Charlie Kirk, a conservative activist and close ally of President Donald Trump who played an influential role in rallying young Republican voters, was shot and killed Wednesday at a Utah college event in what the governor called a political assassination carried out from a rooftop.

“This is a dark day for our state. It’s a tragic day for our nation," said Utah Gov. Spencer Cox. "I want to be very clear this is a political assassination.”

No one was in custody late Wednesday, though authorities were searching for a new person of interest, according to a law enforcement official familiar with the matter who was not authorized to discuss the situation by name and spoke on condition of anonymity. Authorities had earlier provided evolving information on the status of the manhunt, with FBI Director Kash Patel initially saying on social media that a “subject” had been taken into custody, only to later say that the person had been released after being questioned.

Authorities did not immediately identify the person who had been in custody, a motive or any criminal charge.

But the circumstances of the shooting drew renewed attention to an escalating threat of political violence in the United States that in the last several years has cut across the ideological spectrum. The assassination drew bipartisan condemnation, but a national reckoning over ways to prevent political grievances from manifesting as deadly violence seemed elusive.

Videos posted to social media from Utah Valley University show Kirk speaking into a handheld microphone while sitting under a white tent emblazoned with the slogans “The American Comeback” and “Prove Me Wrong.” A single shot rings out and Kirk can be seen reaching up with his right hand as a large volume of blood gushes from the left side of his neck. Stunned spectators are heard gasping and screaming before people start to run away. The Associated Press was able to confirm the videos were taken at Sorensen Center courtyard on the Utah Valley University campus.

Kirk was speaking at a debate hosted by his nonprofit political organization. Immediately before the shooting, Kirk was taking questions from an audience member about mass shootings and gun violence.

“Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?” the person asked. Kirk responded, “Too many.”

The questioner followed up: “Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last 10 years?”

“Counting or not counting gang violence?” Kirk asked.

Then a single shot rang out. The shooter, who Cox pledged would be held accountable in a state with the death penalty, wore dark clothing and fired from a roof on campus some distance away.

The death was announced on social media by Trump, who praised the 31-year-old Kirk, the co-founder and CEO of the youth organization Turning Point USA, as “Great, and even Legendary.”

“No one understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States of America better than Charlie,” Trump posted on his Truth Social account.

Utah Valley University said the campus was immediately evacuated and remained closed. Classes were canceled until further notice. Those still on campus were asked to stay in place until police officers could safely escort them off campus. Armed officers walked around the neighborhood bordering the campus, knocking on doors and asking for information on the shooter.

Officers were seen looking at a photo on their phones and showing it to people to see if they recognized a person of interest.

The event, billed as the first stop on Kirk's “The American Comeback Tour,” had generated a polarizing campus reaction. An online petition calling for university administrators to bar Kirk from appearing received nearly 1,000 signatures. The university issued a statement last week citing First Amendment rights and affirming its “commitment to free speech, intellectual inquiry, and constructive dialogue.”

Last week, Kirk posted on X images of news clips showing his visit was sparking controversy. He wrote, “What’s going on in Utah?”

The shooting drew swift condemnation across the political aisle as Democratic officials joined Trump, who ordered flags lowered to half-staff and issued a presidential proclamation, and Republican allies of Kirk in decrying the violence.

“The attack on Charlie Kirk is disgusting, vile, and reprehensible,” Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who last March hosted Kirk on his podcast, posted on X.

“The murder of Charlie Kirk breaks my heart. My deepest sympathies are with his wife, two young children, and friends,” said Gabrielle Giffords, the former Democratic congresswoman who was wounded in a 2011 shooting in her Arizona district.

The shooting appeared poised to become part of a spike of political violence that has touched a range of ideologies and representatives of both major parties. The attacks include the assassination of a Minnesota state lawmaker and her husband at their house in June, the firebombing of a Colorado parade to demand Hamas release hostages, and a fire set at the house of Pennsylvania’s governor, who is Jewish, in April. The most notorious of these events is the shooting of Trump during a campaign rally last year.

Former Utah congressman Jason Chaffetz, a Republican who was at Wednesday's event, said in an interview on Fox News Channel that he heard one shot and saw Kirk go back.

“It seemed like it was a close shot,” Chaffetz said, who seemed shaken as he spoke.

He said there was a light police presence at the event and Kirk had some security but not enough.

“Utah is one of the safest places on the planet,” he said. “And so we just don’t have these types of things.”

Turning Point was founded in suburban Chicago in 2012 by Kirk, then 18, and William Montgomery, a tea party activist, to proselytize on college campuses for low taxes and limited government. It was not an immediate success.

But Kirk’s zeal for confronting liberals in academia eventually won over an influential set of conservative financiers.

Despite early misgivings, Turning Point enthusiastically backed Trump after he clinched the GOP nomination in 2016. Kirk served as a personal aide to Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, during the general election campaign.

Soon, Kirk was a regular presence on cable TV, where he leaned into the culture wars and heaped praise on the then-president. Trump and his son were equally effusive and often spoke at Turning Point conferences.

The Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe signed a compact agreement Wednesday morning with Gov. Tim Walz at the state’s Capitol.

The agreement recognizes the Mille Lacs Band’s authority to regulate and sell cannabis outside its land in central Minnesota. 

News came early Wednesday when Aarik Robertson, general manager of Lake Leaf, the tribe’s cannabis company, made a brief announcement at the Minnesota Cannabis Real Estate Conference taking place in Golden Valley. 

A spokesperson for the Office of Cannabis Management confirmed the signing of the agreement. In an interview with MPR News, OCM director Eric Taubel said that the timing of the new compact could help meet the growing demand for cannabis flower from retailers licensed by the state. 

“This compact paves the way for those unique partnerships that we haven’t seen in other states where a small family-owned business can be selling cannabis grown on a tribal reservation in the state market to state citizens,” Taubel said. 

Taubel said that as of Wednesday the state has issued more than 30 licenses to cannabis retailers. 

Virgil Wind, chief executive of the Mille Lacs Band, signed the agreement on behalf of the tribe.

The band currently owns and operates two dispensaries at temporary locations within the boundaries of the Mille Lacs reservation. Another dispensary on tribal land is in the planning stage. Wind says the band will work toward building brick and mortar stores for those businesses. He believes Mille Lacs Band’s growing operation is poised to supply its own dispensaries and supply cannabis wholesale to state-licensed retailers. 

The band currently operates a 50,000-square-foot cannabis grow facility near Onamia. The agreement includes a provision that allows the band to sell cannabis flower wholesale. 

“When looking at the entire cannabis market within Minnesota, I don’t think our intent was ever to own the market, but we really wanted to be a key player within it,” said Wind. “We’re still in the growing phase, but we’re doing good things over there. A lot of [cannabis] flower is being produced.” 

Taubel said the agreement is comparable to the compact signed in May between White Earth Nation and the state. Taubel said the differences between the two agreements are “more style than substance.” Taubel described the agreement as one that “captures the general principles that the two parties intend to adhere to.” 

The Mille Lacs compact will allow the band's regulatory agency to issue as many as eight licenses to off-reservation dispensaries. 

Like the White Earth agreement, the Mille Lacs Band must also set rules for sales outside tribal lands that “meet or exceed” the state regulations. The Mille Lacs Band has opted to use the same “seed-to-sale" software used by the state to track regulatory compliance. 

Wind said that Mille Lacs does not have a current plan to open a dispensary outside the reservation. Instead, he says the band plans to focus on its cultivation business.  

The agreement: 

• Recognizes tribal sovereignty and immunity, affirming cannabis activity on tribal land remains outside state jurisdiction  

• Contains language that allows Mille Lacs Band to amend the compact if more favorable terms are offered to other tribal nations in the future  

• Allows the tribe and OCM to negotiate a Memorandum of Understanding to address OCM licensing of a tribally owned testing facility 

• Allows the Mille Lacs tribal cannabis enterprise to purchase cannabis from state-licensed wholesalers 

• Provides potency limitations on cannabis products  

• Provides a license for Mille Lacs cannabis enterprise to transport cannabis on state land and provides guidelines for advertising 

Wind said he was excited to sign the compact. 

“It really felt like we were entering into, you know, a partnership, right? We both have a shared goal,” said Wind. 

Wind says he sees the compact as another opportunity for the band to expand its footprint in the industry — a strategy that he said has already created jobs for tribal members. Wind estimated the tribe has created as many as 75 new jobs.  

Under the terms of the compact, the Mille Lacs Band and the state will negotiate a tax agreement for sharing sales and taxes collected from tribally owned cannabis businesses operating outside the reservation.  

Tax agreements are expected in the coming months. 

A former Minnesota teacher of the year was found guilty Wednesday of sexually abusing a child while she was his student in 2017.

Soon after the guilty verdict was read aloud by the judge, a Hennepin County sheriff’s deputy entered the courtroom to put Abdul J. Wright, 39, in handcuffs. He walked Wright out of the courtroom and into custody, where Wright awaits sentencing next month.

Under state guidelines, Wright will likely face 12 to14 years of prison for first-degree criminal sexual conduct.

Last year, county prosecutors charged Wright after the mother of his former student reported the abuse. The mother recorded two phone conversations from May 2024 in which Wright “admitted to having sexual intercourse” with the victim, according to court documents.

The woman, now 22, was in eighth grade at the time. Wright was her language arts teacher and had been named the state’s teacher of the year months prior. She was 14 years old.

MPR News is not naming the woman to protect her privacy.

Last month, she testified that Wright singled her out. She said he asked her to babysit his three school age daughters at school while he attended meetings, and that he worked to gain the trust of her mother. Wright began texting her inappropriately in December 2016, commenting on her looks.

“He made comments about my clothes, how they fit,” she told Assistant Hennepin County Attorney Evan Powell.

“How did those conversations make you feel at the time?” Powell asked.

“Definitely confused. I felt like the dynamic was still like I’m a child and he’s an adult. I’m not really sure what’s happening, but if he’s making it OK I guess it’s fine,” she replied.

She said he sexually assaulted her multiple times, often in classrooms at Harvest Best Academy after school hours.

Wright taught at Harvest Best for more than a decade. He later taught English at St. Louis Park High School and left the district in early 2024 when the allegations came to light.

On Wednesday, Sharon Evans, the victim’s grandmother, said she was happy “justice been served,” but said she’s still awaiting answers from the Minneapolis Police Department over what happened to the police reports she filed in 2017 over the abuse.

At the time, she said she was going to the police station twice a week to see who was looking into the case.

”Well, eight years later, ain’t nobody called me yet,” she said.

In March, the founder of what is now Harvest Best Academy was removed by the school board for allegedly failing to do anything after parents and staff brought forward complaints about Wright. A separate civil suit is pending against Harvest Best and Wright.

The victim’s father had also sought a restraining order against Wright and reached a settlement agreement limiting Wright’s contact with her in 2017.

In 2021, Aaron Hjermstad, a teacher who worked for a school now under Harvest Best Academy, was convicted for sexually abusing four boys.

He’s currently serving a 12-year prison sentence. Last month, he pleaded guilty to sexually abusing 12 other victims, all under the age of 13, while coaching and teaching at two charter schools, including Harvest Best. He agreed to a sentence of life in prison, with a sentencing scheduled for November.

A 24-hour statewide sexual violence and domestic violence hotline is available in Minnesota. You can call Minnesota Day One at (866) 223-1111 or text (612) 399-9995.

A judge on Wednesday sentenced the woman who bought the guns that her romantic partner used to kill three first responders in Burnsville to nearly four years in prison.

Shannon Gooden used two AR-15-style rifles that Ashley Dyrdahl purchased to kill officers Paul Elmstrand and Matthew Ruge and firefighter-paramedic Adam Finseth on Feb. 18, 2024. Police responded to the home that Gooden and Dyrdahl share on a report that Gooden was sexually assaulting someone.

Gooden was ineligible to own firearms because of a 2008 felony assault conviction. Dyrdahl, 36, pleaded guilty in January to two counts of straw purchasing.

“This tragedy has changed the molecular structure of my soul,” Burnsville Police Sgt. Adam Medlicott said during a two-and-a-half hour hearing in a St. Paul federal courtroom Wednesday. Medlicott suffered two gunshot wounds in the attack and was released from the hospital the next day.

“My children get to have their father, my wife gets to have her husband. I’m the lucky one,” Medlicott said, addressing Judge Jerry Blackwell by courtroom custom but directing his comments to Dyrdahl.

“You took that away from these families. You may not have pulled the trigger, but you literally put the guns in his hands.”

Medlicott added that the rifles Dyrdahl purchased were “weapons to defeat our armor, weapons for war, not target practice.”

“This is a situation a mother should never have to be in,” said Christi Henke Ruge, the mother of Matthew Ruge, who was 27 when he was killed. Ruge said that the acts of courage by her son and the other responders saved the lives of the children in Dyrdahl’s home.

“All of her children are alive but one of mine is dead,” Ruge said.

Ruge added that Matthew’s father, Sean Ruge, died unexpectedly of a heart attack at age 56 as a result of the emotional toll that the attack took on their family.

Tara Finseth, whose husband Adam, 40, was also killed in the attack, said in a victim impact statement read by a friend that “every day since then has been a living nightmare.”

She said her husband survived deployments to Iraq and a cancer scare related to his military service but was killed in his own community because of the “bad decisions of two monsters.”

Finseth said not only did Dyrdahl illegally purchase the guns for Gooden, she failed to warn police about the large stockpile of ammunition that Gooden kept.

“If she had truly taken responsibility for her actions, Adam, Matt and Paul would still be here today,” Finseth said.

Cindy Elmstrand-Castruita, who lost her husband Paul, 27, in the shooting, said she’s struggled with her mental health since the attack.

“My life has become a nightmare. My daughter asks for her father every day,” Elmstrand-Castruita said. “This is the legacy that Ashley has created for my family. This is not just a mistake but a choice. My children not only lost one parent, but almost two.”

Dyrdahl, reading from a prepared statement said “Not a day goes by that I don’t carry the weight of this. I pray every day for the families of Matt, Adam and Paul. I never could have imagined Shannon would have used the weapons I purchased to cause so much harm.”

Dyrdahl also pledged to produce public service announcements and speak publicly about the dangers of the straw purchasing of firearms. 

The 45-month sentence that Blackwell imposed is slightly longer than the 41 months that the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office requested.

The judge acknowledged the domestic abuse that Dyrdahl faced at Gooden’s hands but said that Gooden did not directly force Dyrdahl to purchase weapons for him, and the “trauma narrative doesn’t square with repeated transactions over months.”

“Mr. Gooden’s conduct cannot excuse Ms. Dyrdahl’s choices. Ms. Dyrdahl still had agency, she could have said no,” Blackwell added.

Dyrdahl’s attorney Manny Atwal asked that her client be allowed to report to prison on Oct. 7. Assistant U.S. Attorney Kristian Weir didn’t object, but Blackwell said that giving Dyrdahl several more weeks of freedom could send the wrong message about the seriousness of straw purchasing.

Blackwell ordered Dyrdahl remanded into custody immediately, and U.S. marshals led her out of the courtroom in handcuffs. 

“Accountability should begin now,” Blackwell said. “Not weeks from now.”

Though there was no mention of domestic violence in the plea agreement or at Dyrdahl’s January hearing, Minnesota court records show that in 2017, Dyrdahl had accused Gooden of abuse and asked a judge for a protection order. At least three women had filed for protection orders against Gooden.

If you or someone you know is in a dangerous situation with a partner, there is a 24-hour statewide domestic and sexual violence hotline. You can call Minnesota Day One at (866) 223-1111 or text (612) 399-9995.

Picketing continued at University of Minnesota campuses across the state on Wednesday, as hundreds of custodians, maintenance staff and food service workers remain on strike.

The university said some dining locations are closed or on limited service while the strike is underway, and that custodial services are also reduced.

Teamsters Local 320 members rejected a final contract offer from the U of M last week, and started their strike earlier this week. The union includes about 1,400 university workers.

As chants echoed from a picket line on the Twin Cities campus on Wednesday morning, cook Michael Johnson said he and his colleagues are not being offered the same pay raises as other bargaining units at the university.

“We’re just looking for fair wages and being able to live our lives. That’s all,” he said. “We don’t want anything extraordinary. We’re not asking for nothing over the top. We just want what everybody deserves, what people deserve — we come in, we work hard every day, and we just want to be shown respect for doing that.”

Johnson said food service workers already face a challenge of reduced or unpredictable hours when classes are not in session.

“I’ve been there for 26 years, so I’m able to kind of fare better than many people,” he said. “Somebody just starting, it’s very hard on them. It’s very hard if you’re just starting, and then all of a sudden you’re off in the summer, you have to navigate the summer. People have other obligations and other responsibilities, families — it’s hard.”

Justin Rodin is also a cook who was on the picket line Wednesday, and he said it’s tough to support himself and his young daughter on his salary.

“I struggle to get by, and I know that most of my coworkers struggle to get by, too,” he said. “Nobody here is expecting to get rich, but we would like to be able to live comfortably, because we know the university can afford to pay us enough to enable us to live comfortably.”

The university disputed the union’s claims about pay raises in comparison to other workers, saying that the Teamsters were offered “additional financial benefits that other employee groups may not receive,” including an annual $500 lump sum payment.

A U of M spokesperson said in a statement that the final offer was “fair and equitable.”

“Our Last, Best and Final Offer balances a good-faith commitment to our employees and the University’s responsibility to be good financial stewards at a time when higher education faces profound financial challenges,” the statement reads.

The strike also affects the Crookston, Duluth and Morris campuses, as well as some other university facilities across the state.

The university has posted a list of services affected by the strike.

Police arrested one person on a picket line on the Twin Cities campus early Wednesday. Union members said that person was standing on a roadway to block a truck from passing. A campus spokesperson said the person was cited and released, and said they weren’t a member of the union or affiliated with the university.

Mike Steenhoek, director of the Soy Transportation Coalition, thought the Mississippi could avoid a fourth consecutive year of low water levels.

More than half of American soybeans depend on the Mississippi River as an export channel. But no significant rainfall is forecast for the lower half of the Mississippi, which could hinder the transport of goods, like soybeans.

“A lot of the Midwest has received a pretty substantial amount of rainfall, particularly in spring, and really through the middle part of August, drought conditions have reversed considerably,” he said. “But yet we find ourselves in some low water conditions on the lower part of the river.”

He says that’s because of another important source of water for the Mississippi — the Ohio river. Both water bodies meet up in Cairo, Ill., after which point 60 percent of the Mississippi’s water volume comes from the Ohio.

But throughout August, rainfall in states that feed into the Ohio has decreased, increasing concerns of potential low water levels for the Mississippi.

When the river’s water levels are low, barges have to reduce their load capacity to avoid scraping the ground with their hulls. In turn, fewer barges go through the channel at the same time. All of this makes exporting soybeans through the Mississippi more expensive for producers. 

Steenhoek said farmers could instead opt to drive long distances to possibly feed into an area with livestock production or to access a rail loading facility for South American markets. 

“So there are additional options, but again, you’re migrating to less favorable options,” Steenhoek said. “Which means there’s going to be a profitability lost anytime that occurs.”

Dredging a path forward

The Department of Transportation refers to river channels such as the Mississippi “marine highways.” Gary Williams, executive director of the Upper Mississippi Waterway Association, said we should treat them as real highways.

“The waterway is vital for trade and export and it needs to be looked at as being a working waterway and maintained and kept up to date, much like our highway system on the roadways needs to be,” Williams said.

He said that means funding the army corps of engineers to continue dredging the riverbed to keep up with low water levels for barges to move up and down the river. 

He said this should happen before the river’s water levels get low in order to be prepared. 

“You’re cheering on the Corps of Engineers to keep dredging deeper and deeper, to keep all the traffic moving,” Williams said. “But we’ve seen it before with low water conditions when it returns, it requires redoubled efforts or greater from the Army Corps, to keep everything running.”

Options are running thin

If rain fails to come, soybean producers whose crops travel on the Mississippi could see themselves stuck in between a rock and a hard place.

University of Minnesota soybean agronomist Seth Naeve said the state’s farmers tend to have two main options to move their product: the first is through the Mississippi down to the Gulf of Mexico, and the second is on railways headed towards ports in the Pacific Northwest that export to Asian markets.

But China, the country’s biggest soybean buyer, hasn’t placed a single order for the upcoming market year. 

“So now, if we have soybeans that are backed up because of shipments down the Mississippi River, that puts increasing pressure from the other direction,” Naeve said. “That means farmers in between those two areas might be affected more severely because they’re caught in the pinch between both of those potential export problems.”

The Department of Agriculture projected record corn and soybean yield for 2025. With so much crop production underway, Naeve said it’s pressing for farmers to have somewhere to sell their crops to. 

“All of this stuff just tends to slow traffic at a time when we were hoping that we could push more soybeans through the Mississippi River,” Naeve said. “We don’t need additional challenges at this time.”

Two Minneapolis restaurants are featured on The New York Times list of 50 best places to eat in America.

Bûcheron, a French bistro located in south Minneapolis, and Diane’s Place, a Hmong restaurant in northeast Minneapolis, both made it onto this year’s list of top restaurants.

Both establishments have received several awards this year. Bûcheron won a James Beard Award for best new restaurant, while Diane’s Place was recently recognized as Food & Wine’s Restaurant of the Year.

Here is what the New York Times said about both restaurants: 

Bûcheron is almost certainly the country’s first French bistro to count lumberjacks as a source of inspiration. It’s a sincere claim, if you can imagine large men laying down their axes to enjoy meals adorned with juniper and pickled elderberries. The flavors, redolent of Scandinavian American home cooks and the North Woods, are part of a broader, Upper Midwestern palate staked out by the chef Adam Ritter, who owns the restaurant with his wife, Jeanie Janas Ritter. Mr. Ritter’s talents are particularly evident in the fall, when he’s turning rutabaga, butternut squash and pumpkin into dishes worthy of an anniversary. But the restaurant’s real gift to the Twin Cities is that it aims to achieve that standard in a neighborhood setting with staples you can count on, like the smoked whitefish dip and pommes dauphine that, as every regular knows, are really amazing Tater Tots.

The chef Diane Moua was a star pastry chef in Minneapolis before she opened this warm, elegant neighborhood restaurant. The barely sweet coconut-pandan croissants and crisp-edged scallion Danishes would be reason enough to visit, but there are so many more. Ms. Moua exalts the Hmong home cooking she grew up with in the Midwest with a sense of both technique and abundance, serving heaps of the pan-fried bean thread noodles that her aunties and grandmas used to cook, as well as sheer-skinned steamed pork rolls just flickering with pepper, and a deeply restorative chicken soup with thick housemade noodles. This is the kind of restaurant that turns you into a regular — if you’re lucky enough to live nearby. 

Last year, The New York Times also named two Minneapolis restaurants to its 2024 list: Vinai and Oro by Nixta.

The proposed sale of a public utility in northeast Minnesota to a private equity firm has ignited a fierce debate over how to pay for the transition to carbon-free electricity, while also scrambling traditional alliances among clean energy groups and state departments.

Allete, the parent company of Duluth-based Minnesota Power, has agreed to sell the utility for $6.2 billion to Global Infrastructure Partners — a subsidiary of the private equity firm BlackRock, which is the largest asset manager in the world. The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board would purchase a minority stake in the utility.

The Minnesota Public Utilities Commission, which regulates the state’s investor-owned utilities, is scheduled to take up the matter at a hearing later this month. It’s poised to decide on the issue–which has attracted national attention–at its meeting on Oct. 3. 

From the beginning, Minnesota Power has argued the sale is needed to provide the utility with enough capital to comply with state’s law requiring 100 percent of its electricity to be generated by carbon-free sources, such as wind and solar, by 2040. 

The company has come a long way in its transition to renewable energy. Twenty years ago, the utility produced almost all its electricity from coal. Now it generates more than half its power from carbon-free sources. 

Just in the past year, state regulators have approved the utility’s plans to spend nearly $3 billion on solar projects and transmission lines. But billions of dollars in additional financing are needed over the next several years to build additional infrastructure, said Jennifer Cady, vice president of regulatory affairs for Minnesota Power. 

“Allete needs to raise more capital in the next five years than we have in the past 75 as a publicly traded company,” Cady said. 

Some clean energy groups support the acquisition to finance the utility’s green energy transition. So do labor unions, whose members would build and work on the infrastructure projects. 

But a coalition of other environmental groups and consumer advocacy organizations vehemently oppose the deal, arguing it’s not in the public interest.

“I’m here with you all today to push back against this story that we have been told by Minnesota Power and their potential buyers that they need to be scooped up by BlackRock in order to achieve a carbon free energy future,” said Jenna Yeakle of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign at a rally last week in front of Minnesota Power’s downtown Duluth headquarters. 

Capital for clean energy

Supporters of the acquisition say Minnesota Power faces unique challenges in raising the immense amounts of capital it needs to fund its transition to clean energy sources. 

It’s the eighth-smallest investor-owned utility in the country. It’s also unusually dependent on a handful of large industrial customers for the majority of its revenue, including Northern Minnesota’s  paper mills and taconite mines, businesses that are notoriously cyclical. In fact, right now one of the mines is temporarily closed, while another is partially idled. 

“Investors who invest in utilities generally do so because they're safe investments. They’re stable,” explained Cady. “Given our size, given our inherent risk, it makes it a little bit harder for us to compete for that capital in the public market.”

Business and residential customers eventually pay for the cost of infrastructure upgrades through their electric rates. But those bills are paid in small increments over long periods of time, usually decades. Utilities first need investors to provide upfront capital to build massive infrastructure projects, such as wind turbines, solar farms and electric transmission lines.

Allete believes private investors offer the best path forward, because of the scale of the coming energy transition, combined with the utility’s size and unique risk.

“This new partnership with a pension fund and infrastructure fund gives us the stability and the longer term partnership to help us navigate these coming years,” said Cady. 

But opponents are skeptical. They say there’s no guarantee that BlackRock will invest in clean energy infrastructure if the deal is approved.

“So this really is a sort of a hope and a prayer and ‘just trust us’ situation where there are executives who have made this handshake deal, and we just have to hope that they will actually follow through,” said DFL State Sen. Jen McEwen of Duluth, who spoke at the recent rally. 

Critics also argue Allete’s assertions contradict recent financial filings, in which the utility projected it would be able to meet its capital needs in the public market. 

An administrative law judge who heard testimony on the case echoed those concerns. In a report recommending that regulators reject the deal, Judge Megan McKenzie said Allete failed to prove “that there is a significant risk that the public markets will be unable to meet its probable capital needs.”

McKenzie said the utility didn’t demonstrate it needs the acquisition to comply with the state’s Carbon Free Standard. 

Minnesota Power called the report “one-sided.” Even some clean energy advocacy organizations and business groups disagreed. They argue the risk of not raising the capital needed to build transmission lines and other infrastructure outweighs the risk of private equity ownership. 

“I totally understand why there's suspicion about private equity being involved in all those things,” acknowledged Allen Gleckner, executive lead for policy and programs at Fresh Energy, a clean energy advocacy nonprofit. 

But regardless of who owns it, Gleckner says Minnesota Power will continue to be regulated by Minnesota’s Public Utilities Commission. 

“It’s a very unique business model that really does not lend itself well to the kind of traditional horrors of private equity that come to mind,” Gleckner said.

Higher electricity rates? 

The worries of most consumer and environmental groups that oppose the deal boil down to concerns over the economic model of private equity, which they say prioritizes quick investment gains over the long-term public interest of serving Minnesota Power customers.

“This acquisition is about maximizing short-term profit,” said Hudson Kingston, legal director for the environmental group CURE. He and others believe if the acquisition is approved, electric rates would likely increase. 

“The new owners intend to double the normal profit that a utility would normally be able to put out yearly and recoup a huge amount of money to make up for a $1.5 billion premium they're paying for this company,” Kingston said. 

They’re also concerned about a loss of transparency, because privately held companies, which Minnesota Power would become, aren’t required to submit the same financial disclosures as publicly-traded companies. 

Kevin Pranis, marketing manager for LiUNA of Minnesota and North Dakota, which represents construction laborers who build many energy projects, said his union has had good and bad experiences with both kinds of companies. But under both circumstances, he emphasized the state public utilities commission sets the rules.

“We didn’t see any change between one set of investors in the stock market who are looking to maximize their returns and a different set of investors operating under that same legal framework, also trying to generate returns for their investors,” Pranis said. 

The Minnesota Department of Commerce, which initially opposed the acquisition, reached a settlement agreement with Allete and its potential buyers that calls for a one-year freeze on electricity rates, as well as some guaranteed investment into clean energy technologies. 

The department, an agency within the administration of Democratic Gov. Tim Walz, now backs the deal. But the office of Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, a fellow Democrat, opposes the acquisition, arguing it holds risks both for ratepayers and the transition to green energy. 

Regardless of how the Public Utilities Commission decides, the case could have implications nationwide. 

Soaring electricity demand to power data centers has sparked private equity interest in utilities around the country. 

“A lot of people are watching this. It will be a precedent-setting decision,” said Brian Edstrom, senior regulatory advocate with the Citizens Utility Board of Minnesota, which opposes the proposed sale of Minnesota Power. 

“I think there is some reason for concern about whether it’s fair and makes sense to have a regulated utility that provides an essential service like electricity to be owned by these large institutional investors.”

After four straight months of raw milk testing in Minnesota’s dairy farms without detecting the H5N1 avian influenza virus, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has designated the state’s dairy herds as “unaffected” by the virus.

The USDA ordered nationwide testing after multiple states confirmed the virus was present in dairy cattle. Minnesota reported nine cases last year. 

In response, the Minnesota Department of Agriculture tested raw milk batches every month since February. 

“Every single time milk is picked up from a dairy farm, there’s a sample collected,” the director of the state’s ag department dairy and meat inspection division, Nicole Neeser, said. “Every day of every year, all the time.”

Neeser’s team coordinated with industry labs to create a schedule of farms to collect samples from each week of the month. 

Only one avian influenza case was confirmed in March and none since.

“The virus itself has been fairly quiet in Minnesota in this calendar year, which is really fantastic,” Neeser said. “However, we know from the history of the virus that it can come and go with the seasonality.” 

She said avian influenza tends to be more present during the spring and autumn. Her team will continue to monitor the virus throughout the fall.

However, now that Minnesota has been designated as “unaffected” by H5N1, the state can now test every two months instead of monthly. But monitoring will continue until all 50 states are cleared. 

“We’re really waiting on some of the other states as well to continue testing and see how things turn out this fall,” Neeser said. 

A body believed to be a Minnesota kayaker who disappeared at Jackson Lake in western Wyoming more than a year ago has been found by a recovery team.

Wesley Dopkins, 43, of St. Paul, was last seen paddling on the lake on June 15, 2024, according to Grand Teton National Park officials.

His foldable kayak, paddle and dry bag were found floating on the lake's east side soon after he disappeared. A search using a helicopter, boats, ground teams and dogs did not find him at that time, park officials said Tuesday in a statement.

A nonprofit search and recovery organization found the body Sunday and recovered it Monday from a depth of about 420 feet (130 meters).

Official identification by the Teton County Coroner's Office was still pending, but “characteristics of the remains” and where they were found suggested they were Dopkins', according to the statement.

Dopkins was not wearing a life jacket when he was seen paddling from Elk Island to Waterfalls Canyon on the west shore. What happened to him is still unknown, but hypothermia is a common hazard in chilly Wyoming waters.

Jackson Lake is a large reservoir on the Snake River at the foot of the Teton Range in Grand Teton National Park.

Jacob Schlichter of The Smoking Tree LLC is suing the City of Albert Lea for blocking registration of his recreational-cannabis dispensary in late July.

The lawsuit was filed Monday and alleges the city’s rejection was based “purely on politics — specifically, members’ policy disagreements with Minnesota law.” It also cites comments made by city council members disagreeing with state cannabis statutes.

Schlichter gained attention as one of the first people in the state to complete the Office of Cannabis Management’s licensing process to sell recreational cannabis. Then, Albert Lea’s city council denied Schlichter’s business in a July 28 city council meeting after lengthy discussion about lack of local control under state cannabis laws.

“The City Council neither had nor articulated a basis to deny the application,” wrote David Liebow, Schlichter’s attorney, in the lawsuit’s petition. “Nevertheless, in a 4-3 vote, the City Council did deny the application.”

Schlichter’s lawsuit accuses the city of defying state law and also cites comments made by city manager Ian Rigg during the July 28 meeting: “We have heard the concerns from the public and weighed those as much as we could within the powers that we did have, that the state has given us. And our only option is to defy the state and see lawsuits.” 

Schlichter is now demanding the city council grant his registration and comply with state law, which says municipalities cannot prohibit the establishment or operation of a licensed cannabis business. He also appealed the decision in state court on Aug. 20; that case is pending.

“My entire business is literally on the line because of it,” Schlichter told MPR News on Tuesday. “Tens of thousands of dollars down the drain if none of this goes my way, and that doesn't include the legal fees.”

Minnesota cities and counties can cap the number of retailers to one per 12,500 residents. Albert Lea previously capped the number of recreational-cannabis dispensaries allowed in the city to two. After denying Schlichter, the city council approved two registrations for Christopher Gracia of Matchbox Farms and Cristina Aranguiz of Black Husky on Aug. 11. In that meeting, the city council reconsidered granting registration to Schlichter’s business and ultimately struck it down.

Schlichter’s criminal history, particularly a 2017 misdemeanor conviction involving a minor, became the center of controversy in the weeks the city council was considering granting him registration. Schlichter opened his storefront on Aug. 3 despite the city registration denial, selling cannabis-themed clothing.

Rigg proposed the city adopt additional requirements after the two dispensaries open, like conducting their own background checks on licensees and expanding their ability to deny registrations based on criminal history. The state Office of Cannabis Management requests criminal history checks for all license applicants, but misdemeanors are not disqualifying.

“I urge all local governments to take a hard look and rely on their own criminal history background checks to bring this process in parity with alcohol licensing,” Rigg said at the time.

Rigg told MPR News on Wednesday “the city denies the claims asserted by Mr. Schlichter and will vigorously defend its obligations to protect the residents of Albert Lea.”

In a letter filed to district court Tuesday, Albert Lea argued the Minnesota Court of Appeals is the correct place for Schlichter’s case and his lawsuit should be dismissed.

OCM declined to comment on the lawsuit. But OCM said in August that it has made clear to local governments they cannot prohibit the establishment or operation of a licensed cannabis business and can only enact “reasonable restrictions” on time, place and manner of a business.

“The specifics of how a local government selects businesses to receive a limited number of retail registrations are not specified in statute and are up to the local government,” said Jim Walker, OCM’s public information officer, in August.

Schlichter is likely the first — if not one of the first — recreational cannabis business owners in Minnesota to file a lawsuit during the launch of the state’s adult-use cannabis industry. He hopes it helps others in similar gridlocks with their local government.

“What a double edged sword of being, having the honor of being the first lawsuit, right? All I can say is that I hope whatever comes of this can lay some groundwork for anyone behind me,” said Schlichter.

Salvage timber harvests are underway on state-managed lands in the Bemidji area.

The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources said the harvests are being used to promote forest recovery, after major storms in late June damaged more than 1,100 acres of DNR-managed forests.

“If you can imagine, blown down timber, just the sheer amount of woody debris that’s covering the forest floor is an impediment to certain desirable tree species that we want to reinitiate,” said Adam Munstenteiger of the DNR forestry division.

Munstenteiger said removing the trees allows sunlight to reach the forest floor and expose soil.

The harvests are also implemented to improve safety for visitors and to minimize wildfire risk.

Munstenteiger said about 500 acres were auctioned to loggers near the end of July.

"A significant amount of these timber sales will be on school trust lands, and in that case, the revenue from timber sales will be deposited into school trust accounts and eventually make their way into the corpus of the School Trust which, over time, is what is used to generate disbursements,” he said.

Munstenteiger said another 500 acres might be auctioned in early winter.

Fall color fans, get ready: This could be a particularly good year for autumn leaves in Minnesota.

The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources released its official fall color forecast and online dashboard this week as some trees in the northwestern corner of the state are already showing the first reds and yellows of the season.

Brian Schwingle is a forest health consultant with the DNR. He said this year’s changeover could be earlier — and more colorful — than usual.

“Relative to 2024, the weather has really cooperated in 2025 for fall color display,” Schwingle said.

Schwingle said the good weather started in May, with dry conditions that helped trees leaf out and avoid leaf diseases. And, unlike in recent years, there was no significant drought in the state this summer. September started with cooler-than-average weather, which Schwingle said can boost red pigments in leaves.

“If things proceed as they have historically — if we don’t see a horrible warm-up in September, temperatures stay cool — we’ll probably see peak in the latter third of September in various locations throughout northern Minnesota,” Schwingle said.

The DNR predicts a peak in early to mid-October across central Minnesota, and mid- to late October in the southern third of the state.

DNR officials expect a busy leaf-viewing season in state parks in the coming weeks. Spokesperson Sara Berhow said the peak visitor season used to end around Labor Day — but since 2020, numbers have stayed high through October.

“There’s a lot of people who sort of found the outdoors during the pandemic, and they’re continuing to come. And that’s great, we love that,” Berhow said.

The DNR said state parks tend to be especially busy on weekends, during the middle of the day. They recommend weekday or early morning trips to help avoid crowds.

Visitors can check the DNR’s online dashboard for maps showing typical peak color dates around Minnesota, and updates on the progress of fall leaves — along with fall grasses and wildflowers — at each state park. 

Schwingle said it’s a good resource to check regularly, because autumn leaves can be hard to forecast.

“I honestly think that predicting fall colors is more complicated than rocket science,” Schwingle said. “There are so many variables that have been studied and continue to be studied.”

Even before and after the peak of autumn leaves in a given location, Schwingle added, visitors can still catch some amount of color — as well as other fall sights, including bird migrations and clear night skies.

 A boy opened fire with a handgun at a high school in the foothills of suburban Denver on Wednesday and shot two teenagers before shooting and injuring himself, authorities said.

The shooting was reported around 12:30 p.m. at Evergreen High School in Evergreen, Colorado, about 30 miles west of Denver.

Shots were fired both inside and outside the school building, and law enforcement officers who responded found the shooter within five minutes of arriving, Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Jacki Kelley said.

None of the law enforcement officers who responded to the shooting fired any shots, Kelley said.

More than 100 police officers from the surrounding area rushed to the school to try to help, Kelley said. A 1999 school shooting at Jefferson County’s Columbine High killed 14 people, including a woman who died earlier this year of complications from her injuries in the shooting.

The three teens from Evergreen were taken to St. Anthony Hospital and originally listed in critical condition, CEO Kevin Cullinan said. Their ages were not released.

By early evening, one teen was in stable condition with what Dr. Brian Blackwood, the hospital's trauma director, described as non-life threatening injuries. He declined to provide more details.

The high school with more than 900 students is largely surrounded by forest. It is about a mile from the center of Evergreen, which has a population of 9,300 people.

After the shooting, parents gathered outside a nearby elementary school waiting to reunite with their children.

Wendy Nueman said her 15-year-old daughter, a sophomore at Evergreen High School, didn’t answer her phone right away after the shooting, The Denver Post reported. When her daughter finally called back, it was from a borrowed phone.

“She just said she was OK. She couldn’t hardly speak,” Nueman said, holding back tears. She gathered that her daughter ran from the school.

“It’s super scary,” she said. “We feel like we live in a little bubble here. Obviously, no one is immune.”

Eighteen students who fled from the shooting took shelter at a home just down the road, after an initial group of them pounded on the door asking for help, resident Don Cygan told Denver’s KUSA-TV. One student said he heard gunshots while in the school’s cafeteria and ran out of the school, Cygan said.

Cygan, a retired educator familiar with lockdown trainings to prepare for possible shootings, said he took down the names of all the students and the names of the parents who later arrived there to pick them up. His wife, a retired nurse, was able to calm the teens down and treat them for shock, he said.

“I hope they feel like they ran to the right house,” he said.

Napheesa Collier and Breanna Stewart’s 3-on-3 women’s basketball league Unrivaled is adding two more clubs — Breeze Basketball Club and Hive Basketball Club — for its second season.

The league announced the expansion Wednesday, saying it also will bring in six players for a season-long development pool and add a fourth night of games.

That brings the league to eight teams and 54 players, up from six teams and 36 players who competed in its inaugural eight-week season that wrapped up in March.

Unrivaled’s second season will tip off in January.

During the first season, games were played on Friday, Saturday and Monday, with each club playing two games per week. Clubs will continue playing two nights a week but will no longer play back-to-back games.

The league’s development pool will include young players who temporarily will fill a spot on a team if a player on its roster gets injured. After that, they’ll return to the pool.

The expansion comes two days after Unrivaled announced that it is now valued at $340 million after closing its oversubscribed Series B investment round that brought in funding from another group of sports figures.

The Trump administration is reviewing material about slavery, the destruction of Native American culture, climate change and more at federal parks after employees flagged information that could be “disparaging” to Americans, according to screenshots shared with The Associated Press.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order in March directing the Interior Department — which manages parks, monuments and other designated land — to ensure public property doesn't contain elements that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living." Instead, it said to “focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people” and “the beauty, abundance, and grandeur of the American landscape.”

The National Park Service had until July 18 to flag “inappropriate” signs, exhibits and other material, according to a document shared with the AP by the National Parks Conservation Association, which obtained internal information from an anonymous source within the Interior Department. The public was also encouraged to participate.

“As we carry out this directive, we’ll be evaluating all signage in the park along with the public feedback we’ve received," said Elizabeth Peace, spokesperson for the Interior Department. “This effort reinforces our commitment to telling the full and accurate story of our nation’s past." The department said any signage inconsistent with the executive order will be removed or covered and reinstated once edits are made. The administration said it would remove all “inappropriate” material by Sept. 17, according to The New York Times, citing internal agency documents.

The directive has raised concerns about sanitizing and erasing dark sides of American history.

“Pretending that the bad stuff never happened is not going to make it go away," said Alan Spears, a senior director with the National Parks Conservation Association, a nonpartisan group separate from the national parks system that advocates for it. “We need to be able to talk about these things if we're going to have any hope of bringing people together."

A look at some of the material that was flagged for review:

North Carolina: Climate change, pollution

WHAT'S IN DISPUTE: A sign titled “The Air We Breathe” was flagged because it discusses the importance of clean air. Pollution from human-caused ozone, it explains, threatens people's health and vegetation, and power plants, cars and industries that burn fossil fuels are the pollutant's primary sources.

In North Carolina's Cape Hatteras National Seashore, there are signs about sea level rise due to climate change. “We do not believe it to be in violation, but would like someone to review if messaging of climate change and sea level rise reduces the focus on the grandeur, beauty and abundance,” one employee wrote.

THE BACK STORY: Emissions from burning fossil fuels are heating the planet, causing ice sheets and glaciers to melt and seawater to expand. Rising seas threaten the people and ecosystems that live by the coast.

THE REACTION: Carlos Martinez, climate scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists, thinks the agency should be educating the public about the threats national parks face.

These public parks are places to learn about pollution, climate change and environmental degradation, he said, and eliminating this information “limits the ability for our population, especially for the younger generation, to understand these issues that allow them to then take action.”

South Carolina and Pennsylvania: Enslavement of Black people

WHAT'S IN DISPUTE: At a gift shop in Charles Pinckney National Historic Site in South Carolina, marked for review were books for sale, including “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” by Harriet Jacobs. Similar books were flagged elsewhere, including at the Washington Monument, where someone identified a book discussing George Washington as a slave owner.

In Pennsylvania's Independence National Historical Park, flagged were descriptions of the whipping, kidnapping, rape and other brutality slaveholders inflicted on Black people. At another, an employee identified an exhibit about Black Americans escaping to freedom that names slave owners.

THE BACK STORY: The legacy of slavery and racism has laid the foundation for the inequalities Black people face in the U.S., including greater rates of poverty, disease and illness, and incarceration at more than five times the rate of white people.

THE REACTION: “Slavery is not a side story. It’s the engine of American economic growth for more than two centuries,” said Cedric Haynes, vice president of policy and legislative affairs with the NAACP. “And there are individuals who played a part in this.”

It's important to name the people who perpetuated slavery's atrocities, he said, because that legacy is embedded in American laws, institutions and the nation's wealth.

Alaska and Florida: A complex history with Native Americans

WHAT'S IN DISPUTE: At Sitka National Historical Park in Alaska, an employee flagged a panel about missionaries who sought to destroy the language and culture of Alaska Natives and forcefully remove them from their lands. The “concerning text” says: “The history of this land includes a series of actions that attempted to remove the Sheet’ka Kwaan from their land, culture, and language which includes forced relocations under both Russian and American governance.”

In Florida's Castillo de San Marcos National Monument, tagged was a panel discussing imprisonment of Plains Indians. “Text of panel needs review for language referring to tribes having choice of extinction or assimilation. Language of U.S. Government giving the ‘choice’ of extinction could be considered negative towards the United States," they wrote.

THE BACK STORY: “The relationship between the United States and Indigenous nations has been fraught, violent, dispossessive and complex over the centuries, and the national parks are part of that story,” said Jessica R. Cattelino, American Indian studies professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “To cut off parts of those stories because they might make someone uncomfortable, that’s a disservice to the ecological and cultural value of these lands.”

Brenda Child, a Red Lake Ojibwe tribe member and American and American Indian studies professor at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, said it's only been about two decades since we started telling the accurate history of the United States and Native Americans.

THE REACTION: It's sad to think about efforts to rewrite it now, she says, at a time when more accurate portrayals of Indigenous history in the U.S. finally exist. "But the way I always look at these things is: You can try to suppress it, but the cat’s out of the bag. We know what happened. The books have been written.”

Florida: A slight to Industrial America?

WHAT'S IN DISPUTE: Is Florida’s Everglades National Park a slight to industrial development in America? Stories of the lands’ urbanization, agriculture and more presented across the park “could be conceived as being disparaging to the development of Industrial America,” one employee wrote.

THE BACK STORY: The Everglades is a subtropical wilderness that protects 1.5 million acres of habitats and biodiversity and is a vital source of drinking water for millions. The Seminole and Miccosukee tribes have called these lands home for centuries.

Decades of urban and farming development degraded the ecosystem, until, in 1947, the park was established to protect what remained. Underway is a massive state-federal project, approved by Congress in 2000 with bipartisan support, that aims to undo the damages.

THE REACTION: People committed these harms “generations ago without knowing better. And we know better now, and we cannot lose sight of the lessons learned,” said Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades. “If we don’t keep in clear view that history and the mistakes that we made in our past, then we are doomed to repeat them.”

Rupert Murdoch, 94, has anointed Lachlan Murdoch, his oldest son, as leader for decades to come, of a conservative media empire that includes Fox News, the The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post as well as prominent outlets in the U.K. and Australia.

The elder Murdoch engineered billions in transactions to end a succession battle among his children and bolster Lachlan's role in charge of Fox Corp. and News Corp.

Lachlan, 54, emerged as the winner Monday in a years-long rivalry with his brother James, 52, over who would control the family's extensive holdings. The succession adds to the already bright spotlight that's focused on Lachlan as he came to be seen as the most likely heir to preserve the conservative identity that defines his father's portfolio.

But observers have long noted that Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch have distinct approaches.

"He's a very different media proprietor than his father," Paddy Manning, who wrote a biography of Lachlan, told NPR in 2022.

Noting Lachlan's affinity for rock-climbing and tattoos when he was younger, Manning said the Murdoch heir isn't likely to seek the "kingmaker" role in Republican political circles that his father enjoyed: "He's kind of a little bit more hands-off."

The question of how Murdoch's fortune and business interests would be split among Lachlan and James, their older siblings Prudence and Elisabeth, and other relatives has played out in dramatic scenes in courtrooms and boardrooms, inspiring the HBO series Succession.

Here's a quick bio and background on Lachlan:

Early ties to New York, and a move to Sydney

Lachlan Keith Murdoch was born on Sept. 8, 1971 — meaning the succession news emerged on his birthday. He was born in London, but within a few years, the Murdoch family moved to New York City, where Rupert began acquiring U.S. newspapers and magazines.

Lachlan had an elite education that included private schools in Manhattan, Massachusetts and Colorado, before graduating from Princeton University.

He started working at News Corp. in 1994, rising to the post of deputy chief operating officer, according to a Wall Street Journal profile. But in 2005, Lachlan left the U.S. to live in his father's native Australia — a move seen as a form of voluntary exile.

"[Lachlan] was frustrated by what he saw as Rupert Murdoch's unwillingness to prevent corporate machinations against him by some of his top executives, including Peter Chernin, then president of the company, and the late Roger Ailes, head of Fox News," as NPR reported in 2021. "Rupert Murdoch wanted Lachlan to learn to fight and win his own battles."

In 1999, Lachlan married Sarah O'Hare, a successful model who grew up in Australia and later worked in television as a host and producer. The couple have three children. As recently as 2021, the family's main base was in Sydney, where the Murdochs' children were attending school. He spends significant time there every year and has spoken of feeling more Australian than American; Lachlan's father Rupert is a native Australian who built his media empire up from a single newspaper in Adelaide, on its southern coast.

Return to the U.S., and regaining momentum as heir

Roughly 10 years after leaving the U.S. for Australia, Lachlan returned to an inside track to run the family empire. His brother had been badly damaged by scandal when the family's British tabloids were found to have hacked into mobile phone voicemails and otherwise violated people's privacy. The Murdochs subsequently split their enterprises between the publishing and television arms.

Both sons got prime jobs, with James named the CEO at Fox and Lachlan as co-chairman. 

Lachlan's path to the top began to clear in 2017, when a mammoth deal was announced in which the Walt Disney Co. bought much of their Hollywood properties. James then left the newly renamed Fox Corp. and later resigned from the board of directors of News Corp., the newspaper and publishing wing. 

Both brothers have been involved in high-profile controversies during their careers. James was the family's top figure in the U.K. when the tabloid scandal broke: total settlements have exceeded $1.5 billion.

And with Lachlan as CEO, Fox Corp. has faced defamation lawsuits from election machine and software companies over Fox News' coverage of the 2020 election. Fox agreed in 2023 to pay $787.5 million to settle a lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems; a lawsuit by Smartmatic is still awaiting a trial date. Evidence showed Lachlan feared alienating core Fox viewers — which is to say pro-Trump voters — by confronting them too directly with the facts that President Joe Biden squarely won the election.

That said, under Lachlan's leadership, both News Corp. and Fox have enjoyed financial successes. For the recently concluded fiscal year, Fox reported revenues of $16.3 billion, a 17 percent rise from the previous year. And in a notoriously challenging time for print journalism, News Corp. reported revenue of $8.45 billion, a slight gain over the 2024 numbers.

Seeing Fox as ‘center-right’

Lachlan's political beliefs have been the subject of speculation, although he is generally seen as being more conservative than his father.

Lachlan "describes his own politics as socially liberal but economically conservative," Manning, the biographer, said in 2022. Manning noted that the Murdoch scion's "biggest political donation was to the Senate Leadership Fund of Mitch McConnell."

In 2021, Lachlan described Fox News as operating in "the center and right" in political news, opinion and analysis, speaking at an event hosted by the Morgan Stanley investment bank.

"We think that's where America is," he said, citing election results and adding later: "We're going to stick to the center-right. We think that's where our audience is."

NPR's David Folkenflik contributed reporting.

Copyright 2025, NPR

Passengers who weren't buckled aboard a Delta Air Lines flight to Europe were violently thrown into the ceiling and back down to the floor in July when the plane encountered severe turbulence in a thunderstorm over Wyoming, according to a new report on the incident.

The National Transportation Safety Board said Tuesday that passengers endured 2.5 minutes of turbulence that caught the pilots by surprise on July 30 even though they had already altered their route to try to avoid the storms. The seat belt sign was off so passengers, flight attendants and drink carts were thrown around the plane.

The flight took off from Salt Lake City and was bound for Amsterdam, but it diverted to Minneapolis, where 24 people were evaluated by paramedics and 18 were taken to hospitals. Two crew members sustained serious injuries and five sustained minor injuries.

The preliminary report said during the turbulence the passengers felt a gravitational force up to 1.75 times their body weight.

“That’s a lot of force. That’s like a muscle man grabbing you by the shoulders and with all of his strength trying to pull you up,” said aviation safety consultant Jeff Guzzetti, who used to investigate crashes for the NTSB and FAA. “If you’re standing and you experience those types of forces, you’re going to be thrown upward into the ceiling and then back down again onto the floor with a lot of force.”

Guzzetti said that enduring turbulence that lasted that long would seem like “an eternity” for the passengers feeling those forces. The NTSB also said the plane's wing dipped down as much as 40 degrees at one point, and Guzzetti said that would have alarmed passengers.

That fits with what passengers described afterward.

“They hit the ceiling, and then they fell to the ground,” Leann Clement-Nash told ABC News. “And the carts also hit the ceiling and fell to the ground and people were injured. It happened several times, so it was really scary.”

The report said that the pilot had turned off the seatbelt sign and flight attendants had begun drink service shortly before the plane encountered the turbulence.

The pilots likely believed they were in the clear after asking air traffic controllers to route them around the storms. But the NTSB charted the plane's flight path over a radar report from the National Weather Service that showed the plane flew directly into a bright red section of the map showing the worst of the storm.

Guzzetti said the NTSB will investigate whether the pilots and crew did enough to avoid the storms and whether the pilot made a good judgement in turning off the seatbelt sign.

Serious injuries from in-flight turbulence are rare, but scientists say they may be becoming more common as climate change alters the jet stream.

Several turbulence incidents have been reported this year, which only added to the concerns about aviation safety after the worst aviation disaster in years. In January, a midair collision over Washington, D.C., killed 67 people. A plane also flipped over as it crashed in Toronto in March.

President Trump's takeover of local D.C. police is set to expire Wednesday, even as other forms of federal control continue.

On Aug. 11, Trump declared a "crime emergency" in the District of Columbia, using his authority under the 1973 Home Rule Act to activate the D.C. National Guard and take control of the district's Metropolitan Police Department (MPD).

But the Home Rule Act limits that power, which is meant to be used for emergencies. He can do so for only 30 days, at which point the House and the Senate would need to authorize an extension. Congress has so far not indicated that it plans to do so.

And despite Trump's earlier talk of seeking an extension, he has changed his tune in recent days, praising D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser for her cooperation and touting a drop in crime in the city.

"Mayor Muriel Bowser of D.C. has become very popular because she worked with me and my great people in bringing CRIME down to virtually NOTHING in D.C.," Trump wrote on Truth Social last week.

Crime was already on the decline in D.C. since peaking in 2023, but Bowser has credited federal intervention with accelerating that drop, even as she stressed that the presence of immigration agents and National Guard troops — who are not subject to time limits — "is not working."

Bowser issued an order last week to ensure — "during and after the Presidential emergency" — continued cooperation between the city and federal law enforcement. She stressed that it is not an extension of the "Trump emergency" but rather a framework for how to get out of it after Sept. 10.

"I want the message to be clear to the Congress: We have a framework to request or use federal resources in our city," she said at a news conference last Wednesday. "We don't need a presidential emergency."

Congress does not appear interested in extending federal control over the local police. The chairman of the House Oversight Committee, James Comer, is turning his panel's focus this week to a raft of legislation that, he says, would "oversee District affairs and make D.C. safe again."

Here's a look at how D.C. got here and what could happen next.

What did the MPD takeover entail? 

The administration's plan to appoint its own "emergency police commissioner" was almost immediately foiled in court, after D.C.'s attorney general filed a lawsuit challenging the administration's bid for full control. D.C.'s police chief, Pamela Smith, remained in charge, while the federal government continued to have oversight over local police.

Shortly after, Smith issued an order allowing MPD officers to share information with immigration agencies about people at traffic stops, as well as provide transportation for agency employees and people they have detained — marking a shift in cooperation.

In the weeks since, local police and federal agencies have set up traffic checkpoints throughout the city and also worked together to detain delivery drivers.

At least 1,669 people have been arrested since the federal surge began on Aug. 7 — and many of those arrests were for immigration-related offenses, as NPR has reported. After combing through court records and other data for the first two weeks of Trump's police takeover, NPR found that of the more than 1,050 defendants whose cases went to D.C. Superior Court, prosecutors charged around 20 percent with felonies, including drug and gun crimes. The vast majority — 80 percent — were misdemeanors, warrants, traffic offenses or prosecutors dropping the case.

Trump has repeatedly touted the mission's success, calling D.C. "NOW A CRIME FREE ZONE" and saying crime is down "100 percent."

Data from the Metropolitan Police Department and D.C. Police Union supports officials' claims that crime has dropped since the federal surge — but not to zero.

An MPD report released Tuesday shows that total crime has dropped 15 percent during the period of Aug. 7 through Sept. 8, compared with the same window last year. Notably, violent crime is down 39 percent and carjackings by 74 percent — there have been just 12 since the federal takeover, compared with 47 during the same window in 2024.

In late August, Bowser acknowledged that the Trump administration's intervention has led to a drop in gun crimes, homicides and carjackings but also a "break in trust between police and community, especially with new federal partners."

She said the city doesn't need masked immigration agents and National Guard troops from other states but, rather, more police, prosecutors, judges, prevention programs and local control.

What is Congress considering? 

D.C. residents — as well as elected officials — have protested against Trump's actions but acknowledge there is not much they can do to block them since home rule gives the federal government so much power over the district. (Trump's repeated threats to send states' National Guards into cities like Chicago and Baltimore, without the consent of their governors, are more legally dubious.)

The past month has renewed conversations about home rule, which many Democrats believe should be strengthened.

In August, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., and Eleanor Holmes Norton — D.C.'s nonvoting delegate to the House — reintroduced legislation that would grant D.C. full control over its police and National Guard.

But many Republicans say the opposite: Two Republican lawmakers introduced bills this year to repeal home rule, while Trump said in August that "we're going to look at that."

In the House, the Oversight Committee is due to consider 14 bills this week that would exert more control over D.C., in particular its criminal justice system.

Among them are proposals to prohibit "the D.C. Council from pursuing progressive soft-on-crime sentencing policy," lower the age of eligibility for juveniles to be tried as adults and change mandatory minimum sentences. Another would impose a fine of up to $500 or up to 30 days imprisonment as a penalty for camping outdoors on public property.

Republican leaders have not said which bills will get a vote in the full House or when that might occur. Republicans hold a slim majority in the House and would need near-unanimous support for the measures to advance. If they are successful, the legislation would go to the Senate, where Democrats could block the legislation using the filibuster.

"Republicans in Congress may have the ability to impose their will on D.C., but I will not make it easy for them," Norton said. "These bills are yet further evidence of why we need D.C. statehood."

Copyright 2025, NPR

Kyle Hendricks threw seven shutout innings, Chris Taylor and Yoán Moncada hit three-run homers, and the Los Angeles Angels scored all of their runs with two outs in a 12-2 victory over the Minnesota Twins on Tuesday night.

Hendricks (7-9) gave up four hits, struck out six and walked one in his best start of the season, throwing 58 of 80 pitches for strikes. Right-hander Zabby Matthews (4-5) took the loss, giving up five runs and seven hits in 4 ⅔ innings.

The Angels had 17 hits and went 8 for 17 with runners in scoring position. Leadoff man Mike Trout and Moncada each scored three runs. Luis Rengifo delivered two clutch hits, a two-out, two-run single in the first inning and a two-out RBI single in the fifth, as the Angels built a 5-0 lead.

The Angels blew open the game with four runs in the sixth and three in the seventh. Taylor followed Taylor Ward’s RBI single with a three-run homer to center in the sixth and Moncada followed singles by Sebastian Rivero and Bryce Teodosio with a three-run shot, his 12th of the season, to right.

Twins infielder Ryan Fitzgerald, who threw a scoreless eighth inning, broke up the shutout with a two-run homer in the ninth.

Angels right fielder Jo Adell, who is fourth in the American League with 35 homers and seventh with 94 RBIs, was scratched from the lineup because of vertigo for the second straight game.

The Twins threatened in the sixth by putting two on with one out, but Hendricks stopped any hopes of a comeback by getting Trevor Larnach to pop out to third and Luke Keaschall to fly to left, preserving a 5-0 lead.

Trout has gone a career-high 119 plate appearances and 27 games without a homer since hitting his 398th on Aug. 6. His previous long drought was 117 plate appearances in 2015.

Twins right-hander Taj Bradley (6-7, 4.92 ERA) will oppose Angels right-hander Jose Soriano (10-10, 4.07 ERA) in Wednesday’s series finale.

Tens of millions of voters have had their citizenship status and other information checked using a revamped tool offered by the Trump administration, even as many states — led by both Democrats and Republicans — are refusing or hesitating to use it because of outstanding questions about the system.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) says election officials have used the tool to check the information of more than 33 million voters — a striking portion of the American public, considering little information has been made public about the tool's accuracy or data security.

The latest update to the system, known as SAVE, took effect Aug. 15 and allows election officials to use just the last four digits of voters' Social Security numbers — along with names and dates of birth — to check if the voters are U.S. citizens, or if they have died.

The upgrade makes the tool far more accessible, since it now aligns with the information most states collect or have access to for most voters. But the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which houses USCIS, has not responded to questions about the system from members of Congress, and numerous election officials NPR spoke with expressed concern about what else the Trump administration could do with the data it acquires from states.

"There's still uncertainty about what is happening, what happens to the data that are shared with USCIS," said Charles Stewart, a political science professor who directs the MIT Election Data and Science Lab. "I don't know if this means that the USCIS now has a depository of one-sixth of all [the country's] registered voters."

In recent months, several Republican-led states have brokered new agreements with USCIS to use SAVE, or announced the results of SAVE reviews. Ohio election officials will begin removing from their rolls thousands of inactive voters that SAVE identified as deceased. And Louisiana's secretary of state announced last week that officials identified 79 likely noncitizens who had voted in at least one election since the 1980s, after running nearly all of the state's 2.9 million registered voters through SAVE.

DHS is encouraging officials in other states to upload data to the system — even going so far as to make millions of dollars of grant money contingent on them using it.

But USCIS did not respond to NPR's questions about what happens to the data states upload and who has access to it.

And officials in other GOP-led states have expressed caution about using the system.

Last month, North Carolina's Republican-controlled state election board did not take up an offer by USCIS to participate in a "soft launch" of the upgraded tool. Spokesperson Patrick Gannon told NPR in a statement that state officials are pursuing "agreements to ensure that proper safeguards would be in place to protect and secure the data, if a decision is ultimately made to use the service."

Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson, a Republican, told NPR the upgraded SAVE seemed like a "fantastic tool," but he still has questions before he can run his voter list through it to ensure it is authorized under state law.

"Where's that data going? And at the end of the day, is it stored? What are they going to do with it? Who has access? Is it shared?" Watson told NPR last month. "I don't want to do something that I don't necessarily have the ability to do without legislative authority. So we just want to be very clear on that before we move forward."

SAVE concerns are compounded by other Trump moves on elections

The push for states to use the upgraded data system comes as the Trump administration is taking unprecedented steps to assert control over elections as well as collect and aggregate personal data on Americans — at times potentially risking the security of that data.

Numerous voting officials told NPR they felt the revamped SAVE tool could be useful for confirming citizenship status without encumbering voters, and many Democrats also acknowledged the efforts by Trump's USCIS to work in a bipartisan fashion.

But concerns about SAVE are compounded by other moves by President Trump's administration. Trump continues to make baseless claims about widespread noncitizen voting, has attempted to change voter registration rules to include proof-of-citizenship requirements, and has directed the Justice Department to prioritize prosecuting noncitizens who register or vote. DHS also recently elevated a person who spread conspiracy theories about the 2020 election to a post on election integrity.

As part of the administration's stated aim to crack down on noncitizen voting, USCIS prioritized updating the data system known as Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, that state and federal agencies have for decades used to query DHS databases to determine if foreign-born individuals are eligible for various benefits.

The agency, working with the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, made SAVE free to states and allowed bulk searches, as opposed to looking up one person at a time — changes that were celebrated by many voting officials.

"It's getting access to data that already exists and just making it so [election officials] can more easily compare things without making it hard for voters," said Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane, a Republican who has begun testing out SAVE's upgraded capabilities. "I'm trying to make it easier for voters while also doing these validations."

In May, USCIS linked data from the Social Security Administration, allowing election officials for the first time to check the citizenship of many U.S.-born citizens with the voter's name, date of birth and nine-digit Social Security number. NPR was the first news outlet to report on the change.

The integration with Social Security Administration data also means SAVE can show if someone appears on that agency's Death Master File.

Since most states only collect the last four digits of Social Security numbers from voters, the latest upgrade swung open the door for many more states to use SAVE. USCIS says almost 80% of the 33 million voters validated via SAVE were run through the system since the Aug. 15 change.

An unprecedented push for voter data

In mid-July, California Sen. Alex Padilla and two other Democratic U.S. senators formally requested information on the updated SAVE system from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, including the accuracy rate of the SAVE program, what data USCIS stores and who has access, and whether the agency is following protocols spelled out in federal privacy laws.

The senators asked for answers by July 29 but have not heard back.

"In light of the president's threats to issue unconstitutional executive orders to interfere with state elections, DHS owes Congress and the public some basic transparency about what they are doing with state voter rolls," Padilla told NPR.

SAVE pings a number of data sources, as opposed to being a database in and of itself. But under USCIS policy, all queries are saved for 10 years for audit purposes, so if a state runs its whole voter list through the tool, that data will remain with DHS for a decade.

Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat, told NPR that such a system sounded like the beginnings of a national voter registration list that would raise privacy and security concerns.

"They said they're going to keep our data for 10 years," Bellows said. "If [former Attorney General] Merrick Garland were asking for this or President Biden, I have to think that the red states would be calling for their heads."

The agreements that states sign to use SAVE include a clause that grants DHS permission to use information from states "for any purpose permitted by law, including, but not limited to, the prosecution of violations of Federal administrative or criminal law."

At a White House meeting about SAVE in late July, USCIS officials tried to reassure state voting officials about sharing sensitive voter data, according to Connecticut Secretary of State Stephanie Thomas, who attended the meeting.

"They said many times like, 'Look, we know the states are in charge of elections. We don't want your data. We don't want your lists,' " Thomas recalled.

But in recent weeks, the Department of Justice has been making controversial demands to numerous states to turn over such data, including in several instances voter rolls that include personal data like driver's license numbers and partial Social Security numbers.

Thomas, a Democrat, said that when a Republican secretary of state pointed out the DOJ's voter data demands to USCIS officials, the officials responded that they worked for a separate agency.

‘The worst thing you can get is a false positive’

USCIS hasn't publicized detailed evidence about the accuracy of the tool or shared what testing went into the program before it was released to states, though it asserts SAVE's accuracy has markedly improved with the recent upgrades.

But voting rights groups and some election officials are voicing concerns that eligible voters could face barriers to casting ballots or be improperly removed from the rolls if states over-rely on incomplete information from SAVE.

USCIS acknowledges that certain categories of people who acquired U.S. citizenship, such as some foreign-born children of U.S. citizens, cannot be verified by SAVE.

Furthermore, data matching in elections is notoriously difficult and there are questions about the completeness of the Social Security Administration's citizenship data USCIS is relying on.

Wesley Wilcox, a Republican elections supervisor in Marion County, Fla., signed an agreement this summer giving his county access to SAVE. But he said he plans to double check any data he gets from the system, since he's encountered multiple instances in which SSA data indicated a person was dead when they weren't.

"It's like any new process that you put into effect … we're going to do that legwork," Wilcox said. "I want to be as accurate as humanly possible at all times."

For a portion of foreign-born individuals, SAVE prompts user agencies to submit more information, such as a person's naturalization certificate number or alien registration number, for their case to be manually reviewed. USCIS told NPR that of the 33 million voters submitted to the upgraded SAVE so far, less than 1% have required that manual review. The agency did not respond to NPR's question about the results of the manual review, how many noncitizens on voter rolls have been identified to date or what portion of the results so far were inconclusive.

While USCIS' materials say election officials are not supposed to reject voter registrations or remove voters from the rolls if the SAVE system asks for more voter information, it is not yet clear if there are consequences if states skip those steps.

Last year, thousands of U.S. citizens in states including Alabama, Virginia and Texas were removed from the rolls or deactivated after election officials relied on imperfect data to identify suspected noncitizens.

Conservative election integrity advocates have broadly celebrated SAVE's development, but among some, there is also an acknowledgement that states need to be cautious when removing people from voter rolls.

"I am hopeful that a great deal of care and a great deal of contemplation is going into this process because the worst thing you can get is a false positive," said J. Christian Adams, president of the conservative Public Interest Legal Foundation. "The worst thing you could do, as some states have done in the past, is remove a citizen from the voter rolls as a noncitizen. That should not happen."

In 2019, a court settlement required Adams to apologize to a group of Virginia voters his organization incorrectly claimed were noncitizens.

Louisiana's test case

The most in-depth data about how the updated SAVE is working came last week from Louisiana.

The state's Republican secretary of state, Nancy Landry, told reporters that by using SAVE, her office identified 390 people on the voter rolls who they believe are noncitizens. Seventy-nine of them were found to have voted. Landry said there was a review of each suspected noncitizen and her office worked with the FBI to investigate their citizenship status.

"They have been given notice we have reason to believe they are not a U.S. citizen," Landry said. "They have the opportunity to come in and provide documentation that they are in fact a U.S. citizen."

Anyone who does not respond or provide proof within 21 days is removed from the rolls, Landry said, and noncitizens who registered to vote — regardless of whether they were among the 79 who voted in recent decades — will be referred for criminal prosecution.

The number of suspected noncitizens Louisiana found to have voted amounts to less than 0.003% of the state's registered voters, a percentage that aligns with what many other reviews on the issue have found.

"The very small numbers suggest that the results are what we expected, and that they are not alarming," said Stewart of MIT.

He added that number might shrink further as some people may prove to be citizens.

Yet even as there are signs the SAVE program is generating helpful data, Stewart said it is troubling that USCIS is withholding answers to key questions, like what happens to the data that is uploaded or detailed breakdowns on SAVE results so far.

In Minnesota, state voting officials would need a change to state law to use SAVE for elections. But Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, said he won't push for such a change until he has more clarity on how it works.

"Certainly it's impressive what they've done in a short period of time," Simon said. "[But] I'd want to see a lot more by way of testing and assurances about the accuracy before we would be a willing and enthusiastic participant."

Copyright 2025, NPR

The Trump administration released a report Tuesday outlining a broad strategy to improve children's health. It calls for a wide range of executive actions and policy reforms aimed at tackling a rise in chronic diseases.

In announcing the report, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called chronic disease in kids "an existential crisis for our country" and said the report's 128 recommendations are "historic and unprecedented."

"There's never been an effort like this across all the government agencies," he said.

The Make America Healthy Again Commission, led by Kennedy, identified four potential drivers behind rising rates of chronic disease among children, including poor diet, chemical exposure, lack of physical activity and chronic stress, as well as "overmedicalization" – which the commission describes as "a concerning trend of overprescribing medications to children."

The report has drawn mixed reactions from researchers and advocates working in public health, who note that its goals stand at odds with other recent Trump administration moves. Those include funding cuts to food assistance, Medicaid programs, and scientific research, as well as Secretary Kennedy's push for changes in vaccine policy, all of which could undermine public health.

"How can we 'Make America Healthy Again' unless we renew our commitment to ensuring access to food for children," and other Americans, asks Eric Mitchell, President of the Alliance to End Hunger, in a statement.

"While Administration officials regularly tout the importance of nutrition," they worked with Congress to pass a plan that will push millions of people off federal food assistance, known as SNAP, he says.

Susan Mayne, an epidemiologist at Yale University School of Public Health and former Food and Drug Administration official, says there's consensus that "we need to address chronic disease in our whole population, including children," and she agrees now is the time to take action.

The MAHA report includes "a lot of good talk about things they want to do," Mayne says. "But the plan for how to execute it and the resources for how to get that done are actually going in the opposite direction. And so that concerns me."

Tackling kids’ diet and exercise habits

The report notes that 60 percent of the calories U.S. children consume come from highly processed foods – which often contain excess salt, refined starch and sugar – and it calls for an educational campaign to promote the government's dietary guidelines, which are expected to be updated in the coming weeks. The campaign will emphasize eating more whole foods and less highly processed products.

Mayne says it's a good idea to develop a standard definition for ultra-processed foods, but says we need more than a definition.

"What are the steps that we're going to take so that they're eating less of it?" she wonders. "There are steps that they should be taking immediately to continue to try to reduce things like excess sodium, excess sugar and excess saturated fat in those ultra processed foods."

The strategy calls for new research into nutrition and chronic disease prevention and the development of a standard definition of ultra-processed foods. It says the government will remove restrictions on whole milk sales in schools, and help states limit the purchase of unhealthy items with SNAP benefits.

The MAHA Commission points to "unprecedented levels of inactivity," among children and their strategy calls for partnering with the President's Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition, to help states and schools "re-establish" the Presidential Fitness Test, and promote more physical activity in afterschool programs.

In addition, the plan is to launch an education and awareness initiative on screen time, one of the causes of inactivity, which will be led by the surgeon general. (To date, the Trump administration has not appointed a surgeon general. It has nominated Casey Means.)

"I'm very happy to see that they've identified diet and physical activity as two of the top health problems in the U.S.," says Lindsey Smith Taillie, professor of nutrition at the Gillings School of Public Health at UNC Chapel Hill. "But this report was lacking actual, meaningful action that would help Americans address our problems."

Chemical exposure flagged, but little pressure on pesticides

An earlier MAHA report, released in May, pointed to potential harms of chemical exposure and noted that children can be more vulnerable to these harms. It listed a range of chemicals, including PFAS, phthalates, bisphenols, microplastics and chemicals used on farms to kill pests and weeds.

The new strategy report states that "children are exposed to an increasing number of synthetic chemicals, some of which have been linked to developmental issues and chronic disease."

This is an issue that has animated parts of the MAHA movement. As a long-time environmental lawyer, Kennedy has spoken out frequently against the use of agricultural pesticides and herbicides. During the 2024 presidential campaign, he made statements vowing to "ban" some agricultural chemicals that are already restricted in other countries.

But the report calls for few changes on regulation of pesticides.

The strategy calls for a more status-quo approach to evaluate current regulations that govern the use of agricultural chemicals: "The current regulatory framework should be continually evaluated to ensure that chemical and other exposures do not interact together to pose a threat."

Dr. Philip J. Landrigan, a pediatrician and professor at Boston College, and director of the Program for Global Public Health and the Common Good notes that "the report contains no recommendations on how to reduce children's exposures to toxic chemicals in food other than food dyes and heavy metals in infant formula."

The Environmental Working Group, said in a statement, that the original MAHA report released in May mentioned "the health risks of pesticides, and the fact they're found at 'alarming' levels in some children and pregnant women."

Tuesday's strategy report has no such language.

"It looks like pesticide industry lobbyists steamrolled the MAHA Commission's agenda," said EWG president Ken Cook.

The group points to agribusiness lobbying efforts urging the administration to "back away" from anti-pesticide rhetoric.

Meanwhile, the American Farm Bureau issued a statement supporting the MAHA strategy. "We appreciate the commission's willingness to meet with farmers across the country, hear our concerns and develop smart solutions," said AFB president Zippy Duvall.

A call for new ‘vaccine framework’

The strategy also calls on the White House Domestic Policy Council and HHS to develop a new vaccine framework, which may mean revamping the vaccine schedule, the list of vaccinations that children should receive at specific ages. The schedule is developed by infectious disease experts, and a committee of expert advisors to the CDC, a group that Kennedy recently replaced with his own picks including some critical of vaccines.

The strategic plan calls for addressing vaccine injuries, and ensuring "medical freedom," which in this context could suggest support for giving people more personal choice over vaccinating their children.

Kennedy's recent moves in this area raise concerns that further actions may undermine an evidence-backed, uniform approach to vaccination. He recently pushed out Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Susan Monarez and put new limits on access to the COVID vaccine.

The American Lung Association notes that the report "puts the childhood vaccine schedule in question, which sows mistrust in the established and science-based vaccine infrastructure."

"Community immunity through vaccination keeps kids in school and helps protect our most vulnerable," it said in a statement. "Vaccines are a cornerstone of public health and the mistrust sewn in this report puts children's lives at risk."

A wide mix of ideas 

All told, the report contains 128 proposals, covering research, policy changes and regulation, public awareness campaigns and suggestions for public-private partnerships.

But Landrigan of Boston College says it fails to present "any kind of comprehensive blueprint for improving the health of American children."

"Overall, I would describe the report as presenting a very uneven, poorly conceived, disjointed hodgepodge of recommendations that reflect Secretary Kennedy's preoccupations and little else," he says.

Other critics noted that the report's goals are undermined by recent Trump administration policy moves.

For instance, the report calls for the Environmental Protection Agency to research the impact of air pollution on children's health. However, as the American Lung Association notes in a statement, EPA is actively eliminating its research arm and "working to roll back critical clean air safeguards and allowing major polluters to bypass requirements that limit emissions – emissions that worsen asthma and other chronic lung conditions in children."

Copyright 2025, NPR

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and legislative leaders met for the first time Tuesday to discuss a possible special session to forge a policy response to a mass shooting in Minneapolis, with both parties expecting the Legislature to be brought back soon.

The state leaders came out of the private meeting expressing optimism about reaching a public safety deal in the coming days and vowed to continue discussions. Walz, who has sole power to call a session, said he doesn’t want to let down the families of victims who are demanding action. 

“I will call the special session one way or another,” he said, adding that it should happen “sooner rather than later” to avoid the recent bouts of gun violence from fading from mind. “I feel the sense of urgency. I think Minnesotans feel the sense of urgency.”

Even if gun measures the Democratic governor wants to see enacted don’t pass, he said it’s important for people to see where all lawmakers stand.

Democrats and leading Republicans split on the biggest priority for DFL lawmakers: banning firearms and high-capacity magazines that can spray bullets in short order and inflict considerable damage.

Republicans have prioritized mental health measures and additional funding for school safety. Those issues could also have backing from DFL legislators.

“House Republicans are committed to making sure that we are keeping our schools and our communities safe, and that is a very broad way of looking at that and getting at the actual foundational root issues that cause someone to act out in such a horrendous way,” said GOP House Speaker Lisa Demuth as she emerged from the meeting that lasted about 40 minutes.

Walz said the tragic events of the summer, including the shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church and School and the assassinations of former House DFL Leader Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, should spur lawmakers to action.

“We absolutely cannot live like this, and those of us who are entrusted with positions of authority or the ability to change things should do so. So the families of Annunciation and countless others have made it clear the expectation is to do something about this,” Walz said. “And I've made it very clear that in Minnesota, we are going to do a special session.” 

The governor said that he’d continue meeting with legislative leaders over coming days but was determined to make a special session happen, even if the sides don’t reach an accord. Typically, leaders agree to the terms of the special session before a governor calls it. Once legislators start a special session, it’s up to them to decide what they take up and when they adjourn.

Demuth, of Cold Spring, said her caucus was open to ongoing discussions and committee vetting to prepare for a legislative session. But she didn’t think there were votes within her caucus — or the DFL caucuses — to advance new restrictions on firearms. She said her children were impacted by the 2003 Rocori High School shooting and can relate to the trauma that those who live through mass shootings face.

“It takes a generation and beyond to really be able to move forward. You do the next step. But as far as it being a passing news story, it's not going to be passing for those families of both the victims, those that are injured and the kids that were just in there,” Demuth said. “I can tell you that it does not just end.”

She emphasized that changes are possible but would require bipartisan backing in each chamber to pass. Republicans in the House hold a one-vote advantage, but the chamber could return to a tie next week after a special election to fill Hortman’s vacant seat. In the Senate, there are two vacancies that would require at least one Republican to vote with Democrats to move a bill forward.

“In the Senate, it takes 34, in the House, it takes 68 and no one has that in the makeup of the Legislature right now,” Demuth said. “We have to work in a bipartisan way.”

Senate Majority Leader Erin Murphy, DFL-St. Paul, expected a working group to being holding hearings in the next week on safety measures that could come up in a special session. The Senate is currently down two members, and Democrats would need Republican backing to get any traction on bills.

Just hours into his new role as House DFL Caucus Leader, Rep. Zack Stephenson of Coon Rapids said he wouldn’t be in the role if not for Hortman’s assassination months earlier. Now, he said, it was incumbent on legislative leaders to listen to the families affected by the Annunciation mass shooting.

“I hope that my colleagues on the Republican side will listen to the families, to the families of the victims of the shooting who are demanding action on guns, on weapons of war and getting those off of the street,” Stephenson said. “So I think what we need to do right now is listen to the people who were impacted by this tragedy.”

According to the latest criminal complaint against Robert Phillip Ivers, 72, staff at the Wayzata Public Library called police Sept. 3 after seeing Ivers printing a 236-page document entitled “How To Kill a Federal Judge.”

“Ivers told the librarian about the manuscript he had written,” prosecutors allege in the complaint. “He showed the librarian a page from his manuscript. The librarian recalled that the page said something about killing children and had a picture of a gun on it.”

Ivers gave library staff a three-page summary document that includes a photo of a man holding a rifle, and that the guide “is designed to teach extremists on how to plan, train, hunt, stalk and kill anyone including judges, their family members, politicians and more!”

Wayzata police arrested Ivers the same day. Shortly after, Ivers allegedly claimed he was having a heart attack. Authorities transported him to Hennepin County Medical Center, but staff there declined to share information about his condition because of patient privacy laws, according to a search warrant request from Wayzata police.

The department did not have an officer available to guard Ivers at HCMC and he “reportedly left the hospital sometime during the night,” writes Sgt. Dan Lee.

Police re-arrested Ivers on Sept. 5. According to the federal complaint, investigators “asked Ivers if he thought his book would have scared anybody. In response, Ivers shouted: ‘It was supposed to!’” Ivers is currently in police custody.

The Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office said that the names of multiple federal judges appear in the document, including that of retired U.S. District Judge Wilhelmina Wright, as well as the judge who presided over the later case involving threats against a probation officer.

In 2018, a jury convicted Ivers of threatening to kill Wright after she ruled against him in a lawsuit that he filed against an insurance company.

While on supervised release in North Dakota, Ivers allegedly threatened a probation officer, “leaving a series of angry, violent and sexually graphic voicemail messages” after he denied Ivers’ request to return to Minnesota. Prosecutors filed new charges in 2022 but dropped them after Ivers agreed to plead guilty to a supervised release violation.

After interviewing library staff, investigators say they learned that Ivers exhibited "abnormal behavior" during a recent visit to a Minnetonka church.

Staff contacted authorities on Aug. 28, the day after the mass shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis, and reported that Ivers had told members that he planned to return for three events in September where children and public officials would be present.

A search of Ivers’ vehicle allegedly turned up 20 copies of Ivers’ spiral-bound self-printed book along with lists of federal judges, a “miscellaneous list of colleges,” a photo of the former Pope overlaid with crosshairs, a replica firearm, pellets and Co2 cartridges, and a box of fireworks.

Ivers twice ran for mayor of Hopkins. During a 2017 debate sponsored by the League of Women Voters, Ivers complained that the planned Green Line light rail extension would bring "ethnics" into the Minneapolis suburb.

A Michigan judge dismissed criminal charges Tuesday against a group of people who were accused of attempting to falsely certify President Donald Trump as the winner of the 2020 election in the battleground state, a major blow to prosecutors as similar cases in four other states have been muddied with setbacks.

District Court Judge Kristen D. Simmons said in a court hearing that the 15 Republicans accused will not face trial. The case has dragged through the courts since Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat, announced the charges over two years ago.

Simmons said she saw no intent to commit fraud in the defendants’ actions. Whether they were “right, wrong or indifferent,” they “seriously believed” there were problems with the election, the judge said.

“I believe they were executing their constitutional right to seek redress,” Simmons said.

Each member of the group, which included a few high profile members of the Republican Party in Michigan, faced eight charges of forgery and conspiracy to commit election forgery. The top felony charges carried a maximum penalty of 14 years in prison.

Supporters, friends and family crowded in the hallway outside the courtroom cheered when the judge said the cases would be dismissed. Defendants leaving the courtroom cried and hugged friends and family. One woman wept as she hugged another and said, “We did it.”

Investigators said the group met at the Michigan GOP headquarters in December of 2020 and signed a document falsely stating they were the state’s “duly elected and qualified electors.” President Joe Biden won Michigan by nearly 155,000 votes, a result confirmed by a GOP-led state Senate investigation in 2021.

Electors are part of the 538-member Electoral College that officially elects the president of the United States. In 48 states, electors vote for the candidate who won the popular vote. In Nebraska and Maine, elector votes are awarded based on congressional district and statewide results.

One man accused in the Michigan case had the charges against him dropped after he agreed to cooperate with the state attorney general’s office in October 2023. The other 15 defendants pleaded not guilty and have maintained that their actions were not illegal.

Reaction to the dismissal

Prominent Michigan MAGA activist and former Michigan Republican Party Co-Chair Meshawn Maddock was one of the accused. Her attorney, Nicholas Somberg, told reporters after the hearing that the case brought by the attorney general's office was a waste of money and a “malicious prosecution.”

“There needs to be major consequences for the people who brought this," he said.

Nessel called Simmons' ruling “disappointing” and a “very wrong decision” during a virtual news conference and said evidence would support criminal charges if the case had been brought before a jury. She said the group members knew their actions did not follow proper election procedure and specifically sought to circumvent the rules.

“They knew they were not electors,” Nessel said of the group. “They knew Donald Trump lost, but then they lied anyway. And that is a crime.”

Nessel said her office is considering appealing the decision.

Nessel could appeal the decision to a higher court. But the legal threshold to overturn the ruling is high under Michigan law and would center on whether Simmons abused her discretion in dismissing the charges after hearing evidence.

Judge says the case was about intent

Simmons, who was originally appointed by Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in 2019 and reelected to her nonpartisan position the next year, took nearly a year to say whether there was sufficient evidence to bring the cases to trial following a series of lengthy preliminary hearings. In her remarks Tuesday, Simmons said the case was not about who won the 2020 election, but about the intent of the people charged.

“This is not an election interference case,” she said.

The judge noted that the group appeared in public about the effort and posed for photos after the meeting.

“Typically people who are seeking to defraud or deceive the public do not gather and make a spectacle. That would be weird,” Simmons said, prompting chuckles in the courtroom.

The judge said Maddock appeared to have direct contact with the Trump campaign and that she could have entertained her culpability, but Maddock’s public statements at the time led the judge to believe she was seeking “redress” from her state senators in presenting them with an “alternate” choice of electors.

“The prosecution would like the court to believe that these named defendants were savvy or sophisticated enough to understand fully the electoral process,” Simmons said in the hearing. “This alternate document doesn’t state it’s an official document of the state of Michigan, doesn’t contain a certificate of vote, no one attempted to forge the governor’s signature, no one attempted to create a fake seal.”

Kahla Crino, an assistant attorney general, contested the judge’s finding on intent, saying to reporters that the group was aligned with the actual language of the document they signed, it was not contingent on the election results and it “directly impaired on legitimate government function.”

Around two dozen people gathered outside of the courtroom Tuesday morning, bearing signs in support of the defendants. One read, “End political lawfare.” Defendants and their lawyers crowded into a small courtroom in downtown Lansing for the hearing, with a handful appearing over a video call. Two of the defendants’ attorneys said their clients could not appear because of medical reasons.

Outside court after the hearing, Republican state Rep. Matt Maddock, husband to Meshawn Maddock, promised “retribution” against the attorney general.

“They’re going to pay for what they did to these people,” he told reporters.

Marian Sheridan, one of the people charged, said her life has been on hold for two years as she waited for the judge's decision. She insists the plan was to act as a “backup."

“I've always been proud of my reputation,” she said. “In such a short time, you have friends and family who believe somehow that you are a criminal.”

Prosecutors in Nevada, Georgia, Wisconsin and Arizona have also filed criminal charges related to the fake electors scheme. None of the cases have neared the trial stage and many have been bogged down by procedural and appellate delays.

The effort to secure fake electors was central to the federal indictment against Trump that was abandoned earlier this year shortly before Trump took office for his second term.

French President Macron late Tuesday appointed Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu as France’s new prime minister, the country’s fourth in about a year.

Lecornu, 39, is the youngest defense minister in French history and architect of a major military buildup through 2030, spurred by Russia’s war in Ukraine.

A former conservative who joined Macron’s centrist movement in 2017, he has held posts in local governments, overseas territories and during Macron’s yellow vest “great debate,” where he helped manage mass anger with dialogue. He also offered talks on autonomy during unrest in Guadeloupe in 2021.

His rise reflects Macron’s instinct to reward loyalty, but also the need for continuity as repeated budget showdowns have toppled his predecessors and left France in drift.

Legislators toppled Lecornu’s predecessor Francois Bayrou and his government in a confidence vote on Monday, a new crisis for Europe’s second-largest economy.

Bayrou gambled that lawmakers would back his view that France must slash public spending to rein in its huge debts. Instead, they seized on the vote to gang up against the 74-year-old centrist who was appointed by Macron last December.

The demise of Bayrou’s short-lived minority government heralds renewed uncertainty and a risk of prolonged legislative deadlock for France as it wrestles with pressing challenges, including budget difficulties and, internationally, wars in Ukraine and Gaza and the shifting priorities of U.S. President Donald Trump.

Drafting a budget will be a top priority for Lecornu, and normally a new prime minister would form the new government before negotiating the national spending in Parliament. However, Macron has asked Lecornu to consult with all of the political parties in Parliament first to try to agree on a budget before assembling his team.

“The prime minister’s action will be guided by the defense of our independence and our power, serving the French and the political and institutional stability for the unity of our country,” Macron said in a statement.

U.S. employers are adding far fewer jobs than initially tallied, in the latest sign that the labor market may be weaker than expected, according to a preliminary report from the Labor Department on Tuesday.

The report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows hiring for the 12 months ending in March was overstated by an estimated 911,000 jobs. That large revision was somewhat expected, but still on the high end of what both economists and White House officials predicted.

In a research note published Sunday, economists at Goldman Sachs predicted that the revision would be between 550,000 and 950,000 jobs. And in a Sunday interview with NBC's Meet the Press, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent put his estimate at up to 800,000 jobs.

The revision is part of a routine, annual exercise in which the government checks its monthly jobs numbers — which come from a sampling of employers — against much more complete data from state tax records. Tuesday's estimate is preliminary. A final tally will be released early next year.

But it has been closely watched this year, after President Donald Trump fired the previous BLS head last month after a weaker-than-expected report. Trump claimed without evidence that the agency was manipulating the numbers to make the economy under his term look bad.

This year's revision comes at a time when the Federal Reserve is closely monitoring signs of weakness in the labor market, ahead of a key decision on interest rates next week. The central bank is widely expected to cut its benchmark borrowing rate by a quarter percentage point in an effort to prevent widespread job losses.

Investors largely shrugged off the revision on Tuesday morning. All three major U.S. stock-market indices were flat.

Last week, the Labor Department reported lackluster job growth during the summer months, with employers adding just 22,000 jobs in August and a net loss of jobs in June for the first time since the pandemic winter of 2020.

The latest preliminary annual revision is further likely to compound concerns about the labor market.

Trump's attacks against the BLS have raised concerns about whether the government's number crunchers will face political pressure, fueling worries about the integrity of the country's economic data.

President Trump last month nominated conservative economist E.J. Antoni to lead the BLS. Antoni previously worked at the right-leaning Heritage Foundation, and many commentators have raised concerns about whether he has the experience to run the agency or whether he will protect it from political influences. Antoni would need to be confirmed by the Senate.

Copyright 2025, NPR

Nearly 20 children returned to their preschool classrooms on Monday at Annunciation Catholic Church and School in Minneapolis.

“It’s so important that we stay together, that we stay in this because right now, we’re doing really well at doing community, and we want to stay that way together despite the impossibility of our circumstances,” Matthew DeBoer, the Annunciation principal, said in a video posted online Monday night. 

Two children were killed and 21 people, most of them children, were injured on Aug. 27 when a person with multiple weapons shot students and adults as they worshipped at the start of the school year. Students tried to shield others and took cover under pews as bullets, shrapnel and glass flew around them. 

Over the weekend, one survivor of the shooting was released from the hospital and a funeral was held for 8-year-old Fletcher Merkel, who was killed in the attack. Twelve-year-old Sophia Forchas remains hospitalized in critical condition at HCMC as of Friday afternoon

Leaders at Annunciation have not yet made public when they will resume classes for older students, but DeBoer said he had emailed families on Monday night his plans for next steps. 

The school has sought advice from trauma experts on how to reconvene for the academic year following the attack. DeBoer has said the return to learning will likely take place in stages. 

“Our commitment throughout this time is to make mission-driven and data-informed decisions every step of the way, one step at a time, together,” DeBoer said Monday. “Right now, we are showing the world what love in action looks like together.”

Correction (Sept. 9, 2025): A previous version of this story had incorrect information about the status of survivors in the hospital.

Authorities said there were no serious injuries in a crash Tuesday morning involving a school bus along southbound Interstate 35W in Mounds View.

The Minnesota State Patrol said the crash happened just before 8 a.m. at the south junction with U.S. Highway 10. As traffic slowed, a car rear-ended an SUV and then veered into the path of the school bus.

The car and the bus came to rest against the concrete median; Minnesota Department of Transportation traffic cameras showed the bus upright and intact.

The Patrol said there were 27 children aboard the bus, from St. John the Baptist Catholic School in New Brighton. Authorities said none of the students reported injuries at the scene; they were evaluated further once at school.

The drivers of the car and the bus were taken to a hospital with what the Patrol said were non-life-threatening injuries.

The crash blocked several lanes of southbound I-35W and led to major traffic delays during part of the morning commute. The crash scene was cleared and traffic was flowing normally by mid-morning.

The crash remains under investigation.