Bob CollinsShe was Christopher Steele when she was born in Minnesota. When her parents split when she was 5, she went into the foster care system and, when she was in the fifth grade, went to live with Al and Madelyn Sisson. He was a Rochester, Minn., cop. Read more →
MPR News Reflections and observations on the news
Crime and Justice
Sandra Sue Albrecht, who died in July 2016, must be turning over in her grave over the way her headstone has split her family. Read more →
The Star Tribune reports that the frozen Minnehaha Falls is again luring people to ignore signs prohibiting them from walking into forbidden territory. Read more →
There is no more helpless feeling in the world than being the parent of an adult child.
We raise them, we let them go. Sometimes they fly and sometimes they crash and die. Our human instinct, however, does not allow us to take such an intellectual approach to the realities of life. They’re our children, after all. Read more →
For some time now, prosecutors who are trying to stop the practice of ‘sexting’ — sending explicit photographs to someone else — have warned teenagers that they could be prosecuted for distributing child pornography. Now there’s a case in Rice County that involves exactly that. Read more →
The normalization of school shootings has made it difficult for those fighting them to get their message to rise above the din of the daily news. One shooting last week in New Mexico barely registered a blip in the news cycle.
Five years ago Thursday, the nation’s shock reached its zenith on the subject when 20 children between 6 and 7 years old and six adults were killed at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT. Read more →
Katie Mager, 27, of Apple Valley, Minn., and Ryan Reiersgaard, 27, of Burnsville, Minn., had a ton of fun last week, claiming they were robbed and, as is often the case in these sorts of things, claiming the perpetrator was a person of color. Read more →
Wayne Lo roamed the campus of Simon’s Rock of Bard College in Great Barrington, Mass., my home before moving to Minnesota. He thought he was getting commands from God to kill people. And so he shot them, killing one student and one professor, wounding several others, including a student from Minnesota. Read more →
Brendon Manuel Dos Santos, 23, was found not guilty of attending a noisy party in Grand Forks yesterday, but was he on trial for that charge or was it really because he wouldn’t so something he didn’t have to do. Read more →
The thin blue line can be particularly tiny in small towns where the local constables know everybody and watch out for each other in a way that’s a little different than the big city. The potential for conflicts of interest is huge. Read more →
Angela Lansbury, the beloved 93-year-old actress, is pinning the blame for sexual harassment and abuse on women.
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Marlene Bird, 50, wanted you to know her name.
She struggled with alcoholism and was homeless in 2014 when she was beaten and set afire. Her legs had to be amputated. She lived with a patch covering her eye. She had been sexually assaulted. Read more →
There aren’t a lot of athletes who spend their offseason calling attention to prosecutorial misconduct, but the WNBA — unlike almost every other major sports league — seems to encourage its athletes not to “stick to sports.”
The Minnesota Lynx’s Maya Moore shows up this week on Jerry Stackhouse’s online show for The Players Tribune.
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The cult leader was a waste of good carbon who spread nothing but misery during his 83 years on the planet. It’s unseemly to speak ill of the dead, of course, but Manson is an exception. Read more →
What we have here is the latest lesson in the First Amendment, courtesy of a sheriff in Texas who posted this image on his Facebook page, seeking to identify the driver so he could have a little chat with her. Read more →