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As of this morning, the arrests seem rather mysterious, except for the context of missing young men from the Twin Cities Somalian ex-patriate community. The FBI rounded up a half-dozen suspects in Minneapolis and in San Diego in a Joint Terrorism Task Force operation, but otherwise the feds have been mum about the specifics of the threat or threats: CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO The FBI arrested several people in Minneapolis and San Diego on Sunday as part of a joint terrorism task force investigation, a spokesman for U.S. Attorney Andrew Luger confirmed Sunday evening. A Somali woman who...

WASHINGTON — Six young Somali-American men were arrested on Sunday in what may be the largest case to date involving recruiting in the United States for the Islamic State, law enforcement officials said on Monday. All six are Somali-Americans ages 19 to 21, the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity before a news conference planned in Minneapolis on Monday morning to announce the charges. Four men were arrested in Minneapolis and two in San Diego, they said. A few dozen Americans have traveled or tried to travel to Syria to join the Islamic State, also known as ISIL...

A source tells WCCO that FBI agents arrested at least six people in Minneapolis and San Diego for suspicion of trying to join ISIS. Authorities say efforts of a joint terrorism task force led to the arrests. The six people taken into custody may be connected to the on-going investigation of Twin Cities residents traveling to Syria to support ISIS over the last year, according to the source. U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minnesota and the FBI are holding a news conference Monday morning to provide more details.

Pope Francis and Kim Kardashian made headlines recently by calling attention to what happened to the Armenian people 100 years ago. It was genocide at the hands of the Turks in what was then the Ottoman Empire, according to the pope, the reality show star and many historians. In Minnesota, the push to recognize the deaths of Armenians a century ago as the first genocide of the 20th century is being led by a small, new St. Paul church. In the past month, St. Sahag Armenian Church has put up billboards on Interstate 94 in St. Paul and Interstate 494...

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren recently appeared on one of the late night talk shows, beating the class warfare drum and arguing for billions of dollars in new social programs paid for with higher taxes on millionaires and billionaires. In recent years, though, blue states such as California, Illinois, Delaware, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland and Minnesota adopted this very strategy, and they raised taxes on their wealthy residents. How did it work out? Almost all of these states lag behind the national average in growth of jobs and incomes. So, if income redistribution policies are the solution to shrinking the gap between rich...

The FBI made six arrests in Minneapolis and in San Diego Sunday as part of a Joint Terrorism Task Force operation, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Minnesota office. “There is no threat to public safety,” .. More information will be released Monday morning, .. Omar Jamal, a Somali activist in Minneapolis, said the community has been abuzz about arrests Sunday of several Somali young men both in Minneapolis and California that appear to be linked to the ongoing investigation related to ISIS and Al-Shabab. He said he’s heard the number of arrested could be between three and six people.

In what was described as the first occasion of its kind in the country, a memorial to the Southeast Asian forces who fought as allies of the U.S. during the Vietnam War era was dedicated at Fort Snelling on Saturday. The plaque, in the cemetery's Airborne Circle, memorializes the Hmong, Laotian and Khmer special forces units that served in Cambodia and Laos. "I believe that this is probably the first time that they have been recognized specifically in a place like this," Trudell Guerue, president of the Chapter XV 173rd Airborne Brigade Association, said during the dedication ceremony. For Khoa...

In 49 states, there are basically two options for public health insurance programs: Medicaid for the very poor, and subsidized private health insurance on the Affordable Care Act's exchanges for everyone else. Minnesota is the exception. Unlike every other state, it has a third option in the middle: MinnesotaCare. Created in the 1990s, MinnesotaCare covers people who earn too much money for Medical Assistance (Minnesota's Medicaid program) but not enough to qualify for MNsure, the state's health insurance exchange.

It took an agreeable 15 minutes Monday to get from the Westgate Station to the Warehouse/Hennepin Avenue station on the Green Line. There was merriment in the air all right, but not enough actual humidity to smell the green grass of Target Field. We are unseasonably dry, and a bit of moisture in the air is essential to bring about the full flowering of the baseball home opener. I watched passengers get on and off; there are seven stops between Westgate and Warehouse, or probably two too many. I don't know who paid and who didn't. Impossible to tell, really,...

The Minnesota Senate will keep its rule forbidding members from looking at one another during floor debate and will continue to ban everyone from having drinks on the Senate floor. The issues arose Monday during the passage of the rules to govern the Senate. On a 15-44 vote, the Senate decided to keep its current requirement that all speakers must gaze at the Senate president. "I find this particular rule of the Senate, dare I say, antiquated," said Sen. Warren Limmer, R-Maple Grove. But Senate Majority Leader Tom Bakk, DFL-Cook, disagreed. When you can look at the senator speaking, he...

In January, the 89th Legislature convened to begin its work. With the elections behind us and the House under Republican leadership, we opened the session with a renewed sense of bipartisanship. Many suburban legislators, myself included, had high hopes for one particular bill that would inject some common-sense into a major concern of local city councils — the Metropolitan Council. The Met Council is an unelected body that has the power to tax and spend over $1 billion every year and inject itself regularly into local government decisions. It has the authority to dictate (among other things) where new trains...

The Minnesota Senate will keep its rule forbidding members from looking at one another during floor debate and will continue to ban everyone from having drinks on the Senate floor.The issues arose Monday during the passage of the rules to govern the Senate. On a 15-44 vote, the Senate decided to keep its current requirement that all speakers must gaze at the Senate president.

Sue Docken’s start in life, in 1951, with a no-questions-asked cash adoption at the hands of a midwife, had strong elements of the crime scene that it was. Her adoptive father was told to stay in the car and keep the motor running. His wife went into a nondescript office building in Butte, Mont., where she met with the midwife, Gertrude Pitkanen, and was handed the hours-old infant and the afterbirth, offered a peek through a curtain at the young mother lying in a bed, and told to leave. The afterbirth was thrown out the window on the drive home,...

Judicial Watch announced today it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Department of Justice (DOJ) to obtain records regarding its response to the January 1, 2014, explosion of an apartment building in the largely Muslim Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis, Minnesota. The FOIA lawsuit was filed in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia (Judicial Watch v U. S. Department of Justice (No.1:14-cv-02212)).

St. Paul police said Tuesday that their investigation continues after a 24-year-old man being robbed at gunpoint pulled a gun and shot one of his assailants Monday. The would-be victim was not injured, and police Tuesday identified Joseph Barre, 29, as the suspect who'd been shot in the foot. Police were called to the Hmongtown Marketplace at Como and Pennsylvania avenues about 5:30 p.m. Monday with a report of shots fired, and officers recovered several casings, according to a police report. A St. Paul man had been walking outside when two men approached and tried to rob him, police have...

Can law enforcement seize an innocent person's property? If you think the answer is no, just ask David Laase. In May 2006, he received an unexpected phone call at 1 a.m. from his wife. She had been arrested for DUI, later pleaded guilty and paid all court-imposed fines. However, that punishment was not enough under the state's civil forfeiture laws. Isanti County sheriffs seized the $35,000 Chevrolet Tahoe she was driving at the time of the stop and refused to return it to Laase, even though he jointly owned the vehicle and had done nothing wrong. Laase became a victim...

Light rail is controversial because of its price tag -- the recently finished Green Line linking downtown St. Paul with Minneapolis cost $957 million. Supporters, though, say it's justified along dense routes where it can move many people more efficiently than buses can. <<>> Taxpayers shoulder the majority of the cost. In the metro area, fares account for about $100 million in revenue last year -- about 30 percent of the operating cost of transit. Federal grants play a big role in paying for new transitways and vehicles -- 55 percent of capital costs last year. But federal taxpayers covered...

It was noted last week that the National Football League desires an additional $2.8 million in beneficial tax reductions or payments -- beneficial to them -- in addition to the perhaps as much as $30 million in enticements to bring the Super Bowl here in 2018. Mind you, any additional benefits are to be piled on top of the free hotel rooms, the paid-for police escorts, the cases of water and pounds of ice and the scented candles in each suite. I have had delivered to me, anonymously, exactly 153 pages of demands that the NFL has placed in the...

people need to take some personal awareness of what’s around them,” Kevin Reed of the Minnesota Homeland Security and Emergency Management Department said. “‘How do I get out of the way before the fire department gets here?’” Minnesotans should answer in advance questions such as “what would I take with me?” he added. People living within a half mile of railroad tracks carrying North Dakota oil are in an area officials say is a “danger zone.”

AMMAN, JORDAN – House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and a delegation of senior lawmakers met with His Majesty King Abdullah II on Sunday during a visit to Jordan where talks focused on Iranian-backed violence in the region and the growing terrorist threat. King Abdullah hosted the delegation for a luncheon at Beit al-Urdun Palace. Lawmakers also met with U.S. Ambassador Alice Wells, Nasser Judeh, Jordan’s Foreign Minister, as well as senior embassy officials. Discussions focused on two major trends in the region: the violence caused by Iran’s allies and proxies, and the spreading of the terrorist threat. There was also...