内容摘要：in Florida’s third straight conference-final appearance.

in Florida’s third straight conference-final appearance.

with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.The New York Islanders hired Mathieu Darche as their general manager Friday, giving the two-time Stanley Cup-winning Tampa Bay Lightning assistant his long-awaited first chance to run an NHL team.

Darche was named executive vice president and GM and put in charge of the organization’s hockey operations department.“Mathieu is the perfect choice to lead our hockey operations,” said co-owner John Collins, who ran the GM search. “He will be given every resource available to put the Islanders first-in-class on the ice, with our business initiatives and in the community.”Darche joins the Islanders after spending the past six seasons with the Lightning, who never missed the playoffs during his tenure. He got his name engraved in the Cup in 2020 and ’21 as director of hockey operations and also worked directly for Tampa Bay GM Julien BriseBois over the past three years.

“Mathieu has served as a key member of the Tampa Bay Lightning and has a diverse background in top-level business models,” Collins said. “He is a proven winner and is committed, as is our ownership group, to building a group that will be highly competitive next season and beyond.”The 48-year-old former player was considered the top NHL assistant who had not been GM in the league. Darche beat out more experienced executive Marc Bergevin for the job. He succeeds Lou Lamoriello in the role after the 82-year-old longtime executive’s

Darche played 268 regular-season and playoff games from 2001-12 as a winger with Columbus, Nashville, San Jose, Tampa Bay and Montreal. The Quebec native left hockey for a few years before moving to Tampa to begin working for the Lightning.

Taking over the Islanders, Darche starts with the No. 1 pick in the draft thanks to theirKoizumi on Thursday announced plans to switch to voluntary government contracts for rice to better control prices and to lift a cap on the next sale.

One problem may be a lack of enough milling capacity to turn the stocks of brown rice kept in reserves into the pure white rice that Japanese prefer. But others have accused some wholesalers of hoarding rice to keep prices higher.So far, the government has done little to investigate and resisted releasing reserves, fearing prices would fall, Kazuhito Yamashita, research director at the Canon Institute for Global Studies.

Japan could have avoided the problem by allowing more rice to be planted and exporting more if there were surpluses, he said.“Acreage cutbacks are contrary to food security, a ruinous policy,” Yamashita said. He said that the policy benefits JA by keeping small farmers afloat.