June 9, 1999 - Two weeks after Katie Poirer was apparently abducted from a Moose Lake convenience store... the official search is ended... but volunteers are continuing to comb a larger area. Even though they've found no sign of the 19-year old woman or her attacker searchers are trying to stay hopeful as they scour roadsides up to 50 miles away.
May 31, 1999 - The Grand Portage National Monument has opened for the summer season at the site of an 18-Century fur trading post a few miles down the North Shore from the Canadian border. For the first time, monument maintainance is being provided by the Grand Portage Band of Chippewa instead of the National Park Service.
May 31, 1999 - Hundreds of volunteers spent part of their Holiday weekend searching swamps and roadsides near Moose Lake, for evidence into the disappearance of 19-year old Kathryn Poirier.
May 6, 1999 - John Lyght, former Cook County Sheriff, talks about being born and raised in Cook County, along Minnesota's far Northeastern corner. With his parents, and eventually 14 brothers and sisters, the Lyghts were the first African American family that settled among the Swedes and Norwegians on Lake Superior's North Shore.
May 5, 1999 - MPR’s Bob Kelleher reports on the diminishing population of rainbow smelt in Lake Superior. Years ago, the smelt run drew huge crowds to Lake Superior beaches, where fish were netted by hand and cooked over open fires. Raucous all-night beach parties fueled by generous doses of alcohol achieved mythical status around the big lake. But now, the big smelt runs are history.
April 29, 1999 - An ambitious plan to market Lake Superior Lamprey for the dinner table in Portugal has fallen through because of Mercury contamination in the fish.
April 27, 1999 - Tucked into agriculture bills before the Minnesota Legislature is a small proposal to study the merits of a publicly owned grain-loading facility in the port of Duluth. The idea comes from a Litchfield area farmer, who's frustrated with large grain companies, and those companies' domination of the grain export business.
April 21, 1999 - A new report says Minnesota loggers are taking so much timber from the state's forests there won't be enough harvestable wood within a decade to support some of the state's timber industries.
April 8, 1999 - A new steel plant proposed for the Iron Range town of Nashwauk could create more than one thousand jobs and pump millions of dollars into Northeast Minnesota's economy. But the proposal comes with a huge start-up cost including Millions of dollars from the State of Minnesota.
March 30, 1999 - The state's longest-serving legislator returned to the Minnesota House on Monday member returned to the Legislature after nearly a two-month absence. Eighty-eight-year-old DFL Representative Willard Munger is recuperating from surgery to remove a cancerous tumor from his colon. Munger will start chemotherapy Tuesday. In a speech marking his return, Munger took friendly shots at lawmakers. He says he was keeping tabs on House members by watching them on television. Munger has held office in the House, representing a portion of Duluth, almost continuously since first being elected in 1954. Despite his health problems, Munger isn't ready yet to discuss retirement.