Bob CollinsThe Duluth News Tribune reports two men — Russell R. Sikkila Jr. of Chisholm and Carl W. Brandt of Forest Lake — have been fined $800 and $1,500. That’s the penalty for hiding bags of leeches in a worm cooler when they crossed the border at Fort Frances. Read more →
MPR News Reflections and observations on the news
Sports
They don’t call the kids on the Caledonia High School football team “champs” for nothing, and it’s not just because they beat Pipestone 57-to-6 on Friday to win the state Class AA football championship, their eighth title in the last 11 years. Read more →
Dan Hartley, a Durand, Wis., native, went hunting around Janesville on Saturday, looking for a deer to shoot.
That’s when a deer found him. Read more →
If the Derek Boogaard’s story wasn’t enough to make hockey fans think again about their glorification of hockey’s “enforcers”, it’s hard to imagine that Stephen Peat’s will be.
Read more →
As promised, the Facebook series from comedians Bill Murray and his brother, Brian-Doyle Murray’s dropped this week. They spent three months last season touring minor league ballparks.
There are worse ways to start the day.
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Johnny Ortiz is trying to believe what people routinely say. If you want something badly enough, you can achieve it. Now it’s up to everybody to give him the break he’s already earned. Read more →
Quick! Name a ski jumper!
Odds are, you can’t. Ski jumping isn’t a big deal for the masses anymore.
It wasn’t always thus. Read more →
Given the November weather and the general state of affairs, the nation has never more needed an online series of Bill Murray visits to minor league baseball stadiums. We’re in luck. Read more →
LeBron James, arguably the greatest basketball player of all time, took the subway to his hotel when he and his Cleveland Cavaliers teammates arrived in New York to play the Knicks last night.
Guess who ended up being the star of the video James posted on Twitter? Hint: He doesn’t play basketball.
Read more →
This looked like your basic NFL touchdown yesterday. A player makes a decent catch, runs it to the end zone and is mobbed by happy teammates. Nice. There was more to the story. A lot more. Read more →
Yesterday afternoon, thousands of volunteers for the upcoming Super Bowl week attended their training on how to put the state’s best foot forward for visitors to our fair state, many convinced that we’re just nicer and more polite than people in the rest of the country. Read more →
The Green Bay Packers paid tribute to veterans during their game on Monday night, giving away American flags to everyone streaming into the stadium.
Many of the flags ended up on the ground. Read more →
Everything that’s wrong with bro-talk radio can pretty much be summed up with a Boston sportscaster’s rant against Roy Halladay on the day after Halladay — about as decent a person as ever existed — crashed his plane into the Gulf of Mexico and died. Read more →
The entitlement of the cigarette smoker in one video. Read more →
It’s not clear what happened in today’s crash. But it’s important to remember that no plane is entirely safe and free from the mistakes a pilot makes, no matter what the marketing says. Read more →