The fraud ran so deep that even Somali parents who might not have even entertained aspirations of scammed wealth were enticed to offer their children up for autism care in exchange for getting paid. A woman named Asha Farha Hassan has been charged with defrauding the Minnesota’s autism program for $14 million.

There is a temptation to call the $14 million a personal record, the 56-game hitting streak of fraud. She probably got a fist bump when she walked down the street. But Hassan is only the first person charged in the autism fraud. Her record could be broken. The U.S. attorney for Minnesota, Joe Thompson, said there will be others, not yet charged.

If you don’t feel betrayed yet, consider that Thompson said that fraud cases are a wholesale attack on Minnesota programs to the point where fraud has overtaken legitimate services.

Hassan, 28, whipped up a business called Smart Therapy, according to the charges. More than 300 of these businesses sprang up, most of them fake, we’re told. Hassan and her untrained young relatives recruited parents. No autism. Not a problem. According to the charges, Hassan paid parents a kickback of $300 to $1,200 if they agreed to participate. Hassan then billed the state and the cash rolled in. Some parents, catching the drift, threatened to take their kids to other “treatment” centers if they didn’t get a bigger kickback.

Autism fraud, food fraud, day care fraud, housing stabilization fraud. Billions of dollars in fraud – Thompson’s words, billions – and basically, he has just begun.

By the way, Hassan is allegedly a double-dipper fraudster. In 2021, Hassan claimed to be feeding 1,200 kids a day seven days a week and allegedly received $465,000 from the state. That might not have been enough to fatten her real estate portfolio in Kenya. She apparently didn’t even spend our stolen money in our state.

We have been more profoundly betrayed than at any time since the founding of the state. We work, we pay our bills and our taxes, we follow the law, maybe go to church on Sunday. And Minnesota government has betrayed us. There is no reason to have trust in the state or in any of the state agencies that we presumed were acting on our behalf. It’s crushing to lose that trust, and according to Thompson and his team, we are in line for more betrayal, maybe even a stolen amount that will break the 56-game fraud record.

Which brings us to our governor, Tim Walz. He is running for a third term. Why? Anybody with a sense of shame or embarrassment could not possibly look Minnesotans in the eye and claim he cares about what he calls working families. Why, it’s preposterous. These are his agencies that have broken the trust, his agency heads, his watch on deck. This is all on Walz and yet, absurdly, he wants a third term. His dereliction of duty could be considered malfeasance and disqualification from running.

Perhaps it isn’t that hard to figure out. He has been written off by the king makers who realize he doesn’t stand a chance on the national stage. He is a career politician. He’s too young to retire and live off his multiple pensions.

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What to do? I know. I’ll run against the president! He is cleverly taking advantage of how polarizing Donald Trump has been for the nation. In Minnesota, particularly, the Walz voter could not possibly turn against him for his incompetence that led to fraud and a broken trust. That would be tantamount to endorsing Trump.

Trump is a poorly matured fellow and wanders about with steamer trunks full of problems, but he has had absolutely nothing to do with fraud in Minnesota. If Walz fools you with his stump talk of Mar-a-Lago and Trump’s billionaire golfing pals, ask yourself what that has do with the financial ruin of this state.

Walz owns the betrayal and the broken trust. It’s ridiculous that he’s running for another term.

Joe Soucheray can be reached at jsoucheray@pioneerpress.com. Soucheray’s “Garage Logic” podcast can be heard at garagelogic.com.

By Aaron Bolton, KFF Health News

Biologist Grant Hokit came to this small meadow in the mountains outside Condon, Montana, to look for ticks. A hiking path crossed the expanse of long grasses and berry bushes.

As Hokit walked the path, he carried a handmade tool made of plastic pipes taped together to hold a large rectangle of white flannel cloth.

He poked fun at this “sophisticated” device, but the scientific survey was quite serious: He was sweeping the cloth over the shrubs and grass, hoping that “questing” ticks would latch on.

Along the summer trail, ticks dangle from blades of grass, sticking their legs out and waiting for a passing mammal.

“We got one,” Hokit said.

“So that came off of this sedge grass right here,” he said. “Simply pick them off with our fingers. We’ve got a vial that we pop them in.”

Biologist Grant Hokit drags a white cloth through brush outside Condon looking for ticks. These surveys help public health officials understand where ticks are in Montana and detect new species that have migrated on large mammals like deer. Hokit found deer ticks, which are known to carry Lyme disease, earlier this year in northeastern Montana. (Aaron Bolton/Montana Public Radio/KFF HEALTH NEWS/TNS)

Any captured ticks would go back to Hokit’s lab in Helena for identification. Most of them would probably be identified as Rocky Mountain wood ticks.

But Hokit also wanted to find out whether new species are making their way into the state.

As human-driven climate change makes winters shorter, ticks are spending less time hibernating and have more active months when they can hitch rides on animals and people. Sometimes the ticks carry themselves — and diseases— to new parts of the country.

Hokit found deer ticks for the first time in northeastern Montana earlier this year. Deer ticks are infamous for transmitting Lyme disease and can infect people with other pathogens.

Knowing a new species like the deer tick has arrived in Montana or other states is important for doctors.

Neil Ku is an infectious disease specialist at the Billings Clinic in eastern Montana. He said most patients don’t come in right after they get bitten by a tick. They usually show up later, when they start feeling sick from a tick-borne illness.

“Fever, some chills, they may just feel bad, similar to many infections we may encounter throughout the year,” he said.

It’s rare that patients connect a tick bite to those symptoms, and even more rare that they capture and keep the tick that bit them. Sorting out whether someone might have a tick-borne illness can be complicated.

Knowing what kinds of ticks are in the region will help doctors know that they might start encountering patients infected with new diseases after a tick bite, Ku said.

That’s partially why the state is on the hunt for new tick species.

“The more we know about what’s in Montana, the better we can inform our physicians, the better care you can receive,” said Devon Cozart, a zoonotic illness and vector-borne disease epidemiologist with the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services.

Cozart collects and tests the ticks from field surveys in Montana to see whether they are carrying any pathogens.

Whether a tick can get a human sick depends on the species, but the kind of mammal it feeds on also plays a role.

“Usually it’s a rodent that might be carrying, for example, Rocky Mountain spotted fever,” she said. “So, the tick will feed on that rodent, then will get the pathogen as well.”

Because the prevalence of a particular disease can vary in mammal populations, ticks in one part of the state could be more or less likely to get you sick. That’s also important information for medical providers, Cozart said.

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This kind of surveillance and testing isn’t happening in every county or state. A 2023 survey of nearly 500 health departments throughout the country found that roughly a quarter do some kind of tick surveillance.

Not all surveillance efforts are equal, said Chelsea Gridley-Smith, director of environmental health at the National Association of City and County Health Officials.

Field surveys can be expensive. For numerous local and state health departments, tick surveillance relies on a less expensive, more passive approach: Concerned patients, veterinarians, and doctors must collect and send in ticks for identification.

“It does provide a little information about what ticks are actually interacting with people and animals, but it doesn’t get into the weeds of how common ticks are in that area and how often do those ticks carry pathogens,” Gridley-Smith said.

She said more health departments want to start tick surveillance, but getting funding is hard — and might get harder as federal public health grants from agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention dry up.

Montana receives about $60,000 from a federal grant annually, but the bulk of that funding goes toward mosquito surveillance, which is more intensive and costly. What’s left funds trips into the field to look for ticks.

Hokit said he doesn’t have enough funding for his small team to survey everywhere he would like to in a state as large as Montana. That means he’s unable to monitor emerging populations of deer ticks as closely as he would like.

He found those new deer ticks in two Montana counties, but he doesn’t have enough data to determine whether they have begun reproducing there, establishing a local population.

In the meantime, Hokit uses data on climate and vegetation to make predictions about where deer ticks might thrive in the state. He has his eye on particular areas of western Montana, like the Flathead Valley.

He said that will help him and his team narrow down where to look next so they can let the public know when deer ticks — and the diseases they can carry — arrive.

This article is part of a partnership with NPR and Montana Public Radio

©2025 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

The Gophers will be without two of its top running backs in the Big Ten opener against Rutgers on Saturday at Huntington Bank Stadium.

ESPN reported starting tailback Darius Taylor(hamstring) for a second straight game, while backup A.J. Turner (leg) is out after getting hurt in the 27-14 loss to California on Sept. 14.

Taylor was injured in the 66-0 rout of Northwestern State on Sept. 6 and has been the Gophers’ most dynamic runner and pass catcher coming out of the backfield. Taylor has been billed as a big-play threat after transferring in from Marshall.

Fame Ijeboi and Cam Davis are expected to shoulder the rushing load against Rutgers. Ijeboi, a redshirt freshman, had 16 carries for 85 yards against Cal, while Davis, a transfer from Washington, had 15 totes for 44 yards.

This story will be update when the full unavailability report is released at 9 a.m. Saturday.

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By KELVIN CHAN, Associated Press

LONDON (AP) — Want to switch to Apple Music because you can’t find your favorite indie band on Spotify? Or maybe you’re on Amazon Music but saw a new subscriber offer on Tidal that’s too good to pass up.

There are a variety of reasons to change music providers. But if you’re thinking about it, and you’re worried about losing your library of saved songs and personalized playlists, fear not: there are ways to bring all of it with you.

Many music streaming services don’t make it obvious — often burying instructions deep in FAQs and making the process arduous — but they do offer options to help migrate your collection.

Apple made it easier last month when it quietly rolled out a new feature allowing users to import libraries from rival sites. Having Apple officially incorporate the feature might give reluctant users the confidence to move.

Some pointers to help you along with your musical migration.

Importing into Apple Music

The iPhone maker recently published a help page to walk users through the process of importing libraries into Apple Music.

The feature, buried in your settings, is provided by a third-party service called Songshift. It’s currently available to users in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Mexico, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.

To use it, you’ll need an Apple Music account and the latest version of iOS or the Android Apple Music app.

On iPhone, go to Settings, then Apps, then Music. Tap “Transfer Music from Other Music Services” to pop up a list of various streaming services. Android users can follow a similar process. Transfers can also be done through a web browser at music.apple.com.

After choosing a service, another screen appears, prompting you to log into the target account.

Now you get a menu with options to import “All Songs and Albums” as well as “All Playlists.” If you don’t want all your playlists, you can untick the ones you don’t want. However, you can’t pick individual songs and albums.

Apple Music will then replicate your library based on your choices.

Importing my Spotify library, with about 150 playlists, went fairly smoothly, although the process took about half an hour because the service also downloaded around 1,230 songs and albums to my iPhone.

I had assumed that ticking “All Songs and Albums” meant that Apple Music would mirror the handful of music I had downloaded to my Spotify app, but it also downloaded all 63 albums in my Spotify library and the 440 songs on my Liked Songs list, which I normally listen to via streaming. If you don’t want to download everything, unselect that option before you start.

Also note that Apple says playlists “created by the music service” can’t be transferred, so I couldn’t bring Spotify-curated lists like This is Taylor Swift or Alternative 80s with me.

It also meant that my Liked Songs list, which Spotify generates for every user — and a list I’ve been adding to over the years — couldn’t be replicated. Any downloaded songs were just dumped into Apple Music’s library.

After this story was first published, reader Linda Feaster wrote in with a workaround: create your own playlist and then add all the tracks from the Spotify playlist. It could be tedious if there are hundreds of songs but should do the trick.

If you’re tempted to try out the tool, note that it probably won’t work the same way with every service. Apple warns that what can be transferred is up to the source platform. Playlists made by others, such as BBC Music’s The Sounds of 1994, for example, did make it over.

After the move is done, you’ll have 30 days to review songs that aren’t available or don’t have an exact match in Apple’s catalog, and choose from any alternate versions.

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Working with other music platforms

Most of the other big music streaming platforms offer ways to transfer your library to their site. They mostly rely on standalone third-party services that have been around for a while, are free to use, and don’t need app integration to work.

Tidal and Deezer both direct users on their websites to one such service, Tune My Music, which works with popular platforms like Spotify as well as a host of lesser known sites.

Amazon Music’s webpage has dedicated buttons for Tune My Music and two similar services, Songshift and Soundiiz.

Google also advises third-party services for YouTube Music users who want to import or export playlists, albums, artists and tracks. However, for Apple Music users who want to move to YouTube Music, the process is different. You’ll have to sign in to Apple Music and request a transfer a copy of your data, then export it directly to YouTube Music.

“The transfer process may take several hours if you have many playlists,” Google warns on its support page.

Spotify says it’s currently testing a way for users to transfer their libraries and expects to provide more details soon.

Using a third-party service to migrate between platforms

It was super easy to move my Spotify library to Deezer using Tune My Music.

I clicked a button on the Deezer website that got the process started by prompting me to log in to my Spotify account. Then a menu came up with pre-ticked options on what I could migrate: my entire library, favorite songs, favorite albums, favorite artists and any or all of my 150 playlists.

I decided to move it all over, which amounted to more than 16,359 items. It took about five minutes. Unlike Apple Music, Deezer didn’t download any files, it just copied lists.

A few dozen songs went missing, Tune My Music said.

“It usually happens because the song doesn’t exist on the new platform, or it’s named a bit differently and couldn’t be matched,” it said, but added that I could download a list of missing tracks to look for them on the new platform.

After you finish transferring your music library, don’t forget that it’s still on the original platform and hasn’t been deleted.

Most third-party transfer services are free, but also offer premium levels with more features, such as instant syncing of libraries between multiple streaming sites.

AP Business Writer James Pollard in New York contributed to this report.

Is there a tech topic that you think needs explaining? Write to us at onetechtip@ap.org with your suggestions for future editions of One Tech Tip.