Philanthropic foundations give 5 percent of their assets each year to further the causes they support — education, the arts, helping the poor or homeless — then invest the remaining 95 percent to earn more to continue (and, they hope, increase) giving in the future.

More and more these days, foundations are realizing that, in addition to the positive work they do with their grants, they can expand their reach and foster more results by also investing their assets in companies or projects that do good and promote their vision.

It's called mission investing, and it's a hot topic in the nonprofit world. (It does not, as I first wrongly guessed, have anything to do with missionaries. Instead, it involves using a foundation's investments to enhance its mission.)

And it's why hundreds of philanthropic foundation leaders from around the country will be in Minneapolis this week discussing ways they can invest their funds in ways that will further their core missions.

Gary L. Cunningham, chief program officer at the Northwest Area Foundation, says it's a great opportunity for the Twin Cities to host the sold-out Mission Investors Exchange conference that runs Tuesday through Thursday at the Minneapolis Marriott City Center.

"All these investors coming to town is a very big deal; they're making social impact investments that are driving business and industry around the country," said Cunningham, who's on the host committee for the conference.

The concept's roots seem to go back to the days of protest over college and foundation investments in companies that did business with apartheid South Africa, and it has evolved into investing a foundation's assets in places that will compound the good work.

Proponents talk about two types of mission investing:

• Market-rate mission investments, which hope to foster  specific social and/or environmental goals while still getting market-rate returns for the foundation.
• And below-market mission investments, which won't earn as much as the broader market and are usually low-interest loans for specific projects by nonprofit or for-profit enterprises that address social and environmental challenges. When repaid, the money goes for new charitable investments.

A primary goal of this week's conference, sponsored by the Mission Investors Exchange, is to share ideas and experiences, said Melanie Audette, the group's education and training manager:

Gary Cunningham

"They will learn primarily about the best ways to address some of our biggest challenges — including income inequality and climate change — by investing locally or globally."

Audette said some good examples of that can be found in Minnesota, such as the Saint Paul Foundation providing loans to small businesses and investing in new technologies like they do at the SW Initiative Foundation, based in Hutchinson.

"This will be a chance for colleagues to share what’s working for them," Audette said.

Cunningham said 400 people are registered; there's a waiting list of 100 more.

Those attending will come from family, community and corporate foundations of all sizes. Many are well known, like the Ford, Rockefeller, MacArthur foundations. They'll also have representatives of nonprofit and for-profit organizations, banks and other financial institutions.

All, Audette said, want to learn "how to use the tools of investing to make people’s lives better, as well as identifying ways that foundation leaders can expand the scope of their work and partnerships with other investors."

Among the projects that the exchange points to as an example of mission investment is the $2.1 million low-interest loan fund to promote job creation, announced last week by the Saint Paul Foundation.

Two other nonprofits ― Neighborhood Development Center (NDC) and Metropolitan Economic Development Association (Meda) ― will lend the money to East Metro business start-ups and expansions that are creating employment opportunities.

Carleen Rhodes, president and CEO of the Saint Paul Foundation, said: "The capital will be recycled several times in the next 10 years. As businesses repay their loans, NDC and Meda will lend it again to other job creators."

Melanie Audette

Cunningham notes that many nonprofits work hard to aid, not harm, their own missions when investing.

"If we're not careful, we might have one hand fighting against the other," he said. "For example, you might be helping people buy homes, so you don't want to invest in a company that might be guilty of predatory lending practices."

In addition to speeches and workshops on the nuts and bolts of mission investing, those attending the conference will also see some examples of Twin Cities projects like the Nice Ride bikes, Midtown Market and affordable living sites.

They'll also visit some American Indian projects and redevelopment in Northeast Minneapolis and along the Central Corridor light-rail line.

Featured speakers include:

• Retired U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe from Maine
• Kat Taylor, CEO, One PacificCoast Bank

Interstate 35E played a major role in destroying downtown Saint Paul. Along with Interstate 94 and Hwy 52, it forms a series of concrete trenches and highway interchanges that pin downtown against the Mississippi River and cut it off from its neighborhoods. In addition to destroying downtown, Interstate 35E creates a huge, north-south chasm that cuts Saint Paul in half, separating east from west.

There are only a few places to cross this chasm — Phalen Blvd, Cayuga Street, Maryland Avenue, Arlington Avenue and, at the northern border, Larpenteur Avenue. With the exception of Cayuga Street and maybe Arlington, all of these crossings are awful, car-choked, arterial boulevards with little or no provision made for pedestrians and bicyclists. The only pleasant and marginally safe places for pedestrians and cyclists to cross I-35E are the Cayuga Street underpass, a bicycle-pedestrian bridge on the Gateway Trail and a bicycle-pedestrian underpass near York Avenue.

Unfortunately, MnDOT’s “I-35E/Cayuga Project” is about to destroy all three of these crossings.

The federal government no longer gives out money to widen highways, unless a state DOT is creating “High-Occupancy-Vehicle” or “HOV/Tolling” lanes. HOV/Tolling lanes (what we call “MnPASS lanes”) can be used by buses and multiple-occupant vehicles to speed trips into and out of traffic-congested downtowns. The new twist is that single-occupant vehicles can also use these lanes if they pay an electronic toll. It’s called “Fast Lane Tolling” and was slipped into Federal Highway Legislation almost a decade ago by Mark Kennedy, former U.S. Representative from Minnesota.

State DOTs love Fast Lane Tolling because it generates extra, dedicated revenue for their agencies with which they can build yet more highways. This and the fact that it qualifies for federal money is the reason that MnDOT and many state DOTs are building these new lanes. They sell them to cities and states by saying they’re somehow “progressive” or “innovative transportation solutions” that will get users to pay road costs, decrease travel times and enable Bus Rapid Transit. In reality they are just road-widening projects that generate revenue for highway departments.

If DOTs were really committed to Bus Rapid Transit and progressive transportation, they could convert existing lanes to HOV/Tolling lanes for a fraction of the cost. By taking away a regular travel lane, they would reduce the volume of single occupant vehicles entering a downtown and they would create real incentives for people to stop driving and use transit. What’s more, if DOTs were really committed to progressive transportation, they would use the toll revenues from these HOV/Tolling lanes to subsidize land use changes and better city and regional public transit. In reality, they just use the toll revenues to build more highways.

The I-35E/Cayuga project is a road-widening project. It will add a northbound and southbound MnPASS Lane to what is already a six-lane freeway, from downtown Saint Paul up to Little Canada Road, near the I-694 interchange.

To do this, almost every bridge over I-35E must be torn out or rebuilt because the abutments for these bridges are not far enough apart to accommodate the additional lanes. As a result, the project is projected to cost $225 million– a quarter-billion dollars for five miles of roadway. This is more money than is spent on bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure in the entire United States! MnDOT says that “many of these bridges needed to be rebuilt anyway” but this is not entirely true and the fact that they have to be rebuilt longer, with brand new abutments is adding major costs to the project.

In addition, MnDOT will be adding on-ramps and off-ramps at Cayuga Street to ease congestion on the University Avenue ramps, further south. The east end of Cayuga Street will simultaneously be reconfigured to connect to Phalen Blvd. By adding this connection and all these freeway ramps, a sleepy, pleasant-to-bike-on street that crossed I-35E, will now become another dangerous, car-choked, arterial boulevard.

To cut costs, MnDOT is tearing out both the Gateway Trail bike-pedestrian bridge and the bike-pedestrian underpass near York Avenue and not replacing them. Bicyclists and pedestrians will be forced to cross I-35E on Maryland Avenue (a motor-vehicle hell-hole), on Cayuga (a soon-to-be motor-vehicle hell-hole), or on Arlington Avenue. The Arlington Avenue Bridge has been widened slightly so the Gateway Trail can be redirected over it. Cyclists, joggers and pedestrians will now have to cross at Arlington but there won’t be a direct trail link on the west side of I-35E to take them south for several more years, because completing this link and making up for the loss of the bike-pedestrian bridge is simply not a priority for MnDOT.

So, to summarize, we will be spending a quarter billion dollars on an unnecessary road-widening project that will enable rich people to get to work ten minutes faster, that will make bicycling and non-motorized crossings of I-35E worse, and will pump thousands more vehicles into downtown Saint Paul, a place already destroyed by parking lots, freeway trenches and traffic.

The I-35E/Cayuga Project is the worst thing to happen to Saint Paul in the fourteen years I’ve lived here.

Cities are required to give “Municipal Consent” for large highway projects. Unfortunately, Municipal Consent hearings are often just meaningless, pro-forma speed bumps. The hearing for the I-35E/Cayuga Project wasn’t advertised but was just one item on a regular Saint Paul City Council Wednesday night public hearing. I was the only person to testify against the project. The city council vote in favor of it was unanimous, including at least two council members who should have known better. Mayor Coleman gave his blessing and the project is now well under way.

If we want to revitalize our cities and save ourselves from catastrophic climate change, we simply cannot keep building new highways and new highway lanes. It’s that simple. No amount of greenwashing can make this project look good. MnDOT just took an asphalt dump on our city. At meeting after meeting, MnDOT says they don’t have the money to make bicycle and pedestrian improvements to Snelling Avenue or other state highways in Saint Paul, something they could do for the cost of a few HAWK signals and some traffic islands. Yet they have a quarter-billion dollars for this horrible highway project or three quarters of a billion dollars for a new Stillwater Bridge.

Somehow, we all need to become informed about where and when these projects are happening, pressure our elected officials to reject them and show up to these municipal consent hearings. We need a state or national organization that is dedicated exclusively to stopping all new highway projects and redirecting this money to alternative modes of transportation and better land use. The existing environmental and alternative transportation groups aren’t getting the job done. If we don’t act, MnDOT will just keep building roads from now ’til doomsday. Given the rate of climate change, doomsday might not be far away.

This post was written by Andy Singer and originally published on streets.mn. Follow streets.mn on Twitter: @streetsmn.

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“It’s wonderful to have gotten to a point where I don’t care what I look like,” said Wendy Lehr Friday morning, sitting in a booth at the French Meadow Bakery and Cafe in Minneapolis as I took her photo.

No wonder. The 71-year-old actress, long considered the grand dame of the Twin Cities theater scene, has made a career of looking like whatever part she inhabits. A founding member of the Children’s Theatre Company from 1966 to 1986 and an always active player at the Jungle Theater and other stages, Lehr was awarded the McKnight Foundation’s Distinguished Artist Award for 2013 and tonight addresses the annual meeting of the Friends of the University of Minnesota Libraries in a talk she’s calling, “My Life in the Theater: I Always Said Yes!”  

Lehr gave MinnPost a preview of her presentation that encompassed her time as an actress, director, teacher, dancer, choreographer, and founding artistic director of The St. Paul Conservatory for the Arts.

MinnPost: How are you preparing for the U of M presentation?

Wendy Lehr: It’s particularly interesting for me to do this now, as the libraries are archiving much of the creative life of Minnesota and a number of the theaters, which are near and dear to my heart. They’re not so interested in things like reviews and programs; they’re really getting a broad view of the life of these theaters and directors’ books and actors’ notes, and I think there may be a move to get oral histories. [Friends President] Judy Hornbacher, who invited me to speak, said, “We’ll clean your attic for you.” I’m looking for things that are particular to me and that might not be duplicated by other gifts.

MP: There’s been a lot of Wendy Lehr in the last couple years. You won a lifetime achievement award at the Iveys in 2010, there was the McKnight award last year, and others. It seems like you’ve never been more beloved. How does it all feel?

WL: It’s outrageous. I am just so amazed and humbled by being, as I call myself, a representative of the community. I think one of the very good things is my good friend Bain Boehlke and I are neck and neck. It’s lovely to be recognized; I’m a little embarrassed by all of it. The thing that gets me the most and the thing I love most is that I’m still getting cast in plays. My career hasn’t ended. Bain keeps thinking when we get all these awards that people are trying to tell him, “That’s enough now, time to retire.” But we’re both still working, and happily so. One of the last things I did, “Driving Miss Daisy,” I learned so much doing that play. I just feel like you don’t get to a certain point and just coast. Things keep opening up all the time.

MP: What did you learn? How can that be?

WL: It often has to do with the actors you’re working with. And one of the actors is very much an actor of the moment. And it really taught me about really listening. You know, you always say “listen.” But don’t listen for what you know is coming, listen for what you don’t know is coming. That keeps the spark of it so fresh. And it’s not that I didn’t know that lesson, but it was burnished for me in that play.

The next thing I did was “Our Town” (for Theater Latte Da), as the stage manager, which is a man’s role, written for a man, but not necessarily so. The cool thing about doing that is Thorton Wilder’s play was so groundbreaking in 1938, and some plays now are not nearly as avant-garde as that play was in its form and content.

MP: As a teacher, what would you impart to people coming up in the theater now? What do you tell people about creativity and staying in touch with that the way you have all these years?

WL: Well, I went into teaching somewhat unwillingly. In the early days of the Children’s Theatre, it was always a part of the aesthetic of the company to have young people play roles of young people [as opposed to adults playing children]. Which happily required some training of these young people. So I think it was 1968 when we started having these classes, and John Donahue, who was the head and founder of the Children’s Theatre, wanted all the actors to teach classes.

And I was always, “How do I teach? How do I teach?” I was 24, I was always begging Bain to teach my classes for me. I started teaching technique and mime and things like that, but as I continued to teach and as I became more adventurous in what I was teaching, I realized that it was a gift to me because it made me articulate my process. Not only that, but talk about what my frustrations are and what I’m trying to accomplish and what my change in tactics might be.

It was a real eye-opener, because in those days so many of the young people were not only your students but your colleagues on stage. So you really had to be on the honest side because they were going to be up there on stage with you in front of a paying audience.

I’ve always tried to remain a student. I’m not taking any classes now, but I took a lot of classes so that I could always feel the perspective of the students. There are only so many lessons you learn, but every time you relearn you come at them with more experience and more perspective, so it enriches you. So I realized there’s only so many lessons to teach.

MP: That’s a very interesting idea — only so many lessons to be taught. There’s a limit?

WL: I don’t mean for the audience, I mean for the artist. The things that you learn that are core and necessary are presence, commitment, discipline, imagination. And a few of those other words like courage and confidence, but those are the lessons, aside from specifically, “How did Mary Twinkle hold her teacup?” You know, you don’t want to ice the cake before you bake it.

Anyway, those are the lessons I had to teach. I find it somewhat more difficult and challenging these days because cultural references have changed so much. I have to sometimes find a new vocabulary, and I don’t mean current jargon, I mean a new way of getting at something. I can’t really guide people young people too much about how to have a career, because I was so blessed to have joined the Children’s Theatre, where I had a 20-year apprenticeship, in which I learned a hell of a lot of skills and didn’t have to spend half of my time looking for a job and another third of my time being a barista and then just scrambling.

One of the reasons why I loved doing “Our Town” is because there were all these young people and I love ‘em. I love to have them over for a drink, because they don’t talk about their health. They’re so cool, because they’re all making their work. There are so many little strange fabulous invigorating companies now. I can’t even tell you what their names all are. A couple years ago I saw just a fabulous piece Savage Umbrella did. It was some weird Greek play about two brothers, and it was ... in like an old bombed-out theater, and it was cold but it was great. And the gestalt of it, all of those things fit together so brilliantly.

Another piece I saw was at Red Eye, and it had some friends of mine in it — Annie Enneking, and Barbara Berlovitz, and Sara Richardson, and it was about Brecht and the three women who were prominent in his life when he went to California. It was exhilarating, and as groundbreaking as some of the early work that was done here, and that Children’s Theatre did as well. Because it wasn’t all children’s literature — there were all those adult pieces that were so wonderful. But the Minneapolis Ensemble Theater, the Palace Theater, At the Foot of the Mountain, Firehouse, all of those places were doing this really groundbreaking material, and it’s wonderful to see it all still happening.

MP: Great that you’re out and going to stuff you’re not personally involved with.

WL: I don’t go as often nearly as much as I should, because there’s always a zillion things going on. But I like to contribute my enthusiasm, and in the spirit of that, it’s going to pass it on to you, and you’re going to pass it on to somebody else.

MP: What did the ’60s in Minneapolis implant in you? What were those halcyon days like, for someone who wasn’t there?

WL: They were so courageous. Nobody ever said … you know, the title of this talk I’m giving is “My Life in the Theater: I Always Said Yes!” Well, part of that is because in those days nobody said, “No.” John Donahue asked me one time, when he was doing one of his very surrealist plays, “Would it gag you if you had a live toad in your mouth?”

It was a time of incredible discovery. I couldn’t believe it. Going to work at the Children’s Theatre, I learned about expressionism, art, music, karate, early medieval music, ballet — you name it, it was all there. It was just expanding the vocabulary of storytelling and the vocabulary of exploration. There was so much exploration going on, and there were audiences for it. That’s one thing I’ve been researching about this community. It’s really great to remember that there’s always been theater here. The thing that’s interesting is that there always was an audience, so I think that that’s fertile ground for what has happened.

MP: Have you ruminated on that at all? For as many artists as there are, there have always been plenty of people in this area who come out and see live theater, music, art.

WL: There are many versions of theater, and many different audiences at this point, and I think it’s good for us to not to get too judgmental about things because I believe in the politics of getting people in the room together. You know, if they’re going to see “Disney Princesses on Ice,” they are in the room and they’re seeing someone who can skate their ass off. That’s a skill; you might not call it Eleonora Duse doing something, but it’s [worthwhile].

MP: I agree one hundred percent. Especially these days when we can sequester off with a book or movie or record and have all sorts of experiences alone. What do you mean by “the politics” of getting people in a room together for a performance?

WL: A lot of things.  I guess “politics” isn’t the word so much as I think it is a necessity in understanding yourself as a community. Of course, people tend to go where they’re most comfortable, and it’s nice to tease ‘em out a little bit.

MP: What’s next?

WL: On Tuesday, right after I give the talk at the library, I start rehearsing “The Heiress” at the Jungle, which is an adaptation of a Henry James novel, “Washington Square.” I’m learning lines, I like to be up front about learning lines because there’s nothing worse than carrying the script around because it truncates your physical process. I’ve been looking at paintings and photographs from that period, 1850, and ruminating. Then Bain and I are playing opposite each other in “On Golden Pond” in November. And I love to work at the Jungle because I don’t drive and I can walk to work.  

MP: Any parting words of wisdom for those of us who have been inspired by your life work?

WL: I try to not to have expectations and not to judge them. A friend was telling me that John Guare was their graduation speaker at Columbia and he said “Beware of the itty bitty shitty committee in your head,” and I love that.

Creative Commons/Rebecca

A new study, published last week in the journal Physiology & Behavior, adds more evidence in support of this yawning-as-brain-cooling-mechanism theory.

I’ve written here before about yawning and how it’s physiological purpose continues to stump scientists.

One leading theory has been that yawning helps send oxygen to the brain, perhaps to counter excess carbon dioxide, which is a waste product that can accumulate in our bodies when we’re tired or sleepy and, thus, more likely to be breathing slowly and shallowly. (We get rid of carbon dioxide, of course, when we exhale.)

But no study has been able to show that yawning and blood oxygen levels are connected.

More recently, scientists have proposed that yawning helps cool the brain to keep it at a temperature that maximizes alertness and efficiency. Studies involving both rats and people have found, for example, that brain temperature rises sporadically before a yawn — and falls again immediately afterward. Research has also shown that human brains tend to heat up when we are in need of sleep and/or are physically tired.

A new study, published last week in the journal Physiology & Behavior, adds more evidence in support of this yawning-as-brain-cooling-mechanism theory. The study found that the amount of yawning people do is dependent on the temperature of the air around them.

A tale of two cities

For the study, researchers approached 120 people walking outside in Vienna, Austria, during both winter and summer months. The pedestrians were shown 18 photos of other people yawning and were then observed to see if and how often they yawned while looking at the photos. They were also asked questions about how long they had been outside before participating in the study, how long they had slept the night before and how old they were.

The results of this study were then compared to an identical one conducted previously in Tucson, Arizona. The researchers found that the people in Vienna yawned more in summer than in winter, while those in Tucson yawned more in winter than in summer.

It didn’t matter, then, what season it was. Nor did it matter how long or short the days were. In both locations, contagious yawning was most likely to occur during a temperature “Goldilocks zone” of around 68 degrees Farenheit.

In other words, the participants were most likely to yawn when the temperature was neither too hot nor too cold.

Unnecessary at both extremes

That finding actually fits the yawning-cools-the-brain hypothesis. For, as the authors of the study explain, yawning may not be necessary when ambient temperatures get too cold. And when temps get too hot, yawning may simply not work at cooling the brain, so we tend to not yawn as much then, either.

But when ambient temperatures begin to get slightly warmer than the brain, a yawn may help us keep our cool, so to speak — and keep us alert. And by “spreading” the yawning to those around us, we ensure (evolutionarily speaking) that our social group stays vigilant, too.

At least, that’s the theory.

If you live here in Minnesota, you can test the theory yourself today. We may reach that yawning “Goldilocks zone” of upper 60s around noon.

WASHINGTON — Republican congressional candidates Stewart Mills and Torrey Westrom have been named to top tier of the National Republican Congressional Committee's "Young Guns" program, the NRCC announced Monday.

The Young Guns program identifies highly-regarded Republican challengers in races the GOP considers potentially competitive, and opens the door for financial and campaign support from the NRCC, the party's chief congressional campaigning arm.

Mills, a businessman, is challenging Rep. Rick Nolan in a race that's already garnering significant early national attention. Westrom, a state senator, is challenging long-time incumbent Rep. Collin Peterson. Mills and Westrom are two of 10 candidates named to the program on Monday. Of the 10, the Cook Political Report considers Peterson the only Democrat "likely" to win re-election (Nolan's race is rated "lean Democratic").

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has a similar program, called "Red to Blue." No Minnesota candidates have qualified for that program yet.

Devin Henry can be reached at dhenry@minnpost.com.

Every day, Ayan Mohamed’s fourth-grade students ask, “Have you gone yet?”

“No,” she answers, laughing. “You would notice if I was gone.”

Whereupon the students add more to the already voluminous list of things they want Mohamed, a bilingual education assistant, and the other three teachers at Anne Sullivan who will visit Somaliland next month to see, do and photograph.

James Kindle’s third- through sixth-grade students, most of whom were born in refugee camps in Ethiopia, want to see pictures of places they’ve never been — places their parents lived and have talked so much about.

Kaitlin Lindsay’s kindergarten and first-grade students want her to find and photograph a particular kind of tree that doesn’t exist here but that plays a special role in their culture. When it gets really hot in East Africa, the community gathers under its branches to tell stories, play games or — sometimes — hold class.

The girls in Laura Byard’s middle-school classes are making sure she knows how to wrap her head scarf properly.

Seeking greater engagement

Nearly two-thirds of Anne Sullivan’s students are Somali and 30 percent are recent refugees. Greater engagement with them was the goal the four teachers had in mind last fall when they applied for a grant from AchieveMPLS to partially fund the trip.

If they understood the role education plays in Somalia, and the knowledge and skills the kids acquired through an experience most Americans assume seeds only deficits, they could better help their students, they believed.

And yet the four were blown away when their kids — many of them enrolled in a special bilingual program for very recent immigrants with limited exposure to formal education — took ownership of the trip.

The kids, for their part, can scarcely believe that their teachers are interested enough in their roots to make the not-so-easy trip, and to blog about it while they are there. Who would want to spend their summer vacation retracing the steps of the displaced?

Last fall the principal at Anne Sullivan encouraged Lindsay to apply for a $750 grant to pay for buses for field trips. On the website of AchieveMPLS, the district’s nonprofit partner, Lindsay noticed that applications for larger grants for teacher projects were being solicited.

“I thought, ‘That’s how we’re gonna go to Somalia like we’ve always wanted,’ ” Lindsay said. The grant is for $10,000; the teachers are a little more than a third of the way toward raising the other $6,000 the trip will cost.

The three nonimmigrant teachers — two of them board certified — already had done a lot to immerse themselves in the culture, from taking Somali-language classes and spending time in students’ homes to taking part in community activities. The Horn of Africa, however, seemed like an impossibility.

The itinerary

Writing the grant turned out to be the easy part. The itinerary was another story.

The majority of their kids came to Minnesota from refugee camps in Ethiopia, across the border from the autonomous region Somaliland. The best and safest plan was to fly first to Djibouti and then into Addis Ababa and travel via rental car across the border. As they go, the teachers will stay with friends and relatives of Mohamed’s and of another MPS bilingual aide.

Their first stop will be Hargeisa, the Somali city where Mohamed’s father is consulting with the United Nations on the region’s schools. There they will visit an elementary school, a college that trains teachers and a dugsi, or Quranic school.

While there they also will visit relatives in a rural area outside the city, in the region’s “college town,” Boorama and, with United Nations permission, a camp for the internally displaced located within Hargeisa’s city limits.

They will also drive just over the Ethiopian border to Kebri Beyah, one of the region’s largest camps and the place where most of their students used to live.

That part of the experience will be entirely new to Mohamed, who left Mogadishu in the wake of the civil war at the age of 10. Until she left, she attended a school that looks more like the Anne Sullivan than some of the programs the four will visit.

In the camps, by contrast, school may take place in a single room or under one of the iconic trees. In the dugsis, it focuses on religious, and not academic, instruction.

Seeking answers

“Our trip will enable us to answer the following questions central to our strategic plan for English-language program leadership,” their grant application explained. “What cultural, linguistic and content knowledge assets may students possess by virtue of being Somali or being refugees or displaced persons?

“What misconceptions do we possess about Somali culture? How might we revise our own perspectives and support colleagues in doing the same? What teaching practices can we add to improve the quality of our instruction? What is the role of the school, and the relationship between students and teachers, in Somali culture?”

The four will travel with security, and with a letter explaining their grant. Still, they are hoping to dispel the image of Somalia as one undifferentiated, war-torn place. Somaliland, they note, is friendlier to westerners than other areas. Its autonomous government is touting the region’s beaches to European tourists.

The founder of a lauded program for recently arrived refugees, Kindle is looking forward to coming back with images of positive archetypes to share with students. Many have heard stories about the region from their parents, but never been there.

The trip will last two weeks. Byard is coming straight home to go camping. Kindle is going on to Palestine, where he will spend the rest of the summer teaching. Lindsay is going to visit her mother, who is the assistant principal of an international school in Dubai. And Mohamed is staying on to celebrate Ramadan.

Finally, the four have made a video for anyone who wants to learn more about the trip or to donate to the effort.   

The story of the kidnapping of more than 200 Nigerian schoolgirls in mid-April continues to horrify the world. Yet for all the urgent headlines and advocacy, what is still missing are basic facts. 

More than three weeks after the shocking incident, it is unclear how many girls were abducted, who they are, who did it, at what time, and exactly how – a dearth of solid information that has deepened the distress and anger in Nigeria and spurred global calls for action. 

For starters, the number of girls taken away by the self-described Islamist radical Boko Haram and later rescued keeps changing.  First it was 129 girls rescued.  Then 121 were rescued and 8 were missing.  The next day, none had been rescued at all. No collective set of photos of the girls appears to exist, or even all their names (some websites with photos of the girls have used photos lifted from elsewhere).

A week ago, police stated that 276 girls remain missing and 53 escaped on their own accord.  This number could change again, according to the police commissioner of Borno State in the northeast, which is the heart of the Boko Haram insurgency.

“It is really difficult to say the actual number of girls that were abducted,” said Commissioner Tanko Lawan. He says the numbers are hard to compile since  students from many schools were taking their exams at the Chibok school "due to the peculiar security challenges in Borno State,” he said.

Nor is much known about how hundreds of girls were taken and when. One newspaper quoted escaped girls that said the attack took place at dawn. In others, girls said it was at 11 p.m.  Amnesty International says the attack took place at “in the small hours of 15 April,” after a gun battle with local security forces. That report only came yesterday, May 9. 

“I think there’s a bit of insincerity in the system,” said Ade Ogundeyin, the CEO of Proforce, a Nigerian security company.  “You can’t tell me that 200 and something girls got move to a particular location and nobody [from the military] saw them?  It’s a confusing situation.”

Which leads to the next unknown: Why was this school opened for exams, given the deep insecurity in the area? 

Again, government and local officials and newspapers have given conflicting accounts. The slaughter of many school children in the northeast, reported for nearly a year, had prompted most schools in the northeast to close.  Mausi Segun of Human Rights Watch suggests that education authorities may have decided to open this one school so that girls from a number of schools in the area could take their final exams and later have a better chance at "employment ... in cities like Lagos." Yet such an opening would have been a widely known event, making the school a potential target.

Perhaps most frustrating for Nigerians is the absence of information on rescue efforts. Few facts are forthcoming, and the Nigerian military maintains it would compromise their efforts if they reported details to the public. 

But Nigerians want an explanation, for example, as to why local people say they have seen the girls traveling in the countryside — and this under the extreme crackdown known as emergency rule — but that the military has not given details nor staged a rescue.

It is widely believed that Boko Haram is responsible for the kidnapping because no other group in Nigeria has the capacity or the motivation to carry out such an attack. The group has killed thousands of adults and children and has previously abducted women to work as porters, spies, cooks, or sex slaves. 

Boko Haram has also taken responsibility for the kidnapping, saying the girls are being held as slaves and will be sold as wives. In a video distributed to reporters on Monday, a maniacal-appearing Boko Harm leader, Abubakar Shekau, rails against the government and threatens to force girls as young as nine years old to marry. 

In the video, however, there are no girls. That in itself is somewhat unorthodox: In the past, terrorists showed images of hostages to prove the truth of their claims. 

Why Mr. Shekau waited three weeks to claim the act is unclear, though some speculate that Boko Haram is so unstructured and diffuse that he may not have known which faction was responsible. And the only hard evidence that Abubakar Shekau is even the leader of Boko Haram is that he says so.  This is a man who threatened to kill former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher from his hideout in northeastern Nigeria more than six months after she died.

But one further fact is not in dispute: With every day that passes without the return of the girls, the fear for their lives becomes greater, and the despair in Nigeria is palpable. Frustration was deepened by a report that the military did not respond to warnings that Boko Haram was about to attack Chibok.

At a protest this week in the capital, Abubakar Sani, a civil servant and a father, sat quietly on the sidelines while the crowd sang: “All we are saying is 'Bring back our girls. Alive. Now.'” 

“It’s something that can happen to anybody,” said Sani. “It’s necessary that we come out and demonstrate so the government will know how we feel."

I confess I'm not the most regular reader of Timeswoman Maureen Dowd, but — writing for The Nation, pundit watcher Eric Alterman uses her as an example of something that bugs him and that also bugs me.

Namely, the many of the less-rigorous thinkers among the punditocracy skip from a nasty problem (the Syrian Civil War, Putin bullying Ukraine, the slow growth of the U.S. economy) to blaming President Obama for not fixing it without passing through the part where they explain the fix that they think would work, and why it would work. These pundits, and it certainly goes beyond columnist, subscribe to what Alterman calls "the now-platitudinous Beltway belief that Obama should just fix everything already."

Writes Alterman:

This view has come to be known as the "Green Lantern theory" of presidential power, after the comic book superhero; according to this theory, the reason Obama has not been more successful is that he has failed to bring Congress to heel the way superior leaders like Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan did during their presidencies, through sheer force of will. But it might be more appropriately dubbed the "Glinda theory," after the Good Witch of the North who advises Dorothy to close her eyes, tap her heels three times and think to herself, "There’s no place like home." There is certainly no place like the one these pundits imagine Obama to be living in — one in which the likes of Vladimir Putin, Bashar al-Assad, Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz and Eric Cantor can be forced to behave responsibly by presidential fiat.

Dowd, whom Alternman adopted as the symbol of the Glinda syndrome, actually wrote:

It is his job to get them to behave. The job of the former community organizer and self-styled uniter is to somehow get this dunderheaded Congress, which is mind-bendingly awful, to do the stuff he wants them to do. It’s called leadership.

Personally, I'm skeptical — or at least unwilling to assume, without evidence — that there was something Obama shoulda coulda done, at a reasonable cost to the United States in money and blood and diplomacy, to end the Syrian Civil War, provide Ukraine with clear, enforceable borders or deliver a steady GDP growth rate that would undo all the damage that the economy sustained in the Great Recession (which he inherited).

Of course we'll never know how that smarter braver luckier president that we can conjure up from our imaginations would have done with the same set of problems. But in whatever alternative universe he or she presides, I wish him/her well.

Kudos to MinnPost teammate Cyndy Brucato for her interview with U.S. Senate GOP candidate Mike McFadden. She asked nothing but substantive questions designed to elicit his concrete policy views. As regular readers of this space know, McFadden has been stingy with concrete policy details (although he is making far more public appearances).

Kudos to McFadden for granting Brucato 30 minutes or so, and for discussing several issue areas. With apologies in advance that I am not grading him on the curve, I would say McFadden continued during the Brucato interview to deprive his would-be constituents of clear, straight answers on policy, nor does he do much to differentiate himself from his opponents for the Republican nomination nor even from Sen. Al Franken, whom he hopes to face in November.

When asked why he is running for the Senate, McFadden often begins his answer with “because we can do better.” Well, sure, everyone can always do better. But other than inviting people to think about their grievances with “Washington” and blame them on Franken/Democrats/Obamacare, what is McFadden promising to do, specifically, that would be better, and for whom?

When I say that I am not grading him on the curve, I mean that I am so fed up with the general eyewash from candidates who bravely endorse deficit reduction (without specifying the actual spending cuts and/or tax increases that would be required) and a theoretical indescribable replacement for Obamacare that would be better for everyone and cost less. There are lots of equivalent non-specific positions, and McFadden has adopted many of them.

For the sake of clarifying the difference between a policy position and the ol’ grip-and-grin-and-tickle-and-run, let’s just put the first McFadden-Brucato exchange under the microscope. She asked about the Dave Camp tax-reform plan. Rep. Camp of Michigan, Republican chair of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, recently committed the brave and apparently hopeless act of publishing a comprehensive tax-reform plan that could actually be scored. Camp’s proposal specified what the new (lower) marginal rates would be and the many special tax breaks that would have to be eliminated to offset the lower rates.

And that is part of the problem. People whose rates would be lowered liked that part of the plan, but when they noticed that many credits and deductions that kept their taxes much lower would be eliminated, they didn’t like that part. Any such detailed plan is going to create winners and losers. Camp offered enough detail that some of the losers could figure out who they are.

Now here is the Brucato-McFadden exchange. As you read it ask yourself: Did McFadden say that he was for the Camp plan? (I can’t find it.) Against it? (Same answer.) He favors the idea of cutting rates and offsetting that by eliminating some, maybe even a huge portion, maybe almost all, of the credits and deductions. But he doesn’t embrace the elimination of a single one.

He says the plan should be “revenue-neutral” because of the big federal debt that he mentions regularly. But wait a minute: Revenue neutral means it raises the same amount of revenue as the old system, so it doesn’t actually change the debt picture.

He calls for a bipartisan process, which sounds excellent except that it doesn’t pass the laugh test given the partisan gridlock. Perhaps he has some ideas for tax provisions that would attract Democratic support. If so, he doesn’t find time to mention any. He bravely endorses “simplicity” and “transparency,” boldly risking the ire of those who think the tax code should be more complicated and obscure.

If you have any inclination to check my work, and haven’t yet memorized the Brucato-McFadden exchanges, here’s the first one:

MinnPost: What did you think of Congressman Dave Camp’s tax plan — it eliminates write-offs and lowers the overall rates — and how does this compare to your concept of tax reform?

Mike McFadden: I think there’s a huge opportunity to sit down and really make some dramatic improvements here.

It shouldn’t be a partisan issue; it should be bipartisan. Sitting across the table with like-minded Democrats and say, “Let’s agree it’s going to be revenue-neutral,” because we’ve got $17 trillion of debt that we have to address.

But we can all agree that we have something that’s much more simple and much more transparent. Every economist will tell you that we’ll see economic growth from that, because it’s just more efficient.

Let’s sit down and talk about what that looks like. The 15,000 deductions; exemptions … I think you start with a white, blank sheet of paper and say, "This is the amount of money we need to run the government, here’s what we’re going to do. Here are the rates. What deductions or exemptions do we absolutely need and why?"

Creative Commons/JR

Public polling shows Minnesotans support Sunday liquor sales with more than 60 percent support.

Each year the vote totals were dismal for supporters of an effort to lift Minnesota’s ban on Sunday liquor sales. In 2010, legislators in the House defeated Sunday liquor sales on a 110-20 vote. Two years later, Sunday sales went down 99-21, and the proposal only garnered 21 yes votes to 106 “nays” last year.

But this year, even while declaring any progress on Sunday sales dead for the 2014 session, supporters pointed to a few votes they say shows legislators are changing their minds on the perennial issue.

Sen. Roger Reinert, DFL-Duluth, pointed to the 43-22 vote in the Senate to restore a stripped-out provision to allow the sale of growlers in taprooms on Sunday. In the House, Rep. Jenifer Loon, R-Eden Prairie, noted that legislators were one vote shy of stopping an effort to move a liquor bill forward without the Sunday growler sales provision.

Sunday sale of growlers – 64-ounce jugs that can be filled with beer and taken home by customers – didn’t make it into a final liquor bill heading to Gov. Mark Dayton’s desk, nor did a full Sunday sales repeal, but advocates say an intensified lobbying effort has bolstered their support in the legislative ranks.

“Less than a baby step, maybe it’s an infant crawl, but forward progress,” Reinert said of their efforts this year. “Anyone who watched this issue this session knows that there was far more energy and engagement.”

Increased lobbying

Public polling shows Minnesotans support Sunday liquor sales with more than 60 percent support, but the issue is regularly squashed by opposition from Mom and Pop liquor stores — represented by the Minnesota Licensed Beverage Association — and Teamsters union members. They argue Sunday sales would just spread the same profits out over seven days instead of six. Liquor sales on Sunday have had bipartisan support and opposition in the past, with some opposing on moral or religious grounds.  

But lobbying has intensified to take Minnesota off the list of 12 states that ban Sunday liquor sales. Resolutions supporting Sunday liquor sales have been adopted by a handful of local DFL and GOP parties around the state, and supporters have sent thousands of emails to their representatives and senators and used social media to highlight their cause.

“I think the louder people are the more you see legislators changing their minds on this issue,” said Andrew Schmitt, director of the Minnesota Beer Activists.

Rep. Ryan Winkler, DFL-Golden Valley, had a sizable number of Sunday sales supporters show up to one of his recent town hall meetings, including a liquor store owner in his district.

“I don’t think buying alcohol on Sunday is an important issue in the scope of all the things we could be doing here, but enough people have said they care,” Winkler said. “I have always felt if small business wants to be closed on Sunday, that’s something we could respect at the Legislature. But as the opinions are changing in the small business community, and the liquor store people start to change their points of view, I’m open to re-looking at the issue.”

“I tend to think I’d vote for it,” he added.

For years Rep. Carlos Mariani, DFL-St. Paul, heard nothing from the Sunday liquor sales supporters. He heard a lot from the small liquor stores in his district.

“These [small liquor store owners] are actually my neighbors. I know them. They are hard working folks,” he said. “My concern is that this doesn’t end up greatly advantaging the big box store operations.”

But Mariani now says it’s just a “matter of time” before Sunday sales is legal in Minnesota, and he’d rather move forward with the proposal. “It reflects the habits and the psychology of the public, the ability to have that choice and the ability to exercise it,” he added. “There’s something kind of growing out there in terms of an expectation here.”

House Minority Leader Kurt Daudt, R-Crown, was not only opposed to Sunday liquor sales last year, he rose on the House floor to push back on efforts to repeal the ban. Now, he says he’d support the bill if it came up on the floor.

“I had never really heard a lot from my district about it. The only people we ever heard from were the small mom and pop liquor stores in my district and I always voted with them,” Daudt said. “There’s a movement afoot to change it and I’ve heard a lot from people in my district, so I’ve changed my thinking and I’m happy to vote for [Sunday liquor sales] if it comes up.”

Sunday sales stripped

Reinert and Loon teamed up at the start of the session on lifting Sunday sales restrictions and opted for the “see what sticks” approach.

They introduced a package of bills that tackled the issue at different angles. One allowed local governments to choose whether they wanted to opt into Sunday liquor sales, while another lifted Sunday restrictions on taprooms in the state. Of course, the full repeal of Sunday liquor sales was included, both as a standalone bill and as a ballot question for voters.

Sen. Roger Reinert

Sunday sales of growlers made it into the House liquor bill, but DFL Rep. Joe Atkins stripped the provision at the last minute in an effort to line up with a bill moving in the Senate. DFL Sen. James Metzen brought a liquor bill to the Senate floor without the Sunday growler provision, but laid his bill on the table when senators voted to bring it back. Reinert said opposition from Teamsters, who did not return a call seeking comment, were the reason growler sales died this year. The union members worried growler sales would re-open their contracts with wholesalers, Reinert said.

In the end, only a provision that allows taprooms to be open Sunday with municipal support made it into the final bill. The non-controversial liquor bill heading for Dayton – who says he supports Sunday liquor sales – also grants liquor licenses around the state, extends beer sales at the University of Minnesota’s TCF Bank Stadium and allows bars to stay open later during the state’s upcoming All-Star Game.

A full Sunday liquor repeal didn’t get an up-or-down vote in the House this year, and the Senate rejected the full repeal 42-22.

“The Sunday taproom provision I don’t think would have passed last year, that’s how things are starting to change. The growler provision passed the Senate,” said Atkins, who regularly carries the omnibus liquor bills and supported an effort to add Sunday growlers sales to his bill this year.

“Attitudes are shifting a little bit, but for most people it’s still not the kind of issue that makes or breaks their support here.”  

Time for the ballot?

Sunday liquor sales will also be a campaign issue this fall. Schmitt said activists are likely to provide boots-on-the-ground support to candidates who support Sunday sales.  “It’s 2014 and it doesn’t make sense to elect someone who doesn’t support an issue the public supports two to one,” he said.

Reinert is still perplexed by how the Sunday sales debate unfolded under a DFL-controlled Legislature.

"This was a session that provided for marriage equality. It was a session that provided for medical marijuana. But Sunday sales, that was too much?” he asked.

Given that even a “baby step” liked Sunday growler sales failed this year, Reinert says he might pursue a Sunday liquor sales ballot initiative next session. Loon said she’s considering supporting the constitutional amendment route.

Said Reinert, “I’m starting to think it might be the only way to get this done.”

Hamline University President Linda Hanson says she'll retire from the St. Paul institution at the end of June 2015.

At that time, Hanson will have served 10 years as president.

She came to Hamline in 2005, after five years as president of the College of Santa Fe. Before that, she was vice president and assistant provost at Seattle University.

In a statement, Hanson waxed eloquent about the university:

“Hamline is an incredible university that I have had the privilege and pleasure to lead. The opportunity to engage with students, help support their dreams on their journey toward gaining an education, and starting or advancing a career are the enduring memories I will take with me when I retire next year."

Hamline Board Chair Bob Klas, Jr. said of her:

"What strikes me as President Hanson’s single most important contribution to Hamline has been the role that she’s taken on as a visionary and a catalyst to align the university’s people and programs — from being schools and areas that operate in silos to helping all of us realize Hamline’s potential as a comprehensive, collaborative university."

Minneapolis has a relatively high number of workers who commute by bicycle, with an estimated 4.1 percent, says a report from the Census Bureau.

Portland, Ore., had the highest bike commuter rate, with 6.1 percent.

The American Community Survey, which includes statistics from 2008-2012, found:

• Among the 204,885 workers in Minneapolis, 13.9 percent took public transportation, 4.1 percent biked, 6.4 percent walked, and 5 percent worked at home.
• Of workers who did not work from home, the average travel time to work was 22.2 minutes.

The full report shows that while biking and walking to work are still small percentages of commuting methods, they are growing.

It includes these national highlights:

• The number of U.S. workers who traveled to work by bicycle increased from about 488,000 in 2000 to about 786,000 in 2008–2012, a larger percentage increase than that of any other commuting mode.
• The combined rate of bicycle commuting for the 50 largest U.S. cities increased from 0.6 percent in 2000 to 1.0 percent in 2008–2012.
• Younger workers, those aged 16 to 24, had the highest rate of walking to work at 6.8 percent.
• At 0.8 percent, the rate of bicycle commuting for men was more than double that of women at 0.3 percent.

Sen. Scott Dibble is not all that pleased with the direction medicinal pot is going … . The Strib‘s Patrick Condon writes, “Dibble says it's wrong to call the Senate proposal more expansive or broad than the House plan. Dibble notes the Senate proposal had much more thorough vetting and underwent a number of revisions during the Senate's committee process.”

The Strib's Rachel Stassen-Berger tweeted later that Dayton later said he is open to some Senate provisions, though without specifics. The guv "hopes the result is the best of both" the House and Senate approaches.

The Gov isn’t happy about a sprinkler clause in the bonding bill … . The AP says, “ … Dayton warned Monday that he would veto the full bonding bill over attempts to dump a building code requirement. That pending requirement commands that new homes of a certain size be equipped with sprinklers, but some lawmakers want to stop the measure from taking effect over concerns it will add too many costs to home construction. Dayton says using a bonding package of $846 million to block the requirement would prompt a veto. …  Dayton told reporters that he ‘will not have something rammed down my throat.’"

Still, it’s easier to clean up than oil … . In the Brainerd Dispatch Jessie Perrine reports, “Coal and crushed metal littered the train tracks early Monday as crews worked to clear the scene of a massive train derailment near Pillager. Fifty train cars carrying coal derailed at about 11:48 p.m. Sunday in Sylvan Township, west of Pillager near County Road 101 and the Bigwater Addition Estates.” Make that “not so Sylvan … .”

For the record … .Elizabeth Baier of MPR reports, “A Waseca teen on Monday entered a not guilty plea to felony charges that he planned to kill his family and place explosives in Waseca schools. A Waseca County judge delayed a decision on whether John LaDue, 17, will face the counts as an adult or a juvenile. … LaDue's defense attorneys say the case should be dropped because police do not have enough evidence to prove LaDue would act on the plans he had written about or use the guns and explosives he had collected.”

For the moment he’s still alive … . Stribber Paul Walsh writes,“A 14-month-old boy fell from a Minneapolis high-rise apartment balcony 11 stories to the ground and suffered severe injuries, authorities said. … The boy somehow ‘slipped through the railings’ of the balcony and fell unimpeded to the ground, said police spokesman John Elder. … The boy was taken to Hennepin County Medical Center, where police say he is in critical but stable condition. The child’s identity has yet to be released.”

Also in the Strib, Curt Brown’s reporting on the Philip Nelson beating incident in Mankato. “Witnesses say they saw two different people assault a former Minnesota State University, Mankato, football player early Sunday morning, first with a ‘sucker punch’ and then with a single kick to the head. … [Stephanie Stassen and Mackenzie Skay]  saw some pushing and shoving and then the sucker punch, which they said did not come from Nelson but a different person in a black shirt. ‘He [Isaac Kolstad] was knocked out on his feet,’ Stassen said. ‘He fell straight back and smoked his head on the pavement.’"

At the Inside HigherEd website, Elizabeth Redden tells her readers, “The Minnesota and New York State legislatures are considering bills that would require colleges to disclose more information about their study abroad programs. … The Minnesota legislation would require the state’s colleges to file annual reports on student deaths and accidents and illnesses that require hospitalization. An earlier draft of the bill would also have required institutions to report incidents of sexual assault, but that provision was struck due to concerns about student privacy … .”

Forever seeking a conclusivity … . Annie Baxter of MPR says, “Home sales in the 13-county Twin Cities area fell again in April, but the details indicate an improving housing market. … traditional, non-distressed home sales actually climbed last month. The median sales price of a Twin Cities home rose in April to $197,000. That means half the homes sold for more, half sold for less.”

You wonder how this will work in practice … ? Marianne Combs of MPR reports, “Five Twin Cities theaters of color are forming a coalition to ensure that their communities are respected on stage. By joining forces, Penumbra Theatre, Mu Performing Arts, New Native Theater, Teatro del Pueblo and Pangea, aim to broaden cultural perspectives in the local theater scene. … a few years ago the Guthrie hosted a pre-Broadway run of the musical ‘The Scottsboro Boys’ in which a young black man was depicted tap dancing while being electrocuted. The show's playwright, composer, lyricist and director all were white. Bellamy said if Penumbra Theatre had been informed, it would have urged the Guthrie to think about how black people in the audience would be affected.”

Your take-it-back-to-your-desk lunch might no longer be packed in a polystyrene foam container — or a number 6 hard polystyrene box— in Minneapolis beginning next Earth Day.

Earth Day, if you want to mark your calendar, will be April 22, 2015.

A Minneapolis City Council committee unanimously approved eliminating the polystyrene (both foam and number 6) Monday, as part of a recycling overhaul. Council members say the plastic is not commercially recycable, not reusable and not compostable. Polystyrene also does not break down in the environment.

Eliminating polystyrene food containers will apply to all food and beverage sales, including food trucks and temporary event vendors. It will also cover grocers’ hot food sales, though polystyrene will still be OK for meat, poultry and seafood in cold cases.

The new rules would also not eliminate the use of polystyrene stirring sticks, straws, knives, forks and spoons. They will not be accepted for recycling.

The ban would not apply to food served in hospitals and nursing homes, which the state regulates.

Riz Prakasim of the restaurant Gandhi Mahal testified for the council’s action: “We find out customer base to be high educated and they, in fact, challenged us to go green; it’s not that difficult. We strongly support the polystyrene ban.”

Ken Schelper of Davannis Pizza disagreed: “There are, from the tests we have done, some significant advantages to what polystyrene foam does as opposed to other materials.”

Schelper defended the use of foam containers “in terms of holding foods hot while preventing them from sogging out from condensation.”

“It won’t eliminate waste,“ predicted Russ Snyder of Genpak, which manufactures cups, bowls and containers for the foodservice industry and has a plant in Lakeville.

Snyder said that when polystyrene is removed from the list of acceptable products it will be replaced by another form of packaging: “We oppose this ban. We favor recycling.”

“I think it would be wise to take a little more time to work with this,” said Dan McElroy of the Minnesota Restaurant Association, who explained that the mandatory recycling bill the state legislature recently passed goes into effect in January 2016.

The state rules implementing the new law have not been written.

Some argued recyclable replacements will cost more, putting Minneapolis restaurants at a price disadvantage with surrounding municipalities that allow polystyrene. Hennepin County has business grants of up to $50,000 to improve recycling programs. The county also has free signs to promote recycling and other business support services.

Several environmental groups spoke in support of eliminating polystyrene, which makes up over 60 percent of the street trash according to a study done in California.

“Every curb in Minneapolis is now waterfront property,” said Trevor Russell of the Friends of the Mississippi River. “The raindrop that leaves that curb flows directly to the storm sewers untreated and into our surface waters.”

The penalty for continued polystyrene use of polystyrene would an administrative citation. There is currently no category for recycling violations in the citations list. Currently, a first citation is $80 and top out at $1,920 for a forth violation.

The full City Council is expect to vote on the matter on May 23.

The latest on the incident involving ex-Gophers quarterback Philip Nelson. Curt Brown of the Strib says, “ … a 24-year-old father is in grave condition with a fractured skull and swollen brain. Doctors are unsure if Isaac Kolstad will survive and, if so, the extent of the brain damage he suffered. … Nelson, a star from Mankato who transferred to Rutgers University after last season, appeared in court for 10 minutes Monday wearing orange jail fatigues. ... He was released on $20,000 bail a few hours later” after first- and third-degree assault charges.

He will not veto … . E-cigs have no great friend in the Governor, says Tom Scheck at MPR. “Gov. Mark Dayton said today that he would not veto a bill that would ban the use of e-cigarettes in public indoor spaces, if it is passed by the Legislature. … Although the Senate bill applies the restrictions to e-cigarettes, the House bill is less restrictive. Dayton said he has concerns about the measure but is open to accepting it.”

Not guilty! The AP says, “A Minnesota man pleaded not guilty Monday to allegations that he entered the U.S. under false pretenses by concealing his military service and concealing crimes committed during the Bosnian war in the 1990s. Zdenko Jakisa, 45, of Forest Lake, is charged with one count of possessing unlawfully obtained documents. … [ICE special agent Michael] Plotnick testified that Jakisa killed his neighbor, a Serbian woman, in September 1993 by firing an AK-47 into her window.”

The beleaguered forensics lab in St. Paul is getting kudos from the chief. Mara Gottfried of the PiPress writes, “After two teens were kidnapped and beaten at a St. Paul home that allegedly was a ‘stash house’ for a Mexican drug cartel, the St. Paul police crime lab identified a fingerprint that helped move the case forward when the city's police chief thought the investigation was stalling, he said Monday. When one of the victim's cellphones was found, analysts in the police department's Forensic Services Unit processed it for fingerprints and matched one to Antonio Navarro, 19, according to a court document. He and three other men were indicted in federal court last week.”

Let’s re-think those road repairs … .  Baird Helgeson of the Strib says, “Minnesota tax collections lagged a little behind expectations in April, coming in at $1.7 billion. Overall income tax, sales tax and corporate taxes were off a combined $12 million, about 0.7 percent below the forecast. Individual income tax withholding in April was off the most, down $19 million. April sales tax receipts were up $17 million over the forecast, a rise of 4.3 percent over predictions.”

Former Gov. Arne Carlson is not content with the U of M’s position on the controversial Dan Markingson case.At MPR, Alex Friedrich writes, “He appears to want an independent investigation into the case — or at minimum a public hearing — as well as information on how many patients have died or been injured in psychiatric research studies. … [U of M] spokesman Brian Lucas emailed me the response below: ... It appears Gov. Carlson’s concerns are based on misinformation that continues to be cited by those who are calling for yet another investigation. He offers no new information and his letter doesn’t change the facts of the case.’” I’m sure that will go over well … .

Yeah, it’s reassuring he’ll be back so soon … . Says Paul Levy of the Strib, “Bradley Schnickel, the former Minneapolis police officer who used the Internet to lure adolescent girls into sexual encounters, was sentenced Monday to 30 months in prison, minus 197 days for time already served. With good behavior, his remaining prison time could be reduced to less than 14 months. Many in the packed Anoka County courtroom that included victims and their families were stunned when Judge James A. Cunningham sentenced Schnickel, 33, to less than one-fourth of the nearly 12-year sentence that prosecutors sought.”

Evolving toward “zero waste” … . Curtis Gilbert of MPR reports, “A Minneapolis City Council committee is recommending a ban on plastic foam containers in restaurants. The Health, Environment & Community Engagement Committee voted Monday to prohibit foam cups and take-out containers. If it is approved by the full council next week, it would take effect next April.” Read our own Karen Boros' take here.

Well, the Yankees bought at least a couple World Series … . At Deadspin, Ryan Lambert gives the Wild … almost no chance … for the foreseeable future. “When the Minnesota Wild made the only real splash in team history by signing the top two free agents of the Class of 2012, people thought it would usher in a change for the troubled franchise. They were right. Instead of just missing the postseason, the Wild are primed to bow out early in the playoffs for years to come, and that's technically an improvement. … the fact that they're spending more than $15 million against the salary cap per season ... on Parise and Suter screams that they don't really know how to spend money at all.”

At Sports Illustrated, Peter King has some interesting tick-tock on the Vikings' attempt to draft quarterback Johnny Manziel. There were four teams bidding for the pick Cleveland ultimately won, and Minnesota wouldn't give up a 2015 first-rounder. Concludes King, "So the Vikings wanted Manziel. That is true. But did they want him enough to give the 40th pick in this draft and next year’s first-round pick as well? No. Can’t say that I blame them either."

In a Strib commentary, Burnsville electrician John G.Morgan says anti-government whiners and scolds (you know who you are) should “get over it” already.“I admire the tenacity and commitment of the anti-stadium crowd, who — even though the Metrodome is history and the new stadium is well on its way — maintain their hope that the project will be scrapped. However, the ‘facts’ they cite in stating their case have always been suspect at best. ‘Rich out-of-staters like the Wilfs don’t deserve to be further enriched on the public spigot.’ Yes, because they’re the first out-of-state entity ever to receive a subsidy. Sheesh.” Noted "Wilfare" critic Ed Kohler offers a point-by-point response here.

With less than a week to go before the May 19 constitutional deadline to adjourn, legislators have announced broad agreements on a $283 million budget bill for the year.

Under the terms of a budget agreement Monday evening, health and human services provisions will get the largest chunk of the surplus at $103 million. Much of that will be spent on a 5 percent rate increase for long-term care and disability care providers, costing about $83 million.

Education will get the next largest pot of the surplus, at $54 million in this budget cycle, with higher education getting $22 million. Public safety will see $35 million in new spending.

However, transportation funding to repair things like potholes will get just $15 million — much less than was originally proposed earlier in the session. Broadband infrastructure will also get a boost in a $20 million pot of jobs and economic development funding in the bill.  About $20 million of that total is wrapped up in spending on policy proposals like the Women's Economic Security Act, which Dayton signed on Sunday, and sythetic drug legislation. 

“Minnesota is on sound financial footing for the first time in years, and this fiscally responsible budget package will keep us moving in the right direction,” said Senate Finance Committee Chairman Dick Cohen in a statement Monday night. “We have an opportunity to make smart investments in schools, roads, and economic development while at the same time keeping our budget in the black going into the next cycle.”

The Legislature already spent $20 million this year to provide propane assistance to the state during the bitterly cold winter. In the 2016-2017 budgeting cycle, the budget agreement will cost the state around $840 million.

Lawmakers are also poised to sign an agreement for a second round of tax cuts. Late last week legislators agreed to the parameters of a second $103 million tax cut bill, which follows $443 million in time-sensitive federal conformity and business-to-business tax cuts passed earlier this year. The second bill focuses on property tax relief, targeting homeowners, renters and homestead farmers with one-time relief checks this fall.

Dayton has said he could agree to the second tax cut bill and prefers a budget proposal that spends roughly $263 million of the remaining budget surplus. Lawmakers have been debating how to spend a $1.2 billion budget surplus all session.

Since becoming Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe has eyed a goal he believes will seal his legacy as one of the country’s greatest reformers: dismantling the pacifist Constitution that has guided Japanese foreign policy for almost seven decades.

On Tuesday, an advisory panel to Mr. Abe is expected to propose amendments to several existing laws that would, in effect, reinterpret the meaning of the Constitution while side-stepping the daunting task of revising it directly through the required votes in both houses of Parliament and a nationwide referendum.

If adopted, the amendments would signal the start of a fundamental shift in the role of Japan’s military, which has not engaged in combat since 1945.

Faced with potential military threats from China and North Korea, and a relative decline in US power, Abe and his fellow conservatives insist the Constitution must be amended to enable Japan to defend its interests and those of its allies, and to play a bigger role in international peacekeeping operations.

Yet 17 months into his second term as leader, Abe has been forced to reconsider his plans to revise the Constitution outright amid strong opposition among voters and inside the governing coalition – an awkward partnership between his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and New Komeito, a Buddhist-backed party with a strong pacifist tradition.

Abe is expected to announce his plans to reinterpret the Constitution with amendments to existing laws by the end of the month, and to secure cabinet approval by the summer, depending on how quickly he can bring New Komeito on board.

Easiest way to change the Constitution?

Abe's target is Article 9 of the 1947 Constitution – drawn up by US occupation forces after World War II – which renounces Japan’s right to wage war as a means of settling international disputes. It says that "land, sea and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained.”

Successive administrations have interpreted the clause to facilitate the build-up of a well-equipped military, yet one with a strictly defensive posture.

Abe and his supporters say that only by casting off the shackles of a constitution imposed by a victorious enemy can Japan vanquish its postwar guilt and emerge as a “normal” nation. He points out that Japan cannot come to the aid of an ally under attack under the current Constitution. 

“Abe is basically looking for the easiest way to change the Constitution,” says Koichi Nakano, a political science professor at Sophia University in Tokyo.

Having postponed outright constitutional reform last year, Mr. Nakano says that Abe “thinks that by reinterpreting the ban on collective self-defense and stripping all meaning from Article 9, he can later come back to voters and say Article 9 is outdated, so why not change that too? This review is just a Trojan horse."

Public opposition

Securing New Komeito’s support in exchange for concessions on other policies down the road promises to be far more straightforward than constitutional revision. 

After floating constitutional reform early on in his administration, Abe appeared shaken by the strength of public opposition, with polls consistently showing a majority of voters in favor of keeping the supreme law in its current form. 

Supporters of reform point to shortfalls in the current constitutional arrangements that could eventually endanger Japanese territory: an attack, say, on US naval ships in or near Japan’s waters to which Tokyo would be unable to respond with force.

"If we stick to this position, Japan won't be able to exercise the necessary deterrence to defend our own national security or to keep peace and stability in the region,” said Takeshi Iwaya, a senior LDP lawmaker in charge of the party's defense policy.

US response 

Barack Obama welcomed the review of collective self-defense after his recent visit to Tokyo, since it would enable Japanese forces to play a more hands-on role in the bilateral security treaty.

And last month, Dennis Blair, the former commander-in-chief of the US Pacific Command, said Japan’s self-defense forces “need to have more flexibility to operate in accordance with their country's interests.”

Abe's personal connection

Whatever the outcome of the re-interpretation debate, Abe is unlikely to abandon his ultimate aim of revising the Constitution, revered by Japan’s large pacifist movement but reviled by conservatives, including Abe's grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, who was prime minister in the late 1950s.

Professor Jiro Yamaguchi, a political scientist at Hosei University in Tokyo, warned that public unease would not knock Abe off his stride, particularly in the absence of an effective opposition in parliament.

“There are no big elections for another couple of years and no institutional barriers to the cabinet changing its interpretation of the Constitution,” says Mr. Yamaguchi. “At the same time, the cabinet’s general approval rating is still quite high, so I think Abe believes he can pursue his [constitutional reform] agenda even though the public is against it.”

Ultimately, Abe’s biggest motivation may be personal rather than political. In pursuing constitutional reform - an ambition he mentioned when he first became a lawmaker in 1993 – he is simply taking care of his grandfather’s unfinished business.

“Revising the Constitution and enabling Japan to freely exercise its right to belligerence is one of the reasons Abe is in politics,” Nakano says. “He wants to emulate his grandfather, only he wants to be more successful.”

Five glaciers that feed continental ice from Antarctica into the Pacific sector of the Southern Ocean – glaciers long seen as the soft underbelly of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet – are undergoing irreversible decline, two new studies indicate.

The glaciers flowing into these waters, Antarctica's Amundsen Sea, carry enough ice to raise sea levels by 1.2 meters (3.9 feet), with effects that cascade to other sections of the ice sheet.

"We have passed the point of no return," says Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at the University of California at Irvine and the lead author of the study, which has been accepted for publication in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

The glaciers' retreat "will also influence adjacent sectors of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which could triple this contribution to sea level," he said during a briefing Monday. This would amount to a global average of three to four meters of sea-level rise.

Estimates of the timing involved for the retreat of one of the two largest glaciers, the Thwaites Glacier, range from 200 to 900 years, according to another study, set to be published Friday in the journal Science. Through the rest of this century, the study anticipates relatively modest additions to sea level from Thwaites, after which the glacier's retreat accelerates.

Regardless of the time span, however, the loss of the glaciers is virtually unstoppable, the researchers say. 

If these results hold up, they suggest that even if all human-generated greenhouse gas emissions were to stop today, the climate would still continue to warm some, as the oceans release captured heat, and the loss of these glaciers would continue unabated.

The study that Dr. Rignot and colleagues have produced "is a really important piece of work" involving a "critically important piece of the continent" for society, says Sridhar Anandakrishnan, a glaciologist at Penn State University in State College, Pa., who did not take part in either study.

Rignot's team reached its conclusion after studying 40 years worth of data on the speed of glacier retreat, as well as more recent data on ice thickness and significantly improved maps of the terrain under the ice.

The causes of the glaciers' retreat represent a confluence of global warming and the region's unusual under-ice terrain, the researchers say.

The weight of the continental ice has depressed the crust. What once were river valleys that made their way to the ocean are now valleys buried under ice and held well below sea level. Continental ice flows seaward via the glaciers until the glaciers hit barriers of elevated underwater terrain known as sills. The upper section of a glacier tries to move across the top of the sill, but friction serves as a brake, significantly slowing the flow of ice.

But human-triggered climate change has added a new twist. It has altered atmospheric circulation patterns over the Southern Ocean, intensifying westerly winds that encircle the continent and driving them deeper south than they otherwise would be, Rignot explains. This has affected ocean currents in ways that allow relatively warm deep water to rise up the seaward side of the sills and begin to melt the ice from underneath.

Once the relatively thin tongue of ice over-topping the sill begins to float free, the brake fails, water moves in behind the sill, driving the glacier's grounding line further inland, which also accelerates the ice loss. The retreat can be slowed if another under-ice hill or mountain upstream is available to act as another sill. Otherwise the glacier retreats until it reaches the inland end of the valley where the terrain begins to rise again. There its retreat slows until the glacier stabilizes.

This process is especially worrisome for the Thwaites Glacier, perhaps the most important glacier of the six, explains Dr. Anandakrishnan.

"It's hanging on by its fingernails," he says. Thwaites currently is losing its grip to a ridge only 10 to 20 kilometers wide (6 to 12 miles). "Once it retreats off of that, it's in an over-deepened bowl; it will keep retreating until it sees a reverse slope" and starts to back itself out of the bowl.

As it does, it will thin, slow, and eventually stabilize, Anandakrishnan adds. But the glacier will have to retreat 300 to 400 kilometers before this happens because the bowl is long and nothing rises sufficiently from the under-ice terrain to stop its retreat.

The story is similar with other glaciers in the sector.

Using radar data from satellites and collected between 1992 and 2011, as well as by subsequent aircraft flights, Rignot's team tracked the retreat of the grounding points, know as grounding lines, for five of the sector's six glaciers: Pine Island, Thwaites, Haynes, Smith, and Kohler.

The Pine Island Glacier, which has retreated some 31 kilometers at its center, slipped its sill's moorings between 2005 and 2009. Although its retreat slowed slightly between 2009 and 2013, the retreat kept accelerating farther inland. Thwaites Glacier's grounding line has retreated by 14 kilometers along its core since 1992. The Smith/Kohler system's grounding line has retreated by 35 kilometers, and the team says the anchor points for its ice shelf are vanishing.

And the data for all glaciers show nothing upstream of their 2011 grounding points to inhibit their retreat once the glaciers' grounding lines move off their current anchor points.

For Thwaites Glacier, a team from the University of Washington led by researcher Ian Joughin used measurements of ice thinning rates, retreat rates, and seafloor maps to model the future of the glacier. The model projects fairly modest melting that would raise sea-levels by about 0.25 millimeters a year through the end of the century. The pace of melting increases and the contribution to sea level rises four-fold once the glacier's grounding line reaches the deepest parts of the elongated bowl it fills. That stage could occur within a few centuries, the team estimates.

But the model results also indicate that the process of destabilizing the glacier is happening now and may be inevitable. Moreover, the model's highest melt rates reach levels comparable to measured melt rates. At those rates, the model indicates that the glacier's collapse may be closer to "a few centuries" rather than to 900 years.

Courtesy of the Minnesota State Historic Preservation Office

Lodge Boleslav Jablonsky No. 219

The Czechs that came to Roseau County beginning in the 1890s were some of the first European Americans to homestead on land in northwest Minnesota. Czech fraternal lodges were created in America by immigrants to promote their welfare, maintain cultural traditions, and satisfy social needs. Lodge Boleslav Jablonsky was one such lodge.

Although Czechs are not one of Minnesota's larger ethnic groups, they were ranked seventh in 1910 with a population of 33,247. Nationwide and also in Minnesota, first- and second-generation Czechs pursued agricultural trades more than any other occupation in 1900. Czechs mainly lived in Le Sueur, Scott, and Rice counties. There were smaller pockets of Czechs elsewhere in the state, however, including Poplar Township of Roseau County.

In contrast to the United States as a whole, in Minnesota most Czechs in rural areas were Catholic. However, a large number of institutions were created by freethinking Czech Americans. The free-thought movement had its origins in Protestantism but could be best described as agnostic. These institutions promoted free-thought philosophy and maintained Czech language and culture. They also created social venues, benevolent societies, and cemeteries. Politically they supported the cause of Czech independence. The fraternal societies of which the Jablonsky lodge is an example were created to serve the needs of Czech immigrants that were normally met by churches.

The Jablonsky lodge was organized in 1914 to obtain life insurance at a reasonable cost and provide a gathering place where Czechs could speak their own language. The lodge was named for Boleslav Jablonsky, a priest, poet, and Czech nationalist. Until the lodge hall was built in 1916, meetings were held in members' homes. The hall is a wood-frame structure on a poured concrete foundation with no basement. It is comprised of three segments: an eight-foot square enclosed entrance porch on the south end, a three-bay hall, and a kitchen and stage at the north end.

The lodge was not militantly anti-clerical. A number of lodge members belonged to local churches, including St. Joseph's (Catholic), but that never caused a problem within the membership. The Czech fraternal societies provided benefits to Czechs on a local, national, and international scale. Aid was distributed to institutions in Chicago as well as Oklahoma, Kansas, and California. The lodge also provided support for Czechs in Europe during World War I and the crises of 1938-1939.

Lodge members sustained Czech language and culture by subscribing to a number of Czech-American publications. Plays in the Czech language were hosted at the lodge hall. Lodge meetings were conducted and recorded in Czech until 1960. Czech weddings and dances were also hosted by the lodge. Money for the lodge was earned through dues, concession sales, and facility rentals. The 1940s were the most prosperous decade for the lodge. Several improvements were made to the hall during that time.

The Czechs of Poplar Grove Township and their members elsewhere in Roseau County were never a large group of people. They did, however, show remarkable persistence. The lodge had thirty members in 1915 and about the same number in 1938. There were approximately ninety members between 1978 and 1995. The Badger lodge merged with Boleslav Jablonsky in 1996, bringing the total to 155 members.

Jablonsky Lodge hall has been in continuous use since 1916. Its main but not exclusive function in the twenty-first century has been to provide life insurance and related services. While there are about twenty Czech lodges in Minnesota, only two halls survive. The history of Jablonsky lodge provides insight into how one group sustained its identity and met its social, cultural, and recreational needs when no other suitable facilities were available in a remote area.

For more information on this topic, check out the original entry on MNopedia.

Voters in Hennepin County's District 3 will go to the polls today to elect a county commissioner to replace Gail Dorfman. Anne Mavity, a St. Louis Park city council member, is running against Marion Greene, of Minneapolis, a former state legislator.

The district includes St. Louis Park and southwest and downtown Minneapolis. Polls are open until 8 p.m. The Secretary of State's Polling Place Finder can help district residents determine where to vote.

Greene and Mavity were the two winners of a low-turnout primary election last month, that narrowed the field from six. Dorfman resigned from the seven-member board in February to take a job as Director of St. Stephens Human Services