Child care providers and Minnesota Democrats gathered Wednesday to warn that an estimated 20,000 children could be affected by the federal child care funding freeze announced Tuesday.

The press conference was arranged after U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Deputy Secretary Jim O’Neill said the federal government has frozen all child care payments to Minnesota after claims of child care center fraud resurfaced over the weekend.

Gov. Tim Walz responded Tuesday on X, saying President Donald Trump is “politicizing the issue to defund programs that help Minnesotans.”

Amanda Schillinger, director of Pumpkin Patch Childcare & Learning Center in Burnsville, said Wednesday that more than 20,000 children in more than 4,000 programs across the state could be affected by the freeze.

“Their families will not be able to go to work because they don’t have child care; our child care center and others like us will have to close our doors. Seventy-five percent of the children in our program qualify through the state for child care funding,” she said. “We can’t afford to continue to operate if we lose 75% of our enrollment without child care assistance funding. Our center will close within a month.”

Rep. Carlie Kotyza-Witthuhn, DFL-Eden Prairie. (Courtesy of the candidate)

Rep. Carlie Kotyza-Witthuhn, DFL-Eden Prairie, co-chair of the House Children and Families Committee, said Wednesday that she takes fraud seriously and is “working every day to improve our systems, hold those criminals accountable and move our state forward.”

“That’s why it’s incredibly frustrating to me that Donald Trump and Republicans want to use this as a political vehicle to cut funding entirely to our state,” she said. “It’s irresponsible at best, and it’s despicable at worst, to cast blanket dispersions on those caring for our littlest Minnesotans, particularly those of Somali American descent. Imagine if a few people stole food from one of the nation’s largest grocers, and instead of strengthening their safeguards, they just decided to stop selling food entirely.”

Maria Snider, a St. Paul child care center director with 15 years of experience with child care assistance, said there are randomized audits to check for fraud “all the time.”

“They come. They ask you for your attendance records. It is extremely detailed. Any information that you don’t provide to them on that day, you cannot go back and say, ’Oh wait, I forgot this one,’ or, ’Oh, maybe this one was wrong. Can I correct it?’ There’s no room for that. They’re looking at very detailed things, like, for example, if you have an ’x’ instead of an ’A’ for absent, that’s considered a ding against you, that’s something that they’ll write you a letter that says, ’This is a citation for suspected fraud for an ’x’ instead of an ’A.’ So imagine my surprise at this narrative that it’s so easy to scam child care assistance,” she said.

Attorney General Keith Ellison said his office is “exploring all our legal options to ensure that critical child care services do not get abruptly slashed based on pretext and grandstanding.”

“This hasty scorched earth attack is not just wrong, it may well be illegal, and my team and I remain committed to protecting the people of Minnesota to the fullest extent of the law,” the Wednesday statement said.

The federal freeze comes after Nick Shirley, a right-wing YouTuber, posted a video Friday alleging millions of dollars of fraud at some of Minnesota’s day care centers. The video has received millions of views on his YouTube channel and X account.

State officials have responded to the claims in Shirley’s video, saying on-site visits have been conducted and children were seen at the centers, and that investigations into some of the centers have not uncovered any fraud.

“It’s my understanding that some of these more recent allegations of fraud are based on the idea that there aren’t any children in these centers and that there are falsifying attendance records to gather taxpayer dollars for children who aren’t actually attending the program, but when DCYF (Minnesota Department of Youth Children and Families) investigators go and check on health and safety visits, they usually see children at the center,” Kotyza-Witthuhn said Wednesday.

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At a press conference Monday, Speaker of the House Lisa Demuth, R-Cold Spring, said her caucus has been “working to expose fraud for years, including working with Nick Shirley and agency whistleblowers to get the information out to the public.”

In a statement from a House GOP spokesperson on Wednesday, the caucus provided some clarification about its involvement with Shirley for his video.

“Some of the information they used, including day care locations, (Child Care Assistance Program numbers), violations, etc., came from caucus staff who found it in the official DHS licensing database and other publicly available sources,” the spokesperson said.

Gophers starting center Robert Vaihola will have knee surgery on Friday and is expected to miss the rest of the season, the Pioneer Press learned Wednesday.

Vaihola aggravated his knee injury in the 66-54 win over Chicago State on Nov. 18 and has missed the last eight games. The 6-foot-8 transfer from San Jose State was averaging a team-high 7.6 rebounds and 5.0 points in 21.4 minutes per game.

Vaihola, a San Francisco native entering his senior season, appears to be a candidate to receive a medical redshirt waiver from the NCAA for next season, if the U applies for one.

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By BEN FINLEY

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. military said Wednesday it struck three more boats that were allegedly smuggling drugs, killing three people while others jumped overboard and may have survived.

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The statement by U.S. Southern Command, which oversees South America, did not reveal where the attacks occurred. Previous attacks have been in the Caribbean Sea and in the eastern Pacific Ocean.

A video posted by Southern Command on social media shows the boats traveling in a close formation, which is unusual, and the military said they were in a convoy along known narco-trafficking routes and “had transferred narcotics between the three vessels prior to the strikes.” The military did not provide evidence to back up the claim.

The military said three people were killed when the first boat was struck, while people in the other two boats jumped overboard and distanced themselves from the vessels before they were attacked. Southern Command said it immediately notified the U.S. Coast Guard to activate search and rescue efforts.

The attacks occurred on Tuesday. Southern Command’s statement did not say whether those who jumped off the boats were rescued.

Calling in the Coast Guard is notable because the U.S. military drew heavy scrutiny after U.S. forces killed the survivors of an attack in early September with a follow-up strike to their disabled boat. Some Democratic lawmakers and legal experts said the military committed a crime, while the Trump administration and some Republican lawmakers say the follow-up strike was legal.

The latest attacks bring the total number of known boat strikes to 33 and the number of people killed to at least 110 since early September, according to numbers announced by the Trump administration.

President Donald Trump has justified the attacks as a necessary escalation to stem the flow of drugs into the United States and asserted that the U.S. is engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels.

Along with the strikes, the Trump administration has built up military forces in the region as part of an escalating pressure campaign on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who has been charged with narco-terrorism in the United States.

Meanwhile, the CIA was behind a drone strike last week at a docking area believed to have been used by Venezuelan drug cartels, according to two people familiar with details of the operation who requested anonymity to discuss the classified matter.

It was the first known direct operation on Venezuelan soil since the U.S. began strikes in September, a significant escalation in the administration’s pressure campaign on Maduro’s government.

By ANDREW DALTON

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Betty Boop and “Blondie” are joining Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh in the public domain.

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The first appearances of the classic cartoon and comic characters are among the pieces of intellectual property whose 95-year U.S. copyright maximum has been reached, putting them in the public domain on Jan. 1. That means creators can use and repurpose them without permission or payment.

The 2026 batch of newly public artistic creations doesn’t quite have the sparkle of the recent first entries into the public domain of Mickey or Winnie. But ever since 2019 — the end of a 20-year IP drought brought on by congressional copyright extensions — every annual crop has been a bounty for advocates of more work belonging to the public.

“It’s a big year,” said Jennifer Jenkins, law professor and director of Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, for whom New Year’s Day is celebrated as Public Domain Day. “It’s just the sheer familiarity of all this culture.”

Jenkins said that, collectively, this year’s work shows “the fragility that was between the two wars and the depths of the Great Depression.”

Here’s a closer look at what will enter the public domain on Thursday, based on the research of Jenkins and her center.

Cartoons and comics bring the boop-a-doop

Betty Boop began as a dog. Seriously.

When she first appears in the 1930 short “Dizzy Dishes,” one of four of her cartoons entering the public domain, she’s already totally recognizable as the Jazz Age flapper later memorialized in countless tattoos, T-shirts and bumper stickers. She has her baby face, short hair with groomed curls, flashy eyelashes and miniature mouth. But she’s also got dangling poodle ears and a tiny black nose. Those would soon morph into dangling earrings and a tiny white nose.

She started as essentially the Minnie Mouse to a popular anthropomorphic dog named Bimbo, whom she would eventually outshine — and push aside. She’s got a supporting role in “Dizzy Dishes,” performing a slinky song-and-dance in a tiny black dress. She’s not named, but sings “boop boop, a doop.”

FILE – Mae Questel, who provided the loopy, child-like voice of cartoon characters Betty Boop and Olive Oyl, poses in this 1978 file photo with a poster of Betty Boop. . (AP Photo/File)

Jenkins suggests this canine Betty Boop could be rich for exploitation in new works, and has a free idea: “She was bitten by a radioactive dog, that’s why she had this weird backstory,” she said with a laugh. “This movie needs to be made.”

The character was designed and owned by Fleischer Studios, and the shorts were released by Paramount Pictures. She was based at least in part on singer Helen Kane, known as the “Boop-Oop-a-Doop Girl,” thanks to a hit 1929 song. Kane would lose a lawsuit over Betty Boop’s character and use of the phrase. During the proceedings the defense alleged Black singer Esther Lee Jones used similar phrases first.

Artists are now free to use this earliest Boop in films and similar work. But making merch won’t be free. In an important distinction often raised by Disney over Mickey Mouse, a character’s trademark is distinct from the copyright of works that feature them. The Fleischer Productions trademark of Betty Boop remains intact.

Boops and doops were apparently in the air in 1930. Blondie Boopadoop was, like Betty, a young flapper, and the central character of Chic Young’s newspaper comic strip that debuted in 1930. It inspired a film series and radio show, and is still running today in papers that still have comics.

FILE – Dean Young shows off one a Dagwood sandwich at his New Orleans test kitchen Tuesday, May 9, 2006. (AP Photo/Cheryl Gerber, File)

The strip followed her carefree breeze through life with her boyfriend, Dagwood Bumstead. The two would marry (and she would change her name) in 1933, and the strip would become the sandwich-heavy domestic comedy familiar to later readers. Though the strip was meant to be based on a woman’s life, Dagwood would in many ways become its breakout star — a proto- Adam Driver, if you will, as the breakout actor from “Girls.”

FILE – Dean Young, writer of the”Blondie” comic strip, draws in his studio in Clearwater, Fla., July 12, 2005. (AP Photo/Robert Azmitia, File)

Nine new Mickey Mouse cartoons also are becoming public domain, two years after “Steamboat Willie” made the first version of him public property. He’s joined this year by his dog Pluto, who, in 1930, was known as Rover. (He would get his long-term moniker the following year.)

Books bring big detective debuts

The books entering the public domain this year open the door to three iconic detectives from the 20th century:

— The teen sleuth Nancy Drew, whose first four books came in 1930, starting with “The Secret of the Old Clock.” They were written by Mildred Benson under the pen name Carolyn Keene.

— The middle-aged(-ish) sleuth Sam Spade, who debuted via the full-book version of Dashiell Hammett’s “The Maltese Falcon.” (It had been serialized in a magazine the previous year.)

— The elderly sleuth Miss Marple, who solves her first mystery in Agatha Christie’s “Murder at the Vicarage.”

A year after his “The Sound and the Fury” became public, William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying” becomes public domain. It would help lead to his Nobel Prize in literature.

And kiddie lit legends Dick and Jane, who taught generations to read and became essential parody fodder for decades, become public via the “Elson Basic Readers” textbooks.

Films include Marxes, Marlene and Oscar winners

A year after their film debut, “The Cocoanuts,” entered the public domain, the Marx Brothers’ beloved “Animal Crackers” joins it, as they entered their prime of high cinematic antics. The film finds Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Zeppo invading a Long Island society party celebrating an explorer of Africa.

FILE – Irving Berlin, at the piano, and friends celebrate his 25th year since he wrote “Alexander’s Rag Time Band” at a banquet in his honor in Hollywood, Ca., Jan. 20, 1936. Standing behind Berlin, at right, is Joseph Schenck, film producer. In front row singing together are two of the Marx Brothers, Chico and Harpo. (AP Photo, File)

Other movies entering the public domain include:

— “The Blue Angel,” the German film from Josef von Sternberg that emblazoned Marlene Dietrich’s top-hatted image into film lore.

— “King of Jazz,” featuring the first screen appearance of Bing Crosby.

— A pair of Oscar best picture winners, “All Quiet on the Western Front,” which won in 1930, and “Cimarron,” which won in 1931. The award was known as “Outstanding Production” then, and the Academy Awards eligibility period didn’t sync with the calendar year.

The coming decade will bring a true bounty of Hollywood Golden Age films into the public domain. 2027 will be a truly monster year, literally, with the original 1931 Universal Pictures versions of “Dracula” and “Frankenstein” among the titles due.

Dreamy and embraceable tunes ring in the 1930s

As in the last several years, a whistle-worthy stream of tunes from the Great American Songbook will become public:

— Four cherished classics written by George Gershwin, with lyrics by his brother Ira: “Embraceable You,” “I’ve Got a Crush on You,” “But Not for Me” and “I Got Rhythm.”

— “Georgia on My Mind,” written by Hoagy Carmichael and Stuart Gorrell.

— “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” written by Gus Kahn, Fabian Andre and Wilbur Schwandt.

Different laws regulate the actual recordings of songs, and those newly in the public domain this week date to 1925. They include Rodgers and Hart’s “Manhattan” by the Knickerbockers, “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” by Marian Anderson and “The St. Louis Blues” by Bessie Smith, featuring Louis Armstrong.