AUSTIN, Texas — Four days after residents of coastal Houston celebrated the Fourth of July with the traditional parades, backyard barbecues and fireworks, Beryl came calling. The Category 1 hurricane, weakened from an earlier Category 5, slammed into Texas’ largest city on July 8 — an unusual midsummer arrival. Delivering one of the worst direct […]
It has been a year since a state law required Missouri schools to have athletes compete according to their sex as assigned at birth, and few student manuals and school-board policies reflect the change. Enforcement, which was murky last year, remains unprescribed with many districts stating that they will follow the law without describing how. […]
Outrage is my beat. Somebody asked me the other day what exactly my beat was in writing a regular opinion column. The query came during a phone call with a producer for a television documentary while she was doing a pre-interview to decide if anything I had to say was compelling enough to appear on […]
BERNALILLO COUNTY, N.M. — Bianca Quintana was just taking a walk in the early morning dark near her mother’s house on South Coors Boulevard. There, the city streets of Albuquerque give way to feed stores and irrigation ditches, and the sounds of chickens and crickets mingle with high-speed traffic noise. Quintana, a 31-year-old mother of […]
GRAYLING, Mich. — Clairene Jorella was furious. In the northern stretches of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, the Crawford County Board of Canvassers had just opened its meeting to certify the August primary when Jorella, 83 years old and one of two Democrats on the panel, laid into her Republican counterparts. Glaring, she said she was gobsmacked […]
Missouri’s backlog of unresolved child abuse and neglect cases has fallen by more than 80%since January, with officials anticipating it will be eliminated by the end of the year.
The mailers started showing up in Rep. Jeff Farnan’s district months before the Aug. 6 primary, labeling the Republican from Stanberry a tool of teacher’s unions with an agenda of “open borders” and “higher taxes.” By the time voters went to the polls, the Missouri chapter of the American Federation for Children had spent $90,000 […]
What the public thinks the law is can matter more than what a law on the books actually says. So inaccurate or exaggerated reporting on a problematic law can make it even more harmful in practice. Over the years, I have written about a number of viral news stories that inadvertently misrepresent the law, causing […]
In September 1992, as I performed one of the perfunctory duties of my job as assistant city editor of the Columbia Daily Tribune — watching the nightly local news to keep up with our competitors — a startling story came on KMIZ. Stephen Gaither, a spokesman for Harry S Truman Memorial Veterans Hospital, described to […]
Bridget Bolder sent her daughter, Mia, to kindergarten at a neighborhood public school. After all, it seemed the “normal, regular thing to do.” But Bolder started to worry that some of her daughter’s classmates were exposing her to inappropriate topics. Early in the school year, Mia had to tell a teacher about a boy groping […]
Missouri regulators issued another cannabis recall on Friday, the third this month, this time for about 37,000 marijuana products. That brings the total number of marijuana products recalled in August to up nearly 175,000 — almost triple Missouri’s first massive cannabis product recall a year ago. The focus of the recall is products made by […]
Families flock to McDonald County in southwest Missouri each summer to float down the Elk River, visit the caves where Jesse James took refuge and stay in a rustic cabin. The county is a vestige of old, wild Missouri charm — and a place where restaurants and bars still ask, “Smoking or non?” People in […]
A proposal to allow a new casino to be licensed on the Osage River near the Lake of the Ozarks will be on the November ballot, a Cole County judge ruled Friday. The initiative, which was initially found to be 2,031 signatures short in the 2nd Congressional District, actually did have enough valid signatures, Secretary […]
Idaho’s state government was facing a problem. In 2018, its 86 state agencies were operating with a mix of outdated, mismatched business systems that ran internal processes like payroll and human resources. Some of the programs dated back to the 1980s, and many were written in programming languages they don’t teach in engineering schools anymore. […]
WASHINGTON — Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday defended her values and vowed, if elected, to appoint a Republican to her cabinet in her first major sit-down interview since her presidential campaign began just over a month ago. Harris, who rose to the top of the Democratic ticket after President Joe Biden dropped his bid […]
The Missouri Hemp Trade Association filed a lawsuit Friday in Cole County Circuit Court to stop the governor’s ban on all intoxicating hemp food and drinks from taking effect Sunday. The action comes in response to a memo the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services sent to food retailers on Thursday detailing how the […]
Much has been written about the conservative crusade to stop President Biden’s student loan cancellation efforts, including Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey’s recent victory in the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals, which blocked the Department of Education from implementing its new income-driven repayment plan, Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE). Less noticed was how this […]
A summer COVID wave fueled by a highly contagious variant, increased travel and hot days that crowded people indoors may be starting to ebb in the Kansas City area. Health officials said they hope that surge prompts far more people to sign up for the new COVID vaccine, which could reach area pharmacies next week. […]
The pay gap between corporate leaders and workers at low-wage companies narrowed a little between 2022 and 2023, but it’s still huge, according to a report that was released Thursday. In addition, those leaders invested far more heavily in a strategy that boosts their already-lavish pay than they did in employee retirement benefits. Nearly half […]
ORLANDO, Fla. — Florida is the hottest state in the contiguous United States, and its residents suffer the most heat-related illness. Older people are most susceptible to the heat, and nearly 4.7 million Floridians — 1 in 5 residents — are older than 65. The peninsula has 8,436 miles of coastline, and three-quarters of state […]
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