Part of an interactive feature I made for Minnesota Public Radio News using Google Fusion Tables. I also shot photographs, collected archive images, mucked around in source code and even built a chart using Highcharts.

The map shows where the cities of Fargo and Moorhead bought and removed flood-prone homes near the Red River from 2009-2012. After a devastating flood in 2009, the cities have replaced those homes with permanent levees and as a result is much safer now.

Mexican Wolf (Canis lupus baileyi) by guppiecat, on Flickr

Germany has a wolf problem. This should sound familiar to those of you reading this from northern Minnesota.

Like their counterparts in this neck of the woods, German farmers have lost some of their animals to wolves.

The Local reports that the eastern German town of Rietschen has embraced their new neighbors.

Having come to be known as “Wolf Town”, Rietschen has reaped the benefits of its new residents too, using it as a marketing tool to attract tourists who track wolves on foot or by bicycle.

“The wolf has brought us more than it has damaged us,” mayor Ralf Brehmer said.

Nevertheless, even if the wolf is no longer the main talking point among villagers, it still has opponents. “Some hunters complain that they eat their game,” he added.

Elsewhere though, farmers aren’t happy. They are banned from shooting wolves, who are still listed as an endangered species. Farmers are supposed to be compensated for lost livestock when they can prove a wolf was the killer, but Deutsche Welle reports that can take a while.

Lutz-Uwe Kahn of the Brandenburg Farmers group isn’t satisfied with the plan. He says farmers in his group have had to wait up to a year for reimbursement for dead livestock and money to train sheep dogs. …

“The solution for us is to allow the wolves to live where they live now, in nature parks and on land owned by the army,” he told DW. “But, if they leave these places, we need to be able to hunt them. If we don’t, they’ll attack our livestock.”

Here’s what an animal rights advocate told MPR last year:

“If ranchers and farmers want to have livestock in northern Minnesota, I think they need to accept the wolf as being as much a part of the natural environment here, as is cold weather,” [Reyna] Crow said.

Minnesota held its first wolf hunt in decades this winter, but a new poll shows the public now supports delaying another hunt for five years — if landowners have the right to protect their livestock, property or people.

Protesters have stopped (for now) the demolition of the longest remaining piece of the Berlin wall. A luxury apartment complex is set to be built where that stretch of the wall stands.

“If we destroy it now, we have nothing left to illustrate our past,” a protester says in the video above.

The stretch of wall, known as the East Side Gallery, is a popular tourist draw for its murals. More from Der Spiegel:

“The artists aren’t very happy about this,” Thoms told the Associated Press. “But, in the end, their paintings and their art will not disappear; it will just not be in the wall, but behind it.”

The dispute comes at a time when debate over gentrification is rife in the German capital. Rising rents and a squeeze on urban housing are undermining the democratic spirit that defined Berlin’s image in the post-reunification era and made it a magnet for creative types. To many, the city is losing its unique appeal and selling out to investors.

Interestingly, Berlin would be bankrupt if not for aid from richer southern states.