Bob Collins
Research confirms that mental health and mass shootings are not well linked, but who’s going to check when the wagons are circled and the weaponry of blaming mental illness is drawn? Read more →
MPR News Reflections and observations on the news
Health
Bob Bloomberg’s story is the story of thousands of parents of dead children across the country who didn’t think heroin was targeting their children. He wants to alert anyone else who still doesn’t think it does. Read more →
Youth football organizers are getting the message that parents are delivering. They don’t want their kids brains scrambled by tackle football.
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The nation’s health insurance system seems to have played a role in the death of a school teacher in Texas who balked at the copay for the medicine that might have saved her life. Read more →
Every day we’re confronted by the exploding opioid crisis ravaging the region and a story today in the La Crosse Tribune adds to the head-shaking senselessness. Read more →
The research, in the PLOS One journal, said suicides spiked by 10% in the five months after Williams’ 2014 death, the BBC says. Read more →
A glance around the ‘news’ coverage of the Super Bowl shows the National Football League has done it again. It’s convinced the skeptical world of journalism to fall head over heels over the celebrities who latch onto the Super Bowl, and the theater surrounding the “big game.” It’s hard to tell where the public relations arm of the NFL ends and journalism begins when a Super Bowl comes to town. The league’s ability to tamp down a discouraging word is how the NFL has become a billion-dollar non-profit organization.
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In the span of just two weeks, there have been two high-profile cases of people being dumped in their hospital gowns on the street outside.
The latest is in Milwaukee where workers of the Aurora Sinai Medical Center put a homeless man out on the street after he was discharged.
Pictures showed he had a hospital gown, sweatpants, no shoes and one sock.
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A chance meeting at a Kohl’s in Duluth sends a hat off to help another cancer patient. Read more →
In North Dakota, the law gives women the right to breastfeed if they act ‘in a discreet and modest manner,’ but it does not define what is discreet and modest.
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Sometimes, life is perfect. Take the case of Diane Bishop of Newfoundland, who was having a difficult time working because of the toll breast cancer was taking on her body. Read more →
A medical examiner in La Crosse County says the number of suicides is up considerably from a year ago. Why? Read more →
John Bond, a soldier in the Minnesota National Guard, needed a kidney. The Apple Valley man’s hero is dead, shot in the head on a street in Pittsburgh. Anton Kemaev, of Siberia, wasn’t a target; he was just in the wrong place. Read more →
Mike Justak, of Plymouth, Minn., can string 60,000 lights across 8 homes in his neighborhood, taming a blizzard of radio waves to dazzle carloads of people with a showman’s blend of theater and programming skill. But he says it’s easy compared to buttoning his shirt. Read more →
In telling the story of Karen Axeen, 57, of Apple Valley, KARE 11 reporter Lindsey Seavert invoked a powerful phrase — four words that can change the way we look at the world and our mortality: ‘the honor of dying.’
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