By MICHAEL R. SISAK, Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — UPS stole tens of millions of dollars in pay from seasonal workers who help the shipping giant deliver packages during the busy holiday season, forcing some to clock in well after their shifts started and deducting pay for lunch breaks they never took, New York Attorney General Letitia James alleged in a lawsuit Monday.

Filed in state court in Manhattan, the lawsuit accuses UPS of “repeatedly and persistently” failing to properly compensate driver helpers, who assist with deliveries, and seasonal support drivers, who use their own vehicles to make deliveries. James estimated that in the last six years, UPS has deprived tens of thousands of seasonal workers of wages totaling about $45 million.

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The lawsuit seeks back pay and penalties, plus a court order requiring UPS to end off-the-clock work and change its timekeeping and payroll practices. The company, known for its brown trucks and uniforms, delivered an average of 22.4 million packages a day and brought in $91.1 billion in revenue last year, according to its website.

“We oftentimes don’t think of these workers when we’re opening up our gifts for the holidays,” James said at a news conference announcing the lawsuit. “And these individuals are struggling each and every day to make ends meet.”

In a statement, Georgia-based UPS said it was aware of the lawsuit, “takes all accusations of wrongdoing seriously and denies the unfounded allegation of intentionally underpaying UPS employees.”

“We offer industry-leading pay and benefits to our more than 26,000 employees in New York, and we remain committed to following all applicable laws,” the statement said.

James, a Democrat, said she started investigating UPS in 2023 after an employee union, Teamsters Local 804, raised concerns about the company’s treatment of seasonal workers. Those workers are employed on a temporary basis from October to January.

Josh Pomeranz, the union’s director of operations, said that while there isn’t evidence that the company’s top management was involved in, aware of or condoning alleged wage theft, “these are just certain practices that you have to actively ignore, not to see it happening.”

NEVIS, Minn. — Although it was dark and freezing cold, the air outside Flour Chicks Bakery in Nevis smelled like warm doughnuts.

Inside this bakery in Minnesota’s lake country, the staff were working late into the night to churn out a steady supply of fresh breads and pastries. In the winter, the bakery’s calmest season, owner Sara Halik said they work until about midnight or 1 a.m., then start baking again at 5 a.m.

Halik bought the bakery two years ago with her sister-in-law, Tina Smith. She also owns Red River Bar and Grill in Akeley and splits her time between the two Hubbard County businesses.

She said she was in charge of making the cakes at her restaurant.

“I just fell in love with it and decided I wanted more work to do,” she said. “So, I bought a bakery.”

Flour Chicks re-opened under Halik’s ownership in October 2023, she said. So far, business has been booming, although the bakery only recently hired a full staff.

Behind the scenes

Flour Chicks Bakery owner Sara Halik of Nevis, Minn., said her favorite things about the bakery are her great staff and customers. (Alex Haddon / Park Rapids Enterprise / Forum News Service)

All of the recipes are kept in a thick binder, where they’re laminated and covered with notes. Some of them are “very touchy,” Halik said. As the seasons, temperature and humidity change, amounts of water and yeast have to be carefully adjusted by the gram.

Nikki Kramer starts her shift at 5 p.m., right after the store closes to customers, and gets to work making “all the pastries for the morning,” Halik said. Those include turnovers, scones, croissants, muffins and cinnamon rolls.

“You’ll see her cinnamon twists come out perfect,” Halik said.

To make cinnamon twists, a large sheet of dough is coated with an egg wash and sprinkled with cinnamon. Then, Kramer folds it over, cuts it into strips, twists them and sets them aside to rise.

Kramer and the other night staff go through dozens of sheets of dough, pressing out air bubbles and cutting out rings for doughnuts.

The centers of the doughnuts are saved to become doughnut holes. Cutter Serena Krotzer chops up any spare scraps of dough with cinnamon to be made into apple fritters.

Nothing goes to waste.

Neil Selseth, the fryer and “muscle” of the team, arrives at 6:30 p.m. and starts on the battered doughnuts.

“These girls make the magic happen, I just take care of the heavy stuff,” Selseth said, referring to the 50-pound bags of ingredients he lifts.

By 7:30 p.m. on a Tuesday, much of the next day’s doughnuts were rising in a warming box called a proofer.

Selseth was frying croissants in hot oil. Each small batch took about two minutes to finish. Selseth monitored them carefully and flipped them with a pair of sticks when they turned golden brown, then transferred them to a rack to glaze.

The business of baking

Neil Selseth of Flour Chicks Bakery in Nevis, Minn., maneuvers with a tray of freshly fried and glazed croissants ready for the doughnut case. (Alex Haddon / Park Rapids Enterprise / Forum News Service)

Halik knew cakes, but not doughnuts or bread when she bought Flour Chicks, she said, so the previous owner gave her and Smith a crash course in baking.

Once a week or so, they would come in and help him bake goods for the farmers’ markets.

“That’s how we learned to do what he was doing,” she said. “So, that really helped. It helped him too, because we were making the product for him to take and sell.”

Opening the doors was “overwhelming” at first, Halik said. Customers poured in, but the bakery was drastically understaffed.

“I was cutting, frying, I mean doing everything, every night, myself,” Halik said. “We were working 15-, 16-hour days. We were running the counter and running the back.”

Summer is their busiest season. Halik said she worked for 24 hours straight during one holiday, although she doesn’t remember which.

“I believe she had like 15 or 18 dozen croissants she had to fry, and additionally, another 30 pounds worth of cake doughnuts that she fried up,” Selseth said about one particularly busy summer day. “And they still ran out of doughnuts before 11 a.m.”

Soon, Halik said she developed a process for the bakery and hired people into specific positions. There were moments of hilarity, like when Halik got to know “Big Bertha,” her giant mixer.

“When we first started, we did not know what speeds they were,” she said. “So, we filled it up with powdered sugar. We thought three was low and it was not.”

The sugar went “everywhere,” leaving her and Smith laughing hysterically.

Now, Halik said she has about nine great employees and the bakery is running smoothly. She stops by in the mornings and evenings to check in.

She also makes all the pies. Over Thanksgiving, she said she fulfilled about 100 orders ranging from pumpkin to coconut cream.

Bright and early

It was about 7 below outside when the morning shift started with prepping bread and frosting doughnuts.

There’s a special technique to folding bread dough so it rises in neat spheres, Maya Deshayes said. The dough is tucked into itself and flipped over, leaving a perfectly smooth, domed top.

Keelin Irish was frosting and filling doughnuts. Despite “not being a morning person,” she works at Flour Chicks before heading to class at Nevis Public School. Halik was cutting cheesecake into tiny squares she would later dunk in melted candy to make 2,000 cheesecake bites.

Halik said Kathy Plumley is her “main person,” taking care of the cookie and cake decorating and overseeing general operations. Many of the vibrant designs in the cake counter are her work. Earlier that week, she’d frosted about 1,000 intricate Christmas cookies for the Akeley Veterans and Community Outreach Christmas party.

Plumley, a self-taught froster, helped teach Halik how to “do cakes.”

“(Plumley) always said, ‘Well, if I was younger, I’d buy that bakery,’” Halik said. “So when I bought the bakery, I reached out to her.’”

At 5:30 a.m., Plumley was dunking tiny, round pieces of cookie in icing and red sugar sprinkles to make Rudolph noses. Then, she decorated doughnuts to look like melted snowmen.

Doors open to customers at 6 a.m., except for a special group of customers known as “the coffee guys.” The group of retirees have been meeting for years to chat in the mornings. They’re greeted by Candy Pike, who works the front counter.

Pike said she loves working somewhere where everyone’s happy to visit.

“Here, I just get to be me and have fun and greet customers,” she said. “I get people to buy a lot of doughnuts.”

Pike said she’s worked in a lot of commercial bakeries, many of which just order their pastries frozen, “warm them up and put a little icing on them.” Flour Chicks is old school, she said. Baking is an art and they do it well.

Pike said her favorite good at the bakery, the fried cinnamon roll topped with buttercream and pecans, is so heavenly it “gives you a buzz.”

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By MATTHEW PERRONE, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. health officials have expanded approval of a much-debated drug aimed at boosting female libido, saying the once-a-day pill can now be taken by women older than 65.

The announcement Monday from the Food and Drug Administration broadens the drug’s use to older women who have gone through menopause. The pill, Addyi, was first approved 10 years ago for premenopausal women who report emotional stress due to low sex drive.

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Addyi, marketed by Sprout Pharmaceuticals, was initially expected to become a blockbuster drug, filling an important niche in women’s health. But the drug came with unpleasant side effects including dizziness and nausea, and it carries a safety warning about the dangers of combining it with alcohol. The boxed warning, FDA’s most serious type, cautions that drinking while taking the pill can cause dangerously low blood pressure and fainting.

Sales of Addyi, which acts on brain chemicals that affect mood and appetite, have been limited. In 2019, the FDA approved a second drug for low female libido, an on-demand injection that acts on a different set of neurological chemicals.

Sprout CEO Cindy Eckert said in a statement the approval “reflects a decade of persistent work with the FDA to fundamentally change how women’s sexual health is understood and prioritized.” The company, based in Raleigh, North Carolina, announced the FDA update in a press release Monday.

The medical condition for a troublingly low sexual appetite, called hypoactive sexual desire disorder, has been recognized since the 1990s and is thought to affect a significant portion of American women, according to surveys. After the blockbuster success of Viagra for men in the 1990s, drugmakers began pouring money into research and potential therapies for sexual dysfunction in women.

But diagnosing the condition is complicated because of how many factors can affect libido, especially after menopause, when falling hormone levels trigger a number of biological changes and medical symptoms. Doctors are supposed to rule out a number of other issues, including relationship problems, medical conditions, depression and other mental disorders, before prescribing medication.

The diagnosis is not universally accepted, and some psychologists argue that low sex drive should not be considered a medical problem.

The FDA rejected Addyi twice prior to its 2015 approval, citing the drug’s modest effectiveness and worrisome side effects. The approval came after a lobbying campaign by the company and its supporters, Even the Score, which framed the lack of options for female libido as a women’s rights issue.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

The inauguration of Kaohly Vang Her as mayor of St. Paul is a moment of transformation. She is the first Hmong woman elected mayor of a major American city, a powerful testament for a community that only two generations ago arrived in Minnesota as refugees. That’s not all. Her’s defeat of an incumbent widely expected to win — and by a large margin — demonstrated that voters want to upend the city’s political establishment and its clubby back-patting and favor-trading habits.

The mayor-elect enters office at a time of crisis in Minnesota’s Capitol City. The departure of businesses and residents swelled the commercial vacancy rate downtown to among the highest in the region and well above pre-pandemic levels, reflecting a slower recovery than many peer cities.  On key indicators of downtown vitality — commercial occupancy, business activity, and tax-base stability — St. Paul has consistently lagged behind comparable mid-sized U.S. cities.  All of St. Paul is bearing the cost: as the number of downtown businesses has plummeted, pressure has shifted onto homeowners through higher property taxes.

Only a bold and ambitious launch by Mayor Her on her first days in office can create the momentum to revitalize St. Paul.

Here’s a big bang: Announce a four-year campaign to raise $400 million in public and private funds to finance downtown revitalization. The declaration will itself light up the sky and inject energy and interest into Mayor Her’s administration. The funds will, in turn, equip the mayor to incentivize the formation of partnerships and to coax change from the usual St. Paul standpatters who prefer the status quo or expect deals to secure their support.

Sound pie-in-the-sky? Not for Kaohly Her, whose 15-year career prior to public service was as a successful businesswoman in the investment and finance sector. The mayor’s unique skills can empower St. Paul to pursue what was previously unimaginable and unmistakably demonstrate Mayor Her’s ability to revitalize St. Paul.

Next up: Mayor Her needs to declare an audacious agenda for her first 100 days to stop the slide in St. Paul and launch a new era of vitality, responsiveness and economic optimism.

Here are three catalysts for change.

Open for business

Small business owners, builders, and homeowners are steamed up by the cumbersome and time-consuming process of receiving permits from the city. St. Paul’s laborious slog adds to the costs of building and chases away businesses. When businesses don’t leave the state, they may prefer Woodbury, Eagan and Roseville, which move much faster and with less hassle. Minneapolis has built a larger and more advanced permitting process, making it more “business friendly” in the eyes of property owners and developers.

Mayor Her can create a faster, simpler process in her first 100 days if she makes it a priority. She doesn’t need massive new spending or sweeping legislation to get started. On her first day, the new mayor can issue an executive order that declares a new expectation of 30-day approval for standard permits, a one-stop permit office to cut through the red tape, a new requirement that all relevant departments review applications simultaneously to avoid infuriating run-arounds, and a new Chief Permit Officer who answers directly to the mayor for meeting the new deadlines and achieving simplicity.

Sound impossible? Apparently it isn’t. Cities around the country have turned around their laborious permitting systems. St. Paul can too.

Economic vitality will follow. Private developers in St. Paul, including the Ryan Companies and Schafer Richardson, along with housing nonprofits such as Aeon and CommonBond are eager to build, rehab, and reinvest. But they need a city that keeps up. Reliable 30-day approvals would jump-start stalled housing projects, accelerate storefront reopenings and return responsiveness to City Hall.

‘Safe, clean, open’ downtown

Large sections of downtown are empty, uncared for, and unsafe. Walking along Wabasha or through the skyways is unsettling. Nothing threatens St. Paul’s future more. Disgust with the city reached the point that residents have taken matters into their own hands by creating “Downtown Improvement Districts” and paying out of pocket for safety services, sidewalk cleaning and the removal of graffiti.

The experiences of the Downtown Improvement Districts along with planning by the Saint Paul Downtown Alliance hand Mayor Her a playbook for quick, visible and practical actions to reclaim downtown in her first 100 days. New lights to illuminate once dark corridors and skyways, removal of foul graffiti and the deployment of welcome ambassadors are starting points. Storefronts that sit vacant and currently generate no revenue can be converted into short-term, rent-free sites for pop-up art and restaurant operations that bring people downtown and begin to make downtown feel alive again.

Milwaukee and Detroit started to reverse their declines by making “safe, clean, and open” their new welcome mat. When streets feel lively and well-lit, crime drops. When storefronts look active, businesses return. When downtown appears cared for, residents regain trust.

Fast-tracking 3 prime targets for office-to-housing conversions

It is time for City Hall to accept the reality that the 2019 market for office space is gone – and move on. The public-private tag team of the St. Paul Downtown Alliance and the Saint Paul Downtown Development Corporation have identified three prime candidates for converting former office space into new housing: the Landmark Towers, U.S. Bank Center, and the Lowertown property on 180 East Fifth. Starting these conversions, which have empty space and flexible designs, will inject economic vitality and begin the process of bringing residents and businesses back along with downtown’s tax base.

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Mayor Her can be a catalyst for change at the beginning of her term by targeting these three prime properties for conversion, expediting the approval of early-stage plans, and encouraging developers and property owners to reach agreement.

Of course, office building conversions will require more than 100 days but the mayor can deliver visible momentum: interior demolitions, new building permits, and the erecting of inconvenient — but heartening — fencing for redevelopment.

St. Paul’s challenge isn’t simply coming up with plans. Those exist. What has been missing is energetic and resourceful leadership that makes downtown redevelopment a top priority. Transforming St. Paul’s lackadaisical permit process, cleaning up downtown and starting to convert offices to housing are realistically achievable within Mayor Her’s first 100 days. The mayor can reform the permit process by using her own authority, kick-start the clean-up by broadening the scope of the Downtown Improvement Districts and teeing up housing conversions for action.

These aren’t grand promises for someday — they’re practical steps Mayor Her can take on her first day.  Results will start to appear quickly.

Larry Jacobs, St. Paul, is director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota.