SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — At a massive military parade attended by foreign leaders, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un rolled out his nuclear-armed military’s most powerful weapons, including a new intercontinental ballistic missile he may be preparing to test in coming weeks.

Related Articles

Morocco’s king addresses social injustices in speech as Gen Z protesters demand reforms

Peru wakes up to 7th president in less than a decade after President Boluarte ousted by Congress

Melania Trump says 8 kids displaced by Russia-Ukraine war reunite with families after Putin talks

France’s Macron asks newly resigned Prime Minister Lecornu to try again to form a government

Russian strikes wound at least 20 in Ukraine’s capital as child is killed in separate attack

The parade, which began Friday night and marked the 80th anniversary of the founding of the ruling Workers’ Party, highlighted Kim’s growing diplomatic footing and his relentless drive to build an arsenal that could viably target the continental United States and his rivals in Asia.

North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency said the parade featured a new, yet-to-be-tested intercontinental ballistic missile called the Hwasong-20, which it described as the “most powerful nuclear strategic weapons system.”

Other weapons on display included shorter range ballistic, cruise and supersonic missiles, which the North previously described as capable of delivering nuclear strikes against targets in rival South Korea.

In a speech at the parade, Kim said his military “must continue to evolve into an invincible force that eliminates all threats,” but made no direct mention of Washington or Seoul, according to comments published by KCNA.

Attorney General Keith Ellison’s office had “no substantive response” on Friday to a further demand by the administration of President Donald Trump for Minnesota to change its policies allowing transgender athletes to participate in girls’ school sports.

The U.S. Departments of Education and Health and Human Services said in a Sept. 30 news release that Minnesota and the statewide governing body for high school sports had 10 days to “voluntarily resolve” its transgender athletes’ policy or risk losing federal funding.

With that deadline now passed, Minnesota and the Minnesota State High School Leagues’ policies remain unchanged — despite federal threats of “imminent enforcement action” if the state didn’t resolve alleged violations of Title IX, federal law banning sex discrimination in education.

An ongoing federal government shutdown and a lawsuit from Ellison’s office challenging an earlier Trump executive order barring transgender athletes from girls’ sports may have bought the state more time.

Timeframe for response

A Friday letter from Ellison’s office to the civil rights offices at the education and human services departments, Solicitor General Liz Kramer said it was not clear whether the 10-day deadline was definitive, as the resolution and the initial letter from education and human services civil rights offices did not include a timeframe for response.

“As you know, if the federal government intends to follow the law, it would need to follow an extensive, multi-step administrative process before any federal funding to Minnesota education programs or activities could ever be terminated,” she wrote.

“In addition, the federal government is currently shut down and I understand employees in both
Offices for Civil Rights are furloughed,” Kramer added later in the letter. “As a result, the Minnesota Department of Education will not provide any substantive response at this time.”

Press officials with the U.S. Department of Education couldn’t immediately be reached Friday as the federal government shutdown entered its 10th day.

The Minnesota Department of Education receives 10% of its annual funding from the federal government — around $1.4 billion in 2025. The September Title IX report is the latest federal challenge to Minnesota’s transgender athletes policy.

Executive order, Ellison lawsuit

Trump also issued an executive order on the issue earlier this year, and U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi threatened Minnesota officials with legal action if they did not comply. The U.S. Justice Department sued Maine and California over their policies allowing transgender athletes in girls’ sports.

Ellison in April brought a preemptive lawsuit against the Trump administration challenging two executive orders — one banning transgender athletes in women’s and girls’ sports and another aimed at removing recognition of transgender people in federal policy, saying they were are aimed at “bullying” transgender youth.

For now, the state of Minnesota’s continued reply to the Trump administration’s threats to cut off education funding remains centered on the lawsuit.

The Minnesota State High School League didn’t respond to requests for comment on the Title IX report. The group has allowed students to decide whether to participate in boys or girls sports based on their gender identity since 2014.

Local pressure

Forest Lake school board members on Oct. 2 voted 4-3 to send a letter to statewide leaders asking them to comply with the order after Trump administration officials published their Title IX report. Board President Curt Rebelein said the state needed to act due to the risk to federal funding.

In response to the Forest Lake letter and other school board members pressuring the state to comply, Ellison reiterated the stance he expressed in an opinion he issued on Trump executive orders on transgender athletes earlier this year: That they likely would violate the state Human Rights Act and the Equal Protection Clause of the state Constitution, which includes protections for different sexual orientations and gender identities.

“Letting the very small number of transgender students in Minnesota play on their school sports teams doesn’t harm anyone, but segregating them does,” he said in a statement. “I too am concerned about the Trump Administration’s threats to cut education funding for kids across Minnesota, but this matter is before the court right now.”

It’s unclear just how many transgender athletes participate in Minnesota school sports. Federal officials said they found transgender athletes had participated in girls’ sports, including lacrosse skiing, track and field, volleyball and softball.

Related Articles

Daniel Rosen to serve as next U.S. attorney for Minnesota

Tony Lazzaro, Minnesota GOP donor likened to Jeffrey Epstein, loses at Supreme Court

Forest Lake schools presses state leaders to follow federal order on trans athletes

As some big names sit out St. Paul mayor’s race, others ponder city’s challenges

MN to launch paid family, medical leave program Jan. 1. How will it work?

By WILL WEISSERT, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — AstraZeneca on Friday became the second major pharmaceutical manufacturer to announce it had agreed to lower the cost of prescription drugs for Medicaid under a deal struck with the Trump administration that avoided its threats of steep tariffs.

President Donald Trump made the announcement in the Oval Office with AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot, who said that during tough negotiations to reach a deal, Trump and his team of officials had “really kept me up at night.”

Under the agreement, AstraZeneca will charge most-favored-nation pricing to Medicaid, while guaranteeing such pricing on newly launched drugs, Trump said. That involves matching the lowest price offered in other developed nations.

“For many years, Americans have paid the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs, by far,” Trump said, adding that the new deal may cut prices to “the lowest price anywhere in the world. That’s what we get.”

Related Articles

Federal judge rules Trump administration cannot put conditions on domestic violence grants

Melania Trump says 8 kids displaced by Russia-Ukraine war reunite with families after Putin talks

Air traffic controllers who duck unpaid work during the shutdown could be fired, Duffy warns

Qatari facility to be built in Idaho, Defense Secretary Hegseth says

Young Republicans challenge 2020 census results as part of wider GOP attack on head count

AstraZeneca’s deal follows a similar agreement Pfizer announced late last month. Advocates have generally praised the administration’s efforts to cut drug prices, though some have expressed concerns that too much onus is being placed on the manufacturers to lower costs without implementing U.S. policy safeguards to ensure such outcomes.

Both agreements, however, build on an executive order Trump signed in May that set a deadline for drugmakers to electively lower prices or face new limits on what the government will pay. Trump had suggested that a series of deals with drug companies would subsequently be coming.

“The tariffs were a big reason he came here,” Trump said of Soriot.

Cambridge, United Kingdom-based AstraZeneca makes a range of cancer treatments. Its products include the lung cancer drug Tagrisso; Lynparza, an oral treatment for ovarian cancer, and Calquence, which treats chronic lymphocytic leukemia.

Those drugs brought in a total of more than $7.5 billion in U.S. sales last year.

AstraZeneca announced Thursday that it would spend $4.5 billion on a new manufacturing plant near Charlottesville, Virginia, and its Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, spoke during Friday’s Oval Office announcement to cheer groundbreaking on the new facility.

The drugmaker said that project was the centerpiece of $50 billion in investments the company plans to make in the U.S. by 2030.

AstraZeneca said it plans to reach $80 billion in total revenue by then, half of which will be generated in the United States.

Trump predicted the investment’s could lead to 3,600 jobs domestically “just to begin with.”

One of the AstraZeneca drugs was already subject to price reductions due to a Medicare negotiating strategy implemented under President Biden. Still, Trump insisted that Democrats shouldn’t “get credit” and suggested the party’s key leaders may try.

The announcements came months after AstraZeneca said it was scrapping plans to expand a vaccine manufacturing plant in its home country. The company blamed several factors, including reduced government financial support.

The Trump administration has put up a landing page for its new website, TrumpRX.gov, where people will be able to buy drugs directly from manufacturers, according to officials. Both Pfizer and AstraZeneca will offer medications through the site, according to the administration.

The website’s landing page features two very large pictures of Trump and a promise that the site is “Coming Soon” in January 2026.

It says at the bottom of the page that the site was “Designed in DC by The National Design Studio,” the new government website design hub that Trump created by executive order in August, which is being led by Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia.

Associated Press writers Tom Murphy and Michelle L. Price contributed to this report.

The setting of a “post-apocalyptic dystopia” has become such a staple of modern literature – and the resultant cinematic adaptations – that your public library could reserve a room for books that fit the form.

When American playwright Jose Rivera wrote “Marisol” in 1992, it may have looked like it could be shelved in that room. But the author leaned upon another literary tradition, that of Latin American magical realism, in his tale of how a civil war in heaven was pulling guardian angels from their duties and plunging New York City into unrecognizable chaos.

While you may feel as if there’s enough chaos in your life right now, don’t let that keep you from attending a performance of “Marisol,” which is opening Penumbra Theatre’s season in a co-production with Teatro del Pueblo. Rivera’s writing is well worth experiencing, and what’s on stage at Penumbra is an imaginative and deeply absorbing staging, which, despite its darkness, offers a sense of hope and faith in humanity.

Directed by Sarah Bellamy, the production can bear the tone of a nightmare while also inspiring laughter with what comes out of the mouths of its wildly offbeat characters. Played out on Maruti Evans’ fascinating set full of steel mesh and funhouse mirrors and enhanced by the haunting projections of Miko Simmons, it’s a triumph of design that’s at its most compelling when it finds the realism embedded in this quite surreal tale.

James Craven plays a homeless man in Penumbra Theatre and Teatro del Pueblo’s production of “Marisol,” Jose Rivera’s apocalyptic drama about a woman trying to survive in a seemingly collapsing world. It plays at Penumbra Theatre in St. Paul through Nov. 2, 2025. (Caroline Yang / Penumbra Theatre)

The title character (played by Kay Mercedes) works for a Manhattan textbook publisher, but lives in a rough part of the Bronx, and it’s not long before we witness her enduring violent threats on a subway train and at her apartment door. In both cases, the danger is swept away by her leather-jacketed guardian angel (a visibly world-weary Vinecia Coleman), who then alerts Marisol that she’s relinquishing her duties of protecting her in order to help lead an insurrection in heaven against a senile and failing god.

Everything goes sideways from there. Marisol is forced to deal with the romantic obsession of a friend’s mentally ill brother, that friend’s disappearance, and being plunged into a landscape that’s less a dystopia than an apocalypse in process. The moon has disappeared, the sun’s in the wrong part of the sky, food is inedible, and men are bearing children. Sad to say, Rivera’s prophecy of violently aggressive “patriots” setting fire to homeless people seems to have come true.

If all that sounds daunting, be assured that Penumbra and Teatro del Pueblo’s production and, especially, Rivera’s arresting voice make this a very rewarding experience. It’s a tricky story to pull off convincingly, but the six-person cast does so, making each character memorable.

Director Bellamy wisely chooses to emphasize naturalism in the portrayals, making it all the more discomfiting when reality goes off the rails. James Craven is a standout as a wheelchair-bound homeless man, while Paul LaNave is compelling as a couple of daunting villains and the obsessive brother who undergoes a startling transformation.

If Mercedes’ Marisol were less melodramatic and more in tune with the naturalism of her castmates, this could be a truly masterful staging. But, as it is, this dystopian odyssey is well worth taking.

Penumbra Theatre and Teatro del Pueblo’s ‘Marisol’

When: Through Nov. 2

Where: Penumbra Theatre, 270 N. Kent St., St. Paul

Tickets: $45-$20, available at 651-224-3180 or penumbratheatre.org

Capsule: While dark and discomfiting, it’s also a deeply compelling experience.

Related Articles

Theater review: English import ‘Enormous Crocodile’ makes Roald Dahl delightful

Review: ‘A Beautiful Noise’ paints a dark picture of superstar Neil Diamond

Theater review: ‘Addams Family’ isn’t curious or kooky enough

Theater review: Park Square offers a riotous love letter to theater with ‘It’s Only a Play’

Review: History Theatre misses the mark with ‘Don’t Miss Doris Hines’