🌧️ A line of scattered showers and thunderstorms will be moving through central and southern Minnesota through the morning. A couple storms could be strong with small hail and wind gusts up to 50 mph.
☀️ Sun will break out later in the day. Highs in southern Minnesota will be in the low 70s, while northern Minnesota sees highs in the 50s and 60s. Get the latest weather news on Updraft.
Coming up on Morning Edition
🏒 The Professional Women's Hockey Finals continue tonight as Minnesota takes on Boston in Game 3 — their first home game in the best-of-five series. The teams are currently tied with one win apiece. Minnesota's head coach Ken Klee joins us ahead of the matchup.
⚒️ Public tours of the Soudan Underground Mine will resume Saturday after a four-year hiatus. Visitors to the state park between Ely and Tower can now plunge more than 2,300 feet underground into the state's oldest iron mine. Reporter Dan Kraker recently got an early peek and brings us the story.
☔ And drought has all but vanished from the Minnesota landscape with less than 9 percent of the state designated to be in moderate drought. Climatologist and meteorologist Mark Seeley recaps this week's rainfall and severe weather, including two reported tornadoes near Fairmont and Winona.
Coming up at 11 a.m.
📚 In Lea Carpenter’s new spy novel “Ilium,” we meet our young and restless unnamed narrator on a day when she’s urging herself to be less mundane and to take more risks.
🎤 Carpenter joins Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas. They talk about how Carpenter’s own family history inspired her interest in America’s intelligence agencies, why women are exceptionally good spies, and how family life both complicates and clarifies the work.
For the first time in four years — after the COVID-19 pandemic and then a $9.3 million reconstruction project — public tours of the Soudan Underground Mine in northeast Minnesota are poised to start up again on Memorial Day weekend.
Visitors to the Lake Vermilion-Soudan Underground Mine State Park between Tower and Ely will again descend more than 2,300 feet underground into the state’s oldest iron mine.
Conversations with his mom led MPR News photojournalist Ben Hovland to the family story of Richard Rossman, a mischievous Minneapolis kid who learned to fly, and a journey to Austria to see where he died piloting the Powder Ann on a freezing December night in 1943.
No signs or memorials mark the spot where the Powder Ann crashed into the mountainside above Volders. There’s no hiking trail or map. The site itself sits on a farmer’s private land at an elevation of 2,085 meters, more than a mile above sea level.
✍🏻 Advocates urge Walz to sign bill funding free college for former foster youth. At the close of this legislative session earlier this week, the Senate passed a higher education omnibus bill that includes $5 million more for the Fostering Independence Grant program, which covers tuition and cost of attendance for Minnesotans who were in foster care as teens. It currently supports more than 645 students.
