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.
It might not look like it, but this might well be the greatest example of airmanship in the history of aviation. It was 25 years ago this weekend, that pilot Al Haines put United Flight 232 down in Sioux City, after losing most ability to control the plane earlier in the flight. By all accounts, Read more →
Agnes McKee has got some game. She’s 105 years old and yesterday, with one hand on her walker, she did this in San Diego. Well, of course, she threw a nice pitch. She’d been practicing. Her goal, she says, is to walk again without a walker.
Theoretically, you should be twice as safe on an airplane today now that the tax — I’m sorry, “fee” — for providing security is doubling. Good one. It turns out — you might want to sit down for this — that it’s merely a money grab. Comparatively little of the extra money is going toward Read more →
The Green Line project put stations after the intersection, meaning trains have to stop twice: once for the signal, and once for the station. Read more →
It’s an aviation truism that when a pilot has a bad day and needs to make an emergency landing, it’s best to get right back on the horse. Frank Fierro, 75, had a bad day last week when he landed his single-engine ultralight Challenger plane on a highway on Long Island. It wasn’t a big Read more →
If there can’t be a nightspot honoring Bob Dylan on the Iron Range, can anything survive on the Iron Range? Aaron J. Brown writes on his Minnesota Brown blog today that a crowdstarter campaign has kicked off to reopen Zimmy’s, the Hibbing night spot and restaurant that closed abruptly last spring. In truth, this campaign Read more →
In the aftermath of the downing of a Malaysian jetliner over Ukraine yesterday, news organizations were quick to reference Korean Airlines Flight 007, shot down by a then-Soviet Union fighter jet over disputed land in September 1983. Not mentioned quite as often, however, was the time the United States shot down a commercial jetliner. The Read more →
Louise “WeeZee” Miner of Bloomington was legally blind but she said she always could tell what a horse was doing at the Minnesota State Fair horse ring, where she passed out the ribbons. Read more →
Why did NBC pull a reporter from Gaza as Israel launched its ground offensive against Hamas?
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After the apparent shooting down of a civilian airliner over Ukraine today, many airlines are joining the directive to stay away from Ukraine. Read more →
As usual, Performance Today host Fred Child provides today’s vicarious escape from the monotony of the cubicle farm. Just not the way he usually does. Child took his flight while on break at the Aspen Music Festival this week. (h/t: Brad Althoff)
NPR is backing off its plan that many journalists thought was intended to take the teeth out of its ombudsman position. Read more →
Ten percent of teachers surveyed spend more than $1,000 of their own money each year on their classroom. Read more →
You can probably understand why Nathan Steffel didn’t want to remember his daughter like this. But he didn’t have much choice. “Since she was in the hospital her whole life we never were able to get a photo without all her tubes,” he wrote this week on Reddit. His daughter died in a Cincinnati children’s Read more →
A woman who worked at a McDonald’s in South Carolina probably would’ve been happier leaving her nine-year-old daughter home alone, but the home was burglarized and the laptop which might’ve provided a little entertainment was stolen. So Debra Harrell dropped the girl off at a park about a mile from where she worked. The mother Read more →
Bob Collins