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New St. Paul Police Chief Axel Henry vows to listen

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Axel Henry made phone calls to new police recruits this week and got a reminder of why he loves his new job.

Henry, who was sworn in as St. Paul’s police chief Wednesday, was calling applicants for the department’s police academy to let them know that they had been accepted. Many cried on receiving the news, he said, but one call stood out.

“One of them was a St. Paul kid who literally said, ‘I’ve been waiting my entire life for this phone call,'” Henry, 54, said. “That inspires me.”

Henry will manage hundreds of officers, oversee a potential $130 million budget and help to implement a community-first public safety approach backed by Mayor Melvin Carter and $10 million in federal funds during his six-year term as chief.

In an interview, Henry detailed some of his priorities, including curbing gun violence and building connections with residents, and shared how the city that he credits with raising him, plus a dose of hip-hop, inspires him to lead.

Carter recommended Henry, a 24-year veteran of the department over four other candidates for the job, and he won unanimous approval from the City Council. At Henry’s swearing-in ceremony, Carter charged him with keeping the city on the cutting edge of public safety. “In Axel Henry,” he said, “we have someone who has been at the forefront for years, keeping St. Paul in the forefront.”

Growing up in St. Paul, Henry said, he found comfort listening to such rap emcees as Ice-T, KRS-One and, his favorite, Run-DMC. He estimates at least 60,000 music tracks are in his collection today. And although he is not a big fan of today’s artists, he said the core tenants of hip-hop guided him.

“When you start talking about real hip-hop culture, what are we talking about? We’re talking about peace, unity, love and having fun,” Henry said. “Those are the four food groups that go into hip-hop that I was raised on.”

Henry said he intends to make combating gun violence one of his first priorities and noted that the number of homicides in 2021 is double what the average was before the pandemic.

St. Paul needs more officers to tackle gun violence and do more police work in the community, he said, which is why recruitment and retention is another of his priorities. He said the department must spread awareness about what police do in order to correct misinformation.

The community may play a huge role in that by recruiting potential officers and working with police to deter crime.

“The police are the community, the community are the police, and we’ve got to work together,” Henry said, referring to the pitch he made in public meetings when he was vying for the job.

“I meant this when I said it in the forums, ‘The next chief is going to have to be as comfortable on a street corner as he is in the council chamber.’ You won’t hear what’s hurting the community unless you’re listening to them, and you won’t actually understand how the solutions you want to help them with will work for them, or they won’t work for them, if you’re not listening.”

On Thursday, Henry spent time listening to officers as he attended his first roll call as chief.

Some nodded in agreement when he said officers’ achievements in St. Paul make them diamonds of the industry. Others asked for support from the administration and for policy changes to help do their jobs.

Henry said everyone must work together to solve problems that face police and the city.

“There isn’t a single problem we’re going to be able to solve here without everyone throwing their shoulder in there a little bit,” Henry said. “If we can do something to do better for you, we want to know about it. Thank you for what you do, really.”



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Former Duluth East hockey coach Mike Randolph violated employee conduct policies

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Not all of the interviews were negative; a fair amount of players and parents reported positive experiences with Randolph, some saying they never witnessed him belittling players.

“To me, he was fabulous,” one parent said, noting their child “blossomed” under Randolph.

Terch wrote he was not able to substantiate an allegation that Randolph received payments from the East End Hockey Boosters, although he did find “unusual financial management practices” by the booster club, including a misrepresentation to parents about the use of at least some of what they paid, a commingling of funds between events and “unorthodox” accounting practices. Several parents said they felt they had overpaid many times without explanation. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension began investigating the former East hockey booster club in 2023 for alleged embezzlement. The status of that case is unknown.

In response to the report’s release, Duluth Public Schools Superintendent John Magas said in a statement that he can’t discuss personnel matters, but the district takes all reports from students and families “very seriously.”

“Our primary goal is to ensure that students have the best possible experiences, both in the classroom and in extracurricular activities,” he said. “We are committed to thoroughly investigating any concerns brought to our attention and taking appropriate action” to maintain safe and positive learning environments.

St. Thomas Academy didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.



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How Trump tariffs would shock U.S., world economies

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Gas prices would increase by as much as 75 cents per gallon in the Midwest, where most refined products come from Canada, according to Patrick De Haan, an analyst at GasBuddy. Overall, the Peterson Institute for International Economics said Trump’s tariffs would cost the typical household $2,600 per year; the Yale Budget Lab said in an estimate released Wednesday that the annual cost could be as high as $7,600 for a typical household. As a share of their income, the poorest Americans would pay 6 percent more with 20 percent tariffs, compared with 1.4 percent more for the richest 1 percent, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a left-leaning think tank.

“We’re not talking about caviar — these are things that people have to buy. They’re essentials,” said Neil Saunders, a managing director at the analytics company GlobalData.

Economists say it would take several painful years for alternative domestic producers to emerge for many goods. For instance, almost all shoes and 90 percent of tomatoes sold in the country are imported, according to the Peterson Institute. And the United States does not even have the climate necessary to produce many food items – such as coffee, bananas, avocados, to say nothing of Chilean sea bass – at the necessary scale to meet domestic demand, said Joseph Politano, an economic analyst who has written on the subject on his Substack.

Trump’s tariffs would also reverberate through Wall Street and global markets, inviting turmoil that would affect investors and companies worldwide. Those effects would probably be felt quickly.

During Trump’s first term, stocks fell on nine of 11 days in 2018 and 2019 that the United States or China announced new tariffs, according to a study this year by economists with the Federal Reserve and Columbia University. Comprehensive tariffs would cause a swift one-time jump in prices before reducing economic growth about six months later, according to economist David Page, head of macro research for AXA Investment Managers in London.

Many analysts are hopeful that a stock market panic would dissuade or prevent Trump from carrying out his plans. The investment bank UBS projected that a 10 percent universal tariff could lead to a 10 percent contraction in the stock market. U.S. multinationals are heavily dependent on foreign subsidiaries, and retailers, auto manufacturers and other industrial sectors would be hit the hardest, according to UBS. Chris McNally, an analyst at Evercore, said Trump’s 10 percent tariff plan could cause a more than 20 percent decline in General Motors’ earnings, with slightly smaller declines for Ford and Stellantis.



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On the Wisconsin-Iowa border, the Mississippi River is eroding sacred Indigenous mounds

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Bear and other members of her tribe are serving as consultants on the project, as is William Quackenbush, the tribal historic preservation officer for the Ho-Chunk Nation in Wisconsin, and his tribe. They also lead teams of volunteers to help care for the mounds, which includes removing invasive European plants and replacing them with native plants that reduce soil erosion.

Some are skeptical of this manmade solution to a manmade problem. There are some tribal partners who’ve expressed that the river should be allowed to keep flowing as it wants to, Oberreuter said. Snow also acknowledged that people have been hesitant about making such a change to the natural bank.

But, she pointed out, “The bank is (already) no longer what it was.”

When the berm is complete, Snow said, there’ll be a trail atop it that visitors can walk. That may help protect the mounds better than the current way to see them, which is to walk among them, she said.

The Sny Magill Unit has been part of Effigy Mounds National Monument since 1962, Snow said, but it’s not advertised like the rest of the park. That’s in part because there are no staff stationed there to properly guide people through the mounds. But if people visit respectfully, she believes it’s one of the best places to take in the mounds because it’s on a flat, walkable surface, unlike the rest of the park, which is on a blufftop.



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