RFT 📰

Renfield (Nicholas Hoult) bursts into his neighbor’s unit, grabs an ant farm from a young boy and tips the contents — ants and sand alike — into his open mouth. As Dracula’s longtime familiar, Renfield derives power from eating insects, rather than human blood.

A St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department SWAT team shot and wounded a man pointing a rifle from a second-story window in the city's Ellendale neighborhood early this morning. According to police, the incident began around 11:20 p.m. last night when they received a call about a domestic disturbance at the 6800 block of Balson Avenue. A 36-year-old man and a 41-year-old woman told police that they were in the house when the 30-year-old suspect "began having mental issues."

As bad weather-seasoned Midwesterners, we usually take a Tornado Warning as a sign that it’s time to go out to the garage, open the garage door, crack a cold one and watch as the wind blows through. But not last weekend. Last weekend, even those of us who don’t normally fear bad weather were grabbing our pets and kids and heading to our basements as the violent storm front moved through.

On Tuesday, April 11, Wicked passed another audience favorite, Cats, to become the fourth longest-running musical in Broadway history. On Thursday, an exceptional touring production of the show opened at the Fabulous Fox (527 North Grand Boulevard, 314-534-1111, fabulousfox.com) giving St. Louis audiences the opportunity to celebrate the inventive, thoroughly entertaining musical. 

Missouri’s marijuana market is on track to generate $1 billion in sales this year, making the state one of the top 10 cannabis markets in the U.S. just two months after recreational marijuana sales began. While this could be attributable to the fact that Missourians are a bunch of potheads, it’s also worth noting that Missouri has some damn good cultivators.

St. Louisan Martin Riker's new novel The Guest Lecture is one of the buzziest books of literary fiction this year, getting rave reviews in the New Yorker and the New York Times, among other taste-making outlets. The novel covers one night in the life of the mind of an economist suffering a fit of insomnia on the eve of the eponymous lecture — though that description belies the humor that runs through what Riker has written, a humor that will land especially hard for anyone who every so often has trouble falling asleep.

A Missouri bill would make driving with marijuana in a container that’s not child- or odor-proof a crime punishable with up to one year in jail.  Representative Kent Haden (R-Mexico) says he filed the bill “due to public safety concerns” after the legalization of adult-use marijuana in Missouri.

Outrage is building in Kansas City after a white homeowner shot a Black teenager who did nothing but ring his assailant's doorbell — and the shooter has yet to be charged with a crime. Ralph Yarl, 16, arrived at the house in north Kansas City on Thursday night. He'd been instructed by his parents to pick up his siblings at a house on the 1100 block of Northeast 115th Terrace.

Another prosecutor left the St. Louis Circuit Attorney's Office today — and wrote a blistering resignation letter on her way out. Up until today, Natalia Ogurkiewicz had been an assistant circuit attorney working in the office's Violent Crimes Unit.

A city employee who has been the object of many gripes by local journalists and transparency advocates took the stand in court today as part of an ongoing lawsuit alleging St. Louis city government routinely flouts state transparency laws.  Joseph Sims’ testimony at this morning's hearing was part of a suit filed in September by Elad Gross, a Democrat running for Missouri attorney general, concerning records requests he made on behalf of Robert Childs. 

If you like pink wine and supporting charity, then you may want to check out Rosé Day in the Central West End. The event is a "walking wine festival" that takes over the neighborhood and promotes nonprofits that are all about empowering women and girls.

The benefits of CBD were clear to Hello Juice co-owner Jon Maness. A long-distance runner and CrossFit enthusiast in his 40s, he noticed that he was reaching for the pain pill bottle more often than he would like.

St. Louis’ Pagan Picnic is a summer tradition that is beloved by all who attend and side-eyed by all who haven’t yet attended. The event describes itself as a place to go if you’re “seeking deeper community” and it’s an event that aims to “offer education about Paganism to the public in hopes of increasing understanding and promoting harmony.” What is a pagan?

A woman claims a driver pinned her between two cars out of spite after a Battlehawks game in St. Louis last month.  Twitter user TizzyEnt described the incident and shared footage of it in a now-viral video.

With a little sleight of hand, three individuals from Romania were able to defraud Target and other stores out of more than a quarter of a million dollars via a “short-change fraud” over five years. The trio pleaded guilty to the crime in federal court in St. Louis yesterday. Legenda Rostas, 28, and her husband, Daniel Rostas, 30, and sister-in-law Loredana Angel, 34, all pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and illegal reentry of an alien, both felonies.

Darmin “Dado” Beganovic first visited Italy from Bosnia, his home, at 18 years old. He’d gone with a couple friends, and they stayed a handful of days, traveling from city to city, seeing everything they could — and eating plenty of pizza and gelato. 

Bruce Springsteen may have skipped St. Louis on his 2023 tour, but Springsteen fanatics can find some solace in being only a handful of cities for Aoife O'Donovan's limited run of shows in which she will perform Springsteen's Nebraska album in its entirety. O'Donovan, who spent a decade as frontwoman of progressive string band Crooked Still, is well-known to Americana lovers for her sensual songcraft, shadowed folk-grass and exquisite ballads.

This story originally published in the Missouri Independent. Differences between the House and Senate on how strict a ban on certain transgender health care should be could spell trouble for the proposals chances as the Missouri legislative session nears completion. Leaders in both chambers told reporters Thursday they are pushing for their respective body’s legislation.

Driving on I-70 West past Zumbehl, the outer road is littered with billboards and signs advertising their respective businesses, but one marquee has sat with its letters unable to announce much for years. That's all about to change. St. Andrews Cinema (2025 Golfway Street, St. Charles) closed for repairs in late 2019 after a fire rendered its theater unusable.

In 2015 and 2016, Brennan England, now owner of the cannabis consumption venue Cola Lounge, organized Crawl for Cannabis, an advocacy event aimed at legalizing marijuana in Missouri. Now that weed is legal, he's revamping the event into The Green Light District: A Cannabis Crawl. Inspired by the original crawl, this event will take place from Thursday, April 20, to Saturday, April 22, along Cherokee Street and feature live music, dispensary bus tours, paint classes, drag shows, product demos and more.