At the recommendation of the state’s appointed mediator, Duluth-based Essentia Health has withdrawn from the facilitation process to assess the formation of a nonprofit “All-Minnesota Health System Solution” alliance with the University of Minnesota and Fairview Health Services.

The initial proposal for a new nonprofit health entity was made by the university and Essentia in January. The goal was to align resources across the systems for education, training and delivery of clinical care with up to $1 billion invested annually over five years.

Fairview Health Services also was invited to join the health system, but declined the merger in February, citing a desire to operate its hospitals and clinics independently. Fairview did not respond to a request for comment on this story.

In March, the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office assigned a facilitator, Lois Quam, a longtime executive and director in healthcare and nonprofits, to explore potential solutions for the future of academic medicine in the state. Essentia, the university and Fairview agreed to partake in the moderated discussion.

Talks continuing on medical school

In a statement this week Essentia officials noted that “broader conversations to support the university’s medical school” between it and the university are continuing despite its departure from talks with the Attorney General’s Office.

“Essentia Health is no longer part of the strategic facilitation process because the strategic facilitator determined Essentia no longer had a role in that process,” Essentia said in a brief statement. “That process is distinct from the broader conversations happening between the university and Essentia to support the university’s medical school — a critical resource for all Minnesotans — in preparing the current and future health care workforce.”

Last September, the U announced plans to expand its medical school program in Duluth from a two-year to a four-year program. The medical school’s Duluth campus partners with Aspirus St. Luke’s and Essentia. Both hospitals have offered locations for the proposed new medical school campus.

Meanwhile, the university and Fairview continue to be engaged in direct discussions facilitated by the attorney general. That process is distinct from the broader conversations between the university, Essentia and other partners on an academic health system.

“The University continues to be engaged in direct discussions with Fairview facilitated by the Attorney General,” university officials said in a statement. “That process is distinct from the broader conversations that are happening among the University, Essentia Health and other partners on an academic health system to meet the needs of all Minnesotans; both organizations remain open to and are actively exploring solutions to ensure a strong medical school to meet the state’s health care challenges.”

Agreement between U, Fairview expires 2026

Fairview owns health care facilities on the university’s metropolitan campus, including the teaching hospital for the university’s medical school. With an agreement between the university system and Fairview expiring in 2026, the university sought to buy back Fairview’s teaching hospitals.

However, the health system expressed surprise in learning about the new “all-Minnesota health system solution” proposal just prior to its announcement, claiming it veered from plans for a resolution on the purchase of academic assets.

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“Despite our good faith efforts, thus far we have not reached an agreement with Fairview that secures the long-term future of the medical school — one of the state’s most vital and essential assets,” university officials said. “As we have done in the past, the University will be exploring all options as part of a path forward that includes partnerships with healthcare providers in the Twin Cities and across Minnesota. The University remains committed to achieving a solution that includes a relationship with Fairview, but it will be different than the status quo.”

The university stated it remains committed to achieving a solution that includes a relationship with Fairview, and holds room for continued conversations with Essentia while inviting other providers to help with solutions to meet current and future health care challenges facing the state.

“Any solution must ensure the short- and long-term sustainability of the University of Minnesota Medical School,” the university’s statement read. “The University of Minnesota is resolute in its commitment to deliver on its public health mission of clinical care, medical education, research and service for patients and Minnesota.”

Fairview previously failed to persuade U officials to back a proposed merger with Sanford Health, based out of state in Sioux Falls, S.D., and the largest rural health care system in the nation. Sanford had proposed combining their 58 hospitals, but announced in July 2023 that the deal withered under pushback from key stakeholders and regulators, including the state Attorney General’s Office.

Imani Cruzen contributed to this story. 

ATLANTA (AP) — Atlanta’s airport has forfeited at least $37.5 million because city leaders have refused to disavow diversity, equity and inclusion programs as mandated by President Donald Trump’s administration.

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The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, the world’s busiest airport by passenger traffic, declined on July 29 to agree to terms set out by the Federal Aviation Administration. Those terms certify that the airport doesn’t “operate any programs promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives that violate any applicable Federal anti-discrimination laws.”

That language mirrors a January executive order signed by Trump banning DEI programs operated by anyone doing business with or receiving money from the federal government.

The FAA told the Atlanta airport, owned and controlled by the city government, that it was holding back $57 million, The Journal-Constitution reports. But federal authorities said $19 million of that money would be available to Atlanta in the next federal budget year if it agrees to the language then.

The money would have gone to repave taxiways and renovate public restrooms, among other projects.

The language could force the city to give up on a longstanding program that targets 25% of airport business for minority-owned firms and 10% for women-owned firms. Atlanta’s first Black mayor, Maynard Jackson, held up a $400 million airport expansion by insisting that a portion of the spending go to minorities and women. That project put Atlanta on the path to having the world’s busiest airport, and the complex is now partially named for Jackson, along with former Mayor William Hartsfield. The city’s minority business programs are credited with helping to bolster Black-owned businesses in Atlanta, burnishing the city’s reputation as a place where Black people could advance materially.

The newspaper found that Atlanta officials unsuccessfully tried to persuade the FAA to alter the language.

A number of other local governments, including New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Boston and Minneapolis, sued in May to stop Trump’s DEI ban. They argue in a lawsuit filed in Seattle that Trump is usurping powers reserved to Congress by trying to impose funding conditions on congressionally approved grants. A judge has temporarily blocked the Trump administration from altering the grant conditions for the local governments that are suing, but not for any other governments.

Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens, who is seeking reelection this year, has said he’s considering changes to the program so the city could keep receiving federal money for a wide range of functions including the airport. Atlanta’s officials are elected on a nonpartisan basis, but Dickens, who is Black, says he’s Democrat.

“The city is currently evaluating all options to ensure alignment with our long-held values, local policy, and federal law and we are confident that the airport will be well positioned to receive federal funds in the future,” said Michael Smith, a spokesperson for Dickens.

In the meantime, the airport plans to “pursue alternative funding to advance these projects without impacting customers or airport service providers,” although Smith didn’t say where that money would come from. The city’s policy has been to finance airport improvements solely with airport-generated income.

In the year ended June 2024, the airport had $989 million in revenue and $845 million in expenses, according to a city financial report. At the time, the airport had almost $1 billion in ongoing construction. Smith said federal funding is “important” but represents less than 10% of the airport’s planned construction program over the next six years.

By MARK SHERMAN, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Friday extended an order that allows President Donald Trump’s administration to keep frozen nearly $5 billion in foreign aid, handing him another victory in a dispute over presidential power.

With the three liberal justices in dissent, the court’s conservative majority granted the Republican administration’s emergency appeal in a case involving billions of dollars in congressionally approved aid. Trump said last month that he would not spend the money, invoking disputed authority that was last used by a president roughly 50 years ago.

The Justice Department sought the high court’s intervention after U.S. District Judge Amir Ali ruled that Trump’s action was likely illegal and that Congress would have to approve the decision to withhold the funding.

The federal appeals court in Washington declined to put Ali’s ruling on hold, but Chief Justice John Roberts temporarily blocked it on Sept. 9. The full court indefinitely extended Roberts’ order.

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The court has previously cleared the way for the Trump administration to strip legal protections from hundreds of thousands of migrants, fire thousands of federal employees, oust transgender members of the military and remove the heads of independent government agencies.

The legal victories, while not final rulings, all have come through emergency appeals, used sparingly under previous presidencies, to fast-track cases to the Supreme Court, where decisions are often handed down with no explanation.

Trump told House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., in a letter Aug. 28 that he would not spend $4.9 billion in congressionally approved foreign aid, effectively cutting the budget without going through the legislative branch.

He used what’s known as a pocket rescission. That’s a rarely used maneuver when a president submits a request to Congress toward the end of a current budget year to not spend the approved money. The late notice essentially flips the script. Under federal law, Congress has to approve the rescission within 45 days or the money must be spent. But the budget year will end before the 45-day window closes, and in this situation the White House is asserting that congressional inaction allows it to not spend the money.

The majority wrote in an unsigned order that Trump’s authority over foreign affairs weighed heavily in its decision, while cautioning that it was not making a final ruling in the case.

But that was cold comfort to the dissenters. “The effect is to prevent the funds from reaching their intended recipients — not just now but (because of their impending expiration) for all time,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

The Trump administration has made deep reductions to foreign aid one of its hallmark policies, despite the relatively meager savings relative to the deficit and possible damage to America’s reputation abroad as people lose access to food supplies and development programs.

Justice Department lawyers told a federal judge last month that another $6.5 billion in aid that had been subject to the freeze would be spent before the end of the fiscal year next Tuesday.

The case has been winding its way through the courts for months, and Ali said he understood that his ruling would not be the last word on the matter.

“This case raises questions of immense legal and practical importance, including whether there is any avenue to test the executive branch’s decision not to spend congressionally appropriated funds,” he wrote.

In August, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit threw out an earlier injunction Ali had issued to require that the money be spent. But the three-judge panel did not shut down the lawsuit.

After Trump issued his rescission notice, the plaintiffs returned to Ali’s court and the judge issued the order that’s now being challenged.

By TRAVIS LOLLER, Associated Press

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Sara Jane Moore, who was imprisoned for more than 30 years after she made an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate President Gerald Ford in 1975, has died. She was 95.

Moore died Wednesday at a nursing home in Franklin, Tennessee, according to Demetria Kalodimos, a longtime acquaintance who said she was informed by the executor of Moore’s estate. Kalodimos is an executive producer at the Nashville Banner newspaper, which was first to report the death.

Moore seemed an unlikely candidate to gain national notoriety as a violent political radical who nearly killed a president. When she shot at Ford in San Francisco, she was a middle-aged woman who had begun dabbling in leftist groups and sometimes served as an FBI informant.

Sentenced to life, Moore was serving her time at the Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin, California, when she was unexpectedly paroled Dec. 31, 2007. Federal officials gave no details on why she was set free.

She lived largely anonymously in an undisclosed location after that, but in broadcast interviews she expressed regret for what she had done. She said she had been caught up in the radical political movements that were common in California in the mid-1970s.

“I had put blinders on, I really had, and I was listening to only … what I thought I believed,”” she told San Francisco television station KGO in April 2009. “We thought that doing that would actually trigger a new revolution.”

Moore was often confused with Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a disciple of cult murderer Charles Manson who aimed a semi-automatic pistol at Ford in Sacramento, California, on Sept. 5, 1975. A Security Service agent grabbed the gun before any shots could be fired, and the president was unharmed.

Just 17 days later, on Sept. 22, Moore shot at Ford as he waved to a crowd outside the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco’s Union Square. Oliver Sipple, a 33-year-old former Marine, knocked the .38-caliber pistol out of her hand as she fired, causing the shot to go astray and hit a building.

“I’m sorry I missed,” Moore said during an interview with the San Jose Mercury News seven years later. “Yes, I’m sorry I missed. I don’t like to be a failure.”

But in later interviews, before and after her release, she repeatedly said that she regretted her actions, saying she was convinced that the government had declared war on the left.

Asked by KGO in 2009 what she would say to Ford if that had been possible, she replied that she would tell him, “I’m very sorry that it happened. … I’m very happy that I did not succeed.” Ford died in 2006, about a year before her release.

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Her family did not publicly comment on her death. Geri Spieler, who wrote a biography of Moore titled “Housewife Assassin,” said she had abandoned her children and was estranged from all her living relatives.

Moore was born Sara Jane Kahn on Feb. 15, 1930, in Charleston, West Virginia. Her confusing background, which included multiple failed marriages, name changes and involvement with both leftist political groups and the FBI, baffled the public and even her own defense attorney during her trial.

“I never got a satisfactory answer from her as to why she did it,” retired federal public defender James F. Hewitt once said. “There was just bizarre stuff, and she would never tell anyone anything about her background.”

Ford insisted that the two attempts on his life should not prevent him from having contact with the people, saying, “If we can’t have the opportunity of talking with one another, seeing one another, shaking hands with one another, something has gone wrong in our society.”

His other attacker, Fromme, also was freed from prison eventually. She had no comment as she left a federal lockup in Texas in August 2009 at age 60.

It was in 1974 that Moore began working for People in Need, a free food program for the poor established by millionaire Randolph Hearst as ransom after his daughter Patty was kidnapped by the radical Symbionese Liberation Army.

Moore soon became involved with leftists, ex-convicts and other members of San Francisco’s counterculture. At this time, she became an FBI informant.

Moore said she shot at Ford because she thought she would be killed once it was disclosed that she was an FBI informant. The agency ended its relationship with her about four months before the shooting.

“I was going to go down anyway,” she said in the 1982 interview with the San Jose Mercury News. “And if I was going to go down, I was going to do it my way. If the government was going to kill me, I was going to make some kind of statement.”

Moore was sent to a West Virginia women’s prison in 1977. Two years later she escaped but was captured several hours later.

She was later transferred to a prison in Pleasanton, California, before going to Dublin.

In 2000 she sued the warden of her federal prison to prevent him from taking keys given to inmates to lock themselves in as a security measure.

In an interview after the July 2024 assassination attempt on President Donald Trump, Moore told the Nashville Banner that part of what motivated her was that Ford, who became president after Richard Nixon resigned, was not elected president.

“He wasn’t elected to anything. He was appointed,” Moore said. “It wasn’t a belief, it was a fact. It was a fact that he was appointed.”