What happened to Brittany Clardy a dozen years ago is not only painful to her family and her St. Paul community, it’s “reflective of a much larger crisis” in Minnesota and across the nation, her sister said Wednesday.

Clardy was 18 when she was murdered in 2013. Her sister, Lakeisha Lee, was co-chair of Minnesota’s Missing and Murdered African American Women Task Force.

The taskforce’s recommendations and legislation led to the creation of the Minnesota Office for Missing and Murdered Black Women and Girls in 2023. Kaleena Burkes, the office’s first director, was appointed a year ago.

Lakeisha Lee in the state Capitol in St. Paul on April 9, 2025. (Mara H. Gottfried / Pioneer Press)

“Many Black women in the U.S. have the same story as Brittany,” Lee said Wednesday at the first Missing and Murdered Black Women and Girls Day on the Hill. “… I, as Brittany’s keeper, want to bring awareness to those voices. … When Black women and girls are safe, all of our communities are safe.”

At Wednesday’s gathering in the Minnesota Capitol’s Rotunda, the aim was to bring awareness to the new office — so families know they can contact them for help — and to the disproportionate number of Black women and girls who are missing and murdered.

“We must first acknowledge the women and girls who are not here … lost to this epidemic of violence,” Burkes said. “Women and girls who deserve to be protected, women and girls whose names should have never become headlines or cold cases.”

“But let us also acknowledge a deeper truth: Too often, when Black women and girls go missing, they are not met with urgency,” Burkes continued. “Their disappearances are not met with national outcry, their lives are not deemed worthy of the same media coverage, the same law enforcement response and the same public sympathy.”

Minnesota became the first state in the U.S. to create an office dedicated to the problem, Burkes said. It’s part of the state’s Department of Public Safety’s Office of Justice Programs.

‘Heartbreaking’ statistics

Kaleena Burkes, director of the Minnesota Office for Missing and Murdered Black Women and Girls, speaks at the office’s first Missing and Murdered Black Women and Girls Day on the Hill. (Mara H. Gottfried / Pioneer Press)

Although Black women comprise 7 percent of the population in Minnesota, 40 percent of domestic violence victims are Black women. Black women are nearly three times more likely to be murdered than white women in Minnesota, according to the Office of Justice Programs.

“The statistics are heartbreaking and sobering,” said Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan.

Former Minnesota Rep. Ruth Richardson was a chief author of the legislation that created the office. She said she will never forget Clardy’s mother, testifying at the legislature about the loss of her daughter, saying: “I wake up every morning asking myself, ‘If there had been an immediate response to my daughter being missing, would she be here today?’”

“No one should ever have to ask themselves that question every single morning,” Richardson said Wednesday. Clardy was missing for 10 days before her body was found in a vehicle at a Columbia Heights impound lot, after the car had been towed from a Brooklyn Park apartment complex.

The family of Taylor Hayden, previously from Medina and the sister of former Minnesota Sen. Jeff Hayden, also advocated for change.

The 25-year-old woman was fatally shot in 2016 in Atlanta. “She was simply walking to meet her Uber when someone ran up, grabbed her and used her as a human shield,” said Joyce Hayden. “… As a mother, my heart shattered into a million pieces.”

The creation of the state office recognizes the need to address disproportionate violence that Black women face, but Joyce Hayden said it shouldn’t be regarded as a solution.

“It’s the foundation of our work,” which must be built upon, she said.

The office’s budget is $2.5 million for the biennium, which is $1.25 million per year.

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Artika Roller, executive director of Cornerstone — which connects victims of domestic violence, sexual violence and other crimes to services — asked people to raise awareness by sharing information on social media and by talking to people they know.

“Bring this issue to light and let them know that we’re doing this work and we’re committed to bringing our family members back home,” she said.

If a family member or loved one is missing, the Office for Missing and Murdered Black Women and Girls says people can contact them for support at 651-201-7326 or MMWG.office.dps@state.mn.us, after they notify law enforcement.

By BARBARA ORTUTAY, AP Technology Writer

Former Facebook executive Sarah Wynn-Williams testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee Wednesday, accusing the social media company of undermining national security and briefing China on U.S. artificial intelligence efforts in order to grow its business there.

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“We are engaged in a high-stakes AI arms race against China. And during my time at Meta, company executives lied about what they were doing with the Chinese Communist Party to employees, shareholders, Congress, and the American public,” Wynn-Williams said in her prepared testimony.

Her book “Careless People,” an explosive insider account of her time at the social media giant, sold 60,000 copies in its first week and reached the top 10 on Amazon’s best-seller list amid efforts by Meta to discredit the work and stop her from talking about her experiences at the company. Meta used a “campaign of threats and intimidation” to silence the former executive, said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, during the hearing.

Wynn-Williams served as director of global public policy at Facebook, now Meta, from 2011 until she was fired in 2017.

“Throughout those seven years, I saw Meta executives repeatedly undermine U.S. national security and betray American values. They did these things in secret to win favor with Beijing and build an 18 billion dollar business in China,” she said in her prepared remarks.

Wynn-Williams also said Meta deleted the Facebook account of a prominent Chinese dissident living in the U.S., bowing to pressure from China to do so. Meta says that account, belonging to billionaire Guo Wengui, shared personally identifiable information such as people’s passport numbers, social security numbers, national ID numbers and home addresses and was removed because this violated Facebook’s rules.

And she said Meta “ignored warnings” that building a “physical pipeline” between the U.S. and China would provide China with backdoor access to U.S. user data. These plans — called the Pacific Light Cable Network — never materialized, but Wynn-Williams said that was only because lawmakers stepped in.

In a statement, Meta said Wynn-Williams’ testimony “is divorced from reality and riddled with false claims. While Mark Zuckerberg himself was public about our interest in offering our services in China and details were widely reported beginning over a decade ago, the fact is this: we do not operate our services in China today.”

Zuckerberg, along with other Big Tech executives, have been trying to improve their standing with President Donald Trump’s administration in recent months — through visits to Mar-a-Lago and the White House, as well as monetary donations — it’s not yet clear if the efforts are paying off.

“This is a man who wears many different costumes,” Wynn-Williams said of Zuckerberg. “When I was there, he wanted the president of China to name his first child, he was learning Mandarin, he was censoring to his heart’s content. Now his new costume is MMA fighting or… free speech. We don’t know what the next costume is gonna be, but it will be something different. It’s whatever gets him closest to power.”

The hearing comes just days before Meta’s massive antitrust trial is scheduled to begin. The Federal Trade Commission’s case against the tech giant could force the company to divest Instagram and WhatsApp.

Plans to spray for spongy moths in five Minnesota counties have been scrapped after the federal funding for the aerial treatments didn’t come through.

The Minnesota Department of Agriculture said it planned to spray more than 2,700 acres throughout St. Louis, Carlton, Itasca, Anoka and Winona counties this spring, striking in the short period in the invasive insect’s lifespan when the bacterial insecticide is effective against it.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Forest Service’s Slow the Spread program funded such work for decades, reducing the moth’s spread by 60% and treating more than 1 million acres. But the state agency said it has not received the money it needs in time to carry out this spring’s aerial assault.

The agency planned to spray Bacillus thuringiensis var. kurstaki, or Btk, a naturally occurring soil bacteria that kills spongy moth caterpillars feeding on canopy foliage. Btk is nontoxic to people, bees, pets and other animals.

“Having to cancel Btk aerial management operations in these areas jeopardizes the future success of this program,” Minnesota Department of Agriculture Commissioner Thom Petersen said in a news release. “Spongy moth populations in these areas will likely increase and advance quicker into neighboring areas, making future years of management more complicated and costly.”

The USDA and Forest Service did not immediately respond to the Duluth News Tribune’s request for comment Tuesday evening.

The state agency said it still plans to aerially apply a mating disruption pheromone to stop the moths from reproducing on 112,000 acres across Minnesota and conduct its annual spongy moth population survey, but both those rely on federal funding, too.

“Overall, federal funding for these strategies is still uncertain; however, the MDA has been assured to receive initial funding for the spongy moth survey,” the agency said in a news release. “It is still unknown if federal funds to perform aerial mating disruption operations will be distributed in 2025.”

The agency said it may need to put temporary quarantines in place to prevent spongy moths hitchhiking on woody tree material from leaving the area.

Formerly called gypsy moths, the spongy moths are native to Europe and are considered a major problem for North American trees because they have few natural enemies here and can overwhelm patches of forest, defoliating trees quickly. They will munch on more than 300 species of trees and bushes, including aspen, birch and oak.

Spongy moths first came to the eastern U.S. from Europe in the 1860s, arriving by ship, and have been expanding ever since. They travel slowly on their own but have ridden west as egg clusters on cars, trucks, trains, trailers and campers. They have been in eastern Wisconsin since the 1970s and have now spread across the entire state and into eastern Minnesota.

The moth does its damage when it’s in its caterpillar stage. Forest health experts say the moths can’t be stopped. But their westward movement can be slowed, and outbreaks can be kept smaller, with annual aerial spraying efforts where the largest concentrations of moths are located.

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The state House Children and Families Finance and Policy Committee recently heard a bill that aims to reduce the cost of child care for Minnesotans.

The bill calls for a scholarship program for families needing child care for young children and aims to prevent Minnesotans from spending more than 7% of their annual income on child care. The scholarship applies to care for children from birth to kindergarten entry.

Bill author Rep. Carlie Kotyza-Witthuhn, DFL-Eden Prairie, said the goal of 7% is an affordability benchmark set by the Department of Health and Human Services in 2016.

The benchmark doesn’t accurately reflect current costs, according to Alaina Skoglund, a mother of two children and a child care teacher at Minnesota State University Moorhead.

“We pay $1,200 every month for child care for Dean, and we also pay $1,200 every month for child care for Harvey,” Skoglund testified to the committee last week, referring to her two children. “That’s almost $30,000 a year. It’s my entire paycheck, plus some of my husband’s paycheck to pay for our child care.”

Family income spent on child care

The average percentage of family income spent on child care in Minnesota is 18.8%, according to the Economic Policy Institute . EPI data as of February 2025 identified Minnesota child care — reportedly averaging $22,569 per year — as the third most expensive in the United States. Massachusetts child care averages $26,709 a year, and Washington D.C., child care is estimated at $28,356 annually, according to EPI.

Scholarship money is allocated to day care providers, under the bill, and eligible families then receive discounts on their monthly payments. The bill states that children who receive the scholarship must continue to receive the scholarship each year until they are eligible for kindergarten.

To be eligible for the scholarship, families need to make “less than 150% of the state median income.” Eligible families will receive a minimum of $100 per month, according to the bill.

‘A very expansive bill’

Kotyza-Witthuhn said that based on how many Minnesotans it would apply to, the bill will cost around $500 million per year.

“This is a very expansive bill, in that we would be attempting to provide somewhat of a subsidy to 85% of the children and families in the state of Minnesota,” she said.

Kotyza-Witthuhn said she sees the bill as an investment in Minnesota’s child care system.

“This program is not about throwing money at a problem, but it is a series of precise policy changes and fiscal investments to reform early care and learning in Minnesota,” she said.

Scholarships would be awarded over a 12-month period and require annual renewal.

If passed, scholarship payments start no later than July 1, 2026.

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