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Minnesota Senate passes marijuana legalization bill

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The Minnesota Senate cast its first-ever vote to legalize recreational marijuana on Friday, pushing the proposal closer to becoming law than ever before.

Senators passed the DFL-led marijuana bill on a 34-33 vote, with all Democrats voting for it and all Republicans opposing it. The House approved its marijuana bill on Tuesday. Both the House and Senate bills now head to a conference committee where their differences will be reconciled into a final version.

“Minnesotans are ready. Attitudes are changing. Now is our time to undo decades of ineffective and damaging prohibition,” said Sen. Lindsey Port, DFL-Burnsville, who sponsored the marijuana bill and wore a bright green suit to commemorate Friday’s vote.

Republicans argued that legalizing marijuana will do more harm than good, leading to worse rates of addiction and traffic fatalities.

“This bill simply isn’t enough. Not enough for public safety, not enough for public health, and our local governments are really, really at the bad end of the stick of this,” said Senate Minority Leader Mark Johnson, R-East Grand Forks.

DFL Gov. Tim Walz has said he will sign the marijuana bill if it reaches his desk. Once the two bills are merged, the House and Senate will hold final votes on the compromise version.

Both bills would allow Minnesotans 21 and older to buy up to two ounces of cannabis flower, eight grams of concentrate and 800 milligrams worth of edible products at one time. Adults could also grow up to eight cannabis plants at home.

Differences to be worked out include issues around at-home marijuana possession and the tax rate for products.

Under the Senate bill, Minnesotans who grow their own marijuana could possess up to five pounds of consumable flower in their homes, while those who acquire their marijuana elsewhere could possess no more than two pounds.

The House bill imposes a private possession limit of 1½ pounds across the board.

Senate Democrats are also proposing a higher tax of 10% on cannabis products, while the House bill would enact an 8% gross receipts tax over the next four years.

The Senate bill would allow cities to cap the number of dispensaries within their limits, while the House version would not.

Freshman Sen. Grant Hauschild, DFL-Hermantown, successfully offered amendments Friday granting more money to law enforcement for drug recognition training and allowing cities to impose an even tighter cap on the number of marijuana businesses within their limits.

Hauschild pitched another amendment that would have increased the proposed tax on cannabis products from 10% to 12%, and then phased up that rate by 1% each year starting in 2028 until it reached 20%. That amendment failed, with both Democrats and some Republicans expressing concern that a higher tax could keep the black market alive.

“If the state of Minnesota approaches this and makes it so expensive and so costly and adds so much tax to it, then we might have the unintended consequence of exacerbating that illicit market even more, which we know is not going to go away entirely,” said Sen. Zach Duckworth, R-Lakeville.

DFL Sen. John Hoffman of Champlin successfully amended the bill to increase funding for addiction prevention, treatment and recovery.

Republican senators said the marijuana bill isn’t ready for prime time. They said more resources are needed to address negative impacts on public health and highway safety, and cities need more regulatory controls.

“We don’t have a reliable road test — that is key — for driving under the influence of cannabis,” Sen. Carla Nelson, R-Rochester, said during a Friday morning news conference. “Our law enforcement are against this bill.”

Sen. Clare Oumou Verbeten, DFL-St. Paul, said legalizing marijuana is a “racial justice issue” for people who have cannabis-related convictions on their records. Expunging those Minnesotans’ convictions, she said, would make a “world of difference” for them.

The bill would automatically expunge misdemeanor marijuana charges and form a committee to consider expungement of felony-level cannabis crimes.

“People should know that these convictions have a long, lingering effect on people’s lives,” Verbeten said. “This is what this bill is about. It’s about writing those past wrongs.”



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Star Tribune

Housesitter in Edgerton, MN, charged with murdering girlfriend

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A man has been charged with murder after his girlfriend was found dead in the residence where they were housesitting in far southwestern Minnesota.

Joseph James Benson, 35, of Edgerton was charged with second-degree murder last week in Pipestone County and attended his pretrial conference Tuesday.

According to charges, Benson told deputies that “there’s a dead body upstairs,” after law enforcement responded to a report of possible domestic assault at a home in Edgerton on Nov. 2.

When police entered the house, they said they found a woman lying face-up on the bathroom. The woman likely died of asphyxia, according to an autopsy at the Ramsey County Medical Examiner’s Office.

Police said the owner of the house had been on vacation in Florida and had asked Benson to watch over the home and take care of her dogs and birds.

The homeowner called police on the morning of Nov. 2, after concerns that Benson and his girlfriend, nicknamed “Panda,” had been fighting.

The homeowner said she had been talking to the housesitters via Snapchat, and that Benson had said his girlfriend was “freaking out and wanted to leave.”

Police said the homeowner told Benson, “I don’t care what you need to do, you get this taken care of.” She said that 20 minutes later, she received a SnapChat call from Benson, and after asked if things were taken care of, he quietly said, “Panda is gone.”



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Senate Republicans are gathering behind closed doors to pick a new majority leader

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Unlike most previous contests, there is no clear front-runner going into the election. Because senators are casting secret ballots, the majority won’t say who they are voting for. And some may never tell.

”It’s a secret ballot and it’s a secret ballot for a reason,” said South Dakota Sen. Mike Rounds, who said early on he would support his home state colleague Thune. ”Each member chooses the leader that they think they can work with the best over this two year period of time.”

Rounds said that he prefers the way that Thune and Cornyn have ”handled it one-on-one with everybody,” but that he had talked to Scott as well. ”We’ve got three qualified individuals,” he said.

One thing all candidates agree on is change from McConnell, who called most of the shots as leader — a top demand from the far-right faction of the caucus who disagreed with McConnell on aid to Ukraine and increasingly turned on him as he feuded with Trump.

Thune, Scott and Cornyn said they would like to see more opportunity for individual senators to bring bills to the floor and offer amendments, and they have pledged to be better communicators within the conference than the often-reserved McConnell. At the forum on Tuesday evening, the three agreed on many of the issues discussed, according to senators leaving the meeting.

Thune, McConnell’s current No. 2, has been seen by colleagues as an incumbent of sorts, having taken over for several weeks last year when McConnell was absent due to medical reasons. He is well-liked among his fellow senators, and was seen for some time as the front-runner in the race. But Cornyn, who served as McConnell’s No. 2 before Thune, is also well-liked and has also won some commitments from colleagues.



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Pete Hegseth is Donald Trump’s pick for defense secretary: 5 things to know

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As President-elect Donald Trump’s second administration comes into clearer focus, one newly announced Cabinet pick may ring a bell for several Minnesotans. Trump has tapped “Fox and Friends” host Pete Hegseth to run the Department of Defense.

While he’s known to most of America as a Fox News personality, here are five things we learned from the Star Tribune archives and other media reports about Hegseth:

He grew up in Forest Lake

Hegseth graduated from Forest Lake Area High School in 1999, where he played football and basketball. He went on to attend Princeton University on an ROTC scholarship, where he continued playing basketball.

Hegseth served in the Army

Hegseth joined the Army after he graduated from Princeton and served with the 101st Airborne in 2005-06, according to the Star Tribune archives. In 2005, the then-lieutenant spoke to the newspaper about the conditions of the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, where he defended the facility against criticism.

“Photographers sometimes take pictures that make it look like American soldiers are putting the detainees in dog cages,” he told Star Tribune columnist Katherine Kersten. “That’s very misleading.”

A year before that, three British Muslim prisoners had reported several instances of torture, forced drugging and religious persecution.



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