Matt Johnson, a former captain of the Minnesota Wild, has fallen into ‘a dark place,’ his mother tells TSN, the Canadian sports network. He’s addicted. She and her husband haven’t seen him in a decade. They hear he’s homeless in Santa Monica, Calif. The $6 million he made playing in the NHL is gone.
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This year’s ads are again dominated by firms in the UK. The ads are better and richer there for some reason. Do we Americans not have the ability to imagine that a carrot would take a bullet — the role is played by a pea — for another carrot?
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Because there isn’t a dog story that can’t provide a human pick-me-up when we could use one, that’s why.
So, here’s to Piper of Traverse City, Mich. Read more →
Ayrton Little, 16, Opelousas, La., just kept hitting ‘refresh’ this week, waiting for word on whether he was accepted to Harvard under the university’s early acceptance program. Read more →
Lost amid all the focus on sexual harassment, Roy Moore, and the presidential tweets of the day is the fact that the Children’s Health Insurance Program will run out of money in February, sooner in some states.
The program was created two decades ago to ensure health care for kids whose parents don’t have a lot of money, yet make too much money to qualify for Medicaid. Read more →
If you’ve never been in the position an 80-year-old Amery, Wis., man was in earlier this month, trust me, you will be someday. Let’s hope by then someone in downtown St. Paul will notice that you’ve been looking for your car for five hours and give you a hand.
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USA Today isn’t exactly the official paper of bomb-throwing Socialists. Neither does it have the journalistic heft of the Washington Post or New York Times. So there’s plenty of reasons for those who want to ignore its editorial today to ignore it, if they so choose. Read more →
Here’s a list of the topics and guests you’ll hear today on MPR News. Read more →
Here’s a list of topics and guests appearing on MPR News programming today. Read more →
The normalization of school shootings has made it difficult for those fighting them to get their message to rise above the din of the daily news. One shooting last week in New Mexico barely registered a blip in the news cycle.
Five years ago Thursday, the nation’s shock reached its zenith on the subject when 20 children between 6 and 7 years old and six adults were killed at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT. Read more →
The U.S. Geological Survey says sea ice is declining because of a warming planet. It has forced polar bears, which feed on seals, onto land where they are dying of starvation. Read more →
Amber Hennlich, of Allen, Texas, is pretty sure that this is the last Christmas that her 7-year-old son, Aluxton, buys into the whole Santa Claus thing. So she was pretty set on finding the Santa Claus that used to appear at a local mall in Dallas until 2015. On Saturday, she did.
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Caribou are disappearing from Lake Superior islands. Let nature run its course? Or intervene? Read more →
Keaton Jones called his mother to pick him up at school the other day. He was afraid to go to lunch where, he says, kids poured milk on him, threw bread at him, and put ham down his shirt. Read more →
Katie Mager, 27, of Apple Valley, Minn., and Ryan Reiersgaard, 27, of Burnsville, Minn., had a ton of fun last week, claiming they were robbed and, as is often the case in these sorts of things, claiming the perpetrator was a person of color. Read more →
Bob Collins