 because of the government shutdown, and even some states that want to step in to fill the gap have found they can’t.

Recipients of the food aid, food banks, states and advocates are bracing for a pause to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, payments at the end of next week. Here’s what to know.

FILE – Mara Sleeter, marketing and communications project manager, stands near boxes of juice while being interviewed in the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank warehouse in San Francisco, July 2, 2025. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File)

It’s not certain the program will be paused, but it’s looking likely

Lower-income families who qualify for SNAP receive debit cards loaded each month by the federal government that work only for groceries at participating stores and farmers markets.

The average monthly benefit is $187 per person. Most beneficiaries have incomes at or below the poverty level.

Time is running short to keep benefits flowing in November.

Congress and President Donald Trump could strike a deal to end the federal shutdown that started Oct. 1.

It’s also possible that the federal government will allocate money for the program even if the shutdown continues. The liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that about $5 billion is available in a contingency fund and is calling on the government to use that for partial benefits in November. It’s not clear if that’s being seriously discussed.

The USDA has not answered questions from The Associated Press about whether those funds might be tapped.

States have also indicated that there could be a delay in benefits even if a deal is struck to fund SNAP for November.

FILE – Katherine Kehrli, founder of Community Loaves, left, and other volunteer shoppers fill grocery orders at the Edmonds Food Bank in Edmonds, Wash., Sept. 8, 2025. (AP Photo/Annika Hammerschlag, File)

States have limited ability to help

Officials from Alaska, New Mexico and North Dakota have said that they’ve considered using state money to keep the food aid flowing but fear a federal government directive may make that impossible.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees SNAP, told states earlier this month not to send information to the vendors who provide the debit cards because of uncertainty about whether the program would be funded in November.

Officials in the states say that federal control of the system appears to stand in the way of their attempts to fund the program on their own.

“Without action from USDA, I think it is highly unlikely that any states would issue November SNAP benefits,” Carolyn Vega, a policy analyst at the advocacy group Share Our Strength, said in an email. “On top of the technical challenges, states can’t shoulder that cost, especially with the risk it wouldn’t be refunded.”

FILE – Crates of milk are shown in the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank warehouse in San Francisco, Wednesday, July 2, 2025. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File)

Losing SNAP could mean tough choices for beneficiaries

Sylvia Serrano gets $100 every month to help buy groceries for herself and the four grandchildren she’s raising in Camden, New Jersey.

Two of her grandkids have autism, and because of their aversions to certain textures they eat only certain foods that are unlikely to be available at food banks.

The act of getting food could also be harder for her without SNAP. She now does her shopping while the kids are at school, using a grocery store that’s close to home due to her not-so-reliable car.

She says that with SNAP, she can mostly stay up on her other expenses. Without it? “I would have to send less payment into a bill or something in order to cover the needs and then the bills are going to get behind,” Serrano said.

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Some states are encouraging stocking up and seeking other help

Some states are telling SNAP recipients to be ready for the benefits to stop.

Arkansas is advising recipients to identify food pantries and other groups that might be able to help, and to ask friends and family for aid.

It’s unclear whether any benefits left on recipients EBT cards on Nov. 1 will be available to use. Arkansas officials suggest people who have balances on their cards to use it this month on shelf-stable foods.

Missouri and Pennsylvania officials, on the other hand, expect previous benefits will remain accessible and are telling beneficiaries to save for November if they can.

Oklahoma is encouraging people who receive benefits to visit a state website that connects people with nonprofits, faith-based groups, Native American tribes and others that may be able to help with food.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, said this week that he would deploy the National Guard to help food banks. “This is serious, this is urgent – and requires immediate action,” he said.

Food banks could be the fallback for many beneficiaries

Separate federal program cuts this year have already put food banks that supply food pantries in a tough spot, said George Matysik, the executive director of Share Food Program in Philadelphia.

So dealing with an anticipated surge in demand could be tough.

Matysik said it’s especially acute for his organization and others in Pennsylvania, where a state government budget impasse has meant at least a pause in another funding stream. He said the group has had to cut about 20% of its budget, or $8.5 million, this year.

“Any time we have a crisis, it’s always the working class that feels the pain first,” he said.

Associated Press reporters Sophie Austin in Sacramento, California; Scott Bauer in Madison, Wisconsin; Becky Bohrer in Juneau, Alaska; Jack Brook in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Jack Dura in Bismarck, North Dakota; Susan Haigh in Hartford, Connecticut; John Hanna in Topeka, Kansas; Marc Levy in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Morgan Lee in Santa Fe, New Mexico; and Sean Murphy in Oklahoma City contributed to this article.

“What a horrible story! What a hideous play!” a theater critic for the Daily Telegraph lamented after the London premiere of “Hedda Gabler” in 1891. Victorian audiences were repelled by Henrik Ibsen’s fatally attractive newlywed who appears to have it all — the fancy house, the doting husband — only to be violently bored.

But writer-director Nia DaCosta (“Candyman,” “The Marvels”) and her star Tessa Thompson understand Hedda down to the pretty poison in her molecules. Their rollicking redo, set from dusk to hangover at a drunken bacchanal, is vibrant and viciously alive. With apologies to Ibsen’s ghost, DaCosta’s tweaks have sharpened its rage. I don’t think that long-dead critic would like this “Hedda” any better. I think it’s divine.

Thompson’s Hedda is a clever, status-conscious snot raised to believe that her sole purpose is to be a rich man’s wife. With no hobbies or career and no interest in motherhood, her only creative outlets are squandering money and machinating the success of her milquetoast husband, middlebrow academic George (Tom Bateman), who has such a flimsy hold on his bride that his last name might as well be attached to hers with Scotch tape. (It’s Tesman and it’s pointedly rarely used.) Hedda doesn’t love George. In fact, she seems to think he’s a whiny little worm. But she’s dead-set on securing him a promotion to afford her expensive tastes.

If Hedda had been born a man, she’d be leading armies into battle like her late father, General Gabler, who spawned her out of wedlock. Instead, she takes out her aggression on civilians. Using her charm offensive, Hedda goads naive spouses to cheat, recovering alcoholics to drink and depressives to wander off into the darkness with a revolver. Some of her havoc is calculated, most of it is out of pique that others are living braver, more fulfilling lives. All of it feels like a cat tipping over water glasses just to see them shatter. Like the nasty seductress of “Dangerous Liaisons,” she’s a warning that frustrated women aren’t merely a hazard to themselves — they’re a menace to the society that made them.

Inspired by her antihero, DaCosta manipulates Ibsen to suit her own goals. She’s updated the play’s setting to 1950s England, a similar-in-spirit era in which well-bred women were kept domesticated. (I can’t wait for someone to do a version among the tradwives of Utah.) From there, DaCosta has smartly tightened the narrative, which used to have a key scene at an off-stage bachelor party to which Hedda was pointedly not invited. “What a pity the fair lady can’t be there, invisible,” Ibsen’s Hedda grumbled at being left home while the men got to carouse.

In DaCosta’s version, the whole drama unfolds during a martini and cocaine-fueled rager at Hedda’s mansion, a party she’s throwing to impress George’s potential new boss, Professor Greenwood (Finbar Lynch), who she hears has a bohemian streak. At her own happening on her own turf, Hedda couldn’t be more visibly in command. She rallies the guests to hurl her former classmate, Thea (Imogen Poots), a wretchedly earnest drip, into a nearby lake and gets the whole room grooving to a dance band’s cover of “It’s Oh So Quiet,” the swinging hit that the Icelandic pop singer Björk would popularize a half-century later. It’s a great song pick with manic crescendos — You blow a fuse, zing boom! The devil cuts loose, zing boom! — that capture Hedda’s feverish mood shifts.

We know this evening will go wrong from the film’s opening shot of Hedda facing down two policemen who keep interrupting her explanation of the last 24 hours. “Where should I start?” she says with smothered exasperation. As we cut back to watch the night unfold, a shot of Hedda surveying the crowd from an upstairs landing feels like she’s looking at a game board — Clue, perhaps? — with a weapon stashed in every room. Which threat is most pressing? The pistols she keeps in a leather box, the precarious crystal chandelier or the lake’s deep waters outside?

Thompson is marvelous in the role. Even the way she chomps a cherry off a cocktail toothpick has menace. I first saw her as the lead in “Romeo and Juliet” at a 99-seat theater in Pasadena when she was barely 20 years old (there’s so much talent in our small stage scene), so it’s a nice reminder that the funny and soulful actor of the “Thor” and “Creed” franchises is also a hell of a good classical performer and a worthy star on her own.

She wears Hedda’s lovely mask with confidence — red lips, lush cheekbones, cool demeanor — and periodically allows it to slip. Editor Jacob Schulsinger often allows Hedda a tiny hesitation before she charges ahead ruining people’s lives, long enough to know that she’s considering the consequences. “Sometimes I can’t help myself, I just do things all of a sudden on a whim,” she admits to the nosy Judge Brack (Nicholas Pinnock), revealing a sliver of weakness. She’s almost (nearly) asking for help. Yet, the judge just wants to maneuver her into bed. How tedious.

DaCosta boldly layers race and sexuality on top of Ibsen’s tale. She’s gender-swapped Hedda’s ex-lover, Eilert, into a lesbian named Eileen (a swaggering Nina Hoss), a brilliant, openly norm-defying author who is George’s job-seeking competition (and the only person Hedda enjoys kissing). If earlier incarnations of Hedda didn’t dare defy social rules when she was white and straight, being Black and queer adds so much additional peril that the script barely needs to say out loud. The new tension is there in just a few whispers, as when Hedda overhears a guest murmur that their hostess is “duskier than I thought she would be.” Hedda doesn’t acknowledge the slight. That would mean admitting vulnerability. She simply starts destroying the speaker in the very next scene.

What’s wiser? Eileen’s determination to face down the boys and be accepted for her full self or Hedda sneaking around and steering everyone’s fates behind the scenes? They can’t team up — they’re doomed to tear each other to shreds. And as much glee as we get watching Hedda’s rampage, it aches to see these two formidable women reduce each other to hysterics (to use the medical diagnosis of the day).

From our 21st century perspective, they both have a right to be mad and they both might be mentally ill. DaCosta doesn’t offer a verdict, but she plunges us so deeply into Hedda’s headspace that we can hear how certain things set her off. Insults hit her with a knife-like hiss of air; fresh schemes get her charging around to Hildur Guðnadóttir’s tumultuous, percussive score.

Costume designer Lindsay Pugh has done incredible work outfitting the film’s central female roles. Hedda wears bullet-like strands of pearls that choke her neck and a jade-colored gown that seems to molder into a festering, jealous shade of green. When her rival, Poot’s Thea, arrives underdressed, Hedda forces her into a hideous frock with fussy bows and an ungainly skirt. Poots, her nose raw and red, her character kicked when she’s down, gamely looks a fright, trusting that moral fiber will expose Hedda’s ugly insecurities.

But Pugh’s stroke of genius is putting Eileen not in some sort of mannish suit but in a bombshell dress that highlights her curves like a primal goddess. It’s pure feminine power — just like the film itself — and when Eileen struts into a room of her all-male colleagues, that dress exposes how fast the tenor can shift from awe to jeers and how little wiggle room she or any woman has for error.

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By MICHAEL BIESECKER

WASHINGTON (AP) — New satellite images taken Thursday show the scale of the demolition of the White House East Wing as President Donald Trump moves forward with the construction of a new ballroom at the White House.

See the change in images from Oct. 23 and Sept. 26, 2025 in images from Planet Labs PBC:

This satellite image from Planet Labs PBC shows the White House in Washington, Sept. 26, 2025, with the East Wing intact before demolition began. (Planet Labs PBC via AP)
This satellite image from Planet Labs PBC shows demolition of the East Wing of the White House in Washington, Thursday, Oct. 23, 2025. (Planet Labs PBC via AP)

East Wing demolished, photos show

The East Wing, where first ladies created history, planned state dinners and promoted causes, is now history itself. The two-story structure of drawing rooms and offices, including workspace for first ladies and their staffs, has been turned into rubble, demolished as part of the Republican president’s plan to build what he said is now a $300 million ballroom nearly twice the size of the White House.

Trump said Wednesday that keeping the East Wing would have “hurt a very, very expensive, beautiful building” that he said presidents have wanted for years. He said “me and some friends of mine” will pay for the ballroom at no cost to taxpayers.

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Trump allowed the demolition to begin this week despite not yet having approval from the relevant government agencies with jurisdiction over construction on federal property.

Preservationists have also urged the Trump administration to halt the demolition until plans for the 90,000-square-foot (8,361-square-meter) ballroom can go through the required public review process.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation said the review process, including time for members of the public to comment on plans for the ballroom, would “provide a crucial opportunity for transparency and broad engagement — values that have guided preservation of the White House under every administration going back to the public competition in 1792 that produced the building’s original design.”

The Trust also expressed concern to the National Capital Planning Commission, the National Park Service and the Commission of Fine Arts that the size of the proposed ballroom will overwhelm the Executive Mansion, which stands at 55,000 square feet “and may permanently disrupt the carefully balanced classical design of the White House.”

Both commissions have jurisdiction over changes to the White House. The park service manages the White House grounds and has a role in the process as several trees on the South Lawn have been cut down as part of the construction. Both agencies currently are closed because of the government shutdown. Trump installed top aide Will Scharf as chairman of the planning commission.

The National Park Service said in August, after the White House announced the ballroom project, that it had provided historic preservation guidance and support as part of a broader consultation process. It said final decisions are made by the Executive Office of the President.