Bob Collins
It’s a reminder that the people are not necessarily bystanders to what happens to businesses and the icons of their region. Communities get whatever communities will support. Read more →
MPR News Reflections and observations on the news
Archives for December 2016
Tracy Mumford
A few favorite finds from stacks of 1930’s newspapers stuffed into the floorboards Read more →
There are angels who walk among us and if you want to glimpse a few, look up sometime on the worst of nights when you hear a helicopter. Nobody would fly in such conditions unless there was someone who needed help.
They’re the crew of medical evacuation helicopters, and they include people like Miles Weske of Nisswa, who is going back to work on Sunday, an impressive fact considering that he was almost killed in September when bad weather forced the North Memorial Air Ambulance to the ground north of the Alexandria airport. Read more →
Assuming I-94 and I-90 are the obvious choices for tolls in Wisconsin, why not extend the practice right into Minnesota too, shifting more of the burden for highway upkeep to those who use them the most? Read more →
So, there was this snowy owl minding its own business on a light pole in Duluth at dawn this morning, Richard Hoeg writes on his blog, 365 Days of Birds.
A little while after Hoeg found the owl, so did the crows.
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If there’s a worse form of transportation than an airline flight these days, what is it?
There might be some that are slower, but the chances are it doesn’t come with the disruptive passenger, which has suddenly become as common on flights as the person who tries to shove a cello in the overhead bin.
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‘We’ll call you when we get down.’ Those were the last words between a pilot and air traffic control shortly before a plane crash near Dayton Beach, Fla., that claimed the lives of two west-central Minnesota residents on Tuesday night. Read more →
Malcolm McDonald, 81, died on Christmas Day, the Austin Daily Herald says. He wanted to die on his own terms, but Minnesota has other ideas on this sort of thing. Read more →
The Grand Forks Herald suggests that with Republican majorities in the House and Senate, the Sunday alcohol ban, designed to protect small liquor stores and the Teamsters who deliver the product to them, could fall. Read more →
Predictably, perhaps, we’ve waited until the last couple of days of 2016 to apply the brakes to the “2016 is the worst year ever” movement.
I’m a glass-half-full kind of guy so this video today reaffirmed something I’ve long believed: If something’s getting done, it’s probably science. Read more →
The court overturned a Minnesota Court of Appeals decision in the case of Nina Wilson, who indicated on a job application for a mortage services company in 2014 that she completed high school via a GED. She was fired five months later when a background check did not find any evidence she completed school. Read more →
We’ll never again likely have the opportunity to witness six living presidents all together. The only other time we’ve had six living presidents is between 1992 and 1994 — Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton — and I’ve yet to find a photo of all of them together. Read more →
One fairly wonders what threat to the self-esteem a Little Free Library in Minneapolis posed to the person who decided to burn it this week. Read more →
As 2016 exits, we’ll take hope anywhere we can find it.
Today we find it in Bahrain, a Muslim-majority monarchy.
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Had we known that it would be her last interview on public radio, maybe we could have dived deeper into the richness of Carrie Fisher’s life than her role as Princess Leia when it aired on NPR’s Fresh Air last month. Read more →