Rep. Dean Phillips files paperwork for presidential bid against Biden

posted in: Politics | 0

Rep. Dean Phillips is officially running a longshot primary bid against Joe Biden.

The Minnesota Democrat, who has been teasing a run for months, filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission on Thursday night. He registered his campaign committee as “Dean 24 Inc.”

He is expected to formally announce his campaign on Friday morning in Concord, N.H. He previously told fellow lawmakers that he was planning to run.

His campaign has also started making ad buys in New Hampshire media markets, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact.

Biden, however, will not appear on the New Hampshire primary ballot, as the state is moving forward with an unsanctioned contest in 2024. This week, the Biden campaign confirmed it wouldn’t participate, after the Democratic National Committee declared the state “non-compliant” with the party’s presidential nominating calendar, which elevated South Carolina to the first-place spot. Top New Hampshire Democrats are expected to coordinate a write-in campaign on behalf of the president.

Phillips’ bid faces steep odds, as he squares off against Biden, the sitting president who is backed by the Democratic Party and has $91 million in the bank along with the DNC and their joint-fundraising committees.

State girls soccer: Maple Grove takes down White Bear Lake to advance to semifinals

posted in: News | 0

Maple Grove took down White Bear Lake 2-1 in a Class 3A state girls quarterfinal showdown Thursday night in Edina.

The first half had its fair share of action. The Crimson struck first, taking the lead in the 21st minute thanks to a goal from freshman Jessica Lee. They then padded their lead just four minutes later after a strike from sophomore Kiera Gill.

White Bear Lake answered with a goal of its own with three minutes left in the half when junior Jenna Maloy found the back of the Crimson net. The Bears put themselves within striking distance entering the second half.

But there was a big change of pace after the break. Both teams played stifling defense, and neither got any good shots at the goal. As both teams held the other scoreless, the Crimson outlasted the Bears and held onto their one-goal advantage the rest of the game.

The win comes as a bit of an upset for Maple Grove, which was unseeded in the tournament with White Bear Lake being seeded third. Maple Grove coach Jean-Yves Viardin said that it was a team win, like all the other wins they’ve had.

“It’s about us, not any individual players,” Viardin said. “We had some girls taking themselves out in the second half. The deal was, if you’re tired and you feel like you can’t do your job, don’t stay out there. So they put out a great team effort, great team game. We don’t have any superstars. Everything we do is collective. And today, with the weather and everything, it was just a lot of hard work and sticking to the game plan.”

White Bear Lake coach John Dierkhising congratulated his team on a successful season, but was disappointed to see it come to an end.

“I think we were super excited to get here, and finally break through Section 4,” Dierkhising said. “We’ve had a lot of good teams the last seven or eight years who didn’t get to this point, just due to competition. I don’t know if we were happy with the way we executed tonight. I don’t think we played up to our standards, just overall, just little stuff here and there, stuff that we expect to see just wasn’t on tonight. Whether it was a missed read, or a bad pass, just wasn’t our night. It’s a real bummer, because that’s a good group of girls, they have a lot of talent.”

Maple Grove moves on to play Wayzata, which holds the No. 2 seed in the tournament. The two teams will face off at 10 a.m. on Halloween at U.S. Bank Stadium. Viardin said the team is excited to meet the challenge head on and use its same team approach as it prepares for the Trojans.

“It’s playoff time, baby,” he said. “Anyone can win.”

Related Articles

High School Sports |


High school girls soccer: Woodbury holds off White Bear Lake

Bruins blow late lead, suffer first loss of season

posted in: News | 0

The Bruins had their record-setting victory in their sights on Thursday at the Garden and booted it away.

Going for the franchise best 7-0 start, the B’s coughed up a two-goal lead late in the third period and then Mason McTavish scored at 2:52 of overtime to lose 4-3, suffering their first loss of the season in brutal fashion. They fell to 6-1.

The B’s appeared to be well on their way sealing their seventh win when Patrick Brown took holding penalty with 4:00 left and the Ducks pulled goalie John Gibson for a 6-on-4. The B’s had several chances to clear but failed and with 1:55 left in regulation, Leo Carlsson scored a 6-on-5 goal to cut the Bruin lead to a goal.

The B’s inability to clear the zone continued and Sam Carrick tied the game with 14.7 second left in regulation to make it 3-3.

As we’ve come to expect in the first game back after a long, successful road trip, the Bruins were pretty lifeless in the first period. The Ducks, meanwhile, looked like they were putting a wakeup call to good use. In their win in Columbus on Tuesday, Anaheim coach Greg Cronin benched star forward Trevor Zegras and, in the first period at he Garden, the Ducks were battling for every puck.

While the Ducks, who held a 9-6 shot advantage, had the better of the chances in the first, they took the lead at 15:00 of the first on a fortunate bounce. With Mason McTavish battling for position in the crease with Hampus Lindholm behind goalie Linus Ullmark, Radko Gudas threw the puck toward the net and it deflected home off Lindholm.

B’s coach Jim Montgomery, after a fair amount of debate on the bench, elected to challenge the play for goalie interference but the goal was upheld.

The B’s killed off the resulting penalty, their second of the period, and went into the break down a goal.

The B’s shook off the cobwebs in the second period and stormed to a 3-1 lead.

Rookie Matt Poitras, who came into the game with three goals in two games – including two in Anaheim – was predictably earning more attention. He was high-sticked in the first period on a play that wasn’t penalized. Then early in the second period, he was cross-checked by Jackson Lacomb. That one was called, and the B’s made the Ducks pay as their struggling power play got off the schneid.

After changing on for James van Riemsdyk, Charlie Coyle won a faceoff in the right circle and went to the net. He was at the top of the crease to redirect David Pastrnak’s fanned-on slapper attempt into the wide open net behind John Gibson at 1:41 for his first of the season. The teams were officially even on lucky bounces.

As things got chippy, Coyle and Frank Vatrano received matching crosscheck penalties and the B’s took the lead on the ensuing 4-on-4. Poitras made zig-zags along the left side of the offensive zone and got it up to Charlie McAvoy at the blue line. McAvoy fed Matt Grzelcyk in the right circle and his blast squeaked through Gibson’s pads for Grzelcyk’s first of the year at 3:01.

The B’s came close to extending the lead on a penalty kill when Patrick Brown fed John Beecher with an empty net but the rookie hit the post.

They did get the third goal with 3:20 left in the second. McAvoy rushed the puck through the neutral zone and, once he gained the blue line, dished it to Pastrnak on the left wing. Pastrnak took a shot that handcuffed Gibson and produced a succulent rebound. Pavel Zacha fouled off his swing but Pastrnak was able to swoop in and deposit his sixth of the year into the empty net.

Former Premier Li Keqiang, China’s top economic official for a decade, has died at 68

posted in: News | 0

BEIJING — Former Premier Li Keqiang, China’s top economic official for a decade, died Friday of a heart attack. He was 68.

Li was China’s No. 2 leader from 2013-23 and an advocate for private business but was left with little authority after President Xi Jinping made himself the most powerful Chinese leader in decades and tightened control over the economy and society.

CCTV said Li had been resting in Shanghai recently and had a heart attack on Thursday. He died at 12:10 a.m. Friday.

Li, an English-speaking economist, was considered a contender to succeed then-Communist Party leader Hu Jintao in 2013 but was passed over in favor of Xi. Reversing the Hu era’s consensus-oriented leadership, Xi centralized powers in his own hands, leaving Li and others on the party’s ruling seven-member Standing Committee with little influence.

As the top economic official, Li promised to improve conditions for entrepreneurs who generate jobs and wealth. But the ruling party under Xi increased the dominance of state industry and tightened control over tech and other industries. Foreign companies said they felt unwelcome after Xi and other leaders called for economic self-reliance, expanded an anti-spying law and raided offices of consulting firms.

Li was dropped from the Standing Committee at a party congress in October 2022 despite being two years below the informal retirement age of 70.

The same day, Xi awarded himself a third five-year term as party leader, discarding a tradition under which his predecessors stepped down after 10 years. Xi filled the top party ranks with loyalists, ending the era of consensus leadership and possibly making himself leader for life. The No. 2 slot was filled by Li Qiang, the party secretary for Shanghai, who lacked Li Keqiang’s national-level experience and later told reporters that his job was to do whatever Xi decided.

Li Keqiang, a former vice premier, took office in 2013 as the ruling party faced growing warnings the construction and export booms that propelled the previous decade’s double-digit growth were running out of steam.

Government advisers argued Beijing had to promote growth based on domestic consumption and service industries. That would require opening more state-dominated industries and forcing state banks to lend more to entrepreneurs.

Li’s predecessor, Wen Jiabao, apologized at a March 2012 news conference for not moving fast enough.

In a 2010 speech, Li acknowledged challenges including too much reliance on investment to drive economic growth, weak consumer spending and a wealth gap between prosperous eastern cities and the poor countryside, home to 800 million people.

Li was seen as a possible candidate to revive then-supreme leader Deng Xiaoping’s market-oriented reforms of the 1980s that started China’s boom. But he was known for an easygoing style, not the hard-driving impatience of Zhu Rongji, the premier in 1998-2003 who ignited the construction and export booms by forcing painful reforms that cut millions of jobs from state industry.

Li was believed to have supported the “China 2030” report released by the World Bank and a Cabinet research body in 2012 that called for dramatic changes to reduce the dominance of state industry and rely more on market forces.

The Unirule Institute, an independent think tank in Beijing, said state industry was so inefficient that its return on equity — a broad measure of profitability — was negative 6%. Unirule later was shut down by Xi as part of a campaign to tighten control over information.

In his first annual policy address, Li in 2014 was praised for promising to pursue market-oriented reform, cut government waste, clean up air pollution and root out pervasive corruption that was undermining public faith in the ruling party.

Xi took away Li’s decision-making powers on economic matters by appointing himself to head a party commission overseeing reform.

Xi’s government pursued the anti-graft drive, imprisoning hundreds of officials including former Standing Committee member Zhou Yongkang. But party leaders were ambivalent about the economy. They failed to follow through on a promised list of dozens of market-oriented changes. They increased the dominance of state-owned banks and energy and other companies.

Xi’s government opened some industries including electric car manufacturing to private and foreign competition. But it built up state-owned “national champions” and encouraged Chinese companies to use domestic suppliers instead of imports.

Borrowing by companies, households and local governments increased, pushing up debt that economists warned already was dangerously high.

Beijing finally tightened controls in 2020 on debt in real estate, one of China’s biggest industries. That triggered a collapse in economic growth, which fell to 3% in 2022, the second-lowest in three decades.

Li showed his political skills but little zeal for reform as governor and later party secretary of populous Henan province in central China in 1998-2004.

Li earned the nickname “Three Fires Li” and a reputation for bad luck after three fatal fires struck Henan while he was there. A Christmas Day blaze at a nightclub in 2000 killed 309 people. Other officials were punished but Li emerged unscathed.

Meanwhile, provincial leaders were trying to suppress information about the spread of AIDS by a blood-buying industry in Henan.

Li’s reputation for bad luck held as China suffered a series of deadly disasters during his term.

Days after he took office, a landslide on March 29, 2013, killed at least 66 miners at a gold mine in Tibet and left 17 others missing and presumed dead.

In the eastern port of Tianjin, a warehouse holding chemicals exploded Aug. 12, 2015, killing at least 116 people.

A China Eastern Airlines jetliner plunged into the ground on March 22, 2022, killing all 132 people aboard. Authorities have yet to announce a possible cause.

Li oversaw China’s response to COVID-19, the first cases of which were detected in the central city of Wuhan. Then-unprecedented controls were imposed, shutting down most international travel for three years and access to major cities for weeks at a time.

In one of his last major official acts, Li led a Cabinet meeting that announced Nov. 11, 2022, that anti-virus controls would be relaxed to reduce disruption after the economy shrank by 2.6% in the second quarter of the year. Two weeks later, the government announced most travel and business restrictions would end the following month.

Li was born July 1, 1955, in the eastern province of Anhui and by 1976 was ruling party secretary of a commune there.

Studying law at Peking University, he was the campus secretary of the ruling party’s Communist Youth League, an organization that launched the political careers of former party leaders Hu Jintao and Hu Yaobang. He was a member of the League’s Standing Committee, a sign he was seen as future leadership material.

After serving in a series of party posts, Li received his Ph.D. in economics in 1994 from Peking University.

Following Henan, Li served as party secretary for Liaoning province in the northeast as part of a rotation through provincial posts and at ministries in Beijing that was meant to prepare leaders. He joined the party Central Committee in 2007.