News Day

Debt buyers hound, harass, and defraud people who may never have owed a dime to begin with, according to an alarming exposé in the Star Tribune.

Firms with little known names, like LVNV Funding and Unifund CCR Partners, buy massive databases of unpaid debts for cents on the dollar, and then inundate courts with legal actions seeking to collect the full amount, plus interest and fees. These firms, known as debt buyers, base their claims on data up to 15 years old that can be impossible to verify.

The National Consumer Law Center, an advocacy group for low-income Americans, estimates that one in 10 debt-buyer lawsuits nationwide is based on inaccurate information. Bank accounts have been tapped, wages seized and people threatened with arrest for debts they don’t owe or for inflated amounts.

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The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) has named a 20-member panel to study the use of gang databases reports Politics in Minnesota. The panel includes representatives from a wide range of perspectives, including ACLU, NAACP and police organizations. The gang databases have been widely criticized because of lack of transparency and due process. Criteria for inclusion are very broad, including being in the company of a gang member, and there’s no way for juveniles or young adults to find out whether they are included in the two Minnesota databases – or to get their names removed. Continue reading →

Sulfide mining is starting in northern Minnesota, reports MPR, and it could turn into our own Deepwater disaster:

A trickle of water runs from a six-inch hole Duluth Metals is drilling some 3,000 feet into the earth, seeping into a pit that holds water and a scum of grey muck, finely ground rock from deep in the earth. Koschak says it probably contains copper and nickel traces.

“But look what it’s going into, a wetland,” he says.  “That’s all this is, is a network of spruce swamps, all interconnected, this all goes into Birch Lake, all this water.”

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