Jessica Mallow Gulley is the next president and managing director of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, the orchestra announced Tuesday.

Mallow Gulley will start her new position on Oct. 13. She replaces Jon Limbacher, who announced his retirement at the end of 2024. Limbacher will remain as an advisor to the orchestra through December.

“I am truly honored and excited to join the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and to help shape its next era,” Mallow Gulley said in a news release. “Together with the extraordinary musicians, dedicated staff, visionary board and vibrant community, we will imagine the next chapter of this remarkable organization — one that deepens engagement, expands accessibility and embraces creativity at every level.”

Mallow Gulley comes to St. Paul from Michigan, where she has led the Kalamazoo Symphony Orchestra since 2019.

Under her leadership, the KSO achieved its first balanced budget in more than a decade, expanded audiences by nearly 80 percent and grew ticket revenue by 190 percent. She introduced the Sound Waves Series, a platform for community collaboration and returned opera to Kalamazoo with a staging of “Tosca.” She also facilitated performances and residencies with world-renowned artists, including Yo-Yo Ma, Emanuel Ax and Branford Marsalis.

Previously, Mallow Gulley held leadership roles at the Jacksonville Symphony, Washington Performing Arts and Orchestra Iowa. She holds a master’s in arts management from American University.

The appointment follows a nine month national search led by a committee made up of board members, musicians and staff.

“Jessica has a winning personality, an infectious enthusiasm and a genuine love for the SPCO,” said violinist and member of the search committee Nina Tso-Ning Fan. “I am confident that her leadership will bring renewed vigor and excitement to the organization and to the Arts Partnership.”

By MICHAEL LIEDTKE, Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A federal judge on Tuesday ordered a major makeover of Google’s search engine in a crackdown aimed at curbing the corrosive power of an illegal monopoly, but rebuffed the U.S. government’s request to break up the company.

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The 226-page decision made by U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta in Washington, D.C., will likely ripple across the technological landscape at a time when the industry is being reshaped by artificial intelligence breakthroughs — including conversational “answer engines” as companies like ChatGPT and Perplexity try to upend Google’s long-held position as the internet’s main gateway.

Mehta is trying to rein in Google by placing new restraints on some of the tactics the company deployed to drive traffic to its search engine and other services. But the judge stopped short of banning the multi-billion dollar deals that Google has been making for years to lock in its search engine as the default on smartphones, personal computers and other devices. Those deals, involving payments of more than $26 billion annually, were a focal point of a nearly five-year-old antitrust case brought by the U.S. Justice Department.

The judge also rejected the U.S. Justice Department’s effort to force Google to sell its popular Chrome browser, concluding the request was a bridge too far.

But Mehta is ordering Google to give its current and would-be rivals access to some of its search engine’s secret sauce — the data stockpiled from trillions of queries that helped to continually improve the quality of its search results.

Authorities are searching for a man who they say is “armed and dangerous” and is charged with murdering a St. Paul man at a Minneapolis park in July.

An arrest warrant was issued for Seneca Lee Jones, 27, in the shooting death of 19-year-old Darnell Hawkins Mapp. Mapp was found with multiple gunshot wounds in Mississippi Regional Park in July.

Jones is charged with second-degree murder and prohibited possession of ammunition or a firearm after a prior offense. The criminal complaint gives his address as Brooklyn Park, but says police searched his home in Apple Valley.

The complaint, which was unsealed Friday, gave the following details from prosecutors:

At about 3:10 a.m. on July 20, police received reports of a shooting at the park. When they arrived there was a large group of people yelling and “frantically” running around the area.

An unresponsive man who had been shot was sitting on the ground with his back against a parked car. Lifesaving measures were attempted, but he died at the scene.

The man was later identified as Mapp.

Witnesses said Mapp and Jones had been “in a feud” over stolen property the night of the shooting. Several witnesses told police that Jones allegedly shot Mapp from behind multiple times as the younger man was walking away from him.

During the execution of a search warrant, detectives found that Jones had allegedly called his wife more than 50 times in the hour after the shooting. In addition, location data on his phone showed him at the park at the time of the shooting and that he left shortly after, the complaint said.

The search warrant also yielded two handguns, ammunition and firearm magazines in Jones’ Apple Valley home. Jones has “multiple prior felonies that prohibit him from possessing a firearm, including convictions for first-degree burglary and for having a firearm after being prohibited, according to the complaint.

The complaint said Jones’ whereabouts are unknown but he is believed to be “armed and dangerous and a significant threat to public safety.”

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Unless the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress act quickly, millions of working Americans could lose access to their health insurance at the end of this year. Among the most affected will be small businesses and middle-income earners — many of whom, ironically, live in congressional districts that vote Republican.

An estimated 4.7 million small business owners and self-employed workers relied on the Affordable Care Act Marketplace to obtain health insurance in 2023, according to the latest figures from the Treasury Department. But the tax credits these businesses use to offset their health insurance costs are set to expire at the end of December — and neither the Trump White House nor Republicans in Congress are poised to do anything about it.

That will inflict real pain on millions of Americans and hand Democrats an issue they can use to bludgeon Republicans in the midterms. Health care remains one of Democrats’ few potent weapons.

The reason for the December deadline is that, in 2021, Congress raised the income levels of people who could receive the enhanced tax credits at the urging of President Joe Biden. The Inflation Reduction Act extended the subsidies until 2025. The changes came with a hefty federal price tag — estimated at $335 billion over 10 years — but they also led to record-high enrollment in the ACA Marketplaces. In 2024, more Americans had health insurance than ever before.

Unfortunately for Biden, most of the public heard little about this program, according to KFF, a nonprofit health policy research organization. Half of the recipients are not even aware their health insurance is subsidized with federal dollars.

And many of the beneficiaries are Republican. According to a review by KFF, 56% of ACA Marketplace enrollees live in congressional districts represented by Republicans and 76% of enrollees are in states won by President Donald Trump in the 2024 election.

Should the credits disappear, states will see a $34 billion reduction in state gross domestic product, lose an estimated 286,000 jobs — nearly half of them in hospitals, doctors’ offices and pharmacies — and state and local tax revenue will decline by $2.1 billion, according to a report released in March by the Commonwealth Fund and the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health.

The hardest-hit states would be those that have not expanded Medicaid, where residents depend more on marketplace subsidies — Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. All voted for Trump in 2024.

For the people who rely on the subsidies, the impact will be immediate, painful and disruptive. Out-of-pocket premiums for ACA marketplace enrollees will increase by an average of more than 75%, according to an estimate by the Petersen-KFF Health System Tracker. Middle-income families (calculated as $103,280 for a family of three) will lose up to $5,370 a year in premium tax credits, forcing many to go uninsured.

“There’s not a lot of gray area here,’’ said Mary Mayhew, CEO of the Florida Hospital Association. “We will see our uninsured rates increase significantly for individuals who are largely working.”

Mayhew is the former secretary of the Florida Agency of Health Care Administration, the former commissioner of the Maine Department of Health and Human Services, and worked in the first Trump administration’s Medicaid office before coming to Florida. For years, she fiercely opposed the expansion of Medicaid under Obamacare, arguing that the federal government shouldn’t be involved in subsidizing private insurance.

Now, as head of Florida’s largest hospital association, Mayhew has changed her mind. Her association has teamed up with other business groups to form Florida Conservatives for Affordable Care, a coalition lobbying Congress to extend the subsidies.

“It really does come down to, if not this, then what?’’ Mayhew told me. “The market has changed” and without the federal program, it would be “incredibly difficult for a small business to purchase health insurance coverage for their employees.”

The about-face over the ACA from many business groups is striking, but their argument is no surprise, said Leighton Ku, director of the Center for Health Policy Research at the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health. The marketplaces were designed to appeal to conservatives by allowing people to buy health insurance through private plans.

Since 2014, when the marketplace launched, the ACA has halved the number of people without insurance, according to the most recent data. Businesses now have the flexibility to hire part-time and seasonal workers who can qualify for individual coverage. Entrepreneurs, early retirees and young adults are guaranteed coverage — and often receive it with federal subsidies depending on their income level.

Mayhew says she is urging Congress to “set aside the polarizing politics of the Affordable Care Act” and realize that small businesses are in better shape now than they were 15 years ago because they have better access to health insurance.

“You can’t simply be ‘no’ to everything,’’ she says. “This is working.”

That’s good advice. Will Republicans take it? If not, they may be handing Democrats a Christmas gift.

Mary Ellen Klas is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former capital bureau chief for the Miami Herald, she has covered politics and government for more than three decades.