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"It means a lot for our district to be able to bring the event back and continue to shore up these businesses as they recover from the pandemic."

The estates of late Alice in Chains members Layne Staley and Mike Starr have sold their music rights to the music publishing company, Primary Wave. According to a press release,…

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Ringo Starr has unveiled updated plans for his 2022 North American tour with his All Starr Band that include a newly confirmed kickoff date and a lineup change. The latest…

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Bob Boehm ended up on a ventilator in 2021 with a 50% chance of survival. He says he's still not back to his old self nearly a year later.

St. Louis’s Cinco de Mayo festival will return to Cherokee Street on Saturday May, 7th 2022, after two years of in-person event cancellations due to the COVID19 pandemic. The Cinco de Mayo festival on Cherokee Street began more than 15 years ago and is now organized by Cherokee Street Foundation — the street’s events nonprofit. […]

The post Cinco de Mayo Festival to Return on Saturday May 7th appeared first on Cherokee Street.

Our Love Story: The Couple: John and Valerie Perotka from Godfrey Date Met/Started Dating: September 17, 2007 Briefly Describe First Date: John took me to the Pasta House. Date Married: August 9, 2016 Name Something You Enjoy Doing Together: Cooking, cleaning, and taking care of our yard. Share Advice For A Happy Relationship: You have to trust, love, and have communication.

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Four men robbed a man of his vehicle Sunday night in the Central West End.

EDWARDSVILLE - Sina Rowe has spent 21 years teaching special education – 16 of those in District #7 at the K-2 level – including the last nine years with the CASTLE (Collaboration for Autism Spectrum Teaching, Learning and Excelling) program. She said that although she did not really choose the CASTLE program and that instead it chose her, it felt like coming home. “With this population of kids, it’s very communication driven. If you think about how hard it would be if you could not say what you needed to say or ask for what you wanted, those kids are dealing with that times a hundred. So those kiddos have my heart and I have really found my home here in the CASTLE program.” Rowe began her stint in D7 by teaching cross-categorical at Leclaire before moving to Goshen when the autism program. She then returned to Leclaire with CASTLE seven years ago. “I do like challenging behaviors, and I do like problem-solving behaviors,” she said. “Everything

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This story was originally publish by Kaiser Health News. A recent lawsuit filed by one Wisconsin health system that temporarily prevented seven workers from starting new jobs at a different health network raised eyebrows, including those of Brock Slabach, chief operations officer of the National Rural Health Association. “To me, that signifies the desperation that […]

The post Bounties and bonuses: Small Missouri hospitals are left behind by COVID staffing wars appeared first on Missouri Independent.

CHICAGO – Following Gov. Pritzker’s significant expansion of anti-violence measures focused on Chicago area expressways, the Illinois State Police (ISP) today announced arrests and charges in multiple shooting incidents. The charges, filed against 20 individuals, include three first degree murders, one involuntary manslaughter, three attempted murders, and additional charges for crimes including aggravated discharge of a firearm, reckless discharge of a firearm, aggravated vehicular hijacking as well as aggravated fleeing and eluding. Under Gov. Pritzker’s leadership, ISP has significantly ramped up enforcement action on expressways, including more proactive patrols with additional Troopers, deployment of Air Operations assets to monitor expressways and provide real-time information to troopers on the ground, and the installation of automated license plate readers on expressways to provide ISP Special Agents with essential leads and evidence. ISP Crime Scene and

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Our Love Story: The Couple: Tabatha Powell and Steven Easley from Jerseyville Date Met/Started Dating: April 20, 2016 Briefly Describe First Date: We met at work, but our first official date was at Buffalo Wild Wings. Name Something You Enjoy Doing Together: Any quality time together is a bonus, *going out to eat or even snuggled up with a movie* but, spending time with our beautiful family we have created has to be our favorite! Including them in family activities, while spending time together. Share Advice For A Happy Relationship: Never stop learning something new about your partner! Grow together, and learn together. Show your kids a love story so they expect nothing less as they get older!

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A man who was injured by the suspect in this shooting died from his injuries months later, police announced Monday.

COLLINSVILLE - Madeline Woelfel, a senior for the girls bowling team at Civic Memorial, had a very successful IHSA regional tournament Feb. v5 at Camelot Bowl in Collinsville, finishing in a tie for second place overall with Collinsville's Courtney Baer with an identical six-game score of 1,267 as the Eagles went through as a team to the sectional at Mt. Vernon, finishing fourth to claim the final spot. Woelfel was fired up over the fact at her finish and the Eagles going on to the sectional, and in a post-tournament interview, talked about how exciting it was for CM to advance. "I'm very excited," Woelfel said, of advancing to sectional, "and I was really proud of our team that we could come out and get fourth as a team." Woelfel felt overall, she bowled well, but had trouble finding a strike zone in the final game, but made the needed adjustments to finish strong. "I'd say I bowled pretty well," Woelfel said. "I mean I was really trying to stay positive the whole time. Then, in

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"My Fair Lady" runs March 22 to April 3 at the Fox Theatre. Win with Five at the Fox!

Grab some popcorn, folks.…

by ProPublica

ProPublica has expanded its engagement team with the hiring of two new reporters — Byard Duncan and Asia Fields. In addition, Jessica Priest is joining as an engagement reporter for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune’s investigative unit, a first-of-its-kind collaboration focused on Texas. All three will use crowdsourcing and community outreach to engage diverse audiences for investigative projects.

“We are thrilled to add these extraordinarily talented journalists to our team,” ProPublica Crowdsourcing and Engagement Editor Ariana Tobin said. “Their proven ability to tell impactful, community-driven stories makes them a perfect fit for our newsroom.”

Byard Duncan joins ProPublica from Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting. There, he created and managed Reveal’s Reporting Networks, which provide more than 1,100 local journalists across the U.S. with resources and training to continue Reveal investigations in their communities. Duncan also led engagement reporting initiatives around Reveal’s major investigations and reported on threats to U.S. democracy. He was part of Reveal’s “Behind the Smiles” project team, which exposed the true toll of Amazon’s relentless drive for speed on its workers by using public injury records from the company’s warehouses and deep sourcing from current and former Amazon workers. The project was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2019. Duncan is the recipient of two Gerald Loeb Awards, two Edward R. Murrow Awards, a National Headliner Award, an Al Neuharth Innovation in Investigative Journalism Award and two first-place awards for feature storytelling from the Society of Professional Journalists and Best of the West. In addition to Reveal, Duncan’s work has appeared in GQ, Esquire, The California Sunday Magazine and Columbia Journalism Review, among other outlets.

Asia Fields joins ProPublica from the investigative team at the The Seattle Times, where she helped lead coverage of the coronavirus’ devastating toll in long-term care facilities, including the site of the nation’s first-known outbreak. She and her colleagues exposed early missteps that allowed the virus to spread in facilities and worked with the families of residents to track outbreaks at a time when officials weren’t able to provide data. This work was selected as a finalist for the Scripps Howard Award and IRE Award for breaking news. For a series on Title IX, Fields connected with dozens of survivors who felt their universities failed them and, in some cases, put other students in danger. Her work has also exposed gaps in colleges' sexual misconduct policies and led to a law in Washington state requiring schools to share information about employee misconduct as part of the hiring process.

Jessica Priest joins the ProPublica and The Texas Tribune investigative unit from the Fort Worth Report. As one of its founding reporters, she exposed corruption by the head of a large public port, prompting a grand jury investigation. At the Victoria Advocate, her call-out driven series about gaps in mental health care in rural Texas won the Star Investigative Report of the Year award from the Texas Associated Press Managers. Later that year, she drove to every apartment complex in Victoria to map damage from Hurricane Harvey, giving visibility to renters all but forgotten in the recovery process. The story and map were part of a series that received a Sigma Delta Chi Award for public service journalism. Most recently, at USA Today and the Austin American-Statesman, Priest detailed a Midland prosecutor’s serious conflict of interest. After this reporting, Texas’ highest criminal court overturned a death row inmate’s conviction. The State Bar of Texas has also recognized Priest’s reporting for fostering public understanding of the legal system and highlighting needs for reform. Her work has also appeared in the Houston Chronicle, the Temple Daily Telegram and the Texas Observer.

Twelve-week program boosts business acumen of diverse entrepreneurs; provides participants with support, connections and $5,000 in non-dilutive capital. Now in its fourth year, the Diverse Business Accelerator (DBA) has provided 36 portfolio companies 320 hours of programming and a total of $120,000 in funding.

If an album of 17 new Red Hot Chili Peppers songs isn't enough to satiate your needs, then we have good news. Speaking to NME, frontman Anthony Kiedis teases "another…

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by Patrick Rucker, The Capitol Forum

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

This story was co-published with The Capitol Forum.

Saying they were “deeply troubled by recent reports” that JPMorgan Chase has “renewed its predatory practice of robo-signing,” six Senate Democrats on Monday asked Jamie Dimon, the company’s CEO, to provide “detailed information regarding the bank’s credit card debt collection practices.”

The letter, signed by five members of the Senate Banking Committee and its chairman, Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, cited an article by ProPublica and The Capitol Forum that revealed how Chase had launched an ongoing lawsuit blitz against indebted credit card customers when the pandemic began battering the economy in early 2020.

Chase had stopped pursuing credit card lawsuits nearly a decade ago when regulators found that the bank’s legal paperwork was often faulty. Back then, Chase lawsuits did not include extensive billing records; they typically contained a two-page affidavit signed by a Chase employee who swore that the bank records were reliable.

Chase employees signed affidavits “without personal knowledge of the signer, a practice commonly referred to as ‘robo-signing,’” the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau concluded in a consent order with Chase in 2015. Nearly 10% of lawsuits Chase won were for inflated totals and “contained erroneous amounts,” the CFPB found. Chase neither admitted nor denied the CFPB’s findings at the time, but agreed to provide “relevant information and documentation” in future suits.

When key terms of the CFPB settlement expired on New Year’s Day in 2020, Chase returned to suing credit card borrowers much as it did before, according to consumer lawyers and legal records.

“Chase should not utilize robo-signing in pursuing these debt collection suits, or any other debt,” according to the lawmakers’ letter. The letter asked Dimon to lay out the steps the company takes to verify the accuracy of its lawsuit claims. “How does Chase quality check the affidavits?” the lawmakers asked. “Do these employees have personal knowledge of the case?”

The letter also requested that Dimon provide details about the company’s credit card suits and their outcomes, and it inquired about Chase’s past promises to grant hardship exemptions to customers during the pandemic. Finally, the letter noted the “extensive evidence about racial disparities in debt collection” and asked what measures Chase has in place to make sure its debt collection practices don’t create these gaps.

Chase did not immediately reply to a request for comment. But in a statement for the earlier article by ProPublica and The Capitol Forum, Chase said its current system for processing credit card lawsuits is sound and reliable. “We quality-check 100% of our affidavits today,” the bank said. And, Chase said, “we continue to meet the requirements of the consent order.”

Before the CFPB settlement, roughly half a dozen Chase employees, working from a single San Antonio office, signed hundreds of thousands affidavits. Today, Chase has about a dozen employees mass-producing affidavits from the same office using some of the same methods as in the past, according to Chase employees and outside lawyers who have represented the company.

Chase declined to say how many suits it has filed in its blitz of the past two years, but civil dockets from across the country give a hint of the scale — and its accelerating pace. The company sued more than 800 credit card customers around Fort Lauderdale, Florida, last year after suing 70 in 2020 and none in 2019, according to a review of court records. In Houston, Chase filed more than 1,000 consumer debt lawsuits last year after filing only seven in 2020.

The lawmakers asked Dimon to respond to their letter by Feb. 21.