Attorneys for former KSTP-TV meteorologist Wren Clair and the St. Paul-based TV station requested on Tuesday that a judge dismiss her lawsuit against her previous employer.

They filed a stipulation for dismissal with prejudice, meaning the lawsuit can’t be refiled.

Wren Clair (Courtesy of KARE-TV)

Clair, who filed the lawsuit on Aug. 12 under her legal name of Renee Fox, alleged sexual harassment and retaliation at KSTP. She said in the suit she was abruptly terminated after she reported the conduct.

KSTP, in a legal response filed in court on Aug. 13, said Fox was terminated “as a result of her poor performance, on which she was repeatedly coached.” The response also said she was not “subjected to sex-based harassment.”

Ramsey County District Court Judge Reynaldo Aligada Jr. referred the matter to mediation on Nov. 17, according to the court file. The file doesn’t indicate whether they went to mediation or what led to the joint request to dismiss the lawsuit.

“The matter has been resolved,” Fox’s attorney, Paul Schinner, said Tuesday. He said he couldn’t comment further.

Attorneys for KSTP could not immediately be reached Tuesday afternoon.

Kirk Varner, previously KSTP’s news director, said in a Tuesday statement: “While confident that I would have been able to defend myself against the allegations that were made, I am pleased that this matter has been resolved.”

Fox, who grew up in Hopkins and went to the University of Minnesota, was a morning show meteorologist in Boston, a top-10 market in the U.S. at the time. Her husband obtained a promotion that required a move back to Minneapolis and she was hired as a KSTP meteorologist in 2018.

After chief meteorologist Dave Dahl retired in 2020, Fox took over as the prime-time weekday evening meteorologist for “5 Eyewitness News.” She was demoted in 2024 and terminated in February, “but the sex-based disparate treatment and sexual harassment occurred throughout the entirety of her employment,” her lawsuit said.

Fox became a meteorologist for KARE-TV in May. She wrote on Sept. 3 on Instagram that she and the TV station “have agreed to part ways.”

“I thank all my colleagues for their professionalism and hard work,” Fox wrote. “I thank all the viewers for watching me and supporting me. I look forward to focusing more on my personal life and pursuing scientific careers outside of television.”

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There are two big worries when it comes to the rapid advances in artificial intelligence. The first is that it will lead to robot overlords that will eradicate humanity. The second is that AI will eliminate many jobs. The more likely scenario is that it creates a labor shortage, or at least a dearth of skilled workers who can make the most of the new technology.

I recently spoke to the head of the informatics program at a large university and asked her about training undergraduates for this future. The biggest obstacle, she explained, is that many students do not have the necessary math skills for a world where AI will dominate our lives, especially those who don’t plan to specialize in the field.

But what about those who do plan a career in AI? Technology has always made labor more valuable because it allows workers to become more productive. The concern now is people will use AI to do their thinking for them, thereby making themselves redundant. That will probably be the case for some, but using AI in a productive manner involves employing the technology to develop novel ideas, and that requires at least some human input.

For example, large language models work by taking lots of data to not only answer a question, but finding the answer that is most common, or average. Sometimes that is adequate, but what distinguishes people in a work situation is often coming up with an exceptional answer. AI can help you get there but is rarely sufficient on its own; it also takes an ability to assess the output and push further. Or often the answer from AI is inadequate because it lacks the context that makes a certain situation unique.

Suppose you attempt to get a simple statistic from a large trove of data. It is not enough to get a statistic thrown back at you; you need to understand the limitations of the data your model is working with, where it comes from, when it is from, if it is relevant to your problem and what specification did the technology use to provide the statistic. Making sense of the results takes both decent statistical and analytic skills.

In the meantime, we are witnessing a collapse of standards and some students’ ability to do even basic math in some of America’s best universities and secondary schools. Perhaps only a fraction of students at Harvard University need remedial math. But the fact that this is even a population at such a school suggests standards across the board are weakening, not only for math but reading as well. Even exceptional students are getting less rigorous training in how to think critically during this crucial time in their lives and brain development.

I’ve heard many academics say they are still unsure how to teach students the skills they need to thrive in an AI world that eliminates many entry-level jobs. Amid a major economic transition, it is impossible to know what the future of work will look like. One likely solution may be as simple as teaching the basics well, enforcing consistent standards and giving real grades.

Doing anything else risks a vicious cycle where new graduates can’t offer much improvement on AI because they lack the skills they need to work with the technology and so aren’t worth hiring. In such a scenario we end up in the worst of all worlds — unemployable graduates and employers unable to find enough workers who can use the new technology effectively.

When it comes to the U.S., there’s an added risk tied to immigration. Many foreign students have better quantitative skills than their American peers, but our legal and skilled migration system is broken. Even the president, long an immigration skeptic, admits we need more skilled workers who can create and use technology, and many of them will need to come from abroad. But lasting immigration reform cannot come from an executive order; it requires Congress and bipartisan consensus on immigration priorities. Unfortunately, this is not looking likely at this time.

The result is that America is potentially left dealing with a major mismatch in skills and the lack of analytical thinkers with strong math abilities who can use and adapt to however technology evolves. Neither our education nor immigration system is producing enough of these people. The outcome may be both many unemployable graduates and a massive labor shortage.

Allison Schrager is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering economics. A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, she is author of “An Economist Walks Into a Brothel: And Other Unexpected Places to Understand Risk.”

By SARA CLINE and JACK BROOK, Associated Press

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — President Donald Trump said Tuesday that National Guard troops will soon head to New Orleans and bring another federal surge to the city that is already awaiting a separate immigration crackdown that is expected to begin this week.

Trump did not say how many troops would be sent to New Orleans or exactly when they would arrive. Republican Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, who asked the Trump administration in September for up to 1,000 troops to fight crime, told reporters Monday that he expected the Guard to arrive in New Orleans before Christmas.

“Gov. Landry — a great guy, a great governor — he’s asked for help in New Orleans. And we’re going to go there in a couple of weeks,” Trump said during a Cabinet meeting at the White House.

Landry, a staunch Trump ally, has said he welcomes federal intervention in Democratic-run New Orleans, citing concerns about elevated violent crime rates even though local police officials say crime is down. Separately, Landry posted on social media this week that “We Welcome the Swamp Sweep in Louisiana,” referring to the Border Patrol-led operation that aims to arrest 5,000 people over the coming weeks.

Opponents argue that deployment of federal troops or agents in Louisiana is unwarranted, especially as some cities have actually seen a decrease in violent crime rates — namely New Orleans, which is on pace to have one of its safest years, statistically, since the 1970s.

In September, Landry requested federally funded National Guard troops be sent to Louisiana. In a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Landry said there have been “elevated violent crime rates” in New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Shreveport along with shortages in law enforcement personnel.

Landry also said the state’s vulnerability to natural disasters makes the issue more challenging, and the extra support would be especially helpful for major events, including Mardi Gras and college football bowl games.

Louisiana National Guard spokesperson Lt. Col. Noel Collins declined to comment Tuesday.

In 2022, New Orleans had the dubious distinction of being considered the “murder capital of the country,” reporting the highest per-capita homicide rate in the nation. That year there were 266 murders — a rate of 70 per 100,000 inhabitants.

Three years later, however, shootings, carjackings and armed robberies have plummeted. While there has been a spike of homicides in recent weeks, the city is still on pace to have its lowest number in nearly 50 years, according to crime data from the police department. As of early November, the New Orleans Police Department reported 97 murders.

Mayor-elect Helena Moreno, a Democrat who takes office in January, has firmly rejected the idea of a National Guard deployment in the blue city and has expressed concern that a federal immigration enforcement surge will lead to rights violations.

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Outgoing Mayor LaToya Cantrell, a Democrat facing federal corruption charges, previously said the city was open to working with the federal government to improve public safety.

Moreno and Cantrell did not immediately provide comment about the impending deployment.

Other New Orleans officials have warned that troops could disrupt unique cultural traditions, such as the frequent brass band parades in the streets that are known as second-lines or jeopardize hard-won relationships between communities and the police.

In January, 100 guard members were sent to the city to help with security measures following a New Year’s Day truck attack that killed 14 people and injured dozens of other revelers on Bourbon Street.

In September, Landry also suggested that federally funded National Guard troops should be sent to Baton Rouge and Shreveport, and Monday indicated troops would be sent to cities beyond New Orleans.

In Baton Rouge, the capital, Republican Mayor Sid Edwards said this month that extra assets could provide “much-needed boots on the ground” amid a police shortage.

Although homicides are on pace to decrease from the previous year there as well, the city has struggled with gun violence, with bystanders caught in crossfire made worse by the use of machine gun conversion devices. A recent multiagency initiative to crack down on violent crime resulted in more than 100 arrests and the seizure of guns.

In conservative Shreveport, the hometown of U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican Mayor Tom Arceneaux told The Associated Press in October that violent crime has significantly decreased. Arceneaux said he was willing to work with the National Guard but would prefer receiving state police officers instead.

Louisiana is the latest place where Trump has sent — or tried to send — National Guard troops in recent months. Other cities include Los Angeles, Baltimore, Washington and Memphis, Tennessee. Leaders in Democratic-controlled jurisdictions have turned to legal action to block planned deployments, such as in Chicago and Portland, Oregon.

Cline reported from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Associated Press writer Michelle Price contributed reporting from Washington, D.C.

By LARRY NEUMEISTER, Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. Justice Department is seeking dismissal of a lawsuit that fired former federal prosecutor Maurene Comey brought against it, saying she didn’t properly follow administrative complaint procedures before suing.

The argument was in court papers filed Monday prior to a Thursday hearing in Manhattan federal court.

In September, Comey sued the department, the Executive Office of the President, U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi, the Office of Personnel Management and the United States.

The lawsuit said her July firing was based on political reasons, including that her father is former FBI Director James Comey. President Donald Trump fired James Comey in 2017.

The Justice Department indicated its defense to the lawsuit in a joint letter submitted to Judge Jesse M. Furman by Maurene Comey’s lawyers and the chief of the civil division of the federal prosecutor’s office in Albany.

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It said her lawsuit was not properly before the court because she did not fully comply with administrative procedures requiring the Merit Systems Protection Board to first consider her claim. It rejected her lawsuit’s claim that the notice of appeal she filed with the board was futile.

The board, the Justice Department maintained, was “the appropriate forum to determine whether, as Ms. Comey claims, her removal was a prohibited personnel action or an arbitrary and capricious agency action.”

Maurene Comey’s lawyers said in the filing that the board “lacks expertise to adjudicate this novel dispute” and was not an appropriate forum because “this case raises foundational constitutional questions with respect to the separation of powers.” They also argued that it was “no longer true” that the board functions independently of the president.

Last month, U.S. Attorney John Sarcone in Albany took the case after the recusal of prosecutors in New York, where Maurene Comey had secured guilty verdicts in several high-profile cases, including the sex trafficking conviction of Ghislaine Maxwell and the bribery convictions of former U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez and his wife.

Two weeks before Maurene Comey was fired, a jury convicted music maven Sean Combs of prostitution-related charges, though it acquitted him of more serious sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy charges. She led the prosecution team. Combs, 56, is scheduled for release from prison in June 2028.

Maxwell, 63, was convicted in December 2021 on sex trafficking charges after a jury found she aided the sex abuse of girls and women by financier Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein was found dead in his federal jail cell in August 2019 as he awaited a sex trafficking charge. His death was ruled a suicide. Maxwell is serving a 20-year prison sentence at a prison camp in Texas, where she was transferred last summer from a prison in Florida.

Robert Menendez, 71, is imprisoned in Pennsylvania. He is scheduled for release in September 2034.