Good morning and happy Thursday. Christmas is approaching and things are starting to slow down a little. But that doesn’t mean we can’t check the Digest.
1.Out of the nine young Twin Cities men who were sentenced last month as part of the nation’s largest ISIS conspiracy case, Guled Omar, who was at one point the group’s leader, received the harshest penalty - a prison sentence of 35 years. He may also be the most complex figure among his friends, a potentially dangerous stew of charisma and cunning. But to Omar and the people who believe in him, it was his sense of idealism and empathy, along with his troubled past, that drove him to want to join a terror group notorious for its cold-blooded executions. (MPR News)
2. When a college student is sexually assaulted, the student’s most likely chance at justice is often through the school’s administrative process. That’s because the burden of proof for punishing perpetrators of sexual violence is significantly different in schools’ internal processes than in the courts. When the University of Minnesota suspended 10 football players after investigating alleged sexual assaults that a prosecutor declined to charge, it illustrated how schools’ investigatory and disciplinary practices can sanction perpetrators more readily than police and courts. (MPR News)
3. Changes to the state’s drug sentencing laws went into effect earlier this year were designed to lighten up on addicts and increase penalties for drug dealers.The laws also attempted to address the racial disparities and overcrowded prisons. The state sentencing guidelines commission is now considering whether the changes should apply to people who were convicted before the changes took effect. Some say they should; others say the Legislature never intended the changes to be retroactive. (Star Tribune)
4. Another candidate has entered the race for Minneapolis mayor. It’s state Rep. Raymond Dehn, DFL-Minneapolis. As a teenager he was addicted to drugs and convicted of a felony. He was later pardoned and as a legislator worked to help felons get their lives back together. (Star Tribune)
5. Temperatures in the Arctic today are expected to be 27 degrees above normal. In the middle of last monthparts of the Arctic were more than 35 degrees Fahrenheit higher than average, and at the North Pole itself, mean temperatures for the month were 23 degrees above normal.On Wednesday, researchers released a study linking the abnormally high Arctic temperatures to human-caused climate change. From this piece: "A warm episode like the one we are currently observing is still a rare event in today's climate," said one of the researchers, Friederike E.L. Otto, a senior scientist at the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford in Britain. "But it would have been an extremely unlikely event without anthropogenic climate change." (New York Times)
The Digest is going to take a rest for the holidays. It will return on Jan. 3, just in time for the start of the legislative session and the new session of Congress. Thanks so much for reading and following all our coverage at MPR News. Have a merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah, and a blessed and happy new year.
