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Kenai, Minnesota Zoo’s largest grizzly bear, dies

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Kenai, one of the Minnesota Zoo’s three grizzly bears, has died. The 17-year-old Alaska native was in the latter stages of liver cancer, zoo officials said in a social media post announcing his death.

He arrived in Minnesota in 2008 accompanied by two other orphaned bears: Sadie and Haines. Kenai was found as an 8-month-old runt and sent to live in the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center. He weighed 28 pounds. Like Haines, Kenai was named after the Alaskan city where he was found.

Kenai weighed 320 pounds when he landed in Minnesota by way of a FedEx plane that carried him and the other two orphaned bears. Grizzly bears weigh between 400 and 600 pounds on average, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. They typically live about 25 years.

“Although unrelated, they acted in many ways like siblings, with Kenai being lovingly referred to as the laid back ‘little brother’ – always willing to tag along with Haines and let Sadie be the unquestioned leader of their group,” zoo officials wrote on social media. “This is a hard loss for our staff and the Zoo as a whole. Kenai was an important ambassador for his wild counterparts and his presence will be dearly missed.”

Kenai’s playful nature was well-documented. When one of the three bears hurled a rock at a glass pane and shattered it in 2015, zoo officials were left scratching their heads and wondering which of them was responsible. Kenai was named a bear of interest.

Kenai was “usually the clown out there, fooling around in the water,” Tony Fisher, the zoo’s animal collections manager, said at the time. “He didn’t know what he was doing. He was just being a bear.”

The episode was reported around the world. Officials said they tracked 1.3 billion unique visitors to various stories that covered it in the days that followed.





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Volunteers keep Christmas alive in shuttered church with a Nativity scene with a live baby and carols in German

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When Reeck first joined, he was uncertain whether people would donate to help keep the church standing. But they’ve raised more than $300,000 in the past three decades, which has helped the nonprofit refinish the pews, replace the stained glass windows in their original style, redo the roof, tuckpoint the bricks and install a ramp.

Most people on the nonprofit’s mailing list are connected to the church through relatives, but the connections seem to get looser every year. And some people just yearn for a nostalgic Christmas service, Jenniges said: “Every year, we get people from the outside who say, Oh my gosh — I can’t believe you still do this. You can’t let it be lost.”

Susan Lorenz uses a broom to hang tinsel on a 20-foot tree ahead of the Christmas service at Salem Historical Church in Paynesville. The church closed in 1968 but volunteers organize the holiday service each year. (Jenny Berg)



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The GOP stoked fears of noncitizens voting. Cases in Ohio show how rhetoric and reality diverge

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Before the November presidential election, Ohio’s secretary of state and attorney general announced investigations into potential voter fraud that included people suspected of casting ballots even though they were not U.S. citizens.



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Police in Ohio launch homicide investigation after bodies of 3 women found in home

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COLUMBUS, Ohio — Authorities in Ohio launched a homicide investigation after the bodies of three women were found Saturday inside a home in Columbus.

Officers were called to a home on the city’s south side just before 4 p.m. Saturday for what a 911 caller described as a medical event. Police found three women who were pronounced dead at the scene, according to police spokesman Sgt. James Fuqua.

He said the killings were considered homicides, but he did not have further details, including what led up to the killings.

”Unfortunately, this is a very complex scene with the amount of victims that we have,” he told reporters Saturday. “It’s going to take a little bit longer to make sure that we’re very careful in going through the scene meticulously so we do not miss any key piece of evidence.”

He said investigators were interviewing witnesses and looking for video evidence.

Fuqua said Saturday that no suspects had been taken into custody.

Columbus police did not immediately have an update on the homicides on Sunday.



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