Hermantown’s girls soccer team opens its season Thursday at home against North Branch with a rebuilt defense, an experienced group of attackers and the lingering memory of an overtime loss that ended last season one victory short of the state tournament. The Hawks finished 7-9-2 last fall
The Bulldogs’ championship window is open because they have Max Plante, high-end talent and unusual roster continuity. It is believable because Sandelin is still standing behind the bench.
Financial need alone will not carry two operating referendum questions across the finish line Nov. 3. The district must confront a trust issue that has accumulated over two decades and explain why voters should believe the next 10-year, $103 million plan be better than the plans that preceded it.
All seven city employee labor agreements were approved after Mayor Roger Reinert took office in January 2024.
Minnesota will not stumble into the future by accident. The forces shaping the state’s next 25 years are already visible— demographics that no longer replenish evenly, an economy increasingly anchored by health care, housing that determines who can work where, climate pressure that moves people quietly, and institutions built
The city cannot eliminate a multimillion-dollar structural deficit without confronting employee costs, service levels or taxes. That is where the money is — and where the difficult decisions will be.
Willie Howard, the former NFL linebacker recently named the Monsters’ senior consultant, understands that the AF1 carries responsibilities beyond winning. Most of its players are still chasing something. They need film, exposure and an opportunity to demonstrate that they can play professionally.
More than five decades later, I am still chasing the same goal I had as a 15-year-old sports reporter in Cloquet. Earn the reader's trust. Everything else is just ink.
Each innovation sparked debate. Each was accused, at one time or another, of making journalism less authentic. Yet journalism endured because the profession was never about the equipment. It was about the work.
The first step is honesty. Residents already know homelessness, addiction and mental illness exist. They also know downtown remains home to exceptional restaurants, successful small businesses, major employers, recognized attractions, a spectacular Lake Superior shoreline and people who work there.
Ness convinced Duluth to stop speaking about itself like a city waiting for the next economic funeral and start speaking about itself like a place with a future worth competing for nationally. Not perfectly. Not without backlash. Not without legitimate criticism. But undeniably.
Unfortunately, the new currency of leadership is visibility. You’re judged not by budgets balanced or streets repaired, but by how many times your face appears on a feed. The ribbon-cutting is no longer the celebration of work done; it is the work.
Duluth residents simply need this summer emotionally. They need concerts at Bayfront and families along the Lakewalk. They need baseball games, festivals and tourists asking directions. They need reminders that life cannot become an endless cycle of bills, politics, inflation, anxiety and survival.
Bayfront remains one of the few places where the city still functions the way a healthy city is supposed to function: as a shared public space where people continue gathering together because they genuinely want to be there. Every summer, Duluth remembers that again.
Oberstar approached Congress differently. He understood it as machinery requiring relationships, technical credibility, negotiation and committee leverage rather than ideological performance.
History will remember George Floyd’s murder for many reasons. Protest. Rage. Reform. Politics. Division. Reckoning. But the enduring question may be simpler. Did America merely react to what it saw? Or did it finally learn to tell itself the truth?