Bob Collins retired from Minnesota Public Radio in 2019 after 12 years of writing NewsCut and pointing out to complainants that posts weren’t news stories. A son of Massachusetts, he was a news editor 1992-1998, created the MPR News regional website in 1999, invented the popular Select A Candidate, started several blogs, and every day lamented that his Minnesota Fantasy Legislature project never caught on.
Last evening, Eric Saathoff, a teacher who lives in the Payne-Phalen neighborhood, demonstrated what he calls ‘the pedestrian experience’ on St. Paul’s Maryland Avenue. It could’ve been anywhere in the city, however. It was hard crossing the four-lane section of the road. It wouldn’t take much to get killed. Read more →
West St. Paul and South St. Paul have passed ordinances limiting the housing options for people who are low-income and disabled. One politician insists it’s not discrimination. Read more →
Presuming that most people aren’t big supporters of drunk drivers, one might think being less lenient on DUI offenders (1 in 7 Minnesota drivers has a DUI conviction) would be a slam dunk for state politicians.
So why is it relatively easy for people to still be driving after 9 arrests? Read more →
Someone called the cops in Asheville, N.C., over the weekend because some people in a neighborhood built a home-brewed slip and slide in the street, which should immediately lead most of America to exclaim ‘why didn’t I ever think of that?’
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Shawn and Shamus Evans rolled into Minneapolis today enroute to Lake Charles, Louisiana.
They left Moorhead last week with the aim of running along the Mississippi River to support Ainsley’s Angels of America, providing running chairs to children along the way.
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The parade in Wisconsin took two minutes and covered 88 yards. Read more →
Apparently, our species took a giant step forward on Friday and nobody realized it, at least until today when the Washington Post reported on the work of John Pratt, the chief of quantum measurement at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which oversees weights and measures in the United States. He and his colleagues Read more →
Were those bomb-throwing leftists at NPR trying to undermine the nation and start a revolution? What could possibly explain this kind of talk on the 4th of July? Read more →
Over 190 immigrants from 59 countries became American citizens at the fourth annual Independence Day naturalization ceremony hosted by the New York Public Library. Read more →
‘For me it was kind of like a moment of realizing that I didn’t have to just walk away,’ student Camille Denton said when encountering a vandalized civil rights memorial. So she and her friends fought back. Read more →
Although he’s given credit for the assertion, Thomas Jefferson never actually said ‘an educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people.’ Maybe he knew better. The country has now survived 241 years, most of them with a sizeable percentage of the population having no clue about the origins of the nation.
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Wisconsin Public Radio reported that farmers in western Wisconsin have been visited by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and warned they’ll be back, suggesting the possibility of sweeping raids that farmers say could weaken the local economy.
Dairy workers around Durand, Wis., decided to leave after rumors swept the community that ICE was in town.
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The Duluth News Tribune’s John Lundy reports the Paris tradition of attaching a padlock as a symbol of love has made it to Duluth. Couples write their names on the lock and then attach it to three pillars on the Lakewalk in Canal Park.
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David Desper, of Pennsylvania, would have gotten to wherever he was going about 10 seconds later had he let Bianca Robinson merge as two highway lanes became one. Instead, he shot her in the head and will likely be right on time for prison. Read more →
Ayaz Virji could be forgiven if he’d followed his instinct and moved his family out of Dawson, Minn. Virgji, the medical director of a local hospital, was upset that his community had voted for Donald Trump, spurred on by the candidate’s portrayal of Muslims as terrorists. Virji was the first Muslim to move to Dawson Read more →
Bob Collins