Live: Yacht Club music festival wraps up Sunday with high-energy, nostalgic lineup

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The 2025 Minnesota Yacht Club Festival wrapped up Sunday with thousands gathering at Harriet Island Regional Park for some of the event’s most nostalgic headliners, including Sublime, 311 and Green Day.

“I’m here for Green Day. And everything else is diminishing in importance,” said festival attendee Kris Jeronimus.

Audience member John Kloster said he was particularly excited for Green Day, 311 and Garbage.

Throughout the day, the sun beat down on a crowd wearing tie-dye, bucket hats and ’90s band merch. Local musician Landon Conrath kicked off the third day of the festival 20 minutes after doors opened.

“I live in St. Paul, so my commute to this was like seven minutes,” he told the crowd. “It was wonderful.”

By the end of Conrath’s upbeat indie rock set, a few hundred people had gathered and were politely bopping their heads.

Nashville-based Winona Fighter raised the energy with a raging pop-punk set, during which frontwoman Coco Kinnon ran around onstage doing high kicks, screaming into the mic and encouraging the audience to open a mosh pit. Up next, fellow Nashville musicians Grace Bowers and the Hodge Podge jammed out with songs full of funk, soul and rock influences. The voice of 18-year-old Bowers was sometimes difficult to hear over the six-piece band, but her groovy guitar solos shined during the set.

Harriet Island was beginning to fill up by the time Blind Melon took the stage at 2:50 p.m. However, no matter how many times vocalist Travis Warren hoarsely yelled “Come on, Minnesota!” the audience stayed pretty calm until the band played its biggest hit.

“Here comes the one Blind Melon song I know,” Jeronimus said as the 1993 tune “No Rain” began to play.

Midway through the afternoon, indie rock band Beach Bunny began its set with “Cloud 9,” one of the songs that brought the Chicago-based group widespread TikTok fame in 2020. Throughout the hour-long performance, frontwoman Lili Trifilio had the audience clapping and singing along to the band’s catchy alternative tunes. She changed the lyrics in “Ms. California” for the set, yelling, “Everything is better in Minnesota!”

All-female Canadian rock band The Beaches also kept the audience entertained, with high-energy songs interspersed with banter among band members. The band closed with 2023 viral hit “Blame Brett” and the crowd sang along, chanting “Blame my ex!” repeatedly.

The festival will finish up tonight with headline performances from Garbage, Sublime, 311 and Green Day.

(This story will be updated.)

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St. Paul homicide detectives investigating a fatal shooting Sunday afternoon

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Detectives are investigating a shooting death in a St. Paul homeless encampment on Sunday that is the fifth homicide this year in the city.

About 1:15 p.m. Sunday, police officers responded to reports of a shooting at an unsheltered encampment near the 1200 block of Jackson Street, according to a news release from authorities.

When officers arrived, the release says they found several people performing first aid on a man inside a tent with gunshot wounds. Officers took over the lifesaving efforts and called for St. Paul Fire medics. When the medics arrived they pronounced the man dead.

No arrests have been made as detectives investigate what led to the shooting and who the shooter is. Anyone with information is asked to call 651-266-5650.

The Ramsey County medical examiner’s office will identify the victim and determine the exact cause of death.

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Stillwater cracks down on use of e-moto bikes on city trails

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No throttles on the Stillwater Lift Bridge — or state trails or sidewalks, for that matter.

The Stillwater Police Department is cracking down on the use of high-speed electric motorbikes or “e-motos” within city limits.

“We have recently been receiving complaints about e-motos that have been driving around town,” according to a statement the agency posted on social media. “These vehicles are not street legal unless they have all of the required equipment a motorcycle would have. They also need a license plate and need to be fully insured.”

E-motos, which look like small dirt bikes without gas engines and do not have bicycle-style pedals on them, are prohibited from state trails and are not allowed on any sidewalks, which would include the Stillwater Lift Bridge, the post states.

“They are only allowed on private property unless a person riding (one) meets the requirements to legally use one on the road,” police said. “They may only be driven by a licensed driver with a motorcycle endorsement or a valid motorcycle permit.”

Officers have not yet been issuing citations against violators, but they will be in the future, Police Chief Brian Mueller said.

“We are working on education right now, but we are watching as complaints have slowly increased,” he said. “We really are concerned about the safety of those using our streets and trails.”

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Trump order gives Minnesota taconite plants more time to cut mercury pollution

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DULUTH — President Donald Trump is giving Minnesota’s taconite iron ore mines two more years to comply with a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency mandate to reduce their mercury emissions — a rule that the Trump administration has already signaled it intends to roll back.

A proclamation Trump signed late Thursday evening states that the rule adopted by the EPA last March relies on “technologies that have not been demonstrated to work in the taconite industry, are untested at commercial scale,” or are not “reasonably achievable.”

The order was among a series of proclamations from the president granting two years of relief from regulations for coal-fired power plants and other polluting industries that the Trump administration considers overly costly and burdensome.

After more than two decades of lawsuits and pressure applied by tribes, states and environmental groups, the EPA imposed a rule last year requiring the state’s six taconite mines and processing plants to cut mercury emissions by about 33% beginning in 2027.

U.S. Steel and Cleveland-Cliffs own and operate the facilities in northeast Minnesota, where the taconite ore is dug out of the earth and then made into pellets in giant furnaces, which are then shipped to mills around the Great Lakes to be transformed into steel. Another facility is located in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

Both companies have sued to block the rule. They praised the Trump administration’s move to delay its implementation until 2029.

“The proclamation will provide a reprieve from an onerous regulation that was put in place without regard to the technological feasibility of their implementation or the impact it presented to the domestic iron ore industry and thousands of good paying jobs these operations sustain,” said Cliffs, which owns three of the six taconite facilities on Minnesota’s Iron Range, and is majority owner and operator of a fourth.

U.S. Steel, which owns two iron ore mines on the range, including the state’s largest, Minntac, called the president’s proclamation “fair, reasonable and necessary,” and said the EPA’s rule “is not supported by science and would impose unprecedented costs while setting technologically unachievable standards.”

Taconite plant standards coming since 1990

With its 1990 U.S. Clean Air Act, Congress required the EPA to set mercury emission standards for taconite plants by the year 2000. But the agency never did. Since then, tribes, environmental groups and the state of Minnesota have pushed the agency to take action. Those efforts culminated in the EPA’s rule last year.

The requirements don’t go far enough for Minnesota to reach its mercury air emission reduction goals, said Jim Pew, who directs the federal clean air practice at Earthjustice.

“They didn’t really require the plants to do nearly as much as they could, but they still would have taken a significant bite out of the mercury emissions,” he said. “That’s what the Trump administration is trying to roll back right now.”

Pew said when the rule was adopted last year, taconite plants were given until 2027 to meet the mercury reduction targets so they had time to install pollution controls. He said Trump’s proclamation pushes that date back to 2029.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration had already announced in March that it was reconsidering the rule.

“So what’s really going on is that the Trump administration is telling these companies that they don’t have to do anything now to start getting ready to control their emissions, and in the meantime, it’s getting ready to get rid of the rules altogether so they never have to do it,” Pew said.

Mercury is a neurotoxin that can be especially harmful to young children and infants in the womb. It mostly enters the environment in Minnesota through air pollution from burning coal, processing taconite and other sources.

Once in lakes and streams, bacteria in the water convert it to a more toxic form called methylmercury, which works its way up the food chain and accumulates in fish.

More than 1,500 rivers and lakes in Minnesota are considered impaired for mercury, meaning there are advisories recommending that fish from those bodies of water not be eaten more than once a week or month.

Taconite emissions prevent state from reaching goal

The state has a goal to slash mercury emissions 76% from 2005 levels by this year. Significant progress has been made. Mercury emissions have dropped by more than half, largely because of the closures of coal-fired power plants or the installation of pollution controls.

But the state did not meet its goal, in large part because emissions from taconite plants have remained largely flat. Iron ore mines now emit about half of the mercury pollution in the state.

Minnesota Pollution Control Agency spokesperson Becky Lentz said the state’s ability to meet its mercury emissions reduction targets “will require additional reductions from all sources, including the taconite iron ore processing facilities.”

”We are continuing to assess how this presidential proclamation impacts our statewide mercury reduction goals, but, at a minimum, the Trump Administration created additional regulatory uncertainty with yesterday’s announcement,” she said.

The EPA has estimated it would cost more than $500 million over the next decade for the taconite industry to comply with its mercury emissions rule.

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“It’s economically doable,” Pew said. “The only real obstacle is that the steel companies don’t want to be decent neighbors and put on the controls that just about every other industry, like the power industry, has already put on.”

But Kristen Vake, executive director of the Iron Mining Association of Minnesota, said the extension will give taconite operations more time to find solutions. She said testing of pollution control equipment is underway at Keetac, a taconite facility operated by U.S. Steel in Keewatin.

“This decision recognizes that the technology isn’t there yet, and more time is needed,” she said.