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Bad AI, Clerical Error in L.A. Cause Police Drama for Local Car Reporter
Minnesota journalist Joel Feder and his wife were out running errands on weekend, bopping about in a $155,000 Range Rover he was testing for review. Then four police cars boxed Feder in at a Plymouth Kohl’s parking lot and began shouting at him to get out of the vehicle.
The cops believed the Rover was stolen, and had been following Feder via Flock’s AI camera system for days. “You’re lucky we’re in Plymouth. If you were in Minneapolis, they definitely would’ve come at you with guns drawn,” an officer told him at the scene.
It’s a wild story, laid out by Feder himself in a piece appropriately titled “How Flock Cameras Wrongly Tracked Me for Days Over ‘Stolen’ Plates and Sent Police After Me” for auto industry news site The Drive. Basically, an L.A.-based dealer made a typo when reporting a lost license plate. On top of that, Flock's glitchy AI cameras were unable to properly read the special characters used on the media plates issued for review cars.
“Anywhere a police department has a partnership with Flock, any other JLR-owned car with the same plate structure is going to get flagged as stolen,” Feder writes. “In fact, four other 34 ## DTM cars were being tracked around Minnesota that week.”
We’re No. 1! We’re No. 1!
For, um, skin cancer. Which is kinda shocking, considering sun-soaked states like Arizona and Florida exist, but a new report crowns us the most cancerous. “Minnesota has the highest rate of melanoma in the U.S., with 46.8 cases per 100,000 people in 2023, according to the most recent data compiled by the CDC and NCI,” Carly Mallenbaum writes in Thursday's Axios Twin Cities newsletter.
So how did this happen? Our caucasity is partly to blame, as our white, non-Hispanic population has the highest melanoma rates. Farmers, migrant workers, and other folks who work outdoors are also at greater risk—and we have a lot of 'em. But it’s not all bad news; Mallenbaum notes that more aggressive screening has helped patients get diagnosed years—sometimes decades—earlier, which yields higher survival rates.
Better access to healthcare also probably played a role. The number of insured Minnesotans began to rise after the Affordable Health Care Act was signed into law in 2010, and MNsure reported a record year in 2025 for insurance signups. Unfortunately, that trend is already starting to nosedive thanks to this year’s massive rate hikes.
New Labor News: Suburban Starbucks, Half Price Books Workers Unionize
Starbucks workers just keep voting to unionize, with over 700 locations onboard nationwide. In Minnesota, that number has grown from 16 to 17, with employees at 3939 W. 50th St. in Edina opting this week to join Starbucks Workers United.
“I’m so proud of our team and all the hard work we put in these last few weeks while the company leaned hard on us with their union busting,” 50th & France Starbucks worker Kaye-Lani Story says via press release. Key concerns for employees include addressing chronic understaffing and unaddressed accusations of labor law violations.
Elsewhere in the wild world of labor: Workers at the Half Price Books in Apple Valley also voted this week to unionize; five of the 10 unionized HPBs in the U.S. are in Minnesota. Much like the Starbucks gang, they're also mobilizing for better pay and hours, as well as a fight against workforce homogeneity.
“Half Price Books is attempting to iron out the individuality that shapes our community by standardizing our roles and incorporating AI in our workplace,” staffer Drew Schmidt says. “Unionizing is our way of encouraging Half Price Books to correct its course.”
A Heartwarming Story About a Cemetery for Neglected Children
No really—hear me out! This MPR News story about a man and an Eagle Scout rehabbing an old graveyard out in Owatonna is the kind of stuff that restores one’s faith in humanity.
While on a visit to the Minnesota State Public School for Dependent and Neglected Children, Tim Shea was disheartened to see the cemetery in disrepair. So he began fixing it up, cleaning the headstones, picking up detritus, and researching the history of the kids and teens who, between the years 1886 to 1945, grew up, learned, and, in some cases, died at the school. Eventually he was joined by Xavier Trager, a 16-year-old Eagle Scout. Together they’re sprucing things up, and potentially adding new elements to the site in the future.
“These kids have become my kids, you know,” Shea tells reporter Catharine Richert. “You get very protective of them after a while.”
