Star Tribune
St. Paul mayor and city council meeting to reach budget compromise
The middle ground: a 7.2% increase.
In an interview Wednesday afternoon, Deputy Mayor Jamie Tincher said Carter, too, would like the levy to be lower. But proposing a 5% increase would mean an additional cut of $6 million from 2025 city services — a reduction that could increase fire response times, slow the processing of license applications and reduce parks and rec and library services.
“He doesn’t have a path to do that without reducing services that will be felt by the people who are currently getting them,” Tincher said.
If the two sides cannot agree on a tax levy for 2025, state law would require the city to institute this year’s levy. That, Tincher said, would lead to drastic cuts in city personnel and services, as costs go up every year because of things like health care, insurance and previously negotiated salary increases.
The gap between revenue and costs then, she said, would be $16 million.
Tincher was asked if this year’s negotiations felt “different.”
Star Tribune
Trump calls for ‘immediate ceasefire’ in Ukraine after meeting Zelenskyy in Paris
KYIV, Ukraine — U.S. President-elect Donald Trump on Sunday called for an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine, shortly after a meeting in Paris with French and Ukrainian leaders, claiming Kyiv ”would like to make a deal” to end the more than 1,000-day war.
In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump claimed that Moscow and Kyiv have both lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers in a war that ”should never have started.”
”There should be an immediate ceasefire and negotiations should begin. Too many lives are being needlessly wasted, too many families destroyed,” he said, as he called on Russian President Vladimir Putin to act to bring the fighting to an end.
Trump’s remarks came after a meeting Saturday with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, that Zelenskyy later described as ”constructive”.
Speaking to reporters later that day, Zelenskyy insisted that any peace deal ”should be just” for Ukrainians, ”so that Russia and Putin or any other aggressors will not have the opportunity to return.”
In a separate social media update Sunday, Zelenskyy asserted that Kyiv has so far lost 43,000 soldiers since Moscow’s all-out invasion on Feb. 24, 2022, while a further 370,000 have been wounded.
Both Russia and Ukraine have been reluctant to publish official casualty figures, but Western officials have said that the past few months of grinding positional warfare in eastern Ukraine have meant record losses for both sides, with tens of thousands killed and wounded each month.
Star Tribune
Artworks owned by Alicia Keys and husband Swizz Beatz will come to Minnesota in March
The show includes not only photographs, paintings and sculptures but also installations, record albums and musical equipment. In fact, the exhibit has such a natural rhythmic flow, with themes being mixed and remixed, that it sometimes resonates like its own musical composition.
An installation on lost childhood innocence by Chicago-based Jamaican artist Ebony Patterson gives way to a room-sized, 33-panel work by Botswana-born painter and Yale professor Meleko Mokgosi.
A sculptural Soundsuit by fiber artist Nick Cave is in conversation with regal, intricate charcoal-and-pencil paintings by Nigerian artist Toyin Ojih Odutola, whose jewel-eyed details bring out a sublime grace in her subjects.
“The way that [these pieces] play together is like a song, like a journey, and it’s very beautiful,” Keys said, adding that the exhibit creates “a space to feel your power, your ancestry, your growth, your future, your present. And no matter who you are, what walk of life you’ve come from, you feel it.”
Audiences in New York and Atlanta have quickened to the work.
Star Tribune
One dead, one seriously wounded in shooting in Brooklyn Park strip mall parking lot
One person died and another was seriously wounded in a shooting Saturday afternoon in a Brooklyn Park parking lot.
Brooklyn Park police officers responded to a shooting around 2 p.m. Saturday in a strip mall parking lot near the busy intersection of Brooklyn Blvd. and Bottineau Blvd., not far from a Target and a Menards.
Officers found two victims and began to aid them before both were taken to a hospital, according to a police spokesman.
One of the victims was later pronounced dead. The other was seriously wounded. Identities for the victims werenot available Saturday night.