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Howie Carr: Boston City Hall arrest opens position for other desperate folks ready for the Reparations Task Force

Published Sat, 22 Feb 2025 10:50:51 GMT

Try not to let the recent after-hours arrest at City Hall of the coordinator of the totally on-the-level Boston Task Force on Reparations destroy your faith in the integrity of this vitally important grift, er, restorative justice initiative.Surely there must be some mistake here!How dare the cops assume that a distinguished scholar like George Washington Williams IV “appeared to be under the influence of some narcotic” just because he got into a scuffle with the local constabulary late at night in an abandoned upper-floor office.The world-renowned “social demographer,” who has beaten numerous minor raps over the years, has since been fired by The Man, in this case Mayor Michelle Wu.That’s the bad news. The good news is, there are plenty of good candidates of color ready, willing and desperate to pick up the burden of this vitally important mission.Two names immediately come to mind: Rachael Rollins and Monica Cannon-Grant.Those two are certainly experts on reparations. Until recent...

Where have Cubs players lived over the years? The suburbs were a popular choice for decades. And many have rented.

Published Sat, 22 Feb 2025 10:50:51 GMT

The Chicago Cubs have played on Chicago’s North Side for 116 years, since the team moved north from West Side Park.And although many Cubs players have owned homes in the Chicago area over the years, a review of the locations where players have owned shows a distinct trend: Throughout much of the 1960s through the ‘80s, most Cubs players were loath to own homes anywhere in the city, and instead favored the north, northwest and western suburbs as places to hang their ball caps.However, since the 1980s, far more of the homeowning Cubs have bought places in the city than in the suburbs. Also striking: In the past few years, only a select few Cubs have bought Chicago-area homes of any kind.Many rentersMost major league baseball players rent homes in their teams’ cities. Many lead an itinerant lifestyle, as they are subject to the whims of team owners who can trade or release them at any time, and the advent of free agency has made long careers with any one team rare.Als...

Divided MassGOP plays blame game for $600K party debt

Published Sat, 22 Feb 2025 10:50:51 GMT

Who’s to blame for the precarious financial position of the Massachusetts Republican Party will be hashed out at an upcoming committee meeting.Two factions of a divided state committee have put forth competing agenda items, which would seek votes for the removal of the party’s top two financial officers, and bring last year’s gubernatorial candidate in for questioning about “campaign finance irregularities” that led to roughly half of the party’s $600,000 debt.“Basically, of all the debt that I inherited as party chair, nearly half we’ve attributed to the Diehl campaign,” said MassGOP Chair Amy Carnevale, referring to losing Republican gubernatorial candidate Geoff Diehl. “Then about a quarter we believe the party is responsible for, and about a quarter is still under review.”The party’s debt now stands at roughly $628,000, up from the $602,000 figure that was estimated in the weeks that followed Carnevale’s narrow win over former chair Jim Lyons this past January, Carnevale told th...

Skywatch: The great late June star show

Published Sat, 22 Feb 2025 10:50:51 GMT

The Summer Solstice, the first day of astronomical summer, is on June 21 this year. It’s the longest day of the year but unfortunately for us stargazers, it’s also the shortest night of the year, which means staying up late to begin your celestial adventures. The good news is that the nights get longer after the solstice, and stargazing can start earlier and earlier. Get an afternoon nap so you can enjoy the show!The very bright planet Venus continues its stint as the “evening star” this month, and it’s by far the brightest star-like object in the night sky. You can’t miss it beaming away in the west, popping out long before the end of evening twilight.(Mike Lynch)Since Venus is entirely shrouded by a very dense atmosphere, there isn’t much to see with a telescope. However, since it’s an inferior planet with its orbit around the sun within the Earth’s orbit, it goes through phases like our moon. At the start of the month, Venus i...

Ray LaHood: High-speed rail can curb America’s summer travel woes

Published Sat, 22 Feb 2025 10:50:51 GMT

The summer travel season that gets underway this weekend promises to be one of the most challenging ever. As transportation patterns return to pre-pandemic levels, millions of Americans will face the familiar miles-long traffic jams and labyrinthine airport security lines.Following last summer’s chaos in the skies, with nearly 45,000 flights canceled and over 400,000 delayed, transportation experts are urging calm as travelers prepare for a summer of frustration and frayed nerves.While patience is certainly a virtue, resignation to a dysfunctional transportation system is not. As the world’s wealthiest nation, we can do so much better. If we had a nationwide high-speed rail network, holiday travel would be enjoyable. Instead of driving or flying, you could hop on a high-speed train, zoom across your region with great ease, comfort and peace of mind, and arrive right on time. Not to mention that it would cost less than flying.America’s holiday travel quagmire is a r...

F.D. Flam: The spike in child mortality won’t go away on its own

Published Sat, 22 Feb 2025 10:50:51 GMT

For Americans under 20, an epidemic much deadlier than Covid-19 has raged over the last three years. Deaths among those aged 1 to 19 surged 20% — driven by an increase in car crashes, suicide, homicide and drug overdoses.The combined toll of behavior-related deaths on children and teens hit home after a March report by the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University. Earlier this month, a Wall Street Journal story fleshed out that data with stories — a mother finding her teenage son dead from fentanyl poisoning, an honor student taking a bike ride with friends and being fatally gunned down.How much of this is a result of the pandemic — or the government’s disruptive reaction to it? Teen suicides and drug overdoses had been on the rise over the last decade, but that rise accelerated during the pandemic. Deaths on the road had been decreasing, and since 2020 they rose more sharply than any other time on record. And gun deaths overall —...

One-third of St. Paul now exempt from rent control as exceptions pile up

Published Sat, 22 Feb 2025 10:50:51 GMT

When renters move out of a St. Paul apartment, landlords now have the right to hike rents on the empty rental unit by 8% plus inflation, well over the 3% rent cap imposed last year by the city’s new rent control ordinance.That amendment to the ordinance, crafted by the St. Paul City Council last fall and intended to encourage property improvements between occupancies, took effect in January.In other words, once an apartment goes empty, St. Paul landlords have a clear path to increase rents by nearly 15% this year, given the U.S. inflation rate. From Jan. 1 through the end of April, landlords have submitted 362 requests — or 90 per month — asking to do just that. And most of these “just cause” rent requests have been approved by the city.“The 15% (rent increase request) now comes up very frequently in ‘just cause’ vacancies,” said Angie Wiese, director of the St. Paul Department of Safety and Inspections. “That’s far a...

Conor Sen: Walmart is now fighting inflation in a big way

Published Sat, 22 Feb 2025 10:50:51 GMT

Americans’ buying power has been squeezed since the start of 2022 as companies steadily raised prices to restore their profit margins — deflated by higher costs for freight and labor — to pre-pandemic levels. Now Walmart Inc. appears to be saying enough is enough.Consumer goods companies have been willing to hike prices on core products even if it meant selling fewer units, as long as the end result is more profit. But those price increases have been costing Walmart, too. That’s because Walmart earns higher margins on discretionary spending — categories like apparel and home goods — so for the company, household budgets being gobbled up by the basics is bad for business.Walmart is determined to push back against this trend. The chief of Walmart’s U.S. operations explained the strategy on the company’s recent earnings call, saying that “working with those suppliers that are on the prepared foods and consumable categories to get co...

Two magical summer reads — one for grown-ups, one for kids, both by Minnesotans

Published Sat, 22 Feb 2025 10:50:51 GMT

Do you believe in magic? You will after you read these involving novels that include all the staples of other-worldly fiction but with a contemporary feel.“Ink Blood Sister Scribe” by Emma Torzs (William Morrow, $30)Unlike most books, which simply absorbed the drop of blood they were offered, the words drank. As soon as she’d touched her finger to the page it began greedily swallowing her blood, her finger stinging with slight suction as if a tiny mouth was latched on, and the ink grew brighter, blacker, fiercer on the linen page. — From “Ink Blood Sister Scribe”“Ink Blood Sister Scribe” by Emma Torzs. (Book cover courtesy of William Morrow. Author portrait by Maxwell Collyard)It doesn’t matter how many TBR books are lying on every surface of your house. You have to make room for this debut novel from a Minneapolis author. It has everything we want in summer reads — old houses, hidden staircases, messages (and corpses) sent...

Minnesota man uses acupuncture to find relief from tick-borne illness

Published Sat, 22 Feb 2025 10:50:51 GMT

ANGLE INLET, Minn. — In September 2021, I wrote about Paul Colson, a third-generation owner of Jake’s Northwest Angle Resort and lifelong Northwest Angle resident, who in June of that year began getting sick every time he ate red meat.The first incident occurred after eating some elk sausage.“It was a gastrointestinal sort of thing,” Colson, who’s now 53, said at the time. “It wasn’t severe or anything, but it was like nausea, diarrhea, and I didn’t really think a whole lot of it.”A couple of days later, Colson and his wife, Karen, grilled up some pork steak, and he got sick again, this time more intensely and with a rash. A beef steak several days later produced the same reaction, he recalls.Something definitely wasn’t right.Fatty meat seemed to produce the strongest reactions, Colson recalls, so he wondered if maybe he was having gallbladder trouble, since fatty foods are known to trigger flare-ups.Then he got even sicker after eating some canned elk that had absolutely no f...