Line 3 oil flowing but Enbridge has major construction cleanup work ahead

Enbridge really embracing that “drain the swamp” rhetoric. The Star Tribune’s Jennifer Bjorhus reports: “Oil started flowing through the newly built Line 3 pipeline in northern Minnesota on Friday, bringing closure to one chapter of the large and bitterly disputed construction project. … Now comes a new one: cleaning up the mess left behind. … Forced by state regulators, Calgary, Alberta-based Enbridge has launched a major cleanup effort in Clearwater County to repair the aquifer crews punctured during construction in January. Artesian groundwater has been welling up for more than eight months near this rural community, wasting at least 24 million gallons and threatening to dry out two rare and protected wetland areas nearby called fens.”

More Minnesota January 6 arrests announced Monday morning. WCCO reports: “Three more Minnesotans have been arrested in connection with the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. … The FBI said three men from Lindstrom were arrested Monday morning and all are expected to be charged.”

A report from Wisconsin’s Fort McCoy. The New York Times’ Miriam Jordan and Jennifer Steinhauer report: “In late August, evacuees from Afghanistan began arriving by the busload to the Fort McCoy Army base in the Midwest, carrying little more than cellphones and harrowing tales of their narrow escapes from a country they may never see again. They were greeted by soldiers, assigned rooms in white barracks and advised not to stray into the surrounding forest, lest they get lost. … More than a month later, the remote base some 170 miles from Milwaukee is home to 12,600 Afghan evacuees, almost half of them children, now bigger than any city in western Wisconsin’s Monroe County.”

And a profile of Minneapolis mayoral candidate Sheila Nezhad in LGBTQNation. Molly Sprayregen reports: “To Sheila Nezhad, being queer means being a world builder. … The longtime community organizer and Minneapolis mayoral candidate would be the city’s first out queer mayor. With a focus on reimagining policing and public safety, she told LGBTQ Nation that launching Minneapolis into the future requires ‘radical compassionate imagination,’ which being queer has given her. … ‘[Queer people] have had to imagine and build families, homes, jobs, and the way we do safety outside of traditional social systems for years…What we have now is a system of policing that we’ve been doing for 150 years, and it continues to bring violence to our communities, and especially to our trans communities and LGBTQ communities of color.’”