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Minneapolis police respond to fights at DFL endorsement convention

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DFL leaders are condemning those responsible for a melee that erupted during a convention for Minneapolis City Council candidates Saturday, causing the event to end unceremoniously in a frantic scene and with no candidate endorsement.

Minneapolis police spokesman Brian Feintech said officers responded to the convention at Ella Baker Global Studies & Humanities Magnet School to find a large group of people dispersing. Police made no arrests Saturday, but the officers heard several reports of injuries and fights. At least one person was taken to HCMC by paramedics for non-life-threatening injuries, and another was treated at the scene, Feintech said.

Video posted to Twitter by John Edwards, who blogs about Minneapolis politics as Wedge Live, shows the chaos break out at the Ward 10 endorsing convention after supporters of Minneapolis Council Member Aisha Chughtai took the stage. Supporters for Chughtai’s challenger, Nasri Warsame, shouted and jeered in the gymnasium, and a man waving a Warsame sign jumped on the stage. More people in Warsame shirts followed and continued to shout, slam on tables and wave signs, disrupting the convention proceedings.

“This is embarrassing!” convention chair Sam Doten shouted, finally adjourning after pleading futilely for order. “We are shutting this down!” he said. “This is no longer safe!”

In a Facebook post afterward, Warsame said his campaign manager “has been assaulted by one of the other campaign staff member, and he’s now being transported to hospital by an ambulance.”

“The convention was shut down due to turmoil, and all the people were instructed to exit the building,” Warsame wrote. “No endorsement at this point, but more questions to ask regarding the process.”

Chughtai also released a statement, casting blame on Warsame’s campaign for leading his delegates onto the stage and “assaulting me and my supporters as I was about to begin my convention speech.” Chughtai said more than a dozen of her supporters were “physically assaulted,” along with a photographer documenting the convention, and more were bullied and harassed as “an attempt to scare us.”

“Eventually, our supporters locked themselves in our hospitality room, so they would be safe and away from a rapidly escalating and dangerous situation,” she said. “The Warsame campaign followed us off the floor and was only held back by a group of brave volunteers who blocked a hallway while our supporters were able to escape from the locked hospitality room out a back door of the building to safety.”

Minneapolis DFL Chair Briana Rose Lee said on Twitter that “several DFL volunteers were assaulted” at the convention, including members of the state executive committee.

“The behavior displayed today was despicable and unacceptable,” Lee wrote. “I don’t know the next steps yet. But there will be repercussions.”

The video does not show clearly what preceded the fight. “I don’t know what triggered it,” Edwards said in an interview. “People just kind of spontaneously came forward to the stage.”

Edwards said there had been votes on rules and disagreements on procedure, and that issues with translating appeared to be causing some confusion earlier in the day. Chughtai was about to give the first speech of the convention, and Warsame would have been next, followed by a question-and-answer segment and then votes.

Saturday evening, Minnesota DFL Chair Ken Martin apologized to the attendees. “While we are still gathering all of the details of what transpired today, I am extremely disheartened by reports that a fight broke out,” Martin said. “Violence has no place in our politics, and it goes against our party’s most cherished values of democracy, inclusivity, and empathy. I sincerely hope that the perpetrators will be held accountable by law enforcement, and I will work to ensure they are held accountable within our party as well.”

He said the state DFL party is working with Minneapolis DFL to “determine what the next steps in the endorsing process will be given today’s events.”



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Coloring book duo teams up again to highlight St. Paul’s Rondo history

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Kosfeld used family photographs and old newspaper pictures as the basis for her illustrations. She also researched clothing of the period. It was important to her, she said, that her drawings “were respectful. No cartoons or caricatures.”

“Rondo,” Kosfeld said, “can be a heavy subject to some communities. But I wanted to show it was just beautiful. Playful.”

The project took nearly two years to complete from January 2023 to early 2024. Kosfeld and Kronick published the coloring book themselves. The Rondo book can be found at several shops and bookstores in St. Paul, including Next Chapter Books, Red Balloon, Wet Paint, Waldmann Brewery, Subtext Books, the Minnesota Historical Society gift shop and St. Paul Children’s Hospital.

Kosfeld is working on a third coloring book with a St. Paul focus, this one on the art, architecture and history of the St. Paul park system, to be published by the Ramsey County Historical Society.



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Harris goes to church while Trump muses about reporters being shot

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LITITZ, Pa. — Kamala Harris told a Michigan church on Sunday that God offers America a ”divine plan strong enough to heal division,” while Donald Trump gave a profane and conspiracy-laden speech in which he mused about reporters being shot and labeled Democrats as ”demonic.”

The two major candidates took starkly different tones on the final Sunday of the campaign. Less than 48 hours before Election Day, Harris, the Democratic vice president, argued that Tuesday’s election offers voters the chance to reject ”chaos, fear and hate,” while Trump, the Republican former president, repeated lies about voter fraud to try to cast doubt on the integrity of the vote and suggested that the country was falling apart without him in office.

Harris was concentrating her Sunday in Michigan, beginning the day with a few hundred parishioners at Detroit’s Greater Emmanuel Institutional Church of God in Christ. It marked the fourth consecutive Sunday that Harris, who is Baptist, has spoken to a Black congregation, a reflection of how critical Black voters are across multiple battleground states.

”I see faith in action in remarkable ways,” she said in remarks that quoted the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah. ”I see a nation determined to turn the page on hate and division and chart a new way forward. As I travel, I see Americans from so-called red states and so-called blue states who are ready to bend the arc of history toward justice.”

She never mentioned Trump, though she’s certain to return to her more conventional partisan speech in stops later Sunday. But Harris did tell her friendly audience that ”there are those who seek to deepen division, sow hate, spread fear and cause chaos.” The election and ”this moment in our nation,” she continued, ”has to be about so much more than partisan politics. It must be about the good work we can do together.”

Harris finished her remarks in about 11 minutes — starting and ending during Trump’s roughly 90-minute speech at a chilly outdoor rally at the Lancaster, Pennsylvania, airport.

Trump usually veers from subject to subject, a discursive style he has labeled ”the weave.” But in Lancaster, he went on long tangents and hardly mentioned his usual points on the economy, immigration and rote criticisms of Harris.

Instead, Trump relaunched criticisms of voting procedures across the nation and his own staff. He resurrected grievances about being prosecuted after trying to overturn his 2020 loss to President Joe Biden, suggesting at one point that he ”shouldn’t have left” the White House.



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How votes get counted in Minnesota on Election Day

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If that’s good, in many counties, election judges have a machine tabulate results, or count votes for candidates. In these counties, one copy of the tape the that machine prints in this process is taken to the central office. In most places, that is the county elections office. In others, the central office is the city elections office, which then reports to the county, Simon said.

Some precincts are close to the elections office, and some are far away, which explains some of the variation in when results show up.

But not every county tabulates at the precinct.

In Ramsey County, judges take the ballot counting machines from precincts to the county’s election office, Elections Manager David Triplett said. There, judges of different parties verify the machines’ seals, check the number of ballots against the number of voters that day, and if they add up, tabulate the votes.

“We have 100 receipts; we have 100 ballots. All right, go ahead and let’s report that result,” he said.

It is legal for precincts to transmit results to central offices online, but it’s rare, Simon said. And no devices used in the election can be connected to the internet while voting is in progress.



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