Minnesota regulators identified another 20 bodies of water used for wild rice production that exceeded the state’s wild rice sulfate water quality standard, placing the 13 lakes and seven streams on its biennial impaired-waters list.

In doing so, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency opted to follow the federal Clean Water Act over a 2015 state law that sought to prevent the MPCA from adding impaired wild rice waters to the list and to prevent the agency from enforcing sulfate reduction if it cost the permit holder any money.

Sulfates — discharged into water by industrial activities like mining, wastewater treatment and other industrial facilities — at high levels harm wild rice when the sulfate is converted to hydrogen sulfide in the sediment.

Minnesota’s sulfate limit for wild rice waters is 10 milligrams per liter, which the mining industry had long argued was too stringent .

The 2015 state law was designed to largely prevent the MPCA from enforcing the existing standard until it established new wild rice water-quality standards for sulfate.

The MPCA had tried to change that standard to a formula that would include the water’s organic carbon and iron content, but withdrew its rule change proposal in 2018.

When the MPCA submitted its 2020 impaired waters list to the Environmental Protection Agency without any wild rice waters exceeding sulfate standards, the federal agency pushed back, identifying 30 bodies of water that it said should have been on the list.

The MPCA revised its 2020 list, despite state law, with those bodies of water, and added another 35 bodies of water exceeding wild rice standards to its 2022 impaired water list.

“Since 2020, that kind of overruled any state law because that’s a federal expectation and requirement from EPA: You follow the Clean Water Act,” Leya Charles, the MPCA’s water assessment and impaired waters list coordinator, said in an interview with the Duluth News Tribune.

The 2024 impaired water list includes 54 water bodies and 199 impairments, which range from finding “forever chemicals” in fish to mercury and other pollutants, and is open for public comment through Jan. 12, 2024. That brings the total water bodies on the list to 2,798, with almost 6,500 impairments.

After weighing any changes after the comment period, the MPCA will submit the list to the EPA, which will either approve or disapprove of the list.

Upon approval, any water bodies considered impaired need a total maximum daily load report, which determines how much of a pollutant the water body can receive before exceeding water quality standards.

Federal officials have also made clear the MPCA needs to enforce the sulfate standard, something the 2015 state law sought to curb.

“We also received from EPA in February of 2022 a letter stating that we needed to implement the sulfate standard to the (National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System) permitting program,” said Bill Cole, supervisor of the MPCA’s water quality standards unit. “So, like the impaired waters list, the EPA expects us to implement the standard. They told us that repeatedly.”

Birch Lake added

That’s giving an environmental group opposed to copper-nickel mining near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness some hope that adding Birch Lake to the impaired waters list will make it more difficult for a project to get permitted.

In its list released Tuesday, the MPCA said Birch Lake, which flows into the BWCAW via the Kawishiwi River, exceeds the wild rice sulfate standard.

That’s largely based on data submitted by the Campaign to Save the Boundary Waters and the 1854 Treaty Authority.

“It has long been known that there is sulfate pollution in Birch Lake, but so far, effectively nothing has been done to address it. In 2021, we rapidly expanded our water quality testing program after discovering that the state had in its possession almost no data on sulfate concentrations in the west end of Birch Lake, where mining pollution is discharged,” Lisa Pugh, water quality monitoring program manager at Northeastern Minnesotans for Wilderness and Save the Boundary Waters said in a news release Tuesday. “The listing of Birch Lake means that the machinery of the Clean Water Act will begin to turn, requiring — we hope — cleanup of the mining pollution still being dumped into the lake.”

The organization believes the sulfate is coming from the Dunka Pit, an iron ore mine pit last mined in 1991 by the former LTV Steel Corp. The Dunka Pit has long been known to contain high levels of the pollutant. It’s where the Biwabik Iron Formation meets the Duluth Complex, which contains copper-nickel sulfide ores.

The Dunka River, which runs alongside the pit and into Birch Lake, was also added to the list Tuesday.

The Campaign to Save the Boundary Waters said the addition of Birch Lake to the list would make it “more difficult for dangerous mining projects to be permitted.“

The group was referring namely to the Twin Metals — which was trying to underground mine — tailings storage facility processing plant along Birch Lake until the Biden administration effectively killed that plan by not renewing its federal mineral leases and putting a 20-year ban on mining on federal land within the same watershed as the BWCAW. Twin Metals continues to explore for minerals state leases along the lake’s shore.

Twin Metals declined to comment. But Julie Lucas, executive director of MiningMinnesota, said its members, which includes Twin Metals, were “committed to meeting our state’s stringent water quality regulations, which includes progressing solutions for restoring water quality in impaired water resources. Our projects cannot and should not be permitted unless they are able to meet all the requirements of state and federal water protection laws.”

Asked if permitting would be more difficult for a project near an impaired water body, Cole, of the MPCA, said: “I don’t think there is any real change in the process itself because we’re required by federal law to evaluate whether a discharge has the potential to cause or contribute to an impairment. So this reasonable analysis procedure is done even on waters that aren’t impaired. So what it could mean for waters that are impaired is that it may be the discharge would need to be less than what the water quality standard is, for example.”

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SAN FRANCISCO — The man who attacked the husband of Rep. Nancy Pelosi came armed with a hammer, zip ties and fevered delusions about her role in a make-believe plot by elites to destroy the nation.

Now, facing trial a year later, the 43-year-old Canadian’s lawyers are trying to beat serious felony charges on a technicality — arguing that he wasn’t interfering with Pelosi’s role in Congress when he broke into the couple’s home demanding to know “Where’s Nancy?” and striking her elderly husband in the head with a hammer.

Instead, David DePape’s attorneys say, he sought to hold her captive over her “wholly unrelated” role in a bizarre conspiracy theory. They are effectively claiming that he was living in an alternate reality where her role as speaker of the House did not factor into his thinking.

As a result, the trial has become something of a test — not just of DePape’s guilt or innocence, but of what happens when certain far-out strains of digital-age American radicalism collide with the criminal justice system.

The defense’s argument reflects the growing prevalence of a certain kind of extremism in American politics — internet fever swamps, supercharged during the Covid-era as many isolated and marginalized Americans scoured fringe message boards. Now, many of those who pursued fantastical plots to violent ends — including the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol — are asking judges and juries to factor in those breaks from reality when they render judgment.

For DePape, a verdict on that argument could come as soon as Wednesday when jurors get the case after a weeklong trial in federal court in San Francisco.

DePape’s argument is reminiscent of one lodged by dozens of people charged in the Jan. 6 attack, including some who burst into the halls of Congress shouting “Where are you, Nancy?” While many stormed inside the Capitol with a plan to prevent lawmakers from certifying Joe Biden’s presidential victory, others have claimed they were unaware that lawmakers were conducting business that day — or believed the job had already been done when they got inside. In some cases, that argument has helped defendants wriggle out of the most serious charges they faced: obstruction of an official proceeding.

Judges and juries have largely rejected the claims of Jan. 6 rioters. But a handful of judges have found that some rioters could not face weightier charges because they had no clue what was happening in the Capitol and therefore couldn’t have intended to block certification of Biden’s victory over Donald Trump.

U S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson found that one defendant— who surged with the Jan. 6 mob onto the Senate floor — had such a “unique stew in his mind” that she couldn’t be sure he had any idea he was breaking the law.

The parallel arguments, in high-profile cases of political violence that gripped the nation, are emblematic of America’s descent into online and social media-driven conspiracy theories. That trend has created a more complicated path for prosecutors, who must prove criminal intent to convince juries to convict DePape and the Jan. 6 rioters on more severe felony charges that carry longer prison terms.

DePape told jurors Tuesday during his rambling and tear-filled testimony that he didn’t target Pelosi to prevent her from serving in Congress. He said his real intent was to reveal a sinister plot.

“I wanted to use her to expose the truth,” DePape said, testifying that he planned to wear a unicorn costume he brought to her home and interrogate Pelosi on camera about what he believes are Democratic plots against former President Trump.

He’s facing two charges: attempted kidnapping of a U.S. official (which requires the intent to interfere with official duties) and assault on an immediate family member of a U.S. official (which also requires the intent to interfere with or retaliate against the official over their duties). The kidnapping charge carries a 20-year prison sentence and the assault has a 30-year term.

Prosecutors have called the defense’s argument outlandish. Assistant U.S. Attorney Laura Vartain Horn said DePape’s actions and words before and after the attack show “there is ample evidence of retaliation” against Pelosi over her official role as the former speaker of the House.

DePape and his attorneys have admitted that he planned to hold Pelosi captive and struck Paul Pelosi with a hammer, a brutal attack captured in grainy police body camera footage.

The defense has, instead, leaned into the Hail Mary argument that DePape shouldn’t be found guilty on more severe charges that he sought to impede, interfere or retaliate against Pelosi over her role in Congress.

DePape’s attorneys are essentially implying that the charges against him belong in state court, not federal court. DePape faces a separate trial on state charges for the attack, and defeating federal charges could make it easier for his attorneys to negotiate a potential plea deal with local prosecutors.

“He did something awful, but as you will hear, it was not on account of Nancy Pelosi’s duties as a member of Congress,” Jodi Linker, DePape’s attorney, told the jury. “This case here in federal court is a narrow one. The case here is about the ‘why.’”

That nuanced argument is strikingly similar to the case of a young Pennsylvania woman who broke into Pelosi’s office on Jan. 6 but claimed she didn’t know the building was the U.S. Capitol.

Defendant Riley Williams argued that despite her conduct that day — which included pushing against police officers in the Capitol rotunda and cheering a mob in Pelosi’s office as several others purloined a laptop — she couldn’t be convicted of obstructing Congress’ business because she didn’t have any awareness of what was happening in the building.

Williams was ultimately convicted of multiple felonies for her actions, but jurors deadlocked on the obstruction charge.

DePape’s attorneys have focused heavily on the far-right podcasts and internet echo chambers that influenced him in the months before the attack. He testified Tuesday that he spent most of his free time playing video games while listening to fringe podcasters like Tim Pool, Jimmy Dore and Glenn Beck.

The defendant said the podcasts convinced him that Pelosi and other Democratic officials were smearing Trump with lies and protecting a cabal of pedophiles. DePape is a follower of the QAnon conspiracy movement, an evolving series of allegations against celebrities and political figures that attempts to tarnish them with false allegations of pedophilia and other crimes.

DePape’s list of targets included Pelosi, Hunter Biden, Rep. Adam Schiff, Gov. Gavin Newsom, actor Tom Hanks and a queer studies professor and scholar — all of whom he believes are villains sprung from delusional online conspiracy theories.

“Many of us do not believe any of that,” Linker told the jury. “But the evidence in this trial will show that Mr. DePape believes these things, he believes them with every ounce of his being.”