State lawmakers plan to work through the Memorial Day weekend to finalize Minnesota’s next $66 billion, two-year budget, which they failed to pass by Monday’s legislative deadline.

Republican Minnesota House Speaker Lisa Demuth, right, and House Democratic-Farmer-Labor Leader Melissa Hortman, left, address reporters during a news conference at the state Capitol in St. Paul on Thursday, May 22, 2025. (Alex Derosier / Pioneer Press)

Leaders hope they can wrap up negotiations between the House — evenly split between Republican and Democratic-Farmer-Labor members — and the DFL-led Senate by early next week, so that Gov. Tim Walz can call them back for a special session to pass a budget before the end of the month.

If they don’t, state employees will get layoff notices starting June 1 warning of a potential government shutdown in July. The fiscal year ends June 30, and the Legislature has to authorize new spending before then in order to keep the state running.

“Working groups” have been meeting since Tuesday, mostly in private, to finalize details on big spending areas like K-12 education and health and human services, which account for two-thirds of state general fund spending.

“Even though it’s slower than we would like, things are going well. It doesn’t appear that anyone has quit or given up, and that is a very good sign,” Republican House Speaker Lisa Demuth of Cold Spring told reporters Thursday. “Our expectation is they’ll be here working until they can come up with an agreement and move it forward.”

There’s been progress on a handful of bills, but as of Friday evening, there was no public information on final deals for taxes or the biggest parts of state spending. A controversial provision in the budget deal reached by legislative leaders and the governor last week may be slowing progress on the health bill.

DFLers and Republicans agreed to end state-funded MinnesotaCare health insurance for adults in the U.S. without legal immigration status, a benefit DFLers created while in control of state government in 2023. Republicans agreed to preserve care for children, but many Democrats remain strongly opposed.

Senate Majority Leader Erin Murphy of St. Paul wants MinnesotaCare cuts to travel as a separate bill, but Republicans want it to run with the overall health package. At a Thursday joint news conference with Demuth, House DFL Leader Melissa Hortman of Brooklyn Park said they hadn’t resolved the matter.

Both the DFL and Republican House leaders said they’re confident Walz will sign all parts of the budget deal into law and still would approve cuts to immigrant care even if it traveled separately from a broader health bill.

Further complicating matters are the unique dynamics of co-leaders from both parties in the House working with the DFL majority in the Senate. The last time the House was tied was in 1979. Murphy called the House a “two-headed monster.”

“It’s been more challenging than usual to sew this all together,” she told reporters on Thursday.

Working groups have already passed their leadership-imposed Wednesday deadline to finish work on bills, so leaders from both parties said they are getting more closely involved. They haven’t moved to take over the bills for committee chairs yet, but the option remains on the table.

Murphy said she was skipping cabin plans for the weekend to make sure work gets done.

As of Friday, most negotiations have taken place in hearings that are not publicly posted or open to the general public.

A few key budget pieces had public hearings on Thursday — K-12 and human services — though the tax bill has been the only part that has had daily public hearings since the working group process started. The Legislature only passed a handful of the 20 or so budget bills in the regular session.

On Thursday, Hortman said the commerce, workforce and human services bills were close to completion. While there had been some trouble with energy and K-12 education, most of the budget deals were approaching completion.

House leadership sent Reps. Paul Torkelson, R-Hanska, and Zack Stephenson, DFL-Coon Rapids, to help mediate. As of Friday, it was unclear if they were any closer to a deal.

“The only ones that are very far from having a fully formed bill ready to post is probably taxes and maybe health,” Hortman said Thursday. “The rest of them I think you are going to see posted spreadsheets soon and posted language not too long after that.”

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By MIKE PESOLI

ARLINGTON, Va. (AP) — For the last two years, Army Sgt. 1st Class Andrew Jay has been dutifully guarding the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery.

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Rain or shine, snow or sleet, for 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, Jay and the other guards on watch duty serve as both protectors and commemorators of a national tribute to America’s unidentified and missing service members.

With Jay’s final walk scheduled for June 2, this Memorial Day will hold special significance for him as the cemetery prepares for a string of events honoring those who paid the ultimate price for their country.

“It’s meant a lot,” Jay, 38, told The Associated Press. “I’m going to try to make sure it doesn’t define me, but it was definitely a defining moment in my career.”

The Associated Press was given rare access to the changing of the guard at the sunrise hour, as the cemetery was still closed to the public.

Jay, who is from Indianapolis, volunteered for the position after serving in the Kentucky-based 101st Airborne Division, which specializes in air assault operations and is known for its record in World War II. He trained for almost 18 months for the guard duty.

“The training is unlike anything I’ve ever done in my career so far,” he said. “It’s more than the physical aspect of any other Army school you might think of.”

The guards, also known as sentinels for their watchful duty, train even on their off-days, walking on the mat for two hours straight to build up muscular endurance.

But that isn’t the only endurance required of the sentinels.

“It’s a lot of mental ability,” Jay said. “You have to be locked in for a nine-minute guard change, but then also your 30-minute walk. So, what you’re thinking about kind of varies between soldier to soldier.”

The sentinels spend half an hour walking the mat in the warmer months and an hour during colder months. They perform a dramatic changing of the guard at the grave site that visitors to the Washington area flock to see, marching 21 steps down the mat, turning and facing east for 21 seconds, then north for 21 seconds and then back down the mat for 21 more, repeating the process.

The number refers to the high military honor of the 21-gun salute, which can be heard booming throughout the cemetery and surrounding areas during military funerals on the grounds.

There are currently three unidentified U.S. service members buried in the tomb: one from World War I, one from World War II and one from the Korean War.

With Memorial Day approaching, the cemetery — which is run by the U.S. Army and has 3 to 4 million visitors annually — will hold a number of events to honor fallen service members. Just before Memorial Day weekend, the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment places American flags at the grave sites of more than 260,000 service members buried at the cemetery — an event known as “Flags In.” On the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, the public is invited to leave flowers at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier for Flowers of Remembrance Day.

“Memorial Day still retains the purpose that it had back in 1868 during that first official observance here in Arlington,” said Allison Finkelstein, the senior historian of Arlington National Cemetery. “It is the day to remember and honor our war dead.”

There have been 733 tomb guards since 1958. On average, seven to nine tomb guards work every day.

“The honor of guarding them isn’t just about the Three Unknowns, it’s about everybody that lays here in the cemetery and what they gave in the pursuit of freedom,” Jay said.

By GERALD IMRAY and MICHELLE GUMEDE

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — South Africa’s top law enforcement official said Friday that U.S. President Donald Trump wrongly claimed that a video he showed in the Oval Office was of burial sites for more than 1,000 white farmers and he “twisted” the facts to push a false narrative about mass killings of white people in his country.

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Police Minister Senzo Mchunu was talking about a video clip that was played during the meeting between Trump and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa at the White House on Wednesday that showed an aerial view of a rural road with lines of white crosses erected on either side.

“Now this is very bad,” Trump said as he referred to the clip that was part of a longer video that was played in the meeting. “These are burial sites, right here. Burial sites, over a thousand, of white farmers, and those cars are lined up to pay love on a Sunday morning.”

Mchunu said the crosses did not mark graves or burial sites, but were a temporary memorial put up in 2020 to protest the killings of all farmers across South Africa. They were put up during a funeral procession for a white couple who were killed in a robbery on their farm, Mchunu said.

A son of the couple who were killed and a local community member who took part in the procession also said the crosses do not represent burial sites and were taken down after the protest.

South Africa struggles with extremely high levels of violent crime, although farm killings make up a small percentage of the country’s overall homicides. Both white and Black farmers are attacked, and sometimes killed, and the government has condemned the violence against both groups.

Whites make up around 7% of South Africa’s 62 million people but generally still have a much better standard of living than the Black majority more than 30 years after the end of the apartheid system of racial segregation. Whites make up the majority of the country’s wealthier commercial farmers.

Mchunu said Trump’s false claims that the crosses represented more than 1,000 burial sites was part of his “genocide story” — referring to the U.S. president’s baseless allegations in recent weeks that there is a widespread campaign in South Africa to kill white farmers and take their land that he has said amounts to a genocide.

“They are not graves. They don’t represent graves,” Mchunu said regarding the video that has become prominent on social media since it was shown in the White House. “And it was unfortunate that those facts got twisted to fit a false narrative about crime in South Africa.”

“We have respect for the president of the United States,” Mchunu added. “But we have no respect for his genocide story whatsoever.”

President Donald Trump meets South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office of the White House, Wednesday, May 21, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

The White House, when asked about Mchunu’s remarks, pointed back to press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s comments a day earlier at her briefing, when she said that “the video showed crosses that represent the dead bodies of people who were racially persecuted by their government.”

Of the more than 5,700 homicides in South Africa from January through March, six occurred on farms and, of those, one victim was white, said Mchunu. “In principle, we do not categorize people by race, but in the context of claims of genocide of white people, we need to unpack the killings in this category,” he said.

Lourens Bosman, who is a former lawmaker in the national Parliament, said he took part in the procession shown in the video the Trump administration played. It happened near the town of Newcastle in the eastern province of KwaZulu-Natal in September 2020. The crosses were symbols to white and Black farmers and farmworkers who had been killed across South Africa over the previous 26 years, Bosman said.

Trump’s falsehoods that South Africa’s government is fueling the persecution and killing of its minority white farmers has been strongly denied by the country, which says the allegations are rooted in misinformation.

Ramaphosa pushed for this week’s meeting with Trump in what he said was an attempt to change Trump’s mind over South Africa and correct misconceptions about the country to rebuild ties.

Trump issued an executive order on Feb. 7 that cut all U.S. financial assistance to South Africa and accused it of mistreating white Afrikaner farmers and seizing their land. The order accused Ramaphosa’s government of “fueling disproportionate violence against racially disfavored landowners.”

Trump’s executive order also accused South Africa of pursuing an anti-American foreign policy and specifically criticized its decision to launch a case at the International Court of Justice accusing U.S. ally Israel of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. The order accused South Africa of supporting the Palestinian militant group Hamas through that case.

AP Africa news: https://apnews.com/hub/africa

Four of the 14 Planned Parenthood clinics in Minnesota and four of the six in Iowa will shut down in a year, the Midwestern affiliate operating them said Friday, blaming a freeze in federal funds, budget cuts proposed in Congress and state restrictions on abortion.

The clinics closing in Iowa include the only Planned Parenthood facility in the state that provides abortion procedures, in Ames, home to Iowa State University. The others are in Cedar Rapids, Sioux City and the Des Moines suburb of Urbandale.

Two of the clinics being shut down by Planned Parenthood North Central States are in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, in Apple Valley and Richfield. The others are in central Minnesota in Alexandria and Bemidji. Of the four, the Richfield clinic provides abortion procedures.

The Planned Parenthood affiliate said it would lay off 66 employees and ask 37 additional employees to move to different clinics. The organization also said it plans to keep investing in telemedicine services and sees 20,000 patients a year virtually. The affiliate serves five states — Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota.

“We have been fighting to hold together an unsustainable infrastructure as the landscape shifts around us and an onslaught of attacks continues,” Ruth Richardson, the affiliate’s president and CEO, said in a statement.

Of the remaining 15 clinics operated by Planned Parenthood North Central States, six will provide abortion procedures — five of them in Minnesota, including three in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. The other clinic is in Omaha, Nebraska.

The affiliate said that in April, President Donald Trump’s administration froze $2.8 million in federal funds for Minnesota to provide birth control and other services, such as cervical cancer screenings and testing for sexually transmitted diseases.

While federal funds can’t be used for most abortions, abortion opponents have long argued that Planned Parenthood affiliates should not receive any taxpayer dollars, saying the money still indirectly underwrites abortion services.

Planned Parenthood North Central States also cited proposed cuts in Medicaid, which provides health coverage for low-income Americans, as well as a Trump administration proposal to eliminate funding for teenage pregnancy prevention programs.

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In addition, Republican-led Iowa last year banned most abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy, before many women know they are pregnant, causing the number performed there to drop 60% in the first six months the law was in effect and dramatically increasing the number of patients traveling to Minnesota and Nebraska.

After the closings, Planned Parenthood North Central States will operate 10 brick-and-mortar clinics in Minnesota, two in Iowa, two in Nebraska, and one in South Dakota. It operates none in North Dakota, though its Moorhead, Minnesota, clinic is across the Red River from Fargo, North Dakota.