By SUSAN MONTOYA BRYAN

“Kablooey!”

Related Articles

Instacart ends a program where users could see different prices for the same item at the same store

$1.6B Powerball jackpot to be drawn Monday, but the odds still aren’t in your favor

Attorneys urge judge to visit Florida detention center to assess detainees’ access to lawyers

Betty Reid Soskin, oldest National Park Service ranger, dies at 104

A small town’s American Dream is at risk. What happens when its biggest employer shuts down?

That’s the word U.S. Geological Survey volcanic experts used to describe a muddy eruption at Black Diamond Pool in Yellowstone National Park on Saturday morning.

Video shared by the USGS on social media shows mud spraying up and out from the pool just before 9:23 a.m. in Biscuit Basin about midway between park favorites Old Faithful and Grand Prismatic.

Other recent eruptions have mostly been audible and not visible, because they happened either at night or when the camera was obscured by ice.

The agency said the Black Diamond Pool was previously the site of a hydrothermal explosion, in July 2024, that sent rocks and mud flying hundreds of feet high and damaged a boardwalk. It prompted the closure of the area to visitors due to the damage and the potential for additional hazardous activity.

So-called dirty eruptions reaching up to 40 feet have occurred sporadically since then.

Researchers installed a new camera and a seismic and acoustic monitoring station this summer, and they say the instruments, along with temperature sensors maintained by the Yellowstone National Park Geology Program, can better detect and characterize the eruptions.

The Yellowstone Volcano Observatory webcam at Black Diamond Pool didn’t disappoint Saturday.

“We got a nice clear view of one of these dirty eruptions under bright blue skies with the surroundings covered in snow (ah, winter in Yellowstone!),” USGS Volcanoes said on social media, noting that it was a great example of the kind of activity that has been happening at the spot over the past 19 months.

Experts say there is no real pattern to the eruptions at the pool and no precursors.

Park officials say Yellowstone preserves the most extraordinary collection of hot springs, geysers, mud pots and fumaroles on Earth. More than 10,000 hydrothermal features are found within the park, over 500 of them geysers.

NEW YORK (AP) — Instacart said Monday that it’s ending a program where some customers saw different prices for the same product ordered at the same time from the same store when using the delivery company’s service.

Related Articles

What to do with a windfall

A small town’s American Dream is at risk. What happens when its biggest employer shuts down?

Most US adults aren’t making year-end charitable contributions, new AP-NORC poll finds

Here’s what stores are open, and which ones are closed, on Christmas

Department stores try to distinguish themselves as beauty lovers turn to TikTok and Amazon

The program was meant to help grocers and other retailers learn more about what kinds of prices customers would pay for items, similar to how stores offer different prices for the same products at different locations. But it raised alarms after a report from Consumer Reports and two progressive advocacy groups, Groundwork Collaborative and More Perfect Union, said Instacart offered nearly three out of every four grocery items to shoppers at multiple prices in an experiment.

“At a time when families are working exceptionally hard to stretch every grocery dollar, those tests raised concerns, leaving some people questioning the prices they see on Instacart,” the company said in a Monday blog post. “That’s not okay – especially for a company built on trust, transparency, and affordability.”

Retailers will continue to set their own prices on the delivery website and they may still offer different prices at different brick-and-mortar locations, Instacart said, but “from now on, Instacart will not support any item price testing services.”

Instacart said these services were neither “ dynamic pricing,” a system where the price for something can go up when demand is high, nor “surveillance pricing,” where prices can be set based on a user’s income, shopping history or other personal information. Instead, the company said it was offered to customers at random.

Some customers would simply see a slightly higher price for an item, while others would see a slightly lower price. The experiment by Consumer Reports and the two progressive advocacy groups, for example, found that Instacart customers saw one of five different prices for the same dozen of Lucerne eggs from a Safeway store in Washington, D.C.: $3.99, $4.28, $4.59, $4.69, or $4.79.

Instacart had been offering the price-testing service to retailers since 2023. The company declined to say how many customers may have been affected, but it will end the service, effective immediately.

Last week, in a separate case, Instacart agreed to pay $60 million in customer refunds to settle federal allegations of deceptive practices. The Federal Trade Commission had accused Instacart of falsely advertising free deliveries and not clearly disclosing service fees, which add as much as 15% to an order and must be paid for customers.

Instacart denied FTC allegations of wrongdoing and said it reached a settlement in order to move forward and focus on its business.

“Trust is earned through clarity and consistency,” Instacart said in its blog post Monday. “Customers should never have to second-guess the prices they’re seeing.”

By KONSTANTIN TOROPIN and AAMER MADHANI, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House is expected to announce plans Monday to build a new, large warship that President Donald Trump is calling a “battleship” as part of a larger vision to create a “Golden Fleet,” according to people familiar with the plans.

Retired Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, who is now a senior director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and familiar with the discussions, said the announcement will include a new, large “surface combatant class” of ship and as many as 50 support ships.

The announcement will come just a month after the Navy scrapped its plans to build a new, small warship, citing growing delays and cost overruns, deciding instead to go with a modified version of a Coast Guard cutter that was being produced until recently.

Trump is to be joined by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Navy Secretary John Phelan for what is being billed by the White House as a “major announcement.”

Related Articles

Trump holds an event with Rubio and Hegseth during vacation as tensions with Venezuela mount

Trump removes nearly 30 career diplomats from ambassadorial positions

Nicki Minaj surprises conservatives with praise for Trump, Vance at Arizona event

Schumer urges Senate to take legal action over Justice Department’s staggered Epstein files release

US pursuit of third oil tanker intensifies Venezuela blockade

Trump plans to discuss a shipbuilding initiative, according to a White House official who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

It’s being unveiled at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort while he vacations in Florida and as U.S. forces take part in operations in the Caribbean that Trump says are aimed at stemming the flow of illegal drugs into the U.S. and beyond and mounting pressure on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s government.

Montgomery said that while he supports the idea to build more support ships, he was critical of the plan to build a new battleship-like warship.

Historically, the term battleship has referred to a very specific type of ship — a large, heavily armored vessel armed with massive guns designed to bombard other ships or targets ashore. This type of ship was at the height of prominence during World War II, and the largest of the U.S. battleships, the Iowa-class, were roughly 60,000 tons.

After World War II, the battleship’s role in modern fleets diminished rapidly in favor of aircraft carriers and long-range missiles. The U.S. Navy did modernize four Iowa-class battleships in the 1980s by adding cruise missiles and anti-ship missiles, along with modern radars, but by the 1990s all four were decommissioned.

Trump has long held strong opinions on specific aspects of the Navy’s fleet, sometimes with a view toward keeping older technology instead of modernizing.

During his first term, he unsuccessfully called for the return to steam-powered catapults to launch jets from the Navy’s newest aircraft carriers instead of the more modern electromagnetic system.

He has also complained to Phelan about the look of the Navy’s destroyers and decried Navy ships being covered in rust.

Phelan told senators at his confirmation hearing that Trump “has texted me numerous times very late at night, sometimes after one (o’clock) in the morning” about “rusty ships or ships in a yard, asking me what am I doing about it.”

On a visit to a shipyard that was working on the now-canceled Constellation-class frigate in 2020, Trump said he personally changed the design of the ship.

“I looked at it, I said, ‘That’s a terrible-looking ship, let’s make it beautiful,’” Trump said at the time.

The Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development recently unveiled $91.7 million in public infrastructure loans and grants to support projects in 26 cities. The funding will replace nearly 1,000 lead service lines in 15 cities and back water treatment plants in Hastings and Maplewood, among other projects coordinated through the Minnesota Public Facilities Authority.

Maplewood

The largest subsidized loan went to St. Paul Regional Water Services, which received $28 million toward financing construction of the new $250 million McCarrons drinking water treatment plant that opened this year in Maplewood. The funds, which will be paid back over 20 years, also will be put toward final site work, including grading, paving and the installation of several stormwater ponds and the demolition of old, decommissioned infrastructure. The plant, which serves 14 cities in the east metro, is installing a new water quality testing lab in a building previously dedicated to flocculation, the process of getting particles to clump together for easier removal.

Hastings

The city of Hastings received $9.9 million in grants and loans toward construction of a new water treatment plant to remove chemical contaminants known as PFAS, as well as construction of a raw water transmission line to the plant. Work on the Central Water Treatment Plant began this year at 1290 North Frontage Road, which is next to the existing nitrate treatment plant and ground storage reservoir owned by the city. The plant, which will remove PFAS from Wells 3, 5 and 7, is expected to be fully online by mid-2027.

Stillwater

In Stillwater, a $1.2 million grant will be used to replace galvanized water services with new copper services, said Assistant City Administrator Shawn Sanders. The city has roughly 700 of those types of water services remaining, according to Sanders, and the grant will be used to replace about 100 of them. This is the second year Stillwater has received such a grant, he said.

Funding for the water-related projects primarily comes from MPFA’s Clean Water Revolving Fund and the Drinking Water Revolving Fund. Projects also are being backed by MPFA’s Point Source Implementation Grant program, Water Infrastructure Fund and Small Community Wastewater Treatment Program.

Related Articles

Abdirashid Ahmed: In a time of dangerous rhetoric, Somali Minnesotans are among Minnesota’s success stories

State officials plan more study on sulfate pollution on wild rice

One last cast: Brad Dokken reflects on nearly 30 years of covering the outdoors

Joe Soucheray: Ho, ho, ho, merry TIFness!

MN jury says Johnson & Johnson owes $65.5M to woman with cancer who used talcum powder