Minnesota Government News

No single person ever became the public face of the successful drive for gay marriage in Minnesota, but the man who gets the most credit from his allies for making it happen is Richard Carlbom.

The new tobacco tax signed into law last week will raise the price of cigarettes in Minnesota by $1.60 a pack, add more than $430 million to state coffers over the next two years and, public health advocates hope, prevent nearly 48,000 young people from taking up the habit.

In the final hour of the session, printed copies of the Legislative Wrap-up were delivered to the House.

A Minnesota man found the Holy Grail of comic books whilst renovating a house - with the comic being used as insulation for a wall! A man stumbled across a geek goldmine while renovating an abandoned house on the outskirts of Minneapolis this week, with Minnesotan David Gonzales finding the Holy Grail of comic books among the rumble: the Action ... (more)

At the State Capitol Governor Mark Dayton signed the gay marriage bill into law in front of several thousand supporters earlier this month.

The 2014-15 Minnesota budget is set - or it will be when Gov. Mark Dayton affixes his signature to the last of the 10 omnibus tax and spending bills approved by 2013 Legislature before its regular session expired at 12 a.m. May 21.

The 2013 Legislature was an all-DFL show. But to hear legislators from the two parties tell it, the session was a "win-win." I consider that fact a marker of how wide the gulf between Minnesota's parties remains, even though the voters consigned one of those parties to minority status in 2012.

Driving yesterday I found myself suddenly, and very briefly, excited to see gas at $4.09 a gallon.

A recent meta-analysis , performed at Harvard Department of Environmental Health, concluded: The results support the possibility of an adverse effect of high fluoride exposure on children's neurodevelopment.

Earlier this month, I visited the University of Minnesota to hear from students about the impact of student debt.

St. Paul author William Kent Krueger knew he was taking a chance when he strayed from his beloved Cork O'Connor mystery series.

The new marketplace for health coverage under Obamacare debuts this fall, but details and prices of the policies are still unknown.

Much of Minnesota's crop is in the ground, despite a late-ending winter and spring rains that kept farmers out of the fields.

For all the heated rhetoric about the Affordable Care Act being a rigid, top-down approach to health care, the 2010 federal health reform law in reality gives states abundant opportunities to innovate, and often the additional funding needed to make it happen.

Finally at Five...some native Minnesotans have a new home in Indiana. Wolf Park is located near the town of Battle Ground and the latest addition to the family are three gray fox pups from a facility in Minnesota.

NOAA's eye in the sky for the East Coast and Atlantic went down this week for the second time in the past few months.

A gas station attendant pumps gas in Portland, Ore., May 2012. Aside from states in the upper Midwest, gasoline prices at the start of the 2013 Memorial Day weekend are about the same as last year, averaging $3.66 a gallon nationwide, according to AAA.

Our STD rate might be on the rise , but at least Minnesota's teens are having safer sex: Between 2007 and 2011, the number of teens giving birth in the state dropped by more than 30 percent.

Today, Public Policy Polling released its end-of-session snapshot of the popularity of Minnesota's elected officials.

St. Paul authorities shut down a popular fossil-hunting area in a riverside park Thursday, one day after two children were killed and two others injured by a landslide.