Bob CollinsPrivacy rules are requiring the public to try to piece together the shards of information stemming from an alleged rape in a University of Minnesota dorm last Sunday morning. Read more →
MPR News Reflections and observations on the news
Crime and Justice
A Madison, Wisc., family can no longer stay in their home because of death threats, and it’s a local TV station’s fault.
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Sports talk radio host Jeff Dubay has been alternately an inspiration and a reminder of the insidiousness of drug use in his recovery from a cocaine addiction that cost him his career and his freedom years ago. Read more →
Hands down, the hardest part of parenting — aside from teenagers — is how quickly people will judge your parenting, as if parents don’t already judge themselves enough.
Take the woman who tried to slap some sense into her son at the riots in Baltimore, and has gotten plenty of national attention for it.
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Images that aren’t likely to be on the front page of newspapers and websites when telling the story of what’s happening in Baltimore.
Abdi Warsame ridiculed ex-Sen. Norm Coleman’s assertion that the large Somali community in the state could lead to “the land of 10,000 terrorists.” Read more →
The Minnesota Court of Appeals Monday tossed out a lawsuit from a former doctor at the St. Peter psychiatric hospital who argued that an MPR investigation on the treatment of patients there was based on state data that should’ve been private. Read more →
Apparently, prosecutors believe that whether Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the man who murdered people at the Boston Marathon in 2013, should live or die hinges somewhat on a photograph. Read more →
A Star Tribune letter writer today wondered how it is a young man suspected of running off to join the Islamic State was able to withdraw $5,000 on a debit card for financial aid at his college. Read more →
The great Spotted Cow threat is over now that authorities have put a quick stop to a Maple Grove bar’s bootlegging operation. Spotted Cow beer is supposed to only be sold in Wisconsin. Read more →
If there was any confusion, the Minnesota Court of Appeals cleared it up today: The car wash receipt you get at the gas station is only good for 30 days.
It wasn’t for lack of trying by Don Wells, who bought a $7.99 car wash at the Holiday in Blaine in January 2012 and didn’t use it, even though it said on the receipt that the code expired in 30 days.
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We’ll find out more later today about the arrests of several people in Minneapolis and San Diego in a continuing investigation of the recruitment of potential terrorists. Read more →
Minnesota is getting another test of whether First Amendment rights extend to private functions on public property.
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Joan Cheever has a non-profit food truck and every Tuesday for about a year, she feeds the homeless near a park in San Antonio.
Last week she got a ticket because it’s against city law. Read more →
Yesterday’s gyrocopter flight into the heart of Washington, DC, which illuminated the incompetence of those entrusted to provide air defense over the nation’s capital, has also started a debate in journalism circles around this question: What duty — if any — did a newspaper have to alert authorities? Read more →