The St. Paul City Council will choose from among four finalists to temporarily fill the Ward 4 seat vacated by former Council Member Mitra Jalali, who left city employment on March 8. The candidates are artist and community organizer Sean Lim, artist and neighborhood advocate Lisa Clare Nelson, clean energy advocate Matt Privratsky and nonprofit consultant Melissa Martinez-Sones.

The council will interview the candidates on Wednesday and vote on an interim appointment on March 26. The candidate will be sworn into the seat in April and serve through a special election likely to be held Aug. 12. The city council will finalize the date of the election on Wednesday.

Jay Willms, chief budget officer and interim director of operations for the city council, reviewed 20 applications and culled them down to four after conferring with City Clerk Shari Moore and other council staff.

The ward spans Hamline-Midway, Merriam Park, St. Anthony Park and parts of Macalester-Groveland and Como.

Backgrounds

What makes these four applicants qualified to represent Ward 4 through at least mid-August? Resumes, cover letters and media coverage reveal the following:

Sean Lim

Lim, an artist and community organizer, is the director of community outreach and engagement for the East Phillips Neighborhood Institute in Minneapolis, which is working to convert the Roof Depot warehouse into an indoor urban farm. He is also a graphic designer for electoral campaigns, including Omar Fateh for Mayor of Minneapolis and Marvina Haynes for Minneapolis City Council Ward 4. A leader at an art collective, he’s contributed to Art Shanty Projects, and called for a moratorium on tearing down homeless encampments. He got his start in organizing with the Minnesota Youth Collective, based at the time in Ward 4’s Spruce Tree Building, and was active during the pandemic in St. Paul Camps Support, which regularly distributed supplies to 50 unhoused residents.

Lisa Clare Nelson

Nelson, a painter and art conservator, is a board member with the Union Park District Council, where she co-chairs the transportation committee. She was previously a project conservator for the Jewish Theological Seminary and the Brooklyn Museum in New York City before becoming a stay-at-home mom active in neighborhood planning around Allianz Field. She has worked with the St. Paul Police Department to improve the permitting process for recurring block parties, organized neighborhood clean-ups and written 10 Capital Improvement Budget project proposals, several of which were funded. She’s working to launch the Snelling and University Alliance, a collaboration with the Hamline Midway Coalition, Midway Chamber of Commerce and African Economic Development Solutions.

Matt Privratsky

Privratsky, director of government affairs for Nokomis Energy, is a clean energy advocate and former legislative aide to Jalali. He’s the former director of public affairs for Fresh Energy and launched his career at the Minnesota Rural Electric Association after serving as news director for a Morris radio station. To support clean energy campaigns, he’s led lobbying efforts at the State Capitol and partnered in local and statewide initiatives. He’s the editor and founder of Equal Time Soccer, which covers women’s soccer, a broadcaster at women’s games and co-founder of Minnesota Aurora FC. After the May 2020 riots, he biked the entirety of the University Avenue corridor in St. Paul documenting damage, and in 2017 led an effort to install 176 street signs directing pedestrians to the Green Line by walking distance.

Melissa Martinez-Sones

Martinez-Sones is the co-owner of Mighty Consulting, a 15-person, St. Paul-based consulting firm that provides executive search services and interim leadership for nonprofits in transition. She is the former director of the CapitolRiver Council and former executive director of the Macalester-Groveland Community Council. She spent several months as an interim legislative aide to Russ Stark when he was on the city council, and she spent almost 11 years with Roger Meyer Consulting before founding her own company in 2021. She has served as interim executive director of nine organizations, including St. Paul Smart Trips, Transit for Livable Communities and Rainbow Health. Around 2000, she was a community organizer in the Minneapolis Seward neighborhood and in Frogtown.

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Open AI and Google, having long trained their ravenous bots on the work of newsrooms like this one, now want to throw out long-established copyright law by arguing, we kid you not, that the only way for the United States to defeat the Chinese Communist Party is for those tech giants to steal the content created with the sweat equity of America’s human journalists.

“With a Chinese Communist Party determined to overtake us by 2030,” Open AI wrote Thursday to the federal Office of Science and Technology Policy, “the Trump administration’s new action plan can ensure that American-led A.I. built on democratic principles can prevail over CCP-built, autocratic, authoritarian AI.”

Built on democratic principles? More like built on outright theft.

That’s why news organizations, including this one and the New York Times, have sued Open AI and its partner Microsoft over their breaking copyright law by vacuuming up millions of newspaper articles without permission or payment, constituting copyright infringement on a colossal scale.

Now Open AI comes back with the absurd argument that this was somehow necessary for national security.

In their letter, Sam Altman’s crew added a whole lot of obfuscating, self-serving blather about “scaling human ingenuity” and “freedom of learning and knowledge” while describing the innovations of ChatGPT as part of some great and glorious trajectory from domesticated horses to steam power to electricity to printing presses and the internet.

You see the irony there? Printing presses.

For generations, those presses sent out the work of America’s reporters, the fruits of capital invested, and hard labor performed, in city halls and crime scenes and throughout all the communities they served.  They amplified and distributed a news organization’s work, as now does the Internet.

They didn’t steal the work of someone else and then pass it off as their own.

Gutting generations of copyright protections for the benefit of AI bots would have a chilling effect not just on news organizations but on all creative content creators, from novelists to playwrights to poets. That iron-clad commitment to protecting the rights of owners of work they themselves created is precisely what distinguishes the United States from communist China, not the reverse.

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This country has dominated the world of news and information by respecting not just the precious freedom of the press but also its right to protect its work. Had it not done so, there would have been no economic base on which to build the kinds of news organizations that can, and still do, keep a check on the government. Heck, there would have been no economic basis to build anything creative whatsoever.

Securing permission from, and fairly compensating, those publishers who created this great foundation of knowledge is the right, just and American thing to do.

The government should reject these self-serving proposals and protect the work of artists, authors, photographers, journalists and all other creators and copyright holders who have been the victims of these companies.

— The Chicago Tribune

This editorial is being published in more than 60 daily newspapers throughout the MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing networks.

By NICOLE WINFIELD, Associated Press

ROME (AP) — Pope Francis is registering new slight improvements in his monthlong treatment for double pneumonia, the Vatican said Monday, as it also provided some details on the first photo of the pope released since his hospitalization.

The 88-year-old pontiff is now able to spend some time during the day off high flows of oxygen and use just ordinary supplemental oxygen delivered by a nasal tube, the Holy See press office said. Doctors are also trying to cut back on the amount of time he uses a noninvasive mechanical ventilation mask at night, to force his lungs to work more.

While those amount to “slight improvements,” the Vatican isn’t yet providing any timetable on when Francis might be released from the Gemelli hospital or confirming any upcoming events. Known events include a planned visit by King Charles III and Holy Week in April.

Nuns pray the rosary in St. Peter’s Square at The Vatican, Sunday, Mar. 16, 2025, for the health of Pope Francis hospitalized at Agostino Gemelli Polyclinic in Rome where he is being treated for bilateral pneumonia since Feb.14. (AP Photo/Domenico Stinellis)

When Francis is being wheeled to his private chapel down the hall from his hospital room, for example, he doesn’t need to be attached to the oxygen, the press office said. It was at that moment that Francis was photographed on Sunday, from behind, as he sat in his wheelchair before the chapel altar in prayer without any sign of nasal tubes.

The photo, showing Francis wearing a Lenten purple stole, marked the first image of the pope since he was admitted to Gemelli Feb. 14 with a complex lung infection that developed into double pneumonia. It followed an audio message Francis recorded March 6 in which he thanked people for their prayers, his voice soft and labored.

Together, they suggested Francis is very much controlling how the public follows his illness to prevent it from turning into a spectacle. While many in the Vatican have held up St. John Paul II’s long and public battle with Parkinson’s disease and other ailments as a humble sign of his willingness to show his frailties, others criticized it as excessive and showy.

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Francis’ doctors told reporters on Feb. 21 that the pope authorized them to clearly explain the gravity of his situation, in detail, and their regular medical bulletins have suggested that Francis is comfortable with such information being in the public domain.

The Vatican press office said Francis approved the photo being released, but the fact that his face was hidden suggested something of a compromise in terms of how his sickness is seen visually.

Francis doesn’t want to hide his illness and the difficult moment he is going through but he’s “not dramatizing it either,” noted La Repubblica’s Vatican correspondent, Iacopo Scaramuzzi.

The first three weeks of Francis’ hospitalization were marked by a rollercoaster of setbacks, including respiratory crises, mild kidney failure and a severe coughing fit in which he inhaled vomit. Over the last week, his condition has stabilized and doctors said he was no longer in imminent danger of death. With gradual improvements, the Vatican has suspended morning updates and is issuing less frequent medical bulletins. The next one is not expected before Wednesday.

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

State Republicans introduced a bill Monday to define “Trump Derangement Syndrome” as a mental illness under Minnesota statute.

The bill defines Trump Derangement Syndrome as “the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal persons that is in reaction to the policies and presidencies of President Donald J. Trump.”

“Mental illness is a real problem for many, and I’ve supported resources for those who need help,” said Sen. Eric Lucero, R-St. Michael, in a statement Monday. “But Democrats need to get real and understand they can’t blame Trump for everything they’ve done. That’s exactly what this bill is highlighting.”

Lucero said that in the weeks since Trump took office, Democrats have attempted to make Trump the “scapegoat” for Minnesota’s problems, including the state’s $6 billion looming deficit.

The bill refers to the “syndrome” as “Trump-induced general hysteria, which produces an inability to distinguish between legitimate policy differences and signs of psychic pathology in President Donald J. Trump’s behavior.”

The bill sites “verbal expressions of intense hostility toward President Donald J. Trump; and overt acts of aggression and violence against anyone supporting President Donald J. Trump or anything that symbolizes President Donald J. Trump.”

Majority Leader Erin Murphy, DFL-St. Paul, said in a statement Monday that the bill should be withdrawn immediately and that it “trivializes” mental health issues.

“This is possibly the worst bill in Minnesota history,” she said. “If it is meant as a joke, it is a waste of staff time and taxpayer resources that trivializes serious mental health issues. If the authors are serious, it is an affront to free speech and an expression of a dangerous level of loyalty to an authoritarian president.”

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