DULUTH — Many roads across Minnesota’s Arrowhead region were flooded and washed out Tuesday night into Wednesday morning after waves of thunderstorms dropped more than 7 inches of rain in some areas.

Parts of the Iron Range across to the North Shore and across Lake Superior to Wisconsin’s Bayfield Peninsula appeared to be the hardest hit areas, with flooding across many roads and some roads entirely closed, according to the Minnesota Department Transportation website.

Minnesota Highway 1 west of Tower; state Highway 73 north of Chisholm; state Highway 135 near Eveleth, U.S. Highway 53 near Cook; state Highway 61 near Schroeder and near Tofte all had flooded areas. Other roads were reported covered by water with washouts in some areas.

The Minnesota Department of Transportation suggested using alternate routes for many of the roads, noting water should recede off most roads by mid-morning Wednesday, but some may still be damaged by the flooding.

Social media photos show a large section of North Arm Road near Burntside Lake near Ely entirely washed out.

RELATED: Boy injured during Tuesday’s storm evacuated from the BWCA

The National Weather Service in Duluth has posted a flood warning until 4 p.m. Wednesday for lasting impacts from the storm, including St. Louis, Lake, Cook, Itasca, Cass and parts of Koochiching, Crow Wing and Carlton counties in Minnesota and Ashland, Bayfield and Douglas counties in Wisconsin. Streams and low-lying areas in all those counties could continue to rise throughout the day before falling again.

Meanwhile, Biwabik city officials on Wednesday said major washouts had cut utility services to the Giants Ridge Recreation Area and other nearby developments. They said it was unclear when utilities would be restored.

While electricity went out during the storm in some areas, Minnesota Power reported no major outages Wednesday morning while Lake County Power reported 17 scattered outages reporting about 150 customers.

The National Weather Service in Duluth reported just over 2 inches of rain, mostly between 6 p.m. and 1 a.m., but radar reports indicated anywhere from 1.5 to 4 inches of rain fell in just a few hours late Tuesday over a large area of the Northland on top of already saturated ground. A flash flood watch and warnings were posted for most of the region.

While the storm system has moved out of the region, more rain is expected in some areas Thursday night into Saturday, with an additional 0.5 to 3 inches of rain expected.

In the metro, Wednesday is the first day since Friday that we are not expecting any periods of rain, the Twin Cities office of the National Weather Service reported on X. However, an additional one to three inches of rain is possible for most of the Twin Cities through this weekend.

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By BRIAN MELLEY (Associated Press)

LONDON (AP) — Two climate protesters who sprayed orange paint on the ancient Stonehenge monument in southern England were arrested Wednesday after two bystanders appeared to intervene and stop them.

The latest act by Just Stop Oil was quickly condemned by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak as a “disgraceful act of vandalism.” Labour leader Keir Starmer, his main opponent in the election next month, called the group “pathetic” and said the damage was “outrageous.”

The incident came just a day before thousands are expected to gather at the roughtly 4,500-year-old stone circle to celebrate the summer solstice — the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere.

English Heritage, which manages the site, said it was “extremely upsetting” and said curators were investigating the damage. Just Stop Oil said the paint was made of cornstarch and would dissolve in the rain.

Video released by the group showed a man it identified as Rajan Naidu, 73, unleash a fog of orange from a fire extinguisher-style paint sprayer at one of the vertical stones.

As voices can be heard yelling “stop,” a person wearing a ballcap and raincoat ran up and grabbed Naidu’s arm and tried to pull him away from the monument. A man in a blue shirt joined in and wrestled the paint sprayer away.

The second protester, identified as Niamh Lynch, 21, managed to spray three stones before the first bystander in the hat stopped her.

Wiltshire Police said the pair were arrested on suspicion of damaging one of the world’s most famous prehistoric monuments and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Stonehenge was built on the flat lands of Salisbury Plain in stages starting 5,000 years ago, with the unique stone circle erected in the late Neolithic period about 2,500 B.C.

Just Stop Oil is one of many environmental groups around Europe that have received attention — and blowback — for disrupting sporting events, splashing paint and food on famous works of art and interrupting traffic to draw attention to global warming.

The group said it acted in response to the Labour Party’s recent election manifesto. Labour has said that if it wins the election on July 4, it would not issue further licenses for oil and gas exploration. Just Stop Oil backs the moratorium but said it is not enough.

In a statement, the group said Labour, which is leading in polls and widely expected by pundits and politicians to lead the next government, needs to go further and sign a treaty to phase out fossil fuels by 2030.

“Continuing to burn coal, oil and gas will result in the death of millions,” the group said in a statement.

By SETH BORENSTEIN (AP Science Writer)

LISLE, Illinois (AP) — With their bulging red eyes and their alien-like mating sound, periodical cicadas can seem scary and weird enough. But some of them really are sex-crazed zombies on speed, hijacked by a super-sized fungus.

West Virginia University mycology professor Matt Kasson, his 9-year-old son Oliver, and graduate student Angie Macias are tracking the nasty fungus, called Massospora cicadina. It is the only one on Earth that makes amphetamine — the drug called speed — in a critter when it takes over. And yes, the fungus takes control over the cicada, makes them hypersexual, looking to spread the parasite as a sexually transmitted disease.

“They’re zombies, completely at the mercy of the fungus,” said University of Connecticut cicada researcher John Cooley.

This particular fungus has the largest known genome of any fungus. It has about 1.5 billion base pairs, about 30 times longer than many of the more common fungi we know, Kasson said. And when these periodical cicadas live underground for 17 years (or 13 years in the U.S. South), the spores generally stay down there with them.

“This was a mycological oddity for a long time,” Kasson said. “It’s got the biggest genome. It produces wild compounds. It keeps the host active — all these quirks to it.”

Kasson decided to ask people from around the country to send in infected cicadas this year. And despite an injured leg, Kasson, his son and Macias travelled from West Virginia to the Morton Arboretum outside Chicago, where others have reported the fungus that takes over a cicada’s nether parts, dumping the genitalia and replacing it with a white, gummy yet flaky plug that’s pretty noticeable. The spores then fall out like salt from a shaker.

Infected cicadas are supposed to be hard to find.

Ten seconds after she hops off the golf cart, Macias is in the trees, looking. She emerges victorious, hand in the air with a cicada, yelling “I got one.”

“That was just lucky,” Oliver whines.

“Luck, huh? Let’s see you get one,” Macias replies.

Ten seconds later at a neighboring bush, Oliver finds another. And just a bit after that a photographer finds a third.

Kasson and his small team collected 36 infected cicadas in his brief Chicago area jaunt with people sending him another 200 or so from all over. He’s still waiting for an RNA analysis of the fungus.

Some cicada experts have estimated maybe one in 1,000 of the periodical cicadas are infected with this fungus, but it’s not much more than a guess. Mount St. Joseph University’s Gene Kritsky, a biologist who wrote the book on this year’s unique dual emergence, said it might be skewed because the healthy cicadas stay higher up in the trees.

This year “the fungus is about how it always is,” Cooley said in an email. “It’s not super common.”

There’s debate among scientists if the fungus infects more cicadas deep in the soil coming out of the ground after 13 or 17 years or if it infects the newly hatched nymphs on the way underground for more than a decade.

This fungus isn’t the type of parasite that kills its host, but instead it needs to keep it alive, Kasson said. Then the infected cicadas attempt to mate with others, spreading the spores to its mate/victim. The males even pretend in their hypersexualized state to be females to entice and infect other males, he said.

The cousin to this fungus which infects annual cicadas out west also makes a psychoactive compound in the cicadas but it is more akin to psychedelics like magic mushrooms, Kasson said. So sometimes people, even experts, mix up the amphetamine that the infected 17- and 13-year cicadas produce with the more trippy compounds of the annual bugs, he said.

Either way, don’t try it at home. Even though cicadas themselves are edible, not so much the infected ones.

In the interest of science, Kasson tried one during this emergence, making sure they were from the inside of a female so more antiseptic.

“Man, it was so bitter,” Kasson said, explaining that he immediately rinsed his mouth out. “It tasted like something you would consider poisonous.”

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Read more of AP’s climate coverage at http://www.apnews.com/climate-and-environment

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Follow Seth Borenstein on X at @borenbears

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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.

Around Galveston, Sam Collins III is better known as Professor Juneteenth. 

For the past 20 years, Collins, 54, has devoted his life to educating the public about Juneteenth—the commemoration of June 19, 1865, when Union General Gordon Granger and his troops landed on the island. More than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, Texas was then the last bastion of legal slavery. Granger read the orders freeing 250,000 enslaved Texans across Galveston, before traveling inland to proclaim freedom and the promise of “absolute equality”at plantations across Texas. 

Today, Galveston is an open classroom for Juneteenth’s legacy, largely due to Collins’ efforts. He’s organized community members to get Juneteenth-related historical markers, murals, statutes, and public exhibits established. Collins worked together with Fort Worth’s Opal Lee to make Juneteenth a federal holiday in 2021. But he says that his work, as well as the promise of Juneteenth, is unfinished. He’s now trying to expand the story of Juneteenth’s legacy and bring it back home to Galveston with plans for an International Museum of Juneteenth in the port city. (A museum is also in the works up in Cowtown.)

“The Juneteenth story is much more than one day, or one city. But this is where it started,” Collins said. 

I had the opportunity to join Collins as he hosted Miss Juneteenth USA, Sunshine Higgins, and Miss Juneteenth Texas, Madison Swain, on his “Freedom Walk Tour,” which highlights the sites where the orders of freedom were read. Higgins and Swain are both college students who won scholarships through Juneteenth-themed pageant programs. As we walked around Galveston, I learned about Collins’ own history, work, and plans to continue promoting Juneteenth’s legacy in his hometown. 

We started at the Nia Cultural Center, a gallery dedicated to promoting the history and legacy of Juneteenth as well as the work of Black artists. Collins explained its exhibits to Higgins and Swain. Credit: Josephine Lee

In front of the Middle Passage historical marker on the Galveston Historic Seaport building, Collins explained the role that Galveston played in the slave trade. “For a period of time, along the Middle Passage routes, 90 percent of the transatlantic slave trade went to South America and the Caribbean islands. Only 6 percent came into what is now considered the United States. Of that, 80 percent came through Galveston, and from there, enslaved people would walk into Texas or were brought over by wagons.” Credit: Josephine Lee

Inside the Nia Cultural Center, photos display the Roof Garden wedding venue across the street, a space that one of Galveston’s many cotton commission and slave auction houses once occupied. Credit: Josephine Lee

“This is an example of a sale that was made in 1837 of 36 enslaved people to the Bynum Plantation. David and Robert Mills were the largest enslavers in the state of Texas. The reason I am bringing it up is to show that children younger than 10 years old stayed with their mother. At ten, they could be sold individually,” Collins said. Credit: Josephine Lee

At the Reedy Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Collins, Swain, and Higgins stand with Diane Henderson-Moore, the church’s steward. Henderson said the church’s congregation was founded in 1848 by enslaved African Americans who first met in an open outdoor space until a building was constructed there in 1863. Following June 19, 1865, the church ran a school for the Black community, and in 1866 the church was organized as Texas’s first African Methodist Episcopal congregation. Credit: Josephine Lee

A statue of General Gordon Granger stands in front of Ashton Villa where his five orders were also read to citizens on June 19, 1865. The third of these orders freed enslaved Texans. Credit: Josephine Lee

With the Juneteenth Legacy Project, Collins spearheaded the creation of the “Absolute Equality” mural on the east side of the Nia Cultural Center. The mural was painted by artists Samson Adenugba, Cherry Meekins, Joshua Bennett, Reginald Adams, KaDavien Baylor, and Dantrel Boone. Visitors can use the Uncover Everything App to see videos about the depicted subjects. Credit: Josephine Lee

At the Galveston Historical Foundation’s African American Heritage Committee’s Juneteenth Exhibit, “And Still We Rise,” Collins points to sites along his Freedom Walk Tour. In addition to oral histories, the exhibit features interactive visuals about Juneteenth. Credit: Josephine Lee

Collins wears many hats around Galveston. He’s a father of four, an associate minister at his church, and a financial consultant. But he’s best known as a public historian, who regularly lectures on Black history and also sits on the board of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. 

His own family’s history in Texas dates back seven generations to 1837, when his oldest documented ancestor Joseph Thompson was brought to Brazoria County as an enslaved child. Other family members hailed from San Felipe and Sealy. Like many other Black families who fled to the bigger cities of Houston and Galveston in the decades after 1865, Collins’ family sought better opportunities on the island in 1925. But every Juneteenth, they made their way back home to celebrate the holiday with extended family members. 

“It was important for people to make the connection from the cities to where their families had roots. Most enslaved people had worked in the southeast region of Texas, close to the coast. So people would go back home … and celebrate it with their families. It’s been a tradition since 1865,” Collins said.

As a child, Collins attended parades and festivals in Galveston and nearby in his smaller hometown of Hitchcock. Celebrations were about family and community, but it wasn’t until he was older that Collins started learning more about the holiday’s history. In 2006, he gathered what he found and hosted his own Juneteenth celebration at the Stringfellow estate in Hitchcock, a former plantation that Collins had purchased and repurposed as a family home and space to present Black history. Six-hundred people attended that celebration. 

That same year, Ronald Meyers, a Mississippi doctor who had since 1999 been championing a federal Juneteenth holiday, reached out to Collins for help. Through the National Juneteenth Observance Foundation, Meyers worked with Opal Lee, who became the foremost representative of the national campaign, and Collins. Meyers died in 2018, before he saw his work realized. “He drove all across the country and sacrificed a lot of his personal resources, but his role in the movement has been forgotten,” Collins said. 

It’s why Collins makes sure to mention Meyers and others who have fought for Juneteenth recognition. As early as 1879, Robert Evans, a Black state legislator from Navasota tried to get Juneteenth recognized as a state holiday. But that was two years after the Compromise of 1877 ended Reconstruction and, along with it, the promises to protect the rights of Black Americans. It wouldn’t be until about a hundred years later, following the civil rights movement,  that calls to fulfill the promise of “absolute equality” would be collectively renewed. Juneteenth finally became a Texas holiday in 1980.

Despite the work of Meyers, Lee, and Collins, among others, it would be the 2020 mass protests against racist police brutality that spread following the murder of George Floyd that would push the federal government to recognize Juneteenth. “That started a social movement, an uprising and awakening of consciousness. The National Juneteenth Observance Foundation had been trying to get recognition for 26 years, but no one was paying attention, until after what happened to George Floyd,” Collins said. After more than 150 years, President Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth bill in June 2021. 

Collins’ work didn’t end there. Later that year, he worked with the Juneteenth Legacy Project and artists to create a public art mural at the site of where Granger first read his orders. The goal was to expand the narrative of Juneteenth to include a continuous struggle for “the absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves,” as proclaimed by Granger’s order. From Harriet Tubman to the Black troops who enforced the order throughout Texas to those who fought for federal recognition of Juneteenth, Collins said Black Americans are “still traveling that road.” 

On the stoop of Reedy Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Collins told me that he’s now trying to bring the story of Juneteenth back to Galveston. It makes sense as the port of Galveston served as the beginning and end of slavery: the site where enslaved people once entered into the country to be sold in the city’s auction’s houses, where cotton was traded and shipped out, and where the last stand to hold on to this brutal system took place before the final group of African Americans were freed. It’s a history that some Galveston officials have been hesitant to reckon with, according to Collins. 

“Some don’t want to paint Galveston in a negative light centered around slavery, since it’s seen as a tropical vacation spot,” Collins said. “‘Slavery wasn’t that bad, we always got along, there were never any racial problems’—that’s another version of that history seen through the eyes of a privileged few.” 

But Collins believes Galveston still has a greater role to play in presenting Juneteenth’s legacy and the city’s history as it relates to the country’s. He’s been organizing supporters for a Galveston International Juneteenth Museum and has already engaged the Prairie View architectural school to come up with designs. Those designs were then shared and voted on by community members. Collins said that while they have the concept, they still don’t have a location. The selected design now hangs in the Nia Cultural Center, near the site where Granger first read the orders to free enslaved people in Texas. 

Quoting Frederick Douglas, Collins said that it’s an ongoing struggle to achieve “absolute equality,” just as it’s an ongoing struggle for Americans to reckon with their past. “Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without plowing the ground,” Douglas said at a speech in Canandaigua, New York, in 1857. “They want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters.”