For more than a year, Minnesota has been operating under some level of restrictions, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. But soon, most of those restrictions will be lifted. Here’s what you need to know.

Five hostages were freed and a suspect is in custody after a standoff Thursday that lasted more than eight hours at a Wells Fargo branch in St. Cloud. The Stearns County Attorney says the suspect will be charged Friday with aggravated robbery, kidnapping and second-degree assault, and may also face federal charges.

Dr. Nancy Messonnier had served as the agency's top respiratory disease official since 2016. Then-President Donald Trump reportedly threatened to fire her after her comments in February 2020.

An evolutionary biologist in Belgium found that the variant from the U.K. "had a transmission advantage." When Tom Wenseleers looks at early data on the variant in India, he has a feeling of deja vu.

Bemidji police on Friday released surveillance video footage showing the moment that someone climbing on the city's iconic Paul Bunyan statue caused one of its arms to break.

Three trans journalists spoke with NPR about their experience covering their community, anti-trans legislation and the idea of objectivity in the media industry.

The teacher whose class had the discussion described the lesson as a constructive one that helped students make sense of current events. But many parents who clicked on a partial recording later interpreted the conversation differently. In between those two accounts lies a fault line that confronts educators — especially Black educators — when they try to discuss race in the classroom.

World powers held a fourth round of high-level talks Friday aimed at bringing the United States back into the nuclear deal with Iran, with both sides signaling a willingness to work out the major stumbling blocks.

For most people, COVID-19 vaccines promise a return to something akin to normal life. But for the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have a transplanted organ, it's a different story.

U.S. employers added 266,000 jobs last month, far fewer than analysts had expected. The unemployment rate rose to 6.1 percent.

Duluth Mayor Emily Larson is recommending a $24 million investment into Spirit Mountain— in addition to forgiving nearly $1 million in debt— to help put the struggling city-owned ski area on more sustainable financial footing.

The small but growing trend is seen as a welcome acknowledgement of people who are grieving, as well as a sign that email marketing is becoming increasingly personalized and socially conscious.

Amid a sudden surge in demand for domestic travel, especially to beach destinations and national parks, decimated airlines are adding service to new markets as they try to inch back to profitability.

U.S. Space Command says the exact entry point into the Earth's atmosphere cannot be pinpointed until hours before its reentry, which is expected sometime around Saturday.

Authorities say a Wisconsin man killed himself in a Rochester shopping center parking lot on Wednesday.

The surge in demand for electric vehicles has ignited a new kind of “space race” within the automobile industry.

It's not just tech companies embracing work-from-home for the post-pandemic era. But manufacturers like Ford also have to consider the huge swathes of their workforce that simply can't work remotely.

House and Senate negotiations on a public safety bill focused on police accountability proposals Thursday during a conference committee meeting that included testimony from families touched by recent fatal police encounters.