Cameron Gainer created Minne three years ago, and in the past year partnered with the Minneapolis Parks Foundation to boost park attendance, CBS Minnesota reported.
Minne's location is always a mystery, but she tweets and Facebooks clues for her followers to find her.
"There is nothing better than walking around the lake and for the first time spotting Minne," Mary DeLaittre of the Minneapolis Parks Foundation said. "And it's not just once, they keep coming back and coming back and weaving stories around Minne."
Minne will start lake-hopping again this May.
]]>Checked from behind during a hockey game on Dec. 30, Jablonski partially tore his spinal cord.
The Jablonski family grew close with the nurses and staff at the Sister Kenny Rehabilitation Institute, Kare 11 reported.
"It's exciting," Jablonski said. "It's obviously bittersweet, but, it's the next step, so it's good to move on."
]]>The House bill would require doctors to remain in the room with patients when the women took abortion drugs and require abortion clinics to pay a licensing fee, CBS Minnesota reported.
Proponents of the bill, including Rep. Joyce Peppin, argued that the abortion drugs are too dangerous for women to take without a doctor present.
Opponents of the bill sarcastically said that there are more dangerous drugs than abortion ones.
"There are fewer deaths from this drug than Viagra or even Tylenol. Certainly having a medical abortion is less dangerous than having a live birth," Rep. Tina Liebling said.
]]>"Some women care for style, and some women care for their people," the video said.
Huberta Voss Wittig, wife of the German ambassador, explained their motives behind making the video.
"We want to urge Asma Assad to speak out openly for peace and to send a signal, because only if and when she does it other women can follow," told CNN.
The U.N. Security Council will meet on Thursday to assess the success of the peace plan in Syria, according to Sky News.
]]>The attorney for Zimmerman, Mark O'Mara, asked that Recksiedler be removed from the case, according to ABC News, because her husband is in the same law firm as a legal analyst for CNN who has commented on the case.
"The goal is to have a new judge in place in order to make that hearing," court spokeswoman Michelle Kennedy said of Zimmerman's impending hearing this Friday.
Considering these setbacks, the state and attorneys estimate that the trial will not be settled until 2013, according to ABC News.
]]>For the metro area, there will be only one drive-in left after the Cottage View Drive-In closes this month to make room for a Wal-Mart, the Pioneer Press reported.
"This is going to be the closing of an era," owner Gerry Herringer, 77, told the Pioneer Press.
The city of Cottage Grove has a different opinion. "It's a good thing for the city," said Mayor Myron Bailey.
The new Wal-Mart store will create 300 jobs as well as act as a "catalyst" for more new businesses, according to the Star Tribune.
"It's sad to see it leave," local woman Carolyn Muhvich, 18, said.
]]>Until now, this was common practice in Afghanistan, with U.S. troops often performing the "night raid," Time reported.
The Afghan minister of defense Abdul Rahim Wardak and the American commander General John R. Allen signed an agreement Sunday that will gradually stop U.S. forces from performing night raids and give more power to Afghan forces to perform them, The New York Times reported.
"This is an important step in strengthening the sovereignty of Afghanistan," Wardak said in a press conference.
The U.S. is also optimistic that this agreement will lead to Afghan sovereignty.
Allen said Afghans are now "in the lead on two of the most important issues: capturing the terrorists and ensuring they remain behind bars."
]]>Last Saturday, however, Pope received a postcard from seven people of the Isles of Scilly in the United Kingdon, Huffington Post reported.
"When I received my postcard back, it jarred my memory because I forgot I did it," Pope told NBC Connecticut, "and I said isn't that something."
Pope has sent the people of the Isles of Scilly a message back, but has not heard back yet. He said he wants to try another bottle and see where that one goes.
"One day I'm going to do it either this summer or in the fall again, and just see," Pope told NBC Connecticut. "I'm going to mark bottle number two and just see if it gets there again."
]]>Cupcake owner Kevin VanDeraa has been trying to open a secondary location on Grand Avenue for months, but the city of St. Paul denied their license because of a parking issue, the Star Tribune reported.
Mayor Chris Coleman proposed a parking plan that saved the day for Cupcake and prompted the St. Paul City Council to approve the license on Wednesday, the Pioneer Press reported.
According to VanDeraa, the new St. Paul location will be open sometime this summer.
]]>The student pilot and his instructor ejected before the crash, and Navy Capt. Mark Weisgerber said in a press conference that the plane had experienced a "catastrophic mechanical malfunction," according to The Wall Street Journal.
The pilots had also dumped most of the F/A-18D Hornet's jet fuel before ejecting.
"By doing so, he mitigated what could have been an absolute massive, massive fireball and fire," Virginia Beach EMS division chief Bruce Nedelka told The Wall Street Journal. "With all of that jet fuel dumped, it was much less than what it could have been."
Thankfully, only seven people were injured and there were no deaths.
"It just looked basically like he dropped out of the sky, pretty much," witness Daniel Kavanaugh told CBS News. "The front end of the plane started going down and then, boom - a huge black cloud of smoke."
]]>Owner Brittany Kirk, 32, told the Associated Press that Sugar used up "one or two or maybe eight" of her nine lives.
Sugar survived by splaying her limbs out like a flying squirrel.
"Instead of, you know, being scared and just running out into traffic, she somehow hit the best spot and stayed near the building," Mike Brammer, an assistant manager at the Animal Rescue League of Boston, told MSNBC. "So it was very fortuitous on many different levels."
"I was definitely relieved and kind of in disbelief," Kirk told MSNBC, "if there were a cat to fall 19 stories and to be fine, I think it would definitely be Sugar, because she's a pretty special cat."
]]>"Those guys, they just had it going out there tonight," Rodney Williams, Minnesota forward, told the Minnesota Daily. "We definitely had some lapses on defense but we were right there in their face and they made some tough shots."
This loss ended the Gophers' 23-15 season. They were the sixth seed for the NIT, and they came into the championship winning six of their last seven games, according to The New York Times.
The Gophers won't let this loss get them down, though.
"We would be foolish just to go into next season thinking about this one game," Andre Hollins, freshman point guard, told the Minnesota Daily. "We have come along as a team throughout this year ... I think this tournament helped us a lot."
]]>The U.N. released its estimates that the death toll in Syria had reached 9,000 in the past year on Monday, according to The Guardian.
"This cannot be allowed to drag on indefinitely," CNN reported United Nations-Arab League special envoy Kofi Annan said on Monday. "As I have told the parties on the ground, they cannot resist the transformational winds that are blowing. They have to accept that reforms have to come, change has to come, and that is the only way to deal with the situation."
Annan is the author of the U.N.'s plan, which will mainly require the Syrian government to "commit to stop the fighting," "ensure timely provision of humanitarian assistance to all areas affected by the fighting," "ensure freedom of movement throughout the country for journalists," and "respect freedom of association and the right to demonstrate peacefully as legally guaranteed," according to the U.N. Security Council document.
Will the Syrian government follow these provisions? "We will continue to judge the Syrian regime by its practical actions not by its often empty words," Britain's Foreign Secretary William Hague told The Guardian.
]]>The law itself is over 1,000 pages long, and the justices will hear three days of oral arguments on it. The second day of arguments featured the more conservative justices dominating the arguments.
"Could you define the market -- everybody has to buy food sooner or later, so you define the market as food, therefore, everybody is in the market; therefore, you can make people buy broccoli," Justice Antonin Scalia said, according to Tuesday's transcript.
The proponents of the law have their main argument as follows: "For most Americans, for more than 80 percent of Americans, the insurance system does provide effective access," Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli, Jr. said, according to Tuesday's transcript.
They will have one more day of oral arguments on Wednesday, and then the justices will release their decision sometime in late June, The Atlantic Wire reported.
]]>The Bureau of Mediation Services released the results Monday, which showed 62 percent voted no, according to the Minnesota Daily.
"We were pretty confident going into the election and during the election that we'd come out on top," GSWU/UAW spokesman Scott Thaller told the Minnesota Daily. The turnout for the election was comparatively speaking a good one, with 68 percent of the graduate student workers voting.
"I hope that the people who are unhappy and perhaps feel that they are being taken advantage of can figure out a way to change internal policies of their department or graduate program," associate professor of microbiology Jeffrey Gralnick told the Star Tribune, "rather than try to change the entire graduate student body."
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