A 17-year-old from North Oaks is representing Minnesota on the national stage for the Miss Teen USA pageant.

Maisie Adams waves after she was crowned Miss Minnesota Teen USA. (Courtesy of Miss Minnesota Teen USA)

Maisie Adams was crowned Miss Minnesota Teen USA on Aug. 10. She’s competing for Miss Teen USA this week in Reno, Nevada, and if she wins in Thursday’s finals she’ll be the first Minnesotan to do so in the contest.

Being Miss Teen USA is something Adams has been dreaming of since she was 11, she said.

“It means representing more than a crown,” Adams said. “It is about being kind, showing compassion and representing the state I love.”

Her platform, Compassion in Action: A Movement not a Moment, focuses on inclusion and kindness.

Adams volunteers at Best Buddies, a nonprofit organization that works to promote one-on-one friendships and leadership development for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. She has volunteered there for five years promoting inclusion across Minnesota.

Adams once had a speech impediment, she said, so she knows what it’s like to feel excluded.

“Best Buddies gave me a way to turn that into a purpose by helping others feel seen and valued,” Adams said.

Through Best Buddies, she met Mikayla Holmgren, the first woman with Down syndrome to compete in Miss Minnesota USA. 

Mikayla Holmgren, left, and Maisie Adams connected through Best Buddies. (Courtesy of Miss Minnesota Teen USA)

They instantly connected over their love for pageantry and fashion, Adams said.

“From Mikayla, I have learned that joy is contagious and confidence comes from being unapologetically yourself,” Adams said.

Adams and Holmgren raised $41,000 in 2024 during a six-week campaign for Best Buddies. They also work together on an inclusive fashion show called Dreaming Big Without Limits.

“Seeing the audience rise to their feet for every model, many of them with disabilities, was unforgettable,” Adams said, recounting one of her favorite memories with Holmgren.

The 7th annual fashion show is happening in Stillwater the same night as the Miss Teen USA pageant in Reno. For more information and tickets, visit dreambigwithoutlimits.com. 

The Miss Teen USA finals begin at 7 p.m. Central Time on Thursday. The competition can be livestreamed at thenextmissusa.com for $22.99.

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A “fall refresh” is how 89.3 The Current is describing a series of recent changes, which include ending the Saturday night all-request show Radio Free Current and the Local Current, Purple Current and Rock the Cradle streams. At the same time, longtime DJs Barb Abney and Bill DeVille will pick up more airtime on the Minnesota Public Radio station.

The changes are due to a number of factors, including federal funding cuts to public media and a shift in listener habits due to streaming services, said program director Lindsay Kimball.

“I think now is a good time to make these changes that we’ve kind of been sitting on,” Kimball said. “So all these little nudges have kind of come together.”

Here’s a look at what’s going down.

Thursdays

Producers at The Current have started an on-air new album listening party at 9 p.m. Thursdays, two hours before those records go live on streaming services. Pre-recorded messages from the artists behind the records air between songs.

“Some of the artists will set up every song and tell us a story or other information about it,” Kimball said. “A lot of times you get this deeper context that helps you really understand an album. And the cool thing is, you’re hearing it for the first time, but you’re not just hearing it for the first time. You’re hearing it for the first time presented to you by the artist.”

Neko Case, Big Thief, Polica, Mumford and Sons, Bon Iver, the Head and the Heart and Avett Brothers are among the acts who have participated. Brandi Carlile is on the schedule this week. An abbreviated version airs at 8:30 a.m. Fridays.

Saturdays

Sheroes Radio, a weekly show amplifying diverse female voices hosted by Carmel Holt, will now air an hour earlier, at 6 a.m.

The 7 a.m. hour will now feature DJ Jake Rudh’s Transmission. The weekly post-punk, new wave and indie show previously aired at 10 p.m. Thursdays. Two hours of the retro rock program Teenage Kicks follow.

“Weekend mornings are actually pretty strong,” Kimball said. “Weekends in general are pretty strong. If we’re putting a lot of work into these shows we’re thinking about when’s a good place (to air them).”

Barb Abney’s show “Radio Free Current” has been discontinued. (Courtesy of Barb Abney)

Abney’s final Radio Free Current aired over the weekend, but she’ll still host from 7 to 10 p.m. She’s also picked up a new shift, from 9 p.m. to midnight on Sundays.

Radio Free Current was one of the station’s oldest specialty shows and began as an annual event, Kimball said. After Twitter launched in 2006, it opened a new avenue to take requests and Radio Free Current went weekly. This was years before Spotify and other streaming services took off.

“At that time, if you wanted to hear a song, maybe you downloaded it on iTunes. Or you could request it and there was definitely a space for that. That’s one of the reasons why that show has been so awesome and fun. But it’s become less special, because, for the most part, we all have access to every song at our fingertips.

“The other thing is, I’m thinking about my staff. Barb knows so much about music and I felt like I haven’t been able to give her the opportunity to schedule her own music and then just be herself on the air. She tells stories about these artists, these stories about the songs, and really, leans into what she does best.”

Sanni Brown’s classic hip-hop and R&B show The Message will now air at 10 p.m. followed by an hour of Carbon Sound, the station’s hip-hop and R&B program.

Sundays

Bill DeVille’s United States of Americana — which focuses on folk, alt-country and similar genres — is gaining an hour and now airs from 7 to 10 a.m. Sundays.

In January, The Current will launch a new 6 a.m. show focused on emerging country singer/songwriters.

“It’s going to lean into the genre of country that’s not on radio,” Kimball said. “It’s the stuff that’s blowing up on streaming and selling tickets everywhere. It’s singer/songwriter and country stuff that’s not pop country, not mainstream country. It doesn’t fit on United States of Americana and it’s not getting played on (local country station) K102.”

Streaming

The Local Current (artists from the Twin Cities and greater Minnesota), Purple Current (all things Prince) and Rock the Cradle (children’s music) streams will conclude at the end of October.

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“We’ve had those around for quite a while,” Kimball said. “As we think about how we prioritize where we’re putting our effort and what new streams that we’re working on, we also have to ask what are we going to stop so we have capacity to launch some new things. I would say music discovery is probably our biggest thing. We want to do streams that focus on seasonal components and streams that align with celebrating music and music discovery.”

To that end, the station launched a Halloween stream earlier this month and a Holiday stream will follow in November. They join the Current’s live stream, a 20th anniversary stream and full streams of Teenage Kicks and Carbon Sound.

The station also offers a Latin music stream (Ritmofonica) and one focused on amplifying women in music (The Siren).

By DAVID KLEPPER

WASHINGTON (AP) — North Korean hackers have pilfered billions of dollars by breaking into cryptocurrency exchanges and creating fake identities to get remote tech jobs at foreign companies, according to an international report on North Korea’s cyber capabilities.

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Officials in Pyongyang orchestrated the clandestine work to finance research and development of nuclear arms, the authors of the 138-page report found. The review was published by the Multilateral Sanctions Monitoring Team, a group that includes the U.S. and 10 allies and was set up last year to observe North Korea’s compliance with U.N. sanctions.

North Korea also has used cryptocurrency to launder money and make military purchases to evade international sanctions tied to its nuclear program, the report said. It detailed how hackers working for North Korea have targeted foreign businesses and organizations with malware designed to disrupt networks and steal sensitive data.

Despite its small size and isolation, North Korea has heavily invested in offensive cyber capabilities and now rivals China and Russia when it comes to the sophistication and capabilities of its hackers, posing a significant threat to foreign governments, businesses and individuals, the investigators concluded.

Unlike China, Russia and Iran, North Korea has focused much of its cyber capabilities to fund its government, using cyberattacks and fake workers to steal and defraud companies and organizations elsewhere in the world.

Aided in part by allies in Russia and China, North Korea’s cyber actions have “been directly linked to the destruction of physical computer equipment, endangerment of human lives, private citizens’ loss of assets and property, and funding for the DPRK’s unlawful weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs,” the report said, using the acronym for North Korea’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

The monitoring group is made up of the U.S., Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, South Korea and the United Kingdom. It was created last year after Russia vetoed a resolution directing a U.N. Security Council panel of experts to monitor Pyongyang’s activities. The team’s first report, issued in May, looked at North Korea’s military support for Russia.

Earlier this year, hackers linked to North Korea carried out one of the largest crypto heists ever, stealing $1.5 billion worth of ethereum from Bybit. The FBI later linked the theft to a group of hackers working for the North Korean intelligence service.

Federal authorities also have alleged that thousands of IT workers employed by U.S. companies were actually North Koreans using assumed identities to land remote work. The workers gained access to internal systems and funneled their salaries back to North Korea’s government. In some cases, the workers held several remote jobs at the same time.

A message left with North Korea’s mission to the U.N. was not immediately returned on Wednesday.

MENLO PARK, Calif. (AP) — Meta Platforms is cutting roughly 600 artificial intelligence jobs even as it continues to hire more workers for its superintelligence lab, the company confirmed on Wednesday.

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Axios first reported the cuts, which will affect Meta’s Fundamental AI Research, or FAIR unit, as well as product-related AI and AI infrastructure units.

Its newer TBD Lab unit won’t be affected. Citing a memo sent to workers by chief AI officer Alexandr Wang, Axios said the company is encouraging employees affected to apply for other jobs at Meta, with most expected to find other roles. The Menlo Park, California-based company is also still recruiting and hiring for TBD Lab, which is developing Meta’s latest large language models. Large language models are the technology behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini — and Meta’s Llama.

Meta has taken a different approach to AI than many of its rivals, releasing its flagship Llama system for free as an open-source product that enables people to use and modify some of its key components. Meta says more than a billion people use its AI products each month, but it’s also widely seen as lagging behind competitors such as OpenAI and Google in encouraging consumer use of large language models, also known as LLMs.