Good morning, and welcome to Monday. The snow has finally arrived in the Twin Cities, and even those of us who would prefer to deny it are dealing with the fact that winter is here. Let’s go to the Digest.
1. A towering figure in DFL politics and the judicial history of Minnesota died over the weekend. Miles Lord was 97 when he passed away.During Lord’s nearly 20 years as a federal judge, he decided a number of landmark cases, including his 1974 order that forced Reserve Mining Company to stop dumping its waste rock into Lake Superior. The case forged a new principle in environmental law– the idea that states should take precautions even when they’re not completely sure that an action will seriously harm the environment. (MPR News)
2. DFL party members over the weekend overwhelmingly defeated a resolution to call sulfide ore mining an environment hazard. The issue has been kicked around for decades and would have opposed “sulfide ore mining” in Minnesota due to “unacceptable environmental impacts.” The proposal has come to represent a divide in the DFL party between strong labor supporters who don’t want to steers jobs away from rural Minnesota and environmentalists, who see sulfide mining as a pollution threat. (MPR News)
3.African-American drivers are much more likely than whites to be ticketed during traffic stops in St. Paul, and it’s not close. The population of black, driving-age citizens in the city is about one-fourth that of whites, yet African-Americans made up about half of the people St. Paul police officers stopped and ticketed between 2012 and 2014, an MPR News analysis of 26,000 stops shows. White drivers represented about a third of those traffic-related citations. (MPR News)
4. President-elect Donald Trump told Fox News Sunday he doesn’t believe CIA intelligence that concludes Russia intervened in the U.S. election in the hope that he would win. Instead Trump blamed Democrats, saying they are embarrassed about losing to him. Trump also said he did not need a daily intelligence briefing. "You know, I'm, like, a smart person," he said. "I don't have to be told the same thing in the same words every single day for the next eight years." (New York Times)
5. Some members of the president-elect’s own party are not as untroubled by the reports about Russia as he seems to be. Sen. John McCain of Arizona said he and other senators are putting together a plan to investigate the Russia connection and that he expects the effort to be bipartisan. As for Trump’s dismissal of the issue,"I don't know what to make of it because it's clear the Russians interfered," McCain told CBS' "Face the Nation." "Whether they intended to interfere to the degree that they were trying to elect a certain candidate, I think that's a subject of investigation. But facts are stubborn things. They did hack into this campaign." McCain also expressed "concern" about the leading candidate to be Mr. Trump's secretary of state, Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson, because of Tillerson’s ties to Vladimir Putin. (CBS News)