Laura McCallum, MPR’s managing editor for daily news, is one of the 10,000 people volunteering during Super Bowl week. She’s documenting her experience on NewsCut. Check out part 1, part 2 and part 3. I know you’ve all been wondering (and many of you have been asking) if I got bathroom cleaning duty again. Nope! Read more →
MPR News Reflections and observations on the news
People doing good
Laura McCallum, MPR’s managing editor for daily news, is one of the 10,000 people volunteering during Super Bowl week. She’ll be documenting her experience on NewsCut. Check out part 1 and part 2. Finally, more than five months after I interviewed to be one of the 10,000 Crew 52 Super Bowl volunteers it was time Read more →
Where football is concerned, it’s getting to be that charity begins on the road.
A week after Minnesota fans inundated a New Orleans Saints player’s charitable foundation with cash in admiration for his sportsmanship, Philadelphia fans — some of them, anyway — are pouring money into Minnesota Vikings coach Mike Zimmer’s charitable foundation, too. Read more →
A chance meeting at a Kohl’s in Duluth sends a hat off to help another cancer patient. Read more →
Between the Minnesota Vikings victory on Sunday, and the possibility of an end to the program that allowed people brought to the U.S. illegally as children to stay, Minnesotans are in a giving mood. Read more →
Vikings fans noticed that Thomas Morstead, the punter for the Saints, quickly returned to the field for a meaningless extra-point attempt, after his team was beaten in Sunday’s game against New Orleans. So they started donating money to his charitable foundation. Read more →
Not much can make a person feel better about the future than seeing a fifth-grader tear up at the story of injustice.
Read more →
John Bond, a soldier in the Minnesota National Guard, needed a kidney. The Apple Valley man’s hero is dead, shot in the head on a street in Pittsburgh. Anton Kemaev, of Siberia, wasn’t a target; he was just in the wrong place. Read more →
This video is racing across the InterTubes today. A group of snowmobilers came upon a stranded moose on Saturday in Newfoundland.
They dug it out. Read more →
You look like you could use a reminder that what you hear on the news isn’t all there is to real life. So, here.
Read more →
Bootstrap Comrades, an organization in Sauk Center that helps veterans, had pretty much run out of money to buy toys for veterans’ families for Christmas, but volunteer Julie Peterson knows the power of social media when harnessed for good.
Read more →
Trisha Murphy, single mother of four in Sullivan, Maine who’s picking up shifts at the local Denny’s while carrying a course load at school, was fretting on Saturday. Her Christmas shopping wasn’t done, her car had been towed with a $735 bill and she’d barely made it to work on time. Read more →
Sharon Zimmerman, a University of Minnesota graduate, couldn’t sleep one night in early October. So, up late (or early), she went outside for a respite. That’s when she came face to face with the ‘Tubbs fire’ in Santa Rosa, a sudden wind-whipped wildfire that wiped out the California suburb.
Read more →
We’re entering the slow news season and as I patrol the internet looking for items of interest, I’m noticing various stories in many states declaring someone a person of the year.
I’ve thought about opening up a competition for such a thing for NewsCut readers but then decided not to bother because we’re too conditioned to think about politicians and people in the news on an ongoing basis and, well, they bore me after a year of coverage. Read more →
If you’ve never been in the position an 80-year-old Amery, Wis., man was in earlier this month, trust me, you will be someday. Let’s hope by then someone in downtown St. Paul will notice that you’ve been looking for your car for five hours and give you a hand.
Read more →