Democratic Gov. Tim Walz has been an unflinching ally to public employee unions through most of his political tenure. These days, their alliance is a little rocky to say the least. 

Opening statements began Thursday in Minneapolis in the trial of Derrick Thompson, a man accused of killing five young women in a high-speed crash in 2023.

Valerie ran off while she was on a camping trip with her owners back in 2023 on a remote island in Australia. They had lost hope until locals spotted her more than a year later, surviving in the wild.

Friendly Vang-Johnson’s parents were some of the first Hmong refugees to farm in Minnesota. She wasn’t planning to follow in her parents’ footsteps, but that changed when she started a delivery program that eventually became Friendly Hmong Farms, a wider effort to support farmers in Washington and Minnesota.

If you’re driving in the southern Twin Cities metro area this weekend, you may want to allow some extra time to reach your destination. A long stretch of Interstate 494 in Bloomington will be closed in both directions.

This week’s MN Shortlist highlights a live score performance of Hitchcock’s “The Lodger,” a new musical about Minnesota outlaw Nellie King and a talk on Latin American women muralists.