Ryne Sandberg says he’s being treated for prostate cancer: ‘We will … fight to beat this,’ Chicago Cubs Hall of Famer says

posted in: Society | 0

Hall of Fame second baseman Ryne Sandberg announced Monday that he’s battling prostate cancer.

In a post on his Instagram page, the former Chicago Cubs great shared that he learned last week of his metastatic prostate cancer diagnosis, adding that he already has begun treatment.

“We will continue to be positive, strong and fight to beat this,” Sandberg wrote in his post. “Please keep us in your thoughts and prayers during this difficult time for me and my family.”

A bronze statue of Sandberg, 64, will be unveiled in Gallagher Way outside Wrigley Field on June 23, coinciding with the 40th anniversary of his legendary “Sandberg Game” against the St. Louis Cardinals.

The Wrigleyville company Obvious Shirts is planning to create a T-shirt in honor of Sandberg’s cancer fight with 100% of sales donated to a charity of Sandberg’s choice, which is still being finalized.

A winner of nine Gold Glove and seven Silver Slugger awards as well as the 1984 National League MVP award, Sandberg was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2005 and had his No. 23 retired by the Cubs the same year.

He spent four seasons (2007-10) managing in the Cubs farm system before departing the organization and joining the Philadelphia Phillies, who drafted him in the 20th round in 1978, to manage their Triple-A affiliate in 2011. After a promotion to the big-league coaching staff in 2012, Sandberg took over as the Phillies interim manager in August 2013 and one month later had the interim title removed.

Bloomington police officers take on firefighters in charity hockey game for food pantry, Burnsville

posted in: News | 0

Bloomington police officers are taking on firefighters in a charity hockey match this weekend to collect food pantry items and raise funds for families of the Burnsville public safety members killed last month.

The friendly hockey game will be held from 5 to 7 p.m. Sunday at the Bloomington Ice Garden, 3600 W. 98th St. in Bloomington.

The event is free and families and children are welcome.

Volunteers Enlisted to Assist People will collect essential items for their food pantry at the game.

In addition, there will be a silent auction, raffle and Chuck-A-Puck. Silent auction items include Twins tickets, an autographed Filip Gustavsson jersey and more.

Donations can be made through the lels.org/benevolent-fund.

Related Articles

Crime & Public Safety |


Letters: There should be zero deaths from fire in modern buildings

Crime & Public Safety |


St. Paul agrees to $210k settlement in lawsuit of woman who witnessed police shooting

Crime & Public Safety |


Memorials for 3 first responders to be removed from Burnsville City Hall lawn as grieving continues

Crime & Public Safety |


Washington County, probation officers reach tentative contract agreement over Juneteenth holiday

Crime & Public Safety |


Second 911 call from Burnsville home: Child reported ‘there was a big shootout here’

St. Paul rape charge: Woman found unconscious at man’s house had been given date rape drug

posted in: Society | 0

When a 22-year-old woman’s family was concerned they couldn’t reach her, they used the GPS location of her phone and police found her unconscious in a St. Paul man’s house.

She was hospitalized as “critically ill” and found to have GHB, more commonly known as the “date rape drug,” in her system, according to a criminal charge announced Friday by the Ramsey County attorney’s office.

Kyle Arthur Kamp (Courtesy of the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office)

The woman’s condition improved and she reported she hung out with a man, identified as 38-year-old Kyle Arthur Kamp, a few times in January and February 2023. She said they didn’t talk again until October and he picked her up the night of Nov. 14.

After drinking at various locations, she ended up back at Kamp’s house. She said she didn’t see him pour the last shot, but remembered taking it shortly after 2 a.m. and sending a text message to her sister.

“But that’s it, she has no further recall until waking in the hospital,” the criminal complaint said.

There has been another report of a GHB-involved sexual assault case involving Kamp, which remains under investigation, said Dennis Gerhardstein, Ramsey County attorney’s office spokesman.

“This case is a prime example of the greater collaboration and implementation of our improvement plan on sexual assault investigations in 2019, where we envisioned being able to uncover more cases like this where we would connect the dots with other victims across our region,” Gerhardstein said in a statement.

Neither Kamp nor an attorney could be reached for comment Friday.

Put on ventilator at hospital

In the recently charged case, the woman’s mother contacted police on Nov. 15 to report her daughter hadn’t returned home and wasn’t answering her phone.

The woman’s younger sister reported that Kamp picked up her sister from their house the night before. The woman’s phone’s location was pinging to Kamp’s address in St. Paul’s Highwood neighborhood.

As police were gathering information from the woman’s family, other officers went to Kamp’s residence on Hadley Street off Winthrop Street. Kamp let officers inside and the woman was in the living room, unconscious but breathing.

Kamp told paramedics the woman had been unconscious from drinking since 2 a.m., the complaint said. Paramedics took her to a hospital, where she arrived just before 4 p.m. She had respiratory failure and was put on a ventilator. Tests were conducted out of concern she’d “ingested a substance which was causing a toxic reaction,” the complaint continued.

She was found to have a low level of alcohol in her system, while GHB was discovered in her system. The drug can cause blackouts, memory loss and respiratory arrest.

‘Felt uneasy’ at man’s house

The woman’s condition improved and she was able to talk to a physician on Nov. 16. She told an investigator she had seven to eight shots of liquor during the course of the night, which she said wouldn’t make her lose consciousness.

“Kamp wanted to go to his house and she was OK with it,” the complaint said of what she reported, “When they arrived, she felt uneasy,” so she contacted “her sister and told her to watch her location.” Her sister couldn’t reach her.

The woman reported she asked Kamp for a ride home and he said, “You want to leave me already?” according to the complaint. She said she tried to use Lyft to schedule a ride home but couldn’t find any drivers.

Text messages showed the woman wrote to her sister that she thought the man wanted sex, but “it ain’t happening” with a thumbs down emoji. She said she never agreed to any sexual relations with Kamp that night, the complaint said.

A nurse examiner conducted a sexual assault exam, found an area of redness and pain and collected sperm for testing.

He says they drank, had sex, passed out

Kamp told the officers who were at his house to check on the woman that they each had about 30 shots of tequila, had sex and passed out, the complaint said. He woke up about 7 a.m. and went to his bed.

When he woke again in the afternoon, he assumed the woman had taken a Lyft or Uber home, but then found her vomiting in the bathroom. He said he found her passed out again when he got out of the shower.

An investigator contacted him and he “initially agreed to be interviewed. He then obtained an attorney and his interview was canceled,” the complaint said.

The Ramsey County attorney’s office charged Kamp with first-degree criminal sexual conduct. After Kamp’s arrest Wednesday, he made his first court appearance Thursday and a judge set bail at $80,000.

Related Articles

Crime & Public Safety |


Former Burnsville health aide gets 15 years in prison for sexually assaulting resident, 75

Crime & Public Safety |


Roseville police call in backup as fights break out among groups of youth; 3 injured

Crime & Public Safety |


Bloomington teen pleads guilty in West St. Paul girl’s drug overdose

Crime & Public Safety |


Wisconsin man gets more prison time in slaying, dismemberment of St. Paul man

Crime & Public Safety |


Charges: Texas bandits swipe nearly 19K worth of graphing calculators from eight east-metro Target stores

Biden calls out ‘shrinkflation’ as part of a broader strategy to reframe how voters view the economy

posted in: Politics | 0

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden is going all-in on calling out “shrinkflation.”

The term applies to a seemingly covert way for companies to raise prices by ever so slightly reducing the size of their products. There’s suddenly fewer pretzels in the bag, less toothpaste in the tube and shorter candy bars.

“It’s called shrinkflation,” Biden said in his State of the Union speech on Thursday night. “You get charged the same amount and you got about, I don’t know, 10% fewer Snickers in it.”

The president’s focus on shrinkflation is part of a broader strategy to reframe how voters think about the economy before the November election. Biden is trying to deflect criticism about high prices and instead pin the blame on big business.

He also is attempting to show everyday people that he’s fighting for them as he struggles to convince the public that the economy has strengthened under his leadership.

He talked about the shrinkflation issue in a video released on Super Bowl Sunday and highlighted a social media post by the “Sesame Street” character Cookie Monster that complained about smaller cookies.

The country’s low 3.7% unemployment rate and record 16 million applications to start new businesses have largely been overlooked by voters, who are dwelling on higher grocery and housing prices after inflation struck a four-decade high in June 2022 at 9.1%. Even as inflation has drifted down to 3.1% annually, shoppers are still worried about paying a premium at supermarkets.

“Joe Biden recognizes that high grocery prices are an ‘Achilles Heel’ politically,” said Ryan Bourne, an economist at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. “When consumers are going into the grocery store, they remember that they’re paying more than they did in 2019.”

But Bourne cautioned that, in the alternative, companies might have simply raised their list prices without shrinkflation, possibly upsetting consumers more and hurting the president’s approval on the issue. Just 34% of U.S. adults say they agree with how Biden has handled the economy, according to polling by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

“A number of companies did that because they thought that their customers would prefer it to paying higher headline prices,” Bourne said. “So I think the president should be very careful what he wishes for when he says he thinks shrinkflation is unfair.”

Sen. Katie Britt, R-Alabama, delivered the GOP response to the State of the Union and put the blame for inflation solely on Biden.

“His reckless spending dug our economy into a hole and sent the cost-of-living through the roof — the worst inflation in 40 years,” Britt said.

Republicans have claimed that prices jumped because of Biden’s $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package, even though the price increases were also global in nature. That’s a sign that broken supply chains and higher energy and food prices after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine played a role.

In a report published Wednesday, the liberal economic advocacy group Groundwork Collaborative dug into the inflation numbers published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and documented the evidence of shrinkflation, finding it played a meaningful but modest role in higher prices since 2019.

More than 7% of the increase in coffee prices came from reduced packaging. About 10% of the higher prices for snacks and household paper products came from shrinkflation. And for a president who loves ice cream, about 7% of the inflation for that product came from shrinkflation.

Companies might have been masking the higher prices from customers, but they were straightforward with investors on earnings calls, the report said. Some companies such as General Mills have also portrayed the reduced package sizes as a way to manage their own costs and address the challenge of climate change.

The snack company Utz shaved its potato chip bags by half an ounce to 9 ounces, the report said. It trimmed two ounces worth of pretzels out of its pretzel jars, with the CEO heralding to stock analysts its ability to manage what the industry calls “price pack architecture.” PepsiCo reduced the size of its Frito Scoops bags, Gatorade bottles and Doritos bags.

“Why we’re seeing it now is because shrinkflation is late-stage ‘greedflation’ — when you’ve gone as far as you can go in increasing prices and consumers can’t take another increase,” said Linsday Owens, executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative. “It’s much more deceptive than a list price hike.”

Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pennsylvania, has introduced a bill that would ban shrinkflation by ordering the Federal Trade Commission to treat it as an unfair or deceptive practice, enabling the government to pursue civil penalties in court against companies that do so.

Biden gave the measure a full endorsement in his speech.

“Pass Bobby Casey’s bill and stop this,” he said.

Related Articles

National Politics |


U.S. adds 275,000 jobs last month; unemployment rises to 3.9%

National Politics |


Paul Krugman: The rich spend differently from you and me

National Politics |


Biden administration would cap credit card late fees at $8, part of campaign against junk fees

National Politics |


Real World Economics: Why drug monopolies are bad medicine

National Politics |


Your Money: Where’s my stuff? Spring cleaning your estate plan