NEW YORK (AP) — A crowd is waiting to see you run a labyrinthine obstacle course you've never done before. You have to complete it with enough focus to avoid wrong turns, enough precision to ensure your foot touches certain spots and enough speed to beat dozens of rivals.
Also: You are a dog.
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FILE - Amy Gilmer, left, and her Chinese crested, Surfer Dude, wait backstage at Arthur Ashe stadium before competing in the agility preliminaries during the 147th Westminster Kennel Club Dog show, Saturday, May 6, 2023, at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in New York. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, File)
FILE - A handler and his dog compete in the agility preliminaries inside Arthur Ashe stadium during the 147th Westminster Kennel Club Dog show, Saturday, May 6, 2023, at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in New York. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, File)
FILE - Verb, a border collie, competes during the finals of the agility competition at the Westminster Kennel Club dog show in Tarrytown, N.Y., Friday, June 11, 2021. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, File)
Emily Klarman, a Westminster Masters Agility Championship-winning dog handler, plays with Swish, a border collie, after a practice run at UDog Agility in Huntingdon Valley, Pa., on Thursday, Jan. 15, 2026. (AP Photo/Jennifer Peltz)
Specifically, you're one of the canine aces in Saturday's Westminster Kennel Club agility competition, a recent addition that kicks off the storied club's milestone 150th dog show.
So how do you do it?
“The teamwork of the dog and the handler,” says Emily Klarman, a professional agility trainer who guided her border collie Vanish to a win last year. “Agility is a big conversation that we’re having with our dogs.”
The conversation is partly verbal. Handlers yell commands, such as “tunnel!” “jump!” “left!” “right!” Dogs sometimes answer with barks of enthusiasm.
But it's also about body language: Handlers, running alongside their unleashed dogs, place themselves purposefully and watch the animals' eyes to keep them on target.
“If they're looking at something, that's probably what they're thinking about,” Klarman said before a recent practice session with another border collie, Swish, at the UDog training center in Huntingdon Valley, Pennsylvania.
Like a furry rocket, the lean, mottled, 5-year-old navigated jumps, close-set poles, tight turns, narrow ramps, a seesaw and other equipment as though it was in her DNA. To some extent, it is — border collies are renowned for their intelligence, intensity and nimbleness, and they have taken Westminster's agility title in nine of its 12 years so far. (Three of those winning runs were piloted by UDog's founders, Jessica Ajoux and Perry DeWitt.)
But regardless of breed, becoming an agility champion takes a lot of training, technique and strategy.
For example, the canines get penalty points if they bound off seesaws and ramps too soon. They have to set foot in the end section. To instill that habit, a handler might get the dog accustomed to walking onto a pad on the ground, then put that pad on the end of the obstacle and eventually remove the pad.
Dogs also must master different approaches to jumps, depending on whether they need to turn tightly after landing.
“Easy,” Klarman cued Swish while practicing one such jump, and Swish — who generally prefers to go full-tilt — slowed down a touch. It's a delicate balance: Scores are based on both accuracy and time.
Agility trials don't allow for treats or toys on the course, so dogs need to be motivated by the fun of the game and their relationship with their handlers.
While dogs learn signals, handlers need to memorize complex pathways through 20 obstacles. At Westminster, they don't get maps until the morning of the competition, then have a few minutes to walk the course and ponder, for instance, whether to cross ahead of or behind the dog on various turns.
Besides the mental and physical work, “a lot of it is really emotional,” said Klarman, 33. The animals “can definitely tell whether we're really excited and pumped up, or we're disappointed,” she explained.
For instance, when Vanish didn't excel on a seesaw obstacle in the Westminster finals last year, Klarman told herself to make sure the dog didn't sense discouragement: “If my heart's not in it, obviously, her heart's not going to be in it.”
Westminster, considered the United States' most illustrious dog show, added an agility competition in 2014. The popular canine sport introduced a faster-paced, more athletic and more all-embracing flavor to the traditional, buttoned-up parading of purebred dogs around rings. Agility is open to mixed-breed dogs, and a mix won in 2024.
A dog fan since she was a toddler, Klarman got into canine sports as a preteen, then got a nursing degree before realizing that she wanted to work with dogs as a career. Last year's Westminster win was a capstone.
“To share that moment with a dog that has meant so much to me — it really meant so much to showcase her and let the world know how special she is,” recalls Klarman.
This year, she'll be cheering for her boyfriend, Peter Wirth, and his Pembroke Welsh corgi, named Welly.
Like a number of agility handlers, Wirth, 34, took up the sport simply because he had a very energetic dog that needed more stimulating activity than walks and fetch. Five years later, he and Welly are returning to New York's Javits Center on Saturday for the Westminster contest.
Klarman and Vanish are staying home, for a good reason. The dog's first litter of puppies is due any minute.
FILE - Amy Gilmer, left, and her Chinese crested, Surfer Dude, wait backstage at Arthur Ashe stadium before competing in the agility preliminaries during the 147th Westminster Kennel Club Dog show, Saturday, May 6, 2023, at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in New York. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, File)
FILE - A handler and his dog compete in the agility preliminaries inside Arthur Ashe stadium during the 147th Westminster Kennel Club Dog show, Saturday, May 6, 2023, at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in New York. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, File)
FILE - Verb, a border collie, competes during the finals of the agility competition at the Westminster Kennel Club dog show in Tarrytown, N.Y., Friday, June 11, 2021. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, File)
Emily Klarman, a Westminster Masters Agility Championship-winning dog handler, plays with Swish, a border collie, after a practice run at UDog Agility in Huntingdon Valley, Pa., on Thursday, Jan. 15, 2026. (AP Photo/Jennifer Peltz)
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Journalist Don Lemon was released from custody Friday after he was arrested and hit with federal civil rights charges over his coverage of an anti-immigration enforcement protest that disrupted a service at a Minnesota church.
Lemon was arrested overnight in Los Angeles, while another independent journalist and two protest participants were arrested in Minnesota. He struck a confident, defiant tone while speaking to reporters after a court appearance in California, declaring: “I will not be silenced.”
“I have spent my entire career covering the news. I will not stop now,” Lemon said. “In fact there is no more important time than right now, this very moment, for a free and independent media that shines a light on the truth and holds those in power accountable.”
The arrests brought sharp criticism from news media advocates and civil rights activists including the Rev. Al Sharpton, who said the administration of President Donald Trump is taking a “sledgehammer” to “the knees of the First Amendment.”
A grand jury in Minnesota indicted Lemon and others on charges of conspiracy and interfering with the First Amendment rights of worshippers during the Jan. 18 protest at the Cities Church in St. Paul, where a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement official is a pastor.
In court in Los Angeles, Assistant U.S. Attorney Alexander Robbins argued for a $100,000 bond, telling a judge that Lemon “knowingly joined a mob that stormed into a church.” He was released, however, without having to post money and was granted permission to travel to France in June while the case is pending.
Defense attorney Marilyn Bednarski said Lemon plans to plead not guilty and fight the charges in Minnesota.
Lemon, who was fired from CNN in 2023 following a bumpy run as a morning host, has said he has no affiliation to the organization that went into the church and he was there as a solo journalist chronicling protesters.
“Don has been a journalist for 30 years, and his constitutionally protected work in Minneapolis was no different than what he has always done,” his lawyer, Abbe Lowell, said in a statement earlier Friday.
Attorney General Pam Bondi promoted the arrests on social media.
“Make no mistake. Under President Trump’s leadership and this administration, you have the right to worship freely and safely,” Bondi said in a video posted online. “And if I haven’t been clear already, if you violate that sacred right, we are coming after you.”
Since he left CNN, Lemon has joined the legion of journalists who have gone into business for themselves. He posts regularly on YouTube and has not hidden his disdain for Trump.
Yet during his online show from the church, he stressed: “I’m not here as an activist. I’m here as a journalist.” He described the scene before him and interviewed churchgoers and demonstrators.
The indictment names nine defendants including Lemon. It says two of them posted their planned action on social media the day before and gave the others instructions in a shopping center parking lot the following morning.
Lemon started livestreaming and told the audience he was with a group gearing up for a “resistance” operation against federal immigration policies, according to the document. Lemon “took steps to maintain operational secrecy by reminding co-conspirators to not disclose the target of their operation,” the indictment says, and stepped away so his microphone would not accidentally divulge the planning.
During the briefing before the operation, prosecutors say, Lemon thanked an activist who is among the nine indicted for what she was doing and assured her he was not saying what was going on.
Inside the church the defendants shouted slogans and blew whistles after the pastor was about to begin the sermon and gestured in a hostile and aggressive manner, according to prosecutors, and the pastor and congregants perceived “threats of violence.”
Lemon told the livestream he saw a young man who was frightened, sad and crying and it was understandable because the experience was traumatic and uncomfortable, the indictment says. The defendants then surrounded the pastor and Lemon “peppered him with questions to promote the operation’s message.”
Last week a magistrate judge rejected prosecutors’ initial bid to charge Lemon. Shortly afterward he predicted on his show that the administration would try again.
“And guess what,” Lemon said. “Here I am. Keep trying. That’s not going to stop me from being a journalist. That’s not going to diminish my voice. Go ahead, make me into the new Jimmy Kimmel if you want. Just do it. Because I’m not going anywhere.”
Independent journalist Georgia Fort livestreamed the moments before her arrest, telling viewers that agents were at her door and her First Amendment right as a journalist was being diminished.
A judge released Fort, Trahern Crews and Jamael Lundy on bond, rejecting the Justice Department's attempt to keep them in custody. Not guilty pleas were entered. Fort's supporters in the courtroom clapped and whooped.
“It’s a sinister turn of events in this country,” Fort's attorney, Kevin Riach, said in court.
Jane Kirtley, a media law and ethics expert at the University of Minnesota, said the federal laws cited by the government were not intended to apply to reporters gathering news.
The charges against Lemon and Fort, she said, are “pure intimidation and government overreach.”
Some experts and activists said the charges are not only an attack on press freedoms but also a strike against Black Americans who count on Black journalists to bear witness to injustice and oppression.
The National Association of Black Journalists said it was “outraged and deeply alarmed” and warned of an effort to “criminalize and threaten press freedom under the guise of law enforcement.”
Crews is a leader of Black Lives Matter Minnesota who has led many protests and actions for racial justice, particularly following George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis in 2020.
“All the greats have been to jail, MLK, Malcom X — people who stood up for justice get attacked,” Crews told The Associated Press. “We were just practicing our First Amendment rights.”
A prominent civil rights attorney and two other people involved in the protest were arrested last week. Prosecutors have accused them of civil rights violations for disrupting the Cities Church service.
The Justice Department launched an investigation after the group interrupted services by chanting “ICE out” and “Justice for Renee Good,” referring to the 37-year-old mother of three who was fatally shot by an ICE officer in Minneapolis.
Cities Church belongs to the Southern Baptist Convention and lists one of its pastors as David Easterwood, who leads ICE's St. Paul field office.
“We are grateful that the Department of Justice acted swiftly to protect Cities Church so that we can continue to faithfully live out the church’s mission to worship Jesus and make him known,” lead pastor Jonathan Parnell said.
Richer and Tucker reported from Washington. Associated Press reporters Dave Bauder and Aaron Morrison in New York; Giovanna Dell'Orto, Tim Sullivan, Steve Karnowski and Jack Brook in Minneapolis; Josh Funk in Omaha, Nebraska; and Audrey McAvoy in Honolulu contributed.
Jane Fonda talks to media about First Amendment and her support for journalist Don Lemon. "They arrested the wrong "Don!" while speaking outside the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building in Los Angeles on Friday, Jan. 30, 2026. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass speaks to the media outside the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building in Los Angeles on Friday, Jan. 30, 2026. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)
Journalist Don Lemon, waves after leaving a hearing at the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building in Los Angeles on Friday, Jan. 30, 2026. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)
Journalist Don Lemon, waves to the media after a hearing outside the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building in Los Angeles on Friday, Jan. 30, 2026. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)
Journalist Don Lemon, talks to the media after a hearing at the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building in Los Angeles on Friday, Jan. 30, 2026. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)
FILE - Don Lemon arrives at THR's Empowerment in Entertainment Gala at Milk Studios, April 30, 2019, in Los Angeles. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP, FILE)
FILE - Don Lemon attends the 15th annual CNN Heroes All-Star Tribute at the American Museum of Natural History, Sunday, Dec. 12, 2021, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP, File)
