Good morning, and happy Tuesday.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar talked to NPR this morning to preview a hearing where social media company executives will face questions from members of the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security. Tim Nelson sent this: Klobuchar said she and her colleagues were already weighing better federal privacy protections, and more protections for children online. “My piece of this is updating our competition policy,” Klobuchar said. “We’ll never know what bells and whistles a different product could have had because the major platforms have bought many of them. And making sure that we have things in place that protect our competition, our economy, actually can give a better product.” The hearings follow sometimes revealing recent hearings about Facebook, and new disclosures about the company's knowledge of human trafficking and extremism on its platforms. This time it's Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube.
An apology from the Sisters of St. Benedict for their role in a boarding school on the Red Lake Indian Reservation is sparking a movement for truth and reconciliation.MPR’s Dan Gunderson has the story : Earlier this year, Susan Rudolph, prioress of St. Benedict’s Monastery in St. Joseph, Minn., sent a two-page letter to the White Earth Nation, apologizing for the religious order’s role in the boarding school located there for decades. Children, she wrote, were forcibly taken from their families and placed in mission boarding schools with an “intentional plan to root out” Native ways. "The ripple effect of that wound lingers in the memory, the culture, and the documented history of your people for all time." A tribal official said it was one of the first direct apologies from a religious order to a tribal nation in the United States. As a first step, the monastery opened its archive to researchers from White Earth seeking information about former students. An oral history project is in the works to collect boarding school stories from White Earth residents. Many who carry those memories are elderly, and the project has been delayed by COVID-19 concerns.
Gov. Tim Walz and former Gov. Tim Pawlenty will be back together again today to get COVID booster shots. The bipartisan duo were vaccinated together in March with a Johnson and Johnson shot at a pop-up clinic at the Vikings headquarters in Eagan.
From MPR’s Peter Cox: A Minneapolis nursing home is now under the control of the Minnesota Department of Health, after numerous care and financial issues were found. The 31-resident Twin City Gardens Nursing Home has been investigated several times for on-site conduct this year after staff reported concerns about financial issues with the facility, the Health Department said Monday. A recent review found evidence of unpaid bills for oxygen, insurance, medications and electricity; some staff payroll checks had also bounced, the agency added. The facility had received an electrical disconnection notice from Xcel Energy stemming from a past-due unpaid balance. It could not obtain oxygen for residents because of a non-payment to the oxygen vendor and was running critically low on oxygen.
Minnesota members of Congress want to posthumously award Prince the Congressional Gold Medal for his “legacy of musical achievement and… indelible mark on Minnesota and American culture.” The bill is sponsored by Sen. Amy Klobuchar in the Senate and Rep. Ilhan Omar in the House, but all the members of the Minnesota delegation have signed on as cosponsors. The Congressional Gold Medal is the highest civilian honor bestowed by the United States Congress. Only 163 have been awarded since 1776, the first going to George Washington. Other recipients include Elie Wiesel, Gen. Colin Powell, Rosa Parks, Navajo Code Talkers and the Tuskegee Airmen. Read more here.
Minnesota Sen. Tina Smith hinted on Twitter that she’s not an automatic vote for whatever President Joe Biden agrees to in a reconciliation bill. A climate measure backed by Smith was rejected by fellow Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia, and it’s still not clear what the bill will include to address climate change. Smith tweeted over the weekend: “To be very clear to those asking: I’m working for the strongest possible climate provisions, and my support needs to be earned. This is more than just the Senate at this point, there are plenty of members in both Houses that feel the same way as me.” | 