A meeting of American State Nationals will be held at the Litchfield Public Library meeting room on Saturday at 10 a.m. and everyone is welcome. Jeanette Stottrup provided information about the organization on KLFD’s “Newsmaker” program yesterday.
Stottrup says our nation is at a crossroads with a full-blown constitutional crisis on our hands and American State Nationals are coming together with meetings on the grass-roots level for discussion to bring about a solution. She says the public record must be corrected – based on the Naturalization Act of 1779 – for people to publicly declare their citizenship.
Stottrup says a declaration of citizenship needs to be made in the newspaper or at the Court House, and since the 1920s, people have relied on their birth certificate as proof of citizenship. She says the meeting she is hosting on Saturday at the Litchfield Public Library will provide people with more insight on how to reclaim the inheritance of our federal republic. It begins at 10 a.m. on March 29th in the Litchfield Public Library meeting room.
A 16-story building in downtown St. Paul is expected to stand vacant by next Tuesday.
The property owner, Madison Equities, hadn’t been paying Alliance Bank Center’s utility bills. In mid-March, it told tenants they had two days to leave the building before the lights went off.
St. Paul officials negotiated with Xcel Energy to keep the lights on until the end of the month, buying the small businesses inside just enough time to move thousands of products and pieces of equipment.
Rico’s on Wabasha is a small restaurant on the first floor that sells tacos, burgers and ice cream. Its owner and sole employee goes by “Rico.” He started his restaurant five years ago.
Despite the news of the building’s closure, business is good. A regular, Megan Burchett, stopped by the store last week to grab a burrito and find out when Rico was leaving.
“Rico’s is honestly my favorite place to eat,” she said. “Definitely bummed to hear that they’re not going to be in the neighborhood anymore.”
Rico said he’d been considering moving out of Alliance Bank Center for a while when the notice to vacate arrived. Spring is already a busy season for him. He was in the middle of planning a seasonal menu change and scheduling special events.
A sudden move was not part of his plan.
“This all just threw me for a loop. I was completely shocked,” he said. “There’s no way I ever thought this was going to happen.”
The future of Rico’s on Wabasha is uncertain. Rico hasn’t found a place to move. He wants to stay in downtown St. Paul near where he grew up but doesn’t know if that will be possible.
He doesn’t want to lose the successful store. He said he’s earning about five times as much as he was when the store first opened, and the hours let him spend quality time with his three children.
“I’m just trying to build some generational wealth for them. When I grew up, I didn’t really have anything,” Rico said. “I had a dad that lived in another state. I always told myself I was going to be there for my kids.”
Rico and multiple other tenants said Alliance Bank Center has been poorly maintained for years. The gate in front of Rico’s store broke last fall, and Alliance Bank Center still hasn’t fixed it. While the gate was broken, someone reached inside and stole the iPad Rico used to take orders.
The gate is currently held together by thin gun locks.
His heater broke last winter. He said he asked Alliance Bank Center for a space heater, but they never provided one.
“When it was negative, I just didn’t come to work because it was so cold,” Rico said. “I went and got my own little space heater because I’ve got to be here. I’ve got to make some money.”
Other tenants said one winter, pipes in the parking garage leaked so much they flooded the floor. Broken windows around the outside of the building are covered by wooden planks.
A couple of vacant storefronts separate Rico’s on Wabasha from a jewelry store owned by Paul Hartquist. He’s been moving things out of the store a little bit at a time. A stack of old watch catalogues sits on the windowsill outside for people to take.
In the almost 36 years he’s been in Alliance Bank Center, he’s watched people leave downtown St. Paul.
“It used to be so vibrant downtown. It used to be just thousands of people walking around,” he said. “It was teeming with people. Just an incredible difference. It’s sad.”
Like many tenants, he’s moving his business to Town Square, a building next door.
“I like this location because I have got a view over the street and the sun comes in,” Hartquist said. “In Town Square, there’s no sun.”
Hartquist said all of his business comes from word-of-mouth referrals. He sometimes ends up fitting multiple generations of the same family for wedding rings.
Mike DeTomaso is one of his loyal customers. He works for the St. Paul Police Department and Hartquist has been his go-to jeweler for about 15 years. When he heard Hartquist had to move, he organized a group of friends and police officers, also Hartquist’s clients, to move larger items.
“He’s been an important staple in this community,” DeTomaso said. “He has a very loyal client base, and we want to help him.”
A few doors down is the Skyway Mart, a convenience store owned by Eli Johnson. He has hundreds of chip bags, snacks and fridges full of drinks to move.
“It’s a lot because you've got to update everything with the state of Minnesota, as far as the licensing,” he said. “I say the physical moving is probably going to be the easy part.”
Just past the dirty, immobile escalators is shoe store Classic Kicks.
Its owner, who uses the name Petty Wapp, said he suspected Alliance Bank Center would shut down for months. He started renting from Madison Equities in March, at first without an official lease. He said he heard of many tenants who’d paid rent in advance not getting refunded when their Madison Equities buildings suddenly closed.
He said he didn’t want to risk losing money to a landlord that could kick him out at any time. So, he stopped paying rent in August.
Madison Equities didn’t ask for it until the end of January.
“My rent was only $200. So, I’m putting it to the side like maybe they’re going to give me this eviction notice after 60 days,” he said. “They never did it.”
He said it almost seemed as if Madison Equities “forgot” he was renting.
Madison Equities is downtown St. Paul’s largest property owner and facing massive debts. Its downtown portfolio was placed on the market last year.
The company has relinquished multiple buildings to lenders.
In its notice to Alliance Bank Center tenants, the company blamed its financial hardships on the “deteriorating conditions of downtown St. Paul” and its proximity to Central Station on the Green Line.
“Unfortunately, landlord cannot sustain the costs to operate the building any longer and will be closing the building,” the notice reads. “Landlord did not want to make this very difficult decision, but it had no choice given the unsustainable financial situation that exists at the building.”
Madison Equities has not responded to repeated requests for comment.
According to a study by the University of Toronto School of Cities, since 2019, foot traffic has fallen 26 percent across 52 major U.S. downtowns. Alliance Bank Center had less than 50 percent of its storefronts occupied when it was placed on the market. Its namesake, Alliance Bank, moved a few blocks away to Wells Fargo Place last April.
A spokesperson for the St. Paul mayor’s office, Jennifer Lor, said the city hasn’t decided what to do when Alliance Bank Center becomes vacant. They stress that Madison Equities acted on its own when asking tenants to leave. Because Madison Equities is no longer providing security, she said tenants might see more police officers patrolling around the building.
For now, it appears that Alliance Bank Center will be cold, dark and empty by the end of the month. The building is an important skyway connection downtown, and a notice from the city posted on the building’s entrances said the building will have restricted skyway hours: closed on weekends and shorter hours during the week.
City officials plan to discuss the future of access to the building’s skyway at a public Skyway Governance Advisory Committee meeting on March 28.
The genetic testing company 23andMe — which allows users to spit in a tube and send away the sample for a detailed DNA analysis — is filing for bankruptcy.
The California biotech firm announced in a statement this week that it had entered the federal bankruptcy process with the goal of finding a buyer to address its ongoing money troubles. Co-founder Anne Wojcicki also has stepped down as CEO, and said in a post on X she hopes to purchase the company herself. The board rejected an offer she made earlier this month, according to a press release.
23andMe has faced financial hardship for years, struggling to overcome the fact that many people who went to the website for a one-time DNA test didn’t become repeat customers. In November, the company laid off more than 200 employees, or roughly 40 percent of its staff.
The bankruptcy announcement also comes less than two years after 23andMe suffered a massive data breach affecting 6.9 million customer accounts.
The possibility that the company, once valued at $6 billion after it went public in 2021, could be sold has raised concerns about what would happen to the sensitive information of its more than 15 million users.
In its bankruptcy announcement, 23andMe said the data privacy of its customers would be an "important consideration" in any sale. But federal law does little to secure genetic information given over to a private company, two legal experts on data privacy said.
"Often, if there's so much personal data that a group has, it's maybe in a hospital setting or a research setting and can be governed by more meaningful safeguards," said Suzanne Bernstein, counsel at the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center.
"The scale of how much highly sensitive data 23andMe has is unique," she said.
Is your DNA data protected by law? It depends
For many 23andMe customers, the company holds two sensitive pieces of information: the user-provided saliva sample, and the detailed genetic profile created from it.
In an FAQ about the bankruptcy posted on its website, 23andMe said a new owner would have to abide by "applicable law" governing the use of user data, but data privacy experts say there isn't much on the books.
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, applies to health care providers and insurers but not direct-to-consumers companies like 23andMe, according to Anya Prince, a University of Iowa law professor who studies health and genetic privacy. Another law called the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act bars employers and health insurance companies from discriminating against people due to genetic information.
"That's pretty much it on the federal level," Prince said.
Some states have adopted their own laws covering genetic privacy. At least 11 U.S. states have enacted laws giving consumers a say in how their genetic data is used, according to an article published by Prince in 2023. Those laws typically let users request that the companies delete their data and require law enforcement agencies to get a warrant or subpoena to access genetic information, Prince said. 23andMe already adheres to both of those policies, she added.
23andMe also says any genetic data it shares with researchers is stripped of identifying information, such as names and birth dates. In its bankruptcy FAQ, the company said it hopes to "secure a partner who shares in its commitment to customer data privacy."
How to protect your data, according to experts
23andMe will remain in operation through the bankruptcy proceedings, and the company says customers can still delete their data and shutter their accounts.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a consumer alert last week that residents should "consider invoking their rights and directing 23andMe to delete their data and destroy any samples of genetic material" the company has.
Bernstein of the Electronic Privacy Information Center said any concerned 23andMe customers should delete their data, request that their saliva sample be destroyed and revoke any permissions they may have given to use their genetic information for research.
"We would recommend taking those actions and advocating to your state and federal representatives to pass strong consumer privacy laws," she added, "as this is just the first example of a company like this with tremendous amounts of sensitive data being bought or sold."
Even before a possible sale goes through, Prince, the law professor, said she wonders how many people know what data 23andMe already shares and with whom. For example, the company has given over anonymized data to the pharmaceutical giant GSK for years to help it develop new drugs.
"Everybody's worried about what a new company can do with the data — and that is a concern — but frankly some of the things that people are worried about, 23andMe already can do or already does," Prince said.
Copyright 2025, NPR
State animal health officials have confirmed bird flu in a central Minnesota dairy herd, the first new case in dairy cows since last summer.
In February, the Minnesota Department of Agriculture began testing raw milk samples from each of Minnesota's roughly 1,600 dairy farms on a monthly basis.
The H5N1 virus appeared in samples collected from a Stearns County herd. A national lab confirmed the results on March 21. The state Board of Animal Health has quarantined the herd until tests show it's no longer infected.
Health officials say there's no concern for the safety of the public milk supply. Milk sold in stores is pasteurized to kill bacteria and viruses.
Minnesota has not reported any human cases of avian influenza. The Board of Animal Health says people who work with or have direct contact with infected animals are most at risk for getting sick.
The Minnesota Department of Health monitors people who have direct contact with infected animals. It also provides testing, anti-viral drugs and personal protective equipment to farm workers.
Regular sampling and testing allows state agencies to identify which herds are infected, monitor trends and help prevent its spread to unaffected animals, said Thom Petersen, state agriculture commissioner, in a news release.
Minnesota's first case of avian flu in dairy cattle was confirmed last June in Benton County. The disease isn’t fatal for most dairy cattle, but can cause low appetite, decreased milk production and thickened or discolored milk. Dairy farmers are required to dispose of milk from sick animals.
The virus has been far more destructive to the poultry industry, where it has caused the deaths of millions of commercial turkeys and chickens since 2022. More than 170 species of North American wild birds also have been infected with bird flu.
Public hearings are planned this week on a request by Xcel to store more nuclear waste at the southeastern Minnesota plant.
Xcel Energy wants to extend the life of its Prairie Island nuclear plant by 20 years and continue operating the plant into the 2050s. It’s requesting to store an additional 34 casks of spent fuel at the site. Dry casks for storing spent fuel can be up to 14 feet long and can weigh up to 150 tons.
Xcel has said continuing to operate its nuclear generators in Minnesota is critical to its plan to deliver carbon-free electricity. But spent fuel storage has a history of controversy at the plant near Red Wing, which is just 700 yards from the Prairie Island Indian Community.
Despite decades of debate, the federal government still hasn’t come up with a permanent storage solution for nuclear waste.
An environmental review found that potential impacts to humans and the environment from the additional waste storage are likely to be minimal.
The Minnesota Public Utilities Commission scheduled an online public hearing for Monday night and an in-person hearing will be held tomorrow Tuesday in Red Wing.
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