Here’s your Daily Digest for Wednesday, Oct. 26

Dayton announces $100M for small business

The morning after he hosted a daylong Jobs Summit in downtown St. Paul, Gov. Mark Dayton announced $100 million to invest in small businesses across the state.

“These funds will help break down one of the largest barriers to job growth in our state,” Dayton said in a release.  “After spending the past nine months talking to Minnesotans about how we get our state working again, entrepreneurs need to know that we are going to work aggressively to give them the tools they need to create jobs.”

More than 700 gathered at Dayton’s summit Tuesday to talk about addressing the state’s need to create more jobs.

The extra cash will double the state’s current program for lending to small businesses.

Re-examining Saddam Hussein

A handful of documents captured in the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 offer an inside look at the rule of Saddam Hussein.

The majority of the transcripts and recorded meetings chronicling the Iraqi president’s decisionmaking have been kept under wraps, but the 20 or so that were released Tuesday paint a picture of a paranoid and, at times, inept leader.

“The transcripts depict a leader who was inclined to see enemies everywhere, who often displayed a shallow understanding of diplomacy outside the Middle East, and who harbored grand ambitions for his country but was prone to epic miscalculations,” Michael Gordon of the New York Times wrote in summation. 

Gordon called the transcripts the “Iraqi version of the Oval Office tapes that helped bring down President Richard M. Nixon.”

Hussein was captured by American forces Dec. 13, 2003 and subsequently went on trial for crimes against humanity. After the conviction, he was hanged Dec. 30, 2006. 

Pretty buildings

BBC compiled a relatively short slideshow of what it considers the “World’s most beautiful museums.” Glancing over the fact that they skipped the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain and our very own Weisman Art Museum on campus (no homie love for Frank Gehry, I guess,) there are some really amazing buildings here. Travel + Leisure did a larger slideshow building off of BBC’s work that is worth checking out as well. Does anyone else think the MAS Museum in Antwerp, Belgium looks like the Social Sciences building on the West Bank? But, you know … better?

Oct. 26 in history

-1881: The infamous “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral,” in which three outlaw cowboys were killed, three were injured and Wyatt Earp escaped unscathed

-1905: Norway became officially independent from Sweden

-2001: Former U.S. President George W. Bush signed the PATRIOT Act into law