English Bulldog Puppies for Sale in Minneapolis, MN

Amid the Minnesota fraud row, social media posts have revealed a Craigslist ad seeking “child actors” for a daycare in Minneapolis’ Hennepin County. The poster requested 20 children to act as clients during the time when the Minnesota observes them to determine whether it is a legitimate daycare.

The ad is headlined “Daycare hiring child actors for 3 day contract (Ventura Village)”. “My family runs day care here in the city and have for over 5 years, until Monday when funding was cruelly ripped away without cause,” the description said, referring to the Trump administration freezing Minnesota childcare funds. “Due to this insane poor decision clear in white supremacy, we had to close our door immediately.”

It added, “We must prove we are a function day care to get the funding back. The issue is, the ENTIRE client base has already found new daycare services so we need to find new clients base quickly. To help hurry this state vetting processes, we are looking to hire 20 child actors for 3 days, while state is present on site.”

Read More | Who is Nick Shirley? YouTuber's ‘Minnesota’s Billion Dollar Fraud Scandal’ video sparks backlash against Tim Walz

The ad further said that each actor will be paid $1500 per day, and asked interested guardians to send their child’s age and a “note of what makes your child a special actor.”

The ad was since removed from Craiglist, but screenshots have surfaced on social media.

Fraud in Minnesota

This comes after content creator and independent journalist Nick Shirley came under spotlight for alleging that there is a massive fraud involving taxpayer dollars in Minnesota's daycare system. He shared various videos on social media to expose fraudulent practices in the state, specifically exposing a Somali-run daycare fraud. Subsequently, the Trump administration said it is stopping federal funds to Minnesota because of fraud.

Read More | After Nick Shirley, journalist accuses Somali-run daycare centers of fraud in Washington: ‘They threatened me with…’

Latest federal data showed that 1.4 million children rely on the funds to attend daycare nationwide, NPR reported. More than 23,000 of them are currently in Minnesota.

News that robotaxi company Waymo is planning an expansion into Minneapolis was met with excitement in some corners, trepidation in others — and one big question:

How is that going to work in a Minnesota winter?

Minnesota drivers are accustomed to wintry roads. Less clear is how well driverless cars can handle ice and snow of various forms, from fluffy to slushy to slick.

So far, Waymo is operating its driverless taxi service in temperate cities like San Francisco, Phoenix and Los Angeles. In November, it announced a future expansion into more cities, including intemperate Minneapolis.

Waymo’s cars are already on the roads here, collecting data. The company’s entry into the Twin Cities market builds on other efforts, including a pilot in Eden Prairie, to use autonomous vehicles in a wintry climate.

For now, there are drivers behind the wheel of Waymos, though the company has said it’s not just here for test drives and plans to launch its driverless ride service in the future.

Autonomous in Eden Prairie

Waymo isn’t the first robocar company to come to Minnesota. May Mobility has been operating vehicles semiautonomously in Eden Prairie since last year and in Grand Rapids, Minn., since 2022.

As of mid-December, the Eden Prairie pilot, a partnership with SouthWest Transit, was close to providing free rides to 20,000 people, bringing people to and from 127 preset stops within the city.

On a recent ride, Mark Schmelzle, a May Mobility site autonomy engineer working with SouthWest Transit, took control of the company’s autonomous van when he wasn’t sure the vehicle could safely operate autonomously. Most often when that happens, it’s an issue of the vehicle determining exactly where it is, he said.

“We like to compare it a little bit to a horse and a carriage,” he said. “You can let the horse take the lead, but if things get tight … you always have the leads in your hands to interact and to manually control the situation.”

Snow presents its own challenges because it’s a temporary obstacle: The edges of a building don’t change with the seasons, but the edges of a snowbank in Minnesota do, Schmelzle said.

Eventually, the plan is to operate 100% autonomously. Now, the vehicles operate autonomously about 60% of the time, said SouthWest Transit CEO Erik Hansen.

“It’s a process,” he said. “You start with smaller numbers, you work your way up.”

The vehicles are learning to negotiate snow and ice, but for now, human drivers do play a bigger role on snowy or extremely cold days. May Mobility vans were out during the snowstorm Dec. 9 but were fully human-operated, Schmelzle said. Likewise, it’s up to humans to drive on very cold days because the sensors aren’t rated for use below zero degrees Fahrenheit.

Robocars use a suite of sensors — including LIDAR (light detection and ranging), radar and cameras — that are often better at “seeing” obstacles than humans.

Using light and sound waves, LIDAR and radar are good at detecting and measuring the size of a car up ahead, and how far away it is, even through fog. Because it relies on heat, infrared is good at detecting deer, or a person out shoveling, even if the visibility is bad.

Unlike the lane assist some drivers have on their cars, which tends to rely on white and yellow paint lines to tell when drivers are off-track, robocars use more precise geofencing, which works even when road surfaces are snow-covered.

Put together, these technologies mean robocars have a more sophisticated read on the roads than humans.

“They can see more than humans. They can see more detail farther away. They can see through fog,” Nathir Rawashdeh, an assistant professor of applied computing at Michigan Technological University, which is located in Michigan’s famously snowy Upper Peninsula, where many robocars get tested in winter driving conditions.

Autonomous vehicles tend to be good at dealing with expected obstacles, and less good at handling unexpected ones, said Rawashdeh’s colleague, Jeremy Bos, an associate professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Michigan Tech.

“They’re much better and safer drivers than we are in a lot of circumstances,” Bos said. “The one thing they don’t do is adapt to new situations.”

For example, Rawashdeh offered, a human would hopefully see a wet concrete sign and not drive onto a just-poured road — but an autonomous vehicle might not read the sign. Recently, Waymo recalled software after reports of cars failing to stop for school bus stop signs.

In December, Waymo cars blocked traffic during a power outage in San Francisco as they struggled to negotiate intersections where traffic lights weren’t working. The company suspended service temporarily.

Ultimately, Bos said companies operating autonomous vehicles need to consider the conditions they can — and can’t — safely operate in, whether that’s dry roads or snow and even black ice.

Waymo, a division of Google parent company Alphabet, hasn’t provided timelines on when it plans to advance its rollout of robotaxi services in Minneapolis.

Minnesota Department of Transportation spokesperson Anne Meyer said MnDOT doesn’t have a formal relationship with Waymo, but the company has met with the agency to discuss its product.

In Minnesota, autonomous vehicles are in a legal gray area, though Meyer said MnDOT expects to see action regulating autonomous vehicles in the upcoming legislative session.

In a statement, Waymo weather product lead Robert Chen said the company has collected data in diverse weather conditions.

“The same Waymo Driver navigating foggy San Francisco will navigate snowy Minneapolis,” he said. “We look forward to validating our system further this winter and serving Minnesotans year-round in the future.”

Waymo acknowledged there are some weather conditions that any driver should stay off the roads in and said it would follow local guidance.

The Minneapolis Fire Department is investigating what caused a fire at a home under construction in the Linden Hills neighborhood on Tuesday.

Crews were called to the residence on the 3900 block of Upton Avenue South around 3:30 p.m., according to the fire department. Upon arrival, firefighters found heavy smoke and fire. Crews also reported hearing popping sounds.

Fire officials say crews laid lines to the basement and began to search the home. However, firefighters evacuated the building and began to fight the fire from the outside after learning that propane tanks and gasoline may have been inside the house.

Several hose lines were also laid to protect neighboring homes from the flames. An MTC bus was used as a temporary warming shelter for neighboring residents and firefighters due to the cold weather, the fire department said.

As of Wednesday night, firefighters remain on the scene, working to completely extinguish the flames.

No injuries have been reported.

In:

The Minneapolis-area daycare, whose misspelled sign "Quality Learing Center" went viral after being reported on by YouTube journalist Nick Shirley in his investigation into rampant fraud in Minnesota, has now corrected the infamous sign.

Shirley and another man approached a building labeled the Quality Learing Center (sic) in Minneapolis, with Shirley noting that "Learning" was misspelled on the daycare’s sign outside. The business appeared inactive during the visit despite receiving state childcare assistance funds. This led to allegations that the center is one of several participating in a widespread fraud scheme taking place in certain segments of Minnesota’s Somali community.

To many critics, the misspelled sign was an illustration of the fraud openly taking place in Minnesota.

Among the center’s critics was U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, who wrote on X that "One fraudulent business in Minnesota that misspelled ‘learning’ on its building received $1.9M this year while masquerading as a daycare."

McMahon wrote, "There are not enough words to describe the breathtaking failure that has happened under the watch of [Gov. Tim Walz]."

The center, however, has since pushed back on the allegations, saying it is innocent of any wrongdoing.

Fox News photographed several individuals correcting the misspelled sign late on Monday night.

Earlier on Monday, Ibrahim Ali, a man who identified himself as a manager at the Quality Learning Center, strongly denied any allegations of fraud at the facility. He told Fox News that the center is currently open and has never closed, contradicting statements made earlier today by officials with the Department of Children, Youth and Families that the center had closed earlier this month.

Ali also accused Shirley of visiting the facility before operating hours, which he says run from 2 to 10 p.m. Central Time, Monday through Thursday.

He criticized Shirley, saying, "Are you trying to record that we're doing fraud, or are you trying to put the Somali name and the fraud in the same sentence? That's what really hurt us the last couple of days."

The manager blamed the misspelling on the individual who installed it, saying, "We mess up the sign, we pay somebody to do our sign, he incorrectly did it, we're having him work on it. We paid him to correct the sign. He said it'll be done by this week, so by the end of this week our sign will be fine."

The Quality Learning Center also recently made news for collecting 95 violations from the state human services agency between 2019 and 2023, according to St. Paul’s ABC affiliate.

Such violations range from failure to keep hazardous items away from kids to the daycare not having any records for more than a dozen listed children, according to the outlet. Documentation reviewed by Fox News Digital showed the site’s current license does not expire until the end of 2026.

Fox News Digital's Greg Wehner and Charles Creitz contributed to this report.

MINNEAPOLIS — The misspelled day care at the center of viral outrage over the Somali community’s multibillion-dollar fraud scandal shut down last week, the head of Minnesota’s child services department claimed Monday — at the same time that the owners of the facility put on a dog and pony show for The Post to demonstrate that it was really a working day care and not a front.

Tikki Brown, commissioner of Minnesota’s Department of Children, Youth and Families, told reporters that her staff found no evidence of fraud at any of the day cares highlighted by YouTuber Nick Shirley.

She stated that the Quality “Learing” Center had closed.

Apparently the owners of the site — which has gotten up to $4 million in taxpayer funds and racked up dozens of inspection violations — didn’t get the memo.

At least 20 kids were seen entering the Quality “Learing” Center Monday afternoon after being bused in. One employee shouted down The Post’s attempt to ask questions: “Don’t f–king come to this area. Get the f–k out of here,” he said.

The day care says it is open Monday through Thursday from 2 to 10 p.m., and the owner’s son Ibrahim Ali showed up Monday to claim all the allegations were a big misunderstanding.

“Do you go to a coffee shop at 11 p.m. and say, ‘Hey, they’re not working’?” Ali argued to The Post.

But a local resident said the activity at Quality Learning Center was highly unusual.

“We’ve never seen kids go in there until today. That parking lot is empty all the time, and I was under the impression that place is permanently closed,” the neighbor said.

The unfortunate typo on the center’s exterior signage, which the owner blamed on a graphic design snafu, became an instant meme, was finally fixed Tuesday morning to include the proper spelling.

After Brown’s comments, the Minnesota child services department later sent around a correction noting Quality Learing Center had initially notified state regulators it was closing but ultimately decided to stay open.

Here’s the latest on the Minnesota fraud scheme:

It wouldn’t be the first time that a day care connected to the Somali community conjured up kids for the cameras.

A shocking video unearthed in a 2018 state fraud case showed Somali parents in Minnesota dropping children off at a day care, checking them in and then leaving with them moments later.

Investigators said the ruse was so that providers could bill the state for full days of care for children who didn’t actually attend.

The alleged phony day care centers also gave kickbacks to parents involved.

Another video obtained by Fox 9 shows a man handing an envelope to a parent with an alleged kickback payment for participating in the scheme.

Minneapolis’ child care facilities have come under scrutiny amid an unfurling scandal involving the North Star State’s taxpayer-funded social services, including day cares, in which operators have allegedly lied about steering millions of dollars in government funds to needy people — money that was never delivered.

Dozens of people — the vast majority Somali immigrants — have been arrested in the fraud scheme, of which $1 billion has been found to be misappropriated so far, including $300 million tied to bogus food handouts, $220 million involving fake autism programs and $302 million tied to housing subsidies that never reached their intended recipients.

Brown did not respond to a message from The Post seeking comment Tuesday.

Minnesota Rep. Elliot Engen, who is running for state auditor, told The Post the fraud already uncovered — and the billions more being investigated — could only be the tip of the iceberg, claiming the $9 billion figure cited by Assistant US Attorney Joe Thompson only accounts for the last two years.

“We can assume this has been going on for decades. Minnesotans should be furious about this. Americans should be furious about this because not only have their politicians failed them, they went a step farther. This wasn’t an accident. They were engaged in this themselves.”