Star Tribune
Minneapolis police respond to fights at DFL endorsement convention
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.”
Star Tribune
Palestinian officials say an Israeli strike on a school-turned-shelter in northern Gaza killed 15
DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip — An Israeli strike on a school sheltering the displaced in northern Gaza on Thursday killed at least 15 people, including five children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
The Israeli military said the strike targeted dozens of Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants who had gathered at the Abu Hussein school in Jabaliya, an urban refugee camp in northern Gaza where Israel has been waging a major air and ground operation for more than a week.
Fares Abu Hamza, head of the ministry’s emergency unit in northern Gaza, confirmed the toll and said dozens of people were wounded. He said the nearby Kamal Adwan Hospital was struggling to treat the casualties.
“Many women and children are in critical condition,” he said.
The Israeli military said it targeted a command center run by both militant groups inside the school. It provided a list of around a dozen names of people it identified as militants who were present when the strike was called in. It was not immediately possible to verify the names.
Israel has repeatedly struck tent camps and schools sheltering displaced people in Gaza. The Israeli military says it carries out precise strikes on militants and tries to avoid harming civilians, but its strikes often kill women and children.
Hamas-led militants triggered the war when they stormed into southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting around 250 others. Some 100 captives are still inside Gaza, about a third of whom are believed to be dead.
Israel’s offensive has killed over 42,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. It does not differentiate between civilians and combatants but says women and children make up a little more than half of the fatalities.
Twin Amur tigers born at Como Zoo in August now have names — Marisa and Maks.
Two long-time volunteers who have worked with zookeepers to care for and teach the public about the zoo’s big cats came up with the names, the first to be born at the St. Paul zoo in more than 40 years.
Marisa, a name that the volunteers found to mean “spirited and tenacious,” call that a perfect reflection of her personality. The name also carries special significance for the Como Zoo community, as it honors a retired zookeeper of the same name who was instrumental in the care of large cats during her 43 years at the zoo, Como Zoo and Conservatory Director Michelle Furrer said.
The male cub has been named Maks, which is associated with meanings like “the greatest” or “strength and leadership.” The volunteers felt this was an apt description of the male cub’s confident demeanor and growing sense of leadership, Furrer said.
“Marisa and Maks aren’t just names; they’re a fun reminder of the passion and care that keep us committed to protecting wildlife every day,” Furrer said.
The newborns and their first-time mother, 7-year-old Bernadette, remain off view to allow for more bonding time, zoo officials said. The cubs’ father, 11-year-old Tsar, has been a Como resident since February 2019 and remains on view.
Fewer than 500 Amur tigers — also known as Siberian tigers — remain in the wild as they face critical threats from habitat loss, poaching and human-wildlife conflict, the zoo said.
Much of the wood waste in the metro area is sent to a processing site near Pig’s Eye Lake in St. Paul, where it is stored before being burned to produce energy at the St. Paul Cogeneration plant downtown.
Cogeneration provides power to about half of downtown and was originally built to manage elm-tree waste in response to Dutch elm disease. The plant burns approximately 240,000 tons of wood each year, according to Michael Auger, senior vice president of District Energy in St. Paul.
Jim Calkins, a certified landscape horticulturalist who has been involved in discussions about the problem, said he thinks using wood for energy is the most logical solution.
“The issue is, we don’t have enough facilities to be able to handle that, at least in the Twin Cities,” Calkins said. “So there has to be dollars to support transportation to get the wood to those places, or in some cases, to upgrade some of those facilities such that they are able to burn wood.”
Plans are in place to convert Koda Energy in Shakopee to burn ash wood, which could potentially handle around 40,000 tons of wood waste, but that would take around two years to establish, according to Klapperich.
In some areas of the state, cities have resorted to burning excess wood waste because they felt they had no other option. Open burning wood releases a lot of carbon into the air, Klapperich said.
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