A former legislative aide to St. Paul City Council Member Anika Bowie who was fired after five months on the job is suing Bowie and the city based on a highly critical email she circulated to 11 city officials after he was quickly rehired by another council member.

Jon Berry filed his lawsuit on Monday in Hennepin County District Court, and the case was assigned Tuesday to Judge Susan Burke. He is being represented by the Minneapolis law firm of Gustafson Gluek.

In the 16-page civil filing, he accuses the city of violating the Minnesota Government Data Practices Act by illegally disclosing his private personnel data, and he accuses both defendants — Bowie and the city — of a single count of defamation and a single count of negligence.

The city council met behind closed doors in January to consider Berry’s suit, when it was still deemed pending litigation, but the city has yet to file a formal legal response.

Bowie and other city officials did not immediately return calls for comment on the lawsuit Wednesday.

Hired last May

Bowie hired Berry last May as her legislative aide, a position that paid $42 per hour, or more than $92,000 annually. He maintains he received “positive feedback from various city staff” about his job performance but was still let go by Bowie on Oct. 2, with the sole reason given being that he was “not a good fit” for the position, according to the lawsuit.

On Oct. 21, St. Paul Council Member Cheniqua Johnson hired Berry back to City Hall for a 10-week part-time communications position in her office, a job that paid $17 per hour.

After his rehiring, Bowie sent a two-page email that same day to 11 city officials, including Johnson, Berry, the city attorney, a deputy city attorney, officials with Human Resources and others who work in city finances. In that email, she “illegally disclosed private personnel data” about him and made four defamatory statements, according to the lawsuit.

Berry maintains that much of the information Bowie shared by email was not true, but even misinformation can be characterized as private data under the law.

Among the claims that Berry maintains constitute private data, Bowie accused him of a “misappropriation of travel funds” and unauthorized expenses during a Sept. 10 to Sept. 13 work trip. She noted he “consistently failed to meet the needs of the office, demonstrating a lack of organization and preparation for community meetings,” and she said he was terminated based on her decision to forego an investigation into the misappropriation of funds.

Bowie said Berry was issued an employee improvement plan on Aug. 12, and he failed to meet expectations.

“This statement is false and defamatory,” reads the lawsuit. “Mr. Berry was never issued an improvement plan by Councilmember Bowie. Accordingly, he never failed to meet any such improvement plan.”

She also wrote in her email that there were rumors of a prior intimate relationship between Berry and Johnson, and that the relationship had been mentioned to her “by mutual acquaintances in Councilmember Johnson’s presence.”

“No such conversation, in the presence of Councilmember Johnson, took place and, more importantly, Councilmember Johnson and Mr. Berry never had an intimate relationship,” reads the lawsuit.

Email mailed out

In what the lawsuit describes as yet another breach of state data privacy laws, someone anonymously mailed a printed copy of Bowie’s Oct. 2 email to the St. Paul Pioneer Press, which published a front-page article about the internal council dispute in December after attempting to confirm details and interview individuals involved. Given that the email had initially been shared with city personnel, Berry maintains that it must have been a city employee who leaked it to the media.

On Dec. 11, two days after the article was published, an independent investigator hired by the city substantiated a workplace conduct complaint against Bowie, which had been filed by Johnson in response to the Oct. 2 email. The investigator, who reviewed city records and conducted multiple interviews, found that Bowie violated city policy, defied state data privacy law and “potentially” defamed Berry.

“The investigator concluded that Councilmember Bowie had ‘no objectively valid or productive business reason’ to ‘publicly disseminate the email to … 11 recipients,” states the lawsuit.

Berry is seeking attorney’s fees and damages for an amount to be proven at trial.

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Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has released new breakthrough findings on one of science’s biggest mysteries — one that Albert Einstein once called his “biggest blunder.”

In March, Berkeley Lab researchers presented data gathered from 14 million galaxies at the American Physical Society’s Global Physics Summit in Anaheim, which has ignited new theories on dark energy – once thought to be a universal constant like gravity – as an evolving form of matter linked to the accelerating expansion of the universe.

While both dark energy and the better-known dark matter are still theoretical concepts, they are distinctly different. While the latter is thought to be a form of matter that interacts with gravity and serves as a cosmic “glue” that holds galaxies together, dark energy is the mysterious repulsive force hypothesized to counteract gravity that’s pushing the universe apart.

“’Dark energy’ is a label that we put on what is causing this acceleration,” said Andrei Cuceu, a Berkeley Lab researcher and member of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) team that is working to create the largest-ever three-dimensional map of the universe. Managed by the Berkeley Lab, DESI is made up of nearly 1000 researchers from more than 70 institutions around the world. “The goal with this experiment is to try to shine some light in this space to figure out which of these classes of theories are much more likely to be correct.”

The DESI survey is being conducted at the Mayall Telescope on top of Kitt Peak in the Sonoran Desert, about 55 miles south of Tucson, Ariz. Measurements from the device create a three-dimensional map of the universe that researchers can use to track its expansion over the last 12 billion years, which is measured by the distance between galaxies.

If dark energy were a universal constant, then the separation between galaxies would be uniform over time. But the latest findings show a strong indication that dark energy is weakening and causing expansion to slow, according to DESI researchers.

“We expected to get a better measure of that accelerated expansion, and it’s not at all what we found,” said Claire Poppett, a research physicist with UC Berkeley’s Space Science Laboratory working on DESI in Santiago, Chile. “It confirms, even more strongly, that dark energy is changing with time.”

The study of dark energy began in the 1990s, when researchers studying supernovae sought to identify the rate of the universe’s expansion and found it was actually getting faster over time. That breakthrough earned them the Nobel Prize, Poppett said. But it presented new questions for cosmologists on what force could be strong enough to cause the universe to expand more quickly. Lacking an answer, they called this phenomenon dark energy.

Scientists believe dark energy makes up about 68 percent of the energy density of the universe, but the journey to understanding how it works has been one of trial and error.

When the DESI project launched in 2021, Poppet and other researchers wondered if the data they collected would only reduce the margin of error from past theories. By triangulating DESI measurements with the datasets from supernovae and light left over from the “Big Bang” at the beginning of the universe, they found they could not find a simple explanation for the discrepancies they identified.

Poppett said she initially believed they had done something wrong in their analysis, but the team of researchers was actually on the course of discovery. Cuceu’s review of the data in comparison with the best available models showed a changing pace of growth over the past 12 billion years.

“When we compare this behavior with the behavior that would be predicted if dark energy were a constant, they don’t quite agree. This essentially implies that maybe dark energy is not a constant. It’s evolving somehow,” Cuceu said. “The expansion of the universe is still accelerating, but this acceleration has started to slow down today.”

While the DESI project is not complete — a few million more galaxies are still to be scanned — the team is getting closer to the “gold standard” of discovery in particle physics known as “5 sigma,” an evidence threshold at which scientists declare there is an almost certain likelihood that unexpected data findings are the result of a new phenomenon, and not just a statistical fluctuation.

The current findings are between 2.8 and 4.2 sigma, yet each new round of data brings the DESI team closer to rewriting the understanding of dark energy and sending cosmologists back to their blackboards to invent new theories about the laws of the universe.

“It shows that the more powerful instruments you can build, even when you think you know what the answer is going to be, you actually don’t,” Poppett said. “There’s still so many secrets that we don’t know about.”

By AAMER MADHANI

WASHINGTON (AP) — Amazon has put in a bid to purchase TikTok, a Trump administration official said Wednesday, in an eleventh-hour pitch as a U.S. ban on the platform is set to go into effect Saturday.

The official, who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the Amazon offer was made in a letter to Vice President JD Vance and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

The New York Times first reported on the bid.

President Donald Trump on Inauguration Day gave the platform a reprieve, barreling past a law that had been upheld unanimously by the Supreme Court, which said the ban was necessary for national security.

Under the law, TikTok’s Chinese-owned parent company ByteDance is required to sell the platform to an approved buyer or take it offline in the United States. Trump has suggested he could further extend the pause on the ban, but he has also said he expects a deal to be forged by Saturday.

Amazon declined to comment.

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The existence of an Amazon bid surfaced as Trump was scheduled on Wednesday to meet with senior officials to discuss the coming deadline for a TikTok sale.

Both the FBI and the Federal Communications Commission have warned that ByteDance could share user data — such as browsing history, location and biometric identifiers — with China’s authoritarian government. TikTok said it has never done that and would not do so if asked. The U.S. government has not provided evidence of that happening.

Trump has millions of followers on TikTok and has credited the trendsetting platform with helping him gain traction among young voters.

During his first term, he took a more skeptical view of TikTok and issued executive orders banning dealings with ByteDance as well as the owners of the Chinese messaging app WeChat.

By BECKY BOHRER

JUNEAU, Alaska (AP) — In the days after wildfires devastated the Los Angeles area, a formerly stray dog named Jackie lucked into a new life. She was rescued from an overburdened shelter in Los Angeles County, where she faced possible euthanasia, and given a home far away in Juneau, Alaska.

But Jackie didn’t stay long.

The German shepherd-husky mix slipped her collar on the first day with her new family in mid-February and absconded to a pocket of forest. Since then, she has been living by her wits — eluding a trap that was set with food such as cheeseburgers or chicken by animal control workers and volunteers worried about her.

The forested area Jackie frequents is near a busy road. Further, black bears are starting to reemerge from hibernation, raising the potential the dog could have an unfortunate run-in. Volunteers have stopped putting out food and cat kibble to avoid attracting bears.

“Maybe this is what she wants, is to be free and feral like this,” said Thom Young-Bayer, a Juneau animal control officer. “It’s not a safe way for her to live here.”

Young-Bayer and his wife, Skylar, have been searching in their free time, often at night, for the skittish canine, painstakingly trying to build trust with her. Jackie has been known to burrow into the soft moss on the forest floor for cover and to avoid looking directly into the Young-Bayers’ headlamps, making it hard to detect her eyes in the dark.

On videos Thom Young-Bayer has taken with his infrared camera, Jackie’s red heat signature resembles something out of the movie “Predator.”

On a recent day, Young-Bayer caught a fleeting glimpse of Jackie in the lush forest, her dark coat helping camouflage her movements among the stumps and roots. He surveyed the undergrowth and surroundings but came up empty — as did a nearby trap he had been monitoring for weeks.

When Young-Bayer returned to a trail where a fellow animal control officer had been waiting, he learned Jackie had trotted past on a frozen pond.

Lately Young-Bayer been encountering Jackie on every visit. Young-Bayer says that’s progress. Weeks ago, if Jackie saw someone, she would flee. He and his wife aren’t trying to sneak up on the dog and want to help her feel safe, he said.

Juneau Animal Rescue, a local pet adoption agency that also handles animal control and protective services, has asked that people who see Jackie report their sightings. Given the dog’s skittishness, officials want to limit those searching for her.

Little is known about Jackie’s history. She was brought into a California shelter as a stray in early January, days before deadly wildfires swept through the Los Angeles area. She is believed to be 2 to 3 years old. Her intake forms listed her as quiet with a moderate anxiety and stress level.

Skylar Young-Bayer, who has volunteered with rescue groups in that region, helped arrange for Jackie and two other dogs at risk of being euthanized to be transferred to Juneau for adoption. Jackie was with a foster home before her adoption placing.

Other dogs have gained fame as fugitives, including Scrim, a 17-pound, mostly terrier mutt who was recaptured in New Orleans in February — in a cat trap — after months on the lam.

Mike Mazouch, animal control and protection director for Juneau Animal Rescue, noted Jackie didn’t have much time to bond with her new family before bolting. Officers deemed trying to tranquilize her as too risky because they didn’t know if they would be able to find her once she was sedated.

Mazouch accompanied Thom Young-Bayer to the forest last week to disassemble the trap when Jackie came within 50 feet of Mazouch on the frozen pond. Mazouch snapped a photo of her as she appeared between the skinny, tall trees. He called efforts to capture her a “battle of wills.”

“She is not willing to give up, and we’re not willing to give up, either,” Mazouch said.