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Anzelc bill would put $10 minimum wage on MN ballot
State Rep. Tom Anzelc (DFL-Balsam Township) will introduce a bill in the 2014 legislative session that would pose a Minnesota constitutional amendment question to establish a $10 minimum wage permanently attached to the rate of inflation. The ballot question that would be posed to voters in the Anzelc bill is this: Shall the Minnesota Constitution…
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Gettysburg Address fueled immigrant hopes of freedom
Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, delivered this day in 1863: Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation: conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation…
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Amazing video of deer rescue from lake ice
WDIO reports on a deer rescue on the ice of Nichols Lake near Cotton. You’ve got to see this video: The thin skim of ice over northern Minnesota lakes right now is thick enough to hold some weight, but highly dangerous. It’s common for deer (and people) to fall through this time of year. Unfortunately,…
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Northern MN Team Shuster wins USA curling trials
With the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia approaching quickly, here’s some exciting news for curling fans. The northern Minnesota-based Shuster “rink” (curling-speak for “team”) has won the USA Curling trials and advances to an international tournament in Germany to determine if Team USA qualifies for the Olympics. They are favored to do so. Team…
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Bob Dylan: ‘I’ve been around iron all my life’
(POST UPDATED 11/18/2013) — Bob Dylan was born Robert Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota, raised up north in Hibbing on the Mesabi Iron Range. Much is made of his relationship with his hometown. He, like many Iron Rangers in the 1950s, left and built a life elsewhere. Bob Dylan’s life so happens to include five…
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IRRRB’s Tony Sertich to lead legislative reforms
Sunday’s Star Tribune reported on Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton’s 2014 legislative strategy. The governor hopes for a short session focused mostly on modest reforms to improve government efficiency. One interesting tidbit: Dayton will tap Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation Board Commissioner Tony Sertich to shepherd his legislative agenda. Tony Sertich is three years into his…
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When it comes to recycling, yes we ‘can’
I’ve always had an intimate relationship with scrap metal, having been raised on a salvage yard out in Zim, a swampy lowland scrub-brush township just off northern Minnesota’s Mesabi Iron Range. My family indexed junk into piles of refuse so large as to function as my childhood landscape. Some people remember seeing the mountains as…
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Chisholm coach Bob McDonald to retire after season
Big news in Iron Range boys basketball. This week, Chisholm coach Bob McDonald announced he would retire after this upcoming season. McDonald holds the record for most coaching wins in Minnesota history and has the most wins of any active coach in the United States. He’s also known here on northern Minnesota’s Iron Range as…
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‘Second week of deer camp’ in Minnesota
It’s the world famous second week of deer camp here during the Minnesota firearms deer season. Some folks have been out hunting nonstop, the rest are coming back today to try, in earnest, to get the deer that eluded them during the first weekend, or to elude their families and responsibilities as was the original…
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Highway 169 expansion makes road project list
Big news on the western Mesabi: The 40-year dream of a “cross-Range expressway” is every-so-slightly closer to reality. From a Rep. Tom Anzelc (DFL-Balsam Township) press release: ST. PAUL, MN – Today, Governor Mark Dayton and the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) announced ten highway construction projects slated to receive funding through the state’s new…
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Minnesota native Bob Dylan awarded Légion d’honneur
The nation of France awarded iconic singer/songwriter and northern Minnesota native Bob Dylan its highest distinction this week, the Légion d’honneur (Legion of Honor). According to the BBC, French cultural minister Aurelie Filippetti gave a glowing speech Nov. 13, 2013, citing Dylan’s influence by French poetry and how he inspired student uprisings in the 1960s,…
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Did we win Cold War, or just ‘Get Lucky?’
To quote Rocky Balboa after his stirring fictional defeat of Ivan Drago in Rocky IV: “During this fight, I’ve seen a lot of changing, in the way you feel about me, and in the way I feel about you. In here, there were two guys killing each other, but I guess that’s better than twenty…
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Virginia Public Library celebrates centennial
As a teenager in the 1990s I spent untold hours in the Virginia Public Library in this Minnesota Iron Range city named for the ‘virgin queen’ of England. Always at dusk. Night came early in the winter. My sister had dance classes downtown and I’d drive her in from Cherry after school. The big chairs…
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The United States of North America?
The massive land tracts of the United States and Canada haven’t been attached to the same nation since before the Revolutionary War. Now one idea percolating in the think-o-sphere includes the eventual merger of these two very large North American nations — an aging superpower in the United States and a natural resources-rich social democracy…
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‘Economic cauldron of neglect’ … um, in a good way?
Last summer I met Gene Rebeck, writer for Twin Cities Business, who covers northern Minnesota news for that publication. He was writing a column about the Iron Range economy and was kind enough to include my thoughts in his August 26 column “Forward, into the Past.” I must have been in quiet a mood that…