Babaamaajimowinan (Telling of news in different places)
Babaamaajimowinan (Telling of news in different places)
Sorted by date Results 1 - 25 of 1850
Ignore the majority's protestations to the contrary. The Supreme Court has just ruled that the president is, in fact, above the law - absolutely immune from criminal prosecution for some conduct and "presumptively" immune for much else. This broad grant of immunity raises the stakes for November's election immeasurably. The risk is no longer just that Donald Trump will evade responsibility for his actions as president, though that seems close to foreordained by Monday's ruling. It is that he...
The U.S. Supreme Court didn't give former President Donald Trump what he sought: blanket immunity. But the court wrapped him in a highly favorable ruling that may eventually help him legally and immediately politically. The ruling, which like nearly everything nowadays in the country and the court, split along ideological lines. The 6-3 decision, with all the court's conservatives agreeing while the three liberals dissented, in effect said that while presidents have prosecutorial immunity for...
Last week, a California man was convicted of threatening to bomb an FBI field office where hundreds of agents and other employees work. In one of his threats to the FBI, the man wrote: “I can go on a mass murder spree. In fact, it would be very explainable by your actions.” These heinous threats of violence have become routine in an environment in which the Justice Department is under attack like never before. In recent weeks, we have seen an escalation of attacks that go far beyond public scrutiny, criticism, and legitimate and necessary overs...
It is irresponsible to obsess over President Biden's tendency to mangle a couple of words in a speech while Donald Trump is out there sounding detached from reality. Biden, who is old, at least makes sense. Trump, who also is old, rants like someone you'd cross the street to avoid. We in the media have failed by becoming inured to Trump's verbal incontinence - not just the rapid-fire lies and revenge-seeking threats, but also the frightening glimpses into a mind that is, evidently, unwell. In...
School segregation has been a 25-year catastrophe for Minnesota's children. In the 21st century, at least 100,000 Black and brown schoolchildren in the Twin Cities have been deprived of the chance to attend integrated schools because the state's school integration policy was gutted in 1999. Segregation could have been avoided here as it was avoided in Portland and Seattle, places with similar school demographics. These segregated schools ruined children's educational and economic opportunities....
Justin Jefferson's record-setting contract is many things. Important. Historic. Impressive. Encouraging. Eye-popping. But when the news broke on Monday morning that the Minnesota Vikings were going to pay their star receiver $140 million over four years, there was one thing it shouldn't have been: Surprising. Despite months, if not years, of silly speculation about the Vikings trading Jefferson, or Jefferson wanting to leave the team, this deal was never not going to happen. The Vikings are not...
As jurors deliberated in Manhattan this week to reach a verdict in a former president's hush money fraud case, New Yorker art editor Françoise Mouly was wrestling with Donald Trump fatigue. "We are circumspect about publishing any more Trump covers. No one wants to see or hear about him anymore," recalled Mouly, who last year put courtroom artist Jane Rosenberg's Trump sketch on the publication's cover - a first for the magazine. Yet knowing that a historic verdict was imminent, Mouly and New...
Donald Trump continued his ignominious career of firsts Thursday, becoming the only former U.S. president to be convicted of felony crimes - 34, to be exact - for falsifying business records to influence an election in a hush-money scheme involving a porn actor. The jury deliberated for just 9½ hours before returning its verdict - guilty on all counts. Trump reacted as he always does, without any sense of responsibility or contrition but rather with false claims that the trial was a...
Donald Trump's criminal trial in New York, where he faces 34 counts of falsifying business records to hide a 2016 hush money payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, was rife with liars last week. On the witness stand was Michael Cohen, an admitted liar who claims that part of his job was to be Trump's so-called fixer for years. Now that Cohen turned on his old boss, he is the prosecutor's key witness. Outside of the court, GOP members of Congress - including the speaker of the House, the...
Before Minnesotans decisively rejected him on Election Day 2020, then-President Donald Trump — at a Duluth campaign stop — uttered music to our ears: "If I lose Minnesota, I'm never coming back, I don't care. I'm never coming back!" That wasn't the first lie that Trump told Minnesotans and it certainly won't be the last as he prepares to headline a fundraiser for the Minnesota Republican Party on Friday. After being swept out of power in 2022, the Minnesota GOP should be sprinting away from Trump and his MAGA agenda. Instead, they continue to...
Every year since National Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons Day was established on May 5, 2021, either I or one of my coworkers have spent the day covering the missing murdered Indigenous women's event here in Bemidji. Over the years we've seen the event grow into something increasingly impactful and moving to be a part of. The events are usually attended by several hundred people of all ages from around the region. Sometimes we see a few city councilors and occasionally we will see a...
Have you ever wanted to make a difference in someone's life while filling a critical need in your community? Becoming a foster parent might not be the first thought that comes to mind. But if you have the capacity to open your heart to help, combined with a desire to create a safe and stable environment for children in crisis, it's a choice that can change their lives – and yours. The goal is always to prevent foster care placement and for children to remain safely with their own family. When t...
You can measure the elation surrounding the Minnesota arrival of basketball star Alissa Pili in the beat of drums, the jingles of a dress and the tears streaming down a young mother's face. "I'm gonna cry," Kayla Leo said. "No, I don't want to cry. Why am I gonna cry? No, I don't want to cry." Spoiler alert: Leo cried. The Plymouth mom was courtside at Target Center, dabbing away tears as she explained the significance of Pili's first-round WNBA draft by the Minnesota Lynx. Sitting beside her,...
There is a recent rebuttal to a new book in Nature, The great rewiring: is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?, stating that, "Two things can be independently true about social media. First, that there is no evidence that using these platforms is rewiring children's brains or driving an epidemic of mental illness. Second, that considerable reforms to these platforms are required, given how much time young people spend on them. The onset and development of mental...
Many Minnesota partisans have recently been saying out loud what many of us have said for years: Precinct caucuses are a major contributor to the angry, political division that permeates politics today. As a former statewide endorsed candidate and longtime Republican activist, I can testify that caucuses serve no meaningful purpose in selecting qualified candidates or restoring civil debate in our state's political realm. It's time for them to go. For this to happen, the Legislature and...
The social media platform X (formerly Twitter) has an uncanny knack for producing a main character every day. Someone who was previously unknown or at least not a full-on celebrity gets elevated because of something they did, and the moment goes viral - especially if it is captured on video. The next day, the process repeats itself with a new main character. On Wednesday, Indianapolis Star columnist Gregg Doyel put himself into "main character" territory. At the introductory news conference for...
The conjecture of consciousness for generative AI is not of its equality to human consciousness. It one of data storage, where, in comparison to human memory, if the feature [vector] interactions of large language models [to digital memory] are similar to how the human memory is conscious of its contents. Consciousness is defined as subjective experience. But subjective experience is not a function like memory, emotion, feeling or modulation. Subjective experience [or self-awareness] applies across functions, making it a qualifier of...
DENVER—The National Endowment for Financial Education® (NEFE®) releases the results of its annual opinion poll on the financial well-being of U.S. adults. The new data provides general differences in respondents’ views of their current financial well-being compared to their outlook for the future, exhibited by 68% of respondents saying the current quality of their financial life is what they expected or better (“what they expected”: 46%; “better than expected”: 22%), while 69% state they are at least somewhat concerned that their money will la...
Eight community newspapers - the Hutchinson Leader, Litchfield Independent Review, Chaska Herald, Chanhassen Villager, Jordan Independent, the Shakopee Valley News, Prior Lake American and Savage Pacer - will cease to exist later this month. Their demise due to corporate greed was set in motion last week by Denver-based company MediaNews Group, which is owned by the soulless hedge fund Alden Global Capital. Litchfield's population is 6,600, and Meeker County's is 23,500. Hutchinson's is 14,700,...
Friday afternoon featured a rally at the Minnesota State Capitol that was advertised as a political demonstration against a pair of bills presently before the Legislature. HF 4780/SF 5080 would give state-owned land within one mile of Upper Red Lake back to the Red Lake Band. HF 4304/SF 3480 would give the White Earth Band first option to buy tax-forfeited land. There was a small crowd on the main floor of the rotunda. About a hundred people came from different parts of the state to hear four...
Half a century ago, no one paid attention when my friends and I played basketball. We were kicked off the court, but shoved back in the game, clearing the lane for Paige Bueckers, Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese and other contemporary stars. Over the decades, women's opportunities grew thousandfold with media exposure. Today girls never question their right to play ball. Born at the turn of the 21st century, Caitlin Clark grew up with female sports role models. As early as second grade, she wrote...
The latest surprise from the Legislature, which is full of them, is that bills have been introduced to give the state-owned portion of Upper Red Lake and a 1-mile buffer of state-owned land surrounding it to the Red Lake Band of Chippewa. For good measure, the proposals also would award the band the 84,000-acre Red Lake State Forest, which abuts the southeast corner of Upper Red Lake. The DFL-controlled Legislature might or might not have the votes to pull this off, but you have to concede...
Forecasts at press time suggest snow. Lots of it. Historic amounts. When you hear dire warnings of a snowpocalypse barreling toward the metro, do you: 1. Check the snowblower, make sure you have milk, eggs and toilet paper - not the best omelet, to be honest - and prepare for a day spent inside watching the elements lash the trees and smother the earth. 2. Shrug and figure "it'll be a dusting in Blaine." At some point we began to lose confidence in predictions of big, bad snowstorms. How? Why?...
Look what you made us do. We named a snowplow Taylor Drift. Every year, the Minnesota Department of Transportation invites the public to come up with a few good snowplow names. Every year, the public comes up with a few thousand. On Tuesday, the governor, the lieutenant governor, the MnDOT commissioner and zero snowflakes showed up to reveal the winners of MnDOT's 2023-2024 Name A Snowplow contest (Taylor's version). https://www.startribune.com/not-much-of-a-winter-in-minneso...
After 28 years of owning a resort on Mille Lacs, Kevin McQuoid sold his business a couple of years ago. But he still knows how important ice fishing was on that big lake to his operation's bottom line. "About 60% of our annual income on Mille Lacs came from about Christmas until the end of February,'' McQuoid said. "Once good ice gets on the lake, you really have to push it until the end of the winter season to make the business work.'' The problem this year is that good ice, varying between 8...
