Canada’s Hughes may be what International team has been missing at Presidents Cup

EDMONTON – When the key to a win is work ethic, it is not surprising to see Mattias Ekholm rise to the occasion.

Ekholm had a goal and two assists as the Edmonton Oilers snapped a three-game skid with a 5-4 victory over the Seattle Kraken on Saturday.

Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, Noah Philp, Vasily Podkolzin and Raphael Lavoie also scored for the Oilers, who improved to 2-3 in NHL pre-season play.

“They are a hard-working team, no matter who they have in the lineup, so we expected that,” said Oilers forward Derek Ryan, who picked up a couple of assists.

“There were points in the game where we were kind of matching that intensity and work ethic and things were going well for us. We let the work ethic dip a little bit and then the game gets away from us. It is a good message to the guys who were playing and the whole group that it starts with work.”

Jacob Melanson, Eduard Sale, John Hayden and Ben Meyers responded for the Kraken, who fell to 1-3 in exhibition action.

“I thought we were getting up the ice well, playing fast, playing north,” said Meyers. “I think we probably just gave up a little bit too much to win that game, but I thought offensively we played pretty well and we had our chance.”

The Oilers started the scoring just over three minutes into the opening period as both defenders tried to cover Connor McDavid on a two-on-one, but he made a nice backhand pass back to Nugent-Hopkins, who beat Kraken goalie Philipp Grubauer upstairs blocker side.

Seattle tied the game nine minutes into the first after Oilers goalie Calvin Pickard made a couple of saves in tight before Melanson was able to poke it in from the crease.

Pickard left the game soon afterwards after teammate Noah Philp got angled into his own netminder, hitting him in the head. Pickard did not return to the game.

Olivier Rodrigue replaced Pickard in the Edmonton net and surrendered a power-play goal with six minutes to play in the first as Ryan Winterton lifted a deft pass over a defender across to Sale for the goal.

Edmonton knotted the game with 2:43 remaining in the first frame as Ekholm spotted Philp driving the net and completed a long saucer pass through a couple Kraken players to allow him to wrist it home.

Seattle made it 3-2 5:32 into the second period after Rodrigue attempted to direct a puck away from the net, only to have it hit Hayden and carom into his net.

With two minutes left in the middle period, the Kraken added to their lead as Meyers elected to shoot on a two-on-one opportunity, beating the Oilers’ goalie upstairs.

Edmonton got that goal back just 26 seconds later as Derek Ryan threaded the needle to a trailing Ekholm and he beat Grubauer to make it 4-3.

The Oilers tied the game six minutes into the third on a short-handed tally as Ryan made a great play to draw the defenders his way before sending it over to Podkolzin for the easy tap-in.

Edmonton avoided overtime with 2:53 remaining in the final frame as Lavoie battled hard to retrieve the puck before swinging out front and sending a shot through Grubauer’s legs.

Oilers head coach Kris Knoblauch has been impressed with Lavoie’s skills as a sniper.

“He’s got good hands and an even better shot,” he said. “He showed great skill on that goal.”

NOTES

The Oilers still had 41 players in camp — with four goalies, 13 defencemen and 24 forwards. … Seattle was down to 37 players at camp — 33 skaters and four goalies — after cutting eight players before Friday’s contest against Vancouver. … Edmonton had both of the players in camp who are on PTOs in the lineup on Saturday, forward Mike Hoffman and defenceman Travis Dermott. … Grubauer made his first appearance since last Sunday’s 6-1 loss to Calgary, during which he allowed four goals on 19 shots.

UP NEXT

Kraken: Visit the Calgary Flames on Monday.

Oilers: Host the Vancouver Canucks on Monday.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 28, 2024.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Riding in a black SUV with tinted windows, lawyer Mariel Colón rolls up to the gates of a remote mansion, strolling past a security guard side-by-side with Emma Coronel, the wife of notorious drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.

Sporting suits and sunglasses, the pair stride into a dimly lit room full of slickly dressed men smoking cigars.

All to the roar of trumpets.

The scene is from “La Señora,” the latest music video from Colón, who spent several years working as a defense lawyer for Guzmán while he faced trial in a U.S. court. Now, at a time when regional Mexican music is becoming a global phenomenon, the 31-year-old is leveraging her association with the former leader of the Sinaloa Cartel to launch her music career under the stage name of “Mariel La Abogada” (Mariel, the Lawyer).

“La Señora” features — and pays tribute to — Guzmán’s wife, who was released from prison last year and has struggled to find work. It paved the way for the two to model together last weekend during Milan Fashion Week, raising eyebrows in Italy and beyond.

“(My work) opens doors for me because of the morbid, because of people’s curiosity … They want to understand this,” Colón told The Associated Press. “I’ve always told people that Mariel is a singer who became a lawyer.”

The Puerto Rican daughter of a music director grew up listening to Mexican ballads, loving the brokenhearted passion infused in the music. She always wanted to be a singer, but her family pushed her to pursue a law degree.

She began working for Guzmán’s defense team in 2018 after graduating from law school in the U.S. and stumbling upon a Craigslist ad seeking a part-time paralegal to help prepare a Spanish-speaking client for trial.

It was only later that she learned she would be working with Guzmán, taking him and Coronel as clients full time. She saw it as a “great opportunity professionally” and said she wasn’t easily intimidated.

Once among the most wanted men in the world, Guzmán led his Sinaloa Cartel in a bloody war for control of the international drug trade, gaining a cinematic level of notoriety for his dramatic prison escapes before his extradition to the U.S. in 2017. Now his sons, known as “Los Chapitos,” are locked in a deadly power struggle with another faction of the cartel, leaving mutilated bodies around the state capital.

“(People ask) how I can do this job, that I’m part of the mafia, how can I sleep at night?” Colón said. “I don’t care what they say about me. I sleep very well at night.”

Colón is one of few people who maintain regular contact with Guzmán. She visits him three times a month in the maximum security prison in Colorado where he’s serving a life sentence. She declined to discuss details of Guzmán’s cases, citing attorney-client privilege.

Seeking to build a rapport, Colón sings to Guzmán and other clients, who have included other Mexican drug traffickers and, for a brief time, Jeffrey Epstein, who killed himself in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges.

Colón serenades Guzmán with Mexican classics from bands including Los Alegres del Barranco and Tucanes de Tijuana. To this day, she said, he’s among the first to hear her new music.

“Whatever genre, anything that was coming out that I liked, I would sing it to him because he doesn’t have a radio,” she said.

Her musical career began little more than a year ago, when she released her first video, “La Abogada,” which features Colón dressed in a pink suit, crooning to law enforcement from a courtroom. Like much of the genre, her music is diverse, ranging from percussion-heavy banda to character-focused ballads known as corridos.

“La Señora” features a table sprinkled with diamonds, Guzmán’s wife astride a trotting horse and strolling beside a pool.

Colón said the song was based on Coronel’s life, sending a message of redemption and second chances. It was also a way to offer the 35-year-old work, a condition of her probation.

Coronel, a former beauty queen, was released from prison last year after completing her three-year sentence for drug trafficking and money laundering in relation to her husband’s drug empire. Coronel declined to be interviewed.

“A small waist and beautiful eyes. A brain for business and a strong voice for the bad boys. She only shows her affectionate side to El Chaparrito,” Colón belts out in her ballad. “El Chaparrito,” meaning “the little shorty,” plays with Guzmán’s nickname.

Colón’s musical rise coincides with a relative golden age of Mexican music, which grew 400% worldwide over the last five years on Spotify. In 2023, Mexican artist Peso Pluma bested Taylor Swift as the most streamed artist on YouTube.

While corridos have dominated for more than a century, young artists have filled stadiums by twisting the style on its head, mixing classic ballads with trap in corridos tumbados.

But it also cuts to the heart of a larger debate: Does the music capture the realities facing many Mexicans or does it glorify the narco-violence long plaguing the Latin American nation?

Narco culture has long been part of corridos, with many singers idealizing traffickers as “an aspirational figure going against the system,” said Rafael Saldívar, a researcher at the Autonomous University of Baja California.

“They’re cultural expressions speaking to the realities of the country,” Saldívar said. But “in a way they glorify these criminals, or do so in a way where some feel it’s pushing this kind of lifestyle.”

A classic example: king of corridos Chalino Sánchez used the violence around him in Sinaloa to spin lyrics while also calling out the “Sinaloa gang” for torturing and killing innocents. He was shot dead at a performance in the state’s capital in 1992.

Last year, Peso Pluma – who paid homage to Guzmán in songs – was forced to cancel a show in Tijuana after the 25-year-old received threats from a rival of the Sinaloa Cartel that if he came it “would be your last performance.”

Later, Tijuana banned the performance of narco ballads altogether to protect “the eyes and ears” of youths as it tries to contain violence. Local authorities in northern states previously banned musicians singing narcocorridos.

Colón, who hasn’t gone so far as to glorify arms or drugs, is quick to defend narcocorridos.

“There’s a reason why Netflix did the ‘Narcos’ show, it’s because there’s an audience for it. It intrigues people,” she said. “That doesn’t mean they’re applauding or celebrating what this person did, but they do have a sort of admiration for this person or this person’s life. Not everything is violence. These people have hearts, they have families.”

While Colón plans to put out her first record in December, Coronel has leveraged “La Señora” to launch her career as a model and social media influencer.

April Black Diamond, the designer who asked Coronel and Colón to model in a side event during Milan Fashion Week, said her choice was met with “shock.”

“People evolve. My platform isn’t about judgment but about showing different dimensions of women, their strength, and resilience,” she wrote in a statement. The next day, photos of Coronel in one of the designer’s dresses appeared plastered on a billboard in New York’s Times Square.

On Wednesday, Italy’s National Fashion Chamber issued an “urgent” press release saying the show wasn’t affiliated with official fashion week events and that brands need to follow its code of ethics.

Meanwhile, eyes on Colón and Coronel’s video continue to grow, clocking around 750,000 views on YouTube.

VIENNA (AP) — Austria’s far-right Freedom Party could win a national election for the first time on Sunday, tapping into voters’ anxieties about immigration, inflation, Ukraine and other concerns following recent gains for the hard right elsewhere in Europe.

Herbert Kickl, a former interior minister and longtime campaign strategist who has led the Freedom Party since 2021, wants to become Austria’s new chancellor. He has used the term “Volkskanzler,” or chancellor of the people, which was used by the Nazis to describe Adolf Hitler in the 1930s. Kickl has rejected the comparison.

But to become Austria’s new leader, he would need a coalition partner to command a majority in the lower house of parliament.

And a win isn’t certain, with recent polls pointing to a close race. They have put support for the Freedom Party at 27%, with the conservative Austrian People’s Party of Chancellor Karl Nehammer on 25% and the center-left Social Democrats on 21%.

More than 6.3 million people age 16 and over are eligible to vote for the new parliament in Austria, a European Union member that has a policy of military neutrality.

Kickl has achieved a turnaround since Austria’s last parliamentary election in 2019. In June, the Freedom Party narrowly won a nationwide vote for the first time in the European Parliament election, which also brought gains for other European far-right parties.

In 2019, its support slumped to 16.2% after a scandal brought down a government in which it was the junior coalition partner. Then-vice chancellor and Freedom Party leader Heinz-Christian Strache resigned following the publication of a secretly recorded video in which he appeared to offer favors to a purported Russian investor.

The far right has tapped into voter frustration over high inflation, the war in Ukraine and the Covid pandemic. It also been able to build on worries about migration.

In its election program, the Freedom Party calls for “remigration of uninvited foreigners,” and for achieving a more “homogeneous” nation by tightly controlling borders and suspending the right to asylum via an “emergency law.”

Gernot Bauer, a journalist with Austrian magazine Profil who recently co-published an investigative biography of the far-right leader, said that under Kickl’s leadership, the Freedom Party has moved “even further to the right,” as Kickl refuses to explicitly distance the party from the Identitarian Movement, a pan-European nationalist and far-right group.

Bauer describes Kickl’s rhetoric as “aggressive” and says some of his language is deliberately provocative.

The Freedom Party also calls for an end to sanctions against Russia, is highly critical of western military aid to Ukraine and wants to bow out of the European Sky Shield Initiative, a missile defense project launched by Germany.

The leader of the Social Democrats, a party that led many of Austria’s post-World War II governments, has positioned himself as the polar opposite to Kickl. Andreas Babler has ruled out governing with the far right and labeled Kickl “a threat to democracy.”

While the Freedom Party has recovered, the popularity of Nehammer’s People’s Party, which currently leads a coalition government with the environmentalist Greens as junior partners, has declined since 2019.

During the election campaign, Nehammer portrayed his party, which has taken a tough line on immigration in recent years, as “the strong center” that will guarantee stability amid multiple crises.

But it is precisely these crises, ranging from the COVID-19 pandemic to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and resulting rising energy prices, that have cost the conservatives support, said Peter Filzmaier, one of Austria’s leading political scientists.

Under their leadership, Austria has experienced high inflation averaging 4.2% over the past 12 months, surpassing the EU average.

The government also angered many Austrians in 2022 by becoming the first European country to introduce a coronavirus vaccine mandate, which was scrapped a few months later without ever being put into effect. And Nehammer is the third chancellor since the last election, taking office in 2021 after predecessor Sebastian Kurz — the winner in 2019 — quit politics amid a corruption investigation.

But the recent flooding caused by Storm Boris that hit Austria and other countries in Central Europe brought back the topic of the environment into the election debate and helped Nehammer slightly narrow the gap with the Freedom Party by presenting himself as a “crisis manager,” Filzmaier said.

Nehammer said in a video Thursday that “this is about whether we continue together on this proven path of stability or leave the country to the radicals, who make a lot of promises and don’t keep them.”

The People’s Party is the far right’s only way into government.

Nehammer has repeatedly excluded joining a government led by Kickl, describing him as a “security risk” for the country, but hasn’t ruled out a coalition with the Freedom Party in and of itself, which would imply Kickl renouncing a position in government.

The likelihood of Kickl agreeing to such a deal if he wins the election is very low, Filzmaier said.

But should the People’s Party finish first, then a coalition between the People’s Party and the Freedom Party could happen, Filzmaier said. The most probable alternative would be a three-way alliance between the People’s Party, the Social Democrats and most likely the liberal Neos.

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Associated Press videojournalist Philipp Jenne contributed to this report.