Lyon County Sheriff Eric Wallen and Jail Administrator Brad Marks went before the board of commissioners on Tuesday to request approval to hire more jail staff. Wallen and Marks described a situation of being between a rock and a hard place. The Minnesota Department of Corrections recommends ...
Gov.Tim Walz on Monday called on legislators to hold public hearings on their conflicting plans to make insulin more affordable. They’ve been holding closed-door negotiations over the past month with no resolution on how to pay for their plans to help those diabetics who can’t afford their ...
Former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Erin Murphy was fielding questions after her speech during a Lyon County Democratic-Farmers-Labor event Nov. 10 when the subject of health care billing came up. A woman in the audience stood up and described a common experience when it comes to health ...
To actually have a conversation about bias against political groups, we have to dismiss any comparisons to marginalized communities. There have long been complaints in the sphere of liberal college education in the United States that there is a bias against conservative students from their ...
Keep working on insulin solutions THUMBS UP: U.S. Sen. Tina Smith, D-Minn., joined other legislators in introducing bipartisan legislation to create a national study to more fully understand the scope of the insulin affordability crisis in America. Earlier this year, Smith introduced ...
One cannot blame the Turks for not wanting to be the world’s jailers for some of the most dangerous people on the planet. When Turkish forces invaded northern Syria to push back Kurdish separatists, they captured some facilities in which the Kurds were holding Islamic State terrorist ...
The Minnesota Department of Human Services (DHS) has, over the years, evolved into a big beast. This makes it difficult to handle, as recent news indicates. The Star Tribune of Minneapolis reported last week that the department violated state law more than 200 times over the past year, ...
Americans who leave our country to reside in another are outside the protection of our government in most ways. But the sheer horror of what happened in Mexico last week — nine women and children massacred, apparently by drug cartel terrorists — cries out for some meaningful reaction by ...
While the NCAA took a good first step admitting that college athletes deserve “to benefit” for the millions they bring to their schools and the league, it left open options for restricting that compensation as much as possible. The NCAA Board of Governor's approved a policy Tuesday that ...
This is what Veteran’s Day is all about THUMBS UP: Veteran’s Day is one of those yearly observances that sometimes gets lost in the shuffle of our busy lives. Here’s a reminder to take a few moments and thank a military veteran for their service. Health care will be on the ...
Two articles involving school referendums and how they affect farmers were published in Monday’s edition. One of the articles was originally generated from the Minneapolis Star Tribune and shared by the Associated Press. It featured the $34 million bond school referendum on Tuesday’s ...
Especially at major powers in the collegiate sports world, purely amateur athletics has been a myth for many years. Under-the-table gifts by well-to-do boosters have ensured that. Now, however, even the pretense may be about to end. Last week, the NCAA Board of Governors voted to allow ...
Hemp offers opportunities to farmers THUMBS UP: Its was about time that U.S. Agriculture officials finalized a rule that will allow farmers to legally grow hemp. A national hemp-growing program that Congress authorized in the 2018 farm bill WILL be launched by the rule. At a time when ...
The Department of Human Services is Minnesota’s largest and most convoluted state agency. The results of a legislative auditor’s office investigation, released Tuesday, indicate is also due for a major overhaul, top to bottom. The investigation found “troubling dysfunction” at DHS ...
The 2019 Minnesota Student Survey (MSS) added a new set of questions this year, inquiring about students’ use of and attitudes toward e-cigarettes and vaping. The survey is administered every three years to students across Minnesota, in grades five, eight, nine and 11. It’s a completely ...
We Americans have a habit of bragging about our feats of technology. Our chief economic and military rivals — namely Russia and China — seldom do. They prefer to keep their secrets. No one in this country is certain, then, how far the state-controlled economies of those nations have gone ...
The presidency of Donald Trump is becoming dangerous for Americans, deadly for our allies and surreal. One can see this in the eyes of his Republican colleagues. Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell sees it. House Republican leaders know it. They took remarkable action Wednesday when they ...
Wind energy grants promotes jobs THUMBS UP: Rural Minnesota received a boost from bipartisan legislation introduced by U.S. Senators Tina Smith, D-Minn., and Susan Collins, R-Maine, to renew and expand the Department of Energy’s Office of Wind Energy and award competitive grants to ...
Russian internet trolls who have been successful, probably beyond their wildest dreams, in sowing discord among Americans may be getting a good chuckle out of an announcement by Facebook. Officials at the widely used social media company said this week they will increase efforts to keep ...
Three weeks ago the Independent reported that President Donald Trump's administration announced an agreement to do more to protect the U.S. Renewable Fuel Standard. Vesta farmer George Goblish, who also sits on the Minnesota Corn Research and Promotion Council, was quoted as saying the plan was ...