Your daily Minnesota news roundup starts … NOW.

The St. Paul City Council decided not to vote on a drone expansion proposal by the St. Paul Police Department and are instead withdrawing it entirely from consideration. The department was seeking a $200k grant from the Department of Justice to install docks on top of buildings for the drones.

In other surveillance technology news, the city of Crystal is ending its use of six Flock cameras because of concerns from residents. Crystal joins cities including North Branch, West St. Paul and Columbia Heights that have pulled back on the automated license plate readers.

Last December, Adam Abdullah was pulled over in St. Paul by federal agents. Now, he’s been sent to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. You know, the notorious prison for terrorism suspects. Abdullah has no criminal record.

Chalk it up to climate change, but it appears that one of the two seasons in Minnesota has given way to endless road construction, at least on the East Side of St. Paul. While the ultimate goal of the two-year project is increased safety and access, in the short-term, it has made it tough for local businesses, many of them immigrant-owned, to come back from the aftereffects of Operation Metro Surge. 

Concordia College is dropping its tuition by $5,500 for the 2027-28 academic year, a move that puts their yearly cost back where it was in 2006, a year best remembered for the release of the late Amy Winehouse’s seminal album “Back to Black,” featuring the hits “Rehab” and “Tears Dry on Their Own.”

While the education might not be as good, you will also be able to get into Sever’s Fall Festival for less this year. Early bird tickets can be had for just $16 — considerably less than the $22 they were last year. Just be aware that the price to attend Midsommar at the Hårga commune is *much* higher.

An investigation into Rep. Ilhan Omar’s wealth reporting has cleared her of wrongdoing after an accountant failed to account for liabilities in her husband’s business. The first disclosure put the couple’s net worth between $6 and $30 million. That has now been revised down to $18,000 to $95,000. 

And finally in your news roundup:  Just in time for its 30th anniversary, the Mesabi Trail is at last complete and stretches continuously for 165 miles from Mississippi River in Grand Rapids to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Ely. Although the first part of the trail was completed in 1996, the conception of it dates all the way back to 1986, a year best remembered for the first installment of not just Castlevania, not just Metroid, but also the Legend of Zelda. I mean, wow. What a year.