16-year-old Minneapolis North High School football player shot in legs as he walked home

The Star Tribune’s Liz Sawyer reports, “A 16-year-old North High School football player is in stable condition after being shot multiple times while walking home in north Minneapolis on Wednesday night. Minneapolis police responded to a shots fired call on the 2100 block of N. 8th Avenue just before 8:30 p.m., where they located a minor with gunshot wounds to both legs. First responders applied two tourniquets before rushing him to HCMC. Relatives identified the boy as Cashmere Hamilton-Grunau, a junior multisport athlete at North High who was prominently featured in the recent Showtime documentary ‘Boys in Blue,’ which chronicled the Polars’ 2021 football season.”

At MPR, Brian Bakst says, “ … since his re-election last November, Walz is nearing the number of cable TV news appearances he did in all of his first term, according to his office. And he’s using them to contrast his agenda in Minnesota to what’s happening in other states with Republican governors. The latest move expected to garner notice beyond Minnesota came Wednesday when Walz staged a Little Free Library in his office lobby and stocked it with books facing bans or restrictions in school libraries in other states. some are starting to wonder: What’s Walz up to? There is no apparent lane for Walz to run for another office — if that’s what he ultimately wants.”

Stribber Stephen Montemayor writes, “Anton Lazzaro used his wealth to ‘buy what he wanted’, and that was young, small, broken teen girls, federal prosecutors told jurors in Minneapolis at the start of his child sex-trafficking trial on Wednesday. ‘This case is about a wealthy man who paid tens of thousands of dollars to have sex with minor girls’, Assistant U.S. Attorney Laura Provinzino said during the government’s opening statement. Defense attorneys for the 32-year-old once-rising Minneapolis GOP operative countered that Lazzaro was instead a generous but ‘socially awkward’ computer nerd taken advantage of as he paid people for their company amid the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. … Prosecutors gave jurors a look inside Lazzaro’s 19th-floor condo to illustrate what the girls would see upon arrival: Framed photos of Lazzaro posing with celebrities, politicians and athletes. A bathroom with a television in the mirror. A well-stocked, high-end liquor cabinet. And above Lazzaro’s bed hung a large gold mirror.”

MPR’s Paul Huttner says, “Here are some select snowfall totals rolling in Wednesday:

• Moorhead, 6.6 inches
• Pelican Rapids, 6 inches
• Brainerd area, 4-5 inches
• Grand Rapids, 6 inches
• Hibbing, 7 inches
• Duluth area, 4-5 inches
• Silver Bay, 7.6 inches
• Lutsen, 8 inches
• Grand Marais area, 7-10 inches

In the Twin Cities, it was rain. Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport picked up 26 one-hundredths (.26) of an inch of precipitation overnight.”

Chris Reece of KSTP-TV says, “As the snow melts and flooding concerns ramp up, Stillwater is already working to protect businesses and residents along the St. Croix River. Current projections show there is a 75% chance that the St. Croix will reach major flood stage. Stillwater city leaders and residents say the clock starts now to get sandbags in place ahead of whatever the river may do. ‘It’s a lot of work to fill them and bring them back all down there and start loading them’, Stillwater resident Betty Nelson said. The city is looking for volunteers, and anyone 14 or older can sign up for sandbagging shifts. They run from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Thursday next week and from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Friday.”

Dan Gunderson of MPR reports, “Residents of Moorhead and neighboring Fargo, N.D., can no longer put glass in their curbside single-stream recycling bins. Glass can still be brought to recycling drop off sites in both cities, but it will be reused locally rather than being shipped to a Twin Cities recycling company. MinnKota Recycling, which handles curbside materials collected by Fargo and Moorhead, said it made the change after Twin Cities businesses where it sent material decided they would no longer take shipments of glass, plastic, aluminum, paper and other materials compressed together into bales — the kind MinnKota sent.”

This, from KSTP-TV: “The Immersive Disney Animation Experience is set to open Thursday at Lighthouse Artspace. It’s from the same company that created the original Immersive Van Gogh Exhibit. Dorothy McKim is a producer for Walt Disney animations and one of the minds behind the spectacle. ‘It’s all about worlds’, McKim said. ‘And bringing you into that world and that’s what this experience is. There’s surprises, the floor is activated, we have some wristbands that will be activated and we also have bubbles’.”