Monday, July 13

The cloud of dust from light rail construction in downtown Minneapolis is still two years off. But plans for the route are rolling along and people are beginning to consider the consequences. If the city council gives final approval on Friday, the proposed downtown portion of the line will enter and return on 5th Street. Business owners are running hot and cold on how they think light rail will affect their lives. Minnesota Public Radio's Dan Olson has more.

The big tobacco companies are being challenged again, but this time by a tribe in Nebraska. And it's not after damages, but cigarette business. The Omaha Nation tobacco company began manufacturing cigarettes about a year ago with the goal of capturing one per cent of the U.S. market. Most are sold to Native Americans. Critics say the company is cashing in on high levels of cigarette addiction among natives. Mainstreet Radio's Mark Steil reports.

St. Paul will be celebrating the opening of the new Wabasha bridge this week. After several redesigns and two years of construction, the new bridge, which connects downtown with Harriet Island and the West Side, will open to cars and pedestrians on Wednesday. We got several perspectives on the bridge from Kevin Nelson, the city's project engineer for the bridge, Peter Kramer, who served on a task force that came up with its design, and Tom Welna, owner of the Covington Inn and No Wake Cafe, a business that was disrupted by the bridge's construction and will be affected by its completion.

Corporate earnings reports and inflation data will keep the attention of traders on Wall Street this week. Minnesota Public Radio's Chris Farrell sizes it all up.

On Future Tense: A company that runs an internet service for doctors across the United States is trying to expand its network across the globe. Physicians Online recently announced a partnership with a similar service in Germany that will allow doctors in both countries to share their expertise. Some 15-thousand American doctors use Physicians Online each day to search journals, medical news, or discuss diagnoses in secure chat rooms. We hear from David Danar is vice president of medical content at Physicans Online, who says there are several benefits to physicians having their own community on the Internet.

Prehistoric copper tools were first found at the Fish Lake Dam site on the Beaver River near Duluth in 1911. But for decades the area lay unexplored by archeologists. Recent excavations show humans have criss-crossed the banks of the river for the last nine thousand years. Researchers say their discoveries are shedding light on the lives of ancient people in northern Minnesota. Minnesota Public Radio's Amy Radil reports from Duluth.

A bipartisan congressional commission took testimony in Minneapolis yesterday on the future of Medicare. The commission is charged with keeping the national health care system solvent after 77 million baby boomers become eligible and start demanding MediCare services. Minnesota Public Radio's Eric Jansen has more.

When violent storms ripped through northern Minnesota in 1995, straight-line winds left a swath of millions of downed trees from Detroit Lakes east to the Iron Range and Lake Superior. The devastation created an ideal habitat for bark beetles, which tunnel under the bark of pine trees and eventually kill them, and whose numbers grew to epidemic levels after the storms. At Itasca State Park, about 3,000 acres of forest were destroyed by the storms, and officials there are still concerned the thriving beetles threaten some of Minnesota's oldest pines. Minnesota Public Radio's Tom Robertson reports from Bemidji.

The dog days of summer are here. The National Weather Service says hot, humid weather will blanket the state at least through Saturday, with high temperatures ranging from the middle 80s to the middle 90s. Yesterday, the heat index climbed to 103 degrees in the Twin Cities - that's a measure of how hot it feels when temperature and humidity are considered together. As you might expect, the heat is putting some strain on the region's power companies. We get an update from NSP spokesman Paul Adelman.

Office towers are sprouting up in the Twin Cities at the fastest pace in a decade, and plans for more buildings are in the works. A strong economy, high demand for office space and low interest rates are sparking the building boom, but is a bust inevitable? John Manillo is a commercial real estate broker and developer in St. Paul. He says businesses are currently willing to build more office space, but in another 2 or 3 years, when construction is finished, the market will likely look different.

On Future Tense: More and more libraries are facing the problem a lot of people have at home. A computer can find a lot of information, even the kind you'd rather not have your kids find. Libraries are being pressured to install so-called filtering software that - by definition - prevents someone from accessing certain sites. But they also can block what isn't intended. You may not be able to find information on "breast cancer," for example. Karen Schneider is a librarian in Brunswick, New York and assembled a team of libraries to test the use of filters on library computers.

Many African countries struggle to provide young people a basic education. In villages of the Ivory Coast in West Africa, parents often don't have the resources to send their children to school. Marianne Combs is a teacher in the Ivory Coast. It's one of several duties she's taken up as a Peace Corps voulunteer, as she reports in her latest "Letter from Africa."

Three years ago legislators enacted a law designed to toughen penalties for juvenile offenders. Minnesota was one of the first in the nation to pass the "Extended Jurisdiction Juvenile" law or EJJ. EJJ hangs a prison sentence over a teen's head as an incentive to follow juvenile court rules. The law drew fire because some critics felt it gives teens who commit serious crimes a last chance they don't deserve; others felt the law puts teen offenders on a fast track to prison. Minnesota Public Radio's Elizabeth Stawicki has an update.

The Twin Cities is experiencing a rash of fraud in home sales. In the past year, the Minnesota Commerce department has investigated about 200 deals involving inflated appraisals of low-value homes. Such scams often reap big profits for mortgage brokers and stick buyers with mortgages they can't afford. We talk with Dave Greunes, Minnesota's Commerce Commissioner.

A hearing is set for today on an effort by General Motors to have a court intervene in the strikes that have crippled the company's North American production. After 41 days of the strike, Tim Ciccarelli, Brookdale Buick Pontiac GMC's New Car Sales Manager fears he has only a month's supply of new vehicles left.

Minnesotans cherish summer, especially long summer evenings. But there ARE some good reasons to spend those evenings indoors: one is air conditioning, another is the Guthrie Theater's summer season, which opens tonight with Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Ernest." Ivan Turgenev's classic "A Month in the Country" opens Friday. We talk about the season with Joe Dowling, artistic director of the Guthrie Theater.

On Future Tense: Get rich quick, growing new hair in just a few days guaranteed, the best porn on the net. Those are the subject headers for the last 3 emails I've received. It's called "spam" - unsolicited commercial email. Half of it is a fraud, the other half is just as annoying. For the last 10 months, a coalition of groups on all sides of the issue have been trying to come up with a method to curb "spam." They've just released the report and it stops short of calling for an outright ban. Instead it proposes requiring senders to make it clear where the messages came from so you can shout back at them, and to make better mail programs to filter out the junk. Deidre Mulligan of the Center for Democracy and Technology coordinated the report to the Federal Trade Commission.

A reputed gang member testified his former gang leader mixed the molatov cocktails that caused the fire deaths of five young St Paul children in 1994. Robert "Buster" Jefferson and five others are on trial in federal court in Minneapolis on charges ranging from drug trafficking to murder. Minnesota Public Radio's Elizabeth Stawicki reports.

A building boom underway in St. Paul has city boosters crowing about the revitalized downtown. But the construction projects also have detractors: some critics of Republican Mayor Norm Coleman are warning of the financial risks of running up debt to pay for big downtown projects. Wall Street is scrutinizing the city's debt and - while showing some concern - experts are not sounding any alarms. Minnesota Public Radio's William Wilcoxen reports.

Critics of the light rail transit system proposed for Minneapolis say we're going at the question backwards. They argue we should be asking how the marketplace rather than government can supply transit options. An example is jitneys, or privately operated buses. A Twin Cities jitney proponent says private bus service is a much cheaper alternative than pouring hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars into LRT. Minnesota Public Radio's Dan Olson reports.

Republicans in the US Senate yesterday defeated a Democratic proposal to give struggling farmers one-point-six billion dollars in subsidies. Democrats say government aid is the key solution for farmers who have suffered repeated crop losses due to weather, disease, and falling crop prices. Their proposals would establish subsidies similar to those Congress stripped away in the 1996 farm bill. But Republicans remain skeptical of that approach. We talk with Minnesota Republican Senator Rod Grams.

The Minneapolis Police Department is considering taking a new, gentler approach to dispersing late-night crowds that hang around after bars close in the warehouse district. The groups can often be unruly... but police have one secret weapon that they hope will get them to clear out in a hurry. It's called: opera. Inspector Sharon Lubinski is precinct commander for downtown Minneapolis.

The Metropolitan Sports Facilities Commission says it will drop a lawsuit against the Twins and help them make more money for four years... but only if the Twins agree to look for a buyer that would keep them in Minnesota. The Twins are threatening to move to North Carolina as early as next season after claiming over 26-million dollars in losses from 1995 to 1997. The team projects another 10 million dollars in losses this year. We get the details from Sports commentator Jay Weiner.

Manufacturing exports from Minnesota were down almost 10 percent for the first three months of this year. The Asian economic crisis is partly to blame. Economist Paul Anton of Anton & Associates says the impact on Minnesota's economy will be small, but individual businesses may decide to change their business strategies to focus on stronger markets.

When you are eight, and a tornado flattens your town, life changes a lot. Kids who survived the tornados in St. Peter, Comfrey and Spencer are getting a little extra attention this summer. "Camp Noah," a week long day camp, is teaching children how to deal with their fears and feelings. Minnesota Public Radio's Cara Hetland reports from Sioux Falls.

The Minneapolis City Council is scheduled to vote on two rail lines at its meeting today. Councilmembers are expected to approve route and station locations for the planned Hiawatha Light Rail, and to join other cities and counties studying a commuter rail line linking Minneapolis and St. Cloud. Minnesota Public Radio's Eric Jansen has more.

Tens of thousands of people are expected in downtown Minneapolis tonight when one of the world's best known rock bands helps kick off the city's annual Aquatennial celebration. The Smashing Pumpkins will give a free concert at the Hennepin Avenue Block Party, and organizers are taking extra precautions to make sure all goes smoothly. Minnesota Public Radio's Chris Roberts reports.

When the state completed its work on the Generic Environmental Impact Statement, or G-E-I-S on Timber Harvesting and Forest Management, many saw it as the end of a long process; but for one group it was just the beginning. During the last three years, the Forest Resources Council has been refining the guidelines of the Timber G-E-I-S and studying the impact they might have. As Minnesota Public Radio's Gretchen Lehmann reports, the Council is now at a pivotal point in its work to bring sustainable forestry to the state of Minnesota.

Climatologist Mark Seeley says while high summer temperatures haven't reached 90 degrees too often in the 90s, average summer temperatures have been fairly warm.

On Future Tense: With fast computers and fast internet connections, online gaming is one of the fastest growing activities on the Internet. Folks playing a particular game--such as a flight simulator--can log into a central computer and play in an environment where everyone can see everyone else. A group of professionals who play a game called War Birds formed the Flying Pigs squadron. And on most nights, they fly missions. Dr. Nic Steussy of Indianapolis is a Flying Pig.