Owamni, the award-winning native restaurant from chef Sean Sherman, will relocate just down the river to the restaurant space on the main floor of the Guthrie Theater in the spring of 2026.

The restaurant, part of the nonprofit group North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems, will double in size by moving out of its original spot in the Water Works Pavilion.

“We are so grateful to the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board and Water Works Pavilion for giving Owamni our solid start — we outgrew our original location almost from the moment we opened,” Sherman said in a news release. “The Guthrie space gives us the opportunity to share Indigenous cuisine with more diners, and we can’t wait to bring it to life.”

Owamni opened in 2021 to immediate acclaim, and with that came difficulty scoring a reservation. The restaurant focuses on ingredients native to our land, avoiding commodities introduced by colonizers such as wheat flour, dairy and sugar. The James Beard Foundation named it the Best New Restaurant in 2022, cementing its importance — and popularity.

The original location was chosen for its proximity to the river, something that will remain with its new spot, which has housed many excellent restaurants over the years. The last restaurant to occupy the space, Sea Change, shut down during the pandemic and never reopened.

“Owamni means ‘falling water’ in the Dakota language, and we’re so glad to remain close to St. Anthony Falls, on the shores of the Mississippi, which is a source of great significance to the Dakota people,” Sherman said.

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By HALLIE GOLDEN, Associated Press

Jane Goodall, the conservationist renowned for her groundbreaking chimpanzee field research and globe-spanning environmental advocacy, has died. She was 91.

The Jane Goodall Institute announced the primatologist’s death Wednesday in an Instagram post. According to the institute, Goodall died of natural causes while in California on a U.S. speaking tour.

Her discoveries “revolutionized science, and she was a tireless advocate for the protection and restoration of our natural world,” the Institute said.

While living among chimpanzees in Africa decades ago, Goodall documented the animals using tools and doing other activities previously believed to be exclusive to humans, and also noted their distinct personalities. Her observations and subsequent magazine and documentary appearances in the 1960s transformed how the world perceived not only humans’ closest living biological relatives but also the emotional and social complexity of all animals, while propelling her into the public consciousness.

“Out there in nature by myself, when you’re alone, you can become part of nature and your humanity doesn’t get in the way,” she told The Associated Press in 2021. “It’s almost like an out-of-body experience when suddenly you hear different sounds and you smell different smells and you’re actually part of this amazing tapestry of life.”

In her later years, Goodall devoted decades to education and advocacy on humanitarian causes and protecting the natural world. In her usual soft-spoken British accent, she was known for balancing the grim realities of the climate crisis with a sincere message of hope for the future.

From her base in the British coastal town of Bournemouth, she traveled nearly 300 days a year, even after she turned 90, to speak to packed auditoriums around the world. Between more serious messages, her speeches often featured her whooping like a chimpanzee or lamenting that Tarzan chose the wrong Jane.

While first studying chimps in Tanzania in the early 1960s, Goodall was known for her unconventional approach. She didn’t simply observe them from afar but immersed herself in every aspect of their lives. She fed them and gave them names instead of numbers, something for which she received pushback from some scientists.

Her findings were circulated to millions when she first appeared on the cover of National Geographic in 1963 and soon after in a popular documentary. A collection of photos of Goodall in the field helped her and even some of the chimps become famous. One iconic image showed her crouching across from the infant chimpanzee named Flint. Each has arms outstretched, reaching for the other.

In 1972, the Sunday Times published an obituary for Flo, Flint’s mother and the dominant matriarch, after she was found face down on the edge of a stream. Flint died about three weeks later after showing signs of grief, eating little and losing weight.

″What the chimps have taught me over the years is they’re so like us. They’ve blurred the line between humans and animals,″ she told The Associated Press in 1997.

Goodall has earned top civilian honors from a number of countries including Britain, France, Japan and Tanzania. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2025 by then-U.S. President Joe Biden and won the prestigious Templeton Prize in 2021.

“Her groundbreaking discoveries have changed humanity’s understanding of its role in an interconnected world, and her advocacy has pointed to a greater purpose for our species in caring for life on this planet,” said the citation for the Templeton Prize, which honors individuals whose life’s work embodies a fusion of science and spirituality.

Goodall was also named a United Nations Messenger of Peace and published numerous books, including the bestselling autobiography “Reason for Hope.”

Born in London in 1934, Goodall said her fascination with animals began around when she learned to crawl. In her book, “In the Shadow of Man,” she described an early memory of hiding in a henhouse to see a chicken lay an egg. She was in there so long her mother reported her missing to the police.

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She bought her first book — Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “Tarzan of the Apes” — when she was 10 and soon made up her mind about her future: Live with wild animals in Africa.

That plan stayed with her through a secretarial course when she was 18 and two different jobs. And by 1957, she accepted an invitation to travel to a farm in Kenya owned by a friend’s parents.

It was there that she met the famed anthropologist and paleontologist Louis Leakey at a natural history museum in Nairobi, and he gave her a job as an assistant secretary.

Three years later, despite Goodall not having a college degree, Leakey asked if she would be interested in studying chimpanzees in what is now Tanzania. She told the AP in 1997 that he chose her “because he wanted an open mind.”

The beginning was filled with complications. British authorities insisted she have a companion, so she brought her mother at first. The chimps fled if she got within 500 yards (460 meters) of them. She also spent weeks sick from what she believes was malaria, without any drugs to combat it.

But she was eventually able to gain the animals’ trust. By the fall of 1960 she observed the chimpanzee named David Greybeard make a tool from twigs and use it to fish termites from a nest. It was previously believed that only humans made and used tools.

She also found that chimps have individual personalities and share humans’ emotions of pleasure, joy, sadness and fear. She documented bonds between mothers and infants, sibling rivalry and male dominance. In other words, she found that there was no sharp line between humans and the animal kingdom.

In later years, she discovered chimpanzees engage in a type of warfare, and in 1987 she and her staff observed a chimp “adopt” a 3-year-old orphan that wasn’t closely related.

Goodall received dozens of grants from the National Geographic Society during her field research tenure, starting in 1961.

In 1966, she earned a Ph.D. in ethology — becoming one of the few people admitted to University of Cambridge as a Ph.D. candidate without a college degree.

Her work moved into more global advocacy after she watched a disturbing film of experiments on laboratory animals at a conference in 1986.

″I knew I had to do something,″ she told the AP in 1997. ″It was payback time.″

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020 and halted her in-person events, she began podcasting from her childhood home in England. Through dozens of “Jane Goodall Hopecast” episodes, she broadcast her discussions with guests including U.S. Sen. Cory Booker, author Margaret Atwood and marine biologist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson.

“If one wants to reach people; If one wants to change attitudes, you have to reach the heart,” she said during her first episode. “You can reach the heart by telling stories, not by arguing with people’s intellects.”

In later years, she pushed back on more aggressive tactics by climate activists, saying they could backfire, and criticized “gloom and doom” messaging for causing young people to lose hope.

In the lead-up to 2024 elections, she co-founded “Vote for Nature,” an initiative encouraging people to pick candidates committed to protecting the natural world.

She also built a strong social media presence, posting to millions of followers about the need to end factory farming or offering tips on avoiding being paralyzed by the climate crisis.

Her advice: “Focus on the present and make choices today whose impact will build over time.”

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

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By PHILIP MARCELO and BRUCE SHIPKOWSKI

NEW YORK (AP) — A New York City rapper who joined then-former President Donald Trump during a campaign rally last year has been sentenced to five years behind bars after he admitted he used earnings from his music career to fuel gang violence in Brooklyn.

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Sheff G, whose legal name is Michael Williams, also must serve five years of supervised release once he’s freed under the terms of the sentence imposed Wednesday. He had agreed to the prison term after reaching a plea deal with prosecutors earlier this year. He pleaded guilty to two counts of attempted murder and a conspiracy charge.

“This defendant had talent and opportunity, but chose to use them to fuel violence instead of building a better future,” Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said after the sentencing.

The 27-year-old rapper, whose songs and videos have millions of YouTube views and Spotify streams, was among those arrested in connection with a long-term investigation into gang-related shootings in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. The allegations of violence against Sheff G had already been made public when he appeared with Trump onstage in May 2024.

More than 30 purported members of the 8 Trey Crips and the street gang’s affiliate, the 9 Ways gang, have been indicted. Twenty-three have pleaded guilty to various charges while seven cases are still pending.

Among those charged was Tegan Chambers, a rapper known as Sleepy Hallow who also appeared on stage with Trump and Sheff G during the May 23, 2024, rally in the Bronx. Chambers was sentenced last week to a year in jail following his guilty plea to a conspiracy count.

A spokesman for Trump’s campaign was asked at the time about whether the campaign knew about the charges and whether it was the former president who sought the rappers’ support or the other way around.

“As Sheff G said: ‘They always whisper your accomplishments and shout your failures.’” campaign spokesman Steven Cheung responded.

Prosecutors have said Sheff G showered money and jewelry on gang members as they battled rivals in Brooklyn.

They say the rapper acted as a getaway driver on at least one occasion, chauffeuring three co-defendants to and from a 2021 shooting that targeted a rival but instead hit two bystanders. Sheff G even treated gang members to a lavish dinner at a Manhattan steakhouse to celebrate a 2020 shooting that killed a purported rival gang member and injured five others, according to prosecutors.

Surveillance videos, social media posts, text messages and more evidence document the criminal activities, and the two rappers also boasted about their misdeeds in their songs, Gonzalez’s office said.

Sheff G’s lawyer, Arthur Aidala, didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment on Wednesday. He’s said previously that the plea deal was in the “best interest of everyone involved.”

Sheff G and Sleepy Hallow were among the notable names Trump touted during his campaign stops as he worked to woo Black voters on his way to reclaiming the White House.

Shipkowski contributed to this report from Toms River, New Jersey.

Follow Philip Marcelo at https://x.com/philmarcelo

By Noam N. Levey, Katheryn Houghton and Arielle Zionts, KFF Health News

With the Trump administration scaling back federal efforts to protect Americans from medical bills they can’t pay, advocates for patients and consumers have shifted their work to contain the nation’s medical debt problem to state Capitols.

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Despite progress in some mostly blue states this year, however, recent setbacks in more conservative legislatures underscore the persistent challenges in strengthening patient protections.

Bills to shield patients from medical debt failed this year in Indiana, Montana, Nevada, South Dakota, and Wyoming in the face of industry opposition. And advocates warn that states need to step up as millions of Americans are expected to lose insurance coverage because of President Donald Trump’s tax and spending law.

“This is an issue that had been top of mind even before the change of administrations in Washington,” said Kate Ende, policy director of Maine-based Consumers for Affordable Health Care. “The pullback at the federal level made it that much more important that we do something.”

This year, Maine joined a growing list of states that have barred medical debt from residents’ credit reports, a key protection that can make it easier for consumers to get a home, a car, or sometimes a job. The measure passed unanimously with bipartisan support.

An estimated 100 million adults in the U.S. have some form of health care debt.

The federal government was poised to bar medical debt from credit reports under regulations issued in the waning days of former President Joe Biden’s administration. That would have helped an estimated 15 million people nationwide.

But the Trump administration did not defend the regulations from lawsuits brought by debt collectors and the credit bureaus, who argued that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau exceeded its authority in issuing the rules. A federal judge in Texas appointed by Trump ruled that the regulation should be scrapped.

Now, only patients in states that have enacted their own credit reporting rules will benefit from such protections. More than a dozen have such limits, including California, Colorado, Connecticut, Minnesota, New York, and Vermont, which, like Maine, enacted a ban this year.

Still more states have passed other medical debt protections in recent years, including caps on how much interest can be charged on such debt and limits on the use of wage garnishments and property liens to collect unpaid medical bills.

In many cases, the medical debt rules won bipartisan support, reflecting the overwhelming popularity of these consumer protections. In Virginia, the state’s conservative Republican governor this year signed a measure restricting wage garnishment and capping interest rates.

And several GOP lawmakers in California joined Democrats in support of a measure to make it easier for patients to access financial assistance from hospitals for big bills.

“This is the kind of commonsense, pocketbook issue that appeals to Republicans and Democrats,” said Eva Stahl, a vice president at Undue Medical Debt, a nonprofit that buys up and retires patients’ debts and has pushed for expanded patient protections.

But in several statehouses, the drive for more safeguards hit walls.

Bills to ban medical debts from appearing on credit reports failed in Wyoming and South Dakota, despite support from some GOP lawmakers. And measures to limit aggressive collections against residents with medical debt were derailed in Indiana, Montana, and Nevada.

In some states, the measures faced stiff opposition from debt collectors, the credit reporting industry, and banks, who told legislators that without information about medical debts, they might end up offering consumers risky loans.

In Maine, the Consumer Data Industry Association, which represents credit bureaus, told lawmakers that regulating medical debt should be left to the federal government. “Only national, uniform standards can achieve the dual goals of protecting consumers and maintaining accurate credit reports,” warned Zachary Taylor, the group’s government relations director.

In South Dakota, state Rep. Lana Greenfield, a Republican, echoed industry objections in urging her colleagues to vote against a credit reporting ban. “Small-town banks could not receive information on a mega, mega medical bill. And so, they would in good faith perhaps loan money to somebody without knowing what their credit was,” Greenfield said on the House floor.

Under the Biden administration, CFPB researchers found that medical debt, unlike other debt, was not a good predictor of creditworthiness.

But South Dakota state Rep. Brian Mulder, a Republican who chairs the health committee and authored the legislation, noted the power of the banking industry in South Dakota, where favorable regulations have made the state a magnet for financial institutions.

In Montana, legislation to shield a portion of debtors’ assets from garnishment easily passed a committee. Supporters hoped the measure would be particularly helpful to Native American patients, who are disproportionately burdened by medical debt.

But when the bill reached the House floor, opponents “showed up en masse,” talking one-on-one with Republican lawmakers an hour before the vote, said Rep. Ed Stafman, a Democrat who authored the bill. “They lassoed just enough votes to narrowly defeat the bill,” he said.

Advocates for patients and legislators who backed some of these measures said they’re optimistic they’ll be able to overcome industry opposition in the future.

And there are signs that legislation to expand patient protections may make headway in other conservative states, including Ohio and Texas. A proposal in Texas to force nonprofit hospitals to expand aid to patients facing large bills picked up support from leading conservative organizations.

“These things can sometimes take time,” said Lucy Culp, who oversees state lobbying efforts by Blood Cancer United, formerly known as the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. The patients’ group has been pushing for state medical debt protections in recent years, including in Montana and South Dakota.

More concerning, Culp said, is the wave of uninsured patients expected as millions of Americans lose health coverage due to cutbacks in the recently passed GOP tax law. That will almost certainly make the nation’s medical debt problem more dire.

“States are not ready for that,” Culp said.

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